The Crisis

by David Poyer

  Their shocked stares told him he’d said exactly the right thing. The SEAL thing. “Tell them, put those fucking cameras away!” he added. “Right now!”

  “NOW ON USS SHAMAL: PHOTOGRAPHY IS SECURED TOPSIDE. PHOTOGRAPHY IS SECURED TOPSIDE.”

  “Guys got any cold water?”

  “I’ll send a case with the boarding party,” Geller shouted down. “All secure?”

  “Not sure yet. Send the medic. Dooley’s hurt. Send everybody armed, might be more below.”

  “Enemy casualties?”

  “Saved one to interrogate. You bet.”

  Geller and Lenson exchanged looks. “What?” Teddy said.

  “We need you back aboard ASAP,” Lenson said. “We’ll send the corpsman for Dooley. Leave the bodies aboard for whoever follows up this, uh, event. Just got a message.”

  “What’d it say?” Teddy asked. Saw him frown, like he should have said, “sir,” and nearly laughed in his face. Blackshoes. You hadda love ’em.

  “Proceed to MODLOC off Ashaara City.”

  “Off Asshair City? What for?”

  Lenson glanced into the pilothouse as a radio crackled. “The embassy’s surrounded and under attack. Centcom’s considering how to evacuate it. They want us inshore as soon as possible. I need to go over some things with you. As soon as you get cleaned up.”

  II

  FOOD

  7

  USS Mount Whitney

  DAN stepped over the knee-knocker, still shaky from a violent helicopter flight. The Combined Arms Coordination Center was enormous compared to the one he’d once worked in aboard USS Guam, as a lowly lieutenant (jg). Its tiered seats sloped down to electronic displays instead of enlisted men wielding grease pencils on Plexiglas. Before them were twin brown-leather-covered reclining chairs, for the Navy overall commander of landing operations and the Marine commander of the troops once ashore. The Marine chair was empty, the Navy one occupied.

  By Commodore Goya, who looked up from a notebook computer locked between upthrust knees. “Lenson. How your men doing? The wounded?”

  How had they become “his”? “Two are minor, torn ear and a defensive cut on the hand. The other’s serious, but the surgeon says he’ll make it.”

  “You left Shamal off Ashaara City?”

  “Yes sir. Dr. Henrickson and I helo’d back.”

  “Where is she? Pierside?”

  “No sir, but within visual range. Captain Geller’s standing off to observe, pending orders. I told him to try to establish comms with the embassy. Serve as a relay, or a backup comm channel. Even VHF or a cell phone would put us ahead of the game.”

  “Okay, great. Question. Are you familiar with caps in geeks?”

  That was what it sounded like, but Dan heard CAPS—the Crisis Action Planning System—in GCCS—the Global Command and Control System. “Yessir. At the Joint Staff College, then on the NSC staff.”

  Goya’s eyebrows rose. “You worked at the White House?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Done any real-world crisis action planning?”

  “The incursion into Syria after the embassy takeover in Cyprus. Arroyo Gold, the strike on Libya. Signal Mirror, in Iraq. Then in the Sit Room, for Eritrea.”

  Goya reached above his head. “Mr. Wurtz there? I’d like to see him, if he has a moment.”

  A short commander in sweat-stained khakis came in one of the lower doors, Kim McCall and Monty Henrickson a couple of steps behind. As he climbed toward them Goya said, “Commander Lenson, Commander Wurtz. Goes by Rocky, my N-3, Operations. He’s new in the billet.”

  “Good to meet you, Rocky.”

  Dan stuck out a hand, but Wurtz’s flinched back. “You don’t want what I got,” he said.

  “See the doc?”

  “Yes I did, Commodore.”

  “Well, we have a possible NEO downrange, Rocky. Can you brief Dan? I’m thinking of having him help with the planning.”

  Wurtz looked put out, then resigned. “Could use the help, sir. Miz McCall here’s already getting sucked into the whirlpool.”

  “Whatever we can do,” Dan said. “This is a noncombatant evacuation from Ashaara City?”

  The operations officer outlined the situation. The president of Ashaara had fled the night before without bothering to officially abdicate. He’d simply left, in a chartered Air Tanzania jet, along with his ministers and what remained of the treasury. Police and troops had evaporated. Al-Jazeera and CNN were reporting looting of foodstuffs and reprisal killings. “The ambassador’s Jedidiah Dalton. You might remember him from That Dalton Bunch,” Wurtz finished. “He was the youngest, who held his breath to get what he wanted.”

