The Command

by David Poyer

  “They went down the engine room. I ain’t seen them since we split up.”

  Lizard came up the ladder. His coverall legs were dripping. He didn’t say anything, just pushed past. Marchetti grabbed him. “Amarillo? Turd Chaser?”

  “Headed for the engine room, last I saw.”

  “Okay, get out. But stay forward of the deckhouse. The crew’s aft, and they’re armed. If they come forward, light ’em all up and let Allah sort ’em out.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Join up with Hopalong and Booger. Soon’s we get everybody clear and I confirm the crew’s out of range I’ll call the RHIB in. All right, where’s—”

  Water came up the scuttle, racing toward him. Marchetti gaped at it for a second, it was that startling, it was moving that fast. Not only that, it wasn’t water. Or not just water. It was black. Smelled like oil. When it got to his boots he saw, yeah, it was oil all right. He turned and headed out after the others.

  The deck was definitely taking on a list. He walked uphill to where the officers were crouching behind cover, pistols out. They were learning. Cassidy was on the horn to the Horn. Lizard was doing a Columbus into the sandstorm, shading his eyes and coughing. Marty looked but couldn’t see anything. He wondered if the coxswain was going to be able to find them in this murk. The ship had radar, but the RHIB didn’t. Maybe the ship could talk them in, if they had them both on the scope. If the scope worked in a sandstorm. He didn’t like the number of ifs that were building up. He touched the float coat, wishing it was a real life preserver. It had some flotation, but mainly it was to carry gear. If they had to go in, and there was a boat full of smugglers out there, he was going to hold on to the Mossberg. The .45 might go, though.

  Kalashnikovs clattered in the Martian fog. “What are they shooting at?” Deuce wanted to know. “Oh. Shit. The RHIB.”

  “I hope not.” But Marty figured it probably was. Which was not good news at all, at all. Fear was fast, they’d just drive away, but once away, that was it as far as coming back. Not in this muck.

  The deck tilted more, and things started to fall inside the superstructure. Tires started to slide. Son of a bitch, he thought.

  “Here she goes,” Crack Man mumbled. “Just like the fucking Titanic, only we don’t have a band.”

  “Anybody see Turd Chaser? Amarillo?”

  Nobody answered. They were looking past him. He turned, to see the water rushing up from the stern. Took a few steps aft and peered round the deckhouse. The rear davits hung empty, lines trailing in the water. No lifeboats. No ragheads. No life jackets. Just a rising tide, and the gas-station stench of crude. It was geysering from vent pipes in the deck. They’d been hidden by the tires, so you couldn’t see what looked like a junky worn-out freighter was actually a tanker. Oil smugglers, with orders to hold out if they were searched, and if they couldn’t brazen it out, to suck the boarding party aboard and ambush them. Then open the sea cocks and scuttle. Trapping them. Cute.

  Berger said brightly, “Anyway, the water’s nice and warm.”

  HALF an hour later Dan glanced over the side. The lookouts were double-teamed, each man searching the murky sea for the missing.

  The smuggler had dropped off the scope. Its boats were beyond pursuit, lost among the islets and reefs of the Jazireh-Ye Khark. All that was left was a boil of rising crude, sweet and heavy all around them in the hot air. Hatch covers, wood, scores of old tires covered the water, all greased with a black paste. And it was still coming up, bubbling from below as the ruptured tanks gave up their integrity.

  The Gold Team was back aboard. At least, most of it. Two souls missing. He hoped they were around here somewhere. If they weren’t, they’d gone down with the ship. Trapped below as she slipped beneath the Red Sea.

  He swallowed, thinking sickly that if he hadn’t gone to the launch basket they’d probably be alive.

  Strong came out onto the wing. “I recommended you not leave them here. Not with the escalating pattern of Iraqi smuggling.”

  “You said nothing about that, sir,” Dan said.

  “Indeed, I did. You’ll have to explain yourself, Commander. First the dead Iranian. And now this.”

  Horn searched deep into the night. She found many things floating on that dark water, but none were her children.

