Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (27 page)

“Limes, huh? She didn’t mention that.”

“Remember, she was pretty shaken up. Once she had time to think about it, she remembered. He smelled like limes.”

“Okay, maybe that’s valuable, maybe not. Do we have anything lime-scented in the ship’s store?”

“Not for two years, Captain. Hermelinda remembered stocking a lime aftershave back then. But nothing recently. So it might mean, whoever our guy is, he’s not a recent accession.”

Behind her, Bart Danenhower lounged against the nav console. Obviously, next in line to talk. “Okay, good.” Dan hitched himself once more; he kept slipping down on the slick leather. “Keep at it, Lieutenant. Sooner or later, he’ll try it again. I’d rather nail him before that happens.”

*   *   *

THE
chief engineer had nothing much new, just needed permission to tear down one of the gas turbine generators to replace seals. The message traffic came up, which Dan usually read on his desktop, but apparently word had gotten around that he was installed on the bridge. He ate a couple more ibuprofen. Forced himself to turn pages and initial routing boxes, skimming most, but stopping to read one.

Staurulakis had mentioned sub activity off Singapore the night before. This morning’s message gave more detail. Chinese nuclear submarines had been detected approaching the Malacca Strait. To join an already robust presence in the IO? He rubbed his forehead, contemplating what that might mean for force numbers and threat level, the delicate balance of red line and boundary testing, that prevailed in the Darwinian, Mahanian world of the Indian Ocean. But generating thought felt like squeezing molasses through a strainer.

One by one, his department heads came up through the forenoon hours, and he tried his best to give appropriate responses. But he could feel his attention wandering, his responses disjointed and partial. His arms ached as if he’d spent the morning shoveling coal, and his head spun whenever he made the slightest effort. Was this how half his crew felt? Grissett had mentioned lingering effects. Longley brought up another tray, but Dan winced and waved it away.

The overcast was thinner today, the sun brighter behind the scrim of monsoon cloud. He sent his steward down for his sunglasses, leaned back, and rested his eyes.

*   *   *

HE
was asleep again when a sudden increase in the noise level roused him. He cleared his throat and stretched, then tensed as
Savo
heeled and a sudden cacophony of shouting broke the drowsy routine of the watch.

When he joined the officer of the deck out on the wing, Van Gogh had his binoculars up, staring ahead. “What’ve we got?” Dan asked him. “Why’d you change course?”

“Something weird on the surface search.”

“Weird? Weird how?”

“A line … straight line across the screen. Combat reported it; the JOOD confirmed.”

Dan looked down at the sea. Out at the horizon. Then behind them. The sea heaved in all directions, shading from a slate graygreen far out to a deep cobalt directly below. Small birds darted along the crests, and bits of weed the pale hue of drowned corpses slid past, their shadows slanting down blackly into the deep blue beneath. His mind labored, but couldn’t summon an explanation. “A squall line? Or some kind of anomaly effect?”

“I guess it could be,” the chief quartermaster said, still peering ahead. “But that’s not what I’m wondering about … huh.”

“What?” Dan glanced back into the pilothouse. Everyone was looking out ahead, except for the JOOD, who had his face submerged in the black rubber hood of the radar repeater.

When Dan looked back at the sea, a thin dark line extended from dead ahead off to the left and the right, seeming to taper, or vanish, at the edges of vision. As he blinked at it the line extended, swiftly running out and away in both directions until it bridged the horizon. Van Gogh snapped his glasses down, turned, and shouted into the pilothouse, “Slow to five knots. Steady as you go.”

“Collision alarm,” Dan told him. A moment later the triple electronic tone blasted out over the 1MC. The thing was swiftly growing darker and wider. Obviously closing in. When he lifted his own glasses he saw it was a surge of sea, capped here and there with white, the overcast sun glowing and flashing off its sullenly lifted planes. It looked like the mother of all big surfing waves.

BM1 Nuckols, on the shipwide circuit:
“Now hear this! All hands, stand by for heavy seas. All hands topside lay within the skin of the ship immediately. Now set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. This is no drill.”

Doors began slamming, isolating each space from the next, subdividing the ship into hundreds of watertight compartments. The JOOD, head still down, began counting down the range as the phone talkers slammed the dogging levers on the wing doors. “Twelve hundred yards … one thousand … eight hundred yards.”

