China Sea (11 page)

They actually could have made port last night, but Khashar had decided not to run in close under the island during the night; they'd passed the darkest hours steaming slowly on an east–west course, then turned north at 0500. The sky was still overcast, but the wind had dropped during their final leg in and the anemometer wavered now between ten and fifteen knots.

Ever since the fire, a standoff had existed between the halves of the crew. Like a creature with two brains, two wills,
Tughril
had staggered eastward with a divided heart. Dan had pulled all his men off training and reorganized them into a shadow watch team. He stood watch on the bridge, trying to keep an eye on things and at the same time stay out of Khashar's way. Every time Dan was around the captain, he had an uneasy sense that the guy was waiting for an excuse to blow. He had a job to do, so he did it, but he kept out of the captain's way except at mealtime. Khashar kept inviting him to lunch. It was tense, but he figured he was in a sense being the lightning rod. The downside was that he was getting really sick of boiled lamb and greasy rice.

Khashar had never mentioned the night his men tried to abandon ship. Not once.

“Three thousand yards to turn point,” murmured Robidoux. Dan told him he didn't need continuous reports, just to let him know if anything didn't look kosher. This wasn't a demanding evolution. Just proceed in toward Horta Light, hang a right on a radar range, pick up the pilot, then let him conn them in. Warships usually took the last berth on the mole, and it was always a port-side moor. He raised the glasses again and examined the cottony wisps of squall that clung to Pico Alto, miles off to starboard but still perfectly clear in the rain-washed air.

A rattle on the outboard ladder, and Jim Armey hauled himself up. The engineer's face was gray and his coveralls stiff with dirt and dried sweat.

Dan returned his salute. “Jim. How's it looking down below?”

“Got the bus transfer problem nailed down. They're flying the circuit board in to the air base.” Armey rubbed his eyes, squinting forward. “That a C-5?”

They watched the huge aircraft in the distance, so huge and slow it seemed to float. Dan said after a moment, “Stopping to refuel. On its way to Saudi.”

“Gosh, we're almost in.”

“It's a short sea detail.” Swinging the Big Eyes—the huge pedestal-mounted binoculars—around, Dan took him on a tour of the island.

“You been here before?”

“Twice, but you never stay long; it's just a stop on the way someplace else. Like for Columbus. There's a park at the top of that volcano, a mile across and about a thousand feet deep. Kind of a
Lost World
thing. You going ashore?”

“Like to, but we've got the fuel barge coming alongside—”

“Take a damn break, Jim. We can get a decent dinner, at least.”

Armey said he'd think about it and went below again. Dan turned back to the nearing land. He could make out individual buildings now, church spires rising on the hillsides amid masses of trees, the long black line of the mole. He lowered the glasses and looked down.

Into a sea clear and blue as sapphire. It appeared harmless and welcoming, ruffled by faint cat's paws of wind. Sometimes, when it looked this lovely, it was hard to remember the placid surface hid a thousand fathoms of darkness, an unquenchable craving for the bones of ships and the lives of men.

Beside him the port bearing taker spoke urgently. A moment later yelling came from inside the pilothouse. The deck leaned as the bow came right, swung too far, and corrected back to within a point of the peninsula that screened the town.

The engine-order telegraph pinged, and the ripple and rush of the hull slackened. Glancing down at bits of weed rocking past on the paling sea, he estimated they were making ten knots. The dark knobs screening the town slid away. Masts and white-shining hulls came into view past the breakwater. The gleaming upperworks of what looked like a cruise liner were slowly being revealed, just forward of where the frigate would moor.

He went below for a head call and refreshed his coffee from the pot in the Combat Information Center. When he came back up, Horta spanned the horizon. He checked the chart with Robidoux. The QM said the Omega fixes were plotting three hundred yards east of the visuals, but the error was consistent. He went back out on the bridge and lost himself in reverie as
Tughril
slowed further, pivoted. The mole stretched out like a black barring arm of volcanic stone, then opened, welcoming them in. Old men in ragged shirts and straw hats swung nets into the water. A windmill stood on the mountain, arms clicking rapidly around in the steady wind. The water was even paler now, the tint of female turquoise.

