Korea Strait (38 page)

“Fuck you doing here, Commander?” O'Quinn shouted hoarsely.

“Trying to keep us afloat. Like you. What's going on?”

“Hold that, will you? We're riggin' this fuckin' eductor. Hold it
tight,
goddamn it.” Dan got his hands where O'Quinn pointed. The other bent and he heard the clank of metal, then a scrape and clang as a wrench slipped and flew. The Koreans talked quickly, all together, and O'Quinn shouted, “Fuck. Fuck! No, let it go. Forget it! Just put a crimp in that fuckin' hose. Twist it and… okay, you guys know how to do that. Good. Just hold that for a second.” Another grating squeak of metal on metal. “Okay. Let her go.”

A hollow roar, a throb under his hands. It felt like the thing was working. He took his hands off gingerly and it held. “This the only penetration?” Dan yelled.

“It's a fucking parted seam. We got more leaks aft.”

“Yu says they never hit us.”

“Maybe not, but the fucking next goddamn thing to it. There's a lot of fumes back aft. I'm thinking flares or something, from the smell.”

“Fire, you mean?”

“Not sure. I don't think fire, but I kept thinking I heard somebody yelling back there. I tried to get these assholes to go look, but they won't leave the main space.”

“They're right, Joe. They've got to get a handle on the flooding. That's priority one.”

“I know, I know, they're fucking right. But how about we go look? We're like fifth wheels down here anyway.”

“Where are they? This way?”

“You're turned around, that's forward. No, aft somewhere—aft of the launcher—”

“Shaft alley? After steering?”

“Not that deep. Maybe some kind of deployment room for the
towed array. All the way aft. I don't know exactly, but I can hear guys yelling back there.”

“You can hear them? You sure?”

“That's what I said.” O'Quinn jerked his head.

It sounded okay to go see if they could help. So he followed the older man through the darkness, past and nearly under a massive boxlike structure he recognized as one of the gas turbine enclosures.

The ship fell ominously silent once they left behind the clamor and clanging of the damage-control party. The whole aft section felt abandoned. They were climbing, not walking, going hand to hand along gratings and ladderways that tilted and shifted as the ship rolled. Dan wondered what was going on topside. If a torpedo hit now, they'd never make it out.

A grating suddenly gave way under their boots. O'Quinn slipped, slid, and went into the water. Dan grabbed his collar. When he came up he was spluttering. Laughing.

“Been fucking here before, boy.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“PCF out of An Toi. Coastal Division 11. Hit a mine. Blew the bow off. Got her home though.”

“Spruance class, in the Med.”

“Did you get her home?”

He nodded in the dark, remembering the ones who hadn't made it. But the ship—yeah. He'd brought her back, and most of her people with her. Why couldn't he focus on that? On how many he'd brought back, not how many he hadn't?

He knew the answer. His own perfectionist self, his most persistent and merciless critic.

It wasn't that Niles had accused him that rankled. The admiral had only voiced the condemnation Dan Lenson himself had leveled long before.

“Asked you a question, Commander. Did you hear me?”

He bared his teeth in the dark. “I heard you—Captain. Yeah. We got her home.”

“Let's get some of these Korean kids home too,” O'Quinn rasped. Then slid, cursing, scrabbling, and went down again. Back here the water, the gratings, everything, was coated with oil. Dan hoped the stuff didn't catch fire. They'd be well and truly screwed.

Then he smelled it, what O'Quinn had told him about. A nitric burning stink, like the afterlingering of a fireworks show, or a burned-out roadside fusee. What the hell was it? It wasn't anything he'd ever smelled before aboard ship.

The ship rolled and something let go with a grinding clatter in the dark. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was right above them. Dan cowered, his arm whipping up in protective reflex. But nothing came down. Yet. He shouted, “Where the hell are they? You sure about this, Joe?”

O'Quinn was coughing, and Dan felt the tickle in his lungs too. The fumes, or smoke, or whatever it was, was getting thicker. “Just a couple more yards,” he grunted between coughs. “Right under here. Duck under this thing.”

