by David Poyer
There had to be rules. But there had to be something above, or behind, the rules of the job, too.
A poke and a note: Don’t answer this bitch. Don’t fall for her tricks. Blair’s handwriting again.
But he couldn’t just sit here. That would be admitting her accusations. Hiding behind silence.
CAPTAIN LENSON. I will answer the congresswoman’s question.
MRS. TREHERNE. Good, at long last.
CAPTAIN LENSON. In the circumstances you cite, such a weapon would have to have been launched in defiance of established U.S. policy: that we limit collateral damage, that we don’t target enemy populations as such. Therefore, the answer is: yes, I would shoot it down.
MRS. TREHERNE. You see? He’d sell us out, based on some kind of skewed personal softheartedness. What good are our weapons, when we have men like this in charge? There’s a rottenness here. A lack of commitment to the principles that made this country what it is. And it goes very deep, into all kinds of—
MRS. MACLAY. The congresswoman is out of order. This is not the occasion for a stump speech. I would like to return to the issue at hand: defining national-level antimissile policy. Mrs. Treherne, I must ask you to leave.
Dan adjusted his tie, feeling sweat trickle under his dress blues, as Sandy Cottrell Treherne fired a last venomous parting glance down at him. She rose unsteadily, nearly knocking her chair over, and tottered off. He eased a breath out, conscious that every word they’d traded was now part of the record. He caught Niles’s glance, resting on him like a lead carapace; Szerenci’s elevated eyebrows, regretful shake of the head. The junior staffers stared with wide-eyed horror. Only Blair regarded him levelly; then, after a moment, winked and grinned.
MR. LA BLANC. Should we perhaps strike that exchange from the record?
MRS. MACLAY. I think it serves a useful purpose. Let’s leave it. But it does seem that the executive branch needs to devote more attention to the guidance furnished to commanding officers in the field. Now, returning to funding of an additional increment—remember?—we will take a short adjournment, after which we will hear on the topic from the deputy undersecretary of defense for strategy, plans, and forces.
The gavel came down. Sucking air bereft of oxygen, Dan hoisted himself to his feet. His neck felt as if someone had been mining for silver between his cervical vertebrae. A worried murmur rose from the back of the hearing room. Edging between the chairs, he caught Niles’s brooding glance as the admiral slipped a small object into his cheek, where it bulged. An Atomic Fireball, no doubt. Dan cleared his throat. “Um, hope I didn’t screw the pooch, there.”
Niles said heavily, “You were doing reasonably well until that woman started holding your feet to the fire. It would’ve been better to obfuscate, Lenson. Lay a little smoke and sneak away. Didn’t the murder board tell you…”
“Don’t make news. I tried not to, sir.”
Blair slid through the crowd. She patted his back. Szerenci leaned in to shake his hand and offer a consoling word before heading for the door. It was like a party breaking up, almost.
“So what happens now?” Dan asked Niles.
The admiral sighed. He started away, shaking his head, then looked back. “You know, I think keeping you out of Washington was a good idea.”
II
INTO THE LABYRINTH
5
The Red Sea
THE helicopter ride out was hot and smoky, the rising sun baleful on a bloody horizon. As they slid into position over the green-and-white turbulence of the wake, Dan reached for a handhold. Ever since he’d seen one explode in midair, helos made him nervous. From the cockpit, Ray “Strafer” Wilker glanced back, and mimed pulling his seat belt tighter.
Red Hawk 202, Savo Island’s SH-60, dropped from the sky in a weave that left Dan’s semicircular canals tumbling. Some kind of evasive maneuver, but why execute it now? The violet line of land off to starboard was Egypt. Friendly territory, last he’d heard. Though in this part of the world, one year’s enemy could be the next’s ally.
A powerful argument for a navy that could shift its positions within days; off one coast one week, but thousands of miles away the next.
That was happening now. Savo was redeploying, part of an unannounced, yet undeniable, pivot of force eastward. Below the helo, the cruiser’s stern came into view. The white circle-and-cross of the landing pad grew. The nose tipped up and the turbines whined, husbanding power for an emergency waveoff. Was the crisis both Niles and Szerenci had warned him about coming to pass? Probably not. There’d always be threats, and rumors of war. Nothing to do but be ready, as best he could.
