"I like it." Smith turned to the girl, who watched them without a word as she sat with her back against a rock. "How do you feel, ma'am?" he inquired gently.
"Tired." Her voice said more than that, Edwards thought. There was no emotion there, none at all. He wondered if this was good or bad. What was the right thing to do for the victims of serious crime? Her parents murdered before her eyes, her own body brutally violated, what kind of thoughts were going through that head? Get her mind off it, he decided.
"How well do you know this area?" the lieutenant asked.
"My father fish here. I come with him many times." Her head leaned back into a shadow. Her voice cracked and dropped into quiet sobs.
Edwards wanted to wrap an arm around her, to tell her things were all right now, but he was afraid it might only make things worse. Besides, who would believe that things were all right now?
"How we fixed for food, Sarge?"
"I figure we got maybe four days' worth of canned stuff. I went through the house pretty good, sir," Smith whispered. "Got a pair of fishing rods and some lures. If we take our time, we ought to be able to feed ourselves. Lots of good fishin' creeks around here, maybe at this place we're goin'. Salmon and trout. Never could afford to do it myself, but I heard tell that the fishing's really something. You said your daddy's a fisherman, right?"
"Lobsterman-close enough. You said you couldn't afford-"
"Lieutenant, they charge you like two hundred bucks a day to fish up here," Smith explained. "Hard to afford on a sergeant's pay, you know? But if they charge that much, there must be a shitload of fish in the water, right?"
"Sounds reasonable," Edwards agreed. "Time to move. When we get to that mountain, we'll belly-up for a while and get everybody rested."
"I'll drink to that, skipper. Might make us late getting
"Screw it! Then were late. The rules just changed some. Ivan's liable to be looking for us. We take it slow from now on. If our friends on the other end of this radio don't like it, too damned bad. We'll get there late, but we'll get there."
"You got it, skipper. Garcia! Take the point. Rodgers, cover the back door. Five more hours, Marines, then we sleep."
The spray stung his face, and Morris loved it. The convoy of ballasted ships was steaming into the teeth of a forty-knot gale. The sea was an ugly, foam-whipped shade of green, droplets of seawater tearing off the whitecaps to fly horizontally through the air. His frigate climbed up the steep face of endless twenty-foot swells, then crashed down again in a succession that had lasted six hours. The ship's motion was brutal. Each time the bow nosed down it was as though the brakes had been slammed on a car. Men held on to stanchions and stood with their feet wide apart to compensate for the continuous motion. Those in the open like Morris wore life preservers and hooded jackets. A number of his young crewmen would be suffering from this, ordinarily-even professional sailormen wanted to avoid this sort of weather-but now mainly they slept. Pharris was back to normal Condition-3 steaming, and that allowed the men to catch up on their rest.
Weather like this made combat nearly impossible. Submarines were mainly a one-sensor platform. For the most part, they detected targets on sonar and the crashing sea noise tended to blanket the ship sounds submarines listened for. A really militant sub skipper could try running at Periscope depth to operate his search radar, but that meant running the risk of broaching and momentarily losing control of his boat, not some thing a nuclear submarine officer looked kindly upon. A submarine would practically have to ram a ship to detect it, and the odds against that were slim. Nor did they have to worry about air attacks for the present. The sea's crenelated surface would surely confuse the seeker head of a Russian missile.
For their own part, their bow-mounted sonar was useless, as it heaved up and down in a twenty-foot arc, sometimes rising completely clear of the water. Their towed-array sonar trailed in the placid waters a few hundred feet below the surface, and so could theoretically function fairly well, but in practice, a submarine had to be moving at high speed to stand out from the violent surface noise, and even then engaging a target under these conditions was no simple matter. His helicopter was grounded. Taking off might have been possible, but landing was a flat impossibility under these conditions. A submarine would have to be within ASROC torpedo range-five miles-to be in danger from the frigate, but even that was a slim possibility. They could always call in a P-3 Orion-two were operating with the convoy at present-but Morris did not envy their crews a bit, as they buffeted through the clouds at under a thousand feet.
