by David Poyer
JOTS, the Joint Operational Tactical System, like a croupier on a heavy night. He was drinking coffee with one hand, tapping at a keyboard with the other, and carrying on two different conversations over the air while reporting over his shoulder to Dan about a generator bearing failure light the helo said just came on. Dan told him to bring him back in, get the generator checked out.
“Sir, OPFOR commander wants to know why we’re not moving out there at flank speed.”
“Let me talk to him.” Dan informed Hotel Juliet, the Red Force commander, about the trouble light and promised he’d be proceeding north at flank speed as soon as his aircraft was secure on deck.
Sitting back again, one segment of his consciousness monitoring the sputter of speech and the jerky prance of digital symbology, another reflected on how free-form and inchoate operations at sea seemed now. The navy had once moved across the face of the planet in great ordered formations. At Armageddon battle groups would march in great phalanxes into the northern waters of the USSR, while submarine fleets collided north of the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap. Flag officers had plotted strategy that stretched across time zones, and commanding officers followed written orders and stayed in their sectors.
Now Blue and Red and merchant traffic interpenetrated, zones overlapped, no identity was certain. Chaos had been loosed on the deep.
Camill, interrupting his increasingly gloomy thoughts. “Sir, prefire brief complete, safety walk-through complete, we’re ready to start.”
“Make it so,” Dan said.
OF four attacking aircraft, Horn splashed one. The designators reacted slowly and had trouble keeping the radars on the targets. The combat direction system dropped track while they were being passed from the consoles. The automatic tracking systems either failed or were applied haphazardly. When the hits started fires, the repair parties reacted hesitantly and probably would have passed out from smoke inhalation because their masks didn’t fit right. The main space fire drill and mass casualty drills dissolved into confusion and recrimination. They were even less ready for chemical attack.
NINETEEN hundred in the wardroom. Officers, chiefs, tactical petty officers held up the bulkheads, nodding with fatigue. They presented weather, equipment status, operations, intelligence, and rules of engagement. They discussed Q-routes and frag orders. The observer-liaison reminded them of the data collection requirements, sheets that had to be filled out hour by hour so that after the exercise ended their tactics could be graded.
TWENTY-THREE hundred. He tossed in his at-sea cabin, tormented by dreams. They switched between his father and the Mukhabarat torturer named Major al-Qadi. The dream was bad enough. But then he came to the part where they doused Sergeant Zeitner with fuel and set him on fire. It was that, the smell of oil and flame, that jerked him awake.
Only to remember, sweating, staring into the darkness, it hadn’t been a dream. And that he himself had not been as brave as Zeitner. He didn’t deserve the decoration he wore, or the respect.
He lay with palms blanking his eyes, denying, minute by minute, the voice in his heart that told him to take the pistol out of his safe and make the guilt and terror stop. He kept telling himself this voice lied, that it was trauma, stress, the aftermath of torture. But he didn’t believe it.
It came to him with dreadful certainty that he was going to do something irreversible. Shoot himself, or go mad, or pull up the dogging bar on the watertight door next to his bank and step out into the dark sea.
The bridge buzzer went off beside his ear, and his whole body jerked. He grabbed it and half barked, half moaned, “Captain.”
The officer of the deck said they had a contact at eight thousand yards, closing, with a closest point of approach of two hundred yards. He stepped into his pants and got to the bridge barefoot to find it coming in fast on his port bow, a containership or cruise liner, much larger than Horn, a huge and confusing array of white and red lights that made no sense to the eye. The little Furuno radar was obviously not giving correct courses. Combat seemed to be tracking not the ship he was looking at, but another ten degrees off and fifteen thousand yards away. He could not slow his engines, the reflex action in a serious and quickly worsening situation; another contact was following them close astern to starboard, reducing their maneuvering room to zero, unless he cared to cut across the steadily nearing ship’s bow.
And to his horror, faced with the necessity for immediate action, his mind did not respond. He seemed to be back in the dream, suspended, yet at the same instantly conscious of others around him waiting for orders.
