China Sea (15 page)

The OOD muttered something, touched the speaking tube, then decided against it. He brought the head around by eye, lining the tossing ferry up on the pelorus. In the failing light Dan went out on the wing. The wind ironed his khakis against his chest as he searched the bridge opposite. A heavyset fellow in a black fisherman's cap looked back. Hard to tell at this distance, but he seemed to be wearing a beard. The others must be below, working on the leak.

Letting his binoculars drop to their strap, Dan swept his arms up and down several times. The man opposite stared at him. Dan then climbed onto the little platform that ran along the outer edge of the wing. From there he hauled himself up another couple of feet, till he was straddling the corner of the splinter shield.

The man opposite raised his glasses. Excellent. Dan bent over and thrust his rump out. He pointed to it several times, then with a flattened hand mimed something hinging or folding down from it. He noticed the Pakistanis watching him from inside the pilothouse. Their faces were carefully noncommittal. He faced the other ship again and was rewarded by a vigorous nod and wave. The man in the cap disappeared.

Dan jumped down to the gratings as a curtain of spray hurtled over the port side and rattled over his head, then craned out, trying to see into the fast-falling darkness. They'd have to do this right the first time. Would it be easier if they were steaming into the wind? No, it'd give them better helm control, but it wouldn't give the RHIB the shelter they needed to launch safely. This course was as good as it was going to get.
Al Qiaq
, of course, was still hoping for Jedda; that was why she was on it. He slammed the door open, wrestled the wind for it, and dogged it closed. “How far to Jedda?” he yelled to Robidoux. “And what's the tide doing here?”

“Wait one … about sixty nautical miles, with a dogleg around the Mismari Reef. Tide … that's a tough one, sir. There's no tables for Sector Six, and the sailing directions mention frequent crosscurrents.”

Irshad: “At least a day yet, at the speed he's making good.”

“If we can keep her afloat that long. You want to make sure the RHIB's loaded, all personnel have life jackets on and secured, that they have lights, and that their radios work. Tell the boat officer the easiest approach will be to make for that ramp on her stern. Do you see the ramp?” Irshad nodded.

“They'll be dropping it in a couple of minutes. That'll be a lot easier than trying to get up those sheer sides. Once it's down, we lag back to give them a lee, smooth that pitch out, and they can head on over. You sure you don't have anybody who speaks Arabic?”

“Not the kind of Arabic they're speaking.”

Dan picked up the portable radio. It was on Channel 16, a line-of-sight distress frequency.
Tughril
was angling in, approaching the ferry's wake. The big seas were rolling through it, but the wide, flat stern of what Dan saw now was a rather larger vessel than he had at first thought had ironed them down to five to seven feet. Events were accelerating now, taking on that vicious smooth velocity that could at any time career out of control into utter disaster. He lifted the radio again, figuring to try French on them, then thought,
Wait a minute; Compline got their distress message.
He thumbed the 21MC. “Radio, Bridge: Chief Compline there?”

“Speaking.”

“Chief, when the distress call came in, how did you copy that? We can't seem to get through to the other fella's bridge team.”

“There's at least one guy speaks English over there. 'Cause I was talking to him.”

“Call him back. Keep it short, but ask him to lower their stern gate. Think I got that message across nonverbally, but make sure. Number two: I want them to maintain present course and speed, their best man on the wheel, and hold the swings to two degrees max. Number three: See if your English speaker can come up on Channel 16 and translate; we're gonna have to coordinate our movements pretty closely while we're running alongside.”

Compline rogered. Dan double-clicked the lever and checked the relative positions of the two hulls again. Maybe five hundred meters back,
Tughril
was coming left now to parallel course, ratcheting up steadily on the heaving ferry. Looking across to her, Dan saw a party of seamen at the stern gate. As he watched, it came slowly down, and they scrambled back as a sea licked at their boots. He saw also that what he'd taken for oil or loose water, a mobile darkness on the ferry's decks, wasn't oil at all.

“Good God,” he breathed.