WHEN they finally reached the door, Dan saw the problem. One of the generators had come off its foundations, sheared its bolts, and been toppled by the sideways snap of explosive shock. A corner of its steel-I-beam base pinned the door closed.

He figured it was some sort of stern compartment, a Nixie handling room or the towed array deployment gear, like O'Quinn had said. The deepest, remotest manned station, all the way aft, all the way down. The door's dogs were turned to the open position. Whoever was inside must have done that. But they couldn't pop it against the weight.

They were both coughing now, unable to stop, the biting pungent fumes making it impossible to get a full breath. No wonder the others had stayed forward. He and O'Quinn leaned on the door, panting and bracing themselves against another heavy roll, another cacophony of terrifying sounds from above them. Something was hissing and bubbling not far away.

“They don't get power back pretty damn quick, she's going over,” Dan gasped.

“Probably going anyway. With all this water.”

O'Quinn's placid tone was so at variance with what he was saying that Dan glanced over in surprise. His face—what little of it was visible in the gleams from the lights far behind them—was smudged with oil, but the man was smiling. “Uh, you all right, Joe? Breathing this shit—”

“Huh? Never better.” O'Quinn studied the fallen machinery. The frame pinned the hatch closed. The black water moved across its foot, a little higher each time the frigate rolled. He groped along the bulkhead and came up with a dogging wrench. He slammed it on the hatch, two, three times.

Dan listened but nothing came back. No answering concussions, no yells, nothing but the distant bubbling, the uneasy squeak of steel on steel. He coughed. Got out, “You heard somebody inside?”

“Yeah. Hear ‘em shouting?”

“You sure, Joe?'

“Hell yeah, I'm fucking sure. There it is again. Say you didn't hear that?”

Dan hesitated, remembering what Henrickson had told him about O'Quinn. The
Buchanan
disaster. Hadn't his disgrace and dismissal been for leaving men trapped below? Was this some kind of flashback, some aural hallucination? He tried to catch O'Quinn's eye, but the man was already tugging at fallen metal. “Come on here, goddamn it. Put your back to it.”

“Uh—I don't hear anything, Joe.”

O'Quinn didn't answer and Dan gave up questioning. Maybe he
did
hear something—it was hard to tell with all the other noise around them. He got his back under a corner, where he could brace his legs. They grunted in unison a couple of times, then put all they had into it. The generator didn't move an inch, not a millimeter. There was no give to it at all.

The hull around him tilted farther, groaning. Black water bulged out of the dark and surged over the tops of his boots. He heard the damage-control parties shouting behind them, but they seemed more distant than before. Were they withdrawing? Called back out? Even… abandoning ship? He kept expecting another detonation, this one final: the flash, then the black end. He drew down acrid air, fighting an overpowering urge to bolt. “Joe, you really sure—I don't hear—”

“
I
fucking heard them, Lenson. We're all they got.” O'Quinn sounded frantic now. His oily hair stuck up in spikes. He was bent, feeling around under the black water like a man who's lost his keys. “You want to fucking get out, hey, go! Save your own ass, all right?”

“I'm not going anywhere, I'm just asking—”

“Ask about the guys in that compartment. Figure how they feel right now. Okay? Get on the other end of this thing. Not that. The I beam there. Yeah, that one. That attached to anything? See if we can get it over here.”

The beam seemed to be part of a demounting kit, kept to swap out the generator. In the dark it was hard to be sure, but it appeared to be eight, nine feet long, a chunk of solid steel with some machined fitting at the end Dan didn't recognize. Halfway through getting it dragged over to the door Dan grasped what the other had in mind. He sweated his end up as O'Quinn, knee-deep in water now, fought to force the butt end under the generator frame.

“Uh, hey—Joe? We actually get this hatch cracked, this water's going to flood it. If it's not flooded already.”

O'Quinn held up a thin snake Dan recognized after a moment as a hose. “What's that?” he muttered.

“Compressed air. What was hissing and bubbling, under there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Get it to ‘em, maybe they can breathe.”

“But if it's flooded—”

“If it was flooded, would we be hearing guys screaming under there?”

“But I don't actually hear—”

“
I
heard'em.”

