19

19° 14' N, 117° 32' E:

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

THE dawn broke with him still in his leather CO’s chair, staring out at the sea as it created itself from darkness. For all he could tell from the rolling crests, the same polished gray-green as olive leaves, it could have been a billion years ago, before whole biological kingdoms had risen. Only instead it was today, this unavoidable day he had to meet and somehow master. Gaddis, dangerously low on fuel, without orders, manned by a sullen and restive crew, saber-sawed again and again into ten-foot seas driven out of the Luzon Strait by the interminable monsoon wind. The surface current here was carrying them north. He had moved with it, urged by a shadowy sense his business lay somewhere in that direction.

“Skipper? Sir, you awake?”

He flinched and sat up, returning to the prickle of unshaven beard, the dry mouth, the anxiety that accompanied him now wherever he went, every eye averted from his. Thank God he no longer drank. Or he’d be down in his cabin, turning into Dick Ottero bottle by bottle. “What you got?” he asked Compline.

“Sir, I don’t like the weather picture. Here’s the latest.”

“I thought we couldn’t copy Fleet Weather.”

“We can’t; I’m eavesdropping on the commercial reports out of Hong Kong. They’re only three hundred miles north of us, and I’m getting it pretty clear. This Hercule they’re talking about—”

“Make sense, Chief. What ‘Hercule’?”

“The typhoon,” Compline said, gaining Dan’s attention immediately. “It’s out around 130 and headed west. They’re getting real focused on it, in the Philippines.”

Dan told him to bring him every report he could get on it and to have Robidoux put up a typhoon chart for the bridge watch. He sat and worried a bit more after the chief went below.

Even at minimal consumption, they’d suck the last of the Brunei oil out of the bottom tanks in a couple more days. The last evaporator had crapped out, meaning all the freshwater would soon be gone, with Gaddis’s increasingly leaky steam system wasting it. The men were down to a gallon a day, barely enough to shave and wash under their arms. Slowly failing boilers, no water, no air-conditioning, no comms … pretty soon this crew would be hoisting pirate flags for real. He didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going. Maybe it would have been better if the islanders had done a Captain Cook on him back at Dahakit, grabbed him and chopped him in the surf. No, that was self-pity. He didn’t have anything he recognized as a death wish. And without him, the ship would be chaos. Juskoviac would never be able to hold things together. The way he had so far, under some pretty trying circumstances.

Or was he kidding himself?

Sitting alone, he knew that was the most pernicious and inassuagable doubt, that unbeknownst to him he’d lost it, gone too far, he was over the line, and now no one dared tell him he was into Mistah Kurtz territory. That was the curse of command. But in his case there was a hidden flaw, like a bubble in cast metal. He’d always had problems with authority figures. Oh, he knew why. His father, the drunken, failed, strap-wielding cop. Commanders like Ike Sundstrom, Tom Leighty, Ben Shaker. Not always wrong, not always evil, but Dan had suspected and been wary of them all, even the good ones.

He smiled faint and bitter, watching the sea roll past. So that now he himself was in command, what more natural than that he should doubt himself?

“Bridge, Combat,” said the 21MC. Colosimo, who had the watch, glanced up from the radar repeater. Dan said, “I got it, Dom,” and hit the lever with his foot. “Captain.”

“Sir, distress call coming in from a merchant ship. Being shadowed by unidentified craft. It’s open mike; they’re still transmitting.”

“They give a posit?”

“Coming in now, sir. They’re up north of us.”

“Let me know as soon as you have it plotted.”

“Aye, sir. Permission to respond, sir? Let them know we’ve copied their distress call?”

“Absolutely.”

“Combat aye.”

The 21MC went off. Dan leaned back, briefly debating kicking her up to flank, then dismissed it. Why bother? If it was pirates, they either would strike or would not. If they did, it would be over in minutes. A swift attack, a quick departure, melting back into the chaff of fishing craft and small merchants that thronged these shallow seas. Why burn the last of his fuel to no good purpose?

He sank back into his seat, returning to the unpleasant contemplation of a very narrow range of possible actions. The time was coming when he’d have to go into port willy-nilly; otherwise he’d end up drifting around out here with empty tanks. He sure as shit didn’t want to have to go through a typhoon in that condition. That was how Halsey and Task Force Thirty-eight had lost three destroyers east of here in 1944. Every seaman knew that story. No, the thing to do was head southeast, back toward Subic. Permission granted or not. Anchor off if there was no space at the pier, but just go in. Go in; give up; give over; throw in his cards; dump Gaddis and her hodgepodge crew and the murderous evil lodged at her heart into someone else’s lap.

Why put it off any longer?

A weight eased off his shoulders. It was so easy, giving up. Only the nagging sense he’d failed made it less a resignation than a surrender.

“Captain, Combat.”

“Go ahead,” he snapped. Why were they still calling him that? He wasn’t in command. He never had been. It was time just to accept it.

“Sir, more information on the Marker Eagle. The ship shadowing them is a gunboat of some sort. It signaled them to heave to. Two more craft approached. One’s attempting to lay alongside. The master has increased speed and is trying to keep them from boarding—”

Dan set his coffee aside, not sure he’d heard that right. “Say again—say again the name of the ship.”

“They identify as the Marker Eagle, a ro-ro out of Hong Kong.”

A restaurant in Little India and a white-bearded fellow who started conversations with strangers. A workaday ship, not new, not yet old; a cabin filled with paintings and good talk and friendliness to a stranger.

