The Passage

by David Poyer

  “I haven’t had any complaints about him from anybody else.” Harper slid a knife out, clicked it open, and started cleaning his fingernails as he leaned against the bulkhead. “So it’s me? I don’t think so, Hoss. Look, you decide. There’s gonna be some intense antisub ops when we hit Gitmo. The ASWO console keeps going down, and I think the problem’s in the feed from the sonar stack. You want that ping jockey homesteading his equipment, sitting on a four-decibel loss? Or you want me to take him down on the pier and show him what’s inside the fucking piñata?” Harper held up a fist.

  Dan sighed, looking down and across the pier to where the old destroyer was getting her final coat of haze gray. He wished abruptly that they were all far at sea, away from the yards, the heat, everything that fucked up a sailor’s life. “Neither. I’ll talk to him. But you’ve got to make an effort, too. He’s right about one thing: It is his gear. He sits on it twenty-four a day under way.”

  Harper sucked a tooth, leaning out. Dan followed his eyes down. At the bottom of Barrett’s sheer, like a moat at the foot of a castle’s wall, a ribbon of river separated her from the pier. A gull floated in that narrow strip of calm water, oblivious to looming steel and concrete. Harper took out a quarter, bombardier-aimed it, and let go. Halfway down, the wind caught it and it curved away and hit the water a yard from the bird. It swam toward the splash and dabbled its bill.

  “Well, sometimes maybe I do come on too hard-assed. Want me to go scratch his ears, make him purr?”

  “That might not be out of place.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Hey, you like to sail?”

  He remembered as if from another life sailing in Newport with Betts and Nan—the baby just big enough for a life jacket; the hard wind, cool-edged even in summer up there; the sail, struggling like a living thing in the sunlight; her arms, tanned dark as a Polynesian’s; body outlined by the sun under thin cotton … . “Yeah. Haven’ t done it for a while, though.”

  “Saturday’s supposed to be nice. Want to slam a few brews, do a little sailing?”

  “You have a boat?”

  “A little one. Fun to kick around in.” Harper clicked the knife closed and put it away. “What you say? Not gonna be a lot of free time once we hit Gitmo.”

  “Might be fun. I’ll get back to you. Okay, I’m going to go see Fowler now. Next time you go into his space, make a point of asking permission in front of his guys if you can work on his gear. Got that? A sense of ownership, that’s good. Let’s make it work for us.”

  Harper nodded, passing a hand over his bald spot. Dan left him standing there against the lifelines.

  HE found Fowler pacing outside his stateroom. “Come on in, Chief,” he said, opening the door. His roommate frowned up from a pile of papers. Dan closed it and said, “Well, maybe we can talk out here. Look, I told the chief warrant to back off. It’s your gear; he can’t work on it without your say-so. But you need to lighten up, too, Chief.”

  Fowler stood silent, molding invisible spheres with his hands. Finally, he said, “Sir, I don’t want him in my spaces—at all”.

  This was unexpected. He studied the chiefs face. Sonarmen were all a little strange, true. If they didn’t start that way, staring into a screen twelve hours a day made them weird. And now that Harper had pointed it out, Fowler did seem sort of … fussy. In one way, that was good; he was great on the paperwork end. But Dan didn’t know yet whether he was going to cut it as a supervisor, running the stacks watch after watch. Dan remembered the cramped, dirty sonar room of USS Reynolds Ryan. He remembered in the soles of his feet the week they’d spent tracking a submarine that refused to surface, refused to identify itself as a winter Arctic storm gradually tore the old destroyer apart. He blinked and said harshly, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Fowler wilted. His narrow shoulders slumped and his eyes slid aside. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Just don’t like it.”

  A seaman came around the corner and they stood apart to let him pass. Dan said, “Look, I don’t know what the two of you have going, but we won’t have time for personality conflicts at Gitmo. You guys are going to have to work it out. Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” Fowler said, still shifting the invisible balls from one hand to the other.

