THE sea, the sky, were even darker now. The whirling tendrils reaching down were longer and more solid-looking. One dangled from a cloud’s belly directly above the mast. It groped blindly, swaying, its wispy maw visibly spiraling. Dan barely glanced at it. His gaze followed a pointing finger from the 40mm crew.
Fine on the port bow, so far in the dimness it was all but lost, black smoke mushroomed against inky cloud. A red stream glimmered, then faded. Smoke rolled upward above a distant white bubble.
He cursed fate, cursed himself. If San Francisco had called in a few minutes earlier, he might have persuaded the commodore to pull his force off to let her make a pass. A Los Angeles-class had powerful active sonars, and they’d be below the mixing layer that was frustrating the surface units. She could’ve stood off, fired a spread of heavy Mark 48s into the wolf pack, and let them maraud. There was a good case for letting Mangum deal with the remaining North Koreans. Fewer lives would be at risk if the engagement went nuclear. They’d be American lives, not South Korean, but Dan didn’t think he should be assigning them different values.
Instead, another ship had been hit. And now Jung was charging like a bull into the ring. He wasn’t weaving, or zigzagging, or taking any other precautions. Yes, like a bull. But not into a ring. Into an abattoir.
With a droning roar a four-engined aircraft with an elongated tail like a dragonfly’s emerged from the boiling clouds and banked toward the stricken frigate. It seemed to move more slowly than an aircraft should. It must be fighting a fierce headwind. One after the other, three specks fell seaward. Parachutes bloomed. The specks hit the sea and the chutes collapsed. Sonobuoys, going down in a line. With the rising seas Dan doubted they’d pick up much. The P-3 banked in the opposite direction and merged with the overcast once more.
Down on the forecastle the mount suddenly broke from its immobility. A clanking came from it as it trained left, trained right, elevated, depressed. The sea hollowed beneath the bow, then bulged like a tensed biceps and broke over the forecastle. The crew on the forward 40 ducked, gripping their helmets, as it rained down on them. Immediately two ran out and began frantically cleaning an optical sight.
He took a deep breath of the cool dark air, sucked it all the way down, trying to douse the tension in his gut. He didn’t want more men to die. More ships to burn. There were those who loved war. He wasn’t one of them. But it seemed the only thing that had ever extinguished its flames, once they started, was overwhelming force. He didn’t see to the bottom of it. Sometimes he wondered if he was in the right profession. But maybe it was better to be reluctant than eager. Though sometimes there was no choice, when evil attacked those who just wanted to live in peace.
Just as there seemed to be no way out of mutual annihilation now.
He turned from the lightless sky, and went below.
CIC was a roaring babble, and desperately hot. The temperature in the packed space, with all the consoles operating, had to be over a hundred degrees. Transmissions were streaming in over the overhead speakers, reports from the other ships and probably, or so he guessed from the background noise, from the P-3s too—two or three nets were going at once. It was all in Korean so he got hardly any of it, just occasional prowords like “banjo” and “madman.” He stood out of the way of the plotters’ flying elbows, watching the attack develop on the flat white paper.
Henrickson, at his side. “Where you want me, boss?”
“Help the sonarmen if you can,” Dan told him. “How about O’Quinn? Where the fuck’s Joe?”
“UB plot, I think.”
Mesan had gone dead in the water. A new datum symbol near her represented where the torpedo had been fired from. Some two thousand yards to the east, Cheju, the assisting ship during the last attack, had slewed around in a tight turn and was racing in. Kim Chon, the only PCC left in the task group, was following in Chung Nam’s wake as the flagship barreled into the attack.
Dan wondered exactly what Jung had ordered. It looked like an urgent attack, to divert the sub’s attention from the ship she’d wounded. He really, really wished they had a helo. A dipping sonar could get them passive bearings without risking a hull and a crew But there were no helos. And even if there had been, they couldn’t have launched in this wind, with a landing platform going up and down the way Chung Nam was heaving. He clung to the table as the flagship lurched. A wave slammed against the bulkhead and roared down the port side, sounding just like a subway train.
Jung stood swaying to the lean, arms folded, mouth impassive. Lieutenant Kim stood to his left, Commander Hwang to his right. They stared at the lit tabletop. Dan noticed that the flagship was well inside the torpedo danger area, and approaching the optimal range to fire.
The gaps between successive one-minute positions seemed very long. He reached up and found a handhold on a bitch box and hung on, wondering when or even whether Jung planned to drop to a speed where the frigate’s own sonar would be effective. She was rushing toward destruction, blind to what lay ahead. But just as he was opening his mouth the commodore snapped out an order in that harsh-sounding language that even when you were exchanging compliments sounded brusque. Now, giving mortal commands, it was even more peremptory.
A weak, distant voice, breaking up as it transmitted, came over the speaker. He caught the name Mesan. Still afloat, then. He glanced at the radar, trying to keep track of who was where. Fast as the plotters sketched, their trace would lag reality by a minute or two.
Jung snapped another order. The turbines wound down. The men around him swayed, and Dan tightened his handhold as the sea decelerated the rushing hull.
A cry came from the sonar cubicle. The contact light blinked on over the DRT. In midwriting the sub plotter switched to red pencil, whipped the protractor around, and jotted his first range and bearing to the new contact. The ASW officer was speaking into his sound-powered phones. A warning bell began shrilling, faint through the bulkhead, but perfectly audible.
Dan moved a step to the side, pushed past a phone talker, and pulled the curtain aside. Sonar control was also underwater battery plot; ordnance was controlled from here, as well as sensors. The petty officers didn’t look up from their screens. O’Quinn, seated with them, was just as rapt. Dan said to the senior Korean, “How many torpedoes do we have left?”
