The Command

by David Poyer

  Meanwhile it was same-same routine. Today was hazy, and that old-brick tint to eastward meant they’d be eating sand soon. He patted his coveralls, checking the extra bottles of water. He made the guys carry at least two liters when they boarded. Searching was hot work, and you didn’t want to drink the water aboard these tramps.

  This morning’s objective rode between them and a dry-looking shore fringed with that reefish green. It had been slipping inshore on the Sudanese side, but the blip weenies had picked it out of the clutter. The skipper had run in and put the lights on it, the helo had circled it, and finally it had come reluctantly out into this burning dawn. Not large, couple hundred feet, with a rust-stained green hull and what looked to this Montana boy like tractor tires hung along the gunwales. A stumpy superstructure aft and two sawed-off masts. He’d heard its name, but forgotten it. Its running lights were still on, glowing like fireflies through the sandstorm dim. Funny, he thought, scuffing at the gritty deck. The wind was up, but it was still hot as hell.

  Cassidy came out of the hangar, Berger trailing him. The Australian looked confused, like always. “Take extra water,” Marty told him. Berger smiled foolishly, as if he didn’t understand what he’d just been told.

  They stood waiting for word. Marchetti kept glancing down. At the sea. As the square stern moved over the oily-looking surface it left a roiling road of bubbling jade wide as three lanes of traffic.

  From nowhere at all he thought about how it’d be going down into it. Your hands zip-tied behind you. Maybe out cold already from somebody stroking you with a shotgun as you went back through the clapped-out lifeline. Hitting, and going down, and down … it was deep here … somehow the green water looked cold. Sweat was rolling off him. No wonder, with the float coat and coveralls, all the fucking gear. The green followed the stern for a hundred yards, then faded back into inky blue.

  Fuck it. He was cool with it. Fucking raghead just had bad luck, that was all.

  As the sky darkened he wondered why they called it the Red Sea. He’d never seen anything but that deep blue. And green, where it shallowed around the jazirats and reefs.

  Drifting around down there, the sharks taking a taste….

  Cassidy’s radio snapped, “Gold, in the boat and cast off. Sound off when you’re on the deck opposite.”

  “Senior, you like the looks of this?” Lizard Man muttered. He pointed at the approaching bank of dust.

  Marchetti ignored him. Sand, dust, fuck’s the difference. “Let’s go, go, go,” he yelled. Sasquatch levered over the rail and dropped down the jacob’s ladder. Fear rocked as he stepped into it. The coxswain yelled, “Next man,” and Snack Cake let go. Marchetti looked around at the ship, then heard the yell from below. He hitched the Mossberg on its sling, grabbed with both hands, and swung his boots lightly over.

  DAN sat in Combat, scanning the message again.

  ZZZZ TTTT 9007WW——WUUUT-RHUALLQ-PZZZZ

  Z 200010Z JUL 93

  FM COMFIFTHFLT

  TO COMIDEASTFOR

  CTF 50

  USS LABOON

  USS HORN

  USS PETERSON

  USS CARON

  USS OKLAHOMA CITY

  USS DEYO

  INFO USCINCENT MCDILL AFB TAMPA FLA//00/01/J3/J31/J32//

  CINCUSEUCOM VAIHINGIN GE//J00/J01/J3/JFACC//

  BT

  T O P S E C R E T//FLAGWORD-DESERT SCORPION//

  MSGID/A L E R T O R D E R/FEB/001//

  REF/A/NCA/DOC/31JAN93/NOTAL//

  REF/B/USCC/ORDER/312345ZJUN93/NOTAL//

  NARR/REF A IS EXECUTIVE ORDER 12349, DIRECTING CINC

  OPERATIONS

  AGAINST NATION OF IRAQ. REF B IS USCINCENT ORDER

  DIRECTING COMUSNAVCENT TO CONDUCT OPERATIONS.//

  RMKS/1. (TS/FW-DS) NCA HAS DIRECTED ORIG TO CONDUCT

  MILITARY OPERATIONS AGAINST THE NATION OF IRAQ, IN

  RESPONSE TO ACTIONS OUTLINED REF A.