  HE didn’t go to lunch. Instead, he changed into gym gear and went for a run, dodging forklifts and trucks. He ran hard and felt pleasantly tired when he climbed the brow again. As he faced the ensign, then showed the petty officer of the watch his ID card, he resolved to cut down on the drinking and try to get more sleep.

  He started the afternoon by clearing out his in box in the department office. He signed off on changes to quarterly maintenance schedules, looked over the revisions to a tacmemo, signed three outgoing speedletters. At the bottom of the box was a special request chit from ETSN Sanderling to get Thursday afternoons off to take a class at a junior college. Harper had checked “disapproved.” Dan started to, too, then stopped. He got two or three chits a week from Sanderling. It was annoying, but that shouldn’t mean each one didn’t merit consideration. He put it in his hold box to think about.

  He gave the other things to Cephas, the departmental yeoman, to distribute and then checked his wheel book. Time to see how yard work was wrapping up. He grabbed the clipboard off the bulkhead and went out.

  Things looked good up forward. Horsehead’s gunner’s mates were greasing the new guiderails for sea. The other jobs were on schedule or close to it. His spirits rose a bit. A centerfold in one of the missile-maintenance rooms reminded him of Sibylla Baird. He’d called twice but hadn’t caught her in yet.

  But as soon as he walked into the computer room, he knew something was wrong. A portable air conditioner was whining, but the air was still close. All the equipment fans were on. Mainhardt and Dawson and the other DSs were staring at logic diagrams, plugging and unplugging boards. He propped an elbow on a workbench and waited till Mainhardt glanced up. “What’s broke, Chief?”

  “Can’t get these subprograms to run, sir.”

  “Which system?”

  The data processing chief blinked, bringing himself back to the world around him. “New Version Three software for the ACDADS. It’s supposed to have a self-installation feature; you just get it talking to the operating tape and it erases the old code and writes the new in. But it ain’t working.”

  “Why not?”

  “Williams, answer the lieutenant. He’s been on it all night, sir, trying to get it to run.”

  DS2 Williams was tall and black. He wouldn’t look directly at Dan. He paused after every few words. The pockets under his eyes were deep enough to sink a cue ball into. He said, “I figure it’s a configuration control problem, Lieutenant. The … software contractor has got a computer lash-up that’s a little too unique. The system they built this version on don’t look quite like what we’ve got here.”

  “You mean different computers?”

  “No, Lieutenant, I mean just little differences, like the RAM configuration, or the interface lineup. Maybe they’re using a different version of operating system software. Things can get fouled up easy, sir. They ain’t supposed to, but they do, and more often than they should. The result is, they make a tape and send it out to us, we try to load it, and it craps.”

  “Can you locate the problem?”

  “Trying, but we don’t have the tools the whiz kids got. I think it’s in the software interface between the operating system and the NTDS module.”

  “Go back a step,” said Dan.

  Williams blinked at the far wall. “Okay, sir, you know how NTDS works. The net control station does the roll call … polls each participating unit in turn for bearing and range to its contacts.”

  “I’m with you so far.” Dan knew the basics of the Naval Tactical Data System. After the Pacific Fleet’s hammering by kamikazes in World War II, it was obvious that grease pencils, plot boards, and voice radio nets would never cope with jets and missiles. So NTDS did it electronically.
The radar operators on each ship identified and tracked incoming aircraft on their consoles. Computers derived the track data (course, speed, altitude, identification, threat level) and transmitted it automatically to the net control station. The carrier put together the big picture and rebroadcast it, so that if one ship got a contact, everyone in the task force knew about it in seconds.

  “Okay, and you know that the most common problem is that the NCS and the PUs can’t talk to each other, usually because the crypto gear ain’t set up right. But it’s all … gotta be encrypted because if the bad guys can read it they can see where our defense is, our combat air patrol and missile ships, and skate around them and plaster the shit out of the carrier.”

  Williams took a breath, but he was wound up now, not hesitating anymore. “OPSPEC-four-eleven sets the protocols for the handoff. That’s maybe where the screwup is. Something in there is scrambling the data.”

