by David Poyer
Marty didn’t say anything, but Chesko was starting to irk him. Probably because he was putting the mouth on his ship.
Devlin glanced at his watch. “Ready?”
Chesko said he had to pony home to mama-san, give him a call before they deployed, they’d get together. Marty said yeah, they’d have to do that.
Walking to Devlin’s truck, Marchetti said, “I don’t know how much these melonheads are going to pick up in an afternoon. Or even if I’m going to keep too many of this bunch.”
“I see a couple you can lose without hurting anything.”
“I figure whatever they learn, it can’t hurt. We’ll just have to work at it.”
“Right,” said Devlin. He buckled the seat belt and adjusted it. Then squinted through the windshield. “But if you can get one thing across … Machete? That what he called you?”
“Yeah.”
“Your team. The mind-set.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’ve got to make a decision. Are you the hunter, or the prey?”
Marchetti said, “Okay.”
The SEAL said, squinting into the sun, “I say that having been in a few gunfights. Remember, a lot of the guys you’ll go up against, they’ve never had to take on a real opponent. Don’t be afraid of them. Let them be afraid of you.”
“Got it,” Marty said.
“You’re going to make mistakes. You might even get shot. But as long as you’re still shooting back, you’re not dead. And even if you die, if you’ve trained him right, the guy behind you will win.” Devlin looked at him level. “If you can pass that on to your team, you’ll be okay.”
He nodded.
“Ready for the Killing House?”
And Marty Marchetti said yeah, he was ready to strap it on.
4
Off the Virginia Capes
SOME weeks later Dan was in his at-sea cabin, just behind the J bridge, talking to Lieutenant Herbert T. Camill.
“The Camel” was the operations officer, one of the department heads. He’d grown up in Muncie and gotten an NROTC commission at Ball State. His shaved head glowed in the overhead light. He spoke ver … y … slow … ly, with pauses not just between words but within them. They’d been out to sea every week since the change of command, and every time Camill went on the net, Dan itched to snatch the handset away from him. But he’d come with a solid recommendation from Tactical Action Officer School. He also had a full multiwarfare drill schedule planned, set to start slow and peak with the joint task force exercise. This morning Camill was briefing him about Evinrude, the electronic surveillance package they’d take to the Mideast with them.
As soon as the Camel left, the phone trilled. Hotchkiss, was he free? Dan said sure, wondering why the exec always called first. He’d told her his door was open twenty-four-seven. As long as he lived aboard, and they had so much ground to make up. “Meet you on the bridge,” he told her. They were making their approach to the Capes, and he liked to be on hand when they were in sight of land.
One of the electronics technicians was coming aft as he went forward. “Petty Officer Leatherbury,” Dan said.
“Morning, sir.”
“Tweaking the TACAN?” A radar beacon that friendly aircraft could use to home in on the ship.
“The new board’s in, she’s doing good now, sir.”
“How about those fifty-cals?”
“Fired them again yesterday, sir. Still rusty on what to do when it jams, though.”
He was working his way through the crew. Five or ten minutes with each man. Something Chief Woltz said Ross had never bothered to do, that he hadn’t even seemed to know some of the chiefs. Dan felt he owed it to the men he served with to at least know their names. To know a little about each one, where he was from, if he had a family, what he hoped for from his time in the navy.
He tried to use those minutes to get his own message across, too. That admin inspections and meticulous cleanliness were less important now than honing combat skills, firefighting, and damage control. That everyone aboard would qualify with the pistol, rifle, shotgun, and fifty-caliber machine gun, no matter what their job on the watch, quarter, and station bill.
In fact, he’d been unpleasantly surprised, looking over the records with Hotchkiss, to see that although their deployment date was rapidly bearing down on them, his crew wasn’t fully trained.
