Sea of Shadows - Страница 3

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The wind was hot in Bowie’s face, and he was beginning to look forward to the brief stretch of cool air he would find in the starboard break.

He checked an urge to put on a burst of speed. Running in the heat was all about pacing yourself. Patience, he thought. Patience.

He glanced at the supertanker again. Oil. In the end, everything came down to oil. The light-sweet crude that these fields held in such abundance was easily fractionalized into kerosene, diesel fuel, and gasoline — the very lifeblood of the industrialized world.

Bowie had done an experiment with a globe once. He had discovered that he could cover all of the Arabian Gulf and most of the OPEC nations under the tips of two fingers. The idea that such a disproportionately small area had the power to influence events all over the planet was frightening.

When you factored in the region’s political instability, the whole situation got scary as hell.

Bowie reached the boat deck and ran past the RHIBs, the ship’s two Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.

Suddenly, an alarm sounded: a jarring electronic klaxon that pounded its discordant rhythm out of every topside speaker. Bowie’s easy jog turned instantly to a sprint. He was already into the starboard break and opening the outer door to the airlock when the alarm was replaced by the amplified voice of the Officer of the Deck.

“General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. Set Material Condition Zebra throughout the ship. Commanding officer, your presence is requested on the bridge.”

Five seconds later, Bowie was climbing the first of the four steeply inclined ladders that would take him to the bridge. He passed a dozen Sailors, all headed in different directions, toward their battle stations.

Those who got caught in his path were quick to leap out of the way. One did not delay the captain under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when he was headed toward the bridge for General Quarters.

Bowie’s running shoes pounded up the aluminum steps two at a time.

He hadn’t approved any training drills for this morning, so the emergency (whatever it was) had to be real.

He nearly ducked into his at-sea cabin to grab a set of coveralls and a pair of boots, but the OOD’s amplified voice came over the 1-MC speakers again. “Away the Small Craft Action Team. Now set Tac-Sit One. This is not a drill.”

Bowie put on a burst of speed as he hit the last ladder. Screw the coveralls. If the OOD was declaring Tactical Situation One, he was expecting immediate combat. Something was getting ugly fast, but what in the hell could it be?

* * *

The bridge on board Towers was a break with a centuries-old tradition in shipbuilding. In place of a customary “walk-around” style pilothouse that ran from one side of the ship to the other, the Towers’ design offered a small angular module that protruded from the leading edge of the superstructure like a faceted bump.

Seen from the inside, it resembled the cockpit of a jumbo jet. Two contoured chairs, each surrounded by instrument-packed control consoles, dominated the small amount of floor space. The forward-most of these chairs belonged to the Helmsman, a junior petty officer whose primary duty was to steer the ship and issue speed commands to its engines.

Behind the Helmsman sat the Officer of the Deck; his chair was mounted on a platform to give him an unrestricted view through the angled bridge windows. In another break with nautical tradition, there were no chairs for the commanding officer, or his second in command, the executive officer.

Bowie stepped through the last watertight door and edged into the cramped control room. The Helmsman’s voice announced his presence before he had closed and dogged the door. “The captain’s on the bridge!”

Bowie squeezed in next to the OOD’s chair and grabbed the overhead handrail that was the only real provision for visitors. He began to shiver almost instantly as cool air from the circulation vents hit his sweat-drenched skin. “What have you got, Brett?”

Lieutenant Brett Parker looked up from his console. His boyishly good-looking features were taut, his normally mischievous green eyes dark and intense. He pointed out the window toward a pair of dark shapes skimming rapidly across the water: small boats, moving fast. The Bridge Heads-Up Display projected targeting symbols on the inside of the windows, superimposing red diamond-shaped brackets around each of the rapidly moving boats. “Sledgehammers, sir. Two of them, off the starboard bow — about a thousand yards out. Looks like they came in on the far side of that tanker and pretty much used it for cover until they got in close.”

Sledgehammer was the current Navy code word for a motorboat armed with an over-the-shoulder missile launcher.