  “Great,” Dan said, hoping to cut to the chase. “Can we get it running? Or do we need to ship it back and stay with Version Two till they fix this one? We’ve got to have everything up by next week.” That was when they were going to test-fire the guns and missiles.

  “Well, sir, it’s like this … .”

  He spent several minutes trying to pry the bottom line out of Williams and Dawson, but they were still going in circles when the 1MC said, “Lieutenant Lenson, Lieutenant(jg) Deshowits.” Mainhardt punched buttons into the phone and held it out. “Quarterdeck,” said a voice over the clatter of a needle gun.

  “Lieutenant Lenson, you just passed the word for me. What’s up?”

  “XO wants you an’ Mr. De Shits—I mean Deshowits—in his stateroom, sir.”

  “Got it.” He rattled the phone down. “Okay, stay on it. If it looks like something serious, let Mr. Harper know we need to start screaming.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” they muttered, already reabsorbed.

  Dan turned back from the doorway. “Where’s Sanderling?”

  “Captain’s stateroom.”

  “What’s he doing up there?”

  “Fixing the entertainment system.”

  “Yeah, sure … been a lot of trouble with the captain’s stereo lately,” said Williams, blinking with reddened eyes at a printout as it chattered out.

  HIM and Deshowits in the XO’s stateroom … Dan wondered as he rattled down the ladder why Vysotsky needed both of them at the same time. Only thing he could think of that he and the damage control assistant had in common was they both had beards. Outside Vysotsky’s stateroom, a petty officer was tagging out an emergency power panel. Dan stopped to make sure the OOD had signed the tag-out. Deshowits came around the corner and Dan tapped on the door. “Come in,” came Vysotsky’s gravelly baritone. Then, as they stepped inside, he said, “Uh, give me another minute with this. Have a squat on the settee.”

  George Vysotsky was medium height, with a squarish head and blond hair that stuck up in back for a day or two after a haircut. He had full lips, strong white teeth, strong-looking hands with golden hair on the backs. Right now, he had reading glasses on. His broad shoulders hunched over the desk as he rapidly scanned down the unit manning document, making corrections and insertions in #2 pencil. While they waited, Dan looked at the swords racked over the doorway. The bottom one was a standard Navy dress sword. The others were older, one a saber with a broad nicked-up blade, the other with a basket-style hand guard.

  “How’d the audit go?” Vysotsky asked him, not looking up from the roster. His voice was hoarse, as if his vocal cords had been damaged. Occasionally, Dan had noticed him massaging his throat after he spoke.

  “Nothing new, sir.”

  “No rabbits in the hat?”

  Dan shook his head. “They’re talking about some kind of suit. Sipple left a house and some insurance, apparently. The auditor said they were going after his wife.”

  “Be tough on Jerrie … but if he misappropriated funds …” Vysotsky pulled a stamp out of his desk, stamped the roster, and pushed it into his out box, then leaned back like a gun going into battery. “How about the CMS inspection?”

  “Classified materials, that’s Felipe’s department, sir. The comm officer, Mr. Van Cleef.”

  “Mark, how’s that lagging job going?”

  “Bulkhead’s done. Two days’ work left on the lines.”

  “We be ready to steam next week?”

  “Steam, sir? We’ll give you something a lot better.”

  Vysotsky grinned back but looked tired. That seemed to be all the time he had for pleasantries, because he bent forward again—to his in box, from which he extracted a message. While Lenson was reading the headers, the XO said, “You’ve both already seen it—the one about beards.”

  “I haven’t seen this.”

  “Beards, sir? No, sir,” said Deshowits. Vysotsky looked displeased but just said, “I told Radio to slot you copies. Bottom line is, those beards are history.”

  Dan said, surprised, “It’s regulation, sir. Trimmed and everything.”

  “There’s a revision to uniform regs coming down the pike. The new CNO’s cutting out a lot of the stuff Zumwalt let go by. Part of that, he’s banning beards aboard combatant ships.”

  “On what grounds, sir?” said Deshowits.

  “The message sets out the reasons, Mark. Uniform appearance, adherence to tradition, and you can’t get a proper seal on oxygen-breathing apparatus or gas masks.”

