Tipping Point

by David Poyer

  He checked out the little store, bought postcards. Looked over the tourist-trap trinkets, the heavy gold jewelry. Not Blair’s style, nor his daughter’s, either.

  Then he noticed, against the wall, stacks of colorful cloth.

  Shemaghs, desert-style cotton head-wraps with distinctive stitched designs. The clerk, who was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, spread them out on the counter, said they’d just come in. He explained how they protected the face from sun, the lungs from dust. Dan asked what the various colors and designs meant, and got more explanation than he needed, plus a demonstration of the various ways to wear one: a turban, a face-wrap, a bandanna.

  There were bales of the things, and the prices were reasonable. He bought one in olive and black, after the clerk assured him this didn’t belong to any particular nationality or tribe. The postcards went to his brothers and his daughter, a few words apiece on the back of a glossy colorful shot of Dubai. When they were stamped and in the blue U.S. Mail box he slid into a diner booth and ordered a cheeseburger and fries. The waiter talked him into a Lebanese nonalcoholic beer. At the first taste, he grimaced at the unexpected bite of lemon. Well, he wouldn’t have to worry about scurvy.

  He kept glancing at the phone booths. On most the handsets dangled, the international signal for “out of order.” He’d e-mailed Blair almost every day, though of late his messages had been short, as had her replies. But all at once, he yearned to hear her voice. He checked his watch as he sipped the lemon beer … okay, so it grew on you. The time difference was eight hours … so it’d be around seven. She was usually an early riser.

  To his surprise, his Verizon card worked. She picked up on the third ring. “Who’s this?”

  He smiled, picturing her lying in tumbled sheets. A little grumpy and disoriented, the way she was first thing, before her coffee. Maybe in the black silk pajamas he’d given her, practically see-through, breasts and nipples and the swell of her mons all perfectly outlined in glossy, sheer fabric. Shit, he was getting hard.

  “Dan? I almost didn’t pick up. Where’re you calling from? God, there’s a huge delay.”

  “Someplace hot and dry. Here for two days. Under way again tomorrow.”

  A pause, which he broke with “How’ve you been doing? Any progress on the fund-raising?”

  “Oh, we’re all right … ugh, the fucking fund-raising. I spend two hours every morning calling people and asking for donations. They all want something for their money. Guess I can’t blame them for that. They’re talking about redrawing the district … oh, let’s not talk about that. I guess the big news is we have a new member of the family.”

  Dan blinked. “What?” Had Nan gotten—

  “He’s black and white. And cute as hell.”

  “He’s a … what? A puppy?”

  “Puppy? No, you’ve always got to be there for a dog. I learned that from Checkie, and his Labs. So fucking needy. No, a kitten. I got it from Ina.”

  Ina was her English girlhood friend, who lived several miles away in Maryland. “Well, I guess that’s good. Has he, she—has it got a name?”

  “It’s a ‘he,’ and his name is Jimbo. How’s your cough doing? Your throat?”

  “Not too bad. The dust irritates it, though. You remember what it’s like out here.”

  “Yeah. How’s your crew?”

  “Oh, fine … We’re still seeing that respiratory bug. But they’re holding up. Actually, I’ve been trying to think of things to weld them together better, give them a little more esprit.”

  “Oh! You made the Post. Third page, continued from the second. ‘Renewed Friction in Strait of Hormuz.’”

  “Friction, huh? It was more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sounded surprised, and he checked himself, wondering. Were both sides close-holding accounts of the action? He checked outside the booth; the senior enlisted were still talking and drinking. Outside, in the falling dark, lights were coming on, and it looked as if a drunken volleyball tournament was starting. “Um, well, more than I want to discuss on the phone. I’ll send you a detailed e-mail. You still have that covered account through SAIC, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m still listed as a consultant.”

  “Look, I’m putting stuff out to the dependents through Chief Slaughenhaupt’s wife, but if it’s in the papers, it might be good to reassure the families. Have them get something personal from you. A note, or an e-mail. Think you could take up some of the slack? Maybe—”

  “Dan, I understand, the CO’s wife is supposed to do that stuff. But I’m not a traditional captain’s wife. Running for office is like having two full-time jobs. Unless you really, really have something you desperately need me to do, I’d rather you stayed with your regular ombudsperson, or whatever.”

