Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (14 page)

“All ahead flank!” he shouted. Van Gogh shouted it at exactly the same moment, as if they’d rehearsed. But Dan barely noticed. His brain raced. Rain blasted his face. The spark winked out, and the silhouette faded. But, to judge by its relative motion, it and
Savo
would arrive at the same point on the surging sea at the exact same moment.

He shuddered, suddenly gripped by a perverse apathy. For a second he seemed to hear voices, lifted on the wind. Screams. Dear God, no. It could not happen
again
.

“Hard right rudder!” Van Gogh shouted, and Dan, at the same instant, yelled, “Belay that. Belay that! Hard
left
rudder. Emergency ahead flank! Belay your reports! Hard
left
rudder.”

The bridge babbled with a cacophony of shouts, through which the helmsman’s clear tenor penetrated, calm as an accountant. “My rudder is left hard, sir. Passing zero-one-zero. Engines ahead emergency flank.”

Dan breathed out. Van Gogh’s instinctive response had been to keep to his original course. Try to fit the cruiser between the two oncoming ships. It might have worked, but he suspected not. His way was more prudent, but they still weren’t out of the woods. “Very well. Combat, are we clear out at two-seven-zero? JOOD, port side, binoculars.”

”Passing zero-zero-zero … rudder hard left. No course given.”

The squall slacked. He raised his glasses again, focusing on the emerging slate-gray bow of a smaller ship, ro-ro or containership. Yes, there were the boxes piled high, the colors washed pastel pale by the fog that writhed around them. He bent to the bearing ring. Zero-five-four.
Savo
heeled into her turn, ten thousand tons of aluminum and steel leaning and straining as the plowing rudders levered it around, as centrifugal force tilted the deck and things started to slide.

When he bent to the bearing circle again, it was the same. Locked as if welded to the oncoming prow. “Range to Skunk papa,” he muttered.

The nav console began to peep, a shrill electronic warning he didn’t really need. “Range to new contact, twelve hundred yards and closing. Constant bearing, decreasing range … collision warning.”

“Passing three-five-zero.”

“Combat reports: range clear to port. Two-seven-zero is a good course.”

When he bent again the bearing had changed just the slightest bit. Drawing right. They should pass clear. Unless the merchant, startled by the sudden appearance of the cruiser dead ahead, had swung his own wheel right … in which case they would still collide. “Continue left to three-zero-zero,” he snapped to Van Gogh, beside him. “We’ll put our stern to him, then figure out what to do next.”

The ships drew together massively as colliding planets.
Savo
’s wake broke against the immovable reef of the containership’s side. They stood watching helplessly as the distance narrowed. The merchant didn’t seem to have changed its course at all. Probably astonished, Dan thought, at having a gray warship suddenly materialize ahead, then slam on power and spin away. He studied the stained rusty bow, the blunt cutwater, the indentation of the anchor well, only a hundred yards distant, until he could have drawn it from memory.

As
Savo
’s powerful turbines surged her ahead, the gap began to widen.

A minute passed. Another.

The distance kept increasing. The hull behind them paled as the fog pushed in.

Van Gogh cleared his throat. “Captain, about that right rudder order—”

Dan slumped against the bulwark. He clutched his binoculars, so no one would see his hands shaking. “Uh, we might have made it, Chief. But given the, um, circumstances, it wasn’t the most prudent response.”

“Steady on three-zero-zero,” the helmsman stated.

“Very well,” Dan called. “Let’s get well clear, make sure this is all sorted out. Then come back to—Quartermaster: new course.”

“Coming up with a new course, sir … zero-three-four looks good.”

Dan cocked his head into the corner of the pilothouse, gesturing the OOD aside. Their heads together, he murmured, “Don’t fucking
apologize
. Just tell me you understand what just happened.”

“I gave the wrong order. Sorry, Captain. I mean—”

Dan wondered how best to tell him. “It’s a little more than the wrong order. Ever heard of
Reynolds Ryan
?”

“The destroyer? That got cut in two by the carrier?”

“That’s the one. I was on the bridge. JOOD. Know how it happened? At a critical point, like today, the CO gave ‘left rudder’ instead of ‘right rudder.’ I don’t think he even realized, until it was too late.”

The little chief’s head was down. “I—I didn’t know.”

