by David Poyer
“So we’ll lose her regardless of what I decide.”
“Lose her?” Hotchkiss seemed surprised. “Not necessarily. Not for several months yet, anyway.”
“If she’s pregnant, she can’t do her job,” Dan told her. “So I want her off the ship. Same as the first girl.”
“Why? All she has to do is sit at a desk and work the pay program.”
“We made this decision already, Claudia. We’re running a warship, not a maternity ward. If a woman gets pregnant, we scrub her off the manning document pending a permanent relief. That’s what we promised would happen, on the page thirteen entry and the fraternization briefings.”
Hotchkiss said with ominous silkiness, “So let me get this straight: We fire the woman, and keep the guy who knocked her up.”
“No—or at least not for the reason you’re getting at. One, a pregnant woman waddling around can’t do the shipboard damage control and firefighting job, whatever her day-to-day rate is. She can push a desk shoreside, but sea duty’s tough even for a man in good shape. Two, she’s not being ‘fired,’ we’re sending her to a safer environment for an expectant mother. We may punish her for fraternization and adultery, but the pregnancy’s a separate issue. We have a responsibility to both of them, mother and baby. And she’s going to need family support intervention when she goes home, to explain this to her husband.”
His phone went off. The comm messenger was trying to locate him. Dan told him he was in the sea cabin.
The message was from Strong. Horn’s liberty port was canceled, due to emergent operational commitments. They were to proceed north at best speed to a point off Duba. Due to a comms breakdown on the flagship, Horn was to stand by to receive the task group flag.
“What is it?”
“Port visit canceled. The commodore’s coming aboard.” He passed it to her.
“We aren’t staff configured,” Hotchkiss said, fingering the message doubtfully. “We don’t have the space, and we sure don’t have the comm suite.”
Dan wasn’t enthusiastic either, but he didn’t see a way out. “Strong can go in my in-port cabin. Move the junior officers to overflow berthing.”
“It’s going to be crowded.”
“Then maybe they won’t stay long,” Dan said. He caught her look. Yeah, in some ways having a female exec was a lot like being married. “I meant, this is probably just temporary, till another flag-configured ship comes available. Are we all clear now about this other thing?”
“I’m still not convinced Charmine deserves to get hammered. The man’s a first class, she’s a third. There’s got to be an element of intimidation.”
“She should have brought it up when he hit on her, then. I don’t buy that, that the woman’s always the victim.”
“If one partner’s twenty-four, the other’s thirty-two?”
“Old enough to blow the whistle if her supervisor’s coming on to her.”
“If you’re going to throw her off the ship anyway, why take her to mast?”
“We went through that,” he told her. “Plus, so far all we’ve got is her word he’s the father. There’ll be enough complications downstream. I don’t want to pin this on Konow if it actually was somebody else. So he’s got to have his say, too. Put together your evidence and start the process.” He hesitated. “Actually we’ll probably end up losing them both. There’s that issue of trust when you’re in there with the cash and the checks. And he’s abused it. So let’s get a message out to get some kind of quick fill body on their way so we can keep the people paid.”
She tossed her foot nervously. Her coverall had ridden up and he saw fine blond hairs on her calf. “I don’t agree. I don’t think she should go to mast.”
“Get them both ready,” Dan told her. “And you’re dismissed.”
He sat listening to the echo of the slammed door, unable to shrug off that he’d just fantasized doing what he was bound to punish others for.
Ah, but he hadn’t done it. Only thought about it.
Thought about it night after night, alone on that same settee. What she’d say. What they’d do. Just to have her hand gently fingering up and down his prick … and what that first long, irretrievable orgasm would feel like. Guilt and pleasure. The most explosive mix of all.
And if Lieutenant Commander Claudia Hotchkiss, USN, his executive officer, had gone to the door, and pushed in the button? Locking them in?
Fortunately, it couldn’t happen. She was happily married. To a marine aviator she talked about with a lilt in her voice, her professional demeanor suddenly transforming with a sparkle, a smile.
