She sent the junior officer of the deck out, a fresh-faced ensign named Eugene Mytsalo. “Clear to port,” he reported back.
The pipe shrilled. “Commencing rudder tests. All hands stand by for heavy rolls.” Dan took his fingers out of his ears and felt for his seat belt. Snapped it closed, and braced an elbow against a steel ledge. Around the bridge, men and women sought nooks between the helm and the remote operating console for the 25mm, or reached up to the woven bronze cable that stretched across the pilothouse, a handhold when the world tilted far out of vertical.
“Speed?”
“Thirty-five knots, sir,” said the navigator from his position over by the chart console.
“This really fast as we go, Bart?” Dan said into the Hydra. “No rocket boosters you can kick in?”
“This is it, sir. Do it now, while we got everything cranked up.”
He nodded to Singhe, who grabbed the overhead cable. “Hard right rudder,” she ordered.
“Hard right rudder … my rudder is right hard, ma’am.”
For a long second Savo Island did not seem to respond. She plunged ahead at the same velocity, seemingly unaffected.
Then she began to lean.
Dan tightened his grip, unable to discontemplate the hundreds of tons of weight the additional decks in the superstructure added, and what that meant for stability. For a moment the deck under him seemed to lean left. Or maybe he was just braced for it. If she leaned out, that was bad. Very bad. If she leaned into the turn, she’d be fine.
Then the incline began, the rudder digging in, the deck tilting faster and faster to starboard. Pencils and small objects rolled and clattered to the deck. The helmsman, a small spare woman with blond braided hair, clung grimly to the console. Dan nailed his gaze to the clinometer. Forty degrees. Forty-five. Forty-seven. A rushing roar came through the starboard door, and he glimpsed past Mytsalo a rolling roar of seething sea. The bow wave, crowding into a jostling welter of foam as the bow turned into it.
Fifty degrees.
They clung and watched. The needle hung there, and then, all too deliberately, retreated. The cruiser rolled back upright and Dan relaxed. “Speed?”
“Two-niner by GPS, Captain.”
Right, they didn’t have a pit sword. “Very well. — Bart, everything cool down there?”
“Rudder bearings’re fine. No vibration. No indication of stress.”
“Make absolutely sure. If we had any damage from the grounding—”
“Everything’s okay so far, sir. Tell you for sure after the port turn.”
He nodded across the slanting air to the woman whose almond-eyed smile sought his, and Singhe sang out, “Rudder amidships. Steady course three four zero.”
The helmswoman was echoing the order when a bell cut loose on the bulkhead. Sudden. Peremptory. Strident. At the same moment a detonation shook the ship’s fabric. A soft one, not that distant, and not that loud. A second later, a ghostlike waft of pale smoke breathing out from the ventilators brought the dense, chemical stink of an electrical fire.
5
“Engines stop!” Singhe shouted, just as Dan opened his mouth to give the order himself. Smoke was blasting out of the ventilator, thicker, whiter. The stink of burning insulation and something else, acrid and poisonous, filled the bridge.
“On the bridge: Don gas masks. 1MC: Set damage-control status Zebra,” Singhe shouted, her tone slicing through the chatter and hubbub like a cleaver. “Sound general quarters.”
“Belay that,” Dan snapped. Then, as the helmsman reached for the throttles, added, “Not the all stop — but stand by on the general-quarters alarm.”
Nuckols had reached up and secured the ventilation; both wing doors were open; the smoke was streaming outside, thinning. Singhe glanced at Dan through the lenses of her mask; then stripped it off and stuffed it back into its case. “Fire, fire, fire,” came over the 1MC. Not from the bridge; from Damage Control Central. “Class Charlie fire in SPY-1 equipment room, compartment 03-138-1-C. Fire, fire, fire. Repair Two provide.”
Dan leaned to toggle the 21MC. “Combat Systems, bridge: captain. What’ve you got?”
“Electrical fire, Captain. Equipment Two. The Combat Systems rover opened the door and it’s a sheet of flame in there. We’re securing power.” With the last syllable the bridge powered down. Fans whirred down the scale. Screens went blue, then blank. Silence welled up from wherever it had lurked all this time. The ship … creaked. The wind sighed. Something topside went clunk.
Equipment Two was a couple decks down. Dan tried to dismount from his chair but got hung up on the seat belt. Unstrapped, he headed for the ladderway. The door was dogged. He hesitated; placed the back of one hand against it. The steel was cool. He barked to Singhe, “Shift to sound-powered circuits. Shift to manual backup. Keep those lookouts alert.” Then sucked a deep breath, heeled the dogs free, and jerked the door open.
A puff of white smoke welled up. He slammed and dogged it again and stood shaking, trying to regain control. But … but … No. He did not want to breathe that. Icy sweat broke across his back. The nav team regarded him curiously. He shot a glare at them, then instantly looked away, not feeling proud. In fact, deeply shamed.
“All right, then. General quarters,” he said.
An hour later he stood in the passageway outside his sea cabin. Contemplating the fact that if he’d been in there, he’d have been trapped. The firefighting team had used water fog to fight their way into the radar compartment, and CO2 to douse the flames. Fortunately they’d contained the fire. The repair team leader stood panting and smoke-stained, mask dangling, sooty gloves tucked into his belt, talking to the Combat Systems watch officer. Past them, through a half-open door with a wavy, melted plastic warning placard that read CAUTION DO NOT ENTER VOLTAGE DANGEROUS TO LIFE, equipment steamed and smoked. “A coolant hose,” a chief missile fire controlman named Slaughenhaupt was saying. “We’ve got six megawatts of power out through here. As much as your typical shoreside power plant. So there’s a lot of heat generated. At an incredible voltage. Come in here while it’s operating, it’s like standing in the presence of Zeus.”
Dan asked him, “And it’s water cooled?”
“Yessir, the system runs chilled water through the chassis plates. You’ve got a seawater loop and a secondary distilled-water loop. Looks to me, the hose worked loose. So when we took that heel, it comes off. Shoots water all over, and bam—major-league fireworks.”
Dan leaned in. Steam eddied up from scorched metal. It stank of pyrolysis and what smelled like burnt chicken feathers. “How long will it take to get everything back in operation?”
Slaughenhaupt glanced away as Donnie Wenck joined them. Lifted his shoulders, then dropped them. “Don’t think that’s gonna happen, sir. See that silver stuff all over the deck? That’s solder. This is gonna take a complete rebuild.”
Dan sucked air, looking down at the smoking pools of hot metal. “So we can’t radiate.”
“Well, not true, sir. This is one driver-predriver. We got six. Three forward, three aft. You need two to operate a transmitter at full power. You leave the other in standby; that’s your backup.”
“So we can run the forward radar?”
“Yessir. We just don’t have the backup”—he nodded at the steaming equipment—“in case another DPD goes down.”