“Look, Teddy, you’re a decent officer of the deck. Conscientious. Alert. All I’m saying is, when you’re at an inflection point, that’s when you need to take that couple of extra seconds and make absolutely certain of the order you’re giving. That your brain, or your tongue, isn’t on automatic, or you’re replaying some old tape. So next time you’re faced with a big decision, one that can kill people … slow down. Make what you decide as right as you can make it. Understood?” The chief nodded. “Now take the conn and get us back on course.”

Dan clapped his shoulder and turned back to the pilothouse. The helmsman, quartermaster, phone talkers, instantly looked away. “This is the captain. Chief Van Gogh has the deck and the conn.”

He waited as each watchstander reported his status to the conning officer. Until the bridge, overhead lights snapping off, going to darkened status now, settled back into the somnolent routine of night watch. Until they were on course for the rendezvous, and he’d double-checked it, made triply sure it passed near no reefs or headlands or other hazards to navigation.

Then he strolled out onto the wing.

Alone at last, both hands claw-gripping the dew-coated, varnished teak of the bulwark, he let himself freak out.

The mist cooled his cheek like an open freezer after the heat of the day. No stars gleamed through the overcast. Even the channel behind them, stacked with the lights of incoming and outgoing ships, was only a glowing band, fuzzy as the Milky Way. And all around, above, ahead, lay darkness, into which
Savo
’s cutwater drove with a continuous roar, her bow wave waxing and waning as the cruiser rolled, creaming out coruscating and flashing into the dead and returnless velvet black.

The shaking eased off, leaving nausea, and a stabbing agony in his knotted neck. By any standard, that’d been too fucking close. Five seconds’ hesitation, a few screw-turns slower, or if he’d let Van Gogh’s erroneous rudder order take effect … they’d have collided. Sailors dead, maybe. For certain,
Savo
damaged, her mission unfulfilled. The billions of dollars and millions of man-hours invested in her lost, squandered, wasted.

The chief was doing the best he knew how. So were Cheryl, Ollie, Hermelinda, Max, even Amy Singhe, who after all was just trying to fix something that all too often seemed deeply broken. But no one could do his or her job alone. They needed each other, and
Savo
needed them all.

And at the top, solitary … Really, who was
he
to lead them? Most Navy careers, successful ones, ascended as gracefully and predictably as a curve of ballroom stairs. Winding upward to greater responsibility, greater honor, greater rank.

While his own had been tossed by downsucks and updrafts like a glider in the mountains, heading for the ground one minute, the sky the next. Questionable decisions. Courts of inquiry. Awards. Letters of reprimand. Dangerous assignments. Unexpected promotions. The one sure thing he could say was, he’d had an eventful career. Yeah, if experience came through bad judgment, he
had
it, all right. In spades.

But by all rights, he should be on the beach, living the dreary aftermath of an active career. An engineer at a shipyard, a consultant, real estate, insurance, dabbling in local politics or charity boards or docenting at museums. Knowing, all the while, that the apex of their lives lay behind them.

A tentative cough behind him. “Captain? Meeting on the mess decks. They’re standing by for you.”

A sardonic smile curved his lips. He nodded into the dark, thanking it, at least, for staying with him. Before turning away, back to his duty.

7

The Strait of Hormuz

“
EMERGENCY
breakaway,” Dan told Amy Singhe, and the pilothouse filled with shouting and the drone of the ship’s whistle. Five short blasts. The distance line was hustled in hand over hand. Aft and below, the refueling gang danced their intricate pavane. The boatswain tripped the pelican hook with a clank audible even high on the bridge wing. The heavy black hose through which
Savo
had sucked as at some massive teat withdrew up its supporting cable in spasms and starts. As the ships began to pull apart, the linehandlers paid out the inhaul line, faster and faster, as it snaked back to the departing oiler.

Two days after the near collision, late in the afternoon, he reclined in the leather chair on the port wing under a cloudy low sky. Ceiling two hundred feet, winds southwest, seas four to six feet. Engines 1A and 2B on the line, generators one and two, steering unit B. Singhe had taken the conn for the replenishment. She’d arrowed in too fast, making them all hinky as the massive swollen stern of USNS
Kanawha
had loomed too suddenly. At his cautionary murmur, though, she’d slowed, and dropped them into the refueling slot fifty yards off the oiler’s starboard side with seasoned aplomb.

