THE THIRD BATTLE: ATHENA VS. SAHAND

Two days later, deep in the Indian Ocean and off the trade routes and sea-lanes, they were over the Somali Basin, sailing toward the northern edge of the Mascarene Plateau, in almost virgin territory devoid of anything that might appear on the surface other than porpoises and dolphins. Placid, green seas by day rolling gelatinously smooth, emerald, and slick, turned miraculously blue at night as luminescent sea creatures lit the translucent waters. And all the way to the horizon, the sea was glossed in the kind of azure one might see in a Technicolor cartoon. They were eager to hunt the Sahand despite the forbidding overmatch, and anxious to face it if they could find it. For no particular reason, they were sure they would.

On the empty sea it was hard to believe that they were at war. Where once were heard the arresting noise of ten thousand rifle bolts rammed shut, ten thousand hoofs pounding a field in headlong charge, or the chest-shaking sound of tanks, their engines unlike anything in civilian life, now the dominant sound of war was the roar of fighter planes rising from desert strips or swooping in from above. But not on Athena, alone at sea, with none of the basso profundo of mass formations, tanks, or planes. The sound of her engines was ever present but not overwhelming. What the sailors would remember were the almost musical sounds of the wind as they accompanied the loneliness of patrol.

In the middle of the afternoon, Athena came to a stop and was allowed to drift in a two-foot swell caressed by a light breeze. Without the wind from her forward motion, it became almost unbearably hot on deck. Over the 1MC, Movius announced, “Lieutenant Di Loreto and Chief Pisecki to the captain’s quarters.”

Five foot seven, Pisecki was 190 pounds of muscle that seemed as hard as stone. He had a thick, red-brown mustache and a heavy beard that even though he shaved twice a day was always apparent. His eyes were blue and set amazingly far apart, and no one on the ship or perhaps anywhere else had ever seen him in other than an inexplicably high state of energy and cheer.

“Close the door behind you, gentlemen, and take a seat.” Rensselaer had brought a second and third chair into his tiny cabin. It was tight.

“Sir,” Di Loreto said.

They sat facing one another, Rensselaer’s right arm and Pisecki’s left resting on the built-in desk, and Di Loreto packed uncomfortably into a corner. Rensselaer went on the 1MC, stretching the coiled cord farther than normal because of his unaccustomed position at the desk. “All hands, this is the captain. Very soon, Lieutenant Di Loreto and Chief Pisecki may require your assistance. Make sure that you render it efficiently. Do not hesitate, balk, or gawk. You may think they’re out of their minds. They aren’t. They will be executing my direct orders. If you’re puzzled, translate your puzzlement into usefulness. Captain out.”

From stem to stern, Athena’s sailors turned to one another in silence, and with facial expressions alone communicated skepticism and astonishment. Their widened eyes, slightly raised cheeks, and slightly open mouths, said, What?

“Frank?” Rensselaer asked Pisecki.

“Sir?”

“You had time on the Coast Guard’s tall ship, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. Six months on the Eagle.”

“You’re our marlinspike sailor.”

“I’d like to think so, sir.”

“And when you were on the Stennis you were in . . . ?”

“Underway replenishment.”

“And the lieutenant is highly skilled at mechanical improvisation. This should be easy for you, then.” Rensselaer paused to organize his thoughts, and then spoke slowly. “Rig taut lines from the topmast to the stern and the prow. Halfway between the peak and the stern, set up the spars we got at Lemonnier, like a mizzen mast. Fashion three appropriately proportioned ‘sails,’ and set up a sheet and pulley system so you can run them up as jib, mainsail, and mizzen.

“For each of the buckets we took on, fill a gallon jug with half diesel fuel, a quarter lubricating grease, and a quarter cooking oil. Fill the buckets with kindling from the pallets. Suspend some of them and put others on deck, everything away from ordnance, with the jugs of fuel, and a flare or two for lighting each one. I want the guns, radar, rockets, and RHIB covered with camouflage netting or tarps that can be pulled off as fast as a magician pulls a tablecloth from under a set table. I suggest that you make them such that they can easily break in the middle. It just occurs to me now that that’s maybe how Gypsy Rose Lee managed. She was before Velcro, but not before snaps.”

“Sir?”

“When we clear EMCON, Google her.”

He continued, “Have everything ready to go so that the sails can be raised, the tarps placed, the buckets lit, in just a few minutes. The faster the better. Can you do this?”

“I don’t see why not, sir,” Pisecki said. “It’s not like cross-decking explosives.”

“I’ll leave it up to the two of you. If you have a problem, come to me.”

“We’re going to be a Q ship, Captain, aren’t we,” Di Loreto said.

“Yes, we are. A lot of the crew won’t know what that is, and they’ll wonder what we’re doing. Let them. I want to see how it looks before I announce it and we drill, if we have time.”