But was he? Sandy Treherne hadn’t seemed to think so.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he was really the guy for this job. His shiphandling was above average. And he was pretty sure he could fight the ship to her limits in a multithreat air-surface-subsurface scenario. But the great names they’d read about at Annapolis—Nelson, Jones, Farragut, Spruance, Nimitz—hadn’t gone in for much self-questioning, at least according to the biographies. “Don’t give up the ship.” “Damn the torpedoes.” They’d known exactly what to do, and had been utterly determined to do it. Gut fighters, bruisers, eager to close for the kill.
Survivor guilt, a civilian psychiatrist had called it. Maybe. Sometimes the faces of the dead, and their screams, startled him awake in the depths of the night. Had Farragut and Nimitz heard those screams? Did every commander have to wall off this self-doubt, and buckle the iron mask of command tight over the human features beneath?
A double thump, a lurch, and they were down. He unbuckled the stinky cranial, checked that his pisscutter was tucked in his belt, and grabbed his briefcase. Actually, Blair’s; she’d given it to him, saying she needed a new one and he might as well replace his battered antique. Sunlight cut a rectangle from the fuselage. Wilker yelled something unintelligible and pointed to the exit. Dan groped his way down the wire that lowered the access ladder to the rough gray nonskid.
Into brilliant light, equatorial heat like a stoked furnace, a dusty tan sky pureed by whirling blades; in his nose the hot blast of ship exhaust, turbine exhaust; sandy grit in his teeth. And bent forward, advancing to meet him, Cheryl Staurulakis’s chunky figure in coveralls and flight deck boots. “Welcome back, Captain,” she shouted.
“Good to be back.”
“Let’s get out of this heat. Captain Racker’s waiting for you in the wardroom.” Making a keep-’em-turning twirl of her index to Strafer, she turned away toward the hangar, her blocky little rear end beckoning him on.
* * *
THEY had iced tea and day-old upside-down cake in the wardroom. The air was so icy he shivered. Wickie Racker, Jenn Roald’s chief of staff, nodded amiably and stood. They were both O-6s; Racker was numerically senior, but Dan’s decorations seemed to even them up. Racker didn’t look reluctant to leave. As they shook hands he said, “Crew’ll be glad to see you. How’d your testimony go?”
Dan shrugged. “Well enough I’m back, I guess.”
“Let’s be grateful for that. Some tea? This isn’t bad.”
Dan took the glass the XO poured, and sucked down half before coming up for breath. Staurulakis was saying, “Bird’s on deck for a hot refuel, but the longer we wait, the farther they’ll have to fly to get back.”
“I’m packed. Dan, any questions?”
“Just, what’s changed while I’ve been gone? Cheryl, you said on the phone we completed the rearm.”
She handed him a clipboard and a Hydra, the intraship radio they used when the J-phones weren’t convenient, and sometimes when they were. “Yes sir. Here are the eight o’clock reports, combat systems weapons inventory, and this morning’s DSOTs and engineering reports. Three hundred and thirty-eight bodies including the air det. Chief engineer reports indications of water in the CRP; otherwise engineering’s green. Inertial navigation was down yesterday, but repaired this morning. Captain’s mast is scheduled this afternoon, unless you’d rathe
r postpone.”
“Might as well hold it now, while we’re in transit. Current orders? Remember, I’ve been out of the loop.”
“Proceed east, refuel in Djibouti, join up with TF 151 near Hormuz. Past that, participate in Malabar exercises and Hash Highway patrol ops in the western Indian Ocean. Then possibly Deep Saber.”
He nodded. Djibouti was a routine refuel. Malabar was a multinational exercise he’d refereed before as a rider. Deep Saber would be new, an antiproliferation exercise out of Singapore. But nothing in this part of the world could be counted on to proceed as scheduled. Which Racker confirmed when he added, “You should know, if you haven’t already heard, the Iranians are threatening to close the strait again, over Yemen. I know, what else is new, but there it is.”