He shook himself back to the Gaddis’s bridge, to find Colosimo looking at him expectantly. He depressed the key again. “You said you had a posit. Distance to intercept?”

“Ninety-two nautical miles straight-line, sir. I don’t know what his turn-away course is, though.”

A trifle over three hours, at Gaddis’s best speed, Which she could not reach now, with steam leaks and worn pumps, yet still not all that far. Without Dan’s understanding why, his heart surged suddenly upward, as if struggling toward the surface from an immense depth. The bare possibility of action transformed the world, the way love changed the look and feel of everything accustomed and everyday. He cleared his throat and said to Colosimo, filtering any hint of excitement from his voice, “Commander, let’s come to three-zero-zero and go to flank.”

“Flank speed? You sure?”

“Right, I know, we’re short on fuel.”

“Real short. We sprint too far, we won’t make it back to Subic. By the time we get there, it’ll all be over, anyway.”

Dan ignored the assumption that was their ultimate destination. “Well, without knowing the ship’s name, I’d say you’d be right. But I’ve been aboard the Marker Eagle, in Singapore. She was boarded and robbed before, in the Strait of Malacca, and the captain built in some precautions based on that experience. Depends on who’s attacking him, but he might be able to hold out long enough we could do him some good.”

While they were talking, Compline had been busy at the chart table, but he now turned away from it and approached them and stood silent, waiting for their exchange to end. Dan said, “Yeah, Chief?”

“Sir, uh, just to interject, going north right now isn’t going to improve our position in respect to this typhoon.”

The radioman had a point, and Dan crossed the bridge and checked the chart Robidoux had taped up. They only had two date-time/lat/long positions on Hercule, but it was obviously headed in their general direction. It would pass over Luzon first, though; that mountainous island was a barrier in its path. The movement roses in the Sailing Directions suggested a tropical cyclone coming over Luzon would curve northward. Compline said the forecasts he was monitoring had mentioned this as a likely track, but not as the only possible one; it could head straight west or even hook left, though this was statistically rare. Dan tried to weigh all the factors in his mind, trying to make the right decision. He’d watched the process, watched his previous COs as they thought their way through a go–no go call. Sometimes they’d been right, sometimes not. “We’re getting status reports on this out of Hong Kong, right?”

“Yessir—so far,” Compline said.

“And we’ve got a little time to watch him come, see what he does. I don’t think another ninety miles north is going to put us in an irretrievable position. Let’s bring her around, Dom.”

Colosimo looked doubtful but started snapping orders. Gaddis swung obediently to the new course. Dan hit the bitch box again to tell Combat to pass to the Marker Eagle to hold out and try to shape her course southward if possible. Then he went back to stand by the helm console. The helmsman showed no sign he knew Dan was there, eyes riveted on the gyro, his whole being intent on keeping the ship on course within a tenth of a degree. Slowly, he became aware of a murmured conversation behind them, in the little chart room abaft the pilothouse.

“… Let me out, but you know the son of a bitch did it still prowling around. Who the fuck knows? And what he doin’ about it? He’s headed north again. We’re not going to Subic. Just steamin’ off into fuck knows where.”

A mutter in reply, something about the officers. Then, just incrementally louder enough that Dan could make out the words: “Maybe he right. Somebody got to do something about it.”

He slammed back the sliding curtain to reveal two startled faces. One was Quartermaster Second Robidoux’s. The other was that of Johnile Machias, the third-class Dan had mistakenly confined. Machias stared at him with a brazen, lazy gaze, as if he’d said nothing worthy of note. The QM swallowed, smoothing the charts spread before him. “Yessir? Need something, Skipper?”

“South China coast.”

“Out on the table, sir, underneath the one we got out now.”

“What are you doing up here, Machias?”

“Just hanging out with my buds, Cap’n. There a problem with that?”

“You’re not on watch, you have no business here. Boatswain, show this man below.”

“You gonna chain me down in the fan room again, sir?”

Dan turned back, enraged by the heavy-lidded face, the sleepy, contemptuous voice. For a moment he struggled with what to say, while three men watched and waited: the QM, Machias, and the boatswain. “Get below, Machias,” Dan said at last.

Instead the enlisted men glanced at one another. They still didn’t move. What the hell was going on? Taken by a sudden disquietude, he glanced back over his shoulder; but the bridge looked normal; no one else was paying any attention. Colosimo and Compline, standing watch as JOOD, were over on the starboard side. He wheeled back as Machias said, “You ain’t never apologized for locking me up down there, my man. That was not easy on me.”

“If it was a hardship for you, I apologize. I did it for everyone’s safety.”

“I told you, I can’t take that kind of thing. I said—”

Dan said again, “Below, Machias,” and somehow that broke the spell.

The boatswain grabbed the seaman’s arm. Machias said, disgusted, “You ain’t gon’ get away with this shit much longer,” and drifted toward the ladder down, looking back, as if daring Dan to take up the threat. But he ignored the bait, and a moment later the joiner door banged.

“I don’t want him on the bridge again. Or anybody else who’s not on the watch team,” he told Topmark, then raised his voice. “Commander Colosimo? I’m going for a tour of the ship. Keep her headed to intercept the merchant. Pass the word, what’s going on, to get your boarding team and the boat crews spun up, but don’t call them away yet. I’ll call you back for an update in a few minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said the reservist, eyes masked by binoculars as he stared at the sea ahead.

