by David Poyer
Harper leaned forward. “Looks like shit. Smells like shit.” He scooped a fingerful out. “Tastes like shit. Must be shit,” he announced.
“You bastards—”
“All together now.” And the table burst into:
“Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
You look like a monkey,
And you smell like one, too.”
“Gee, thanks,” muttered Paul.
“It’s chocolate and peanut butter, sir,” Antonio offered. “Want a scoop of vanilla with it?”
A stocky man with lieutenant commander insignia came in. His blond hair stuck up on one side, as if he’d slept on it. “Hello, XO,” somebody said, and George Vysotsky half-smiled. “Happy birthday, Martin,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse.
“Did you hear the one about the bus driver?” Harper said to Deshowits.
“The what?”
“There’s this bus driver, see? And it’s the last part of his route, it’s real late, and finally there’s nobody on the bus except this nun. So they’re talking, and he’s asking her where she’s going. She says back to the nunnery, that she only gets to go out once every ten years. And he says, ‘That sounds terrible. What’s it like being a nun.’ And she says, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad, except that.’”
“Except that what?” said Horseheads.
“That’s what the driver said, ‘Except that what?’ And she says, ‘Well, sometimes we wonder. You know, about men.’
“‘Yeah?’ says the bus driver.
“‘Are you married?’ she asks him.
“‘No, I’m not married,’ the driver says.
“‘Well, it’s late, and we’re all alone, and nobody will ever know. So why don’t you show me what it’s like?’ the nun says.
“So he parks the bus and they go back where the bench seat is, and it’s dark. And she says, ‘But you know, we have to still be virgins when we go to Heaven. So I want you to do it the back way, all right?’ So he does.
“So they’re done and the driver’s zipping up and he says, ‘You know, I got to tell you something. I lied. I’m really married and got two kids.’ And the nun smiles and says, ‘Well, I lied too. I’m a queer, on my way to a costume party.’”
Vysotsky glanced down the table at Harper, but he didn’t say anything, except to Antonio: “One over easy, bacon.”
“Right away, XO.”
Harper launched into a long story about an ex-skipper of his on the USS John R. Craig, DD-885. “The old ‘hatchee-hatchee-go,’ they called it. A chain-smoker, smoked filter tips, and when he was done with ’em, instead of stubbin’ them out, he used to eat the butts. He only had two sets of khakis. He used to inspect them, when he got them from the laundry, for wrinkles along the seam, and if he found any, he’d have the supply officer up on the carpet and scream at him for hours.
“He got pissed off at the XO once. Left him on Hilo Hilo, wouldn’t let him back aboard when they sailed. Something about letting the Filipinos steal all the wing nuts. He used to put the officers in hack and take the chiefs waterskiing behind his gig. Once he ran it up on Diamond Head, he was drunk as shit. But it was okay—none of the hookers got hurt.”
Dan grinned at the ensigns and jaygees. “The old Navy,” he told them. “The chief warrant’s your living link with it.”
“Yeah, I was on the fucking Nautilus with Captain Nemo … . Pass the go juice, Ensign.”
Dan had another cup, too. He was starting to feel better as the aspirin kicked in. But he’d noticed it before in hangovers: Things occurred to you that didn’t when your head was straight. Ideas came loose and drifted around, made different connections than they usually did.
Like now … He found himself musing as he looked down the table how they all seemed the same at first, and how then when you looked closer, all different. Horseheads with his baby face and hurt expression. Kessler, big and slow, in an old green cardigan with a piece of masking tape spotted with blood stuck to his chin. Harper, Deshowits, Vysotsky … He thought about the military people you saw in the movies, in books, how one-dimensional they seemed—either evil or heroes, but either way, without complexity or depth. It was probably true that they seemed simpler than civilians. They spent too much time with other men, for one thing. They didn’t lead examined lives. But beneath that, they were as divided and contradictory as any other human beings.
