Early the next morning a few hours north of Port Said as a shimmering sea lifted and lowered Athena on three-foot swells, no other ships were in sight. When the watch changed, Rensselaer ordered a full stop and assembled the crew, even engineering, called up from obsessively tended spaces bathed in the whine of turbines.
“Given Russian acoustic assets,” Rensselaer announced, “and in the most unlikely but still conceivable event that we may be sitting over one of their subs, I didn’t want to use the 1MC. I have a lot to tell you. We may be attacked as we go through the Canal, anywhere from Port Said to Suez.” After summarizing for them the briefing of the previous day, he went on. “Before we enter the Canal, we’ll move to Condition One. The fifties will shift to port or starboard as dictated by circumstances. Most of the time, armament will be heavier on the port side, but we’ll keep two fifties and a minigun to starboard.
“It may seem a bit much that we’ll be at general quarters while the merchant seamen on ships forward and aft of us are playing checkers and drinking beer, but we’re a ship of war. As such, we’re not only a richer, more prestigious target, but, now, an active part of the Canal defenses. Notwithstanding issues of sovereignty, our passage is, de facto, a patrol. The watch bills and P.O.D. reflect this and will be posted shortly.” He looked over at the XO.
“Ten minutes,” Movius said. Everyone heard.
Rensselaer continued. “First, I want to clarify something about the enemy with whom we’re at war. It appears from conversation on the mess deck that some think we’re at war with the Arabs. We are not. We are at war with the remnants of ISIS, Islamic terror groups, and others who are mainly Arabs, but Iranians are not Arabs. They are, by and large, Muslims, but they’re neither Arabs, Indians, nor East Asians. They’re Indo-European, and they come from that often neglected part of the world between the once great empires. In ancient times they were them-selves an empire, the easternmost power known to the Greeks, and a perpetual rival. It’s been a long time since they stretched from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, which is what they’ve done now. Americans generally are unaware that, perhaps insanely, Iran has world-conquering ambitions. Thousands of years ago they fought the Greeks even off Athens, and the Greeks took the war to them. It seems that we’re repeating that. Just so you know, that’s who we’re fighting. Athena versus the Persians. Nothing new under the sun.
“Some specifics. We’re going to stop in Djibouti to take on stores and top off—loading mainly munitions, some food as well. Only supply parties will be leaving the ship. Our stay will last about three hours, if that. You won’t share anything I’m about to tell you with anyone there, no matter what his rank. Is that understood? It’s crucial.”
Everyone nodded.
“We’re not going to the Gulf.”
Everyone groaned. There was much shuffling.
“At least not yet. We’ve been given a more important job, one that we may not have the opportunity to do, and that, if we are lucky enough to try, is something from which—I feel obligated to tell you—we may not walk away, even if some of us may swim. If you survive it, you’ll remember for the rest of your lives.” The crew listened intently. How could they not?
“Before I had even thought of going into the Navy, I wondered what it would be like for a general to sacrifice a certain body of his troops so as to save the rest. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that admirals and the civilian command authorities might have to do the same. This has fallen upon us. I agree with the order, I’d give it myself, I would never get over having given it, and I intend to execute it. I intend as well to succeed, and to preserve the ship. No doubt that will be difficult.”
Other than the idling engines below and the occasional splash of a wave against the side, there was silence. He went on.
“By now there’s a giant armada deployed in overlapping operational boxes in the Arabian Sea beyond Iranian air and missile range. If my experience is a guide, ship movements within those boxes are precisely timed so that where they overlap they maintain maximum distance between carrier strike groups. Things are heating up in Korea and the South China Sea, so we’re stretched really thin. Still, we’ve got four carriers just outside the Gulf, including the Ford. These are well defended against anything the Iranians have deployed.
“We’ve sunk ten of their twenty-one submarines. They keep coming, and we’ll keep sinking them. Thus far, our screening forces have managed to intercept all missile shots. But if they can sink a carrier and kill thousands of sailors in one blow it’d give them an immensely strong hand. So that’s what they’ve been trying to do.
“Russia has developed a hypersonic, maneuvering, anti-ship missile. NATO calls it SS-N-Thirty-Three. Russia calls it Tsirkon. It can travel at Mach eight: that is, somewhere around five thousand miles per hour, depending upon altitude, temperature, and I don’t know what. It’s fast and its maximum range is five hundred and forty nautical miles. I don’t have a clue about the warhead, but at Mach eight the kinetic energy alone might be enough to sink or disable a large ship. Because the damn thing goes so fast it’s enveloped by a plasma cloud that absorbs everything on the electromagnetic spectrum, making it invisible to radar.
“Our shipboard defenses can’t handle anything even vaguely like that. Anti-ballistic-missile systems can, but not if it’s flying low, in air, on a flat trajectory. So if a Tsirkon could get within five hundred nautical miles and link into some form of intermediate guidance—terminal guidance is built into the missile itself—it could possibly sink a carrier.”
“Do they have the missile?” a chief asked, raising his hand after he spoke.
“Not in Iran. But the Iranian frigate Sahand has spent the last year upgrading in Murmansk, hidden in a shed so we wouldn’t see it from our satellites. What we do know is that the three-inch gun on the bow was removed and left outside in the snow, which is the kind of thing Russians tend to do—leave stuff outside in the snow. And when the Sahand sailed from Murmansk it had a box-launcher—which, to preempt the wits among you, has nothing to do with either launching boxes or box lunches—mounted in place of the gun: four containers sized properly for the Tsirkon.