He looked down at an excited man in a tossing small boat. He was yelling up, whipping his cap back and forth. He pointed at the bridge, at him, and after a perplexed moment Dan raised his hand to return the greeting. The gesture seemed to drive the fellow into a rage; he threw his hat down into the boat.

It was bobbing in the wake when Dan suddenly realized who it must have been. He did a double take, focusing the glasses. Yep, a black-painted
P
on the boat's side.

“Sir.” A crisp salute never hurt with this captain. “We've missed the pilot. Small boat just passed down the port side.”

Khashar turned a lazy gaze on him from out of a cloud of smoke. “This doesn't look like a very challenging harbor.”

“He's required by Portuguese regulations, sir.”

“If necessary I will apologize to the harbormaster.” The Pakistani stared ahead, making it obvious that the exchange was over.

Dan wavered, then shrugged inwardly. It looked straightforward enough. The mole lay ahead to port. Their berth was closest to the entrance, just aft of the moored cruise ship. Ahead were a small military pier and a patrol boat, to starboard a shoal of pleasure craft cupped by another, smaller seawall and beyond that the town. Khashar had brought the ship's speed down, though they were still surging ahead faster than Dan liked. The stern of the cruise liner walked steadily closer, a red-and-yellow Spanish ensign flapping briskly. Dan liked the wind. All Khashar had to do was park himself fifty or sixty meters off the pier and the sail effect would sideslip him into the berth. The captain spoke to the helmsman sharply. The bow came left, then left a little more. Dan tensed, but it stopped there.

“Sir, I'd take this a little slower if I were you. She doesn't back very efficiently.”

Khashar didn't answer. He stared rigidly forward at the rapidly approaching mole. Dan hesitated, looking at the others on the bridge. Not one of them met his eyes. He looked at the liner again.

There is a moment, dreaded by every ship handler, when the momentum of thousands of tons of steel means collision can no longer be avoided, but it has not yet actually happened. These are the longest minutes ever made, and Dan stood gripping the rail and staring as the high rounded stern of the liner drew closer. He saw the line handlers staring up at it from the forecastle. “Get back!” he yelled, accompanying the order with a violent pushing-away motion. They glanced up, seemed to grasp their danger all at once, and ran. The strip of milky green water narrowed steadily. Gray-haired passengers stared down from the stern gallery of the liner. He waved them back, too, and they retreated hastily. The lee helm pinged then, but far too late. He couldn't help baring his teeth and tensing his forearms as if to push off as the bow coasted into the liner's quarter.

The sound was tearing and gritty, like a dozen Dumpsters being dragged over concrete by a bulldozer. The spray coaming along the gunwale bent inward, then the lifeline, stanchions wrenching inward one after the other as they popped and twisted off their bases. Bolts cracked and bonged across the deck. Each stanchion left its own separate black gouge across the white-painted hull of the liner. The jolt came back along the hull, rocking him gently as the greater mass of the bigger ship shouldered
Tughril
off. As the bow rebounded to port, the frigate continued to move forward. The result was that the point of impact moved steadily aft along the starboard side. The grinding and screaming continued, marching steadily closer, scuppers popping up and writhing like live things as they were crushed, stanchions snapping inboard, held now only by the vibrating lifelines. Steel grated and screamed. The liner's high hull was still swelling outward at the level of the frigate's main deck, and as the point of impact moved aft it gradually rose.

As it reached the bridge, Dan grabbed the bearing taker and hauled him into the pilothouse and dogged the door. The white hull, so close Dan could read a palimpsest of previous chippings and paintings, bit into the splinter shield where he'd stood a moment before, snapping up the wooden handrail and gnashing it into varnished kindling. A white-uniformed steward stared at them through a porthole. Then the curved wall receded, and the squealing and groaning moved on aft, accompanied by reverberating bangs.

Khashar was yelling, berating someone, Dan couldn't tell who. A knot of men in work clothes gaped up from the pier.

He was opening his mouth to suggest a hard backing bell, to be followed by a nudge ahead, when Khashar shouted what was obviously an order. The helmsman and lee helmsman yelled back, and the engine order telegraph pinged. It looked like hard rudder and a full ahead bell. Son of a bitch … he was about to speak again when Khashar yelled again, and the ahead bell came off and the handles went back, and the rudder angle indicator swung back to amidships. The vertical line of the jackstaff hesitated, then swung slowly to the right. The mole loomed closer and closer, the black rock and concrete looking extremely hard and jagged. Then the back bell took effect, and from the forecastle lines uncoiled in the air.

