China Sea (46 page)

He came back to
Gaddis
's helo deck to feel the first cold exhalation of the oncoming squall. Juskoviac was regarding him strangely. He cast back to whatever they'd been talking about. Oh … petitions, and the XO had said it wouldn't be limited to that. Dan cleared his throat. “No? Then what will it be?”

“This time the word in the p-ways is they're just going to kill you.”

“OK, Greg. So on the one hand, I'm overreacting by issuing side arms. And on the other, you tell me the lowlifes have a contract out on me.”

“It isn't just me. Jim Armey thinks we ought to turn back, too.”

“Jim's shared his doubts with me, Greg, more than once. He's up-front with it. Then he salutes and goes down below and keeps things running. You ever noticed that? What he says'll get done, well, damn! It gets done. Not because he sits in his office playing with his snake. Because he goes down there and works it and bird-dogs it till it's done.”

“You've got them believing you, Lenson. I don't know how. My own sense—”

“Yeah? What sense is that, Greg?”

Sentence by sentence, they'd passed from wariness to enmity. The equivocal construction of Dan's last remark nudged it past recovery. He felt it happening, but he was too tired to care, too fatigued to dissemble anymore with the man he'd carried on his back since the day they met. He did not clarify or recall his statement.

Juskoviac flushed, gripping the lifeline as the deck slanted beneath their boots. Suddenly words tumbled from his mouth. “You know, I saw from the second you came aboard to stab Dick Ottero in the back that you were an arrogant, devious son of a bitch. I could live with that. You run into them now and then in this organization. But you're so far over the line now that—I know you hate the Chinese. They hurt your fiancée or something—”

“They killed her, Greg. Hired some D.C. gang bangers to rape her and kill her.”

“OK, they killed her. That's rough. But you're so obsessed you've become what you think you're fighting. You're becoming a pirate yourself, and dragging the rest of us down with you. You think you're Captain Kidd. But you're not. You're not Captain Queeg, either.”

Dan said dryly, figuring this was the time to let the man spit all the poison he'd stored up, “Then who am I, Greg?”

“You're Captain Ahab.”

“And you're Starbuck? I don't think so, Greg. The men respected him.”

Dan knew the second it was out of his mouth he shouldn't have said it. Up to now the exec had been ineffective, undependable, a pain in the ass, but he was at least nominally still responsible to the command. After he got his whining over with, he'd have turned back into his inadequate, harmless self. But now Juskoviac's eyes blazed in a way Dan had not seen before. His face went the mottled red and white of someone who's been out walking in deep winter and come in suddenly to a suffocatingly hot room.

“You son of a bitch,” he said in a low, tormented voice. “Just remember: What goes around comes around. There's gonna be a reckoning for this someday. When it happens, I intend to testify to the truth.”

He turned on his heel. Dan reached out, half-intending to call him back, then gave up and just called after him, “Wear your side arm, Greg.”

The men looked toward Dan as the first drops of rain arrived, plopping first on the fantail, then around them on the black nonskid, clapping heavily down one by one, then more and more swiftly until he had to jog toward the hangar. He took shelter there with the sweating crewmen in long-unlaundered dungarees and T-shirts, in a sudden silence. Shoulders pressed into his; he felt someone shift and move behind him.

Suddenly his mouth grew dry. It was all he could do not to turn around, to stare out at the dancing silver mist as if the idea of a blade suddenly thrust into his back was not all that filled his mind.

*   *   *

BUT the squall passed without incident. As it eased off, he worked his way through the crowd and forward and then up to CIC to check on the radio and sonar searches. Thence to Radio, and thence to the bridge. Where he stayed perched in his chair, alternately trying to nap and pacing the deck for the rest of the afternoon.

By dusk preparations were close to complete. The power cabling for the new lights was still being connected, but the rigging of the lights themselves, the alterations to ship's structure, and placing of the containers were finished.
Gaddis
heaved steadily now through a darkening gloom penetrated only by occasional bursts of heavy, almost drowning rain, so sudden and concentrated it was as if she'd sailed under a waterfall. He went down to Radio again to get another message off to Subic, then came back up to the bridge. Chick had prepared an emissions bill and had assigned his JOOD to check it off. Dan called for a status on the dark bridge and was startled when a woman's voice answered.