“Before the war, Sahand was shadowed after it sailed out of Murmansk, first by us, then by the Brits, and then by a French sub. It made a refueling stop in Algeria and then doubled back into the Atlantic and south. The French sub followed politely until the Cape of Good Hope and then turned around, losing it. The deal was that the U.S. would pick it up at that point, but by that time we needed everything we could spare in the Iranian theater and to deter China and North Korea. We had deployed a sub from Seventh Fleet, but needed the French to extend their pursuit for two more days around the Cape. Put it this way: they were never disturbed by Iranian nuclear weapons, and there are big demonstrations against the war all over France. They said no go to the IO.”
A young sailor asked, “What’s the IO?”
Rensselaer replied, “Think of the song.”
“Sir?”
“‘Old McDonald had a farm.”
“Sir, I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. In naval parlance, the IO is the Indian Ocean. And the Sahand slipped away into the IO. As you well know, the Indian Ocean is many thousands of miles wide and long, with much of it empty of shipping. Because there’s nothing in the southern half but freezing seas, no islands to speak of, and as it’s not suitable as an SSBN bastion, it’s not surveilled.
“Not only is it outside normal satellite coverage, but because the Iranians set up a sleeper cell that at the beginning of the war took out a key ground station, even with re-tasking we’ve lost the ability to look at the Southern Ocean. Our satellites are so heavily tasked that none would have been sent to scan that area anyway. Nor would it be at all sensible to detach major surface ships to run around doing the same, or to fly P-8s or Tritons, except as follows:
“A picket line of three Aegis destroyers and various aerial surveillance assets will be spaced just outside the range of the Tsirkon relative to the carriers. That is, a sparse two-thousand-mile line roughly from Cochin in India to Ras Hafun in Somalia. One Triton UAV and one P-8—they can’t spare others—will survey the area directly south of them. Not a bad plan, but because it leaves a lot to chance Washington wants more. So, how will it get more? That’s where we come in.
“Sahand has to refuel somewhere on the coast of East Africa. CIA has people in every port, but it’s also possible that Sahand will meet a tanker or a barge out at sea. We have a handle on all the tankers now in the area, there being so few because of the war, the spike in insurance rates, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s possible however that a small tanker or barge will sally from some East African port without our knowledge.
“We don’t want to weaken the picket line by sending a major surface combatant down there, because in fact the Sahand may already have refueled and may be somewhere in the open sea heading north. And why waste a major ship on a low-probability search? So they’re sending us. If our intelligence picks up Sahand, we sail right at it to confirm its position, engage it, and at least slow it down so our more capable assets can close in from their widely spaced positions. If necessary, we are to sacrifice ourselves in inflicting to it as much damage as possible.
“Given the capabilities involved, doing so will be something you can liken to knowing when orchids bloom. You can’t. At least I can’t. But then again I don’t know anything about orchids, and I do know how to fight a ship, although it’s been a long time since the Navy fought a purely surface battle without air support.”
He paused, recognizing that he and the crew had crossed over yet again into a state very different from the one that preceded it, and were that much farther from home. Still, the terrible odds excited him as if he were young.
“Now . . . ,” he said, “now comes the pertinent question. What about the Sahand?”
The crew, too, was ready to fight. There they were, on the ocean, with no visible home shore to soften their desires. It was as if they were in a different time, their fathers’ time, the time of their fathers’ fathers, and perhaps all the way back to the unknowable beginning.
Someone said, “Fuck the Sahand!”
“Well,” Rensselaer commented, “that’ll be as easy as impregnating an elephant. But since that’s what the chiefs do on liberty, maybe they can show us how.” This went over rather well, but only because of the tension.
He resumed. “At twenty-five hundred tons, Sahand has six times our displacement and five times our complement. The bloody thing carries a helicopter, and even with its main gun removed for the Tsirkon, it has a forty-millimeter and two twenty-millimeters, six torpedoes, and, here’s the rough part, eight Qader missiles. They won’t waste the Tsirkons on us, but the Qaders have a four-hundred-and-forty-pound warhead, advanced guidance, and a range of at least a hundred and fifty nautical miles. I need not tell you what would happen if one of those warheads struck us amid-ships. It would blow us in half, and each half would go down in a minute or two. Other than the hip pockets, we don’t have BPMD for a sea-skimming missile like that. And if the helicopter is in the right quadrant, it certainly has the range and altitude to spot us, set the missile on its initial course, and even provide terminal guidance if it stays beyond the range of our Stingers.”
From behind him, Ensign Josephson asked, “Captain, sir, how the hell are we going to defend against that, sir?”
“Mr. Josephson asks how the hell we’re going to defend against Sahand,” Rensselaer returned. “First, whereas we can’t ignore the facts, we don’t have to be defeated before we fight. How could thirteen fractious colonies have ever thought they could defeat the world’s most powerful empire? They took it one step at a time, they didn’t let fear cloud their judgment, and they didn’t give up when that seemed the only sensible thing they could do.
“The Qaders need guidance. There’s a roughly one-in-three chance that the helicopter would be in the right sector. There’s a chance that it would miss us even if it were. How reliable is the Sahand’s helo? How much can they afford to fly it in regard to fuel and engine wear? Far from their Tsirkon launch range, outside the war zone, will they even fly it at all? Or will they save it for when they begin to close? How accurate and reliable are the Qaders? We don’t know.
“And that’s just one part of the equation. It doesn’t take into account what we ourselves might do.”
Holworthy raised his hand and asked, in a negative, perceptibly bitter tone, “And what might we do, Captain?” In translation: This isn’t a SEAL fight. Why are we along for such a ride?