  He glanced out again, pulled the sliding door shut. Not a cheering answer, but pretty much the response he’d expected. And maybe it wasn’t smart to ask the next question, either. The mid-deployment phone call … so much had to be crammed into these minutes, so much else left unsaid … “Look, are we still good? You and me?”

  A pause. “We still need to talk. What you’re going to do, if I’m a sitting member of Congress. And what I’m going to do, if I lose.”

  “That’s about our careers. What about us?”

  She sighed. “I’m still thinking. Maybe it’s just, I don’t know, getting older, losing my looks—”

  “Good grief, Blair. You haven’t lost anything! If this is about your ear—”

  “Not really. I’m not that shallow—”

  He said, “I didn’t mean to say you were,” but the delay made it awkward and she was speaking again by the time his words reached her, leaving them talking over each other in a not-quite-argument, not-quite-friendly exchange that petered out into silence. Until there was nothing more to say but an awkward good-bye.

  When he went back into the bar the chiefs looked him over, tsk-tsking. “Rough call home?” Zotcher said. When Dan shrugged, he beckoned the barkeep. “You like those lemon pops? I saw you makin’ a face.”

  “I guess they’re all right.”

  “Another of those for the skipper,” Carpenter called.

  Dan opened the plastic bag the clerk had given him. He pulled out the shemagh and unfolded it on the table. The chiefs frowned at it, then at him.

  “Let me run an idea past you,” he said.

  * * *

  THEY got under way just after dawn, beneath a sky the color of a sander belt and a wind that blew banks of airborne grit past them like mist on some haunted moor. Then steamed in six-knot squares through the morning, as the supertankers they were to escort were delayed getting under way.

  At last their monstrous shadows loomed through a pale red half-light as if some lander were televising it from Mars. Mitscher fell in astern as they joined up off the Great Pearl Bank. The tankers eddied in and out of sight in a ruddy, tricky haze that closed in with a rising wind. Dan placed his task group to the north, intending to transit the outbound lane with Mitscher ahead this time, Savo bringing up the rear. He went to general quarters an hour from the western entrance, developing a thorough air and surface picture.

  Face taco’d in one of the shemaghs, he leaned back in his wing chair, coughing. The very air hurt to breathe. The sun microwaved through the haze. The bridge wing thermometer stood at 125 degrees. He wouldn’t be able to stay out long. The only other person outside was the mine lookout, up in the eyes of the ship. He stood motionless as a figurehead, one hand on the wildcat, staring ahead.

  But he didn’t want to go inside. Since the battle, he’d felt depressed. In there, the line would form. Messages. Reports. Decisions. He’d told Cheryl to manage the routine stuff. Only if something hot came in would she route it out to him. She was taking hold. Which wasn’t easy—the XO’s basic job description being to act as the leading asshole. To demand more than anyone could offer, and keep driving standards upward. It had broken the previous exec, and come close to breaking
Dan, back when he’d had the job. In some ways, being the skipper was easier.

  Aside from making those life-and-death decisions, of course.

  He shaded his gaze into the wind. The sand, the dust, the scarlet sky, the sheen of brown scum on the weirdly still sea, reminded him of Earnest Will. The escort mission that had ended with Turner Van Zandt’s sinking. But also where he’d met Blair, on a fact-finding mission for the Armed Services Committee.

  For a long time, the relationship had been on and off, passionate when they were together, but comfortable apart, too. Then they’d gotten married. And for a time it had all seemed fine.

  But now … His first marriage had gone into the same kind of death spiral. He’d seen it over and over; deployments were hell on both sides. There was so damn little he could do from here. His daughter from his first marriage didn’t need him anymore; she had her own life now. Maybe it was time he thought about getting out. A fucking cat … it was sad that Blair felt the need for company. If that was what it was.

  And there she was, Staurulakis, not Blair, at the window in the port wing door. Checking him out, then undogging the door. Unsightly red grooves engraved her cheeks. The duty radioman fidgeted behind her, a clipboard over his crotch. Dan sighed and pulled his shemagh tighter.