*   *   *

HE went below and walked the length of the ship, all the way forward on the second deck, then turned at the windlass room and went all the way aft. Pondering, as he slid through office spaces and passageways and test labs. Thinking, as he breasted the too-hot air of the empty mess decks. A solitary sailor in cutoffs, bare shoulders shining with sweat, pushed a listless swab over glistening streaks that dried as dirty as before. The scullery trash had been pushed into corners and forgotten; the stench was choking in the cloying heat. A half-finished repair had left cables dangling from the locked-open door of the package conveyor. He pushed through a watertight door, its ungreased hinges groaning and cracking, and down a narrow hooked passageway that ended at a door that was unlocked and shouldn’t be. He pushed it open and looked around at a looted litter of masks and rubber ponchos, the deck covered with the black rubber duck feet of Footwear, Chemical Protective. A cleared space and a blanket.

Wherever he looked he saw the signs of neglect, filth, lack of care. Sure, they were undermanned. But wasn’t that what Dick Ottero had said?

A functioning exec would have helped, too. Damn Juskoviac anyway. After their confrontation beneath the helo nets he’d vanished, like the Invisible Man when he unwrapped his bandages. Juskoviac’s visibility, his impact on the ship and on Dan’s consciousness, minimal before, had ended. He didn’t come on the bridge anymore or show up in CIC. Dan wondered fleetingly if he’d done the right thing, securing power to the XO. Maybe any XO was better than no XO … no, not in this case. He didn’t care what the man was doing, as long as Greg Juskoviac was out of his face.

He dropped down a deck to Main Control, found Jim Armey there, and discussed fuel state and possible ballasting against heavy seas. Then emerged from the hole and headed up, until with sweat dampening his shirt he emerged onto the open main deck on the starboard side aft.

Driven by a cool wind, the green sea surged by, leaping and running like a herd of deer, and he followed it aft to watch the washing-machine surge of it as the square stern dragged itself over the rolling surface. The foam seethed and sucked, and looking down into it he remembered how years before on another ship a man had turned his back on him and stepped out and off the stern, seemingly standing on the air, before dropping away into the vortex. For a moment that endless maelstrom called to him, too, and he leaned forward, gripping the lifeline so hard his fingers hurt. And that, too, brought a memory, of his younger self trying to abandon the doomed and sinking Reynolds Ryan, staring down into a fire-lit sea while his fingers cramped on an icy lifeline.

So many memories. So many years at sea. Was this all it had come to? Duty and sacrifice and struggle; was this what he had earned?

What in God’s name was happening to him?

Gaddis was bulling through the ocean now at flank speed, and the wind blustered across her deck so strong he had to take shelter under the lee. Leaning again on the lines, he looked down as the combers surged endlessly by, their backs the cool gray-green one saw sometimes in human eyes, but a darker color in their curved hearts.

Standing there, he contemplated the conundrum. And once again, could come to only one conclusion.

It didn’t seem logical. He might not be quite sane, even to entertain it. But if it was not the explanation for why he and Gaddis were where they were, well then, he had no other theory. The U.S. Navy didn’t just misplace combatants, even obsolescent frigates. It didn’t detail crews the way it had detailed these misfits and undesirables to him. And it didn’t cut off communications or refuse port entry to its own ships.

All right then, he told himself. Reason it out. One step at a time.

Fact: He’d been extended to go with the training team, when usually the XO or the chief engineer was the officer in charge.

Hypothesis: Someone wanted him in command of, or at least aboard, Gaddis after her departure from Karachi.

Fact: The USN didn’t let a ship’s commissioning status drift, even if it was a question of a lapsed or abrogated transfer. It either was a Navy ship or it wasn’t. But Gaddis had been left in that limbo, despite repeated notification.

Hypothesis: Someone wanted a doubt to exist as to whether Gaddis was actually a U.S. warship.

Fact: The Navy didn’t refuse port entry when a ship needed resupply and fuel and ammo, “beans and bullets and black oil,” in sea parlance.

Hypothesis: They wanted him right where he was, in the northern end of the South China Sea, west of the Luzon Strait.

Boot propped on a chock, staring down into the passing foam as the frigate charged northwest, he gradually realized that facts and deductions, hypotheses and speculation, all added up to a conclusion only if he assumed that everything—his unlikely assignment as Gaddis’s CO, her delayed turnover to Pakistani control, everything that had happened since then—had been set up by some single, as yet unrevealed operator, with the tacit or active concurrence and cooperation in varying degrees of COMDESRON Twelve, COMNAVSURFLANT, NAVOTTSA, CINCLANTFLT, PACFLT, and possibly COMIDEASTFOR.

He shook his head slowly, rubbing his mouth as he stared at the rolling horizon. No, no, impossible. Just reciting the list of commands and commanders who would have had to acquiesce made it prima facie the paranoid construct of a disordered brain. He’d always pitied those who saw conspiracies at the root of world events. It had seemed a sign of minds too isolated, too simplistic, too enraged at their own powerlessness to deal with the innumerable permutations a messy reality offered up for marvel every day. But then, grimly, he took hold of his doubts and set their faces forward again. Continue the analysis, he ordered himself. Follow to its logically absurd end, and clear your mind of it forever.

What possible rationale would justify such collusion?

He tensed. As soon as he asked the question, the answer was self-evident.

The only reason to have a ship that was not a U.S. ship, under a commander who could be disowned as a U.S. Navy commander, with a crew that was disposable … would be to make it possible for that ship and that commander and that crew to take on an enemy that was, for whatever reason, undesirable to confront directly. To make a statement or send a message, while protecting other U.S. interests by making his action plausibly deniable.

