The Command

by David Poyer

He’d been here before and wasn’t that excited about it, but a drink sounded good. He hadn’t had one since Palma, and what he was hearing from the radio chief, Gerhardt, was that after they got their repairs done, they’d be heading up toward Iraq.

  He went through into the berthing area and found Gerhardt and Andrews, the cryppie, getting dressed. They planned to start at Murphy’s Pub, then hit the Ramada, then later on check in at Shwarma Alley. He showered and shaved, then lathered his head. At the mirror he pulled the razor over it with light careful strokes. Very gingerly; there was a place at the back where if he wasn’t careful he’d cut the shit out of himself. He put on slate Dockers and a Harley buckle with glass jewels and a short-sleeved shirt with red and blue stripes and then his boots.

  DAN slumped on the sofa in his in-port cabin, looking blankly at the equally blank television, drinking a diet Coke out of the fridge. Blair wasn’t due in till five, at Bahrain International, on the far side of the city.

  Someone from the staff should have been on the pier to meet them. Strange there hadn’t been. He’d have to pay his calls, starting with the DESRON commander. He’d ask there if it’d be kosher to call on CO-MIDEASTFOR.

  He was throwing his civvies and kit into an overnight bag when someone tapped at the door.

  The lieutenant introduced himself in an apologetic manner as Palzkill. Dan found out why when he handed over the envelope. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, sir.”

  In accordance with Paragraph 4 of Part V, Manual for Courts-Martial, he was notified the command was considering imposing nonjudicial punishment on him. The alleged offenses were violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 128, assault, and Article 134, conduct of a nature to bring discredit on the armed services. He had the right to refuse imposition of nonjudicial punishment. If he did, charges could be referred to trial by court-martial by summary, special, or general court-martial.

  He looked up to see the lieutenant still standing, and waved at the settee. “Sit down. Want a soda? So, you’re a JAG?”

  A JAG was a navy lawyer, assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s office. “Yessir,” Palzkill mumbled, perching on the edge. “No, sir, nothing, thanks.”

  Dan turned it over and read the back. Nothing there he hadn’t seen before, though it was unpleasant to read his name on it. “What exactly is this about?”

  “I understand your boarding party killed a man on one ship. Two of your own sailors died on another.”

  “It’s dangerous work.”

  “Yes, sir, evidently.”

  “And what have you got to tell me?”

  “Well, Captain, you have to decide if you want to accept nonjudicial punishment, or go to a court-martial. Then you have to decide if you want to request a personal appearance before the commodore, or you can waive that—”

  “I’ll appear.”

  “Then you have the following rights: To be informed of your rights under Article 31(b), UCMJ; to be informed of the information against you relating to the offenses alleged; to be accompanied by a spokesperson. To be permitted to examine documents or physical objects against you; to present matters in defense or extenuation; to have witnesses attend the proceeding, if their statements will be relevant and they are reasonably available. A witness is not reasonably available if the witness requires reimbursement by the United States for any cost incurred in appearing, cannot appear without unduly delaying the proceedings, or, if a military witness, cannot be excused from other important duties. And to have the proceedings open to the public unless the commanding officer determines they should be closed for good cause.”

  “Okay,” Dan said, taken aback at the rapid monotone in which this had been rattled off. “How about this. I don’t want a lawyer; I accept nonjudicial punishment; and I want to appear in person. My witnesses are my exec and the men from the boarding and search party.”

  “Sure you don’t want help with this, sir?”

  “Do COs usually have counsel?”

  “Well… not usually, sir.”

  “It’s taken as a sign of guilt?”

  “I can’t comment on that one way or the other, sir.”

  “Then let’s skip it. But thanks for offering.” He signed the form. “When’s the appearance?”

  “The commodore’s in Riyadh right now, but he wanted to get to this as soon as he gets back. I’d say two or three days.”

  “And how formal is it going to be?”