“Shall we start immediately, sir?”

“Yes. And work through every watch until you finish. Though we’ve heard nothing further about Sahand, she might be bearing down on us as we speak.”

*

Neither Pisecki nor Di Loreto let on, each of them giving orders with a poker face and communicating neither opposition nor enthusiasm. The crew, however, had the perpetually entertaining and increasing enjoyment of thinking that the captain had really gone crazy. They were apprehensive of serving under his absolute authority, but delighted that his erratic orders reduced that authority, thus elevating them. Needless to say, thinking that he profited, Holworthy enjoyed this the most even as he was tortured by it. The crew hadn’t wanted to think as they now did of Rensselaer—for he had been an excellent captain—but they couldn’t avoid it. It was strange enough when they set up and rigged the buckets, and put in place the “masts” and sheets. But when they ran up the sails they had stapled and sewn together, they began to get really nervous.

By the time the tarps were placed, the sails had filled with the rising breeze to the point that Athena moved south-southeast at two or three knots.

“Goddamn,” said Roberts, a deckhand, head upturned to the billowed sails. “The captain must have a gallon of scotch hidden in his cabin.”

“You think he’s just nuts?” asked another.

“I don’t know,” Roberts answered, still peering in wonder at the sails. “It’s not as if we’re low on fuel.”

“Maybe he’s a member of the Sierra Club.”

*

Next, Rensselaer met with the XO, the chief engineer, and Holworthy. They were apprehensive.

“I want the three of you to coordinate the following as rapidly as you can. Chief, I want you to improvise extra gun mounts on the port and starboard sides. I don’t care if you have to weld, bolt, clamp, or glue, but I want it so that we can move all our firepower cross-deck from one side to the other. That is, four more fifty-caliber mounts, one each on both sides amidships and astern, one more minigun mount on each bridge wing, and a grenade launcher mount on each side.”

“We don’t have the steel for that, sir.”

“Improvise. Strap’em down if necessary. Figure it out.”

“Mr. Holworthy, how many anti-tank rockets do you have?”

“Six.”

“How many M4 grenade launchers?”

“Six.”

“How many sniper rifles?” Rensselaer knew—he was just taking inventory.

“Two.”

“Light machine guns?”

“Two.”

“I want you to establish positions on the port and starboard sides for you and your men so that you can fast-break from one to the other, with weapons distributed so that whatever combination each man has, he can quickly switch either opportunistically or in response to orders. Ask for a volunteer to take position way up top, with one of the sniper rifles, an anti-tank rocket, and a light machine gun, as well as his M4 with grenade launcher. That will be the most exposed position on board—only a volunteer.”

“No problem. I’ll do it.” As if the supports had been knocked out from beneath his satisfying conclusions, it pained Holworthy to be asked to do the kind of thing he wanted to do.

“It’s extraordinarily exposed. It could be rough.”

Holworthy shrugged his shoulders.

“Appreciated. XO?”

“Sir.”

“A lot of drilling’s going to happen on short order, and we may not have much time.

Everyone will be bumping into everyone else; no way around it. Start now even before the new mounts. Have them lay the weapons on deck if the mounts aren’t yet ready. I want to be able to move everything from one side to another in two minutes or less. Start now.”

“Now? Right now?”

“Right now. Drill general quarters, and organize it. Then arrange with Di Loreto and Pisecki to give them the men they need to man the canvas, ropes, and buckets. Right away.”

*

For two days, they drifted—and sailed very slowly when the sails were raised—in the almost calm, abandoned spaces, as if they were the only ship, the only people, in a world of nothing but water. Still, and paradoxically, activity on deck was furious. A few scuffles broke out as the SEALs and sailors fought for space and right-of-way, and there were a dozen cuts and blood blisters as guns were lifted off their mounts, rushed across the deck, and remounted.

They worked so hard and so long in humid, oven-like heat that they were frequently punchy, and that was when, particularly among the ropes-and-canvas detail, pirate talk began. Pisecki barked out tall-ship nomenclature—which they quickly learned—to which they responded by saying, “Aye, me hearties!” or “Skull and bones to the top gallant, God save the Queen!” He let them, even if they seemed drunk, because they were having a good time as they strained every muscle to beat his stopwatch while simultaneously being as piraty as they could be. The SEALs thought the sailors were idiots, but SEALs often think that non-SEALs are idiots, despite which they are almost universally forgiven because they are SEALs, the tip of the spear, forgivably crazy. Now everyone seemed crazy.

By evening of day two they could shift the heavy and formidable armament from one side to the other in slightly less than two minutes. The canvas could be raised in a minute, after which the deck crew stood by the buckets, flares in hand. That night, with the exercises mastered the normal watches resumed and the stars came out with neither diesel smoke nor wavy air to mar them. It was as if, alone on the ocean, without main engine noise, Athena had slipped back in time to the beginning of the world.

