The Cruiser (23 page)

“Manning up Console Two now.”

“Okay, Cher. Good work.” He signed off, almost resenting the calm rational voice that was always a step ahead. Looked out to the distant speck once more. Beyond it lay a land embattled, and beyond that, one about to be invaded. Somehow he had to share intel with the Israelis. Or at least get their watchdog off his back. But how? If only he had a genie aboard. He'd wish
Savo Island
and her crew far from here. No, he'd wish war itself and the eternal suspicion between nations, classes, and those of different hues of skin, over and done, existing only in a past of myth and legend. Something you read about in the history books, like the centuries-long duel between the Romans and the Parthians …

“Captain?” Almarshadi's thin, nervous features were shadowed like a foretaste of dusk. “Boat crew's wondering, it's really looking like it's going to kick up, they're not sure they can stay out much longer. Got a call from the XO on
Pittsburgh
, too. What's the plan? When's Captain Youngblood heading back?”

“Call the whaleboat in, Fahad. We'll call him away before it blows any harder. I'll come down to see him off.” He turned away, gripping the overhead cable as
Savo
leaned into a roll that seemed to have no end.

But war wasn't going to end. Not as long as men were men, and contended each against the other on a steadily eroding sphere compounded of the dust of the dead. Wish all he liked. There'd still be violence. Still be war. Most relentless of the Four Horsemen. And doubly bitter because Man, along with the ants, was a species that inflicted its greatest plague on itself.

11

 

THE
rest of the day passed swiftly. He checked in again with Staurulakis, asking how she'd set up the watch rotation. The forty-eight-hour deadline would expire tomorrow; he wanted them ready for whatever happened. The senior watch officer said she was running an overlapping rotation. It was tight; the admiral's mast, on top of
Savo
's already reduced manning, had cut deep into their bench. She and Mills would be standing five hours on, five hours off. Either Dan or Almarshadi would be on call, again five and five, though they wouldn't actually have to be in their seat in CIC. They had a bit more slack on the bridge, with three qualified officers of the deck: Pardee, Garfinkle-Henriques, and the comm officer, Dave Branscombe. She said Gene Mytsalo was doing well as JOOD and might be able to step up to OOD soon. “But I think we can keep them going up there for quite a while, four on and eight off.”

Next he went down to the engine spaces, undogging and then redogging each door and hatch as he passed through, observing the damage-control drills.

Almarshadi secured everyone from general quarters at 1400. The wind had increased to twenty knots, twenty-five in gusts. It stayed dark as hell all afternoon.
Savo
rolled, top-heavy like her sisters, but she could take six- to seven-foot waves forever. He ate evening meal in the wardroom, not contributing much to the conversation. He could feel himself starting to sag. Better sleep while he could.

Instead, he went back up to the bridge and stared at the running lights of the Israeli corvette, still soldered to the northeastern horizon. He contemplated the radio handset. Perhaps he should call Marom, ask him to increase the standoff distance, at least during the hours of darkness. Finally he decided, to hell with him. As night fell he went back down to his at-sea cabin. He stripped off sweat-smelling coveralls and stuffed them into his laundry bag. He picked up Freya Stark; read a page or two about Diocletian's increasing recruitment of mercenaries for the defensive armies, rather than Roman citizens; and turned off the light. Sleep? Yeah, maybe …

*   *   *

THE
fucking buzzer. No, the call note on his Hydra. He fumbled getting it out of the recharging base and it hit the deck. The leather case must have damped the impact, because it was still working when he hit the Reply button. “C'm,” he grunted. Then cleared his throat and said again, louder, “Captain!”

“Sir, maybe you better get up here.”
Mytsalo, voice high and young, frightened as a child's.

Dan dropped the radio, found his shoes, and sprinted out the door. But the left turn, or rather, the roll
Savo
had just plunged into, betrayed him, and he caromed full tilt off the opposite bulkhead. He groped for the ladder up in the dim red light, shoulder aching, cursing.