  “I don’t think it’ll be too formal. He doesn’t like that. If you don’t want counsel, probably it’ll just be like a sit-down meeting between you and him. Maybe with somebody from COMIDEASTFOR there. They’re the ones who preferred the charges. He’ll read the charges, you’ll present your defense, he’ll make his decision there and then.”

  Dan looked at the paper again, wanting to ask whether he was likely to be coming back to the ship afterward or not. Finally he just handed it back. “I guess I’ll wait to hear from you when he wants to see me. Do you get a lot of these?”

  “Article 128s, sir? No, sir. You’re the first one on my watch.”

  That didn’t sound good, but he resolved not to obsess about it. In fact, the prospect of some big Crime and Punishment scene didn’t bother him as much as it would have years earlier. Either he was gaining some perspective, or else just getting jaded. “You say the commodore’s in Riyadh. Anybody else I ought to check in with?”

  Palzkill suggested the base commander, a Captain Fetrow, and maybe the CO of the Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activity, they’d be doing whatever repairs Horn had scheduled. Dan asked if he’d walk him over, and Palzkill said he’d be happy to.

  Hotchkiss was on the midships quarterdeck when Dan got there toting his overnight. He’d asked her to stay aboard while he was gone, at least for the first day. He gave her the number of the Regency Intercontinental. Since that was where they’d met, he figured Blair couldn’t fault it.

  “We need some decisions before you vanish,” Claudia said.

  “Be with you in a minute,” he said to Palzkill. “Shoot,” he told Hotchkiss.

  She led him away from earshot of the lawyer. “This boat you told Casey to get in the water.”

  “What about it?”

  “He tells me it’s a violation of Bahraini law to have weapons aboard. He said he advised you of that and you told him to hide them under a tarp.”

  “Correct. I also told him to keep bores clear but full mags handy.” Dan looked around the sunny, shining water of the basin, at the Japanese can, at what looked like a ferry passing to the eastward.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little … alarmist?”

  “I’d call it being prepared. But I’ll talk to the base staff, get their cut on it. What else?”

  “The replacement generator.”

  “It’s here, isn’t it?”

  “Lin called over as soon as the phone lines were connected. Yeah, it’s here. The question is, how soon do you want it in? It’ll take about eight hours to get the old one out and eight more to get the new one in.”

  Dan thought about installing the generator versus letting the snipes have the night off. But they could get orders to sea again anytime. He told her reluctantly to swap out and test it as soon as possible, then grant additional liberty for the work center concerned. “Anything else?”

  “We had a policy overnight stays, hotels, required a special request chit.”

  “If you mean did I put in a chit to stay at the Regency—”

  “No, sir, I didn’t mean you.” She unclipped a flimsy from her clipboard. “This is from Mr. Richardson and Ms. McCall.”

  Dan looked it over. The strike officer and one of the helo pilots wanted to get a room at the Sheza Tower together.

  “You didn’t want a no-dating policy. I went along with you. Then I got this.”

  Since Richardson was a pilot, he wasn’t in Kim’s chain of command. But he didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of his officers … fucking each other, to use ab
solutely accurate language. Fornication wasn’t an issue in the civilian world anymore, at least in legal terms, but he’d read about an air force general getting fired for it. And Richardson? The guy was such a twit. A narcissistic blowhard. Dan remembered how Kim had looked at him on the way to see Niles, how she’d gazed so worshipfully at him—

  Hotchkiss was looking at him like she could see every picture in his mind. “What, they couldn’t just get two rooms?” he said weakly.

  “The frontiers of navy policy. Don’t ask something if you don’t want to know the answer.”

  “What’s your call?”

  “We should disapprove it.”

  “Because it would be officially condoning it?”

  “Exactly,” said Hotchkiss, compressing her lips in a subtle but extremely effective conveying of primness and contempt.

  “I agree,” Dan said. He put an X in the Disapproved box and signed it in the CO’s space. “Okay, I’m out of here. I’ll check at the hotel desk if we go out to dinner or shopping or whatever.”