With a chill, he realized how neatly it fitted into his own career history. He had decorations, yes, and dedicated service. He had supporters, friends, even a patron or two. But he also had letters of reprimand in his jacket, adverse fitness reports, and a reputation in the Fleet for acting independently, speaking his mind, for being close at times to the proverbial loose cannon. Daniel V. Lenson could easily be labeled a rogue. And how smoothly and gradually it had all been done! On paper Gaddis was Pakistani. He had nothing, not a document, not so much as a message, to prove he was entitled to sail her. Everything had been verbal, passed by messengers who could deny any such instructions had been given.

It wasn’t the way the Navy he knew did business. But he had to admit, if he wanted to reason in this dark vein, it did make a shadowy and frightening sense.

But if that was so, if it was even conceivable that was what was happening … then where did his duty lie?

Could the Navy abandon him and still expect him to do his duty?

Or did they expect him to see it was all a front, a cover story or beard or stratagem or whatever you wanted to call it, expect him to penetrate it, recognize it for what it was, and yet persevere?

He rubbed his hand over his jaw again, an unconscious caress to reassure himself, feeling the damp that rose off the restless sea, and his hand came away wet with mingled sweat and salt water. He was replaying in his mind every conversation he could recall back in the States, trying to snag some snippet of meaning he could point to as signifying, We’re sending you in under false colors, but we expect you to do your job anyway. Or something like, We’ll disown you if you’re caught, but that is the code and you will have to stay true to it.

But then he saw that anything like that was impossible. If he went into this knowing what he and his ragtag crew would be expected to do and was captured, it would blow the lid off the whole effort. Moreover, it would expose the United States as too weak or too divided to take an open stand against the power that loomed over the western Pacific.

For if such a conspiracy existed, it could be aimed at none other than China. The only power on earth that could seemingly not be confronted directly, either by the United States itself or via a client state or ally. The only power that had expansionist interests in the China Sea … and the only one that was underwriting piracy as a tool of hegemony.

He clung to the lifeline as the sense of doomed inevitability chilled his bones. Because they’d picked the right man. He had good reason to hate the Chinese. He’d lost Kerry to them, on a deserted towpath years before in Washington, and had to watch as the guilty danced away from punishment. Yeah, he had unsettled business with the People’s Republic of China.

And also because, God help him, he’d always tried his best to do his duty, as far as he understood it. It wasn’t so much loyalty to his superiors, nor even to his orders. It was an obligation to honor and to the United States, and even beyond that. Hard to discern as it sometimes was, he had always tried to do what he thought was right.

Could duty exist without orders? Of course it could.

Could a mission exist without orders? He had to admit it seemed unlikely.

But he couldn’t think of any other explanation that would lead to a ship without a flag, a captain who was no captain, a stateless and abandoned crew.

He stared into the passing sea till he felt squeezed and wrung and his brain would no longer track down the mazes and switchbacks that opened before it. Then shook himself free and went inside the black-bulkheaded quarterdeck compartment and spun the crank on the phone.

Colosimo answered. No further transmissions from the Marker Eagle. They were not yet on radar. Lieutenant Doolan was mustering and arming the boarding party. Dan hung up and went back out onto the weather deck.

The gray sky hurtled past above, driven on an endless conveyor belt of high-altitude winds. Covering the heaven that presumably lay above it with an impenetrable mask.

*   *   *

HE stopped in Combat and listened to the ops specialist call the Marker Eagle. Radio confirmed that the transmission was going out, but only the hiss of empty ether replied. He crossed to the electronic warfare station and watched the petty officer as he stared at the screen.

The SLQ-32 electronic surveillance display console looked like an oversize desktop computer. A green bull’s-eye pattern glowed on the monitor. Since there was no realistic way to measure how far away the emitters the electronic warfare gear eavesdropped on were, at least for a single ship, the display didn’t show range, the way a radar screen did. Instead it placed own-ship and friendly emitters in the center, hostile missile radars on the appropriate bearing in the middle ring, and hostile nonmissile sources such as aircraft or ships along the outer perimeter. “What have you got?” Dan asked the operator, who flinched at the interruption.

He said he had two Skin Head I-band radars, a Soviet-style surface search radar used on light patrol craft, occasional VHF voice transmissions, and a commercial radar he assumed was the ro-ro’s, all coming in from 000 to 007 degrees relative. “There’s something else I get an occasional mutter of. Haven’t been able to pin it down yet, though. Weak and intermittent.”

Dan asked him, “Those Skin Heads could be Chinese, right?”

The petty officer said it was consistent with light Chinese units; his guess was Shanghai-class gunboats. Dan nodded, thinking it through. It wasn’t too late to change his mind, turn back. That could be justified. He let himself be tempted, just to make sure he was making the right decision. Then he turned and ran lightly up the ladder.

When he got to the bridge Chick Doolan was taking over as OOD. He and Colosimo saluted, and Dan acknowledged the turnover. Doolan said, “We have a radar contact now where our guy’s supposed to be. I altered course to intercept.”

“Just one contact?”

“One fat one, yeah. How big’s this ship you were on?”

“Maybe fifteen thousand tons. High freeboard. That’d give you a big return, beam aspect.”

“Not this big. I’m thinking multiple returns, too close to paint separate.”

Dan said grimly it could very well be that whoever Wedlake had reported as boarding him could still be alongside and that from the ESM picture he anticipated light patrol or fast attack craft.

“That brings up another point,” Chick said. “That we’re going into this with just about empty magazines. We never caught up to Malvar for forty-mil, so the heaviest we got is twenty. You have thought of that, right, sir?”