  III

  AN ISLAND IN THE GULF

  18

  18 Strait of Hormuz

  QUARTERS, quarters. All hands to quarters for muster, instructions, and inspection.”

  Early August, and the heat was even more intense east of the Sinai than it had been to the west.

  The day after the missile strike, and the disastrous boarding of the smuggler, Commander, Mideast Force had detached Horn from the Red Sea Task Force and directed Strong to shift his flag to Laboon. After refueling and reprovisioning at Jiddah, Horn had circled the Saudi peninsula. Today she was transiting the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, where she’d report to the U.S. Naval Support Activity, Manama, Bahrain, for replacement of her generator, repairs to her switchboard, liberty for her crew, and an administrative hearing for her commanding officer before Commander, Destroyer Squadron 50, the permanent Gulf screen commander.

  Dan sat with legs crossed and ball cap pulled low against the brightness in what was once more the skipper’s chair as Horn steamed slowly past lace-bordered islets and emerald green reefs. Past the sky-pricking needles of the great southern oil fields, as if the sea had grown steel hair. Saleh. Mubarek. Fateh. Maybe the only reason the Middle East mattered to the West at all. Those distant needles, and the great tankers always in sight, high out of the water standing in, sunk deep with crude plowing out. He sat watching them pass, sink from sight, as they merged into the dusty obscurity that was all too familiar to him. As the anonymous and abusive kibitzer Americans called the “Filipino Monkey” came over the radio, hearing McCall on the bridge to bridge. “Fuck-a you, American bitch,” and less quotable remarks.

  He sat listening, letting her deal with it. Until his gaze was suddenly riveted to a speck. A speck that grew as they churned onward into a shape he knew.

  The dread grew like ice around his heart. He’d forgotten, till now.

  Pushed it back, not even consciously, as if his mind itself didn’t want to know it knew. Didn’t want to go back into this dark realm of pain and defeat.

  The speck was Abu Musa Island, and this achingly beautiful sea was where Turner Van Zandt had gone down. Years before. But the sky looked the same, the air smelled the same—dry, dusty, with a hint of burning. Above all, the lancing, penetrating blaze above them was the same.

  His fingers turned the heavy ring. Feeling where they’d soldered it back together, after sawing it off his sea-swollen finger.

  A hundred and forty-two men had gone over the side. Two days later, after sea snakes, sharks, the bullets of Iranian patrols, and the endless, burning, remorseless sun, a passing dhow had pulled a hundred and ten out of the water.

  He was staring into the play of light when Lieutenant Schaad, Horn’s combat systems officer, cleared his throat beside him. He flinched back to the present. “Casey. What you got?”

  “Sir, wanted to check with you about security in port. XO told me you wanted a boat in the water.”

  “Not just ‘a boat in the water.’ I want an armed perimeter security patrol.”

  “Sir, I don’t think we can do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bahraini regulations specify national authorities—their own— provide security in their waters. Foreign warships are required to secure all weapons and lock down all ammunition. They permit handguns for brow security, but that’s all.”

  He reflected on this. “What about the Naval Support Activity?”

  “Well, I’d assume they have guards.”

  “You’re an Academy guy, Casey. You know what the word ‘assume’ means.”

  As he might have expected, Schaad took it without the slightest grain of humor. “Yes, sir. Assume means, m
ake an ass out of you, and an ass out of me.”

  “So let’s not, okay? Does Naval Support Activity provide afloat security for visiting fleet units?”

  “I don’t see anything in the lessons learned database or the port descriptor.”

  “Then I want a boat in the water. Put them about two hundred yards off our berth, cruising back and forth. Random movements. No pattern. Chambers empty, but loaded magazines ready. That clear?”

  Schaad looked doubtful. “That’s not in accordance with port regs, captain. The weapons, I mean.”

  “Then we’ll keep them under tarps,” Dan told him. “But I’m not going to sit around naked. I may change that after I talk to the shore staff, but that’s what we’ll start with.”

  Schaad said aye, aye, and left. Dan raised his eyes again to the island, remembering the men whose very atoms had merged with the sea and air around him. They’d paid the price. For freedom? For democracy? Or just for those who jammed the nozzle into their tank and whistled idly as the numbers flickered?

