Dan let the ensign take her alongside. Mytsalo brought her in at a shallow angle until they were a quarter mile astern, then eased off to three knots. The frigate was beam to the seas, which meant Savo started to roll hard too as she lined up.
Mytsalo kept reducing power, until they were edging up at about half the speed of smell. Dan started to tell him to goose it, get on in there, and to use his screws to keep her twisted into the wind. But closed his teeth on it. The only way you learned shiphandling was by doing it. And too slow was better than too fast. What was that old tin-can saying … oh, yes. “Try to avoid situations that call for excellent shiphandling.”
He smiled and coughed into a fist as Nuckols lifted the stainless coffee urn and his eyebrows at the same time. Dan held up thumb and forefinger an inch apart, remembering when someone else coughed too that he’d promised to get back to Grissett about the men in sick bay. The results of the tests on Goodroe’s body … but now wasn’t the time. Not a hundred yards away from an enemy with whom they’d traded deadly blows. Hard blows. Keep your mind right, Lenson. Game’s not over yet.
They were sliding into the slot. Dan tensed. It looked awfully close. He started to say, “—”
“Engines stop,” Mytsalo called.
The helmsman: “Engines stop aye. Both engines stopped.”
Dan closed his mouth and went out on the wing again.
Looked down on from fifty yards away, the damage was much worse. The smoke blowing down on Savo smelled like a burning refinery. In the hangar the tail of a small helicopter lay twisted like a scrap of aluminum foil tossed into a recycle bin. He coughed again, scarred throat closing, and retreated into the pilothouse. Started to call for the XO, then remembered.
“Want the senior watch officer, sir?” Mills asked him.
“No, you can do it, Matt. Leave Cher in Combat.… Keep an eye on Max. He’s doing good, but we need somebody senior to an ensign in charge. Oh, and call Adam Ammermann up here. I want him to get eyes on this from close aboard.”
“Aye aye, sir. And you’ll be—?”
“I’m going aft, get some foam on that fire.”
They were alongside for two hours, pumping fifteen thousand gallons of firefighting foam that smelled like curdled blood onto the hangar and helo deck. Meanwhile the wind blew steadily harder, laying streaks of foam like detergent suds across the wine-dark waves. Snow blew down now and then from clouds dark as cast lead. The frigate’s crew came out from behind the superstructure — where they had, apparently, been hiding — and resumed their own damage-control efforts. Perhaps they’d feared being machine-gunned as the cruiser approached. Dan offered the loan of portable pumps, a firefighting team, but was brusquely turned down. The Iranian commander had at last emerged into sight, and gazed stone-faced across from his bridge wing. By 09 local the fire was out, but he still didn’t see any sign of power being restored. Actually, you could hear whether a ship had power, and this one, clearly, still didn’t.
Savo was slowly drifting away, the black disturbed water between them widening. Fifty yards. A couple minutes later, sixty. She’d done that all morning; her sail area was larger than the frigate’s, giving the wind more purchase. The increasingly violent seas didn’t help. He’d approached from downwind for that very reason — hadn’t wanted to be pinned against the other hull — but it necessitated continual screw and rudder orders, jockeying to stay close enough to fight the fire while not actually colliding.
“Noodge her in there again, Max,” Dan told Mytsalo. He snugged the foul-weather jacket to his neck, screwed on his combination cap, with the gold braid on the brim, more tightly, and went back out onto the wing.
The other captain was still at half attention, gripping his binoculars, pointedly looking away from Savo. Dan leaned against the coaming until they came abreast, then shouted across, “D’you have power yet?”
The Persian’s black eyebrows, so heavy they were one dark line, contracted. He shook his head slightly. In his forties, at a guess. Mustached, not exactly clean-shaven, but not bearded, either. The black stubble was trimmed around the jawline, as if to fit a gas mask. Above it, a hawk-beak of a nose. A dark, foreboding glare, sort of like a male Singhe’s. Dan figured him for a regular, most likely from the shah’s old navy, trained as an ensign in San Diego or Newport.
“Propulsion?”
Another negative wag. He lifted the binoculars and focused them somewhere past Dan. “We will take it soon, though.”
“Uh-huh. Where are you headed?”
No answer. “Syria?” Dan prompted. “Tartus?”
The faintest motion of the shoulders; otherwise, perfect immobility. A figure moved behind the commander, just inside one of the smashed-out windows, and Dan saw one reason why he might not be that forthcoming. Someone was listening, from inside. Holding out … a microphone? Was everything he said being recorded?
“We will regain powers very shortly,” the captain muttered through tight lips.
“Yeah? Well, look. Fleet Weather says this is gonna get ugly again. Forty-knot winds. Fifteen-foot seas. I don’t know how bad that port-side damage is, but you want to get into shelter before it puts too much stress on your hull girder. Right?”
“I will reach port,” the guy said. Obviously hating every word he had to exchange with this enemy, this foreigner, this infidel. Yet also thinking about how he was going to save his ship, and his men. Not a bad skipper. Probably a pretty good one. And if he was like the Iranian destroyerman Dan had faced in the Gulf a few years before, a competent and dogged seaman.
“I can put a line over,” Dan called over the rising wind. “Provide a tow. Get you part of the way there, at least. Until you get your shafts turning.”
The guy was obviously struggling with himself. “You will wait,” he said at last, and ducked into the pilothouse. Figures moved back and forth in the semidarkness. Dan couldn’t see what was going on, so he went to the radar and checked it, his boots sliding as Savo rolled. He called down to Staurulakis for an update and to make sure she was passing everything that was going on to Higher via chat.
When he socketed the J-phone Van Gogh said, “Sir, we can’t stay alongside much longer. We’re really starting to pick up motion, and this close—”
“Yeah, Chief, I know. Make sure it gets logged, that we offered a tow.”
“Logging it all, sir. From the minute we sighted them. Chief Grissett’s back on the signal bridge getting photos, too.”
Document everything — that was apparently going to be the Navy’s watchword from now on. Dan nodded and told him to lay out a course to Tartus. He paced to the starboard side, ran his eyes around the horizon, though the machine-gun crew and the junior officer of the deck were both out there, and paced back. Out to the port wing again.
“We will accept tow,” the other captain called, still not looking at him. “Until we have engine powers again. But no one comes aboard.”
Dan nodded. “Got it. How’s your hull damage?”
“We are keeping up,” he said, and Dan caught the unspoken message: It wasn’t good.
“Do you have a towing hawser? A special rope for towing?”