Did Blair smile like that when she talked about him?
He drummed his fingers on his knee, head lowered in contemplation.
“NEW foxtrot corpen, relative wind will be three-two-zero, ten knots,” said the speaker, the words echoing from the cavernous aluminum bulkheads and lofty overhead of the helo hangar.
Twenty-four hours later and two hundred and sixty miles to the north, on a hot morning backed by desert-blasted mountains. Horn was coming to a course to put the wind on her bow. Dan waited inside, watching the helo approach, then undogged the flight deck door as the rotors disengaged.
As tradition dictated, the senior disembarked first. Dan saluted a lean officer in a green flight suit. Strong handed him his cranial, fitting a pisscutter to a close-cropped head that was turning silver. The 1MC stated, “Red Sea Task group, arriving.” Six bells, and the commodore’s pennant broke at the masthead, rippling in the hot wind.
Horn was now the flagship, and Dan no longer senior aboard.
“This way, sir,” he shouted over the engine howl. Strong eyed him, holding his salute. But Dan was uncovered. U.S. ships didn’t permit headgear on the flight deck. Too much danger of them getting sucked into an engine and ruining a perfectly good aircraft. At last he returned a bareheaded salute. The blades were still turning, Strong’s staff jumping out while a crewman tossed out luggage and tape-strapped cardboard boxes. They seemed to have a lot of gear.
The Australian glanced around the in-port cabin the same searching way he’d examined the flight deck. A carafe stood on the table. “Coffee, sir?” Dan asked him.
“No thanks. Comm arrangements?”
“My Comm-oh’s already arranged that with yours. We’ll have additional circuits on the bridge and in Combat for your staffers, and I’m putting an extra radioman on watch.” He showed him the sleeping cabin behind the reception and work area, giving it just a word or two. Strong must have been aboard Spruances before and there wasn’t anything remarkable about Horn. Other than the obvious.
As if Strong was thinking the same thing, he said, “I saw some sheilas back on the flight deck.”
“We’re an integrated ship. The first one, actually.”
“Interesting. I rather doubt we’ll ever go that way, but… How are they working out?”
“They’re doing a good job.”
“Friction?”
“There’ve been a couple of incidents.”
“Such as?”
Dan told him the basics, neither emphasizing nor downgrading them. Just the facts. The commodore didn’t seem interested in long explanations. Dan felt condescended to somehow, though that might be merely the man’s manner, and had to take care not to be brusque back.
“Anything since this berthing fire?”
“No, sir, nothing since. I’m hoping whoever set it has either changed his mind or at least gotten scared off. Things are going better since I had that talk with the chiefs. Maybe they’re getting used to them.”
“The chiefs?” said Strong briskly.
“No, sir. The women,” Dan said, wondering if he’d been listening.
A tap at the door, and the mess specialists began bringing in the commodore’s gear. A much-abused duffel bag, boxes of records, a Toshiba notebook in a black case. Strong asked several questions about his Tomahawk loadout. As he talked, he opened the boxes with a pocketknife, one slice each, like a su
rgeon doing assembly line hernias. He cut open the bottom, not the top, so he could flip it over and all the files dropped into the open drawer at once. Dan gave him the password to the computer on his desk, and waited for him to write it down. Strong just nodded.
The commodore looked up, seemed to realize his discomfiture. “That’ll be all. I’ll come up to the bridge later,” he said. He gave Dan a quick handshake and opened the door with the other.
In the passageway he watched the commodore’s staff bustle past. They gave him quick neutral glances, as if he were a bollard or a piece of gear they might or might not use.
STRONG had a U.S. officer attached. “A. J.” Lambert was a commander, as was Dan. He wore the gold dolphins of a submariner. Lambert told him Laboon and Horn were headed back to Oparea Adelaide, while Georges Leygues took Laboon’s place inside the Gulf of Aqaba. The U.S. ships would be doing two missions now. One was the usual, maritime interdiction. The second was setting up for strike ops against Iraq.