Utter darkness, pierced by the whine of the wind. He blundered into a soft short shape and heard a sharp intake of breath, a gasped-out, “Captain's on the bridge.”

“Where's the OOD? What's the problem?”

Another shadow, and Garfinkle-Henriques's voice. “Off to starboard, Captain. Constant bearing, decreasing range. I reported it to Combat—”

He couldn't help a sharp intake of breath, at the icy wind on his underwear-clad skin, but much more at the closeness of the green and white and red lights. The other ship was nearly bow on. He couldn't say how far because he didn't know how large it was. But far
too
fucking close. He caught the distant wink of the corvette's stern light. If that was five miles, this ship was only a few hundred yards off. Hell, he could
hear
it; the steady whoosh of machinery and ventilators even through the whine of the wind. What
was
this thing? It was
enormous
.

The supply officer, beside him. He could just make her out, binoculars clutched to her chest. “We're stand-on vessel. I notified the XO, sir. He said maintain course, he'd warn it off on VHF—”

“Did they answer? You've got Channel 16 up here, right?”

“I didn't hear an answer. No sir.”

“Where's your rudder? Never mind. Right hard,
right hard
. All back full!” He gripped the pelorus, staring over it at approaching disaster. On second glance, it was much bigger than
Savo.
Which might not be bad; it might be slightly farther away than he'd thought. But it was hard to be certain. Spray or rain laced the night, making the port running light a carmine smear, the starboard a turquoise glow. The centerline white lights were blurry opals in a deep black velvet night. Was the uppermost very slightly to the right of the lower? A port bow aspect? It all felt so much like his nightmares he had to reach out and grind his knuckles into the gritty steel of the bulwark. No, fuck, it was real. Were the lights sliding left? Or was that the effect of their own rudder, hard over to the right? He couldn't tell, but couldn't wait to see. He turned back into the pilothouse and yelled, “Sound the collision alarm.”

“Lee helm control's not responding.”

Oh, Christ. “You don't have engine control up here! Remember? Call Main Control. All back full! All back emergency!”

Dit dit dit. Dit dit dit
. The triple blips of the collision alarm stuttered over the 1MC. He glanced left, then ran back out onto the bridge.

To his astonished relief, the gap between the white lights had widened. The green starboard light was occulted; the port one shone out clear. But the ship was so close that even in the dark he could make out its silhouette, black against blacker black, in the same way the unlit circle of a new moon was visible against night sky. Pearly aureoles around sulfur-orange lights tapered back in a long line, fading along its … upper deck? In the dark, the obscuring mist, it was hard to tell exactly what he was looking at. Some sort of tanker, oil or natural gas. Or maybe a really huge bulk carrier.

“Main Control responds, all back emergency,” the OOD said, edging onto the wing with him. Still gripping her glasses. “They never answered on VHF.”

He took a deep breath to keep his voice from shaking. “All right, rudder amidships. Secure from collision alert. —You should have called me before this, Hermelinda.”

“I notified the XO. He said you were asleep. That he had the duty.”

She was right; in Condition III, whoever was in the CO's seat in Combat was the go-to guy. But what had happened, that Fahad would let a contact get in this close? “O … kay. I'll take it up with him, then.”

“Do you want me to ask for a relief, sir?”

“No. You have the deck. You never turned it over, I never assumed it.” He stared out the forward windows at the lights, already shrinking into the distance, and shivered; it had been all too fucking much like the last seconds of the doomed
Reynolds Ryan
. He wrapped his arms around himself, tightening his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. No wonder, he was still in shorts and undershirt. “Wait till he's clear, then resume course. I'm going down to Combat.”

*   *   *

HE
stopped for his coveralls, steadily growing angrier. That ship should never have gotten within miles. If she didn't respond to a verbal warning, there were other ways of getting her attention. If all else failed,
Savo
should have turned away, long before the situation became dangerous, and opened the range herself.

Maybe there was a reason Imerson had kept Almarshadi off the bridge.