Rensselaer chose to ignore the translation. “Mr. Holworthy, we’re a United States ship, and like the Constitution when it took on Guerriere, or the fleet forces at Midway, we will take on a superior enemy and not stand down. That is what we will do. As to how we will do it, I’m working on it. That doesn’t mean I have nothing. It means I have something.”
The crew might have been unsettled had Rensselaer looked anxious, or caught, but he forced himself to seem confident and, inexplicably, happy. “Dismissed,” he said.
In the SEALs’ quarters even before Athena began to make way, Holworthy said to his men, “I didn’t sign up to take a Disney cruise around the fucking Indian Ocean. If we go against the Sahand, we’re just along for the ride.
“Americans are dying in the Gulf. Why are we held back here, doing nothing? By what authority are we made to just sit? We can help to win the war and save lives. Christ, I want to get out there!”
Soon Athena was making for Port Said, prepared to be drawn into the other worlds of the East, of battle, and all the things that link one war to another as if the procession of history between the wars were only a dream.
*
During the approach to the northern terminus of the Canal at Port Said, Rensselaer had left a glowing young Josephson as officer of the deck and returned to his cabin, where he sat lost in thought. Facing a David-versus-Goliath problem, he had neither sling nor stones. Even if upon his sighting of the Sahand the Air Force could spare a bomber, it would arrive too late.
That was assuming that he would see Sahand before it saw him.
Bombers with the range, either in the U.S., at Al-Udeid, or on Diego Garcia, were fully absorbed in the Gulf, where what they were doing was crucial in advancing the battle and protecting the fleet. What the Sahand would or could do was not yet clear. With tankerage, carrier-launched F-18s and F-35Cs would have the range, but would arrive too late to save Athena. She was going to assume the classic role of scout: invaluable and expendable.
At a knock on the door, Rensselaer opened a binder on his desk so whoever it was would not assume he had been doing nothing. It was Holworthy, who saluted upon entering, which, his having seen the captain several times that day already, he need not have done, even if Rensselaer had not suspended saluting in general.
“Have a seat,” Rensselaer said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Why the salute, uncovered, when we no longer salute?”
“It’s your cabin, sir.”
“Doesn’t matter. What’s on your mind?”
“May I speak freely?”
“Please do.”
“Sir, my detachment is irrelevant to a pure naval battle on the open sea.”
Rensselaer answered, “Athena was hardly constructed for a pure naval battle on the open sea. We’re a patrol craft best suited to the littorals. So, we’re in the same boat.”
“At least Athena, even if unsuited, would be serving a purpose, whereas my men will be entirely useless.”
“Would you like me to drop you off in Yemen or Somalia so you can run around hunting terrorists, and then I can pick you up on the way back, if we have a way back?”
“No, sir. Leave us, if it’s approved, at Camp Lemonnier, where we can catch a transport to the Gulf.”
“But then, if we survive the mission, and are sent to the Gulf, I’ll have no SEALs.”
“What I mean to ask, sir, is would you object if I myself request it?”
“You’re goddamned right I would. You’re in the Navy, Mr. Holworthy. You don’t just leave a ship for better pickings. We have a tradition of infantry and special forces aboard ship. You know that.”
“Yes, sir, they’re called Marines.”
“Notice any Marines around here?”
“No.”
“While we’re in the open ocean, that’s your job.”
“With all due respect, we aren’t of any use in a naval battle.”
“You sure about that?”
“I can’t imagine. . . .”
“Maybe you can’t, but maybe I can.”
Holworthy stared at Rensselaer, his expression suggesting that he thought Rensselaer had nothing.
Rensselaer understood what Holworthy’s eyes were saying, so he replied, “This isn’t poker. I’m not bluffing and you’re not calling my bluff. I cannot, however, discuss what I’m thinking—with you, or anyone else.”
“Not the XO?”
“Only with God.”
“With God. You’ll discuss it with God.”
“At this stage, it’s the only thing that’s appropriate.”
“Why?”
“Because it will require His intervention.”
Holworthy didn’t know quite how to take this, but he was told to get back to his duties, and he did. The captain was not unhappy. They were SEALs. They wanted to fight. And they would.
*
Although Athena had priority through the Canal and would not have to convoy, she still had to wait for a short time amid the gaggle of ships off Port Said before a gap opened behind the last to go through before her. From the line of low buildings and palms along the shore, a wooden rowboat made its way toward the ship. As the boat’s double-set oars rhythmically propelled it forward, some of Athena’s guns were politely trained upon it, and Rensselaer was alerted.
Those on deck looked lovingly at the wood. After living with metal, plastic, and glass, upon water never ending, they saw wood, especially old, weathered wood, as magical and comforting. At sea there are no green ramparts of pine and fir along a distant ridge, or the intoxicating scent of lilacs after dark.
Two fellahin were at the oars, and at the bow was a kind of colonial dandy, in horn-rimmed sunglasses and a white linen blazer with a Yale crest on the breast pocket.
“Gimme a fuckin’ break,” Holworthy said, sighting this triumph of non-invisibility. “Boola fuckin’ boola.”
“Boola boola?” Rensselaer asked, binocularless.
“Yup.”
“Who is it, William F. Buckley? He might as well wear a CIA cap.”
“That’s what I thought.”
When Boola Boola came aboard, clearly relishing having, spook-like, come in a rowboat powered by natives, Rensselaer took him to his cabin. There, over lemonade and Famous Amos cookies, of which Boola Boola devoured fourteen, he referenced his employer.
“Really!” Rensselaer exclaimed. “I never would have guessed.”
“How so?”