They were human beings, hundreds of them, lining the gunwale as the frigate moved in, shedding speed to fall in on her port quarter. The ferry's crew seemed to be fighting to move them away from the rail. But the passengers weren't obeying. It would be difficult to get the assistance party aboard if they couldn't keep the stern gate area clear. And what if those panicky hundreds suddenly decided they'd feel safer in the RHIB? It was a disaster in the making.

But if the other ship foundered, they'd be trying to pick people out of the water in a heavy sea, at night. They'd die then, a hell of a lot of them. And he had only a few more minutes of light to do anything.

He was still staring across, making sure there wasn't something he'd forgotten or overlooked, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He moved aside as Khashar emerged onto the wing, cigarette in his jaw. The captain surveyed the approaching ferry, the seamen waiting on the boat deck. The stolid dark face with the heavy Stalin mustache looked icy calm. For a moment Dan felt relieved.

Then Khashar swung and shouted an order through the open pilothouse door. The helmsmen's faces flew around. Their hands tightened on the wheel. Irshad gaped from the chart table. Dan didn't know what the order was. All he saw was the astonished expressions, the glances they exchanged.

Khashar spoke again, angrily and threateningly, but the faces did not alter and no hand moved to obey. Instead they did a strange thing. Their glances flicked to Dan, then returned to their work, their charts and instruments, or else they simply stared ahead, as unresponsively as if the bridge were peopled with wooden images.

Khashar blinked as if disbelieving what he saw.

Trying to head off what was going suddenly and horribly wrong, Dan took his arm, realizing as he did so that save for the obligatory handshakes, he'd never touched the man before. He said, “Sir, we have a clear duty to render assistance here. We need to get in there before this light fails, get the assistance party over there.”

Khashar shook him off, not even favoring him with a look. Instead he spoke again to the silent listeners. This time the Urdu sounded incantatory in the pilothouse, mingled with the rush of wind.

Irshad slowly etched a line on his chart. The lee helmsman stood immobile at parade rest, only the nervous flickering of his clasped fingers betraying life. The helmsman stared with oblivious intensity at his gyrocompass.

Khashar shouted, his rage filling the enclosed space. The men paled, but yet again not one moved. Dan saw that the helmsman was holding them in position, glancing over at the ferry from time to time, then back at his repeater.

The captain bit savagely at the ends of his mustache, then turned to Dan, his face suffused with blood. He said, as if each word cost him an effort, “What were you suggesting, Commander?”

Dan explained his plan. When he was done, Khashar nodded. “I have reported this situation to Islamabad. We will wait for orders.”

“We can't wait for them to get back to us, sir. Look; it's getting dark.”

The captain chewed his mustache for a moment more, then grunted, “Carry out the assistance,” and moved a step forward, out of the way.

“Aye aye, sir.” Dan forced his horrified attention away from the crew's silent disobedience, Khashar's rage-flushed cheeks, what would happen to them and to him as soon as this revolution was over. He leaned through the wing door. “Right ten degrees rudder! Steady course zero-four-zero. Engine ahead two-thirds, indicate RPM for ten knots.”

The helmsman shouted his reply; the lee helm answered up. Dan motioned Irshad over. He came unwillingly, glancing at Khashar, but the captain ignored them now. He was staring off toward the ferry, which was rapidly growing larger as they came up astern.

Both ships were rolling, but out of sync, the seas coming in on their port bows, lifting first
Tughril
, then
Al Qiaq.
The gunwales were black with people. By now Dan could make out individual heads. He told Irshad to pass to the boat coxswain to trail on the sea painter till he gave them the cast-off signal from the bridge. Once in the water, they'd proceed directly to the stern gate, put over a bow line, then debark everybody but the coxswain. The crew of the ferry would have to help with the pumps and eductors; a davit near the stern gate might help. “And tell them to keep their hard hats on and buckle those life jackets tight,” he finished.