Dan lurched across the pilothouse and pressed the Transmit lever on the 21MC. “Main Control, bridge. Skipper here. We’ve got some kind of major wave system headed our way. Anything you need to do to minimize damage, keep the engines on line, do it.” Then pushed the button for Radio, and told them to put out a voice warning, alerting anyone in transmission range. “And a message to Fifth Fleet and Strike One, too, flash precedence,” he added.

“Four hundred yards.”

Now it was visible with the naked eye, and the lookouts were calling it in. The sea itself was lifting, as if some unseen force were peeling it up. Above it rolled a thick, pearlescent boiling, a heavy, ghostlike mist. The only thing he’d ever seen remotely like it had been the shock wave that had wrecked
Horn,
but this came on much more slowly.

He’d heard of seismic waves. “Tidal” waves, though they had nothing to do with the tides. Generated by subsea earthquakes, they could march across thousands of miles of ocean, and wreak massive destruction when they hit land. But he’d never expected to see one.

He leaned on his chair, fingers digging into leather and steel. The silence; that was scariest. The way it just came on, noiseless, implacable, steadily larger. A massive, hollow tube that might have lit up the jaded brain of a lifelong surfer, but that frightened him. Without radar, or at night, this thing could have taken them unawares. How many ships had vanished, lost at sea forever, for just that reason?

A warship was built to take heavy seas, and the usual way you met them was head-on. But naval architecture design parameters didn’t factor in one-offs, monster rogues, whatever this thing was. Any ship ever built, balanced just the right way, could break its back. A mine or a torpedo could snap a keel with a bubble of gas. What might one single, massive wave do? He racked his sick, tired brain. He’d warned Engineering, so they could be ready to reset whatever tripped off the line. Gotten a message off, to warn anyone else in range. The bow lookout was sprinting for the port break, shemagh fluttering, leaving headset and cord lying on the foredeck. The
dit dit dit, dit dit dit
of the collision alarm staccatoed on, shrill and galvanizing. “
All hands brace for shock
,” the 1MC announced.

“Three hundred yards.” The JOOD lifted his face. The murmuring died away as men and women wedged themselves between consoles, or grabbed the hand-worn steadying cable that stretched along the pilothouse’s overhead.

Another danger occurred to him. The sonar dome was “inflated” with twenty-four thousand gallons of pressurized water. If he took this thing head-on, it would compress and, most likely, collapse the dome. In effect, blowing out the ship’s eardrums.

He told Van Gogh, “Back down, Chief.”

“Sir? What was that?”

“All back full. Right now!”

The OOD and helmsman gaped, but when he repeated the order they obeyed. He gripped steel, trying to concentrate. Though the screws turned inboard and the rudders were small, a Ticonderoga’s hull dimensions and 80,000 shaft horsepower made her extremely responsive. But dead in the water, then going astern, the helmsman would lose steerageway as they lost wash across the rudders.

Savo Island
shuddered and seemed to fishtail slightly. Then, seconds later, gathered way astern.

He clung to the overhead cable, eyeing the passing sea, then the oncoming monster. They wouldn’t get up totally to a full backing bell. But he’d need steerageway, in case they started to broach. His brain felt sluggish. As if thinking were a skill he’d never learned. But he couldn’t stand aside, not now.

“Two hundred yards.” The rising bluegreen all but filled the windscreen. It towered above the bullnose. He couldn’t guess how high this thing was, but the pilothouse of a Tico-class was sixty feet above the waterline. How many millions of tons of sea water did a wave sixty feet high contain? It would lift the bow first, then the midships, and last, the stern. The point of maximum stress would be midships, as bow and stern hung unsupported by sea. The condition was called “hogging,” and it had broken many ships before.

“One hundred yards,” the JOOD breathed.

“This is the captain,” Dan said, raising his voice. “I have the conn. Belay your reports.”

Gas turbines were vastly faster in response than the steam-powered ships he’d started his career on.
Savo
could accelerate from no-load to maximum power in thirty seconds. So he waited, until it felt like he couldn’t breathe. But power up too soon, and he’d hurl ten thousand tons of metal into a cliffside at thirty miles an hour. He had to catch this thing at just the right—

“All engines ahead flank three,” he snapped, and the helmsman repeated the order, no hesitation now. A second ticked away. Another. The turbines began to whine, spooling up rapidly, their song clearly audible on the bridge in the creepy stillness.