“Saddam’s resisting the inspection regime. The White House wants what they call an ‘appropriate response.’ Something that makes headlines but doesn’t kill civilians. You know, like always, they want to have it both ways. What it bottlenecks down to is either an air force strike with smart bombs, or Tomahawk. They shoot a plane down, they’ve got a hostage. So we’ll probably get the job.”
Dan contemplated the flat area on his foredeck, the armored hatches. It was easy to overlook them at a glance, and they were so low maintenance he could all but forget about them day to day. But the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System was Horn’s main battery. His current loadout was sixty-one land-attack Tomahawks, with either conventional warheads or a thousand pounds of bomblets. They made Horn a strike destroyer, able to download data via satellite and destroy targets up to twelve hundred miles away.
A dependable weapon, but not a perfect one. As he knew from helping develop it. Sometimes you launched them and the engine didn’t start and they went on over, falling out of the sky. Sometimes they missed. At best, they were only as good as the intelligence that selected their targets.
Which he had no input into. The team in Combat downloaded the strike package, programmed the missiles, and fired them as directed. Not only did they never see their target, there was no requirement they even know what it was.
Lambert lit a cigar. “Penny.”
“We used to shell their forts when things didn’t go like we wanted. Now we clobber them with missiles.”
“Whatever. Get your guys ready to receive an updated package. When we’re in position, the commodore’ll want a rehearsal. He’s interested in the strike concept, wants to bring it back to the Aussie navy.”
Dan had never seem a non-U.S. officer in the chain of a strike command. “I thought Tomahawk was still NOFORN.” No foreign nationals, U.S. personnel only.
“I’ll show you the message appointing him launch area coordinator. So he’ll need a red phone and a table, and connectivity to the strike commander and to Laboon.”
“All right,” Dan told him, though he was still uncomfortable with his own limited input. He’d always felt real weapons, meant to kill real people, needed human control all the way down. “We have all the taped missions loaded. The ones the theater commander thought we better have ready to fire. He can come down anytime we’re at General Quarters Strike and we can walk him through a launch in training mode.”
They discussed the patrol area and whether there was any air or missile threat. Lambert thought not, but had to admit there was be mines. “There’s no reason one of these smugglers can’t push a few over the fantail. It’d really screw up traffic coming down out of Suez.”
“What do the Iranians think?” Dan asked him.
“Making hostile noises, as usual. But they lost half their navy the last time they tangled with us.” He hesitated. “You were there, weren’t you? Praying Mantis?”
“I was on Van Zandt,” Dan told him, and watched the name trigger its usual effect. Like Samuel B. Roberts and Stark. Navy people had long memories for lost ships.
“But I don’t think they’re going to stick their hand in the meat grinder again. I don’t think there’s going to be much chance of anything on this side of the Sinai. But stay alert, that’s all I can say.”
“Commodore’s on the bridge,” Yerega sang out, and Dan turned.
Strong had shucked the flight suit for khaki shorts. He climbed up into what had been Dan’s chair. Held out his hand, and a staff officer put a folder into it. He didn’t say word one to anyone, and the other
conversations on the bridge had gone silent. So had Lambert, so Dan went over to the nav table. The quartermaster had laid out their track. They’d reach their assigned operating area around 0300 the next day.
“Captain.” It was Lin Porter. “Contact bearing zero-three-zero, fifteen thousand seven hundred yards, course zero-four-zero, speed fifteen. Seems to be outside the traffic separation scheme.”
Dan went over to the Furuno. He liked the little radar in close quarters, because it showed course and speed arrows for each contact, which made it easier to prioritize when you had ten or fifteen on the screen. This blip jumped out at him. A big return, its course arrow aimed right down their throats. Still, it was a good distance away, and there’d be time to maneuver. The catch was, they were the stand-on vessel, bound not to change course or speed, but to wait for the other to change his. In fact, from what he recalled of the International Maritime Organization rules from the Sailing Directions, vessels outside the channels were doubly burdened.
