The Gulf (24 page)

They waited till the yellow horse collar was in the water, then submerged and swam up the starboard side. It was almost dark now. Finally, they collided with it. Gordon helped Terger in first. Four men hauled at the tackle. The first-class dangled slowly up, streaming water, and was swung inboard.

Then it was his turn. When the tackle slacked and his feet hit the deck, he lost his balance and fell, banging his tanks on wood with the toll of a muffled bell.

Everett helped him up. Other hands tripped his tanks, stripped his belt and vest off. “She snapped all of a sudden,” the banker shouted over the wind. “Didn't you hear my signal?”

“We were just about done by then. I wanted to finish up.”

Glancing beyond him, Gordon saw
Sumter
's stern, the towline coming taut again; they were gathering away. He turned his attention to the deck, and to Terger. He was sitting down, and Maudit was working off his hood.

Under it the grizzled hair was clotted black. The paramedic probed it with his fingers, then shrugged suddenly. “Scalp. She bleeds like hell, Leroy, but we get her stitched up, feed you a brandy, you feel like new.”

“Senior Chief.”

Gordon turned, to confront the captain, hatless and bulky in foul-weather gear. “Glad you made it,” Hunnicutt said.

“So am I. Sir.”

The captain looked at Terger. “He okay?”

“Just cuts. He was sucked into the props.”

“Good thing they weren't turning.” He looked back at Gordon. “Uh, Senior … thanks.”

“We follow orders, Captain. But I still intend to file that protest.”

Hunnicutt's face went still. Then he turned away, suddenly, and went below.

“Okay, let's get this gear below!” shouted Everett. “All of it! Clean it and dry it out. Burgee, grab that tank before it goes over the side!”

Gordon sat on the deck, working his fingers. He'd hurt them in that wrestle with the grating. But they'd got it done. Got it done, all right, and thank God none of his men had died.

When he looked up again, Kearn's eyes were on him. But the sweep officer only scowled.

13

U.S.S.
Turner Van Zandt

THREE hundred miles southeast of Hormuz, the Arabian Sea was clear as cobalt glass, marbled with streaks of foam that glowed in the sunlight. The crests, up to fifteen feet in the Gulf of Oman, had dropped to eight to ten, chivvied along by a northwesterly wind. The scattered clouds looked as if they'd just been dry-cleaned. The horizon was a serrated blade to the throat of a sky so clear and high it made Dan's eyes tear.

It was hard to look away. Even the busiest man will glance at a passing girl, and today Thalassa was more beautiful than any human woman. After the narrow Gulf, the Indian Ocean was like being released from a dirty prison cell. One you had to share with two homicidal maniacs.

Shaking his head at the analogy—it was just too apt—he blinked, tugged his cap down to shade his eyes, and concentrated on the chart.

Chief McQueen's 1100 fix showed them an hour east of Point Orange, the convoy rendezvous. Dan confirmed the satellite fix with loran and advised the OOD to adjust course left three degrees.

Navigation hadn't always been that easy. When he'd first gone to sea, the Navy had still depended on sextants and chronometers. Now the phrase
star fix
had a quaint sound, like
raising steam.
He smiled faintly as he entered their position in the log, then strolled out on the wing.

It was comfortable, warm, but the wind, not long out of Central Asia, remembered its mountain passage. He leaned against the coaming, gazing out.

Astern, a shrinking speck, was
San Jose.
They'd just finished an hour alongside her. Underway replenishments were never quite routine. When two hulls were a hundred feet apart, speed sucked them together, and several ships every year scarred their sides and their captains' careers. But Shaker had taken
Van Zandt
in with dash. He'd made the approach at twenty knots and cut speed just as his bow passed the AFS's stern, settling into the notch like a housewife parking at a Safeway. In ten minutes, the black hoses were turgid, ramming JP-5 into the frigate's voids.

Farther aft, the traffic went the other way. Clamped-down pallets of combustible gear swayed across from the flight deck and disappeared into the oiler's capacious holds. In return came spare parts, ammunition, and food. In sixty minutes, the evolution was complete and Shaker commenced his turnaway. A degree or two of rudder at first, then a whine of power as she surged into a hard turn west.

Back for her third convoy. Back to the Gulf.

More deliberately—there was no hurry for her—the stores ship had come about, too, headed east to rejoin the Indian Ocean Battle Group: seven combatants, including
Forrestal
and the new
Ticonderoga
-class cruiser
Mobile Bay.
They would trail the convoy to the mouth of the Strait. From there, the escorts would proceed alone.

That's the life, Dan thought now, looking after her. No worries. Just leisurely two-hundred-mile squares and every couple of months volleyball and beer in Diego Garcia.

But it didn't take much soul-searching to know he'd rather be where he was. Beans and bullets were necessities. Carriers, Tridents, laser programs—they were great. For some other kind of war. But this one had caught the Pentagon off base. The deep-water task forces were almost irrelevant. It was the small boys, frigates, minesweepers, destroyers, that would hold or lose the Middle East.

Dan didn't think of himself as a man of war. He didn't love violence, or talk as though he did. But if the country needed him here, here was where he wanted to be.

He wondered again whether he really belonged in the service. So far, the answer had always come up yes. Sometimes, though, the margin had been narrower than the flip of a coin.

In the end, it wasn't pay or living conditions that mattered. It was patriotism that kept men in and leadership that drove them out. Too often, the peacetime Navy bred overcautious, unimaginative careerists, officers and chiefs more concerned with promotions and benefits than with their men or their profession.

But now he was seeing something new. A new kind of leader, forceful, fearless, ready and even eager for battle. Something the Navy had evolved, before, only in wartime.

But mightn't this unexpected war produce an unexpected kind of leader? It was something to think about. Wonder about. And hope for.

