“Feeling okay? Get any sleep while we were in port?”
“Not much. We had to get those Harpoons onloaded, and coordinate everything with the port security people.” She coughed into a fist.
“You’re not coming down with this thing, are you?”
“Nope. Just tired. I’m okay.”
He glanced around, abruptly realizing that almost everyone else looked just as hollow-cheeked, just as red-eyed. And equally apathetic. The port visit should have helped, but they’d had so much to do. He cleared his throat. “Look, we need to get out of GQ as soon as we clear the strait. Condition three, but only until we’re over the horizon. Then, the normal steaming watch, so the off watch can catch some Zs. And maybe a rope yarn Sunday.”
“A what?”
He blinked. “Never heard of a rope yarn Sunday?”
“You’re losing me, Captain.”
“Well, it’s old Navy… a half day’s work, to catch up on your mending, pick oakum, that kind of thing. Tomorrow’s Sunday, right? What’ve we got scheduled?”
“I wasn’t sure where we’d be at that point. So I didn’t really—”
“Let’s leave the afternoon free. And what else could we do? To sort of let everybody’s hair down. Swim call?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea in these waters, Captain. Sharks. Snakes—”
“How ’bout a steel beach picnic?” Wenck put in. Dan swiveled to face him. “And a beer call,” the chief added. “We earned it.”
Dan nodded slowly, gaze drawn back to the displays. Where the lumbering behemoths they escorted were turning the corner, bound for the Indian Ocean. The Combattantes they’d passed on the way in, and which had trailed them up to the exercise area, were still out there. He was keeping an eye out for them, and for any bogeys rising from the new airfield farther south, near Chabahar. East of that was the Chinese-built port in Pakistan, Gwadar. He’d love to take a look at that, see if he could pick up any electronic intelligence. If they made it out without further incident.
He nodded slowly. “Steel beach it is. Good suggestion, Donnie. Cheryl, let’s get our heads together, see what we can do.”
“Captain. Captain?”
He wasn’t really sure, for a moment, if he was still dreaming. No. In his bunk. Having finally, finally, gotten his eyes closed. He coughed, hard, bringing something sticky and thick and gritty up from inside his chest. Under way… Savo Island… Arabian Sea. He groped for the Hydra. “Yeah… yeah. What is it, Chief?”
“We got some kind of light low in the water. Bearing zero-four-zero. No radar contact.”
Fuck. But you couldn’t say that, or betray in any way that you resented being woken. Or they might not call you, next time, when you really ought to be there. He muttered reluctantly, “I’ll be right up.”
The pilothouse was utterly dark. He groped his way around the helm console, barking his shin on something steel. Muttered, “OOD?”
“Here, sir. Chief Van Gogh.”
“What’ve we got, Chief?”
Van Gogh led him out onto the port wing, where Dan stared into one of the blackest nights he’d ever seen. The warm wind blustered in his ears. “What am I looking at?”
Hands gripped his shoulders and aimed him. “Out there, sir. Right below the horizon.”
What horizon? But he caught, just for an instant, what might’ve been a flicker of yellow. Van Gogh said, “Port lookout reported it. Young kid. Good eyes. Otherwise we’d have missed it. Zip on radar. I slowed and called you. We’re at five knots.”
“Okay. Where’s Mitscher?”
“Astern, Captain. CIC put him there to do some kind of beam calibration.”
A pair of binoculars was pushed into his hands. Dan found the lights of the destroyer, well astern, then searched off to port again until he picked up the flicker once more. But the 7x50s didn’t give him much more than his naked eyeballs. “Phosphorescence?”
“Look down, sir.”
He looked straight down, to a greenish flicker, along the turbulent layer where the steel skin of the ship slid through the sea. “We have luminescent organisms, but they’re green,” Van Gogh said. “That’s yellow out there. Almost like a flame.”
“Check with Sonar?”
“Yessir. Nothing on that bearing.”
“How far are we from land?”
“Hundred and twenty miles, as of eight o’clock reports.”
“All right, let’s come around. Inform Mitscher what we’re doing. Have them stand clear.” He stared through the glasses again, but the spark was gone. Or he couldn’t pick it up. “Go in slow. And better man up the lights.”
The dazzling beam from the signal bridge picked out debris from the blackness. Low black dots, a dark line. Dan slowed to a crawl, came left to put the wind behind him, and let the ship drift in.
“Three guys, on a raft,” the junior officer of the deck said, balancing binoculars on the tips of his fingers.
A few minutes later they were looking down at them. The wet black heads sagged and lolled. The men didn’t look up, or wave. There was no raft. They were lashed to a long wooden timber, some kind of beam or spar.
This was what the Navy called a SOLAS event. Saving life at sea. Not that he wouldn’t have anyway, but Savo was legally obligated to render assistance. Dan debated putting the RHIB in the water, but at last just bumped ahead and lowered the boat ladder midships. Grissett and two boatswain’s mates went down to help the men out of the water.
The first lieutenant and the chief corpsman reported to him on the bridge an hour later. “Three dudes,” Grissett said. “Lucky as hell. One kept showing me a Bic lighter. That was probably what we saw.”
“Okay, who are they? Where are they from?”
“Iranian. Not super coherent at the moment, but Kaghazchi says he thinks they’re saying they’re refugees. Baha’is. One was condemned to death for proselytizing. Disrespecting Islam, whatever. The other two are his cousins. They broke him out of prison, or bribed him out — that’s not real clear, but who cares — and they were trying to escape in a boat. The good news: they made it out. The bad news: the boat came apart and sank. There were two others. They swam away, and these guys never saw them again.”
“Hundred-plus miles from shore? Headed east? Where’d they think they were going?”
“I don’t get the impression these are seasoned travelers.”
Van Gogh put in, “This is where the prevailing wind and current would take them, from the coast. Pretty fucking lucky, I’d say.”
“Absolutely agree,” said the corpsman. “One more day without water, they’d have been DOA.”
Dan leaned back against leather, unutterably fatigued. “Yeah — to get seen at night, way out here. Somebody’s looking out for them. Okay, so they’re claiming religious, political refugee status, I guess. That right?”
“We didn’t get to the legalities yet, Captain. I was just trying to get ’em rehydrated, and checking eyes and airways. Two of ’em inhaled gasoline when the boat went down, in the slick. Think they’re gonna be okay, though. You can talk to ’em yourself if you want.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said, envisioning his bunk again, looking at his watch. 0300. He might be able to get another couple hours in.
If they didn’t call him again.
9
Chicken, steak, and burgers were grilling over charcoal in torched-apart fifty-five-gallon drums. The smells of barbecue mingled with those of baked beans, coleslaw, chips, and stack gas. Gulls darted overhead, shrieking with rage and envy as Savo rolled eastward at a casual ten knots, barely fast enough to push a bow wave. Two hundred and fifty miles out of Hormuz, the atmosphere was nearly clear of sand. Still cloudy, still monsoon weather, and the wind still kicked up a blue sea.