HE passed the rest of the night in fevered dreams, each with some aspect of frustration or terror. He took Savo, now a huge silver spaceship, down to land on an asteroid where she displaced all the air, leaving them unable to breathe on the surface. Yet they had to accomplish some shadowy mission … He didn’t remember the rest, but each dream was unimaginably detailed, vivid, scary. Each time he was about to die, or the missile was about to hit, he battled to wakefulness, panting and coughing. He sucked on the inhaler in the dim light from the radio remote. Listened to distant creaking, voices. Then let his eyelids drag shut again.
Cheryl woke him at 0800. Grissett hovered behind her, with Longley in the doorway. They looked concerned. “Sir, we doing all right?” the exec murmured. Her hand hovered over his brow, but she didn’t actually touch him.
“Yeah … still here.” He coughed and cleared his throat. Tried to roll out, but found he just had too little horsepower to sit upright. “Um, maybe some coffee—”
“Right here, Captain. And some nice rye toast, with butter.” Longley set the tray down, poured half a cup. Dan eyed the plate, but it made him feel like hurling.
“Try to eat,” Grissett said. “Even if it comes up again, you’ll get some nourishment.”
“Look, you guys don’t need to fuss over me.” He gathered all his strength and hauled himself upright. Then grabbed the bunk frame just before he went down. “Where … where’s Wuhan? Mitscher? Pittsburgh? What about this increased alert status?”
Staurulakis explained, but Dan couldn’t get traction on the answers. Something about the Chinese task group re-forming south of Karachi. Something else about submarine activity off Singapore. He sagged back into the bunk. “I’ll be up to the bridge in a little while. If anything serious goes down, Commander Staurulakis has command authority. Chief, Longley, you can witness that.”
Staurulakis patted his blanket. “Stay here, Captain. There’s nothing to worry about.” Grissett drew a glass of water from the tap and set it and two white oval pills beside the bed.
The door closed, leaving him staring at the overhead. “Nothing to worry about.” With the newly confident and aggressive Chinese moving into what might very well be a blocking position, and tensions escalating between Pakistan and India?
If only that were true.
* * *
HE slept until 1030, when guilt goaded him out of bed. He felt very slightly better, or at least stronger, though every muscle ached, his head still felt stuffed with bronze wool, and his thinking was not exactly first-class. He started to shave, but his hands shook; he quit after the second sting that meant he’d cut himself. He stepped into yesterday’s coveralls, made sure he had a pen and his Hydra, and lurched into the passageway.
Only to stare up in dismay at a ladder that loomed above like the East Col of the Matterhorn. He was about to turn back when one of the fire-control petty officers stepped out of the equipment room, ran a gaze up and down him, and held out an arm. Dan gripped the handrail, half-supported by the petty officer, and managed to make the top. He squinted into the light. “Captain’s on the bridge,” Nuckols yelled, making him flinch.
“Too loud, Boatswain, way too damn loud.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Dan tried to get up into his chair. Nearly fell, but made it, and sank back with a deep sigh that turned into a wrenching coughing fit that left his ears ringing. He rubbed his face, trying to regenerate the Big Picture. Headed south … en route to join up with the battle group for Malabar. Behind them, the Chinese. Up north, the Paks and the Indians gearing up for another go at each other.
One of the worst things about a deployment was how distant the rest of the world began to feel. It wasn’t quite as bad these days, with satellite e-mail, chat, but he still had to guess at and try to reconstruct what was going on over the horizon. If there still was a world out there. If Savo, like one of Heinlein’s generational starships, wasn’t all the universe that still existed. He simply had to infer, from the crumbs of information that reached them out here … but why was he worrying?
Hey, if you needed to know, your bosses would tell you, right?
Yeah, like they’d explained what was supposed to be in the freighter’s holds, and why they’d suddenly decided to call him off, when he’d all but had his hands on it.
He coughed, levered upright, and took a fresh grip on the clipboard. He should be studying the exercise op order. But even the thought was laughable. He had barely enough energy to bite off another breath.
“Captain. Heard you were under the weather.”
He screwed his head around to meet Amarpeet Singhe’s dark-lashed gaze. As usual, a hint of cleavage peeped at the neck of tailored coveralls, and gold glinted deep within. But he didn’t even care to squint for a better view. Just sighed. “Amy.”
“Thought you might want to know how we’re doing on the investigation.”
“Uh, right. Yeah … very interested,” he lied. Tried to struggle upright again, to at least pretend a modicum of interest. “You’re working this with Chief Toan, right? Where is he?”