  “Have a great time with your wife, sir,” Hotchkiss said.

  Dan wondered what that tone of voice meant. Trying to keep it light, he said, “Any chance Chip’s going to make it out here, this cruise?”

  She didn’t answer, just shrugged. Which was unlike her. But he was thinking about Blair, so he just turned away and returned the petty officer’s salute and ducked out from under the awning into brightness so intense he caught his breath. He went down the jetty with Palzkill, blinking, and showed his ID at the gate. The marine waved him into a crowded, heavily built up compound, past a movie theater playing The Fugitive and the Desert Dome lounge and a post office. The streets were full of dungarees and desert camo fatigues. At headquarters Palzkill mumbled to have a good day, and Dan went up the stairs.

  COBIE hadn’t figured on going ashore, even after the briefing from the black Arab woman or whatever she was. The rest of the crew got liberty, but not the engineers. The older guys, the ones who’d been on steam-powered ships, “teakettles” they called them, said it used to be that way in every port. You had to light off a week before you sailed, long before anyone else had to be back from leave. You had to keep the boilers lit in liberty ports, in case you needed to get under way in a hurry. They said she was lucky to be on a gas turbine ship. Fifteen minutes from cold iron to cast off. She didn’t really care about how it used to be. She figured it was probably all about the same, and the most annoying things, like the whistles that went on and on till you were ready to scream, were what the navy liked most to keep around.

  In the days since the seal failure and explosion M division had gotten the old turbine broken out and ready to move. They’d taken off the module walls, disconnected the hoses and piping, bleed air lines, and electronics leads, and unbolted and taken out the scatter shield. This was a four-piece steel assembly, each part an inch thick and upward of three hundred pounds, that was supposed to keep the turbine blades confined in case of explosive disassembly. Only Helm said they didn’t fly out when they came apart, they went backward into the engine. Which seemed to be what they’d done in this case, so she didn’t think they’d be putting the scatter shield back on. Especially since they’d lugged the pieces back aft that night and dropped them over the side. But that had been a bear, getting them unbolted and out of the module. There was zilch room to do this, and as the smallest, she’d done most of the inside work, S’d around the turbine with her boots sticking out.

  She hadn’t seen Patryce since their screaming argument. Or, yeah, they’d seen each other. You couldn’t exactly miss someone, so many women in a space as small as the berthing compartment. Only now Co-bie Kasson didn’t register on Patryce Wilson’s radar. Even when they came face to face in the head, the third class just pushed by, bulling her out of the way.

  Or at least she’d thought she was off her radar. Till Ina had said, “I hear you and Helm got something going. That right?”

  Cobie had said angrily that was an utter lie, where’d she heard that? But too late realized from the glances around her she shouldn’t have reacted at all. Realized from Wilson’s smirk as she went down the passageway—you weren’t supposed to leave the compartment unless you were in full uniform, but Patryce went out in a bathrobe open down to her belly—she’d just been set up. Ina told her Patryce had said worse than that. She was passing all kinds of shit about her. Exactly the things Patryce did herself, she was accusing Cobie of.

  It made a sick kind of sense, now she was starting to figure the woman out. It also made her so angry she could hardly talk. All she’d wanted was to do her job and send money home. Learn something she could use. Build up that reenlistment bonus. She didn’t need this crap.

  So now she didn’t go back to the compartment, except to shower. She slept on a mat somebody had put in the IR flat to do sit-ups on. Let Patryce play her games. Fuck half the men in the crew and blame it on her. Pretty soon everybody else would see through her the same way she had.

  So she hadn’t expected anything different now, had figured they’d have to work all night and all day while everybody else went ashore. So when the chief came by with word the generator was going to be here in a couple of hours, they had to get the old turbine up on deck, it didn’t surprise her.