“Sir?” He smiled, but obviously didn’t understand.
Dan tried to communicate it by sign language but gave up halfway through. He switched to the American. “Joe? Do you know?”
“What?” O’Quinn jerked out of his hypnosis.
“Do you know? How many fish we’ve got left?”
He blinked. “How many fish? These Ulsans don’t have a dedicated torpedo stowage space. I don’t think they carry more than one reload.”
Which meant the six rounds in the two triple tubes right now were all they had left. That wasn’t good news.
On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t get to make more than one more attack.
The turbines cut in again. The frigate lurched, with the same tormented groaning the stabilizers had made since their repairs. Chung Nam seemed to skate around, surfing on the crest of a swell. The heading indicator spun crazily, slowed, and eased to a stop at last thirty degrees to port of their last course.
He couldn’t believe it. Jung was increasing speed as he attacked. Though he was zigzagging at last, probably not so much to evade a straight runner as to throw off the sub’s target motion analysis.
But if their target got off a torpedo, they’d never hear it. At this speed, the sonarmen were totally deaf.
A speaker burst into life. Almost as if to himself, Hwang murmured a translation. “From aircraft tail number thirty-two. Passive sonar contact, bearing sixty-one thousand yards, zero three zero. Possible submarine. Proceeding to attack.”
The team stared at the plot. For a moment Dan didn’t understand either; then his whole body flinched, almost like a seizure. “No!” he shouted. “That’s San Francisco. Call off the attack!”
Jung nodded and gave the order. The air coordinator repeated it, his tones urgent. Dan sucked one breath after another, dreadfully slowly, until an acknowledgment came back. He ran his hands over his face, cursing himself for a dangerous idiot. Too tired to think of it, he hadn’t made sure the Korean P-3s knew about the incoming U.S. attack boat.
“They acknowledge, Commander,” Hwang said. “I apologize. We overlooked passing that information to our MP air.”
Jung nodded agreement, glanced at them, but didn’t say anything. He seemed too absorbed in the unfolding attack even to speak. Which Dan understood. They were playing chess in three dimensions, at high speed, with sudden death as the penalty for a wrong move.
His skin crawled as he looked back at the range. Through the exchange with the aircraft they’d still been closing, and still at flank speed, pushing deeper and deeper into the zone of danger. The rudder shifted, and the heading indicator spun in the other direction, but the range still kept dropping.
He stopped breathing. They didn’t fire, they didn’t fire, they still didn’t fire. They were abeam of the target, unless it had turned. This was the right target aspect for the Mark 46. But they were too close now, the acquisition numbers degraded fast if the fish didn’t have time to—
“Fire,” barked Lieutenant Kim. A moment later the hissing clunk of an air slug pumping out a quarter-ton of metal, explosives, and electronics came through the bulkhead. Three long seconds followed. You had to separate homing torpedoes in salvo fire or their seekers would jam each other. Then another hiss and clunk shivered the frigate’s frame.
Three more seconds, and the last pulse whunked and hissed. Kim barked again—the ASW officer controlled the ship and its weapons during an attack—and the rudder indicator reversed. The frigate leaned hard, still at speed, and pivoted her stern through the firing bearing. She was less than a thousand yards from the sub and now headed directly away.
Dan watched the sweep hand on his watch. They ran for a minute. Then another. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. He expected every second to die in nuclear flame. Actually it would happen so fast, at this range, he’d probably never know he was dead at all. Just phase shift instantly into superheated gas, carbon dioxide, and radioactive steam, along with the water and steel and other men around him.
Instead the seconds kept going by.
He sagged, unbelieving. Their torpedoes would have reached their target in about fifty seconds. He told himself they were activating, circling, they’d acquire and home and explode any moment. But still no thud of a hit came.
His gaze locked with Jung’s. The older man’s chin was stubbled gray. Sweat stood on his forehead too. His graying hair stuck up in spikes, and for the first time his uniform shirt looked rumpled. “What’s wrong with our fucking torpedoes, Lenson? They’re American. Do you have any idea?”
“You launched too close, I think. Time to acquire—”
“I don’t buy that. Even if we fire too close, it should just circle once and reacquire. One should have worked. Out of three.”
Dan thought so too. Their enemies had to have some kind of countermeasure. U.S. submarines did, though he didn’t know much about them; the topic was highly classified. “If we hadn’t attacked at such a high speed we might have heard something. Jamming. Ejecting some sort of countermeasure.”
“The slower we go, the more vulnerable we are.”
“It’s a trade-off. Correct.”
“Tell the captain we will reattack,” Jung snapped to Kim in English. The junior officer swallowed, looking frightened, but spoke into his phones.
“What’s our torpedo load?” Dan asked them.
Kim swallowed again. “We have three remaining.”
“The three in the starboard tubes?”
“I am sorry. Three reloads, once those are fired. So six are left.”
More than he’d expected. But now he wished they had something other than the Mark 46s. He’d always considered them good weapons. But for some reason they didn’t seem to be cutting the mustard here in the Eastern Sea.
But there wasn’t anything to be done about that, and Jung was barking orders again; the rudder-angle indicator was hard over again. Dan did some swallowing of his own. His mouth was so dry it seemed to close up. They were going in for another attack. This time, goddamn it, he’d have to make them do it at low speed. He cleared his throat. “How about the planes? Can we vector them in?”
“They’ve departed the area,” Hwang said, remotely. “I forget you do not follow the radio comms. They have expended all torpedo and sonobuoy loadouts. They offered to stay and do passes until their fuel ran out but the commodore ordered them to return to base. There will be no reliefs; the crosswinds are too high on the runways for them to take off again.”