He sipped coffee and looked thoughtfully around at them, feeling like them, yet unlike; one with them, yet separate. As he had all his life. Nor did he have the faintest idea why.
“NOW all hands to quarters for muster, instruction, and inspection. Officers’ call,” said the 1MC, the general announcing system. As they clambered toward the weather decks, Dan shivered in the morning wind, wishing he’d worn a jacket.
The exec held officers’ call on the 03 level, in the sheltered area between the stacks. The department heads—Dan, Quintanilla, Cannon, Giordano, and Cash—aligned themselves in front. The others fell in behind them, spaced around antennas and lockers.
It was a clear morning, and he looked out past the black shoals of submarines and the gray bulks of other ships, over the sheds and cranes of Charleston Naval Shipyard. An oiler loomed in Dry Dock Five, her underwater hull hairy with weed. Beyond that sprawled North Charleston, one of the most depressing places he’d ever seen. To his left rose the spires of St. Michael’s and the other churches.
And behind him was the Cooper River, sliding like melted silver slowly out to sea.
It felt as if he’d spent half his time aboard in shipyards. But that was usual for new construction. The first year saw you in and out constantly for tests and trials and availabilities. And since she was the last of her class, Barrett had a lot of catching up to do, installing backfit gear.
Backfit was tearing perfectly workable new gear out and replacing it with something even newer. Over the years a class was in production, new gear didn’t stop coming out. But instead of trying to keep up, the Navy accepted the ship as it was originally ordered. Then, after commissioning, it put it back in the yard, tore out the gear that had to be changed, and installed the new stuff. It had always struck Dan as a no-brainer way of doing business.
But after a while, being in the yard got to you. First was the endless noise, a nerve-torturing cacophony of grinders, chippers, the shrill of warning bells, the hiss of compressed air. There were always strangers in the ship, and they left behind dirt and trash. They were stripping an old Gearing-class at the next pier, getting it ready to sell, and the wind carried grit and paint down every time it blew from the north.
Dan ran his eyes over her, feeling nostalgia and fear as his guts recalled Ryan.
Suddenly, before he could throw up his guard, a black wedge drove itself silently between himself and the world. At its foot, a line of white gleamed like bared teeth: the bow of an aircraft carrier, towering sudden and tremendous out of what had been utter blackness.
No, he thought. No! His fingers dug into his shoulder, fighting memory, hallucination, nightmare, with raw pain.
Ryan had been in company with a carrier task group, late at night, several hundred miles west of Ireland. Dan had been junior officer of the deck.
And someone had made a mistake.
He arm-wrestled will against memory, gritting his teeth, till at last the North Atlantic, the screams of burning men thinned and vanished. He took a shuddering breath, becoming aware of someone next to him: Quintanilla, brown eyes concerned. “You okay, Dan?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” he said, swallowing. Christ, he had to get a grip.
“Attention on deck!”
“At ease,” Vysotsky said, returning their salutes. The exec was wearing one of the new green nylon jackets, with his name stamped in gold. “Who’s command duty officer today?”
“Me, sir,” said Shuffert.
“Don’t we have a CDO name tag?”
“I have it, sir. Sorry, I forgot to put it on.”
“T
ake a look at the starboard side after quarters—about frame sixty. Okay, everybody, progress on yard work is the big number one today … .”
Vysotsky conducted a fast officers’ call. He reminded them that the parking lots outside the shipyard were unsafe; another sailor had gotten mugged the night before; the men should use the buddy system after dark. Radio message traffic should be held down, a worldwide Fleet Minimize was in effect. When he dismissed them, Dan huddled with his division officers. He glanced around at them—three young faces, one older: Horseheads, Kessler, Shuffert, Harper.
“Okay, first order of business today, like the XO says, look over what we got left to do before going to sea. Progress conference after quarters. Casey, I need a sonobuoy inventory today. Write it in message format for transmittal to Gitmo.”
“Check.”