  2. (TS/FW-DS) CINC AND NCA HAVE DIRECTED TLAM ATTACKS

  AGAINST THE FOL TGTS:

  TGT ID AND AIMPOINT

  TGT NAME

  AABN-1Y-02Y4-AB 236

  RAS AL GHAZIR MUNITIONS

  DEPOT

  AALR-4Z-06U7-AB

  AL-NUHAYAB,

  COMMUNICATIONS FACILITY

  ABQV-3D-04Z3-AA

  SHALAT AL BAZIR

  INTELLIGENCE CTR

  3. (TS/FW-DS) DESIRED TIME ON TOP IS NO LATER THAN 022300Z21JUL.

  4. (TS/FW-DS) TAKES REF B FORAC.// ENDAT

  NNNN

  He folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket, glancing angrily at the clock. Only two hours away. Not enough time to finish the current boarding and reembark the team. The launch window was critical for a simultaneous time on target. Ships in the Gulf would launch later than Horn and Laboon, since they were closer to Baghdad. He had to scoot north to the launch basket. Why couldn’t they stick to the original plan? He told the tactical action officer to come right and bring her up to flank three for the launch box.

  “Sir, the MIO team’s still over there. Shall I call them back?”

  He reflected. The seas were fairly calm; the sand in the air reduced visibility, but it wasn’t a storm in the sense of high winds and seas. “No. Tell Cassidy what’s going on. Tell him to board and start the search. We’ll be back to pick him up as soon as we launch.”

  The original launch order and time and clearance had come in Top Secret just after midnight. Shaken awake by Kim McCall, Dan had passed the word for Condition One, Strike, then gone down to Combat. The mission was now in a control by negation mode, meaning they’d launch on time, unless told not to.

  McCall had gotten her strike team together around the chart table. “Okay, this is a real-world contingency strike into Iraq. What we get paid for. Let’s get busy.”

  The fire controlmen had rigged the top secret curtain and signs around the consoles. It was hot already in Combat, with the air-conditioning down, and it’d get hotter. McCall and the petty officer at the launch control console had begun entering the verification codes for the mission data already on the hard disk. As the system began retrieving landfall data—what the missiles had to know to cross the coast, so the operators could plan the overwater leg of the flight path—everybody had settled in for a hectic and busy several hours. Since then, he and McCall and the chief fire controlman had validated the launch order, number of missiles targeting, and salvo spacing.

  Which was good, because with this new message everything had just been moved up. Launch was now set for 1510 local time. Giving the time of flight and the evasive pattern the missiles were programmed to fly, they’d reach their targets almost exactly at dusk. Arriving simultaneously with those fired from the Gulf, they should overwhelm and saturate the Iraqi antiair defenses.

  He blinked in the dim coolness, sweat suddenly icy on his back as he remembered some of those defenses. Like the antiaircraft crew they’d had to crawl past on the banks of the Tigris, on their way to planting a flag on Saddam Hussein’s ultimate deterrent.

  That of course had been after he was tortured. He regarded the numbers scrolling across the panels to his left with alternate flashes of fulfillment and horror. He told himself again that to have to resort to violence meant that someone, somewhere, had failed.

  But faced with a lying and ruthless tyrant, maybe violence was the only answer. Litigation, friendship, trade, suasion, threats, even war, all had failed with the man with the mustache.

  “Report from the Gold Team.”

  “What is it?”

  “Completed the loop. They’re alongside now.”

  “Alongside us, or—?”

  “No, sir. Alongside the merchie.”

  “Did they get the message, where we’re headed? That they’re on their own for a while?”

  Camill said they had, and Dan let them go. He’d done all he could. All that remained was to wait.

  TWO scruffy-looking dudes glared sullenly down from the bow. Marty glimpsed a
nother face at a bridge window. Where they weren’t supposed to be. If the bridge was manned, the target could get under way, leaving the team stranded aboard and the RHIB panting after.

  Which might not be so cool at the moment. Cassidy had just gotten off the radio with the Camel. They were going to get left aboard for a couple of hours, while the ship went north, shot, and then came back. Marty nodded, wondering why the melonheads at the top couldn’t do anything the way it was planned. Anything to make it tougher for the dumb snuffies who had to actually carry out the orders. He wasn’t worried, though. They’d just start the search while they waited for the ship to come back. No problemo.