  For a ship that was designed to have the engines replaced instead of repaired, she was beginning to think somebody didn’t do his job when he drew where to put things on the Horn. The generator had to go up the escape scuttle. Five decks, straight up. But before that, they had to get it out of the module, pivoted around, and headed aft. Then chain-fall it from point to point until it got to the scuttle entrance, then pivot it again until it pointed up.

  “Ready to do this?” Helm said when she got down to the lower level. She cracked her knuckles and nodded.

  BAHRAIN International was across a causeway on an island of its own. Dan waited at the lounge area reserved for U.S. military, reading back copies of the Gulf Daily News and trying not to keep looking at the clock.

  Finally her plane glittered in the sunlight, a falling flake of silver, then slowly grew, landing lights like Venus in the evening sky. It flared out above the runway before slowly decelerating to pivot and trundle back toward the terminal.

  They didn’t kiss. Cold glances from waiting Arabs were no inducement to bill and coo. He just hugged her, wanting so much more but knowing he had to wait; then stood back. Her smile was like the sun on a winter day.

  “God, you look tired,” was the first thing she said.

  “You look kind of travel-worn yourself.”

  She did look beat, as if too much had happened too fast to keep up her usual grooming standards. He touched her hair. “You got it cut.”

  “It was time for a change.” She looked around. “Let’s get my luggage before it disappears. Where are we staying? The Regency?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I know how your mind works. And I like it.”

  AT the hotel she insisted on a shower first. Then they made love. He didn’t think about anything while they were doing it. Just surrendered to his body, and to hers. Responding without necessity of thought, with the simple instinctual desire that had come long before thought.

  Afterward they lay in the air-conditioning cool, her thigh thrown over his stomach, telling each other about what had happened to them. Except that he left out the part about the charges. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t help, and he didn’t want her to help. She told him about her ongoing feud with the army three-star for personnel and how she was trying to get the military health-care system restructured. Then asked, as she always did, whether he’d heard from his daughter and his ex.

  “A letter from Nan. Nothing from Susan.”

  “How’s she doing? Nan?”

  “Getting ready to start school, at Goucher. Where her mom went.”

  “So that’d work out for you, if you got a Washington assignment.”

  “Yeah, I’d see her more than
I do now.”

  “A girl needs her dad.”

  “A dad needs his girl. I miss her.”

  “Ever think about having another?”

  “I always said, that was up to you,” he told her.

  “That’s not what I asked. You jumped a step there.”

  “Just cutting to the chase.”

  “It’s skipping a step,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “So do you miss having a kid?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He thought she was heading for something, but instead she let her hand rove over his chest. Rubbing it, tweaking a nipple and watching his response. “Enough talking? Is the commander ready for action again?”

  “You’re not hungry?”

  “I’ll just have a little bite,” she said.

  THEY had dinner atop the hotel, looking over the coastal highway, out into the darkening sapphire Gulf. Northward, he thought. So Iraq would be over that horizon. Dozens, scores of rusty-hulled dhows were putt-putting in. As they neared they fell into line ahead. Then slowed, threaded the entrance to the artificial harbor, and gunned forward and back, stacks jetting blue smoke, fitting themselves into the shelter of the eastern mole. It was exotic, magical in the ending light.

  “How long can you stay?” he asked her.

  “Three days. Maybe four. How about you?”

  “We haven’t gotten orders yet. I’ve got to do a generator swap, fuel, and do some—administrative stuff. Then we’ll probably go north, to the interdiction line.”

  “We’re putting a lot of effort into that. Isn’t that what you were doing in the Red Sea?”

  “Yeah, we put in a lot of hours. More than I thought we would.”

  “Is it working?”

  He veered her away from that question. He wanted to forget about the navy, oil, Horn, about everything he’d been doing for months. He wanted to concentrate on having a fine dinner in the company of a beautiful woman who was also his wife.

  “How are your women working out, Dan? We’re very interested in that, on the committee.”

  “They’re doing all right.”