Cheryl cleared her throat, to wake him. “Captain.”
He yawned and stretched. “Yeah, Cher. What’cha got?”
“202’s back aboard. Both RHIBs are back for crew change and maintenance. Commander Danenhower reports the DC crew has the petrochem fire under control.”
“This is the fire—”
“On the tank farm island.”
“Okay. Good. What else?”
“You’re due at the airfield at 2000 local. Conference of relief providers. They want you to brief on the coordination of seaborne relief. And some interesting news. The Chinese reported in.”
He sat up, boots slamming to the deck, as the whole depressing, enraging business flooded back. “Fuck. The Chinese… Wuhan?”
“No, she and the other destroyer are still up north. This is the other unit in their task group. The support ship.”
He leaned to the keyboard. Weishanhu, hull 887, was a Qiandaohu-class replenishment ship. It displaced thirty thousand tons and carried two helos, but her complement was only a hundred men, which would limit flexibility. Still, she would supply fuel, water, and enormous quantities of food and other supplies, and her onboard cranes would get them ashore quickly. He said reluctantly, “Holy smoke, this thing’s enormous. How’d they get in touch?”
“HF to Male.”
“Not to us? On the coordination net?”
“I tried to call them on that freq, but there was no response.”
Which might mean they were declining to acknowledge him as on-scene commander. Did he need to worry about that? He decided not to, for now. “We’ll need a list of — no, never mind, the colonel can ask them that.” Dan ran his hands through his hair, noting that it was getting past time for a visit to the barbershop. “They could go outboard of Tippecanoe at the terminal. That should give even this mother enough keel depth. Pass that suggestion to the harbormaster. I don’t think we need to get involved. And let Captain Hunteman know they might be mooring alongside, so he can get his fenders over and lock down his topside accesses. We don’t want them wandering around. Frankly, I’d just as soon not have them moored alongside him… but I guess it’s the most logical place to put her.”
The exec put a hand on his shoulder. “Understand, Skipper. You can’t have felt too great about how that all turned out.”
This was the first time they’d discussed it aloud. And it still hurt. Forever after, his name would be associated with it. The Navy had a long memory for any shortcoming or error, and he had a feeling this one would turn out to be epic. He shook his head. “It’s not the message we should’ve sent, Cheryl.”
“The fleet commander had to know what he was doing. Maybe whatever they were hiding, we already knew about. And airing it in public would just put Beijing on the spot.”
Dan wished he could believe that. He said irritably, “They need to be put on the spot. They’ve been proliferating missiles all over the map. Along with Pakistan, North Korea… but don’t get me started.” He coughed long and hard, doubled over the command desk. When he looked up, she was gone.
He took the RHIB in to that night’s meeting, along with Amy Singhe and Max Mytsalo, just to give them a look.
They cast off after dark. The bowhook cradled a portable searchlight, scanning the water just ahead. Twice they had to detour around floating logs, and other, less identifiable debris. A small plane droned above, lights flashing, and banked away toward the field. Where, as they passed, heavier engines thundered: a four-engine transport. They motored past the riprap at the end of the runway and made for the inlet beyond. Lights glittered here and there on Male; some parts of the island had power, while others, closer to the water, were dark. They passed close to the tank farm. The fire-glow no longer flickered, but the stink of burning petroleum, dank and heavy, lay over the water, mixed with the smells of rot and decay from all the organic material that had been sucked back into the estuary.
“D’you know the route in to the ferry landing?” Dan asked the coxswain. The boatswain said he did, and pointed to brilliant orange apron lights ahead.
They ran in at dead slow, heading for two jetties. Beyond them lay the sloped roof of the terminal and a concrete pier where palms swayed and clashed beneath tangerine lights.
The bowhook raised his arm suddenly, pointing off to port. The coxswain pulled back the throttles and they drifted in, turning slightly, toward where the bowhook focused his beam.
Something floated there. Dan stood, hoping it wasn’t what it looked like, right up until the smell reached him.
“Pick it up, Skipper?”
“Can’t leave it out here, BM2.” He cleared his throat, leaning out as the boat drifted the last few feet and the thing bumped into the rigidly swollen rubber with a faint thud. The details came through one at a time, each reluctantly acknowledged, as if his brain resisted assembling sensory inputs into recognition. Small. Facedown. Dark hair.
A child, back humped beneath thin cotton as arms and legs dangled. It had only begun to swell. He knew that from other bodies he’d picked up at sea, on other cruises. But this was smaller than any he’d encountered before. It belched gas as they got a line around it. “Careful,” he muttered to Singhe. “The limbs can separate very easily.”
A heave, and they had it over the gunwale. The bowhook threw an oil-stained tarp over the slack face, but not before Dan had looked into the fish-eaten sockets of a young boy, ten or eleven at a guess. He looked away, sighing, toward the orange lights. They glimmered cheerfully on the water, as if this didn’t matter. As if someone’s whole world had not just died.
No one said anything else the rest of the way in.
The passenger area had been cleared of the strandees. Tables had been pushed together, and a vertical whiteboard held the by now familiar outline of the island. Another showed the northern and southern atolls, populations called out in grease pencil. A steady chain of Maldivians trudged past, each lugging a box or crate. Forklifts and trucks shuttled outside the huge windows, under the saffron light. A Fokker transport, gunning its propellers, nosed in to where white Nissan pickups waited with men standing in their beds. Dan joined a group of about thirty men and a few women, among whom he recognized the mayor, this time in a severe dark blue pantsuit. Lieutenant Singhe headed straight for her, and soon they had their heads together. He wondered what they were comparing notes on.
Colonel Jaleel, looking as if he hadn’t changed his camos, welcomed them in English. “This meeting is so everyone can see who they’ve been talking to on the radio. So far we have representatives from India, the United States, Singapore, and Japan. French forces are providing assistance to the northern islands. And let me now also welcome China, in the person of Captain Han.” He nodded to where a small man in the same white uniform Dan had seen aboard Wuhan stood, cupping his elbows. “We are grateful for your help. If all will take seats please… I will now introduce our secretary of human welfare, who is in charge of the relief effort.”
There was an uncomfortable dance as they found chairs. The Indians started to settle down, then got up again. Apparently they didn’t want to sit next to Captain Han. After several awkward moments, Dan found himself between the Indians and the Chinese. He nodded to Han, who bowed his head but said nothing. After a few minutes of platitudes and gratitudes, though, the secretary called on “the senior officer in charge of our naval relief efforts, Captain Daniel Lendon, United States Navy.”