Savo
slowed her retreat, wallowed, then began to gather way forward again.

A foreswell reached her and the bullnose began rising. But too slowly for the massive slope that lifted ahead of them. At the same time that uncanny mist closed in, like the worst fog he’d ever seen. The helmsman cursed, fighting the wheel. Dan waited, squinting, clinging to his handhold, and as the massive wave pried the bow upward he ordered, “
Left
hard rudder.”

The ship shuddered beneath them, heeling, bowing like a stressed girder as the immense wave pressed them skyward. He felt heavy, as in an ascending elevator, but the heel from his radical rudder order was counteracting the wave, which was trying to force her over to port. The sea crashed through the bullnose and cascaded up over the foredeck in a welter of deep green, turning white as it broke apart on ground tackle and gun mount and VLS hatches but still rising, hundreds of tons of it, thousands, and slammed into the flat forward face of the superstructure, shaking it like an earthquake. It whipsnapped the JOOD off the repeater, where he was still clinging, to stagger forward and slam his nose into the window. As he shook a bloody visage the whole superstructure groaned around them. Sharp cracks and bangs carried through the metal as through the bone of one’s own skull.

The wave was passing; time to straighten her out. “Right full rudder … port engine ahead full, starboard engine back full.” With this combination, the ship would pivot in place as the bow swung to starboard, ready for the follow-on waves he anticipated would emerge from the mist-murk at any moment. This fucking white stuff … it seethed ahead of the windscreen … if only he could
see
—

“Right full rudder, port ahead full, starboard back full … Number one engine indicates off the line,” the helmsman said, voice tense.

“Christ,” Dan whispered. Exactly what he’d hoped wouldn’t happen.

He hesitated as
Savo
began to topple. He’d slewed her as the great sea burrowed beneath, to lessen the strain on the keel and the dome. Accepting the risk of broaching; figuring to use the engines, if she started to go, to twist her back. But
Savo
’s controls had betrayed her before, some intermittent, mysterious glitch having to do with the grounding of the back plane wiring in the machinery consoles. It could trip a turbine off the line or, worst case, cascade, and shut down power entirely. He’d hoped it wouldn’t bite him in the ass when he was most vulnerable.

But of course, it had.

The 21MC crackled on through the scream of buckling aluminum and the roar of heavy water raining down, spray from the breaking crest rattling down and, along with the silvery mist, obliterating all sight.
“Number one back online … no … offline again.”

The wave passed on, under them, and
Savo
keeled over to starboard, slowly, like a mastodon toppling to die. Metal screeched and groaned as the sea surged up toward them, as she inclined farther and farther. He couldn’t see the next wave. Couldn’t tell if it was larger or smaller than the one just past.

In extremis, then, fuck the sonar dome. Twist her back to where, if the second wave was the killer, she’d meet it head-on. “Right
hard
rudder,” Dan said, fighting the urge to scream it out. “Port shaft ahead flank emergency, starboard back flank emergency.”

“Engine room … engine room answers, port ahead flank emergency, starboard back full…”

Dan clung to the chair, brain vacant now. Nothing else left to do. Only wait to go on over, capsize and break apart and go down. Trusting in the engineers who’d designed her, and the welders who’d built her, for their lives. Everyone on the bridge clung tight, some dangling like apes from the bronze cable, boots kicking in the air.

The second wave materialized from the mist. The stern dropped away, and with a screeching, exhausted cry
Savo Island
’s bow rose again, to point into the misty sky. She shuddered and quaked as the sea boiled around her.

Then, very slowly, she began to roll upright again. “Rudder amidships,” Dan bit off. “All ahead one-third.” She shook and snapped and groaned, yet straightened a few degrees more.

Shaking hundreds of tons of green sea off her decks, she nodded heavily from side to side. The clapper of the ship’s bell rang once, twice, and again. The mist thinned, the particles of spray coalescing and falling as a light rain that pattered across the windshield. A third wave, smaller than the first two, lifted and set them back down.