Bowie felt his stomach tighten a fraction. “Damn.” He stared at the target symbols, and then at the small boats behind them. “Are you sure they’re Sledgehammers?”

“Pretty much, sir. They’ve made two high-speed runs on us already, sheering off suddenly both times. It looked like they were practicing missile approaches. And my Helmsman thought he saw a laser flash on the last pass.”

“I did, sir,” the Helmsman said. “A red dot, dancing on the side of the gun mount. I think it was a targeting laser, sir.”

Bowie nodded and looked around. “Did anybody else see it?”

The OOD shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“I saw the tanker when I was out there,” Bowie said. “But I didn’t see anything else.”

The Helmsman piped up immediately. “With all due respect, Captain, I know what I saw.”

The corners of Bowie’s mouth curled up in the faintest hint of a smile.

“Relax, son, I believe you. I was just wondering if anyone saw a laser from the second boat.”

A speaker crackled in the overhead. “Captain? This is the TAO. Are you watching these guys on MMS?”

The voice belonged to the ship’s Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Terri Sikes, currently standing duty as the Tactical Action Officer.

Bowie pressed the talk button on the comm box. “Not yet, Terri. Give us half a sec to get it punched up.” He nodded toward his OOD.

Lieutenant Parker tapped out a rapid-fire sequence of keys on his wraparound control console. A burst of video static blossomed on one of the three display screens and then instantly resolved itself into a coherent image: a direct video feed from the mast-mounted sight, a high-definition video camera mounted near the top of the mast.

The video was black-and-white, but the picture was exceptionally crisp.

The camera was locked on the nearer of the two speedboats. It was a cigarette boat: long and dagger-shaped, very fast and very low to the water. A continuous rooster tail of spray shot out from under the stern of the narrow fiberglass hull. The image jerked occasionally as the boat took a dip or a roll that the Towers’ optical tracking computer hadn’t anticipated.

Suddenly, the image froze and the Tactical Action Officer’s voice came over the speaker. “There!” she said. “Right there, sir. Do you see that?”

Bowie pressed the talk button on the comm box. “What am I looking for?”

A pixelized oval appeared on the screen, drawn in by the TAO using a light pen. The area inside the oval magnified itself to show a grainy image of the interior of the cigarette boat. Two men were visible, or people, anyway — it was impossible to tell more from the frozen image. One of the figures was hunched over a console, obviously driving. The second figure was half-crouched, hanging on to the windscreen with one hand. His other hand was wrapped around a rectangular object draped over his right shoulder.

Bowie’s stomach tightened another notch. “Got it.”

The oval disappeared, and the image leapt back to life. “Sir,” the TAO’s voice said, “that’s got to be a missile launcher. I think those bastards are going to light us up. Request permission to engage.”

Bowie watched the screen. “Not yet,” he said.

The boats were circling back around for another pass at the ship.

“Two boats,” Bowie said to himself. “No markings. They’re not terrorists, or they would have shot at us on the first pass. There’s no way to tell if they’re Siraji or Iranian, but it’s a decent bet that it’s one of the two. I don’t think anybody else around here is mad enough to shoot at us.”

Lieutenant Parker cleared his throat. “Uh, Captain … I have to agree with the TAO. Those boats are showing classic Sledgehammer attack profiles. We need to take them out before they get off a shot at us.”

An enunciator on the Helmsman’s console beeped once, lighting a green tattletale on his display panel. A second later, it beeped again, lighting another tattletale. “Material Condition Zebra is set throughout the ship,” the Helmsman announced. “All gunnery stations are reporting manned and ready for Tac-Sit One.”

Bowie kept his eyes on the black-and-white video. Something was funny here. If the cigarette boats really were Sledgehammers, why hadn’t they attacked yet? “I’m not sure that’s a missile launcher.”

“What else could it be, sir?”

Bowie glanced up for a half-second into the eyes of his Officer of the Deck. “It could be a video camera, Brett.”

The OOD’s voice nearly squeaked. “But they trained a laser on us.

They’re targeting us, sir. It’s obvious.”