He stole a glance at the strike lieutenant as she crouched, peeping through the bearing circle. “Watch your stern,” he cautioned. “She’s gonna swing fast if you put a hard rudder to her.” Every word sounded like a double entendre.

She spared him one cool glance, eyebrow lifted, full lips curved in an equivocal half smile, then bent to the pelorus again. “Come to course two-seven-zero. Engines ahead standard, indicate pitch and turns for fifteen knots.”

“My rudder is right, coming to course two-seven-zero.” Dan’s gaze locked with the helmsman’s. Was that half a wink, as the seaman suppressed his own chuckle? “Engines ahead standard, fifteen knots.”

He leaned back, opening the focus of his attention as
Savo
’s fantail, with the outboard-slanted canisters of Harpoon launchers, cleared
Kanawha
’s bow. The whipped-cream white of her wake frothed a curving path on pristine sea.

A mile away, another leaden shadow lurked in the haze: nearly as large as
Savo,
but her profile less lofty, more rakish, radar panels set lower on her superstructure. USS
Mitscher
was an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer. Nine thousand tons full load, five hundred–plus feet long, with much the same sensors and weapons, but without
Savo
’s antiballistic capability. Slightly faster and more heavily armored, with a stealthier radar profile,
Mitscher
would be riding shotgun for him as CTG 151.7 penetrated the most heavily traveled, fiercely disputed strait in the world. Dan didn’t know her skipper, Frank “Stony” Stonecipher, but had downloaded his bio and discussed him with Jenn Roald on the “red phone,” point-to-point secure satcomm. Roald said he was a good guy, one Dan could depend on.
“My N4 says HM&E and CS are both readiness status one. She has a full ordnance loadout and her Aegis is at 98 percent. If you have to fight your way in, you’re both as ready as we can make you. If, that is, nobody’s been gundecking his reports. Over.”

“No gundecking here, Commodore, but I could use some horsepower on those aux gen parts. Plus, we never heard back from Bethesda on assistance on those recurrent infections. Over.”

“You’re sure these aren’t just dust? I get a lot of reports of dust infections when we’re operating in the Gulf. Over.”

“No ma’am. People don’t die from dust. We need some expert advice. Over.”

She’d promised to buck the issue up the line, but said that if it was getting to be an operational issue, he should look to his local chop chain for help.

He’d ended the conversation with a sense of the growing distance between them. He belonged to Roald for spare parts and manning, but out here, his sailing orders came from Bahrain. Commander, Fifth Fleet, directed operations in the Gulf, Red Sea, and Arabian Sea. In theory, parts, manning, and administration followed you seamlessly, no matter who your operational commander was. But in practice, the farther from home port, the more interruptions and delays along the way.

He leaned back, taking advantage of a break before heading back to Combat to review what exactly they were sticking their heads into. The flurry of messages was getting overwhelming, just like before every major flap. He glanced out at
Mitscher
again. Both ships were coming to a course for the eastern entrance to Hormuz. The destroyer’s station during the first part of the transit would be one thousand yards to starboard of
Savo Island
. This would place her between the cruiser and the coast. Carrier Strike Group One, centered on
Carl Vinson,
and Strike Group Nine, with
Abraham Lincoln,
would take turns providing continuous air cover.

Just that morning, as if to ratchet things up another notch, the Iranians had announced five days of major naval maneuvers. Both sides had put out Notices to Mariners, so it was hard to believe any commercial skipper would sail unaware of the brewing confrontation.

“Captain?” Cheryl Staurulakis, with Mills behind her. “You asked us to scrub down the Fifth Fleet ROEs against our combat doctrine. Got the results, if you have thirty minutes. Or we can give you the thirty-thousand-foot overview, and just leave the marked-up copy.”

Dan accepted the document and relaxed back into the chair, digging at the tension in his neck and back. The sky ahead was smudged and obscured by the nearly invisible dust that in July and August rose from the deserts. The Iranians liked to pull the eagle’s tail. Test American resolve. If it ever flagged, the rickety, artificial structure of monarchies and emirates lining the west side of the Gulf, inherited from the British Empire, would crumble. Iran would control the Middle East, and the world would change.