“Get him on Channel Sixteen,” Dan told her. “Ask his intentions.”
Combat passed the word up that the contact they were calling Bravo Delta had a closest point of approach of less than a thousand yards in twelve minutes, and recommended coming right to course 000 to open. Dan went to get his glasses, found Strong using them. He borrowed the quartermaster’s and tried to get them focused. At last he had it, a speck, but high enough to tell him what it was. An empty tanker out of Italy or France or Spain, bound south for another holdful of crude. Out of position for some reason. Still, it should be easy enough to sort matters out.
“No answer on Sixteen. Bravo Delta bears zero-three-zero, nine thousand yards and closing. Combat recommends coming right to zero-one-zero at this time.”
Now the broad bow was clearly visible, and the bulge of green sea over a submerged stem-bulb before it broke in a churn of white.
“Captain? Come right.”
He lifted his head, startled. Strong was still examining his traffic. Had he spoken? As he hesitated the commodore added, annoyed, “Did you hear me? I said, come right.”
“We’re the stand-on vessel, sir.”
“I don’t give a bloody damn who’s got the right of way, get out of his path.”
Dan snapped an order, then turned away, seething at being overruled so casually in front of his crew. He stood on the starboard wing with hands jammed into his pockets, trying to reason with himself.
There were always frictions between the ship and the flag. Especially when the ship wasn’t flag configured, which meant the staff didn’t have separate spaces and comm facilities, usually even a separate bridge of their own.
Or … was it possible Niles was right, and Dan Lenson was projecting his ingrained distrust of authority? He remembered how unhappy he’d been, being a staff puke for Isaac Sundstrom. Yes, Sundstrom … Krazy Ike … so far, compared to that incompetent and self-centered clown, Strong rated up there with Nimitz or Spruance.
OVER the next several days traffic was heavy. Both the Blue and Gold teams were called away several times a day. Laboon reported commerce as dense proceeding northbound.
Meanwhile the tasking message for the strike came through. Looking over the launch sequence plan when Kim McCall brought up Horn’s answering status report—line A, line B, reporting that the missions were executable—Dan saw the package included strikes from both the Red Sea, Laboon and Horn, and from the
east, from the Gulf. When he plotted their targets, he got remote-looking locations in western Iraq.
The day after that, the mission data update and associated command information came down, revised missile flight data from Norfolk via a 9600-baud, secure, download-only satellite link. This updated the missions they’d brought with them on tape.
He had confidence in his team, but went down anyway and watched as they rehearsed, from simulated engagement order to system warm-up, load, entry of ship position, launch direction, and prelandfall way-points. A Red Sea launch would be tricky. They’d have to stay in a tightly circumscribed area to fire all the missions. He joined McCall and the first-class fire controlman at the chart table. “Strike, looks like the launch baskets can all be hit from … let me see … about here?”
The first class looked at him. “You done this before, sir.”
Dan had to grin. The first class said it like an accusation, as if having a skipper who actually knew what he was doing wasn’t playing fair. “You get a feel for where you ought to be. Kim, we need to make sure VLS is ready. Who’s got the key?”
“Mr. Camill has one, sir. But if you want to be able to launch, he should have both Remote Launch Enable keys.”
“We don’t have an Indigo message yet.” Of course, they couldn’t launch without both fire-enable keys. Dan kept his locked in his safe … in his in-port cabin. He made a mental note to get it out, since that was Strong’s space now.
They sent the missions to the launch control console and loaded data to twelve missiles, four for each of the three targets; then simulated the rest of the sequence in training mode.
Back in his elevated chair, it occurred to him that, theoretically, at least, Dan Lenson now had the power to kill any human being within a twelve hundred mile circle. He had the keys and sixty-one live missiles. The guys would launch on his word. Actually, since he also knew how to program the missiles, it wasn’t just theoretical.