He couldn’t pull Ross’s famous first envelope on this one. It wasn’t his predecessor’s fault. Cut past the bone on personnel and operating funding, the navy had pulled its training cadre out of Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo experience dreaded, suffered, and valued afterward by generations of sailors—isolated weeks of grinding training, varied by nights on the gun line in case the Cubans came through the wire—was no more. These days, the Afloat Training Group did an assessment, identifying areas the command needed to focus on. The ships did tailored training in home port, finishing with a battle problem. The up side was, it cost less. The down side was, the ship ended up training itself. In Horn’s case, with the women joining either from noncombatants or straight from boot camp, the learning curve would be even steeper.
Together with the problems in engineering, he’d even thought of reporting to Aronie that Horn couldn’t meet her sailing date. It might not end his career, considering he’d just taken over. But he’d decided not to—yet.
So when he spoke to each man or woman, he laid the problem in front of them. Along with his solution: to go to full-time training, every possible day under way, and a final battle problem refereed by observers. This would cut down on time with their families. But he owed it to those families to bring them back. And last, he told them that if things really went to hell, the women would be just as much on the line as the men. So instead of bitching about them, they’d all better help train them. He’d backed up the one-on-ones with a shakeup of the watch bills, to make sure everyone knew a new era was here.
There was grumbling about things like actually setting Condition
Zebra when they went to general quarters instead of simulating it. Zebra was the highest level of compartmentation, sealing every hatch and scuttle below the waterline. The downside was it stopped ventilation and crew movement. But most seemed to agree. The navy didn’t salute indoors, but you could greet a skipper pleasantly or grudgingly. So far, the reactions were reserved, as if they’d taken in what he said but were suspending judgment.
Spruances had wide, spacious pilothouses, with big square windows angled outward. In the morning sun they flooded the bridge with light. “Captain’s on the bridge,” the boatswain announced, and the officer of the deck came in at once from the port wing, where she’d been examining a collier behind them through her binoculars.
Lieutenant Lin Porter wore her dark hair back in a ponytail. Intense, meticulous, with a roundish Slavic face, Horn’s new engineering officer had taken a grip on the confusion below. She’d demoted two chiefs, fleeted first class up to replace them, and reorganized the engineering office. Porter had served aboard Yellowstone and Recovery before an exchange tour with the newly reunited German Navy, where she’d gained the experience on gas turbine engines she’d need on this tour. She was married to a Marine Intruder pilot who’d probably retire and sell insurance when his squadron transitioned to the F/A-18. Porter reported on the contacts around them, courses, speeds, closest points of approach. Dan liked her no-nonsense, deadpan delivery.
Land was a dark green line sketched beneath scattered clouds. He looked at the chart, glanced at the radar repeater. Satisfied everything was in hand, he went out to the wing. The boatswain of the watch, Antonio Yerega, was taking the cover off the padded leather chair reserved for the commanding officer. Dan was hoisting himself to a position of vantage when Hotchkiss came out carrying her signature loaded clipboard. “Good morning, sir.”
“XO. What’s on your mind?”
“I finally got through to SURFLANT, got the revised services schedule. Nicholson may drop out of a gun shoot Fri
day. We can have her services if we want. Also, got a call from Com Second Fleet. Admiral Niles is back from Europe.”
Dan asked her to load a briefcase with the ship’s schedule, the current maintenance plan, and the training plan and have it on the quarterdeck when the brow went over. He told her to have one of the junior officers there, too.
…
COMING in through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The murmur of the plotters, the navigator calling ranges and distances to hazards and obstacles. Horn passed the rocky riprap of the tunnel islands and pivoted to look down the line of gray ships nestled at the Naval Operating Base, Norfolk, Virginia. Dan sat back, trying with all his might to relax.
Ross had let his officers maneuver only in the open sea. Never during underway replenishments and pier approaches, when the danger of collision was highest. It had probably kept his blood pressure down, but the result was they were afraid to handle the ship and uncertain in close quarters.
Dan had decided to work with Hotchkiss first. As the bow passed the clifflike stern of USS Nimitz, she reported, “Sir, I have the conn.”