  Dan said, “Beards aren’t traditional, sir?”

  “A clean-cut appearance is traditional,” said Vysotsky patiently.

  “Sir, I don’t want to step out of line, but whoever said that had better go back and look at Farragut and Porter.”

  Vysotsky sighed.

  “Well, that’s secondary, sir. I just don’t think the Navy’s necessarily got the right to tell me how to do everything. Isn’t that what we’re on duty for—to defend freedom?”

  He felt the ridiculousness of the words even as he said them. Vysotsky wasn’t interested in arguing; he just wanted them to shave. And sure enough, he didn’t bother to answer. He just cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Deshowits? Any comments from your side of the settee?”

  “On the mask issue, sir. I went through fire fighting last month and I’ve been to chemical, bacteriological, radiological school. I never had any problem getting a seal.”

  “That it?” The XO slammed his chair down. “Okay, I heard you out. Blowing off steam is all well and good, but there’s no point arguing. You want to haggle about tradition, how about the tradition of a cheery aye aye?”

  Dan found himself getting mad. It wasn’t so much the beard—he hadn’t had it that long—but so far he hadn’t heard anything like a reason. Just that an order was an order. Maybe that was good enough at the Academy, and he’d obeyed as fast and unreflectingly as the next guy there. But a few years in the fleet had changed his mind about blind obedience. He tried a joke. “Well, we’re kind of attached to them, sir. And I’m as cheery as the next guy, but this is a little sudden.”

  “You sound like a sorehead right now, Dan.” Vysotsky glanced at the swords. “Let me tell you a story.

  “My grandfather was in the Tsar’s Navy. But one day, the fleet mutinied. He came this close to getting shot by his own crew. He picked the wrong side when the civil war came, fought with Kolchak, and when the Whites lost, he never could go back home.

  “We had to make it here. And we did, but it hasn’t been easy. I was at comm school, and one day the head honcho from Schools Command is reading the roster. Suddenly, his eyes get big. He says, ‘Why are we teaching a Russian?’ and he sends the master-at-arms to pull me out of class. I had to be twice as good as the guy in the next seat whose name was Smith. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “Well, I certainly do, sir,” said Deshowits.

  “Maybe you do at that … . Dan?”

  “Uh, I understand about your name, sir. But I’m not sure what the point is that you wanted to make.”

  “The
point, Dan, is that the Navy is not an organization that exists to dispense perfect justice. We all have to live with that fact. Okay? Think of it like an egg.”

  “An egg, sir?” said Deshowits, sounding interested. Or maybe, Dan saw, he was leading the XO on, flicking the cape in front of him. Whichever, Vysotsky nodded and said, “Yeah. We’re the hard shell. Inside, it’s soft. But if there wasn’t a shell, the guts would run out.

  “When you join the Navy, you give up certain rights other Americans take for granted—what to do, what to say. And what you look like, damn it: uniform and grooming. But we go along with it to protect the rest of America.”

  “We have to have clean chins to protect America?” said Dan, but not loudly enough to stop the XO, who was still going. “The Navy gives us security and opportunity. But it’s a trade-off. You want to express your individuality, this is not the place. The service is going to a more professional image. So beards are out. End of message.”

  Deshowits spoke up. He explained calmly that he had no problem with that reasoning but that he was also responsible to another, higher authority. “I have to choose between obeying orders and the dictates of my religion. Do you remember our yarmulke discussion, sir?”

  Vysotsky looked uncomfortable. “Uh, yeah, I remember that … . The message doesn’t say anything about exemptions … . I’ll have to get back to you on that.” He switched blue eyes to Dan. “You got a religious problem, too?”

  “No, sir,” he said, swallowing his suspicion that there was no reason, that it was arbitrary and meaningless. It didn’t matter what he knew or how well he could do his job. What mattered was whether he scraped his chin with a piece of steel every morning.

  Vysotsky said hoarsely, “Okay, we’ve had our little discussion. You’ve got three days to comply. You have people working for you; pass the word to them, too. Clean shaves on USS Barrett. Mark, I’ll get back to you on your question.”