“There’s something dicked about the results we got off the self-noise test. Chief warrant will help you if you need to tear down the equipment.”
“I’m not touching shit in that sonar room till you get your chief ping jockey squared away,” Harper told Kessler.
Dan waited, but neither gave any inclination of telling him what that was about, so he went on. “Ed, here’s a message about servo controllers. Check it out and see if it applies to us. Burdette, the test van—”
“It’s on the pier. The chiefs down checking out when they want to roll the scenario.”
“Chief Warrant, what’s broke?”
“Wacky two, fleetcom downlink.”
“ETR?”
“Back to you on that.”
“Okay, everybody,” Dan told them, “XO’s inspecting Zone Three today. Make sure your guys have their names on their bunks and one locker. Any locks on blank lockers get cut off. Go to it.” He returned their salutes as they scattered, carrying the word to every man in his department.
THE progress conference convened in the wardroom a few minutes later. Dan pulled out a chair, joining the XO, the other department heads, and a middle-aged civilian in coveralls.
“Attention on deck,” said Vysotsky. Dan got up again hastily.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” said the captain, taking his chair. He wore trop whites, contrasting with everyone else in khakis. Antonio put a cup of coffee at his elbow, centerlined the server, sugar, and cream, then closed the pantry door. Leighty added two cubes, considered, stirring, then lifted his head.
“Good morning, everyone. We’re not far from the end of our availability. Mr. Grobmyer’s here to discuss what we have left to do.”
They waited as he sipped, then set the cup down. “Now, I know things have been high tempo since commissioning. Independent operations off Florida, weapons loadout, structural test firing. Then the final contract trials and the shock test. The delay in Key West wasn’t our fault, but we end up paying for it in missed sleep.
“But in just three weeks, we’ll be in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, starting refresher training. It is very important that we achieve a good score the first time through, as I think the XO has explained.”
He waited till the chuckle spluttered out. “But one thing I do not want is for us to take on the kind of hurry-up attitude that lets the men cut corners on safety. There’s time to complete everything, if we do it right the first time instead of rushing to get a block checked off. That’s not how Barrett’s going to operate.”
He nodded to the shipyard representative. “Mr. G., have at it.” “Combat systems first today—forward and aft Mark twenty-six missile launcher guiderail modification … .”
HE stood in the passageway, wondering what was going on. As the meeting broke, the captain had bent to the XO’s ear. A few seconds later, Vysotsky had said, “Dan, Norm, can I see you a second?” He and Cash had moved up a couple of chairs. “The skipper wants to see you two later. Eleven hundred, his stateroom.”
“Yes, sir. Anything we should bring?” the supply officer said.
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll be there, sir.” And Dan had nodded, too.
Now he glanced at his watch. Time to get moving. He liked to see all his spaces once a day, every day—especially now, when they were getting ready for sea.
He started all the way forward, in the handling rooms for the forward five-inch. The gunner’s mates were lubing the projectile hoist. Dan went over the Gitmo checkoff list with them, how they were going to fix the way the batten pins were secured in the projectile magazine. Aft of that was the handling room and magazines for the forward missile launcher. Horseheads and Chief Alaska were helping the yardbirds replace the guiderail. He observed briefly, then headed aft and upward.
In the data processing center, two computers hummed in the chill air. The others stood silent, shut down or racked open for maintenance. The bulkheads were lined with shock-mounted tape drives, memory units, racks of data tapes. His breath was a plume of white. “Coldest computer room in the fleet, sir,” said Chief Mainhardt, looking up from where schematics and circuit boards were spread out over the spotless gray diamond-tread matting. “Want a Coke?”
“Sure,” he said. One of the DSs reached up into the air duct and handed him an icy can. Dan drank half at one swallow, then looked around, shivering as frigid air crept under his khakis.