“Actually I’ve been doing most of the interviewing. The chief’s been concentrating on the physical evidence.”
“There’s physical evidence? I thought…”
“I didn’t mean that. Just, following up on the disconnection of the light switch in the darken ship trunk.”
“Oh. Right. You followed up on that? I mean, he followed up?”
Singhe came close, as if sharing something intimate. “Sure you’re in shape to take this aboard, Captain? XO said you were down hard.”
“I’m listening, God damn it.”
“Well, it turns out the switch was disconnected, yes. But anybody could have done it—it was just a piece of cardboard slipped between the contacts.”
“So that’s a dead end?”
“So far. But I’ve been interviewing the girls, about who’s been paying particular attention to Terranova, so forth and so on. There’s a significant amount of fraternizing going on aboard, Captain. That the command either doesn’t know about, or doesn’t care to acknowledge.”
He cleared his throat. “Um, I wonder if you could … the coffee urn…”
Dark eyebrows crept up. “You want me to get you coffee?”
“Um, no, I didn’t mean that. Ask Nuckols to bring it over.” As he coughed into his fist, then couldn’t seem to stop, lights strobed behind his eyelids. Maybe he should be in his rack. “You said, um, significant fraternizing. Is this something we want to ackowledge?”
“Everybody knows. And I’m afraid it runs deeper than I expected, frankly. We need to raise consciousness about this issue. Maybe a command-wide time-out—”
Dan suppressed a sigh and fitted his fingertips together. He’d always felt there was little point in cramming healthy twenty-something men and woman cheek by jowl in a six-hundred-foot hull for months at a time, and expecting saintlike chastity. As long as it didn’t impact readiness, he was willing to look the other way … to a certain extent, anyway. “I’m not happy to hear that, Amy. We’ll have to think about how to address it. But isn’t a limited amount of, um, interaction between consenting adults a different issue than assault with a knife?”
“The environment generates the crime, Captain. If you stop panhandling, your murder rate goes down too. They proved that in New York.”
“Uh-huh, but can we focus on one thing at a time, Lieutenant? You were going to look into Peeples, right? He had the attitude.” Something else occurred then, and he added, “Also, Petty Officer Scharner, the one he had the set-to with—”
“She’s dead. Yes sir. But the chief corpsman swears that was the crud.”
“He’s absolutely sure? She couldn’t have been smothered?”
“No sir. Neat as that would tie it up, I don’t think we have to go there yet. And as far as Peeples, the CMAA searched his locker and bunk area—”
“What?” Dan hitched himself upright. “I didn’t sign off on that.”
“He consented to a voluntary search. No knife, no stained coveralls, nothing incriminating.” Singhe inspected the overhead. “So we’re at a dead end. Except for one thing Terror remembered at the re-interview: the smell of limes.”
“Limes, huh? She didn’t mention that.”
“Remember, she was pretty shaken up. Once she had time to think about it, she remembered. He smelled like limes.”
“Okay, maybe that’s valuable, maybe not. Do we have anything lime-scented in the ship’s store?”
“Not for two years, Captain. Hermelinda remembered stocking a lime aftershave back then. But nothing recently. So it might mean, whoever our guy is, he’s not a recent accession.”
Behind her, Bart Danenhower lounged against the nav console. Obviously, next in line to talk. “Okay, good.” Dan hitched himself once more; he kept slipping down on the slick leather. “Keep at it, Lieutenant. Sooner or later, he’ll try it again. I’d rather nail him before that happens.”
* * *
THE chief engineer had nothing much new, just needed permission to tear down one of the gas turbine generators to replace seals. The message traffic came up, which Dan usually read on his desktop, but apparently word had gotten around that he was installed on the bridge. He ate a couple more ibuprofen. Forced himself to turn pages and initial routing boxes, skimming most, but stopping to read one.
Staurulakis had mentioned sub activity off Singapore the night before. This morning’s message gave more detail. Chinese nuclear submarines had been detected approaching the Malacca Strait. To join an already robust presence in the IO? He rubbed his forehead, contemplating what that might mean for force numbers and threat level, the delicate balance of red line and boundary testing, that prevailed in the Darwinian, Mahanian world of the Indian Ocean. But generating thought felt like squeezing molasses through a strainer.