“Very good, Commander. Watch that offsetting wind.”
He tried to look calm. Spruances had two controllable rotating pitch screws. Below twelve knots, the ship’s speed was a function of the pitch of the blades; the shaft itself rotated at a constant rate. Above twelve, the screws stayed at maximum pitch and the shafts sped up. The turbines reacted fast and had a lot of power. Normally, you approached a pier at an angle, shallow or sharp depending on the wind, and stopped engines to let the ship bleed off speed. But today’s berth was all the way inboard, past a destroyer and an amphib already alongside pier five. The north face of pier six, on their starboard hand, was stacked deep with nested ships, further narrowing their maneuvering margin. Claudia would have to run straight in, despite a brisk northerly breeze, then move Horn bodily sideways, into that wind, to place her alongside the pier.
A crackle of radio from the pilot informed him the tug was made up ahead of the pivot point on the starboard side, with a power tie-up. Hotchkiss opened with a forceful rudder order lining them up, then dropped the pitch to slow. Horn moved along at a good rate, but began shedding speed as she passed the pierhead. “Left five degrees rudder,” Claudia told the helmsman.
She sounded confident, but Dan was getting light in his seat. With a car, you turned the wheels left, the rest of the vehicle followed. With a ship, you put the rudder over and the stern moved. Left rudder, stern moves right, bow swings left, ship goes left—eventually. It was the “eventually” that got you into trouble. His spine was rigid when she said, “Right full rudder.” He sank back gratefully.
Now they were passing the amphib, lined up down the midpoint of the dock. Civilians called piers “docks,” but to a seaman, docks were the water spaces between the piers. Horn was still moving too fast for comfort, but Dan thought he read the exec’s intent; a swifter passage to the berth meant less time for the wind to work. Unfortunately, the bow was swinging to starboard now as the rudder took effect.
“Port engine back full. Starboard engine back one-third.”
Good, she was using the engines both to slow the thousands of tons of moving metal and to twist them to port. Dan blotted perspiration furtively from his forehead. Enlisted men looked down from the am-phib’s bridge. One pointed at Hotchkiss, who gave him an annoyed glance, then turned her back.
Horn was slowing. Slowing … He felt the moment loom, then slide into the past when he’d have stopped his engines had this been a steam-powered ship. But gas turbines responded more quickly. There, she was ordering “All stop.” The lee helmsman slid the throttles back, and suddenly seven thousand tons of destroyer was perfectly motionless, perfectly placed, parallel to her berth and fifty yards off. She’d stay there for only a few seconds, though. Then the wind would begin carrying her down on a Dutch frigate so close to starboard Dan could have beaned the guys gawking from her deck with a baseball.
“Rudder amidships. Captain, can we have the push boat now?”
“Captain” meant in this case not him but the pilot, a confusing form of address but traditional. The pilot put his handheld to his mouth as Hotchkiss strolled over to Dan. Close up she wasn’t as cool as she’d looked from yards away. Wisps of hair from under her cap clung to flushed skin. She gave him a questioning glance; he cleared his throat and blinked, looked away.
Beside and below them the tug was blasting out diesel smoke. The engine vibrated the air. Something was making him uneasy. Just as he realized what it was, Hotchkiss went on tiptoe to peer over the bulwark.
“We don’t seem to be going anywhere,” she said.
The momentary stillness was gone. They were drifting downwind, away from their berth. Dan stood in his chair to look down over the splinter shield. The tug’s skipper was staring up through his windshield. A middle-aged, reddened face. Their eyes met, and the other shook his head rapidly.
“Clelia Gracie’s dropped gears,” the pilot said, relaying off the handheld.
“Just fucking great,” Hotchkiss said. He followed her gaze across to the Dutch warship. The strip of water between them was narrowing as Horn’s drift accelerated. Yet still he waited, forcing himself to stay nailed in the chair.