The DP center was Barrett’s brain. The five general-purpose mainframes, gray machines each the size of a refrigerator, ran four major systems. The first was the Naval Automated Communications System, which processed messages in and out through the high-frequency fleet broadcast and the new geostationary communications satellites.
The second was the Naval Tactical Data System, which shared target data automatically by radio among ships and aircraft over long distances.
The third was the sonar. Modern sonars depended on computers to filter distant sounds out of noise. So when Barrett was operating against submarines, one computer was devoted full-time to signal processing.
Most warships had these systems, or some variation of them. But the fourth, the newest and most sensitive, was one only Barrett had.
Surrounding him in these humming gray machines was the first operational installation of the Automated Combat Decision and Direction System in the fleet. ACDADS evaluated the threat picture from NTDS, calculated how the ship should react, and generated engine, rudder, and weapon orders.
After two months aboard, Dan was familiar with all this. But the thought of what it actually meant, when you put it all together and flicked the switches to automatic, still sent a chill up his spine. Because ACDADS didn’t just advise you what it thought would be good tactics. It could fight the ship without assistance from human beings. Since ordnance now moved mechanically from magazine to gun or launcher, or else fired from sealed canisters like Harpoon, it didn’t even need sailors to throw shells in the hoists.
In automatic mode, Barrett would be the first truly autonomous war machine ever created: a 560-foot, nine-thousand-ton fighting robot.
Of course, ACDADS was also incredibly complex; it had a mean time between failures of about an hour and a half. But past it, he could glimpse the dim shape of futurity: a warship with no men aboard at all.
“Sir, can I talk to you a minute?”
Dan turned. He studied the young, uncertain, yet somehow impudent face; the hand, holding out a special-request chit.
“What is it this time, Sanderling?”
“Application for Boost program, Lieutenant.”
“Have you run this past the chief?”
“All I got to do is take the test; I got the time in rate.”
One of the other men said, “Hell, Sanderling, you haven’t hardly been off the dock yet.”
“Shipyard counts as sea time. I’m eligible, the career counselor says.”
A black petty officer said, “Yeah, maybe you better try bein’ an officer. You sure ain’t so hot as a seaman.”
“You got to talk to me with respect, Petty Officer Williams. It ain’t that hard. Is it, Mr. Lenson?”
“You get all the respect you d
eserve, you no-load peckerpuffer—”
“Knock it off, people,” said Mainhardt.
When Dan let himself out into the passageway, he almost ran into Casey Kessler. He looked pensive, but he snapped his head up when he saw Dan.
Dan liked Kessler. His antisubmarine officer was Academy, too. When he said he’d check something out, he did; he had common sense. His wife was Navy, too. “How’s Candace like the new billet?” Dan asked him.
“Good, but she’s always hopping up to Norfolk or D.C. or Mayport.”
“Your mom doing any better?”
Kessler traced a chill waterline with a finger. “She’s still about the same. She hates the dialysis, but she’ll die without it.”
Dan couldn’t think of anything to say but “Hang in there. Maybe it’ll work out.”
“Yes, sir.” He looked back along the passageway, to see the big lieutenant still standing there, looking blankly at a fire alarm box.
He stopped at a scuttlebutt and drank as much icy water as he could hold. He had several more spaces on the 01 level, but they were unmanned. He made sure they were locked and then climbed the ladder.
The hangar smelled of isobutyl ketone, rubber, and cleaning compound, aircraft, MIL-C-43616C. It was empty and echoing, a huge cube of space that on deployment would house two helicopters. The 02 level was built around the five-foot-wide interior passageway leading forward from it. It was nonskidded instead of tiled, so supplies could be forklifted from the helo deck straight to the stores elevator for strikedown. The whole ship was built that way so weapons, food, parts, and fuel could be loaded without allhands working parties. In the passageway, he stopped at a plaque that read: RESTRICTED AREA. KEEP OUT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. A smaller plaque read Crypto and Registered Publications Room. When he tried the handle, the vault was locked from inside.