Inside his skull seethed dazzling white pain and the smell of burning fuel.
He put his hands out in the darkness, groping, and felt cloth. His shaking fingers dropped to the knobbed controls of a radar repeater. He leaned forward, hammering his knuckles into them over and over. Till the pain penetrated the milling turmoil of what passed for his mind. He took a deep breath. Then another.
At last, though he could not have said from where, an order occurred to him. He gave it. Then another.
He escaped by putting all engines on the line and accelerating out of the closing jaws. But as he walked aft on trembling legs, seeing blood drip black from his hands in the red passageway light to explode inky ellipses on the buffed and slanting tile, Dan Lenson reflected with utter cold lucidity that the greatest danger to USS Horn might be the tormented brain of her commander.
THE exercise peaked the next day in an intense swirling battle that had no clear front and no clear development and no clear outcome, except that everyone seemed to be getting clobbered. Hostiles, neutrals, unknowns popped up, seethed, and vanished between the imaginary landmasses. Cruise missiles from nowhere blitzed Theodore Roosevelt. Two Red Force units were sunk by air strikes, one by surface-to-surface missiles, two more by Blue submarines, while Blue suffered from mines in the approaches to Kartuna City and from land-based missiles while transiting the straits. As far as he could judge, if the referees hadn’t kept “reconstituting” sunken ships and shot-down aircraft, the exercise would have ended after the first hour with the destruction of every unit from both sides. Horn was hit over and over, and the observers imposed casualty after casualty as the day went on: missile strikes forward, midships, and aft, class A fire in supply berthing, class A fire in the admin office, flooding in Aux One, flooding in the Mount 51 passageway, class B oil fire in main engine room number two, flooding in shaft alley, electrical power failure forward, ruptured firemain piping. On and on till the crew slumped glassy-eyed to the decks.
It was a sobering foretaste of an all-out littoral action fought with computer-aided data availability and long-range, high-speed weapons. He hoped the U.S. Navy never faced an opponent of even roughly equal numbers and weaponry. The carnage would be immense and the victor anybody’s guess. Like the confused and bloody nights off
Guadalcanal, where shadows loomed suddenly from the dark and the first who drew would either win the gunfight or bear the crushing responsibility of blotting out the lives of fellow Americans.
This was the kind of war Horn might be headed for.
This was the kind of war they had to be ready to win.
DUSK, and they were steaming north along the coast. Lights twinkled on the horizon. He looked toward them, wishing he could get ashore. Just for an evening. Just to be no longer the captain. He’d never understood before, watching those he’d served under, second-guessed, criticized, how crushing heavy it all could weigh.
Instead he nodded to Yerega, who flicked switches and handed him the mike.
“This is the skipper speaking.”
He paused, hearing his voice echoing, then went on. “The JTFEX is over. The observer-liaison team has just given me our raw scores. In some respects we’ve done well. In others, not so well.”
He went over the shortcomings: failure to set Zebra, absences from watch stations, inadequate training of firefighting and damage control teams, improper readiness of casualty power cables, inadequat
e marking of casualty power terminals, unfamiliarity of personnel with dewa-tering procedures. Then he paused.
“To sum up: I’m not happy. My choice is whether to accept our performance, go to the Gulf the way we are, or to go back and do it over.
“I don’t like that first choice. We’re going in harm’s way. It would not be fair to you, nor to your families, if I took you there less than fully prepared.
“Horn will no longer accept mediocre performance. Our new motto says it: ‘Aggressive and proud.’ I believe we can be the best ship in the United States Navy. But to get there, we’ll have to do better.
“We have clearance to enter port, but I’ve advised the squadron we won’t be alongside tonight. I’ve asked our observers to help us conduct additional training tomorrow. And the day after, if necessary. Until we’re ready to fight our ship, and save her when she’s hurt.”