*

Rensselaer was on the bridge. He thought of Katy in her tight, tan, sheath dress, her skin the same hue but lighter, and—given her age—not flawless, but glowing. From the side, with her reading glasses and her usual penetrating expression, she was formidable, with an attractiveness that emanated from her intelligence and power.

He had always loved to engage with her on these terms, and could understand why at her firm she was so desired. You could sit across a table from her, discussing anything, even tax law, and her face, her speech, what she did with her hands, and what she said and how she put it . . . these alone were an almost violent, overwhelming, all-powerful seduction. She would pull off her glasses and turn full face toward him, and her particular beauty—the idiosyncratic perfection of her features, and her soft searching look—would combine with all else about her almost enough to knock him out.

This kind of memory could be repeated over and over again not with diminution but amplification. And so the captain of Athena was lost in them as his ship drifted silently over the ocean lit by an almost full moon. Then he was interrupted by Velez.

“Message, sir.” Velez’s tension and excitement awakened from their reveries everyone on the bridge.

Twice, and slowly, Rensselaer read the message. Then he nodded, and after a moment or two spoke to the XO and the others present. “This is a long, coded message within a Fifth Fleet coded message. Fifth Fleet hasn’t read it. How did you read it, Mr. Velez?”

“I used a package of one-time keys, Captain, for communicating directly with other command authorities when naval channels are inoperative. Although it came over on Fifth Fleet it was encoded to fit the Fort Meade CODEMCON for CIA. I tried it and it worked.”

“It did. It’s directly from CIA. No reason not to share it with the Navy unless CIA thinks Iran might have a door into Navy COMMS. If Iran did, and they read this, we could never catch Sahand.” He summarized the message.

“Soon after dark last night, Sahand slipped into a bay in Madagascar to refuel from a barge. All the lights were turned off. Three hours, then she was gone.” He looked up. “I’m continually surprised by where our assets pop up all over the world. Do you know who Martin Gilbert was?”

This seemed odd. None of them did.

“He was a great Oxford historian, the biographer of Churchill. The day after Nine-Eleven, two suits showed up in his office and spread dozens of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs across his desk, pictures of him and his students at his lectures in the seventies. He was astounded. They asked if he recognized a kid in a number of the photos. No, he didn’t. Why? he asked. The kid was Usama bin Ladin. Who the hell was taking those pictures, at that time? Why? And how did they do it without detection? That’s what I mean.

“Okay, not by coincidence, the next morning a light plane took off from Mayotte, on a course to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. This is a relatively well used flight path, and wouldn’t merit attention from maritime traffic below.

“It was our plane, with our people, and it intersected Sahand’s course, which by triangulation before, over, and after the intercept, they were able to fix as a heading of twenty-four-point-five-seven degrees north-northeast, point of origin, these co-ordinates.” He read them. “Buck, go to work.”

Lanham had already bent over the chart table. The line he drew went straight to the section of the Arabian Sea where the Fleet and the carriers were stationed. He announced what he had found.

In response, Rensselaer said, “We can only assume that to get to the launch point for the Tsirkon in a semi-ballistic trajectory originating four hundred nautical miles from target, Sahand will be moving as fast as possible. You know how these people think—not that we ourselves wouldn’t. We sank the original Sahand in the Tanker War of eighty-eight. They’re losing the war, and now they may have all their eggs in one basket. For them, everything might depend upon the Sahand. Take out a carrier or two to avenge the namesake and hit the Great Satan.

“Mr. Lanham, get us on their track as far distant from the carrier-groups as is consonant with both our and their maximum sustainable speeds.”

Buck used both the chart table and electronics. It took only five minutes, and he checked it over several times.

“What have you got?”

“The safe point of intercept, assuming an even greater speed of which Sahand is capable, is three degrees, thirty-eight minutes, thirty-five seconds north, and fifty-three degrees, thirty-seven minutes, fifty-one seconds east. I left some wiggle room, but that latitude and longitude are the exact intercept of Sahand’s unmodified course.”

“How far are we from intercept?”

“Two hundred and ten-point-six-three miles nautical directly west.”

“And how long after we get there at forty knots until the Sahand might show up?”

“It depends on how fast they go—roughly a day, a day and a half.”

“XO.”

“Sir.”

“Wake up the engines. We’ve got some slack, so set Mr. Lanham’s course to the intercept at thirty-five knots. I don’t want to sit at the intercept too long and get nervous. Double the watches at twelve hundred hours tomorrow, when we’ll move to Condition Two.”