THIS time Jung did something Dan should have expected, but hadn’t; he sent both Cheju and Kim Chon in to the attack as well, all three converging, and sheered the flagship off at the last moment, as soon as they gained a solid active contact. Which was at only sixteen hundred yards. It was insanely dangerous, but with three attackers, on continuously altering courses and speeds, it would be nearly impossible for their target to build enough of a track on any one to shoot accurately.
Six torpedoes hit the water. The crunch of a hit tolled through the hull. The sonarmen shrieked. Another crunch, louder.
“Two hits,” Henrickson yelled.
“Got it, great.” He thought of the men who were dying below them, but couldn’t spare compassion this time around. Right now, he just wanted them all dead. Like killing hornets as they tried to sting you. He stuck his head into Sonar. “Joe! Did you hear anything like jamming? Or something being ejected?”
O’Quinn pried an earphone off one temple. “No. But maybe they were out. They can’t carry unlimited amounts, if it’s some kind of mobile countermeasure.”
That was true; if it was a swim-out decoy, each round would take the place of a torpedo. And such things were expensive and scarce. Jung’s tactic might be the best they could do. Just get in there toe to toe and slug. Keep throwing ordnance until they got a hit. It was hell on the nerves, but eventually it should grind the other side down.
But how many subs were left? Did they have enough ordnance, and fuel, and sheer guts to outlast them?
And what if one of these shells had the pea under it?
His fingers danced over the keys of his Compaq. He could model fuel. He could model torpedoes per kill. He could simulate acoustic vertical beam width, and target doppler, and acquisition capability degradation.
But the biggest variables of all—storm and chance, Jung’s dogged stubbornness, and his enemy’s fanatical courage—he could put no numbers against at all.
THE task group re-formed a search line and headed south. The cross seas made the deck lurch and sway, but no one seemed to mind. Rain roared against the bulkheads. The plotters and talkers were guzzling orange pops and smoking up a storm. Some looked dazed, others near manic, eyes glittering and movements badly controlled. They chattered in high-pitched voices and cackled at nothing Dan could see was funny. Jung slumped at one of the consoles, face gray. His hands shook as he lit up a silver-tip.
“You doing okay, sir?” Dan asked, slipping into the seat next to him.
“I had to leave Mesan.”
With a surge of guilt he remembered the torpedoed frigate. “What’s her damage?”
“Screws blown off. Rudders gone. Thirteen men dead or missing, five wounded. Taking water.”
Two ROKN ships out of action; two North Korean subs sunk. The exchange rate was too even to be encouraging. “We’re not that far from shore now. Maybe they can send somebody from P’ohang to help.”
The Korean nodded somberly and sucked smoke. It trickled out of his nostrils. “They’re getting a tug under way,” he said. He squeezed his eyes closed and put his head back, rotated it as if his neck hurt.
Dan suddenly became conscious of his own fatigue, his aching feet, his own sore neck. He looked at his watch. Dinnertime, but he wasn’t hungry. What he could use was strong and black. “Want some coffee?” he asked the commodore.
“Good idea… Keopi jeom ka jeo o ji,” Jung said to a passing petty officer.
Dan looked around the space. “And how about, uh—how about some for the rest of the boys?”
Jung looked taken aback. Suspicious. Then his face relaxed. He snapped out more Korean. Dan thought he caught Captain Yu’s name. The man looked startled, then astonished. But still bowed quickly, then hurried off.
Dan was searching his mind for what he ought to be doing next when a bell shrilled. Jung came to his feet as if spring-loaded. Dan pivoted, looked through the parted curtain into Sonar. Saw all four men sardined in there staring at the screen with eyes wide. And heard, from the speaker, the band-saw whine of counterrotating screws singing through the deep.
Growing louder, closer, with each passing second.
“Where the hell’d that come from?” Henrickson breathed.
“Torpedo!” O’Quinn yelled. “Red Eighty!”
Dan had never heard of “Red Eighty” as a position indicator—it must date from before his time—but figured it meant from the port quarter. From a sub they’d never thought was there, never heard or suspected. “Is the Nixie streamed?” he shouted at Hwang.
“Yes.”
But he wasn’t looking at Dan. Nor was anyone else. They were all looking at Kim.
The tae wi stood with gaze unfocused, index finger on the Talk button of his mouthpiece, other hand on the plot table to steady himself. But he didn’t speak.
Jung put out a hand as if to touch him. Then froze. Dan found himself starting forward too, orders jumping to his lips, wanting to tear the microphone out of the guy’s hands. But the other stations on the phone circuit wouldn’t understand him. Not in English. It was up to the ASW officer to respond. It took a physical effort to clamp his teeth together, and wait for him to act.
For an infinitely long second Kim did not. Then he jerked suddenly down on the button, and speech flooded from his lips.
The rudder slammed over. The turbines surged. Chung Nam heeled. To port, which meant a starboard turn. The first part of the Dingo maneuver.
Jung glanced his way, and their gazes locked. Then the commodore’s moved on, to the rudder-angle indicator. Dan stared at it too, waiting for the reverse-rudder order, to come around hard to port, to snap out turbulence for the wake homer to follow away from the ship rather than toward it.
But it didn’t reverse. Instead the angle steepened. The deck heeled, men slipped, the stabilizers groaned, pencils rolled. A reel of magnetic tape leaped out of its rack. It hit the sonar stack, then spun wildly out through the curtain into the main space, unwhipping yards of rust-colored ribbon that snagged instantly into a hopeless tangle. The shrill squeal kept getting louder, as did the turbine whoosh.
“What the fuck—,” breathed Henrickson.