“A Yale linen blazer, and Hermès sunglasses? Didn’t they teach you anything at Camp Perry?”
“I’m under official cover at the embassy in Cairo, political section.”
“You’re in the Sinai now, you’re not T. E. Lawrence, and it’s dangerous. Just sayin’.”
“That’s exactly why I’m here, to warn you that you may be attacked from the east bank, where ISIS and God knows who else are active.”
“From whom does this intelligence come?”
“I can’t say.”
“I can’t say either, but it comes from the Israelis, they told us at Haifa, and we’re ready.”
“There are scores of navies around here, and these guys can’t tell the difference between one warship and another. They won’t necessarily attack if they don’t know what you are. But they’re sure to if you’re American. So it might be a wise idea not to run with the flag.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Perhaps you should lower the flag.”
“I understand,” Rensselaer said, drawing it out, “that, working in foreign hellholes, you have to sneak around. Not that you do, apparently. But this is an American warship. We don’t lower the flag.”
“Even if it means advertising that you’re a prime target?”
Rensselaer nodded.
“That you might lose some of your crew?”
Rensselaer nodded again. “They would agree.”
“Or that you yourself may die?”
“As many have before me. It’s part of my job, believe it or not, it gives me a kind of joy, and believe it or not it dispels the fear of death. The Islamists think Americans are no longer capable of such things.”
“They do.”
“They’re wrong.”
*
With priority, soon after the Canal pilot came aboard, Athena glided past Port Said and slowly made her way south, when Rensselaer gave Athena’s first war order, “Unpin the fifties and make ready to repel attacks from shore and small boats.”
The pilot, a rotund Nasser, mustache and all, was professional, friendly, and quiet. For reasons of security, some consoles on the bridge had been covered, and it was strange to see the Americans in helmets and body armor while he was in summer clothes, including powder-blue slacks and a sort of Egyptianized Hawaiian shirt with colorful zigzags rather than vegetation. This was fitting, as zigzag may have come from Zagazig, a city in Lower Egypt. Rensselaer knew this, but kept mum so as not to expend his captain’s pedagogical allowance on something so inconsequential.
The pilot took note that on Athena’s port side four twin-barreled, .50-caliber, mounted guns, three in a row slightly forward of midships and one aft, were at the ready. The 30mm chain gun also pointed east, and at any one time two sailors were manning the 7.62 miniguns, and two SEALs were on deck with sniper rifles.
“The pilot said to Movius, “I don’t think anyone will shoot us. They don’t like when people shoot back.”
“Not even ISIS?”
“Daish? Maybe. They are very, very crazy, but it doesn’t happen every day.”
“Every other day?”
“No. Now with the war, maybe once in ten days. The Army has been killing them.”
By 1600 they were halfway through. In the thinned traffic due to the war, they saw no ships either forward or aft, just blinding white and yellow dunes to the east, and the azure water of the Canal rippled by winds that had come all the way across North Africa. The heat was such—110 degrees in the shade—that standing watch in body armor without either fainting or hallucinating required a great deal of strength and many breaks in the air-conditioned interior. The steel decks were so hot they had to be cooled with water now and then, and the radiant heat from sand and sun was numbing.
In a near-hypnotic state, the sailors watched the dunes as they seemed to float by. Half-asleep, they came awake whenever they saw an Egyptian patrol or a group of Bedouin, the latter all in black, sometimes with a camel or two but more often with a herd of goats, walking along the crest of a dune. When the dunes and the artificial banks that once had been the Bar-Lev Line were low, they saw deep into Sinai, sometimes all the way to the mountains. Rising air blurred images, carried others from beyond sight, and made the mountain ranges seem to undulate.
A fragile strip of civilization, the Canal was a silk thread laid across ten thousand years of history in a landscape that had never changed. The vastness and emptiness of it, with colors intense enough to wound the eyes, had been witness to struggles from the time of Abraham to the October War. And Bedouin from the biblical era and before were separate from all and lived as if time did not exist. The women, only their eyes visible, wore bells on their foreheads, like the bells that hemmed the robes of the priests of the Tabernacle. They walked across the sand in a strange way, shuffling but very fast, their feet bare.
At 1638 precisely, on top of a high dune to the east, a dozen or so men—no one had time to count them—crested the rim, dived to prone position, and began firing rifles, light machine guns, and RPGs at Athena. She answered immediately with thirteen gun barrels, firing thousands of bullets and shells.
Rensselaer nearly leapt to the port bridge wing, where a minigun was firing. “Take careful aim,” he commanded over the 1MC. “Take careful aim,” because he could see many shots kicking up sand far below the enemy, just as the incoming fire, directed downward from the lip of the dune, including RPGs, was poorly sighted, and frothed-up the water between the ship and the bank. But he went unheard over the merciless noise of eight .50-caliber barrels and all the other guns firing at once.
He stopped the minigun from firing and insisted that the sailor aim slowly. Two SEALs on deck with Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles were calmly picking off the men on the dune, of whom less than half were still firing. Someone shouted, “RPG!” They could see it coming for the bow. It hit, but it was a dud and it bounced away.
A moment of silence brought little relief. Velez, from COMMS, who had paused firing his twin-fifty, felt a burning pain in his left arm. His right hand slapped it as if reacting to a bee sting. Then he noticed that the fingers of that hand were slippery and hot. Even at this point he understood that, no matter the pain, he had suffered only a graze. Upset that his blood was staining the deck, he kept on firing even as the corpsman, who had appeared as if from nowhere, bandaged the wound. “Stay still,” the corpsman yelled over the sound of the gun, “just for a minute, so I can wrap this, goddamn it.” Velez kept on swiveling the mount and moving around. “Stop it! Will you just stop for a second?” the corpsman ordered.