Because without it, he had the feeling they were going to lose.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, they were at lunch when the captain's phone buzzed. Shaker unhooked it as the conversation died. When he hung up, he wiped his lips, then slipped the napkin into its silver ring. His arms bulged under rolled-up sleeves as he hoisted himself to his feet. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “The convoy's in sight.”

Dan followed him topside. They stood together as white specks slowly pushed over the horizon into huge ships, sheer-walled, their empty hulls looming out of the water.

The merchant captains had been asked to form a line. As usual, they hadn't been able to agree how, or hadn't cared to try. They were all over the sea, steaming slowly on five different courses.

Shaker asked Steve Charaler, who had the deck, whether anyone else had shown up. The lieutenant said
Gallery
had reported by radio, but
Charles Adams
was still enroute.

“Who've we got here?” was his next question. Dan reached for the op order. It listed two American merchants,
Exxon Pacific,
New Orleans, and
Borinquen,
San Juan; and three reflagged Kuwaitis. There were three warships in the escort.
Gallery
and
Van Zandt
would be under tactical command of Commodore Bartholomew Nauman, embarked on
Charles Adams. Mobile Bay
would trail them in through Hormuz, tracking the air picture.

“Well, he ain't here yet,” said Shaker, apparently meaning the commodore. He tilted his ball cap back and squinted out at the merchants. “Dan, you've done this before, what's the best way to get these jokers pointed in the same direction?”

“Basically just talk 'em in, Captain. They don't have secure comms, so we use bridge-to-bridge, channel twelve. Some of them can take flashing light, if you go slow.”

Shaker seized the handset and scowled at the radar screen. “Yeah, but which one's which? What a clusterfuck. Uh,
Gas Prince,
this is U.S.S.
Van Zandt,
hull number nine-one, over.”

It took over an hour to jockey, cajole, and threaten the tankers into a line.
Borinquen,
the Puerto Rican flag, didn't want to lead. Shaker gave her captain a choice: Take his assigned position or head for Kuwait alone. This silenced him, and gradually order emerged.

Meanwhile
Gallery
had poked up her mast top to southward. Dan studied her through the Big Eyes, twenty-power binoculars hard-mounted on the coaming. It was unsettling, like an out-of-body experience, watching a sister ship under way. Bow on, the
Perry
s were good-looking ships. Only from astern did they remind you of cracker boxes, or tractor-trailers painted gray.

Charles Adams
came on the net half an hour later. The old DDG was forty miles away, closing at twenty-eight knots. Shaker shifted to a scrambled circuit and discussed the first leg with the commodore. Nauman wanted them on two-nine-zero. They put the change out to
Borinquen.
The others followed her casually around, sheering out several hundred yards to either side.

“Good God,” muttered Shaker. “How far have we got to walk these dogs?”

“Nine hundred miles. All the way to Kuwait.”

“Jesus Christ.… Okay, OTC wants us off the convoy's port bow. Let's double-time over there, Steve. Say zero-five-zero on the leader, five thousand.”

Charaler gave the order for full speed and came left, estimating the course to station, then refining his solution on a maneuvering board. Dan liked the way he did it, smooth, smart, correct. He and Wise were neck and neck for number one among
Van Zandt
's 0-3s, come fitness report time.

“What have we got set up down in Sonar, XO?” Shaker asked him.

“Condition II Red, Captain. Full wartime watch.”

“Let's make sure.” Shaker pressed the intercom. “Sonar, Bridge.”

“Sonar aye.”

“You guys on the bubble down there? What kind of search are we running?”

“We're pinging active on the SQS-56, Captain. Boundary conditions give us a predicted range of ten thousand yards.”

Dan wondered why he was bothering with the sonar. Shaker gazed blankly at the lead tanker, then pressed transmit again. “That's not too good.”

“It'll get a lot worse in the Goo, Captain.” That was sailor slang for the Gulf of Oman. “And once we get past the Strait, sonar picture turns to shit. Too shallow, and thermoclines up the ying-yang. He could be counting the blades on our prop and we'd never see him.”

“Great … Lieutenant Pensker down there?”

“No, sir. He was here about an hour ago, then he left.”

“Okay, do the best you can. If you see anything suspicious, I'll send the fly-boys out for a look.”

“Aye, sir.”

Shaker signed off. He looked around the bridge. “Dan, you know where Pensker is?”

“Not at the moment. Wait, maybe I do.”

He leaned to the window and looked down. On the forecastle, a long white weapon, fins folded, rested on the launcher rail. Two gunner's mates in coveralls were working its nose cone over with scrubbing cleanser. A third figure, trailing the wires of a headset, was the black weapons officer.

“He's up forward, inspecting the missiles.”

“I'm going down to talk to him. Let me know if anything comes over the net, or if these guys get too far out of formation.”

“Aye, sir.”

Lenson moved out on the port wing again. He leaned against the coaming, enjoying the clean bite of sun and wind on his face. Off their starboard beam, the tankers rolled along like elephants in a circus parade, spaced half a mile from stern to bow. Beyond them—square root of the sums of the legs, that'd be seven thousand yards—he could make out
Gallery,
a bone of foam in her teeth, sliding into station to the north.

Standing there, the wind brushing his wet hair, he thought for just a moment of what lay ahead.

The convoy, limited to the speed of the slowest ship and to deep-draft channels, would take four days to move up the gut of the Gulf. There would be danger the whole way, but it would peak at three points en route.

The first, of course, was Hormuz. Hiding in its incredible congestion, Iranian gunboats had operated on and off throughout the war from the base at Bandar
Abb
ā
s.
The United States had fought several small-scale actions with them. In each case, the Navy had come off the victor, destroying the smaller vessels or chasing them back under air and missile cover.