He was interrupted by a wave that felt like it hit broadside. It slammed into the frigate like a whole team of linemen crashing into a quarterback at once. She staggered again, and a sustained moaning shriek burst from the stabilizers as if each atom of hardened steel were being tormented into consciousness. Dan clutched the console, crouched, wishing right now above all else that he’d accepted Jung’s offer, no, Jung’s direct order, and gotten his life jacket.
The heading indicator hesitated. Then suddenly kicked around in heavy, ship-whipping jerks, ten, fifteen degrees at once. She rose high on a sea and then plunged, aiming it seemed nearly straight down.
“There’s number two,” O’Quinn shouted through the din, the whine, the clatter and roar. A thinner, more remote hornet-whine joined the first.
Dan stared at his computer screen. It was replaying the maneuver he’d just modeled. But Chung Nam wasn’t. She was headed forty degrees to starboard of her original course. Directly away from the torps. Directly away… exposing her stern, her wake—
He let go of the console and staggered across the space between him and the DRT. Fetched up against it with a painful slam of the steel corner into his hip. “We have to come left,” he shouted. “And fire a Mark 46, on 030!”
Jung shook his head.
“What’re you doing? If it’s a wake homer—”
“We don’t have a torpedo to waste,” Jung said.
Dan stared at him in utter horror. “To waste? If it’s a wake homer—”
“What’re the odds if it’s wake first, then acoustic? You said fifty percent. But only ten percent if it’s acoustic first, then wake. They’re not stupid out there. They’ll fire the wake homer second.”
He opened his mouth to argue: the numbers were speculative; they didn’t know the other side’s loadout, analysis, training; then closed it. This was Jiang’s task group. His tactics. His enemy. Dan Lenson wasn’t even an adviser. Just a rider.
The whine was deafening. Every man’s face in the closed hot space was pale, averted, as if they were trying not to listen, as if not hearing might change the doom boring in on them at fifty knots. Dan’s legs shook. He didn’t want to go into the water. Not in seas like this. With the rest of the task group going on without them, sticking with the enemy, the way he had absolutely no doubt Jung would order them to with his last outgoing command.
A tremendous explosion jarred and whipped the frigate. It felt as if her stern were lifted, then dropped fifty feet onto solid stone. Lights burst with the spark-laced ping of shattering glass. Equipment snapped off the bulkhead and catapulted through the air. A fire extinguisher caught a man in the back, knocking him down.
Simultaneously with that image hitting his eyes, something nailed him in the back of the skull. White flame seared his retinas. He staggered and almost went down, but a hand, Henrickson’s maybe, jerked him back up. His ears ululated. In the little sonar cubicle a short scream was cut off by the clap of a blow. Jung and Kim slammed together, recoiled, and grabbed, keeping each other on their feet. The commodore was shouting. Kim was nodding, then turning away, hunching his shoulders as he passed on whatever he’d been told into the sound-powered phone.
Dan clung to the table, blinking, feeling something wet and warm running down the back of his neck. He knew what it was before he lifted his hand. A seaman tossed him a folded handkerchief. Dan clamped it to his scalp, starting to nod his thanks, then caught sight of the heading indicator.
It was jerking right again, in great swoops as the bow labored through the seas. Each swoop was accompanied by a grating boom that set his teeth on edge. It seemed to be coming from astern, though he couldn’t be sure; or maybe from below, the keel area. He tried to force his stunned brain into computing what that meant. The only thing that came didn’t make sense. Or wait, maybe it did.
They were headed back toward the torpedo firing bearing. Meaning that if this next fish was an acoustic homer, they were running headlong into it.
He lurched forward and grabbed the chief of staff’s shirt. “What the fuck’s going on, Hwang?”
The tall pale officer lifted his head. “The first torpedo exploded close astern.”
“On the Nixie?”
“How would I know?”
Dan nodded reluctantly; of course he couldn’t. But despite the grinding of steel being gnawed apart, she seemed to be answering her rudder. So they were ahead of the game, compared to Mok Po and Mesan, anyway. “But what’s he doing?”
“The maneuvering of the ship is not the commodore’s responsibility. It is that of the captain.”
“I don’t see Yu down here.”
“He is on the bridge.”
The second hornet grew louder. Closer. Chung Nam rolled as another heavy sea plowed into her, or she into it. Her frame shuddered, flexing like a whip. But steel wasn’t oiled leather. Stressed too hard, frame welds cracked. Ships broke up. He wished he could interpret the shouts and screams that came from talkers and petty officers around the space. Were they taking water? Reporting major damage? Was the hull patch holding?
Henrickson grabbed his biceps. He pointed to the computer, which he’d anchored to the tabletop with silvery strips of duct tape. “He’s still coming around.”
“I have no idea what these people are doing, if that’s what you’re asking me, Monty. They’ve still got their rudder hard a-starboard. Shit! I hate not knowing what’s going on.”
“You mean you hate not being the skipper,” Henrickson said. “And you know what? I wish you were.”
The rudder swung at last, but halted amidships. They stared at it. When it didn’t budge, Henrickson rather reluctantly glanced down at the keyboard. He inputted numbers. “Son of a bitch. He’s trying to do a Dingo in reverse. Head away first, from the acoustic, then cross back and do a wake knuckle to shake the wake homer—”
“Is it gonna work?”
The display changed. It now showed an elongated loop, an upside-down 6. Henrickson stared at it, then blinked up in disbelief.
“Only if he gets totally lucky on his timing. We never even heard that the fucker fired these. Not one peep. Nothing from the P-3s. He just bushwhacks us out of nowhere—”
The incoming screws grew louder, became a circular saw chewing its way into them. Dan clapped his hands over his ears.