  While he still looked out over this deceptively calm blue. This time, in command.

  At least, until they got to Bahrain. After that, someone else might be sitting in his seat.

  He glanced again toward the distant land. And the black fear came on him, the one that squeezed cold sweat and made his breath patter rapid and shallow, spiraling his mind toward terror. He groped for control. Trying to talk himself out of it. None of it was going to happen again … he wouldn’t be captured, tortured… Horn would not die as Van Zandt had.

  His fists clenched. Who was he kidding? This was the Gulf. Anything could happen here. Anything.

  Plodding along at ten knots, Horn passed slowly into the most dangerous sea on the planet.

  HE spent that day strolling through the ship. He might not get another chance to say farewell. So he made a point of asking about each man and woman’s family, finding something to praise about their work. They were still excited from the strike. Delivering ordnance made a sailor’s day. It wasn’t bloodthirstiness, though it might sound like it. More like how a surgeon must feel washing up after an operation that he felt went well.

  When he went back up at 1430, a flattened darkness loomed: the headland of Qatar. He sat musing as it passed and Bahrain pushed over the horizon.

  He’d been here before, too, during the Tanker War. He remembered Blair coming across the lobby of the Regency, striding tall and cool and regal. Her hair shining, tumbling to her shoulders. Then corrected himself. It hadn’t been Bahrain. Not the first time. That had been aboard a civilian tanker Van Zandt was escorting. A sand-whipped deck, she in slacks and goggles and cranial; he half asleep with a cold Heineken in his hand. He’d barely noticed her, only recalled the encounter when they met again.

  “Make all preparations for entering port. Check the setting of modified condition Zebra. The ship expects to moor starboard side to. Uniform for entering port will be service dress white for officers and chiefs, dress whites for E-6 and below.”

  THE Bahraini pilot talked all through sea detail. Dan contented himself with monosyllables as they moved without fuss down the deep-water fairway. The land gradually closing at both hands, low and blasted-looking. They passed the Sitra terminal, a long causeway at the end of which lay two gigantic supertankers. The white domes of liquid natural gas tanks rose above their decks. Dan jiggled his foot as Horn passed a quarter mile away; each dome held the energy equivalent of a small nuclear bomb.

  But then they turned and the city grew, the soaring office towers and hotels and futuristic minarets of the most modern and open Arab society in the Gulf and maybe anywhere. Horn glided past a dry dock, a shipyard. Claudia Hotchkiss stood behind the pilot as he slowed, maneuvered, and finally brought them safe alongside a half-mile-long concrete jetty jutting out from Minas Salman, the southern quarter of Manama City itself.

  It was already crowded. There were no empty berths once Horn was fitted into hers, farthest from land on the western face. A dry-cargo vessel swung nets of sacked grain or rice down to trucks. A cruise ship flying the Italian flag lay opposite; passengers in suits and abayas regarded their new neighbor with noncommittal stares. Only one old man, in suit and tie despite the heat, raised his hand to Dan, who tipped his hat across a hundred yards of space. Another warship, too, a modern frigate-type that flew the Rising Sun.

  “Now secure from sea and anchor except for line handling detail… secure from navigational detail. The officer of the deck has shifted his watch to the port quarterdeck. Set the normal in-port watch. On deck, watch section three.”

  AISHA had found a patch of shade on the west side of the customs office. A lieutenant in khakis nodded to her. She recognized him as the legal officer from DESRON 50. They agreed it was hot, then stood in silence as the destroyer came into sight past Sitra. Men on the Japanese warship stared at her.

  When the shore party stood back from the brow, the lieutenant gestured for her to go first. She faced the flag, then the petty officer. He looked her up and down. Maybe it was curious, she thought, seeing herself through his eyes: a black woman in a long pants suit and low heels, a beret on her head and a hijab she was wearing at the moment down around her neck like a scarf, a cell phone clipped to her purse, and in it, although he couldn’t see it, the nine-millimeter. She held out the badge. “Aisha Ar-Rahim, NCIS. I’m here for the threat briefing.”

