On the third day, as he napped at his desk, he jerked awake. The fragments of a sad dream evaporated as he roused himself. He shook his head, trying to discern the reason for his waking.
All the chatter on the radio had stopped. The Chinese had gone silent.
He hurried to the bridge.
The bridge was atop the seven-story “house” that contained all their quarters, their mess hall, and hospital. Once underway, it was where the twenty-two man crew spent the vast majority of their time, even though it occupied but a small portion of the ship’s massive volume. Almost all the other space was taken up by containers, the metal boxes designed to be lifted directly from the ship and placed onto either train cars or trucks. The ship was near its capacity of 1,164 TEUs, or Twenty-foot Equivalent Units, an unscientific measure of how many containers it could hold. For this leg of their journey they were carrying plastic pellets, Reebok shoes, tires, a variety of car parts from factories throughout Asia, and, he’d been proud to learn, five tons of food for the World Food Programme, destined for Cambodia.
He quietly stepped onto the bridge, where his third mate and a cadet were reliving their adventures in Singapore. They’d visited Orchard Towers, a legendary Singapore brothel that was a veritable shopping mall of the sex trade. It was known affectionately to sailors around the world as “four floors of whores.”
“Captain,” they both said, acknowledging him as he walked in.
“Reviewing my night orders?” he snapped.
“Captain…” stammered the third mate, surprised by the harshness of the Captain’s tone and his gaze.
“Bullshit on B Deck, after watch,” he said. “Right now I need you to mind my ship.”
“Yes sir,” they both said at once.
He stepped up to the radar screen, a plasma monitor with symbols for every ship in the tracking system. By scrolling the cursor over each, he could see their present course, speed, and the closest they would approach Ever Able. He noticed a cluster of ships in red near the coast of Taiwan, and scrolled over them.
“Are those the same warships we’ve been tracking?”
“Yes sir. They’ve pulled out of the restricted area…I wonder if the exercise is over.”
“Interesting,” said the captain. He hoped the Chinese were done with their games. It would explain the sudden radio silence as well. “But we’ll continue staying out of their way.”
He checked the ship’s speed: near its maximum of 18 knots. He walked over to a chart table where the second mate had drawn out their course. Their track would take them closer for a few more hours, then, finally, they would start to open distance to the Chinese fleet. A rectangle made of bright red tape marked the off-limits area. The resulting detour would add a full day to their voyage to Shanghai. It galled Captain Wright both as a shareholder of the Evergreen Marine Corporation, and as a man who believed in the freedom of the seas with religious fervor.
The rise of Chinese commerce had been the great change of Wright’s twenty-three year career at sea. Chinese ports were now the busiest in the world, and almost all his containers were either bound for China, or, in much greater numbers, contained the products of Chinese factories. But as China’s industrial power grew, so too had its military. Once barely a force on the world’s sea lanes, they were now flexing their muscle, and not just in Asian waters. They seemed unconcerned about the gentlemen’s agreements that the world’s merchant fleets had used to coexist with each other for centuries.
There were accents on the VHF radio that reassured him when he heard them, the voices he identified with traditional seafaring nations: Sweden, Ireland, Australia, and, of course, England. For much of his career, he’d known that his American voice on the airwaves had sometimes discomfited other seafarers: his accent marked him, to many, as potentially aggressive, arrogant, and even dangerous. There was a sense that the Americans had more power than they deserved or could safely wield. Now at the pinnacle of his career, when hearing those frenetic Chinese voices day and night, he understood that feeling. He walked to the far corner of the bridge, fiddled with the controls, verified again that the Chinese radio circuit had gone quiet.
“About time they shut up,” said the third mate, trying vainly to defuse the tension.
They listened to the static for a few minutes together, when suddenly a few words broke through, a rapid burst of chatter that got their attention. The captain turned up the volume as they went quiet again. Then, from a single speaker came short words spoken at a regular, even pace.
Shi…jyo…bah…
Stepping away from the radio, Captain Wright looked ahead, seeing nothing but ocean as the words continued. The bridge was like a greenhouse, nothing but glass on all sides, and it was the kind of day that sailors lived for: clear, bright, and calm with smooth open water in all directions, nothing to hamper their journey forward. Even though he knew from his review of the radar screen that they were far out of visual range, he lifted his binoculars and stared in the direction of the Chinese fleet. The voice continued on the radio behind him, almost like a chant. Although he didn’t recognize any of the words, there was something familiar about it that unnerved him.
Chee…lyo…woo…ssuh…
“Something wrong, captain?” His men stared, perplexed. The captain knew, somehow, that the chant was nearing its conclusion.
Sahn…urr…yee…QIDONG!
With that final, emphatic word, he realized what he was listening to: a countdown.
“Right full rudder!” he ordered. The third mate jumped to comply. Wright knew from looking at the chart that a turn to starboard was the quickest way to open distance from the exercise area. The giant container ship began to respond slowly. A shrill alarm sounded on the radar console.
The captain stepped to the screen: a red arrow with an open circle around it had appeared between them and the Chinese fleet. Under it were the words unidentified contact.
“What is it?”
It disappeared briefly from the screen, and then reappeared, having closed half the distance to Ever Able in seconds.
“She can’t be moving that fast,” said the third mate, looking at the approaching blip in disbelief, fooled into thinking that the new radar contact was a ship, because the computer had, by default, assigned it that symbol.
Captain Wright ran out the door the starboard bridge wing, binoculars still in hand.
Spotting a small, fast-moving object on the ocean was extremely difficult, but Wright had good eyes and a lifetime of experience staring across the waves in search of peril. He saw the exhaust first, a triangle of intense yellow light behind the missile that was moving directly toward them. A finally honed instinct told them that they were on a collision course.
“All stop!” he yelled, a last desperate attempt to save the ship.
But Ever Able was doomed. The missile slammed into the hull amidships, just above the waterline.
Book One: Underway
Ensign Brendan Duggan stood at the opening to the massive diesel fuel oil tank, located near the center of the big submarine. The tank was empty, for the moment, except for a lone, unseen enlisted man whose rhythmic banging with a rubber mallet sounded like a mournful gong. When the petty officer was done, Duggan would climb in. It was his second day on the boat.
He had been invited to enter the empty tank by Lieutenant Danny Jabo, who stood there waiting with him, casually fingering one of the twelve large bolts that had been removed to give them access through a twenty-two inch hole. There was a folder of miscellaneous paperwork on the deck: the certification that the tank’s air was safe to breathe, a form for Jabo to sign upon completion of their inspection, and a copy of the danger tags that would (theoretically) keep shut all the valves that, if opened, would flood the tank with either seawater or diesel fuel. While they waited, Duggan read through it all earnestly, more eager to make a good impression on the lieutenant than he was to actually study the information.