“That you, Bobbie?”

“You said I could sign on as a mate. I can't sit down there any longer looking at that revolver.”

Dan remembered being there. He'd confronted that choice himself, on a divan in front of a telephone, a six-pack, and a pistol, after Kerry died. After he'd realized that all evils do not have remedies, that not all malevolence is punished, that all stories do not tie up neatly at the ends. That some losses can never be avenged or remedied, only outlived.

Could it be possible that Juskoviac was right, that he was over the line? That he was—what had the exec's word been—obsessed?

He became conscious she was still staring at him, invisible in the dark, but he could still feel her eyes, and he cleared his throat, pushing doubt and self-questioning back into the shadowy place where it lived always. “Well … OK. How are we looking?”

“I don't understand all of these things. People call up and tell me they're done, or I call them and ask, and then I check them off. Turn count set and masking, what's that?”

“That's holding our speed to one consistent with a merchant … and there's some other dirty tricks there, so we sound more like one. In case somebody's tracking us with passive sonar.”

“IFF off and tagged?”

“Identification Friend or Foe; that's an electronic responder that tells another U.S. ship we're a U.S. ship.”

“Don't we want that left on?”

“No. Believe me on that one.”

“Fire control radars, tagged out and breakers removed—”

“So we don't give ourselves away as a warship.”

“Deceptive lighting measures.”

“That's the lights and gear we were setting up on the flying bridge and up on the mack. A merchant shows a lot more lights under way than we do. Actually, if we could manage to come up on these guys at night, we can probably get within spitting distance before they figure out we're not what they think.”

“What are the chances of that?”

He told her he didn't have any way of calculating it; all they could do was try and hope for the best. He thanked her for helping out, then moved on through the darkened pilothouse, among the silent anticipating shapes of helmsman and lee helm, boatswain and quartermaster.

And once again fear squirmed in his belly. It would be child's play for someone to take him out up here. A knife in the side, then escape in the dark and confusion. A side arm wouldn't do a damn bit of good. He'd need a suit of armor. His mouth parched again, and he went to the urn. The coffee was bitter and overcooked, it tasted like licking the inside of a cap gun, but he drained the dregs anyway. If somebody wanted him out of the way, there wasn't much he could do about it. He was pretty sure he could count on the bridge team, anyway.

Yeah, and when this was all over, he was going to have to find some way to reward the guys who'd stuck with him. Like Doolan and Topmark and Zabounian, Chief Compline and Sansone and Usmani. Had to find some way to get Usmani into the country. Didn't service in the armed forces help you in applying for citizenship? He ought to get Compline to swear the son of a bitch in. After Bobbie gave him a few pointers on how not to treat women in America. And Chief Tosito, sitting down there in Sonar with the torment from his stitched-up chest plain from the very stoniness of his features. Should be flat on his back in sick bay. Instead he was patiently searching out ahead for any screw beat, any machinery tonal, anything that might indicate the presence of their quarry. They deserved praise and more than praise. Maybe when this was over—if they all came through whatever lay over the horizon—their hard work would be rewarded.

And that made him wonder again, not with any hope of resolving what he had puzzled at now for too long, what
they
had in mind for him. What web those inaccessible deities—he thought of them that way now, like the gods who had pushed Odysseus around the sea like a living toy—were spinning as his fate and destiny.