  “The cute one? With the pet bat?” McCall said. Dan was surprised she was old enough to remember it.

  “That’s him. Anyway, he’s requested military assistance. As of 07 today.”

  “Requested a NEO?”

  “Not specifically,” Goya put in. “That’s part of the problem. Apparently the Chiefs can’t issue a warning order for an embassy evacuation until State officially requests one. Some interdepartmental thing.”

  “I thought we could plan, but not execute,” Dan said.

  “My understanding too, Commodore,” Wurtz said.

  “Then why’s Centcom holding on to the order?” Goya frowned. “If I’m reading this right. And if it’s not a reflection of what’s happening in Tampa.”

  Dan nodded. Goya was referring to Commander, Central Command’s recently being charged with sexual harassment, threatening his confirmation for a fourth star. “Think he’s tied up with this suit, the woman who worked for him when he was Seventh Army?”

  “That, or things are getting worse in Iraq.”

  “He’s not in Florida,” Henrickson put in. They looked at the analyst. “He’s at the temporary command center in Qatar. So it could be Iraq.”

  “Sir,” Dan said, “it’s not labeled as a warning order? It’s informational?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you’re an info addressee? It’s from JCS to Centcom?” Goya nodded. “Who are the other addees?”

  “COMUSNAVCENT, Tarawa, Duluth, Anchorage, Oldendorf, Comphibron Eight, CTG—that’s me—and One-Five MEU.”

  Dan squared his shoulders, feeling a vacancy amidships that had nothing to do with nutrition. “Well, Commodore, I’d say they’re working it inside the Beltway, the Chiefs and the NSC and the SecDef’s office, but somebody in the Concrete Snowflake’s trying to give us as much of a heads-up as he can. My guess is you won’t be the final on-scene commander. Nothing personal—the amphib guys are trained for that job. Chain of command will probably go from NAVCENT to Comphibron on Tarawa. But we should start planning now. See if we can get those units started in our direction. Then everybody’ll be up on step when the warning message hits the street.”

  “Concur, sir,” Wurtz snapped.

  “All right, pull your team together. Keep the chief of staff informed. I’m going to make some calls on the red phone, see if I can get any better sense of the situation.”

  “And get the amphibs moving, sir.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Goya said, and for a moment Dan was afraid he might’ve pushed too hard. For a guy who wasn’t even on Goya’s staff and, though a senior commander, wasn’t an 0-6. And might never be. But the commodore just hit the bitch box and began talking to the commo about covered HF.

  WURTZ convened his Three Shop guys in the ops office for orientation. Dan didn’t say much. It was the ops officer’s show. He tried to keep his mind off Kimberly McCall’s perfume. She sat next to him, legs crossed. He admired the curves of her calves. When she caught him looking he cleared his throat and glanced away.

  “Dan? I said, anything you’d like to add?”

  “Uh—I like most of what you’ve said. Using the MEU (SOC) and so forth. Running the helo routes around the populated areas, that’s smart. But, uh, what comms have we got with the embassy? It’d be good to get them to confirm these info
rmation packages. Sometimes those run two, three years behind. And ‘enemy capabilities’—I wouldn’t assume permissive entry just because somebody says the army’s dissolved. One hardcore in an old MiG strafing a landing craft and we’ve got a hundred dead marines.”

  He went down the notes he’d jotted, watching Wurtz getting steamed but not caring.

  Ashore, the Marines were as close to unbeatable as a military force got. Afloat, the U.S. Navy’s woven layers of sensors and defenses could deal with any imaginable threat. It was when they had to project force inland that both became vulnerable. The ships, because they were close to shore, constrained by hydrography and the obligation to support the landing force. The troops were shorn of heavy weapons, without cover, exposed and vulnerable on open beaches.

  Those who’d studied the bloodbaths at Dieppe and Gallipoli, Salerno and Tarawa, had evolved a list of lessons that troops bent under rucks and rifles realized existed only when everything went horribly wrong. Dan had seen it done well and done badly, and he’d stepped up because he knew how deadly a beach could get. The grunts liked to sneer at the staffers, the pogues, the rear-echelon motherfuckers. But it was the words and times and numbers in the operations plans that preserved or expended their lives, and sometimes determined victory or defeat before the first boot sole stamped a print on wet sand.