Dan wasn’t sure he liked the weapons officer’s lighthearted tone. “I thought about it, Chick. But what’s our alternative? Stand aside?”

“Oh, I fully concur, Skipper. Just wanted to bring it to your attention.” Doolan grinned.

Dan told him he wanted the machine guns and twenties manned and loaded and the boarding party protected with helmets and flak jackets. Chick said they were mustering on the boat deck. Colosimo would be in charge. Lenson nodded. The guy might be a reservist, but he had good judgment, he spun up incredibly fast, and he seemed to know all there was to know about the piracy situation out here. He went out to the wing and had a short shouted conversation with the fire team leaders on the boarding party.

When he came in, he snapped, “Let’s go to GQ.” Doolan nodded to the boatswain, who stepped to the alarm panel. The electronic tones pealed out over the ship, with Topmark’s harsh announcement afterward. When he made to rebracket the mike, Dan reached out. He cradled it for a moment, mustering his words, then pressed the button.

“This is the captain speaking.

“For almost two weeks now we’ve been out searching for pirates. First with the TNTF, then on our own. We had two close shaves, but they got away.

“It looks like we might have another chance today.”

He told the crew briefly about Marker Eagle’s distress transmission and explained he’d been aboard the ship in question, that it had been attacked before, and that the master had since taken precautions. “We’re seeing a larger-than-usual radar paint here on the bridge. Mr. Doolan thinks it’s possible the boarders are still alongside. I suspect they are rogue Chinese Navy gunboats, operating on their own hook to halt and loot merchant shipping.

“If they are, my intention is to give them a chance to depart the scene peacefully. If they do not, we will warn them off with the fifty-cals. We should outgun any light patrol craft and we’re a much more stable platform to shoot from. I will hold the boarding party inside the skin of the ship until I’m sure it’s safe to lower the RHIBs. I don’t want them bobbing around when there’s lead in the air.” He let up on the button and gave it a moment, making sure there was nothing else he wanted to tell them, then realized there was.

“I know some of you feel abandoned by the Navy. To some extent, we seem to be out here on our own. But I want to reassure you that it is only a temporary comm problem. They’ll be in touch soon. Till then, we will stay at sea and carry out our previously assigned tasking.

“We are now proceeding to render aid to a ship and crew who have called for our help. That is an essential part of any warship’s mission.

“I am very proud of how well you are doing, considering equipment failures and shortages of parts. I am proud of you and of USS Oliver C. Gaddis.

“That is all. Perform all last-minute ordnance checks. Ensure ready service ammunition is available at each weapons station.”

He had no more than hung the mike up when a loud crack sounded on the starboard side. Heads whipped around, and the starboard lookout ducked. The phone talker yelled, “Accidental discharge, starboard twenty-mil!”

“Casualties?”

“No casualties, round unloaded outboard.”

Dan told the talker to have the mount captain report to the bridge, applied his face to the radar hood, and racked the bearing knob around and laid the range pip against the contact ahead. Twenty thousand yards. Ten nautical miles. She ought to be in visual range. It did look as if there were more than one contact there, but the separation, if any, was beyond the ability of the radar to resolve or the scope to display.

The 21MC. “Bridge, Signal bridge. Surface ship bearing 350 relative.”

“I hold it,” Chief Tosito yelled in from the port wing. “A big white merchant.”

“Anybody else?”

“Don’t see anybody else, sir.”

Dan whipped his binocs up, searching, then had it. It was the ro-ro, all right. She looked smaller out here at sea than she had alongside the pier with her ramp down.

The 21MC, Armey’s voice: “Bridge, Main Control: Lube oil pressure alarm. Remote bearing header pressure, down to eleven psi and dropping. Cutting on both service pumps, we need to close the throttle and stop the shaft—”

“Negative, goddamnit, Jim, we’re on our way into a situation—”

“Captain, you wanted to see me about that stray round—”

He snapped responses from the center of the bridge, acknowledging Main Control and Combat, sending the twenty-mil gunner back to his post on the double, sparing a quick look around to make sure everyone was in helmet and flash gear. To his surprise, he found he was wearing a helmet and that his made-up Mae West was snapped around his waist. He didn’t recall putting them on.

Topmark: “Condition Zebra set throughout the ship, sir.”

“Very well,” he and Doolan said, both together at the same moment. All hatches and scuttles were closed and dogged. Gaddis was now divided into a series of watertight compartments.

Doolan, beside him. The weapons officer had one earphone clamped to one ear, the other dangling free. He said, “General Quarters set throughout the ship.”

“Very well. That was fast.”

“Minute and a half. New record. I’m going to let Dave take the deck. I might hold Chief Tosito here, too, unless you think we need him in Sonar.”

Dave Zabounian, saluting: “Sir, I have the watch as General Quarters JOOD.”

“Very well.… That sounds good, Mr. Doolan. This is when you notice a serious shortage of junior officers.” Dan lifted his glasses again, checking the already noticeably nearer shape ahead. Gaddis was covering nearly a thousand yards with every passing minute. So far, he saw no evidence anyone had detected them. Sheer good luck that the ro-ro had ended up on their side, masking their approach from whatever was alongside. Her high superstructure even cast a radar shadow behind it, screening the hell-for-leather approach of the cavalry.

Zabounian, from the radar: “Contact ahead separating.”

“Say again.”

“Two smaller contacts separating from the centroid pip.”

The gunboats whose search radars ESM had detected, no doubt. They had to be on the other side; that was why Dan hadn’t seen them. But they’d reacted too slowly. They would be in Gaddis’s line of fire as soon as she cleared the bow of the ro-ro. At the speed he was traveling, there was no way they were going to escape being in range.