One by one, his department heads came up through the forenoon hours, and he tried his best to give appropriate responses. But he could feel his attention wandering, his responses disjointed and partial. His arms ached as if he’d spent the morning shoveling coal, and his head spun whenever he made the slightest effort. Was this how half his crew felt? Grissett had mentioned lingering effects. Longley brought up another tray, but Dan winced and waved it away.
The overcast was thinner today, the sun brighter behind the scrim of monsoon cloud. He sent his steward down for his sunglasses, leaned back, and rested his eyes.
* * *
HE was asleep again when a sudden increase in the noise level roused him. He cleared his throat and stretched, then tensed as Savo heeled and a sudden cacophony of shouting broke the drowsy routine of the watch.
When he joined the officer of the deck out on the wing, Van Gogh had his binoculars up, staring ahead. “What’ve we got?” Dan asked him. “Why’d you change course?”
“Something weird on the surface search.”
“Weird? Weird how?”
“A line … straight line across the screen. Combat reported it; the JOOD confirmed.”
Dan looked down at the sea. Out at the horizon. Then behind them. The sea heaved in all directions, shading from a slate graygreen far out to a deep cobalt directly below. Small birds darted along the crests, and bits of weed the pale hue of drowned corpses slid past, their shadows slanting down blackly into the deep blue beneath. His mind labored, but couldn’t summon an explanation. “A squall line? Or some kind of anomaly effect?”
“I guess it could be,” the chief quartermaster said, still peering ahead. “But that’s not what I’m wondering about … huh.”
“What?” Dan glanced back into the pilothouse. Everyone was looking out ahead, except for the JOOD, who had his face submerged in the black rubber hood of the radar repeater.
When Dan looked back at the sea, a thin dark line extended from dead ahead off to the left and the right, seeming to taper, or vanish, at the edges of vision. As he blinked at it the line extended, swiftly running out and away in both directions until it bridged the horizon. Van Gogh snapped his glasses down, turned, and shouted into the pilothouse, “Slow to five knots. Steady as you go.”
“Collision alarm,” Dan told him. A moment later the triple electronic tone blasted out over the 1MC. The thing was swiftly growing darker and wider. Obviously closing in. When he lifted his own glasses he saw it was a surge of sea, capped here and there with white, the overcast sun glowing and flashing off its sullenly lifted planes. It looked like the mother of all big surfing waves.
BM1 Nuckols, on the shipwide circuit: “Now hear this! All hands, stand by for heavy seas. All hands topside lay within the skin of the ship immediately. Now set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. This is no drill.”
Doors began slamming, isolating each space from the next, subdividing the ship into hundreds of watertight compartments. The JOOD, head still down, began counting down the range as the phone talkers slammed the dogging levers on the wing doors. “Twelve hundred yards … one thousand … eight hundred yards.”
Dan lurched across the pilothouse and pressed the Transmit lever on the 21MC. “Main Control, bridge. Skipper here. We’ve got some kind of major wave system headed our way. Anything you need to do to minimize damage, keep the engines on line, do it.” Then pushed the button for Radio, and told them to put out a voice warning, alerting anyone in transmission range. “And a message to Fifth Fleet and Strike One, too, flash precedence,” he added.
“Four hundred yards.”
Now it was visible with the naked eye, and the lookouts were calling it in. The sea itself was lifting, as if some unseen force were peeling it up. Above it rolled a thick, pearlescent boiling, a heavy, ghostlike mist. The only thing he’d ever seen remotely like it had been the shock wave that had wrecked Horn, but this came on much more slowly.
He’d heard of seismic waves. “Tidal” waves, though they had nothing to do with the tides. Generated by subsea earthquakes, they could march across thousands of miles of ocean, and wreak massive destruction when they hit land. But he’d never expected to see one.
He leaned on his chair, fingers digging into leather and steel. The silence; that was scariest. The way it just came on, noiseless, implacable, steadily larger. A massive, hollow tube that might have lit up the jaded brain of a lifelong surfer, but that frightened him. Without radar, or at night, this thing could have taken them unawares. How many ships had vanished, lost at sea forever, for just that reason?
A warship was built to take heavy seas, and the usual way you met them was head-on. But naval architecture design parameters didn’t factor in one-offs, monster rogues, whatever this thing was. Any ship ever built, balanced just the right way, could break its back. A mine or a torpedo could snap a keel with a bubble of gas. What might one single, massive wave do? He racked his sick, tired brain. He’d warned Engineering, so they could be ready to reset whatever tripped off the line. Gotten a message off, to warn anyone else in range. The bow lookout was sprinting for the port break, shemagh fluttering, leaving headset and cord lying on the foredeck. The dit dit dit, dit dit dit of the collision alarm staccatoed on, shrill and galvanizing. “All hands brace for shock,” the 1MC announced.