  A woman stepped from beneath a shadowing awning. “Ar-Rahim? Claudia Hotchkiss. The exec.”

  She must have looked startled, because Hotchkiss laughed. “They didn’t tell you? We’re mixed gender. An experiment.”

  “I wish they had. It will present—differences in how people here are going to react.”

  They shook hands, measuring each other. Hotchkiss was attractive, in a hard-nosed way. She gave off an aura of cold efficiency, but past that might be a friendly person. Aisha thought her uniform distinctly unflattering to a woman’s shape, though.

  “We’re set up in the wardroom first, officers and chiefs. Then we’d like you to present again on the mess decks, if you’d care to do that. Or we can pass on what you give us.”

  “I’d like to talk to the crew, too. Things they need to know before they go ashore. Especially with this—experiment.”

  Hotchkiss undogged the door and ushered her through. Aisha braced herself for the chill, but inside it was little cooler than out. “We have a generator problem,” the exec said. “Now we’re on shore power, it should cool off, but we had to secure the air-conditioning load.”

  The wardroom was like any other. The captain was tall, with sandy hair. He shook her hand and told her he might have to leave early, he had calls ashore, but the XO would take care of her.

  She was on. She shuffled her materials, trying to decide what to change, what to add. Cleared her throat. “Ahlan wa-sahlan,” she said. No one answered.

  “That was ‘welcome’ in Arabic, the language of Bahrain. I’m Aisha Ar-Rahim, Naval Criminal Investigative Service Field Office, Bahrain. Welcome to the best liberty port in the Gulf! You probably got an advance package from our morale and rec office. Camel rides, tours, golf, beaches, diving. A lot of nightlife downtown. Great shopping. The people here are on the whole welcoming. Almost everybody knows some English. But as is true everywhere, there are things you need to bear in mind.”

  She shifted into automatic and went through the mores of moving through an Arab society. What not to do. Topics to avoid. A hand popped up. “Question?”

  One of the women. “Will we have to cover up the way their women do?”

  “No. Bahrain’s not Saudi or Iran. You’ll see the full-bodied cloaks, the black jilbab, but for you it’s neither required nor expected.” She touched her hijab. “A scarf’s useful. When I go into a mosque, I veil.”

  “You’re a Moslem?”

  “I’m an observant Muslim. For the women aboard, I recommend the same guidelines we require on the base. No bare midriffs, no cleavage, no shorts. Pants or skirts b
elow the knee are acceptable. Bare arms are OK on Western women, though you won’t see Bahraini women in short sleeves. On the beach, conservative one-piece suits.”

  She went on to the security tips: be aware of your surroundings at all times; keep a low profile; stay low-key in dress, language, music, and actions. Be careful in telephone conversations.

  “The island’s relatively crime free, but don’t walk alone at night. Stay in well-traveled, well-lighted areas. Don’t park on the side roads or parking lots near the base.

  “Before you leave the Activity, look at yourself. Can someone tell you’re in the U.S. military? The locals wear brands like Gap and Nike, but leave your ship’s ball caps, military belt buckles behind. Avoid large gatherings, especially near the mosques after evening prayers. Remember Friday’s the equivalent of your Christian Sunday.”

  A tough-looking chief with a stubbled head wanted to know about unrest. She said most resentment was directed at the island’s government, rather than Americans, but she still advised staying out of the Shi’a neighborhoods.

  “Are you Shi’a?” someone else wanted to know. She parried that and went on to warn them about local drug dealers and how not to get ripped off when you bought a rug. She left her card, English on one side, Arabic on the other, with Hotchkiss, and told her to call her cell phone if they needed her.

  …

  HAVING a drink with the guys on the team was OK if he ran into them ashore, but Marchetti didn’t want to actually go steaming with them. So he went down to the goat locker after the brief.

  “There’s only one place I want to go, and that’s anyplace that’s got a bar,” somebody was saying as he came in.

  “This guy in Jubail gave me a card, the carpets at this place will bug your eyes out. Persian. The good stuff. Tear the label off and there’s no way Customs can tell.”