When he got to CIC the exec was sitting at the command desk, fingers laced over his face, thin shoulders hunched. Matt Mills glanced up from the TAO chair; Singhe watched from where she stood behind the Aegis watchstanders, dark eyes hooded. The compartment was crowded with men and women at consoles, but no one said a word. Dan slowed himself down by checking the screens. Only an occasional contact incandesced here and there, sparse stars where typically constellations boiled around the ports of the Levant. The contact they'd just missed was outbound, headed west. He took another deep breath, cleared his throat, and said to the hunched shoulders, “XO? Can you step out in the passageway for a minute?”

Almarshadi stood without a word, and followed Dan past the silent watchstanders.

Out into the passageway. Dimly lit. Not with red, because it didn't open directly to the weather decks, but with half the fluorescents off. The ship creaked around them, and Dan braced an arm to an equipment enclosure as she rolled. When the door thunked shut he said, restraining himself with an effort, “What just happened, Fahad? Because what it looked like to me is, my XO's a point of failure. And right now, I can't afford any points of failure.”

“I guess I … I misread where he was going.” The XO wouldn't meet his gaze.

“What was initial detection range?”

“We've only got the surface search radar. It came up at fifteen thousand yards.” Almarshadi hesitated. “Actually a little before that … an intermittent contact … but we thought it was sea state. Peaking waves.”

“Sea state? That thing was enormous. Forty, fifty thousand tons. And you'd pick up its radar on EW—”

“There was no EW detection,” the XO stated. His voice got a bit stronger. “His radar was off. Or broken. Anyway, he wasn't radiating. And, Captain—he changed course on us.”

“Meaning?”

Still not meeting his eyes, the slight officer explained that although the other ship hadn't answered their radioed warning, it
had
come right slightly. “It stayed on that course for about three minutes. That started to open the CPA on the VMS, so we thought it'd pass clear. The CIC officer thought so. And I concurred. But then it—it swung back. By the time we noticed it was closing again, it was inside two miles.”

Dan rubbed his forehead. The Vessel Management System was the digital replacement for the old grease-pencil-on-the-radar-screen method for figuring out if an approaching ship was dangerous. It computed closest points of approach, course, and speed, and displayed ships' predicted tracks. It also recorded video, so it would be easy to go back and replay the near collision.

But he didn't feel like doing that. He doubted Almarshadi was lying. It was something even more dangerous. “Okay, but when it was inside those two miles, why didn't you call me? The first I heard was when the OOD buzzed me. By the time I got to the bridge, we were
in extremis
. We're talking lives, Fahad. If that thing had hit us, we might well have gone down.”

“I was about to go up, Captain, and take the conn. I was on the ladder when I saw you bolt out of your stateroom. So I came back down.”

Dan looked away. He wanted to have confidence in people, but when it came to keeping the ship safe … tolerate substandard performance, and it would become the new standard.

On the other hand, he couldn't be awake and alert twenty-four hours a day. And Almarshadi had done fine coming through the crowded, chaotic Strait of Messina, in Dan's experience one of the tensest passages on the planet.

He blew out. “I'm honestly not sure what to do about this, Fahad. Is something like this why Captain Imerson didn't allow you on his bridge?”

“No sir.”

He waited, but the guy didn't elaborate. “Right now, I'm pretty angry. Right this second, I'd rather have Cheryl Staurulakis as my stand-in than you.”

Almarshadi nodded but, again, said nothing, his gaze aimed somewhere in the area of Dan's belt buckle. Despite himself, he glanced down to see if his fly was open. It wasn't.

Savo
rolled and plunged around them. Metal protested, yielding and rebounding against the strain. In the closed space, the dim light, Dan felt nauseated. He took a deep breath. “But I need you. I need every man, and woman, right now. Mission accomplishment, Fahad. ‘Hard blows.' I'm going to give you one more chance. But also, a warning. If this happens again, you won't be standing any more watches aboard
Savo
. And I'll put you ashore at the first opportunity.”

“… happen again,” Almarshadi murmured.

“What's that?”

“It won't.”