  “Sir? Update from Fleet. The Pasdaran announced the end of their exercise. Iran lifted the Notice to Mariners. Also, chief corpsman wonders if you can spare a minute.”

  He sighed again, and swung down. Took a last look around. Through the low churning haze, he could see fuck-all. Something could be bearing down on him right now, and he’d never know. Except through radar, of course. Thank God for radar. He couldn’t imagine trying to navigate, much less fight, around here without it. “All right, let me read that. I’ll see the corpsman in my sea cabin.”

  * * *

  GRISSETT looked upset. Dan pointed to the spare chair, wedged into the corner of the tiny compartment. “Grab a sit, Bones. What’cha got?”

  “Not good news, sir, I’m afraid.” The chief medic handed over stapled sheets. “Today’s sick list.”

  “Some of the troops overindulge at the Sand Pit?”

  “No sir. Well, maybe a little. But mainly, I’m getting a big uptick with the crud.”

  Dan studied the list as the chief corpsman went on, “On the next page, I made up a graph. Trying to figure out what this thing correlates to—port visits, whatever. And it does seem to correlate with in-port periods.”

  “Is that right? We get more cases in port?”

  “Yessir—I mean, no sir. The opposite. Look at the graph.” Dan flipped to it. “It’s a negative correlation. The numbers go down when we’re in port, like in Crete.”

  “Not sure I see it.”

  “It’s only about minus zero point two, but it’s there.”

  “What’s minus zero point two?”

  “The correlation coefficient of the two variables, in-port time and reporting cases.”

  Dan whistled. “Are you telling me you calculated the correlation coefficient?”

  “Well … yes sir. Just divided the covariance of the variables by the product of the standard deviations. I brought along my calculations—”

  “That’s interesting, Chief. I didn’t know you were into statistics.”

  “A lot of medicine’s based on it nowadays,” Grissett said stiffly, as if Dan had insulted his competence. “It’s basic stuff.”

  “I see. Sorry, you just took me aback there. I’ll look over your figures. Point two is a pretty weak correlation, but still.” Dan flipped through a couple more pages, groping for a connection. “Anything from Bethesda?”

  Grissett said no, aside from anomalous antigens in the urine samples he’d sent, and waited expectantly. Dan scratched his neck, trying to come up with something. “We scrubbed down the ducts and changed all the filters. Maybe the sequence of events? Did the new filters go in before or after the duct sterilization?”

  “After, sir. And I supervised the duct cleaning, with the Top Snipe.”

  “Meaning Commander Danenhower, I take it.” Dan regretted the reproof immediately, and hastened to gloss it over. “Yeah, the Top Snipe. Think his guys did a thorough job?”

  “If hot water and bleach could’ve killed it, we’d have wiped it out, Captain.” Grissett nodded at the sick list, still in Dan’s hands. “But five new cases this morning. Added to fifteen already off duty. And what worries me is, people don’t seem to be fully recovering, like with a flulike illness. A couple even developed pneumonia.”

  Dan’s eyebrows lifted. “Pneumonia!”

  “Yessir. I dosed them heavy with cipro, and I think we got it, but even the ones that recover just drag themselves around like zombies. You’ve heard them coughing.”

  He had indeed. Pushing his hand back over his hair, he searched his mind. “And it correlates negatively with in-port time … but it doesn’t live in the ventilation. Could we have picked up a brand-new bug? Some Middle Eastern bad boy nobody’s seen yet?” Another possibility occurred, uglier than he wanted to voice, but forced himself to. “It couldn’t be, um, sexually transmitted, could it?”

  Grissett said, a touch patronizingly, “Most viral infections can be passed by close physical contact. But that’s not sexual, in the way I think you mean.”

  Dan sighed. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. “I don’t have any direction for you, Doc. We can’t divert. This is a national-level mission. I can ask again for a medical team, but we don’t seem to be getting much support out here. Let me talk to Fleet medical, see what they think.”

  “I’ve already done that, sir, but maybe the additional horsepower can jar something loose.”

  Dan nodded. He glanced at the door, and the corpsman stood. But hesitated, not yet leaving. “Feeling all right yourself, Skipper? I’ve seen you coughing. Wrapping that scarf over your nose.”