Faintly, though his palms, he heard a thunk-whisssh of outgoing air. The torpedo tubes. They fired again. And three seconds later, again.
The enemy torpedo exploded.
This explosion, this shock, made the previous one seem like a mere tap. Instead of a dropping lurch, it jerked the deck out from under some men, sent others flying through the air. The bulkheads whipped so hard that the remaining lights fragmented instantly into an airy froth of glass. Henrickson’s Compaq catapulted off the table, somersaulted through the slanting air, trailing duct tape like a comet’s tail, and crashed into a tote board. The space went dark, succeeded a quarter second later by the rattle of tripping relays and the dim amber beams of the overhead-mounted battle lanterns. Dust and paint chips and fragments of overhead insulation blurred the already murky air. The DRT face cracked, and the lighted, projected tracking rosette within jarred and went dark. The noise was deafening. Stacks, consoles, repeaters, shrieked and bobbled as the heavy springs of their antishock mountings flexed. A warbling chorus of alarms and overspeeds triggered on. The rudder-angle indicator, heading indicator, and most of the other indicators and gauges either fell to zero registration or froze. The IMC gave an expiring chirp and went dead.
The dim filled with shouting, the thunder of running boots, and an ominous, gradually diminishing sequence of robust cracking sounds that seemed to come from below them. Dan pushed himself up off the rubber deck matting, not remembering exactly how he’d gotten down there. He felt no pain, but knew from experience that that had nothing whatever to do, at that moment, with whether and how badly he was hurt. He rubbed his neck. His hand came away bloody, but sticky; not fresh; he figured it was just seepage from the scalp wound.
Jung was sagged against one of the consoles. Dan hesitated, then pushed his way over. “You all right, sir?”
“I believe so. I believe so. But I don’t think we are doing so well.”
He nodded at the indicators. Dan became conscious then of the way she was rolling. Slow and heavy. No moan of the stabilizers, no engine-whoosh, either. “Engines tripped off? Maybe they can get them relit.”
Kim said heavily, from the sound-powered circuit, “We are taking leak.”
“Where? Aft?”
“Engine room.”
Not good news. Especially since whoever’d just gunned them was still out there.
Wallowing, without power to train or fire weapons, Chung Nam was helpless in the face of another salvo. They didn’t need homers now. One or two straight runners, the big idiotproof Type 53s the Russians had given all their third-world clients, would finish the job.
“What’s going on?” O’Quinn, wearing a too-small battle helmet. “It’s a spare. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“Time to go swimming?”
Dan cleared his throat. It was hard to formulate words, given that his paralyzed mind expected every moment to end in the final punctuation of an exploding torpedo. “I hope not,” he got out at last.
O’Quinn, on the other hand, seemed buoyant, as cheerful as Dan had ever seen him. He glanced back at the dark stacks. “No power, no sonar, no point hanging around up here. What’d he say about the engine room?”
“Taking water.”
“I’m gonna go down, see what needs doing.”
“This crew knows how to do damage control, Joe.”
“But they haven’t been doing it as long as I have. You can always use another pair of hands on an eductor.” The heavyset retiree slapped him on the shoulder. “See ya.”
“Better stay up here, Joe.”
“You and Monty can handle it. Take care of yourself.” He waved casually to Henrickson and exited by the after door.
“You too, Joe,” Dan said softly, looking after him.
DAN caught up with Jung in the pilothouse, standing centerline with Captain Yu. They glanced at him as he came off the ladder, but didn’t break their rapid conversation. He looked past them at the sea.
And all that was there was the sea. He caught one faint gray vertical on the horizon. Either Kim Chon or Cheju, but stern to, steaming away. He checked the magnetic compass to confirm: steaming to the south.
Jung had ordered them to leave the damaged flagship behind. And looking at a huge gray comber as it bore down, he doubted they’d live much longer, in this sea, without power, taking water.
“Just how bad are these leaks? Is it a split seam?”
Yu stared for a moment. “We are not actually hit. Very close blowup.”
“A detonation close aboard,” Jung interpreted. Dan caught the little skipper’s poisonous glance, though it was behind Jung’s back, and a light went on. His flag captain wasn’t just worried. He hated the commodore. Resented him. Jung was younger, taller, better spoken, and if Hwang was right, better connected in the capital. Not a new situation at all, at all. But revealing.
“Anything I can do?” he asked them both.
“We have all in control,” Yu snapped.
“Want me to take a look at the damage?”
“No, all in—”
“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” Jung interrupted smoothly. Yu fell silent, but the set of his shoulders told Dan he’d be just as happy if all the fucking foreigners, and his commodore too, jumped overboard.
He looked at the sea again, at the way the wind was blowing off the tops of the crests and smearing them across the hollowed craters of the combers. What was out there, under them, listening like a panther in the night for its wounded prey? At any moment another torpedo could crash into the hull. Send them to the bottom forever. His gut told him what it wanted very clearly. Go to his fucking stateroom, grab his fucking life jacket, and get as close to a fucking lifeboat as he could.
The rest wasn’t his problem. He couldn’t do anything more on the tactical level. But if Chung Nam went down, or caught fire, it would be his problem, in a very personal way.
He stood motionless, pulled in both directions. Wanting to run somewhere—where, he couldn’t have said—and wanting to help. But how? He wasn’t in the chain of command. He didn’t have a job anymore, even in the most tenuous sense.
All he had to offer was his hands, his experience, his brain.
His body told him again to stay topside. But instead of listening he was remembering what someone had told him once deep in a forest in Bosnia. A woman who’d died seeking the truth.
If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.