“Okay. Thanks. Cheryl, when’s our next self-defense drill? Damage-control-team training? We’ve got a couple of slow days before the Arabian Sea. Let’s be sure we’re up to speed.” Racker cleared his throat and Dan swung to him. “Sorry, Wickie—you’re still officially in charge.”
“Not much to add. Ready to relieve?”
“I relieve you, sir.”
“I stand relieved, sir.”
With that handshake, those ritual words, proffered on U.S. Navy quarterdecks for over two hundred years, command had officially passed. He felt, almost physically, the weight of his ship descend once more. Whatever she accomplished or failed at was now his responsibility, and his alone. It was sobering, but at the same time, exhilarating. No, that wasn’t the word either. There actually wasn’t a word for how command felt. He coughed into a fist, the dust irritating his esophagus. “XO, I really should go back and see him off, but can you accompany Captain Racker aft, make sure he gets off okay? I want to get my bearings in CIC. While we have a breathing space.”
* * *
THE Combat Information Center smelled like an ice cave in some far northern glacier during the season of darkness. He shivered; his khakis were still soaked with sweat from the helo ride. But the electronics liked it cold.
In the dim light four rows of consoles, about half of them manned at the moment, channeled data to the four full-color large-screen displays, LSDs, that glowed to port. Dan strolled to the padded leather reclining chair stenciled CO and nodded to the lieutenant and the chief at the command desk. They murmured “Captain” but didn’t rise. As was proper, since they were on watch.
His priorities were to operate, navigate, and communicate, in that order. He had to maintain both the ability and the situational awareness to fight and defend his ship at all times. If weapons, engines, or generators were degrading, he needed to regain those capabilities, to restore his warfighting capability.
He also couldn’t do that if he collided with one of the scores of other ships that transited this international waterway each day. Along with safe seakeeping, he had to reach his next objective in a timely fashion. Getting where he was supposed to be, when he was tasked to be there, dovetailed with “operate.” This was mainly a function of the engineering systems, though positionkeeping and bridge watchstanding also factored in.
Finally, he had to communicate. Keep the crew, ships in company, and his bosses informed as to his location, status, and intentions, while not screwing the pooch in one of the many ways ships’ captains had come up with in four thousand years of sailing the high seas, from being swallowed by Charybdis to inadvertently crossing some new UN redline.
He leaned against his chair, examining the screens as printer paper fluttered from the air vents. The subfreezing air always blew down the back of his neck, and after several hours in here, his headaches would be excruciating. The sailors had taped the paper to the vents to deflect the cold breeze away from their consoles.
The air display, with so many winking green lines pointing in every direction it looked like a surface of cracked ice, was superimposed on an outline map of the Red Sea. It was slaved to the satellite-downlinked Global Command and Control System. GCCS—usually pronounced “Geeks”—coordinated U.S. land, sea, and air forces, all the way from national command authority, to component commands, right down to every division, air wing, and ship. Updated and overlaid by data from Savo’s Aegis, the screen displayed air and surface activity from the south Med to the tip of the Horn of Africa. A second screen had the local surface picture up, fed from the radar and nav system. Readouts showed each contact’s course and speed, and predicted its closest point of approach to Savo. A glance reassured him they were clear. He checked the fathometer readout, and at last gave the helo “green deck”—the clearance to launch.
The 1MC crackled on, and four bells sounded. “Captain, United States Navy, departing.”
The third screen toggled to video, a camera pointing down from the 04 level at the helo deck, from which Red Hawk was lifting off. Racker was on his way. Above the displays, text readouts presented the status of the various combat systems, a weapons inventory, daily radio call signs, and computer status summaries. The older displays were flickering green on black or orange on black. The newer ones had larger screens, in full color.
Dan leaned on the back of the reclining chair that would be his during general quarters. The days of eyeballing the horizon for an enemy sail, of hours spent maneuvering for advantage before carronades or turreted guns roared, were long gone. Savo had a little armor—hardened steel, lined with a Kevlar layer against spalling—but antiship warheads would punch through it. If an enemy ever got within sight, Dan would most likely already be dead, his crew blasted apart, drowned, roasted alive, or sliced into bloody bulgogi by flying metal.