  Dan shrugged. “I sucked some smoke on 9/11. The dust out here doesn’t help. Could the crud be related to dust? The commodore mentioned dustborne illnesses.”

  “Right, bronchiolitis, and dustborne asthma.”

  “Could we be picking up some kind of toxics in the dust, on the wind?”

  Grissett’s gaze went distant. “I don’t think so. But I’ll run the numbers, see if there’s a correlation with the rates that spend a lot of time outside the air-conditioning envelope. Boatswains. Lookouts.”

  Dan got up, and unwrapped a bundle of thin stitched cotton. “I might have something we can try.”

  * * *

  HE passed the word about the Official USS Savo Island Shemagh via the chiefs. Hermelinda’s storekeepers handled the issuing. He’d bought three hundred with the CO’s discretionary fund (and documented that the ship’s store price equaled what he’d paid, so he couldn’t be accused of profiteering). On the mess decks, Kaghazchi demonstrated how to wear them. The exec made her policy clear: they weren’t uniform items, or a replacement for flash gear, but something to wear on a voluntary basis, when you were on lookout or on watch. The crew seemed doubtful at first, but by that evening, when he went up to the bridge, everybody was wearing his or hers, sometimes in novel ways. The women especially liked them; their eyes, peering out from folds of cloth, seemed alluring and mysterious.

  * * *

  THEY headed for the channel out at 1700 local, with CAP and SUCAP en route from Vinson. According to Fleet, Tehran was crowing about how they’d “damaged two warships of the Great Satan.” No one there seemed to have made much of a fuss over the butcher’s bill: four boats missing, presumed sunk, five more damaged. At least that’d been Dan’s estimate in his after-action report, and his numbers had lined up with Stonecipher’s, as seen from Mitscher.

  Settled into the pocket of his command chair in CIC, he stared at the displays, puzzled. Aside from a few scattered contacts along the coast of Qeshm, the waterway looked normal. Commercial traffic was resuming, to judge by the string of merchants on the surface picture.

  Could it ju
st be … over, with nothing really settled? But no radars locked onto him as they steamed past Jaziriyeh-ye Forur and reported in to Omani traffic control. The Omanis had been conspicuous by their absence during the entire fracas the week before. Preserving a careful neutrality by looking the other way. Well, they had to live next door to the Iranians. In this part of the planet, just staying out of trouble was an all too elusive goal.

  Mills nudged him with the handset, rousing him from reverie. The call was a Dr. Somebody, from Bahrain. Dan drew a blank, then recalled: the Fifth Fleet medical officer. They discussed Savo’s problem. Dan pointed out they’d been reporting the same syndrome for months now, had already had one unexplained death. At last the medico agreed to ask for an epidemiology team from Bethesda. He couldn’t promise when they’d get to the ship, though. “Until then, I recommend focusing on basic sanitation, on the food handlers and meal preparation.” Dan doubted that was the source, but vowed to hold additional training, and inspect for cleanliness.

  Mills cleared his throat and nudged him. A new contact had popped up, sourced from Silver Ghost, the Air Force AWACS out of Oman. Seconds later Mitscher reported it too: Track 7834, out of Abu Musa. The island was disputed between Oman and Iran, but had been garrisoned by Iran since the days of the shah. EW detected a radar corresponding to that of a PBF. These were modest-sized gunboats based on the North Korean Chaho class. Dan kept an eye on it as they passed, and had his surface warfare coordinator develop a gun solution. But the C-801s and 802s were the real threats—plus, of course, any Iranian air.

  But nothing rose to challenge them. As they steered for the Knuckle, more small craft popped up. The supertankers churned serenely on. Presently the C-802 batteries began illuminating as well, though none locked on. Dan set his team to correlating them, trying to figure out if they’d relocated during the days between the transit in and the way out, or if they were parked in the same locations. They also passed four dhows that the cryppies picked up as verbally transmitting targeting data.

  But aside from that, there seemed to be no massing of forces. “They’re backing off,” Staurulakis murmured, standing beside him with arms crossed. “Letting us out.”