Dan muttered through gritted teeth, “I hear people screaming sometimes too, Joe.”

O'Quinn waited, not looking at him. At last he inclined his head slightly, cocked, as if trying to identify distant music. “You hear them,” he muttered.

“Yeah.”

“And then what?”

“And you don't listen. You hear them but you don't listen. You can't. You just go on.”

He straightened and sucked a breath so stacked deep with oil fumes and the choking smoke that his parched throat flamed. Circuits were snapping off in his brain. Red sparks arched and fell gracefully at the corners of his vision. “We're… losing the oxygen down here, Joe. Let's get serious. You really hear somebody? Or are you just remembering them from—before?”

O'Quinn bent him a look of the most complete hatred Dan had ever met. “Get the fuck out of here. No—wait. I need you.
They
need you. Or I'd tell you to go blow yourself! Now put your fuckin' weight on that thing!”

The beam took their weight, but instead of levering up the frame under their combined straining, it slowly bent. Nothing else moved, and Dan realized it was futile. Even if there were someone down there. Even if O'Quinn wasn't just hearing things, they were doomed.

But then the darkness rolled again. A wave crashed from outside, and somehow the added momentum or the cant added just enough to their grunting efforts that the lever came down a little more. Then even more.

The corner of the foundation pried slowly up. Maybe six inches. They worked the butt in farther, so it wouldn't slip, and tried desperately again to lever the generator up and off the hatch. But it didn't go. Just hung there, six inches of gap.

“Hold it there,” O'Quinn grunted.

“Joe—”

To his astonishment and horror O'Quinn was on his hands and knees, then on his belly. In the water. Working hard with the dogging wrench.

A black crack showed. Dan groaned, trying to hold up the enormous weight of the frame single-handed. Cramps knotted his back. His arms were numb. He panted, but what his lungs sucked in wasn't air but some fiery gaseous acid. He watched for a hand to appear in the crack. For a flashlight to shine through, a face to appear, arms to push, a shout to echo.

Nothing. He said through teeth bared in effort, “There's nobody
there,
Joe.”

“Yes, there is. Hold it up—”

“Maybe there was—”

“Get it
up,”
O'Quinn shouted.
”Now,”
and Dan gave a despairing heave and the older man did too, his back braced against the steel.

The whole great mass squealed upward another inch, another couple of inches. As it did the crack widened, and Dan was appalled to see O'Quinn stretch out around the frame and with a quick squirming motion thrust his hands, and head, and upper body inside the black gap.

“Joe!” Dan shouted, straining with desperate effort against the lever, praying it didn't slip. If it did it would close the door again, on O'Quinn's skull.

But the ship rolled, and he couldn't hold it. Slowly the generator began to descend. He heard a soft grunt from the man beneath it as the weight came down on him.

With a burst of dizzying effort that ripped something in his back he pulled the lever down, steel scraping against steel, getting just that much more lever arm on it, and put all he had, more than he had, into it. The descent halted. The generator hovered, poised, as he strained and panted, then came back up a little. “Get
out
of there,” he squeezed through locked teeth. “I can't hold this. Joe!
Get outl”

But O'Quinn either ignored him or didn't hear. He squirmed again, sending ripples across the water, and crawled forward even more.

Dan couldn't see his head now. Or his chest. O'Quinn's elbows worked at the edge of the door. His boots dragged, kicking, splashing, thrusting his body into the closing gap. Dragging the hose behind him.

Dan thought to grab for his leg, but that would mean slacking off on the lever. If that frame came down it'd crush him. “Joe.
Joe,”
he yelled, but got no more answer than before.

The boots gave a final kick and vanished at the same moment the generator began to descend again.

Dan was straining to hold it up, straining too to hear anything from below, when the ship went over.

She'd been rolling hard all the time, of course, but this was different. The swift jerk was like dropping the trap of a gallows. That steep, and that fast. Black water surged around his legs. From behind him came a prolonged, polyphonic chorus of ghastly screams. From above, what had a moment before been beside him but was now suspended terrifyingly came the shriek of ripping metal and the rushing hiss of a malevolent and powerful demon abruptly set free.