“I’m going to need help here, sir,” she said, several beats before a male officer would have.
He came out of his chair. “Left hard rudder. Port engine back full. Starboard ahead full.” In the pilothouse the chorus, “Captain has the conn.” Glancing down, the tug’s master still shaking his head. A whoop, whoop from the Dutchman; his collision alarm, he was shutting his watertight doors.
His only remaining chance to avoid a low-speed but still unpleasant, expensive, and diplomatically embarrassing collision was to get his bow into the right angle the pier made with the quay wall. The maneuver would also push his stern perilously close to the Dutchman. But under the suddenly increased drive of the screws the bow was already pivoting. His glance crossed the pilot’s. The man said another tug was on its way, ten minutes. Dan nodded, but they both knew it’d be over by then, one way or another.
As he walked briskly to the port side, the bridge team flattened against consoles. Hotchkiss followed. Good, she was still in the game. Watching and learning from the Old Man. While that Old Man, anxious but trying not to show it, braced his palms on the bulwark and eyed a swiftly widening gap of brown water fingernailed with scalloped wavelets. The wind was stronger than he’d thought. Spruances had high superstructures, a lot of surface for the wind to grab. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to pull this one out of his ass.
“Engines stop. Both ahead one-third. Rudder hard right.”
Now the bow was nearly in line-heaving range, though the stern was swinging far out, but in the process Horn had gathered forward momentum. The quay was marching up on them. Its cracked concrete face was so near he saw a rat watching from behind a bollard. “Engines stop,” he shouted into the pilothouse, registering the repetition of his command, the ping of the engine order telegraph.
It wasn’t enough. He looked down to see the boatswain’s mates staring grimly across at the pier, lines sagging in their hands. Too far to throw.
One trick left. “Right hard rudder,” he shouted; then, “Engines ahead full.”
Heads whipped around in the pilothouse. He leaned over the splinter shield, waiting, listening.
And suddenly it gripped him. A gush of cold sweat all over his back. The instantaneous and swiftly increasing fear he might turn and run. Or worse, stand mutely frozen, unable to respond or react.
At the edge of his mind, something began to glow. A thin, pale edge, like a white-hot steel blade seen end on.
He heard the engines start to whine, and cut them off. Hearing his voice high, almost out of control. Hoping it wasn’t too late, that he hadn’t stood rooted too long and missed his chance.
The stern halted its downwind drift and nudged twenty yards to port. The momentary shot of water through
the rudders had kicked the stern to windward, but hadn’t increased their forward velocity that much. Maybe they could still brake with the lines, before they slammed the delicate dome below the bow into concrete and mud.
He eased out a shaky breath. Told the phone talker, calmly as he could, “Put over lines two and four.”
Two and four were the spring lines that tended aft, the only ones that could brake the forward momentum he’d built. The line guns popped. Orange ribbons uncoiled in the air. And thank God, the handlers on the pier grabbed the vivid filaments as they drifted down and began hauling them in hand over hand, first the lead line, then the nine-thread, and last the heavy elephant’s-trunks of mooring line. The handlers dropped the bights hastily over the bitts, then took to their heels.
He looked down again at the forecastle crew. They were edging back, too, but the chief was shouting at them to stand fast.
“Check two and four,” he said.
Hotchkiss spoke for the first time since turning over the conn. “Not hold them, sir?”
Dan rethought. “Checking” meant one turn on a chock, braking the outrunning line with friction. “Holding” meant making it fast, stopping the ship dead—unless, of course, the line snapped. And it was true they were not slowing fast enough.
The rat stood suddenly on its hind legs, seeing the bow towering above it. Then tore for the shelter of a Dumpster, speed laying it flat along the ground.
“No, we’ll check them. If we hit the quay, too bad. If we part a line, we’ll kill somebody on the fo’c’s’le.” He shouted into the pilothouse, “Rudder hard left. Engines back full.” And to the phone talker, “Put over one and six.”