  The first indication things weren’t going to be that simple came as Fear purred around the slowly rolling ship. As they rounded the stern, he suddenly smelled something shithouse horrible. Something rotting. But underneath that was another smell, a familiar one. One that made him look significantly at Cassidy

  Oil. Just looking down he could see it welling up, weeping through the riveted plates, the waving sea moss. A sheen wavered on the clean sea.

  The quarter looked like a junkpile. Rusty pipes, cables dangling over the side. “Barbwire,” Crack Man said, pointing.

  No shit, Marchetti thought. There it was, skanky-looking wire tangled along the handrails. No ladder, either. The rusty hull-steel looked shiny a few feet down from the deck. Leakage? The world was going dim. Something began stinging his face. Sand. The faces looking down did not respond until Deuce yelled up in Farsi.

  “What’d they say, Barkhat?”

  “You don’t want to know, Senior.”

  “Tell them to clear that wire away from the rails. Then get the fuck up on the bow where they’re supposed to be.”

  For answer they vanished, leaving the team bobbing below with no way of getting up on deck. Marty looked around at the rocking waves, the swiftly reddening light, the empty sea. Son of a bitch. Now he wished he’d piped up when Cassidy told him the ship was taking off. Well, they’d better get aboard. Even a shitty ship was safer than riding out a sandstorm in the RHIB. “Grapnel,” Marchetti said.

  “Wait, Senior Chief,” said the staffie.

  “What, Booger?”

  “We’re supposed to call the SEALS if it’s an opposed boarding.” The guy looked at the ship. “They’ve got antiboarding measures in place. Isn’t that resisting?”

  “Fuck that. We’re here.” He said to the coxswain, “Give me your life jacket, melonhead.”

  “Fuck you, I need my jacket in the boat.”

  “Fuck you, give it here!”

  Berger said, “The rules of engagement say we need backup.”

  Marchetti ignored him and he mumbled to a stop. Sasquatch had the grapnel out. He gave it a couple whirls, nearly taking the staffie’s head off, and up it went.

  It flew over the rail and caught. He threw the life jacket over his back, balanced on the soft gunwale, and stepped off, letting his weight come onto the line at the same time he jackknifed his boots up against the rusty rolling steel.

  By main force, he walked himself up the vertical face till he got almost in reaching distance of the gunwale. Then his boots hit the shiny patch.

  It was grease, black grease, and his steel-toes shot out from under him. He grunted as his biceps took two hundred pounds of fighting senior chief and forty more of weapons and gear. The tanker rolled and he went face to face with it, grinding his cheeks into greasy iron frosted with sand. Then it rolled back and his kicking boots swung clear above the sea.

  Hanging there, he started to climb. Hand over hand. Fighting his way savagely up against gravity. When he got to the rail he let go with one arm, grunting, and pulled the life jacket off his back and threw it over the barbed wire.

  A heave and just about the last of his strength, and he rolled over and his boots slammed down and he came up in a crouch, .45 cocked in front of him. The deck was empty except for a black litter of what looked like burnt wool. He yelled over his shoulder, “Clear on deck. Next man.”

  DAN watched the launch team work, heads down, intent on the screens. The fire controlman was entering the last of the verification codes. The chief was entering the required text data, which allowed him to determine when and how the missile would launch. He yelled to the database manager, asking if the picture was up to date.

  Dan remembered when the Tomahawk Engagement Planning Exercise Evaluator had been a wonder of advanced technology. An HP9020 computer, state of the art. Now it was a kludge, and the men cursed it. This part would take awhile, to run the compensation program and get the adjusted launch time.

  Strike handed them the go message. They compared the launch sequence plan and the Indigo and both nodded.

  McCall turned to him across the space. “Captain? Permission to send TLAM make ready.”

  “Make ready” sent engagement plans, mission data, and power to the Tomahawk land-attack missiles. Which would start powering up, performing their built-in tests. Slowly waking to their impending flight. Dan nodded. She bit her lip and turned back to the consoles.

  “TLAM make ready, all plans sent.”