“Three hundred yards.” The JOOD lifted his face. The murmuring died away as men and women wedged themselves between consoles, or grabbed the hand-worn steadying cable that stretched along the pilothouse’s overhead.
Another danger occurred to him. The sonar dome was “inflated” with twenty-four thousand gallons of pressurized water. If he took this thing head-on, it would compress and, most likely, collapse the dome. In effect, blowing out the ship’s eardrums.
He told Van Gogh, “Back down, Chief.”
“Sir? What was that?”
“All back full. Right now!”
The OOD and helmsman gaped, but when he repeated the order they obeyed. He gripped steel, trying to concentrate. Though the screws turned inboard and the rudders were small, a Ticonderoga’s hull dimensions and 80,000 shaft horsepower made her extremely responsive. But dead in the water, then going astern, the helmsman would lose steerageway as they lost wash across the rudders.
Savo Island shuddered and seemed to fishtail slightly. Then, seconds later, gathered way astern.
He clung to the overhead cable, eyeing the passing sea, then the oncoming monster. They wouldn’t get up totally to a full backing bell. But he’d need steerageway, in case they started to broach. His brain felt sluggish. As if thinking were a skill he’d never learned. But he couldn’t stand aside, not now.
“Two hundred yards.” The rising bluegreen all but filled the windscreen. It towered above the bullnose. He couldn’t guess how high this thing was, but the pilothouse of a Tico-class was sixty feet above the waterline. How many millions of tons of sea water did a wave sixty feet high contain? It would lift the bow first, then the midships, and last, the stern. The point of maximum stress would be midships, as bow and stern hung unsupported by sea. The condition was called “hogging,” and it had broken many ships before.
“One hundred yards,” the JOOD breathed.
“This is the captain,” Dan said, raising his voice. “I have the conn. Belay your reports.”
Gas turbines were vastly faster in response than the steam-powered ships he’d started his career on. Savo could accelerate from no-load to maximum power in thirty seconds. So he waited, until it felt like he couldn’t breathe. But power up too soon, and he’d hurl ten thousand tons of metal into a cliffside at thirty miles an hour. He had to catch this thing at just the right—
“All engines ahead flank three,” he snapped, and the helmsman repeated the order, no hesitation now. A second ticked away. Another. The turbines began to whine, spooling up rapidly, their song clearly audible on the bridge in the creepy stillness.
Savo slowed her retreat, wallowed, then began to gather way forward again.
A foreswell reached her and the bullnose began rising. But too slowly for the massive slope that lifted ahead of them. At the same time that uncanny mist closed in, like the worst fog he’d ever seen. The helmsman cursed, fighting the wheel. Dan waited, squinting, clinging to his handhold, and as the massive wave pried the bow upward he ordered, “Left hard rudder.”
The ship shuddered beneath them, heeling, bowing like a stressed girder as the immense wave pressed them skyward. He felt heavy, as in an ascending elevator, but the heel from his radical rudder order was counteracting the wave, which was trying to force her over to port. The sea crashed through the bullnose and cascaded up over the foredeck in a welter of deep green, turning white as it broke apart on ground tackle and gun mount and VLS hatches but still rising, hundreds of tons of it, thousands, and slammed into the flat forward face of the superstructure, shaking it like an earthquake. It whipsnapped the JOOD off the repeater, where he was still clinging, to stagger forward and slam his nose into the window. As he shook a bloody visage the whole superstructure groaned around them. Sharp cracks and bangs carried through the metal as through the bone of one’s own skull.
The wave was passing; time to straighten her out. “Right full rudder … port engine ahead full, starboard engine back full.” With this combination, the ship would pivot in place as the bow swung to starboard, ready for the follow-on waves he anticipated would emerge from the mist-murk at any moment. This fucking white stuff … it seethed ahead of the windscreen … if only he could see—
“Right full rudder, port ahead full, starboard back full … Number one engine indicates off the line,” the helmsman said, voice tense.
“Christ,” Dan whispered. Exactly what he’d hoped wouldn’t happen.