Beside him Doolan was saying into the sound-powered mike, “Your target, two small surface craft, bearing zero-zero-five relative, masked by white merchant vessel, range thirteen thousand yards.”

“Remind them batteries tight, Chick. I don’t want any more loose rounds out there.”

“I’d sure as hell like to have the forties and the five-inch operational, sir.”

“I would, too, but twenty-millimeters should be sufficient,” Dan said. “These contacts are small; they’re probably trawler-size. A couple of twin thirty-sevens, without director control. A burst across the bow, point the forward mount at them, and they’ll realize resistance is futile.”

“I hope so,” said Doolan, but he didn’t sound intimidated. He looked happy, eager for a fight, and Dan studied him for a second, unsure whether to leave him in that state or bring him down to earth. Any eagerness he himself might have had once for combat had disappeared the first time he’d seen the butchery an exploding shell made of human bodies.

But it was obvious that the prospect of action kicked the mustached lieutenant into turbo mode. And suddenly a suspicion glowed to life. Was it combat that excited Doolan or danger itself? And if danger turned him on, what was more dangerous, unpredictable, fatal, and thrilling than murder?

“Captain. Captain! Signal Bridge wants to know what flag to hoist. You want the battle ensign or—”

Dan jerked his mind back and almost said, “The battle ensign, of course,” then stopped. Did he want to hoist the oversize Stars and Stripes it was traditional to fly into battle?

Wasn’t that the whole point?

“Hoist no flag,” he said at last.

“Sir? You want the battle flag?”

“No. No! I said no flag at all. I want bare halliards, understand? Get the U.S. ensign down.”

They gaped as if he’d gone crazy, and maybe he had. But he screwed the binoculars back into his eye sockets and after a moment Doolan yelled, “You heard him! Bare poles. ASAP, you son of a bitch!”

“Don’t curse at the men, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir. Got excited.”

“I need you to stay cool, Chick. Let’s buckle down and stay focused.”

But then everything went to hell and his battle plan with it. The 21MC said, “Bridge, Combat: ESM reports X-band fire control radar activated bearing three-zero-five.”

Dan hesitated, mouth open to speak and brain racing to supply content. But none came.

Patrol craft didn’t carry X-band radar.

A white flare rose slowly from the deck of the ro-ro. Wedlake was signaling, apparently. Dan frowned at it, gripping his binoculars half-raised. It didn’t peak, then gradually fall, though, like a signal flare ought to. It kept climbing, straight up, leaving a thick white cone of smoke below it. A second and then a third flare appeared, rising lazily toward the gray clouds.

“Chaff!” he screamed, understanding all at once. Simultaneously Doolan jumped across the bridge, grabbed the pivoting key that fired the RBOC, and yanked it over. A warning bell cut on.

Above the freighter, the cones of white-hot flame and swiftly shredding smoke began to tip downward.

They weren’t flares, and they hadn’t been climbing vertically.

They were missiles of some kind, and they were headed straight for the onrushing Gaddis. They arched down over the drifting freighter and swung left, then right, hunting to and fro before steadying the weapons themselves visible now as dark hearts to the cones of flame, coming fast and straight down their throat.

Six sharp thuds came from aft, and Dan heard screams along with them. He clenched the barrels of the glasses, staring up at the incoming weapons, knowing that the chaff canisters took at least ten seconds to travel far enough from the ship to detonate into a milling midge-cloud of radar-reflective foil. The version Gaddis carried had an infrared decoy, too, but it took even longer for the heat source to ignite. It was designed to divert and confuse an incoming Styx or Silkworm. But for whatever was coming at them, smaller and faster and at a deadly short range, it did not look to him as if it would be effective soon enough.

The paralysis snapped and he loped across the pilothouse, shoved the boatswain aside as Topmark stared petrified out the window, and yelled into the 1MC, “Missile incoming, starboard bow!” He dropped the mike, wheeled, and searched a suddenly empty mind for another action to take. The first incoming round hovered, moving almost imperceptibly against the hurtling clouds, then plunged with the terrible grace of a diving hawk.

“… the deck!” somebody yelled, as in the last ending seconds a clatter of .50-cal fire burst out on the upper deck, a despairing skyward burst, a last futile gesture of defiance as the smoke trail plunged down at near-supersonic velocity.

The blast snapped the deck away under their faces, and an instant later a rain of fragments clattered across the overhead. A second whip-cracked behind it, fast and deafening as stringed firecrackers going off a yard from one’s ear. Bulletlike shards whipped through the open port wing door and whined about the interior of the pilothouse. As if by some magic, Chief Tosito’s shirt suddenly turned bloody. Dan crouched, taking partial cover behind the heavy aluminum casing of the repeater, though his back and side were still exposed. He waited for the third explosion, but it didn’t come. Gaddis plunged on, shaking off smoke and the remains of fire scattered about her boat deck.

Up again, and amid the strange soundless ringing aftersilence Dan stepped to one of the cracked windows, peering ahead. To his enormous relief, there didn’t seem to be any more missiles on the way. After a moment he raised his binoculars, which he discovered were still around his neck.

Something had changed about the Marker Eagle. She seemed to have elongated at one end, as if telescoping outward at her stern. For a moment, confused, his eye told him she was swinging her stern ramp outward. Then he blinked and understood.