Velez stopped, turned to him, and said, “Do you realize what’s going on here?” That gave the corpsman enough time to do what he had come to do.
Rensselaer called into the bridge, “Full astern.”
The helmsman repeated, “Full astern, aye sir,” and then, belatedly, the XO announced, almost under his breath, “The captain has the con.” Athena slowed vigorously enough to make some sailors almost lose their footing, and then she backed to bring her guns broadside once again to the attackers. The first contact had been a surprise, and the ship was a little past the enemy, so the guns had to be brought to bear at an increasing angle. But after reversing and then coming almost to a stop broadside of the assault, all gunners on deck and ready, the massive firing seemed totally out of character for such a small, sleek ship. The many barrels, from the 30mm to the SEALs’ sniper rifles, mixed with grenade launchers fired almost straight up to mimic mortars and strike behind the dune. Thirty-millimeter shells and high-explosive, .50-caliber-machine-gun shells struck below the crest and made fountains of sand and shrapnel in the air.
The dune curved broadly at the top, affording cover of only six inches or so of sand depth three or four feet in front of the attackers. Heavy shells and the 7.62s went through this, slowing somewhat but not enough either to bend their course or significantly lessen their striking power. It was as if the assailants had placed themselves in a shooting gallery, and it was over in less than a minute. Those of the enemy who may have been left alive were nowhere to be seen, and after the cessation of fire everyone felt a deafness and ringing in the ears.
“Report casualties,” Rensselaer ordered. Each station reported in. Velez had been grazed in the arm. After a bullet had tangentially hit but not penetrated his helmet, a man had been knocked unconscious but was now recovered.
“Damage control.” A searchlight had been shot out and there were multiple but inconsequential bullet holes, although a full inspection had yet to take place. No water was coming in. They couldn’t immediately test all the electronics and instrumentation, both because of its complicated nature and because the pilot was on the bridge, but there was no visually apparent major damage.
According to protocol, the pilot had radioed-in his report of the attack, and by the time Rensselaer went to visit the wounded an Egyptian F-16 roared from a mile or two back across the Canal and the dunes. In another ten minutes, helicopters appeared in the distance.
Lieutenant Velez was from a tiny town, in New Mexico, where the only water was underground “What were you doing when you were hit?” Rensselaer asked.
“Firing a twin-fifty, sir.”
“Who took over?”
“No one. I kept firing.”
“To be noted.”
“No big deal,” Velez said. “It was a case of to be or not to be.”
Everyone returned to his station. The guns were reloaded and ammunition boxes replenished. When the watch changed, and even at the evening meal, little was said. Although the term is too strong and imprecise, the crew had been blooded, were now bound more closely, and in some ways were now wiser than philosophers.
As Athena moved on, the Egyptians may have taken stock of the dead. If not, those who had been killed and left behind were erased forever from the world. The people who might remember them would not be informed of their deaths, and would eventually follow as the blood and the bones of the fallen disappeared in sand and sun, their only benediction the wind. As night fell and Athena approached Suez, the great desert lay in darkness off to port.
*
At a steady 40 knots after Suez they would reach Djibouti in less than 30 hours. With 6 to 15 miles of sea on each side down the 200 miles of the Gulf of Suez, they reverted to Condition III, and in the Red Sea, with 50, 60, or 70 miles of sea to port and to starboard, they had planned to relax somewhat, because their radar and visuals would alert them in good time to any surface threat. Still, they would be ready for general quarters even as they kept up their drills.
Their relatively high speed was necessary to bring them on time to the assigned area of operations in the Indian Ocean, and they had a long way to go after topping off their tanks in Djibouti. Many of the crew had been to the Persian Gulf and more than a few had cruised the Indian Ocean, but in the Gulf they had always been close to base and had mostly worked with other ships of Fifth Fleet. In the IO they had made transits in carrier strike groups or amphibious ready groups, virtual floating cities with thousands of Americans, fast food, internet, and convenience stores. Athena would be alone, unaccompanied by a Burger King or his Dairy Queen.
As expected because of the war, both the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea were almost entirely empty of maritime traffic. Perhaps an astute economist could have extrapolated this into market effects and made himself rich, but for Athena it was yet another immersion in the spell of the East. Although no one who had participated in the engagement in the Canal felt guilt or regret, everyone, even those who had been below in engineering, was haunted by the inescapable fact that they had killed. They had been trained to do so, they were defending, and they had had no choice, but it went against their desires, sensibilities, and how they had lived theretofore—especially in regard to the men at the guns, who had seen their projectiles rip into a man and blow him apart. Perhaps had they quickly returned to Norfolk as if on a short deployment in the Atlantic their altered states would have been subsumed in the familiar and they would have more easily forgotten. But now they were coasting down the Red Sea, and the alien landscape mated with the changes within them in ways they had never imagined and could not and did not express.
Rensselaer was on the bridge, scanning the sea through his own, non-Navy-issued, Nikon binocular, which magically made things clearer, better defined, brighter, and more colorful than when seen with the naked eye. The Navy-issued optics were more powerful but less luminous. He dropped the Nikons to his chest and pivoted to Buck Lanham, the quartermaster. “Approaching the chart table and looking over the plot, he said, “We can’t follow that course, straight down the center.”
“West of center, sir,” Buck said.
“I understand, closer to Egypt, just like a tanker making time. Why are there no tankers here, Mr. Lanham?”