  Ignoring his hosts’ frowns, he took Wurtz’s concept of operations apart. He rotated this piece seventy degrees and machined a roughness off that one, then put them back together into a plan that now emphasized overlapping fields of fire, quickly available fire support, comm channels better tuned to what the forces would need if surprised, more precisely delineated areas of responsibility, and less time-critical phase and objective lines. When he finished there was silence.

  Wurtz cleared his throat. “You’ve done this before.”

  McCall gave him a smile and a lifted eyebrow. “Commander Lenson here’s high speed, low drag.”

  She couldn’t be coming on to him. Could she? His head hurt like a sonofabitch. The air-conditioning was ramming icicles up his sinuses, after doing without it aboard Shamal.

  Wurtz cleared his throat again. “Well, here’s what I think. You should take the lead on the overall plan, uh, Dan. Tell us what to do here.”

  “I’ll need SIPRNET and JWICS accounts, and access to your workstations. But it’s still your plan,” Dan told him. “I mean, Commodore Goya’s. All we’re going to do is tweak it a little bit.”

  0200, back in the CACC.

  Thanks to the development tools in Mount Whitney’s computers, including several matrix documents, they were able to generate a reasonably workable plan. Meanwhile, intel trickled in from Centcom J7 and various other codes at DIA and State, along with a cable from the embassy, responding to questions Wurtz had sent.

  The plan opened with a time-critical reinforcement of the embassy’s organic security force. A SEAL detachment would land by inflatable from Shamal and Cyclone, while marines from Tarawa carried out a helicopter assault. The marines would overwatch the embassy by securing an apartment building and a water tower. Security established, the 115 compound personnel, plus whatever local staff the ambassador cleared for evacuation, would be airlifted out by CH-46s staged from Duluth. Meanwhile the SEALs would fall back between the compound and the beach, holding the back door open if for any reason the on-scene commander judged air evacuation too risky.

  Goya had asked to be briefed as soon as they had a product, so here they were, Dan and Wurtz presenting, the rest in the seats to answer questions. The commodore fidgeted through it, asking whether they’d included an amphibious option, and built in excess capacity in case of additional evacuees from the other embassies or UN and nongovernmental agencies. Dan let Wurtz take both questions. The commodore thought awhile, then asked to review the supporting-arms piece in more detail.

  Dan reluctantly took that, having written that tab, and put up a PowerPoint slide showing support available if things turned ugly. Tarawa would cover the force with Cobra attack helicopters for close-in support and Harrier jets in case the aged MiGs of the Ashaaran air force were flyable. “We’ll also have force-protection missile cover and five-inch guns available from Oldendorf, including semiactive laser-guided projectiles, and direct fire from her and the PCs if there’s a situation on the beach.”

  Goya said, “We’re counting on Tarawa for a lot. Are we sure she’ll be here on time? No flight-deck casualties or equipment down?”

  Dan looked to McCall, who handed over the helicopter landing ship’s last readiness report and confirmed the movement order that had gotten her under way. She brought up a slide showing tracks and speeds of advance for the ships en route from the Gulf of Oman, and toggled to the GCCS display. Duluth, in the lead since she’d already been in the Gulf of Aden, would reach CH-53 launch range shortly before noon the next day. Since Duluth had no CH-53s, the plan recommended launching them from Tarawa at 1000, doing a hot refuel aboard the closer ship, then hopscotching in to Ashaara City.

  “All right, that looks good,” Goya said at last, swinging down from the chair. “Let’s put it on the street and see what happens.”

  DAN borrowed a stateroom, showered, and turned in. For a few minutes his mind whirled in dizzying circles, like a defective DVD player, then went blank like a snapped-off screen.

  He was deep in REM sleep, dreaming he was in his grandfather’s house with his daughter, though the two had never met—his father’s father had died long before his daughter was born—when the bulkhead phone buzzed. He folded his pillow over his ears, figuring the call was for whoever usually slept here, but it went on and on. Finally he got up and groped around the unfamiliar darkness, slamming a toe so hard lights flashed even in the dark. Found the phone and snarled, “Lenson.”