What he was seeing wasn’t an extension of the merchant. It was the raked gray stem of a warship, emerging from behind the ro-ro. As he watched, the forecastle came into view and then the unmistakable silhouettes of turreted guns and directors, rising swiftly to a strange stepped pyramid of superstructure.

“Holy shit,” Zabounian muttered beside him. “That’s no fucking gunboat. What the hell is it?”

Suddenly other voices, other sounds penetrated the anechoic bubble around him, and he caught the dying whine from all around him as the power went down. The 21MC made a choked noise and went silent. The phone talkers and the QM were bent over Tosito. Blood was still jetting out of his shoulder. Some large, very sharp sushi blade had sliced him so deep Dan could see the raw pulsation of his lung. The Guatemalan gave him a steady despairing look. Dan almost knelt, then remembered: he had a ship to save, and a hundred men, and turned front again and tried to make sense out of what he was seeing.

The warship that had fired on them was still moving out from behind the merchant, a white bone growing at her strangely curved stem. Now he could see nearly her whole length. She was broken-decked, with very little sheer. Like a British Leander or Type Twelve, but he’d steamed with them in the Med and Caribbean; she wasn’t either of those. The single huge raked-aft funnel looked almost Japanese. It was followed by a long, low, almost featureless midships area, with two more turrets superposed aft and a straight transom stern.

“Son of a bitch, she’s big,” Zabounian breathed.

Dan stared, his mind churning through observation and reasoning to conclusions about ten times faster than it usually operated. He had no idea who this ship was, but her armament and size made one thing perfectly plain. The other, fleeing contacts might be gunboats. This was something more like a light cruiser, at least twice Gaddis’s displacement, and unless he did something very quickly those guns, already training slowly around his way, were going to sink him. But without ammunition for the forties and five-inch, and without power to run the mounts even if he had it, he was helpless. The gun crews could fire the fifties and twenties without power, but they’d just dent the plating on something like this. The other ship could stand off and shell them to pieces, or put more of the missiles into them.

Only great good luck that first salvo had detonated high, a mission kill in their mack and upperworks but still not a mortal wound. Not yet. Not if he could persuade—

He wheeled and grabbed up the black canister that sat just within the wing door, yanked off the tape that held its top on, and shouldered his way outside. He tore the tab off and upended the canister over the side. It lightened abruptly as the weight within dropped away. He yelled to the boatswain. “Pass the word to the lookouts, all the smoke floats! Over the side! Now!”

When he wheeled back to raise his glasses again, the other ship was fully unmasked, clear of the Marker Eagle and moving ahead with swiftly gathering speed through the choppy sea. He narrowed his eyes and squinted as over the three miles of water he suddenly saw clearly detail, shape, armament and superstructure arrangement, radars, and antenna.

“Large guns, and many portholes,” the fishermen on Dahakit Atoll had said. Dan had chuckled indulgently. Now here it was, the high freeboard of the forward hull dotted with dozens of the tiny circles.

Gaddis coasted forward, more and more slowly as the way came off her. The phone talkers and lookouts heaved the last of the smoke floats over the side. From midships, the one Dan had dropped burst into a brief flame, then began venting huge clouds of milling smoke the color of library paste. They were designed to be seen from miles away at sea or from the air, and now up around and behind the helpless frigate a great towering pillar built toward the hurtling sky.

Below him the boat crew, understanding suddenly, spun the lids off the red metal cans that held gasoline for the inboard-outboards. When the gas hit the water it spread, a silvery-blue sheen on the uneasy sea, before its edge reached one of the burning smoke floats and a sudden sheet of white-yellow flame roared up the side of the helplessly rolling frigate.

He didn’t really think it would work. But it was the only chance they had.

Ahead, the gray silhouette shortened, curving gently as she gathered speed toward her wallowing and helpless opponent. Dan screwed the glasses into his eyes, blinking sweat away, searching through the thickening smoke for some sign of its nationality. Now that it was closer, he saw how old it looked, like newsreels of ships from the thirties and forties. The portholes—no modern destroyer type had portholes, not in the hull—were each bearded with a russet streak of rust. She looked like the pictures of prewar cans he recalled from the history texts at Annapolis, the old—what were they called? He couldn’t remember. He lifted his glasses to search the mast again.

She flew no ensign.

Just as he flew none.

The bridge was dead silent around him. Gaddis surged back and forth as she slewed around beam on to the prevailing sea. He became aware that he hadn’t breathed for a long time and forced himself to draw a lungful. He was choking on mortal fear and helpless rage. Watching, through the field of the binoculars, for the first flash from the muzzles of those short, grim-looking barrels that aimed now directly across two thousand yards of heaving sea at the wallowing frigate.

Then her hull began to shorten.

He watched in astonishment, fighting to keep his knees from folding. It did not seem possible. But as bow and stern drew closer together, then collapsed to a stern quarter position angle, he couldn’t deny it, couldn’t understand it, but had to accept it nonetheless.

His unexpected antagonist was turning away, showing him the white toss and burble at her stern. He held his breath and refocused the glasses, fighting the tremor in his hands, the shaky blur it made of vision, hoping to make out something on her counter, some clue to who or what she was, but whatever had been there once, it had been painted out.

Just as Gaddis’s hull number had vanished, in Singapore.

“They’re running away,” somebody said. “Hauling ass.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Dan said nothing, sucking in breath after breath. Smoky air had never tasted sweeter. He’d expected to be swimming by now or fighting fires and flooding from armor-piercing projectiles. Gaddis’s own hull plating was only half an inch thick, barely enough to stop a rifle bullet.