Lanham had semi-bucked teeth, so everyone called him Buck. He had long since given up on protest. “The Strait of Hormuz is closed.”
“What about the ones that left port beforehand, and container ships from Asia?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because they’re taking the long way around, past the Cape of Good Hope. The Red Sea is too narrow and shallow, the Bab-al-Mandab so constricting, that a sub thirty miles on either side would have targets fed to it as in a shooting preserve.”
“Don’t we have ASW there to stop that, and close off the Red Sea?” Lanham asked.
“Our ASW has gone to hell since the Cold War, and everything we’ve got left is in the Gulf or screening the task forces in the Arabian Sea.”
“Why would Iran waste a sub in the empty Red Sea?”
“Why wouldn’t it spare one for the Red Sea in hope of catching a tanker, a container ship, or, better yet, an American naval vessel? Or maybe there were some, or one, already here or in the IO, unable to pass our cordon at the Strait. It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to stay off the sea-lanes and zigzag a bit. Submarines are different than the Behshad.”
“The Behshad, sir?”
“For years the Iranians anchored a big cargo ship, the Saviz, near the Bab-al-Mandab to keep track of tanker traffic and naval movements. The Israelis hit it badly enough so that the Iranians replaced it with the Behshad. When the war started, we told them to move it. They didn’t. One of our F-15s from Saudi Arabia; two two-thousand-pound bombs; no more Behshad.”
He addressed Movius. “As unlikely as it might be, it would be embarrassing to take an Iranian torpedo. XO, double the lookouts and require surface scanning for torpedoes. Be prepared for flank speed and extreme maneuver.”
“Aye, sir,” Movius replied, “we sure as hell can do extreme maneuver,” and got to the order without confirming it by repetition. It was too long for that, and they were far enough into the deployment that often, other than to the helm, confirmation of commands wasn’t always necessary.
Everyone on the bridge could see in Rensselaer’s expression that he was reproaching himself for his negligence, which, had he not caught it in time, might—if only at the outside—have been catastrophic.
With a new course having been coaxed randomly and capriciously from Lanham’s head—at one point he spun around and placed his finger on the chart, eyes closed, to set a waypoint—they came close to land most of the time. Already having upped their readiness because of the potential submarine threat, now, closer to land, they had to be prepared for small boat attack as well.
The change in course meant that they would arrive at Djibouti and, subsequently, on station, roughly fourteen hours later than planned. They had to cover the guns and periodically sweep sand off the decks, because with zigzagging they came so close to the mountains of the Hijaz in Saudi Arabia, and to the arid wastes of Egypt, the Sudan, Eritrea, and Yemen, that it was as if they were sailing on land.
The wind kicked up at Al-Qusayr on the Egyptian coast. Only eighty miles inland, the Nile curved eastward, but from the Red Sea one could spy only sand, yellow and white rock, and the occasional opening of a wadi that beckoned to the interior without promise of anything but desert—though only two camel-days west the Nile flowed with ease and, having passed the cataracts, nothing to wake it from newfound contentment. Wind descends at evening from rapidly cooling deserts to displace warmer air over the water. As night progressed, masses of cold air from the Egyptian desert to the west and the Hijaz to the east met and rose over the Red Sea, lifting the warmer air toward the stars, which, through its undulating lens, appeared to be panicked, flashing like sequins and jumping like fleas.
This was the spectacle above as Athena made south, speeding over the Daedalus Reef, coming within a mile of Ras Banas—in Egyptian territorial waters, but no one was watching—and then heading 120 degrees east so as to drive toward Saudi Arabia while missing St. John’s Island by a hair, deliberately, because submarines shy from islands and reefs. Twenty miles off the Saudi coast, Athena increased speed to forty-five knots at a heading of 190 degrees south. Soon after, they saw the sparkling lights of Jiddah, and within a very few minutes it was possible to see, they thought, the distant lights of Mecca, with a hint of the dawn coming up behind them.
It was cold enough that the sailors on watch outside wore deck jackets. Facing the sea, each of them felt a loneliness freighted with neither pain nor regret. Athena seemed very small in a world infinite in extent, full of clear air and empty spaces: a world of great chances to be taken and wondrous things to see. Something that had begun opposite Gibraltar as they skirted the coast of North Africa—building in the Mediterranean, solidified at Haifa in the Biblical Levant, accelerated during the battle in the Canal, and now permanently impressed as if by Khartoum to starboard and Mecca to port—was the sense that however much they might battle and strike, their agency was not their own. Instead, they felt carried forward, apart from their will as much as they now felt part of the sea, the land, the sky, and the stars.
By 1100, where between Eritrea and Saudi Arabia the Red Sea begins to narrow, the sun was again kiln-like. The farther south they went, the more careful they were, hugging the desolate coast of Eritrea and slipping between the many former Italian islets, until twenty-five miles north of the Bab-al-Mandab they accelerated from the thirty knots to which they had slowed among the islets and made flank speed to the narrows: the twenty miles of sea between Africa and Arabia, an ideal spot for a submarine lying in wait. On high alert, they raced across the water. In the excitement of G-forces and forward momentum, the sailors had to hold on as Athena leaned port and starboard like a speedboat, tossing spray, challenging balance.
At evening Djibouti was in sight. But before they were safe in the harbor they stayed on watch, for the submarine danger, as unlikely as it was, would not subside until, hunting for Sahand, they were far down the littoral of East Africa.