He lowered the mike, then set it back in its receptacle. Catching the bridge team’s looks of resentment and disappointment. That was okay. Nothing in a skipper’s billet description said he had to be liked.
The faces of the dead haunted him. He wasn’t going to add to their number.
He owed his men—correction, his people—no less than that.
7
Mashhad, Khorasan Province, Northern Iran
THE city was a thousand years old. Its name meant “Place of Martyrdom.” Most of its inhabitants were not yet awake, though here and there chimneys smoked, fires glimmered, where bakers were preparing the morning bread. The cool air was an acrid musk of wood smoke and saffron and centuries-dry dust. In an hour the muezzins would call the city to wakefulness and prayer, but now it lay sleeping under the stars.
The third team had been at it since midnight, in a littered, oil-reeking loading bay with a rolling steel door to conceal their work lights. First to be chain-hoisted into the truck were two rusty but incredibly heavy half-inch-thick steel slabs. They fit flat on the bed of the rented Fiat. On top, wrapped and taped in black plastic bags, went twenty kilos of the Polish explosive the man who called himself Malik had brought with him.
After that, the bricks. With muffled grunts, they stacked them along the left side, up to the scarred metal ceiling. Thick, heavy pavers, dug out of a road sometime past and left at a corner of the plastic company’s sprawling and dilapidated site. Malik had lighted up seeing them, and drawn them into his diagram. They boxed the bricks into place with plywood and braced them with planks.
In the darkness they trudged in and out of the factory, carrying sacks and containers. The second team had bought what they carried here and there around the city, from dealers and resellers the first team had located months before.
The three who labored this morning had never met their predecessors. The first party to arrive identified the target and visited it. They paced off distances, observed guards, took photographs, and drew up the attack plan. The second team arrived after the first left. They assembled the materials; truck, tools, road maps, weapons, and the ingredients of the bomb itself. Malik had provided detailed specifications, and nothing they bought was out of the ordinary for men who carried cards identifying themselves as working for the Mashhad Plastics and Associated Chemicals Company Ltd. Sacks of urea pellets. Concentrated acid in carboys. Plastic surgical tubing. Steel beams and sheeting. Half a ton of used bolts, stripped from derelict cars before they were crushed in a junkyard north of town.
The men now stacking sacks and carboys around the central charge were Baluchis. Sebah Sahaba, Gulbeddin Hekmatyar’s militants from the highlands between Iran and Afghanistan. Malik had met them at the bus station two days before and bunked them on mattresses in the abandoned factory.
Yesterday afternoon they’d slaughtered a lamb, cooked it in a steel drum dug into the ground, and feasted on hot baked meat with hand-fuls of saffron rice and pine nuts and spring onions and sweet cakes and crunchy sweet melons, drinking the sweet Iranian Fanta. Then gone together to a hammam, a local bathhouse. They’d soaked in the steam and let the body-washer peel the grime and tension from them with rough cloths and hot water, then eaten icy sherbet of vinegar and sugar, and drunk many cups of strong thick coffee flavored with anise. A boy had brought them fresh ripe pomegranates, so ripe and juicy that, broken open, they looked like lacerated and bleeding flesh.
The men had laughed and joked then, relaxed and loud, young and brash.
This morning they shivered in the wind, and stared at nothing.
Malik flicked his cigarette away and came into the glare of the work lights.
He was not tall. His black receding hair was trimmed and combed. His eyes were rather sad behind plastic-framed glasses. Flecks of some dark material were embedded in his left cheek, above where his beard began. His left eyelid sagged, making him look sleepy, or cynical. It was actually muscle damage. He wore a rumpled gray polyester suit jacket, blue trousers, and a striped shirt with the collar open. Clicking a flashlight on, he climbed into the truck and inspected what they’d done. Then jumped down again and directed the others as they lifted precut I-beams. These went along the right side, fitting so precisely between floor and ceiling they remained upright, wedged in.
The men listened as he explained again the sequence of events, and how it would be brought about.