That’s what she’d said, before her bullet had hit her. It wasn’t a bad motto. Not when danger was all around you, when there was no haven and no protection and nothing, really, you could do to affect what happened next. When all that mattered was what you could do for someone else.
He felt his teeth show in a sardonic smile. Try to keep everybody alive this time, Niles had said. Well, no chance of that. Not anymore.
But maybe he could still help out.
He saluted Jung and Yu, got preoccupied glances in return, and headed below.
THE power was still out aft of the stack. Every door and hatch was dogged solid and had to be undogged and dogged again behind him. He was wheezing by the time he got to the interior passageway on the main deck. It was smoky with exhaust fumes, dark as a subway tunnel, and shot through with the random beams of battle lanterns. The deck was slick with water. Men were shouting, cursing, and the hammering clatter of dewatering pumps made it even harder to hear.
Immediately he felt at home. He pulled a breathing apparatus off a rack, donned it, popped the oxygen candle, and tailed on at the end of a hose team. Behind the mask he was just another guy. Tall for a Korean, but bent over as they edged through the door leading down into the engine spaces, even that probably didn’t stand out.
He blinked ahead through the scratched lenses, his breathing loud and fast in his ears. The speaking diaphragm buzzed as he sucked air. The team caterpillared its way down a ladder into the dark. Steel gratings rang under his boots.
The biggest fear and greatest danger aboard ship was fire, so he was relieved not to see the hateful orange flicker. Just a white gush of foam below, the gleam of lanterns, a black slick and roil of water.
He was working his way after the team when the world toppled. The slick steel slanted suddenly beneath his boots. The men ahead of him reeled back, pinning him against the door, which slammed shut. He wheezed into the mask as the weight of five men drove the breath out of him. He tried to shove back, but the burden was too great.
Then the world toppled again, in the other direction, and the crush lifted and men flailed for handholds, going the other way. He grabbed a handrail just in time and clung like a frightened bonobo, staring down into a black gulf. If he lost his hold he’d shoot forward, over the railing and down into the mass of machinery below.
It had to be the stabilizers. Damaged already, they’d gone out again, and no wonder—no electrical power, hence no hydraulics. The whipping action of the explosions couldn’t have done them any good either. Anyway, they were out, and Chung Nam rolled in earnest now At the mercy of the typhoon, powerless, unstabilized, defenseless; their enemy could deliver the coup de grace at any moment.
They might not even need to waste another torpedo.
The rolling became even more savage. He braced again, one hand for himself, one hand for the hose, and to his surprise found a space had opened between himself and the #5 man. Despite everything, the team was still edging forward. He panted, screwing up his courage to match theirs, and hauled with all his strength, pulling the dead awkward water-filled weight behind them another yard. Judging by its swollen stiffness, the hose was charged. Chung Nam still had fire-main pressure, then. Her inmost heart still beat.
A shout echoed back along the line. He didn’t understand, but when the man ahead turned his face it was naked, unmasked. Dan pushed his own up, sucking in air over and over. When the guy ahead shucked his OBA he slipped out of his too. They left them in a pile on one of the platforms and moved on.
After some minutes of hauling and gripping, wrestling the bulky weight of the hose along catwalks that were as much handholds as walking surfaces, he crouched up to his waist in water in a low-overheaded space that was totally black except for shots of light from ahead. The hose writhed in his grip like a drugged python. The main space was nowhere near as cavernous as it would have been on a larger ship. But he was still lost, in a dripping Escher universe of catwalks and accesses meeting at impossible angles.
A flicker revealed faces upturned to where white water jutted through a vertical seam. The inrush burst through hammered plugs and tore away patches men tried to jam into it. Shouts echoed. Following pointing and gesticulations, Dan and the #5 man wrestled the hose around a corner and lashed it down. Another hose led up, toward an open scuttle where faint light showed above. He jumped down to where more figures struggled, and blundered into a body in the dark. The grunt sounded familiar. Dan grabbed an arm. “O’Quinn? That you? What’re they trying to do?”
“Fuck you doing here, Commander?” O’Quinn shouted hoarsely.
“Trying to keep us afloat. Like you. What’s going on?”
“Hold that, will you? We’re riggin’ this fuckin’ eductor. Hold it tight, goddamn it.” Dan got his hands where O’Quinn pointed. The other bent and he heard the clank of metal, then a scrape and clang as a wrench slipped and flew. The Koreans talked quickly, all together, and O’Quinn shouted, “Fuck. Fuck! No, let it go. Forget it! Just put a crimp in that fuckin’ hose. Twist it and… okay, you guys know how to do that. Good. Just hold that for a second.” Another grating squeak of metal on metal. “Okay. Let her go.”
A hollow roar, a throb under his hands. It felt like the thing was working. He took his hands off gingerly and it held. “This the only penetration?” Dan yelled.
“It’s a fucking parted seam. We got more leaks aft.”
“Yu says they never hit us.”
“Maybe not, but the fucking next goddamn thing to it. There’s a lot of fumes back aft. I’m thinking flares or something, from the smell.”
“Fire, you mean?”
“Not sure. I don’t think fire, but I kept thinking I heard somebody yelling back there. I tried to get these assholes to go look, but they won’t leave the main space.”
“They’re right, Joe. They’ve got to get a handle on the flooding. That’s priority one.”
“I know, I know, they’re fucking right. But how about we go look? We’re like fifth wheels down here anyway.”
“Where are they? This way?”
“You’re turned around, that’s forward. No, aft somewhere—aft of the launcher—”
“Shaft alley? After steering?”
“Not that deep. Maybe some kind of deployment room for the towed array. All the way aft. I don’t know exactly, but I can hear guys yelling back there.”