*
On a small ship, news and opinion spreads instantaneously and osmotically. Rensselaer was not surprised that yet another officer plagued by doubt and wanting to be constructive knocked on his cabin door. In this case it was Lieutenant, Senior Grade, Marchetti, Athena’s weapons officer. He was earnest in general, and now especially so. Rensselaer usually related to earnestness with a silence by which to encourage doubt, thus cultivating objectivity in a young man suddenly seized by a brilliant idea.
Marchetti took a seat. “Sir, given that we’ll be outgunned—guns and missiles—by Sahand, I don’t know if it’s possible to prevail without either support from the air or another vessel. I’ve done the analysis using the Hughes Equations, and it’s clear we’re at a decisive disadvantage, to say the least.”
“What are the Hughes Equations?” Rensselaer asked, deadpan.
Marchetti was shocked. “Captain Hughes, sir.”
“Yes, I know, Wayne Hughes, but I’m not familiar with his equations.”
Marchetti was somewhat alarmed. “Everybody studies them in systems analysis. The Hughes Salvo Equations, sir.”
“My postgraduate training wasn’t in systems analysis. The last time I did that kind of thing was at the Academy, before you were born, and most likely way before Captain Hughes derived his formulas. But, okay, what are they?”
Marchetti happily leaned forward in his chair. “In this case, if delta A equals, parenthesis, theta sub beta, small alpha, beta sub two, large beta, parenthesis, divided by small alpha sub one, where large beta two is the number of Sahand’s missiles that are operable, and theta small beta is targeting ability assessed as point seven, then. . . .”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Sir, if you run the equations, it means, sir. . . . May I speak freely?”
“Of course. Speak freely.”
“It means we’re screwed.”
“Marchetti.”
“Sir.”
“You’ve read Clausewitz.”
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“Sun Tzu, Corbett, Mahan, Hughes . . . ?”
Marchetti nodded.
“How do you think those guys distilled war into the maxims, concepts, and equations that they did?”
“By observation.”
“That’s right. They didn’t read them in a rule book. They distilled them from their experience and observation.”
“Right.”
“And for whom?”
“For everybody, sir.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Not for everybody. For the majority of people who, like them, experience and observe—in real life, and in study—but who, unlike them, are incapable of coming to the same conclusions. Strategy and tactics are in essence metaphysical. You either have it or you don’t. Most soldiers and sailors don’t. They have to follow the rules. But the rules are inexact, so they often lead to trouble and defeat when those who can do nothing but follow them are faced with variations they don’t cover. You see?
“People who do have it are actually repelled by rules—by the inexactitude and rigidity. You can follow Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and the rest. Or, you can be like them.”
“Are you saying, sir, that you are like Sun Tzu?”
“No, I’m saying that I’m like Attila the Fucking Hun.”
“Attila the Fucking Hun?”
“Did you ever see crows driving away a hawk?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve seen it many, many times. The hawk is a raptor, with talons and a sharp beak. He can dive like a Stuka. The crow, well, the crow is a crow. But in concert they never fail to drive away the hawk.”
“With all due respect, sir, we’re not in concert.”
“I know. We’re not even a crow—more like a mockingbird. Except for the Harpoons, for which we have insufficient long-distance terminal guidance, vis-à-vis the Sahand we’re outgunned and outranged.”
“That’s my point, sir.”
“Right. That’s why we’ve got to be like Attila. . . .”
“The Fucking Hun.”
“Yes.”
“Fierce and ruthless?” Marchetti asked.
“Not at all. That wouldn’t save us or sink Sahand.”
“Then why?”
“Attila was no theorist, and the Hughes Salvo Equations are inapplicable here. Why? Because—read them—the Hughes Equations assume a rough equality between forces.”
“I thought you didn’t know the Hughes Equations, as you weren’t a gunnery officer and they came around after you were at the Academy.”
“Pedagogical license.”
“But . . . Attila?”
“Ah. Attila had the stirrup, and his enemies didn’t. With the stirrup, his archers could make quick turns on their horses, hands free. They could fire backward while turned in the saddle, aim more surely, gallop faster, stop suddenly. His advantage was the stirrup, and how it was used. We’ve got to find our stirrup.
“I’m saying, Mr. Marchetti, that if when I say fire you are able to put our missiles and guns on target as ordered, we’ll make the best of it. We’re not going to get air or fleet support. That’s the whole point. That’s our challenge.”
“So, what are you going to do, Captain?” Marchetti asked, with the wavering doubt in which the young instinctively approach the old as the young come into the power of their prime and the old lose their grip. Rensselaer didn’t hold this against him. For other reasons, his eyes narrowed somewhat as he spoke.
“The stirrup, Mr. Marchetti, the stirrup. I’m going to find the stirrup. Then I’m going to put Athena in harm’s way, and fight her as of old. I’m not going to worry that we’re outmatched, and I’m going to sink the goddamned Sahand.”
Marchetti was a good and skillful officer, with a superb temperament, but, a little shaken, he reported this conversation with the captain to his fellow officers. Very rapidly and with poetic license, it made its way around the ship: “The captain says he’s Attila the Fucking Hun.”
*
At the pier in Djibouti Port, trucks were lined up as Rensselaer had requested of Fleet, and the transfer of fuel, ammunition, and foodstuffs began immediately. After the frustratingly slow process of tying up, Rensselaer and three men—Josephson; Di Loreto of Marine mammal-hood; and Holworthy, intimidating of aspect and demeanor—approached an Army truck from which ammunition was being off-loaded.
“Who’s in charge here?” Rensselaer asked.
“I am, sir,” the driver, a corporal, answered.
“I need to borrow your truck.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re ordered to off-load this ammo and return to camp.”
“Take it off the truck right now and put it on the ground.”