  “McCall. You might want to come down.”

  “Why?”

  “Significant developments. Some, you may not like.”

  Was it A.M. or P.M.? From the dimmed passageways, the snoring from the other staterooms, it was 0400 rather than 1600. He made a wrong turn and got lost, but followed the smell of coffee to a cubby where two storekeepers were working late, nodding to Def Jam. They looked surprised when he knocked, and told him to help himself. When he let himself into CACC he was functioning above rudimentary brainstem activity.

  McCall and Henrickson and Wurtz and his subordinates were at the workstations. “What’s up, Kim?” Dan asked.

  She pushed back and knuckled her eyes. “First off, you were right. The phibron on Tarawa’s been designated commander for the extract. But Commodore Goya talked to COMNAVFORCENT. The administration’s been making noises about taking a more proactive role in addressing famine in East Africa. So Ashaara might go bigger than a quickie NEO.”

  “I’m not surprised yet. What about our plan?”

  “NAVCENT forwarded it to the phibron recommending they consider it.”

  “All right . . . what else?”

  “Message from the ambassador, Dalton. He okayed extracting nonessential personnel, but he doesn’t want to evacuate. In fact he implied he wouldn’t even if Secretary Revell ordered him out.”

  Dan nodded, thinking that over. “Things must be cooling off.”

  “Actually it sounds worse. Everything’s walking out of the government buildings, the Interior Ministry’s occupied by armed men, looting and shooting out in town. People getting even for things the president’s clan did over the years. Somebody set fire to the prison, and most of his political prisoners burned to death. But he—”

  “Who?”

  “Dalton—says abandoning the embassy means looters will destroy the compound, the American school, the water-treatment plant, everything we’ve built. And our local staff: if we evacuate them, everybody thinks of them as cowards from then on. Worst of all, we lose street cred. Evac helicopters, the flag coming down. Saigon and Mogadishu.”

  “We looked limp-dick in Somalia, all right,” Wurtz said. “Better to stay than to leave a
nd try to come back again.”

  “The army’s disintegrated. So has the police. That’s ominous, but it means nobody’s around to coordinate action against foreigners. At least not yet.”

  Dan said, “That’s not a bad analysis. But we don’t want this Dalton to end up like Chinese Gordon.”

  “Who?” said Wurtz.

  “British general, got himself surrounded in Sudan. Ended up speared to death. Anything from the Chiefs, the White House?”

  “Just back-channel e-mail on a coordination net, but it sounds like the secretary of state’s studying the recommendations.”

  “Oh . . . great.” “Mokey” Revell was a political general who’d served four presidents with steadily decreasing competence, a Marion Barry look-alike infamous for verbal gaffes and cluelessness. “If he’s studying it, we’ll just plow circles in the ocean until we get low on fuel, then go home. Anything from the Chiefs?”

  “Actually yes. SIPRNET’d a girl I know on the J-3 staff. They’re recommending we pull everyone out and let things settle. Iraq’s too hot and Iran’s too sticky to get tar-babied in Ashaara too. But Melinda Gates and Mia Farrow are getting a lot of publicity about the drought and the massacres on the western border. Anyway, we got an attaboy on the plan. They wanted to know who generated it. We said you did.”

  “It was us, not me.”

  “We’re PC types, not amphibious planners,” Wurtz said. “You pulled it together.”

  Dan shrugged and asked where their surface units were now. The GCCS showed Tarawa, Duluth, and Oldendorf approaching the Bab el Mandeb, the entrance to the Red Sea. The two faster ships were catching up with Duluth, which meant hot-refueling the birds aboard her might be more trouble than it was worth. They’d be in launch range in eighteen hours.

  “Where’s Anchorage?”

  “Recalled. They decided they needed her in the NAG more.”

  The Northern Arabian Gulf, Navy-ese for what the rest of the world called the Persian Gulf. Dan rubbed his face, looking at the screen. Pinpoints scattered across it were U.S. ships. Thanks to radar, satellites, data uplinks, they could surveil the entire surface of the earth. The Air Force could drop special-delivery metal and explosives here and there. But control Africa, the Horn, the Middle East, not to mention the folded abysses of inland Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan? There just weren’t enough forces.