He watched the ferry's stern draw nearer. The closer they got, the safer the RHIB's passage would be. On the other hand, too close and the hulls would suck together; plus the ferry's yaw and wallow didn't give him a hell of a lot of confidence in their helm control. He wanted to drop into a slot about fifty yards off her port quarter. He called Irshad out onto the wing again to explain. “Just like an underway replenishment, only you're going to have to keep a sharp eye on her stern,” Dan told him, conscious at each word of Khashar's back, still turned to them. “That's where you'll see the first motion if she's going to yaw significantly or come around into you. Maybe you should have your OOD watch the stern, yell if he sees her kicking out. OK, got it? Now goose her in the ass and get in there.”

Tughril
surged ahead and Dan tensed, but Irshad chopped power just as the stem passed the stern gate. The frigate rolled hard as she slowed, and he wondered if they could hold this position without slamming into the ferry. All it took was an unexpected sea, a second's inattention at the helm. But the helmsman was concentrating. Dan saw him sweating. “Tell him he's doing good,” Dan said to the OOD.

“What?”

“Your helmsman, Lieutenant. Tell him he's doing good.”

The man smiled briefly, not looking up. Dan watched as they crept up, then seemed to stop, relatively at least, hammering along seventy yards off
Al Qiaq
's port side. The men on the ferry's bridge were yelling something. He couldn't make it out above the mingled wind and blowers and diesels. He glanced again at Khashar's back, then leaned in and yelled, “Captain! Permission to put the boat in the water?”

He'd meant it to help the man save face, but the momentarily turned eyes held a depth of hatred he'd seldom read in a human visage. OK, so be it. He leaned over the shield and gave the boat crew the signal.

Pistolesi waved, and the inflatable dropped. The crew scrambled down a jacob's ladder as it surged and bumped against the hull. “Cast off!” Dan howled down through cupped hands.

The outboards whined, and the boat curved off into the patch of slightly smoothed sea between the heaving, rolling hulls. The OOD, without coaching, dropped four RPMs and drifted back fifty feet, then nudged the bow in with one-degree course changes till they were riding so close to the other ship Dan could have underhanded a softball down to the afterdeck. He saw the bright-colored curved roofs of cars, the wet shine of lacquered metal. The passengers were women, in black veils,
chadors
. Children, too. He rubbed his face anxiously, watching the RHIB try a tentative first approach to the gate. It came in too fast and sheered off, and the wind caught the bow and lifted it and blew it scudding backward like a paper boat on a pond. The coxswain caught it deftly, though, spun it through a full turn in the wake, and surged back again in a full-throttle roar that was audible all the way up here on
Tughril
's bridge. They disappeared for a moment, screened by an immense green-hearted swell, and Dan's hands tightened on the rail. Then they reappeared, and he saw a spider thread of nylon stretching from the bow over the stern gate.

Suddenly a jet of black diesel smoke shot from the ferry's stack. Dan cursed, hammering the freshly repainted splinter shield as Irshad yelled into the pilothouse. Increasing speed, but
Tughril
's steam plant couldn't accelerate as fast as the ferry's diesels. What the
hell
was the ferry's captain doing? Then he saw the stern squat down into the water, sucked down by the increased thrust of the screws, and at that same moment a line of men squatted back along a white thread and the black wedge of the inflatable boat surged up and out of the sea like a beaching seal, sliding to a stop on the wave-washed afterdeck.

*   *   *

THEY dropped back a thousand yards and plodded along after the ferry as the sun dropped out of sight in a final brief blaze followed by the stars that had accompanied Sinbad. Khashar went below without a word to anyone. Dan wasn't looking forward to the explosion. He'd never seen a captain defied on his own bridge like that. He would have simply left declining even to witness, except for the obligation to provide assistance. For the moment, that took precedence over everything else. If it tore poor damn
Tughril
apart, that would have to be accepted.

He retreated inside the pilothouse to warm up, propping a shoe on the radiator as he checked the ferry out through his glasses. Her lights burned bright half a mile ahead, their reflections on the heaving sea now and then silhouetting the RHIB, swimming astern. He wanted to call Pistolesi, see how it was going, but didn't want to interrupt them. They would be pretty busy. It was hard to tell, it was surging up and down so fast and so far, but he had the bad feeling that the ferry's stern was riding lower than when he'd first seen it. The maneuver to dip her stern and get the boat aboard had been nicely done, but he hoped it hadn't made them take on more water.