“No sir.”
“Radar range?”
“Four thousand,” Van Gogh said from the repeater. “Good strong return. Big guy, but we’ll pass at least a thousand yards in front of him.”
“Confirm that, Combat?”
The CIC phone talker spoke into his chest-mounted set as Dan paced the length of the bridge. Not a distance he was comfortable with, but acceptable in the interests of getting up north without delay. If for some reason they had an engine glitch, and Savo had experienced occasional shorting in the engine controls, he could still angle left and open the range.
The Iranians had learned from their last clash with the Navy, when their major units had been wiped out. The Pasdaran had married suicidal commitment, light missiles, and mass wave tactics to reach for an asymmetrical advantage over the numerically inferior Americans. Dan could appreciate why Savo had been chosen to lead the transit. Aegis was designed to track hundreds of small, fast-moving targets. She could reach out hundreds of miles, but her close-in defenses were dense and prickly as welclass="underline" the automatic five-inches, Harpoon, and last, Phalanx, for any leakers. His EW team could decoy and jam most missiles.
The real question wasn’t capability. It was magazine capacity. Reduced, in his case, by the fact that so many of his cells were filled with BMD-optimized Block 4s. Given enough numbers, any defense could be overwhelmed. He couldn’t help thinking of Thermopylae. Isandlwana. The Little Big Horn. And Savo Island’s namesake battle, where the Navy had been surprised, outnumbered, and outfought.
He didn’t want to add the Battle of the Strait of Hormuz to that list.
“Forward lookout reports: large ship, bow on, one-three-zero relative,” the talker said.
Dan and Van Gogh went out on the starboard wing and huddled for shelter in the pilothouse corner, lifting their binoculars like a synchronized team. The rain-fog seethed past like fine grist from some gigantic mill. “There it is,” the OOD said.
Dan steadied the glasses as a gray form took shape. The bow loomed high over Savo’s pilothouse. A bulbous bow pushed up a taut green bulge of sea, which broke as it washed aft into a seethe of vanilla-ice-cream foam. An ultralarge tanker — no, ore carrier — bound, probably, for the furnaces of Germany. Christ, it looked close… though that might just be the fog. He slid the ring of the pelorus to bisect the bow. Watched tensely for a second, then blew out. The angle was drawing right. Savo would clear the oncoming behemoth by a comfortable margin, just as the management console’s plot had predicted.
“One blast?” Van Gogh asked.
This signaled that Savo intended a starboard-to-starboard passage. Dan nodded and the horn droned out its incredibly long, incredibly loud note. Seconds later, an even deeper, more prolonged monotone answered.
“Combat’s getting a second return,” the CIC talker said, out of nowhere.
“Say again?” Van Gogh snapped, wheeling around.
Fighting a sudden shortness of breath, Dan snapped his binoculars to his face again but saw only seething silver mist, and the fog moisture had built on his objectives. He dried them hastily on the sleeve of his coveralls. When he got them back up, the tanker’s bow was centered, aimed directly at them. But even as he watched, it continued to drift aft, seeming to rotate slowly as Savo emerged on its starboard side.
The junior officer’s near shriek from inside the pilothouse broke the stillness. “Another contact! Behind it!”
The rain fell harder, solid roaring sheets, soaking them, obliterating even the sea. But just for a second, Dan had made out a dim spark through the falling dusk. And the faintest shadow. Close behind the ore carrier, but smaller, another ship had pulled out to the right of the inbound channel, as if intending to pass the bigger vessel ahead, and was coming up on its quarter. But the huge mass of steel and ore between it and Savo had masked its radar return.
“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.”