Chick Doolan, beside him: “What the hell was that? I was down in the breaker, all of a sudden it sounded like a train wreck.”

“We had a close encounter with the liner, there.” Dan looked up, saw people gathered along her rail, examining the gouges. There wasn't anything more he could do, but he still didn't leave his post until
Tughril
lay moored at last, snugged to solid rock while above her, rank after rank, the white houses gazed serenely down.

*   *   *

HE avoided the wardroom for the next half hour and sent Doolan down to muster the guys in the port breaker. When they were assembled he laid a few groups on them about conduct ashore. The Azores were pretty pro-American, but a sailor could get into trouble anywhere if he didn't use his head. The moment he dismissed them, they stampeded for the brow. There, that was done; at least they were off the ship for a few hours.

Back in his room, he hauled himself up into his bunk. For a few minutes he lay staring at the overhead. The ship seemed to reel inside his head, then suddenly reorient, as if he were drunk and staggering. He felt something cocked and tense inside him slowly release. Then it was black.

*   *   *

WHEN he came out on deck again late that afternoon the sun had burned off the overcast and the sky was clear and brilliant. He stood on the quarterdeck in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, looking out across the mole and the strait at Pico. The volcano towered like Fuji, black and ominous. Scattered clouds lingered about its upper slopes. He'd called Jim Armey, asking about dinner, but the engineer begged off. Dan decided to go in alone, get off the ship for a couple of hours, maybe find someplace he could make an international call, see if he could get Blair. He owed his daughter a call, too.

A sun-swarthed Azorean with long hair pulled a taxi to the curb as Dan came down the mole. “To hell with Saddam.”

“Yeah, to hell with him.”

“You American, right? But that's not an American ship.”

“We just sold it to the Pakistanis.” Dan declined the ride politely. What he wanted more than anything was just to walk along a street, look at human beings he didn't know, reassure himself a world existed outside
Tughril
's steel shell. He turned back to look at her halfway down the mole. She looked so incredibly small.

*   *   *

THAT evening he ended up halfway up the mountain, at a half-house, half-restaurant whose outdoor patio looked down over a spectacular view of the strait, looked up to hawks skating the updrafts. From here the ship was a scale model. Most of the other diners were German. He refused the
angelica
with some difficulty, declined beer as well, and had sparkling local water and a fish soup and tried a stewed octopus dish that turned out to be quite palatable.

He was sitting back, waiting for the main course and enjoying the twinkling of lights below as night came to the sea, when he saw Chick Doolan at the bar.

The weapons officer wasn't alone. His broad shoulders were hunched attentively toward a twenty-something woman in a lavender pants suit, with long dark hair and a melancholy look that was focused alternately on Doolan and on the wine at her elbow. Dan watched them for a moment, then turned his mind away.

Then he looked up and there Doolan was, coming toward him. Blue cotton slacks, a Polo shirt. Rugged heavy-jawed face flushed, whether from the drink he carried in his hand or at being discovered, it made him look more like Ernest Hemingway than ever. Behind him, the girl, following close as a tow through a crowded strait. Doolan said aggressively, “Commander. Didn't know you were headed up here.”

“Hi, Chick. Bring anybody else with you?”

“No, most of 'em are down at the Estalagem.” Doolan waved the glass at the horizon. “You can see all the way to Philly.”

“Just about.”

“This is Lorenza; she's from Lisbon—”

“Not ‘Lorenza.' Lavina.”

Dan got up, waited for her hand; she didn't extend it. He noticed Doolan had taken his ring off. Dan didn't say anything, just stood there smiling, and after a moment Doolan took the hint, either that or figured he'd discharged his obligation to acknowledge his presence. He said, “Well, enjoy your dinner,” and added something in an undertone to the girl that made her smile. On the way back to the bar he put his hand on her back. Dan looked after them, watching her turn her head and half-smile as Doolan shifted his hand to her waist. Then Dan switched his attention to the deep-sea crab.