A twenty-first-century cruiser’s main mission was to knock down all the incoming weapons possible, until her magazines were empty. Then, position herself between the carrier and the threat, and soak up the final weapons with her own steel. Take the hit, protect the higher-value target …
“Hey, Dan. Good to see you back.”
He turned to Donnie Wenck’s blond cowlick and slightly mad blue eyes. The chief held up a green wool sub-style sweater. “Wanna borrow? Cold as the ass end of Pluto in here.”
“It’s ‘Captain,’ Donnie, or ‘Skipper.’ Not ‘Dan.’”
“Sorry, sir, keep forgetting. Wait a minute, I heard something on the 1MC. Racker’s gone, yeah? I didn’t like that guy. Too fucking friendly.”
“I don’t need your opinions on the outgoing CO, Chief. How’s the system?” Wenck, who’d come to the ship from the Tactical Analysis Group along with Dan, was the “SPY chief,” in charge of maintenance and operation of the massive radars that guided her weapons.
Wenck turned back to the Aegis console, and a chubby-faced girl blinked vaguely up at Dan. “Hey, Petty Officer Terranova,” he said.
His lead radar systems controller turned a dial, and the familiar five-pops-a-second audio of the outgoing beam echoed like a query from some extragalactic civilization. She tapped her keyboard, and the raw video came up on the rightmost screen. An orange, slowly fading beam, clicking, not sweeping, in a clockwise march across the face of East Africa. There was the Rift Valley, where the first human had made the first weapon.… She muttered, “Hinky CFA, and I’m gonna have ta replace one of the switch tubes.”
Wenck said, “ALIS is being a hooker, as usual. Otherwise, you got about 98 percent. You know that Aegis math—one plus one equals four.”
“Chill water system still tight?” The chief nodded, and Dan lowered his voice. “And has Lieutenant Singhe throttled back on pissing off the goat locker?”
Wenck shrugged, as if talking about human beings bored him. Dan lingered for a while, then undogged the door and climbed two flights of metal ladders up to the bridge level.
Brightness and heat. Scarlet dust fine as mercury oxide coated the chart table, the top of the steering console, the objectives of the binoculars. Outside the windows, the green sea, flat and calm today, and the purple land far off. Not a single cloud. Two ships in sight, a tanker, low in the water, and a high-piled containership farther off, both blur
red by the invisible dust hanging in the air, the shimmer of heat boiling off the water. Both stern to, which agreed with the radar picture.
Matt Mills and Noah Pardees turned to salute. Mills, the tall lieutenant, had joined them from Jenn Roald’s staff. Pardees, languid and almost too thin to be seen sideways, was the first lieutenant, in charge of the deck division. A golf fanatic, he’d practiced his putting on the pier every evening in Crete. “Welcome back, Captain. Glad to see you again,” Mills said.
“Good to be here, guys.” Dan looked past them, inspecting the horizon. “Keep your lookouts alert. Some of these little dhows are just about transparent to radar, and a lot of containerships go through here. We don’t want to hit anything that fell overboard.”
Pardees murmured an aye aye, and Dan wandered the bridge, greeting the helmsman, the quartermaster, the boatswain, the junior officer of the deck, and the gunner’s mates on the remote operating consoles for the chain guns. “Good to have you back, sir,” they murmured, though none seemed terrifically enthusiastic about it.
He understood why. He went out on the bridge wing and checked aft. Then gazed down into green water churned to white froth, listening to the steady roar of the bow wave as Savo’s stem ripped through it at twenty knots. Only then did he hoist himself into the leather command chair, grinning. With the drill schedule he’d directed, hardly anyone would get enough sleep in the next few days. They all knew by now; the word flew around a ship like telepathy. But a busy crew, even if they bitched, were happier than one with time on their hands. And far better a trained and tired crew on the screens and damage-control parties, than a rested, sloppy one.