“Sir, I don’t have the authorization to do that. I could call in but I don’t know what they’ll say.” While he was speaking, Rensselaer made a quick circle around him, quick enough that the corporal turned his head first to the left as he spoke and then to the right, without moving his feet. He wondered why Rensselaer had done this, and why Navy men were sometimes as strange as space aliens.
Rensselaer said, “Is that”—pointing beyond the corporal—“your hundred-dollar bill?”
The corporal turned. A brand-new hundred-dollar bill fluttered on the ground. He seemed dumbfounded. Seconds passed. “Yes,” he said. “I believe it is.”
“Take us to wherever we can get things like camouflage netting, tarps, wood, spars, and metal buckets,” Rensselaer commanded as, after the ammunition had been removed, he climbed into the truck’s cab.
“What?”
“Lemonnier has everything in the world. We need camouflage netting, tarps, spars, wood, and metal buckets,” Rensselaer repeated.
“You do?”
“We do. Do you know where we can get them?”
“What are spars?”
“Like a pole or a boom.”
“Like in construction?”
“Right, a light cross-member or beam.”
“Okay.” The corporal set his mind to it and off they went.
As they drove through Djibouti and into Camp Lemonnier, Josephson said, “It’s like the crappy parts of Los Angeles except there aren’t any homeless people and everyone has short hair.”
“Not the girls,” the corporal replied.
“No. Not the girls.”
“Some of them.”
“Yeah. Some of them.”
They pulled up to a giant warehouse, which the corporal said was the Army’s version of Home Depot. “You can probably get anything here,” he announced.
“And rope,” Rensselaer said. “I forgot rope.”
“Go for it, sir,” the corporal said, not quite sure if he were dreaming.
Inside, they faced a fearsome barrier of clerks. For someone of Rensselaer’s temperament, it was better to face the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps than a phalanx of U.S. Army supply clerks. He approached the easiest-looking one, a young fellow who seemed like a better mark than the older, cannier, and likely unpleasant ones. Whereas the danger they promised was the years they’d marinated in the (to them) sex of bureaucracy, his was that of entry-level stupidity. Rensselaer took a chance.
“Yeah, we have all that,” the clerk replied to the spoken list. “I need your requisition papers and approvals.”
“No time. Emergency.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Lives may depend upon it.”
The clerk smiled. “I’ve heard that before.”
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
Rensselaer pursed his lips and prepared another approach.
“Oh yeah?” said the clerk.
“What you mean, ‘Oh yeah?’? I didn’t say anything.”
“You coulda told me,” the clerk followed.
“I could have told you what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever.”
Now it was Rensselaer who was dumbfounded. After a moment, he covertly dropped another hundred, and asked, “Is this your hundred-dollar bill?”
“What hundred-dollar bill?”
Rensselaer pointed. “That one. The one on the floor.”
“Nope,” said the clerk.
“Are you sure?”
“I am. I don’t think it is, because I dropped three hundreds.”
“Crap,” said Rensselaer, “and tell me, don’t you address officers properly?”
“Not the Navy. I can’t read the insignia. As far as I know, you’re Sinbad the Sailor. Everything will be on loading dock eight in about fifteen minutes. The only wood we have is a million pallets around back. You’re welcome to them.”
For the lower-ranking warehousemen it was strange to see officers eagerly loading a truck. On the way back to the port, Rensselaer inventoried what they had: twenty artillery camouflage nets; twenty large tarps; one thousand feet of one-half-inch manila rope; twelve large metal buckets; four twenty-foot aluminum poles; and two freight pallets.
Unhappy to begin with about being trapped on Athena, Holworthy continued to suspect that the captain was not entirely sound. The others wondered as well. Di Loreto had no problem about questioning Rensselaer.
“Sir, do we really need all this stuff?”
“Do we need porpoises?” Rensselaer replied.
Unaware of Di Loreto’s prior service, Holworthy was now actually alarmed. He repeated the question skeptically. “Do we need porpoises, sir?”
“Ask him,” Rensselaer said, meaning Di Loreto.
“Do we need porpoises?” Holworthy asked Di Loreto as the truck bumped along at high speed.
“Dolphins,” Di Loreto answered.
“I don’t understand,” Holworthy stated, feeling as if maybe he had been drugged.
“Why would you?” Rensselaer asked rhetorically. “You’re a SEAL!”
In response to Rensselaer’s delight in this, Holworthy just widened his eyes.
When they pulled up to the pier they called in a work party and everything they had taken from the warehouse was on board in five minutes. The other loading and refueling had been finished, and men were already in place at the cleats and bitts. Ten minutes later, after the officer of the deck—in this case Movius—had moved from the quarterdeck to the bridge, and the commands had been given (ease the spring lines; slack number two; check the steering line; cast off all), Athena made her way into the late afternoon, and by dusk was deep along the Gulf of Aden. Her course was straighter than in the Red Sea, not because the submarine danger was that much less but rather because Rensselaer decided that it was late enough that she now had to hurry along even if at greater risk.
He noticed a change in the young sailors manning the guns. Some had been afraid, but now they were so taken up by their surroundings that they felt only joy. Coming into theater, everyone aboard could feel what was ahead. It heightened their senses and their thoughts, so that they saw things anew. When properly sung, the Navy Hymn rolls like those great and powerful waves, high and deep, that are yet smooth enough not to break at the crest. To those whose lives are on the sea its music conjures images of the oceans. Now, with the world sharpened as if in a fine and magical lens, for some of Athena’s crew the smooth and rolling swells conjured in their hearts and minds the sound of the song itself.