“You can hear them? You sure?”
“That’s what I said.” O’Quinn jerked his head.
It sounded okay to go see if they could help. So he followed the older man through the darkness, past and nearly under a massive boxlike structure he recognized as one of the gas turbine enclosures.
The ship fell ominously silent once they left behind the clamor and clanging of the damage-control party. The whole aft section felt abandoned. They were climbing, not walking, going hand to hand along gratings and ladderways that tilted and shifted as the ship rolled. Dan wondered what was going on topside. If a torpedo hit now, they’d never make it out.
A grating suddenly gave way under their boots. O’Quinn slipped, slid, and went into the water. Dan grabbed his collar. When he came up he was spluttering. Laughing.
“Been fucking here before, boy.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“PCF out of An Toi. Coastal Division 11. Hit a mine. Blew the bow off. Got her home though.”
“Spruance class, in the Med.”
“Did you get her home?”
He nodded in the dark, remembering the ones who hadn’t made it. But the ship—yeah. He’d brought her back, and most of her people with her. Why couldn’t he focus on that? On how many he’d brought back, not how many he hadn’t?
He knew the answer. His own perfectionist self, his most persistent and merciless critic.
It wasn’t that Niles had accused him that rankled. The admiral had only voiced the condemnation Dan Lenson himself had leveled long before.
“Asked you a question, Commander. Did you hear me?”
He bared his teeth in the dark. “I heard you—Captain. Yeah. We got her home.”
“Let’s get some of these Korean kids home too,” O’Quinn rasped. Then slid, cursing, scrabbling, and went down again. Back here the water, the gratings, everything, was coated with oil. Dan hoped the stuff didn’t catch fire. They’d be well and truly screwed.
Then he smelled it, what O’Quinn had told him about. A nitric burning stink, like the afterlingering of a fireworks show, or a burned-out roadside fusee. What the hell was it? It wasn’t anything he’d ever smelled before aboard ship.
The ship rolled and something let go with a grinding clatter in the dark. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was right above them. Dan cowered, his arm whipping up in protective reflex. But nothing came down. Yet. He shouted, “Where the hell are they? You sure about this, Joe?”
O’Quinn was coughing, and Dan felt the tickle in his lungs too. The fumes, or smoke, or whatever it was, was getting thicker. “Just a couple more yards,” he grunted between coughs. “Right under here. Duck under this thing.”
WHEN they finally reached the door, Dan saw the problem. One of the generators had come off its foundations, sheared its bolts, and been toppled by the sideways snap of explosive shock. A corner of its steel-I-beam base pinned the door closed.
He figured it was some sort of stern compartment, a Nixie handling room or the towed array deployment gear, like O’Quinn had said. The deepest, remotest manned station, all the way aft, all the way down. The door’s dogs were turned to the open position. Whoever was inside must have done that. But they couldn’t pop it against the weight.
They were both coughing now, unable to stop, the biting pungent fumes making it impossible to get a full breath. No wonder the others had stayed forward. He and O’Quinn leaned on the door, panting and bracing themselves against another heavy roll, another cacophony of terrifying sounds from above them. Something was hissing and bubbling not far away.
“They don’t get power back pretty damn quick, she’s going over,” Dan gasped.
“Probably going anyway. With all this water.”
O’Quinn’s placid tone was so at variance with what he was saying that Dan glanced over in surprise. His face—what little of it was visible in the gleams from the lights far behind them—was smudged with oil, but the man was smiling. “Uh, you all right, Joe? Breathing this shit—”
“Huh? Never better.” O’Quinn studied the fallen machinery. The frame pinned the hatch closed. The black water moved across its foot, a little higher each time the frigate rolled. He groped along the bulkhead and came up with a dogging wrench. He slammed it on the hatch, two, three times.
Dan listened but nothing came back. No answering concussions, no yells, nothing but the distant bubbling, the uneasy squeak of steel on steel. He coughed. Got out, “You heard somebody inside?”
“Yeah. Hear ‘em shouting?”
“You sure, Joe?’
“Hell yeah, I’m fucking sure. There it is again. Say you didn’t hear that?”
Dan hesitated, remembering what Henrickson had told him about O’Quinn. The Buchanan disaster. Hadn’t his disgrace and dismissal been for leaving men trapped below? Was this some kind of flashback, some aural hallucination? He tried to catch O’Quinn’s eye, but the man was already tugging at fallen metal. “Come on here, goddamn it. Put your back to it.”
“Uh—I don’t hear anything, Joe.”
O’Quinn didn’t answer and Dan gave up questioning. Maybe he did hear something—it was hard to tell with all the other noise around them. He got his back under a corner, where he could brace his legs. They grunted in unison a couple of times, then put all they had into it. The generator didn’t move an inch, not a millimeter. There was no give to it at all.
The hull around him tilted farther, groaning. Black water bulged out of the dark and surged over the tops of his boots. He heard the damage-control parties shouting behind them, but they seemed more distant than before. Were they withdrawing? Called back out? Even… abandoning ship? He kept expecting another detonation, this one final: the flash, then the black end. He drew down acrid air, fighting an overpowering urge to bolt. “Joe, you really sure—I don’t hear—”
“I fucking heard them, Lenson. We’re all they got.” O’Quinn sounded frantic now. His oily hair stuck up in spikes. He was bent, feeling around under the black water like a man who’s lost his keys. “You want to fucking get out, hey, go! Save your own ass, all right?”
“I’m not going anywhere, I’m just asking—”
“Ask about the guys in that compartment. Figure how they feel right now. Okay? Get on the other end of this thing. Not that. The I beam there. Yeah, that one. That attached to anything? See if we can get it over here.”