Not long after, the sound of drums broke the stillness of the night. Then the wailing of the muezzins began. Metallic-sounding, electronically amplified, their voices soared and fell in an eerie, distant, repetitive polyphony.
GOD is most great!… God is most great.
I testify that… I testify that
There is no god but God!… There is no god but God!
And that Mohammad … And that Mohammad
Is the Prophet of God…. Is the Prophet of God.
Come to the Prayer!… Come to the Prayer!
Come to the Salvation!… Come to the Salvation!
Prayer is better than sleep…. Prayer is better than sleep.
God is most great…. God is most great.
There is no god but God! There is no god but God!
AS they rose from their salaams they glanced at the man in the shadows. “You do not join us?” said one.
He shook his head. “I am not worthy.”
“Truly, you are.”
“Truly I am not, my brothers.” Malik spoke quietly. “Today you are His true and beloved soldiers, who will purify the earth of those who defile the true Islam with this false cult of saints. Remember what the Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, said before his death: that a curse be upon those who took the graves of their prophets as mosques. We are all His instruments. But you are His firstborn sons. I bow down to honor you, and wish you the tranquillity that comes before battle.”
“Truly, it is so. That we are but His instruments,” said the man who would drive the truck. He licked his lips, frightened, but making his voice bold. “But you’re still one of us, brother. May His peace be upon you.”
They recognized this as more compliment than truth. This man had come from far away. And Malik probably wasn’t his real name; Malik was the angel in charge of hell. Yet he knew his dangerous trade. His clear, liquid Arabic marked him as educated, but he also spoke good Farsi and reasonable Pashto and no doubt other languages, too. But there was a gulf between them.
“I am merely the willing servant of God. God is great!”
“God is great!” Their shouts echoed in the loading bay, under the glare of the electric light.
THE city was the holiest in Iran, a country drunk with holiness since an aged ayatollah had toppled a dictatorial emperor. Here lay Ali Riza, great-grandson of the Prophet, and the eighth holy and infallible imam, who had been murdered in 817 A.D. Beside him slept the storied Caliph Harun al-Rashid, scholar, poet, warrior, the most magnificent of all the caliphs, correspondent with Charlemagne, hero of A Thousand and One Nights. Omar Khayyam was another poet buried not far away, at Nishapur; but in Mashhad, poets, though respected, did not rank with imams.
Imams were holy leaders in line of succession after Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom the Shi’a held had been blessed by the Prophet as his rightful inheritor. Great merit could be earned by pilgrimages to their tombs. Especially to that of the shah-i-ghariban, Emperor of the Exiled, patron of the lost, the hopeless, and the damned. So that as centuries ebbed, marbled courtyards, golden-domed mosques, museums, and minarets had risen. Its library gathered the largest collection of handwritten Qur’ans in the world. British and Russian had played the Great Game in its alleyways, and in 1912 a bomb had ripped through the sanctuary, permanently estranging the Shi’ite world from the Muscovite bear.
Today was a holy day of mourning for Hussein, grandson of Muhammad. All over the city, at hundreds of inns and hotels, thousands of pilgrims rose and washed and prayed. They streamed into the streets, where first a trickle, then a flood floated through the predawn darkness, converging in an echoing shuffle and the sigh of prayer.
THE team scrambled up into the truck. Malik kept looking to the eastern sky. The silhouettes of mountains loomed against the gray light of coming day.
The chain-link gate swung open, and the Fiat pulled out onto Quarani Tohid, Quarani Street, a wide, spotlessly swept boulevard. It roared slowly south, teetering heavily on overloaded springs. Malik followed in a white Datsun sedan with a battered-in fender. He stayed well behind the truck, blinking involuntarily each time it bottomed out.
His hands tightened on the wheel. A green pickup had pulled out from a side alley. It accelerated up to the Fiat, paralleling it on the four-lane street. In it he could see two of the feared and omnipresent Iranian religious police—the komiteh. They could stop any vehicle, question or jail anyone, simply on suspicion.