He'd taken
Gaddis
on with the naïve assumption that what he saw was what he would get, that it was what it had been presented as, a chance at a temporary command. Since then the assignment had morphed into the strangest of his career. He'd pursued it halfway round the planet and endured Khashar and Juskoviac and Machias. Had passed a sentence that left him with a cold hole where his soul had been, a judgment that would always make him doubt the meaning of justice and retribution. He'd proceeded on faith, faith that these unseen immortals would make everything right, that they knew all, foresaw all, and would end all in some way that would transform the wayward course of his long voyage into a logical mission. And only once through that entire time had their presence been made manifest, incarnated in a shadow out of the dark, a ship he'd never fully seen, peopled by red-lit shadows, who had gifted him with the power of destruction, but flawed, aged, and thoroughly and completely deniable. Twenty-year-old ammunition. A ship manned by outcasts, with an outcast for her captain, named after the great outcast of mankind … no, that had been USS
Caine.
Shit, he couldn't blame Armey or Juskoviac if they didn't buy his take on this. He'd been skating on the edge of disbelief himself when the replenishment message came blinking through the dark.

“Bridge, Sonar.” The 21MC. One of the wraiths pressed the key to acknowledge. “Captain up there?”

“Sittin' here listening. Inform us.”

“He might want to come down here. We got somebody trying to call us.”

*   *   *

TOSITO was stretched out at full length in the dim red light of the alcove that opened off CIC, his chair reclined like a dentist's. Headphones vised his skull. A third-class sat with him, glancing up as Dan rattled the curtain aside. Narrow and equipment-walled, the sonar space smelled of ozone and floor wax and rubber and old burnt coffee from the hot plate bolted to the bulkhead. The sonar stacks were shut down for all but passive listening. Tape reels rotated smoothly behind a transparent shield. Dan placed his hand carefully on the unbandaged shoulder, and Tosito looked up. “Somebody trying to call us on Gertrude, Captain,” he said.

“Gertrude” was the AN/WQC-2A, a seldom-used underwater telephone. Dan had seen it employed occasionally to communicate with submerged submarines during exercises, but subs were wary about talking to anyone at the best of times. Sound refracted through water layers and turbulences at different rates, varying with frequency, and someone speaking over Gertrude sounded as if he were underwater at the bottom of a deep well. Their distorted, echoing words came accompanied by eerie gurgling, clicks, whistles, and distant tolling bells. “There he is again,” said the chief. He motioned to the sonarman, winced, and sank back.

“You better take it easy, Chief.”

“I'm OK, sir. Turn it up on the speaker.”

They sat hunched in the red light as a bubbling, clicking groan was penetrated by what might be a human voice speaking far away. The words were indistinguishable. “Is that English?” Dan said.

“It's degraded now, but it was coming through a couple of minutes ago. When I called you. They said very clearly, ‘U.S. ship
Oliver Gaddis.
'”

“That's an odd form of address,” Dan said, looking at the green cloth-bound comm log the petty officer put in his hands.

“I can play it back. We started taping as soon as I heard it.”

“Did it sound like an American accent?”

“No, sir, it didn't.”

“Did you answer?”

“Not yet. Wanted to get your permission before we put sound in the water.”

“In case it was the Chinese,” the petty officer said.

Dan nodded, commending them silently on recognizing the possibility of a snare. Then they sat quiet again, listening to the distant whirring and clicking. Tosito whispered that those were shrimp. These shallow seas were full of fish and biologicals, and a lot of them made noise.

Suddenly the petty officer half-turned on his chair, staring at the pattern of light marching upward across the screen in front of him. Dan saw no discernible change, but the man was edging dials around, expanding one section of the screen. Tosito struggled to sit up, staring at it, too.

“What is it?” Dan asked.

“Reduction gears. See that tonal?”

“No.”

“This isn't Chinese.”

“No?”

“No. They sound like a fleet of dump trucks on a rocky road. This is real quiet, but—”

Dan waited while they pulled pubs down. Finally Tosito said, “I'm not sure exactly what it is. It's not ours.”

“What could it be?”

“The possibilities are French, British, and Russki.”

“If it was Russian, what class would it be?”

“It's getting hard to pin them down, sir. They've gotten a lot quieter in the last ten years.”

The WQC speaker, which had clicked and groaned intermittently as they tried to identify the tonal, now said very weakly but fairly distinctly, “U.S. ship
Oliver Gaddis.
Over.” The voice was male and tenor. The third-class reached a mike down and cupped it, glancing at Dan.