The warship shrank steadily, moving off to the southwest. Dan got a bearing and best-guessed her course. Then he cranked the sound-powered phone and asked Armey when they were going to have the emergency generator started and how soon they could get way on again.

Doolan slammed a big blue book down in front of him. Jane’s, an old edition. Doolan flipped it open to an outline drawing. Dan stared, grinding his mouth with his knuckles.

“That what we just saw?”

“Sure looks like it. Without this top hamper here and those things aft of the stack—are those cranes?”

“Floatplane catapults.” The weapons officer lifted his hand, revealing the text. “Get this: Built for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Katori-class cruisers. Commissioned 1940 through ’41. Most of them lost in WW Two. One used as a test ship at Bikini. China got the last one afloat as reparations after the war. The Nationalists left it in Shanghai in ’49. This says it was laid up, going to be broken up.”

Neilsen, behind them: “We could use some help with this stretcher, sir.”

They grabbed the head end of the litter, helping to ease Tosito down the ladder on his way to sick bay, then came back to the chart table and stared down at the book. Dan was trying to wrap his mind around the concept of an ex-Japanese cruiser, a ghost from the Second World War, roaming the sea as a Chinese commerce raider. He couldn’t imagine a more intimidating one. “Obviously somebody decided not to scrap it. What kind of guns were those? Does it say?”

“Four six-inch fifty-cal and scads of AA. Range not given, but it’s got to be more than our five-inch.”

Suddenly all the radio remotes began to hiss, the radarscope cooling fans came on, pilot lights winked to life. Dan pushed buttons. “Main Control, Bridge: We have power back up here. When are we going to be able to move?”

Sansone said they were relighting one-alfa now and should have enough steam for steerageway in fifteen to twenty minutes. Dan considered, staring around the horizon. It was empty now, except for the hurtling clouds, the everlasting march of swells, and the white bulk of the Marker Eagle. He said to Doolan, “OK, call away the boarding party. Let’s see just how bad things are over there.”

*   *   *

THE boarding party radioed back that everyone aboard the merchant was dead. They had found the master on the bridge, shot through the head. The other crew members were either dead or missing, presumably lost overboard. Hundreds of spent 7.62 × 39 cartridge casings on the deck told the rest of the story. There had apparently been a hasty effort to scuttle, perhaps triggered by Gaddis’s sudden appearance on the horizon. The hull forward had been blown in either by a shell exploding close aboard or by some form of demolition charge. Dom Colosimo reported water coming in steadily, too much, in his judgment, to stanch with the men and gear they had available. He’d gotten enough watertight doors dogged to slow the flooding, but that was all they could do, postpone her final plunge for a few hours.

Dan stood on the bridge after he acknowledged, scratching his chin and thinking. Remembering the bluff captain who’d been so sure he could handle anything. His sparrowlike, vivacious American wife. Both dead.… And wondering how he was going to find, let alone attack, a ship that outgunned him four to one, that could range over a vast area of ocean, that operated in conjunction with fast patrol craft, that carried missiles he was helpless to retaliate against or counter.

A few minutes later, Dom called back to announce that their first report had been in error. There was one survivor. A woman who identified herself as Roberta Wedlake had barricaded herself in a laundry room behind the captain’s cabin with a revolver. She wanted to stay with the Marker Eagle and her husband. Dan said that was impossible. The ro-ro was going down. She’d have to gather what personal gear she needed and come back to Gaddis in the RHIB. Then he added, “Dom, I’m going to test your resourcefulness. Can you and Pistol locate any hose over there? Fire hose or maybe something down in the engine spaces? As large-diameter as you can handle. Something that looks like it’ll float.”

An hour later, with the white ship’s bow riding noticeably lower in the water, the reservist reported back that Pistolesi had things jury-rigged about as well as they could expect. Dan moved in then and put Gaddis as close alongside upwind as he dared. Both ships had been drifting downwind all this time, propelled by the steady monsoon. The huge sail area of the merchant drove her faster than the relatively low frigate. The deck gang fired over a shot line, followed by a nine-thread. They hauled back a heavy manila line with one of the merchant’s fire hoses slung beneath it. The snipes toiled cursing down on the main deck, spattered by surprisingly cold breaking seas, but at last reported they had a makeshift connection at the fuel riser. Dan told Colosimo to start the pumps when he was ready.

The two ships rode downwind coupled as if for a battlefield transfusion for an hour and a half, till Gaddis’s tanks were overflowing-full with diesel from the doomed merchant’s bunkers. It wasn’t Distillate Fuel, Marine, but Armey assured Dan they could adjust the sprayer plates and burners to accommodate it. After which Dan cast his end of the rig loose for the sinking ro-ro to take down with her, circled around to the lee side, and ordered the inflatables back aboard.

The RHIBs plowed slowly back, buffeted by seas driven higher by a rising wind. They were loaded deep with the food, grease, consumables, and spare parts he’d ordered them to ransack the sinking ship for. It wasn’t looting, exactly. Gaddis needed fuel and stores, and there was no point letting them go to the bottom. Behind them Marker Eagle was listing to starboard, down so far by the head now that her foredeck was awash in the breaking rollers.

When the boats were yet a couple of hundred yards off he could make out the woman’s face. It was pale as a patch of spume, cupped by short dark hair. She was gazing up at the frigate as Gaddis loomed closer, then towered over her as the boat slowed, heaving violently, the coxswain snatching a sea painter tossed down from the main deck. Dan waved at her from the bridge but couldn’t tell if she saw him, if she recalled him, if she recognized him; could not tell whether she was seeing, at that moment, anything at all.