missile dropped from its launch rack. The engine ignited, sending the deadly package streaking toward the north.
“Target lock!” Piotr added. “Firing missile!”
Captain Richard Calvin walked out onto the port-side flying bridge and leaned over the railing, craning his head for a long, searching look aft. He wasn’t sure what those flyboy idiots were playing at, but someone had just flown a pair of high-performance jets over his command so fast and so low that his bridge windscreens had rattled, and he didn’t care for that one bit.
Falcon Patriot was a brand-new member of the old Falcon Leader class, a tanker of 42,369 tons, with a length overall of 630 feet and a transport capacity of 225,100 barrels ? very nearly ten million gallons. Despite her long-term charter through the Maritime Administration, she was a civilian vessel, owned by Falcon Sea and operated by Seahawk Management.
Normally, smaller oilers were used for Underway Replenishment of naval vessels at sea, but the unusual isolation of the Jefferson battle group inside the Black Sea had called for special measures, and the Patriot had been taken off her normal duties as a prepositioning shuttle tanker in the Med and assigned UNREP duties. She mounted two fueling stations abeam, one port, one starboard, allowing her to pass fuel to two ships at once.
Calvin didn’t like jet jockeys. More than once, while the Falcon Patriot was attached to the Sixth Fleet in the Med, frisky Tomcat pilots had made low passes over his command, rattling windows and upsetting crockery in the galley. He had a reputation, he knew, among the various commanding officers and high-ranking brass clear up the ladder to Sixth Fleet HQ at Gaeta, Italy, for his loud and pointed complaints after each such incident. Damn it, you didn’t play games with ten million gallons of highly flammable petroleum products. If the pilot of one of those sea- skimming aircraft had been just a hair off, his plane and the Falcon Patriot would have gone up in a fireball that would be seen and heard clear back to Istanbul, and the burning oil might block the straits for days.
Brady, the ship’s second mate, was already on the wing, looking aft through a pair of watch-stander’s binoculars.
“What the hell were those two playing at?” Calvin demanded.
“Damfino, Skipper,” Brady replied without lowering the binoculars. “But if I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone just stole themselves a bridge.”
“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We heard that thunder aft a moment ago, right?”
“Yeah, just after those jets went over. Sounded like a sonic boom.”
“Maybe.” He sounded doubtful. “I been taking a look-see through these.
I can’t see the bridge back there.”
Calvin could still hear thunder rolling in the distance, a kind of faint thump-thump that hung above the still waters of the Bosporus. Or was that the continuing roar of the jets in the distance? He glanced up. An unusual number of white contrails were scrawled across the blue sky this morning, aircraft at high altitude. Exercises of some sort, most likely.
He held out his hand for the binoculars. “Lemme see a minute.”
This far north of the third Bosporus bridge there was little to see of the structures long, gray, spidery shadow on the horizon. Focusing the binoculars, he thought he could see one of the towers… but he couldn’t be sure. There was a fog or ground haze moving in, and the area close to the water was obscured. It almost looked like smoke.
He couldn’t hear the thunder any longer.
“Did you get a look at those planes, Captain?” Brady asked. “They weren’t ours.”
“What do you mean, not ours?” Calvin had been buzzed by U.S. Navy jets often enough during fleet operations with them that he’d simply assumed that this was more of the same. He’d never paid much attention to the different classes of aircraft, though.
“They weren’t ours,” Brady insisted. “I used t’be in the Navy, remember.
Navy planes are painted gray, dark on top, light underneath. These were kind of brownish. Couldn’t see any Navy insignia, either.”
“Maybe they were Turks,” Calvin suggested. He lowered the binoculars, thoughtful.
“What the hell is that?”
Brady said the words in such a curious, unexcited manner that Calvin simply glanced toward where he was pointing. He could see something moving across the water, something small and dark and very, very fast. He realized what it was just as it flashed past the port side of the Falcon Patriot’s bridge and slammed into the hull amidships. The explosion followed instantly, the detonation sending a rippling shudder through the tanker’s deck. A ball of black and orange erupted from forward as Calvin and Brady both were pitched to the deck.
“What the bloody hell-” But Calvin’s words were lost in the thunder of the blast, followed in an instant by a hurricane roar of furiously burning aviation gasoline. The missile had ruptured Three-port, loosing a torrent of JP-5 and igniting it.
A second missile ? he thought it was a second missile, though in the thunder and boiling smoke he couldn’t be sure of anything ? struck forward. He could feel the ship lurch to starboard with the impact, could feel her bows drifting…
Smoke was pouring aft across the bridge wing, so thick now he could scarcely see more than five feet. On hands and knees to avoid being pitched over the safety railing by further explosions, he crawled toward the bridge door, tumbling inside as Brady staggered in close behind him. The bridge watch, most of them, were on the deck; the helmsman was still at the wheel, clinging to it as if to life itself. The broad, slanted windscreen had shattered, the safety glass spilling across the bridge deck like millions of tiny glass spheres. Smoke made visibility worse, if anything, inside than out.
“Johnson!” he yelled at the helmsman. “Bring her to port! Full speed!”
The helmsman gaped at him, unseeing, uncomprehending. Heaving himself up off the deck, Calvin staggered to the wheel, shoved Johnson aside, and shoved the throttles forward. He could still feel the bite of the rudder as he spun the wheel left; tankers were ponderous beasts and slow to respond to the helm, but the Falcon Patriot had enough way on that she ought to be able to get clear of the shipping channel.
Calvin had several goals in mind, all urgent. The missile or missiles had struck the Patriot’s port side; by bringing the bow to port, he could slow the flooding somewhat and possibly keep the damaged hull sections from tearing themselves apart as they plowed ahead through the water. Too, the vessel was currently in the deepest part of the navigable channel; if she sank here, salvage would be difficult at best, and her hulk would block the channel for weeks, maybe months. If he could steer her to the shoal water to the west, however, he could ground her keel on hard bottom, keeping the channel clear and also making salvage and on-site repair efforts easier.
“Mr. Brady!”
“Yes, Captain!”
“Pass the word for all hands to abandon ship.”
He could feel the pain in his ship, feel her wounds in the way she was shuddering and grinding with the turn to port. The Falcon Patriot was finished; she would break apart soon if she didn’t burn to a cinder first. His instrumentation showed that automated fire control systems were engaged, but the flames from amidships were so hot, so violent, he knew that any firefighting efforts mounted by the automatic systems or by his twenty-man crew were doomed to failure. Better to get his people off now, while they could.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Brady replied. He reached for the intercom mike.
“And Brady?”
“Sir?”
“Make sure you have a head count before you go over the side. I don’t want anybody left behind to fry!”
“Yes, sir!”
Another missile struck, the impact smashing at the bottoms of his feet through the steel deck. Damn, what was this? Someone was deliberately slamming missile after missile into his vessel! All he could imagine was that a full-fledged war had just broken out, and the Falcon Patriot was squarely in its eye.
The fire forward was so thick he could not see where they were going.