He hesitated as Savo began to topple. He’d slewed her as the great sea burrowed beneath, to lessen the strain on the keel and the dome. Accepting the risk of broaching; figuring to use the engines, if she started to go, to twist her back. But Savo’s controls had betrayed her before, some intermittent, mysterious glitch having to do with the grounding of the back plane wiring in the machinery consoles. It could trip a turbine off the line or, worst case, cascade, and shut down power entirely. He’d hoped it wouldn’t bite him in the ass when he was most vulnerable.
But of course, it had.
The 21MC crackled on through the scream of buckling aluminum and the roar of heavy water raining down, spray from the breaking crest rattling down and, along with the silvery mist, obliterating all sight. “Number one back online … no … offline again.”
The wave passed on, under them, and Savo keeled over to starboard, slowly, like a mastodon toppling to die. Metal screeched and groaned as the sea surged up toward them, as she inclined farther and farther. He couldn’t see the next wave. Couldn’t tell if it was larger or smaller than the one just past.
In extremis, then, fuck the sonar dome. Twist her back to where, if the second wave was the killer, she’d meet it head-on. “Right hard rudder,” Dan said, fighting the urge to scream it out. “Port shaft ahead flank emergency, starboard back flank emergency.”
“Engine room … engine room answers, port ahead flank emergency, starboard back full…”
Dan clung to the chair, brain vacant now. Nothing else left to do. Only wait to go on over, capsize and break apart and go down. Trusting in the engineers who’d designed her, and the welders who’d built her, for their lives. Everyone on the bridge clung tight, some dangling like apes from the bronze cable, boots kicking in the air.
The second wave materialized from the mist. The stern dropped away, and with a screeching, exhausted cry Savo Island’s bow rose again, to point into the misty sky. She shuddered and quaked as the sea boiled around her.
Then, very slowly, she began to roll upright again. “Rudder amidships,” Dan bit off. “All ahead one-third.” She shook and snapped and groaned, yet straightened a few degrees more.
Shaking hundreds of tons of green sea off her decks, she nodded heavily from side to side. The clapper of the ship’s bell rang once, twice, and again. The mist thinned, the particles of spray coalescing and falling as a light rain that pattered across the windshield. A third wave, smaller than the first two, lifted and set them back down.
“Steady up on one-zero-zero. Damage reports,” Dan said. His knees were shaking so badly he had to grip the arm of the chair to stay upright. He coughed, head swimming, and again, kept hacking. Once started, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
“All compartments make damage reports to DC Central,” Nuckols grated into the 1MC.
“You all right, Skipper?”
“Yeah, Chief. Thanks. Good work there.” He controlled his coughing fit with an effort of will, tensing his chest muscles, and focused on the sea again, where another, lower line rose ahead.
A fourth, then a fifth swell, each smaller than its predecessor, rolled past. The water seethed, but it was gentling; patches of creamy spume rocked and swirled as far as he could see. “Seems to be it,” the quartermaster said tentatively.
“Do these things come in groups? Or what?”
Van Gogh mused, rubbing his mouth. “There’s not much in Bowditch, Captain, not that I recall. Mostly, you hear about tsunamis when they hit land. Cause a load of damage there. Low-lying ground, coastal areas … you know the drill.”
Dan nodded. He lifted his voice to include helmsman, lookouts, talkers, the JOOD. “Set condition Yoke. Boatswain, pass ‘secure from collision quarters.’ Engineering … have the Chief Snipe call me when he has a handle on that outage. And the damage-control officer, report when he knows what that did to us.”
He looked out at the sea once more, the unpredictable, dangerous sea. And summoning the very last ounce of energy he possessed, dragged himself up into his chair once more.
* * *
THE messages began to stream in while they were still cleaning up. Repairing the davits, recovering the starboard inflatable, which had gone by the board, and patching four new cracks that had opened in the aluminum superstructure.
A huge tsunami had hit the Maldives, the island chain southwest of India. Fleet had a P-3 on its way there from Masirah with an OASIS II/ASIP upgrade, an electro-optical camera in a ball turret in the nose and the ability to stream pictures by satcomm. Exercise Malabar was postponed until further notice. Savo and Mitscher were ordered to the capital, Male, to render assistance while Pittsburgh took station to northward. Dan would be the initial task group response commander. He closeted with Staurulakis and Mills, going over the humanitarian assistance tacmemo and what would be involved in crossing the chop line to PacFleet’s area of responsibility.
When he was sure everything was being done to get ready, he went below. Male was twelve hours’ steaming at reduced speed, with one engine still off the line for a thorough checkout of the wiring and fuel supply.
He had no doubt that when they got there, they would all be sorely tried.