The beam seemed to be part of a demounting kit, kept to swap out the generator. In the dark it was hard to be sure, but it appeared to be eight, nine feet long, a chunk of solid steel with some machined fitting at the end Dan didn’t recognize. Halfway through getting it dragged over to the door Dan grasped what the other had in mind. He sweated his end up as O’Quinn, knee-deep in water now, fought to force the butt end under the generator frame.
“Uh, hey—Joe? We actually get this hatch cracked, this water’s going to flood it. If it’s not flooded already.”
O’Quinn held up a thin snake Dan recognized after a moment as a hose. “What’s that?” he muttered.
“Compressed air. What was hissing and bubbling, under there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Get it to ‘em, maybe they can breathe.”
“But if it’s flooded—”
“If it was flooded, would we be hearing guys screaming under there?”
“But I don’t actually hear—”
“I heard’em.”
Dan muttered through gritted teeth, “I hear people screaming sometimes too, Joe.”
O’Quinn waited, not looking at him. At last he inclined his head slightly, cocked, as if trying to identify distant music. “You hear them,” he muttered.
“Yeah.”
“And then what?”
“And you don’t listen. You hear them but you don’t listen. You can’t. You just go on.”
He straightened and sucked a breath so stacked deep with oil fumes and the choking smoke that his parched throat flamed. Circuits were snapping off in his brain. Red sparks arched and fell gracefully at the corners of his vision. “We’re… losing the oxygen down here, Joe. Let’s get serious. You really hear somebody? Or are you just remembering them from—before?”
O’Quinn bent him a look of the most complete hatred Dan had ever met. “Get the fuck out of here. No—wait. I need you. They need you. Or I’d tell you to go blow yourself! Now put your fuckin’ weight on that thing!”
The beam took their weight, but instead of levering up the frame under their combined straining, it slowly bent. Nothing else moved, and Dan realized it was futile. Even if there were someone down there. Even if O’Quinn wasn’t just hearing things, they were doomed.
But then the darkness rolled again. A wave crashed from outside, and somehow the added momentum or the cant added just enough to their grunting efforts that the lever came down a little more. Then even more.
The corner of the foundation pried slowly up. Maybe six inches. They worked the butt in farther, so it wouldn’t slip, and tried desperately again to lever the generator up and off the hatch. But it didn’t go. Just hung there, six inches of gap.
“Hold it there,” O’Quinn grunted.
“Joe—”
To his astonishment and horror O’Quinn was on his hands and knees, then on his belly. In the water. Working hard with the dogging wrench.
A black crack showed. Dan groaned, trying to hold up the enormous weight of the frame single-handed. Cramps knotted his back. His arms were numb. He panted, but what his lungs sucked in wasn’t air but some fiery gaseous acid. He watched for a hand to appear in the crack. For a flashlight to shine through, a face to appear, arms to push, a shout to echo.
Nothing. He said through teeth bared in effort, “There’s nobody there, Joe.”
“Yes, there is. Hold it up—”
“Maybe there was—”
“Get it up,” O’Quinn shouted. ”Now,” and Dan gave a despairing heave and the older man did too, his back braced against the steel.
The whole great mass squealed upward another inch, another couple of inches. As it did the crack widened, and Dan was appalled to see O’Quinn stretch out around the frame and with a quick squirming motion thrust his hands, and head, and upper body inside the black gap.
“Joe!” Dan shouted, straining with desperate effort against the lever, praying it didn’t slip. If it did it would close the door again, on O’Quinn’s skull.
But the ship rolled, and he couldn’t hold it. Slowly the generator began to descend. He heard a soft grunt from the man beneath it as the weight came down on him.
With a burst of dizzying effort that ripped something in his back he pulled the lever down, steel scraping against steel, getting just that much more lever arm on it, and put all he had, more than he had, into it. The descent halted. The generator hovered, poised, as he strained and panted, then came back up a little. “Get out of there,” he squeezed through locked teeth. “I can’t hold this. Joe! Get outl”
But O’Quinn either ignored him or didn’t hear. He squirmed again, sending ripples across the water, and crawled forward even more.
Dan couldn’t see his head now. Or his chest. O’Quinn’s elbows worked at the edge of the door. His boots dragged, kicking, splashing, thrusting his body into the closing gap. Dragging the hose behind him.
Dan thought to grab for his leg, but that would mean slacking off on the lever. If that frame came down it’d crush him. “Joe. Joe,” he yelled, but got no more answer than before.
The boots gave a final kick and vanished at the same moment the generator began to descend again.
Dan was straining to hold it up, straining too to hear anything from below, when the ship went over.
She’d been rolling hard all the time, of course, but this was different. The swift jerk was like dropping the trap of a gallows. That steep, and that fast. Black water surged around his legs. From behind him came a prolonged, polyphonic chorus of ghastly screams. From above, what had a moment before been beside him but was now suspended terrifyingly came the shriek of ripping metal and the rushing hiss of a malevolent and powerful demon abruptly set free.
Its breath swept over him, icy, misting, and with it came a terrible aching emptiness in his head. Cylindrical tanks tumbled end over end in unnatural slow motion. They tolled and clanged like the iron bells of hell as they caromed and pinballed through the maze of rails and gratings, valves snapping off, spraying out whatever they were discharging. Some kind of gas—
He didn’t see where the spark came from, only felt its instantaneous expansion into a bloom of yellow-white flame as overwhelming as the noon sun, ramming toward him through the beveled air. The shock blew him into a darkness as solid as if both his body and his instantly extinguished mind had been frozen now and forever into black everlasting ice.