  “Missiles pair all plans.”

  He visualized the antique disk drives down in the control room pulling up the data requests from the Rolm 1666B computers. The size of refrigerators, they boasted a megabyte of random access memory and ran at the blinding speed of eight megahertz.

  Strong came into Combat and stood pointedly by Dan’s chair until he slid out of it. The commodore was in crisp white shorts. He wore a light tennis sweater, which he began working up over his head. He said through the weave, face concealed, “What’s going on?”

  “We’re steaming Condition I on the way to our launch basket, sir. No contacts near us other than Skunk 16, which is a merchant… still trying to get a name on her, and some small craft that look like fishing boats. No air tracks, no electronic intelligence other than nav radars that equate to merchants.”

  “What about our close-in from this morning? The one who was trying to sneak past us?”

  Dan explained how he’d sent the boarding team over, then had to leave them behind when the launch time had been moved up. Strong looked grave. “You left them there without backup?”

  “I had no choice, Commodore. We can’t put the helo up because of the ambient sand. We should only be gone about two hours.”

  “You couldn’t retrieve them first?”

  Dan explained he absolutely had to be in the basket on time. If he launched late, the time on target would fall out. Then the whole strike would be vulnerable, birds from Laboon, the others spinning up on the far side of the Sinai, too. “I agree it was a difficult decision, sir. I made it.”

  “Without consulting me.”

  Dan took a deep breath. “Well, sir—the strike’s not a maritime intercept matter. It’s national. It didn’t seem to me it was within your… purview.”

  Strong looked down at him for several seconds. Dan wasn’t sure he was on firm ground, but he stood it. Finally the commodore said, “May I see the engagement order?”

  Dan handed it to him. He ran his eyes down it, obviously checking the missions in the engagement order with those ready to fire. This raised Strong a notch in his estimation, at least professionally.

  “Any coastal radars from the Sudan? Is your EW team alert?”

  “No, sir, nothing but the merchant radars.”

  “So we’re prepared to launch?”

  “The strike team’s been on station since midnight, sir. The move-up knocked us back a couple squares, but we’ll be ready by the time we get to the launch point.”

  “The missiles are up?”

  “The missions are updated, checked, and downloaded to the birds. We’re spinning up the gyros now.”

  Strong nodded, but his expression didn’t give Dan any idea what he felt.

  MARTY took a step, then blinked. The black wooly-looking material was moving. It was crawling. It lifted at one edge as he stepped forward, like the
corner of a blanket turning itself upward.

  His stomach turned as he realized it was flies. Millions of them. They rose from piles of stinking guts and entrails, milling in the hot dry wind. It carried thousands off, though they buzzed their best, but most settled again to their grisly meal. Gold Team stepped gingerly forward, trying to keep their soles clear of the biggest piles.

  “God,” Cassidy said. “What is this stuff?”

  “Somebody had a bad day,” Marchetti said. He saw a severed head looking back at him. It was a goat’s head. He couldn’t decide if that was a relief or even more horrible than what he’d thought there for a moment.

  He turned and saw the others looking around shakily. And yelled, “What’s the fucking holdup? Sweep one, bridge. I saw one scumbag up there. Clear him, zip-tie him, and get him down to the bow. Two, secure the engine room. Three, follow me.”

  The Aussie was mumbling, but he ignored him. Cassidy had his pistol out, too, and was covering him as he went forward, zigging from behind the mast to a stack of the same tires that were slung over the side. The deck was empty. Except for the flies and the sand. The light was turning a deep bloody scarlet, like during an eclipse, and the greasy sand on the hull had grated his face down to hamburger. He wished he had a bandanna, or goggles. Damn, he should have thought of that.

  His eyes noted something strange ahead. A line, or a wire. His conscious mind recognized it only as he was on his way to the deck, as the claymore went off above him with a crack and flash that cut through the hissing sand.

  …

  TWENTY miles to the north, the clock clicked over. Dan and McCall and the chief had moved up to huddle as the first class called the information on the missions they were tasked to shoot. They were focused, in their team mode. Dan confirmed the time against his watch and felt in his shirt pocket for his key as the combat systems officer said tensely, “Initialization complete.”