“Sir?” Movius asked. “On a PC?” Condition II, a heightened state of readiness just below Condition I—general quarters—was not by the book for a smaller vessel.

“It’s warranted. The Sahand outpunches us. By all rights, to win, even to survive, we should be a much larger ship, to which Condition Two would be entirely appropriate.”

Everyone aboard who was not asleep could feel the turbines muscling up and the swing of the bow as Athena turned east, steering by GPS, inertial navigation, compass, and, as if to confirm all this, a star that caught and kept the helmsman’s eye.

*

As Athena moved toward the intercept, Rensselaer went to the engine spaces and queried the engineering chief. “I should know this, but I don’t. In an emergency, how fast can you go from cold turbines to full power?”

Almost as if he fancied himself a SEAL, the chief had quite a non-regulation beard, which Rensselaer had ignored. “It depends on how long we’ve been cold, or, better, how cold we actually are; if we want to monkey with the fuel mixture; and if we want to accept some degradation in a less-than-gradual startup. I mean, no one really knows, but I like to think that cold metal at full speed is not good in terms of future fatigue.”

“Let’s say we’ve been cold for a day. . . .”

“You’re certainly not going to get colder than that, unless you have to calculate for ambient temperature.”

“And the fuel mixture is set for maximum volatility. . . .”

“Then you can’t get, initially, maximum rpm, but you can soon after.”

“Okay. And with my permission, in writing if you want, you can degrade the gears, because if you don’t we’ll likely be sunk anyway.”

“A rough estimate, with those parameters?”

“With those parameters.”

The chief thought. “Mind you, it’s not exact, but if we’re on standby and ready to go, I think that with this power plant and in these conditions I can get full power to the AIMs”—the advanced induction motors—“in two minutes, give or take ten seconds. How does that work for you?”

“Better than I thought. Even assuming that Sahand’s sonar operators are alert, by the time they notice, fix, confirm, and then notify the bridge, depending on how far Sahand stands off, it’ll be too late.”

“For us or them?”

“Them.”

“Sir, I don’t know what you’ve got planned, but I hope it works.”

“So do I.”

Rensselaer briefed the crew in two groups so he could do it in the mess while keeping the ship almost fully manned. He spoke without bravado, as what he proposed was hardly guaranteed to succeed.

“Does anyone know what a Q ship is, or, was?” Several hands went up.

“Boatswain’s Mate Alford?”

“In World War One, the British equipped freighters with concealed naval guns. When a commerce raider approached, panels would drop along the sides, and the British ships would blast the hell out of them—especially subs.”

“Exactly. We . . . are going to look like the burning, disheveled wreck of a sailing vessel. We can do that. We’re small enough. Sahand will see neither our armament nor us until we drop the tarps. Then we’ll use everything we’ve got in carefully controlled sequence to try to disable and then sink her.”

“What’s the catch?” Rensselaer was asked.

“You really have to ask? The catch is that if we haven’t in fact calculated the correct intercept and we’re sitting there dead in the water, we’ll have to move to engage, and they’ll hear the signature of our engines. They almost certainly don’t have it on record, but in this empty quarter it’d stand out and they’d be alerted. The catch goes on: even if we’re sitting smack on their course and they’re not interested in investigating, or are too disciplined to be distracted from their mission; if they stand too far off even if they do investigate; if they see through our stratagem; if we have to chase them in order to fight them and they can launch their missiles at us from range; even assuming they don’t sense the trap, if our tactics and saturation fire are insufficient; if their crew consists of more naval regulars than IRGC and they’re appropriately manned; if their weapons are properly functional; if they’re lucky, or we’re unlucky. . . .

“A hundred things could go wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything better to try in the face of a ship many times our size and with much heavier armament. At least we’ll be able to pinpoint its position, which will be valuable in itself and all that’s expected of us.”

“Captain, sir,” a rating asked. “Why don’t we just report and hightail it?”

Rensselaer was appalled. “In the Revolutionary War,” he said, “with just a few ships, we fought the greatest sea power that had ever existed, and we won some extraordinary and unexpected victories, once even beaching a sloop and dragging its cannon up a hill to defeat a far larger vessel befuddled by the trick. You can sink a sloop, but you can’t sink a hill. Though the world and Americans themselves think we can’t operate any longer at a disadvantage, victory at a disadvantage is in our blood, never forgotten, and still and always the greatest prize.”

Then he heard, barely, a voice in the back of the assembled crew. “He wants to be an admiral.”

“The hell I do,” Rensselaer snapped. “I’m retiring after this deployment. I’d be retired now but for the war. My job is to keep you alive, but it’s also to sink the Sahand so that others may live. Pray that Sahand doesn’t take a smoke-shrouded, drifting vessel in tatters for a U.S. Navy combatant ready to spring.”

*

The night before the expected battle, Rensselaer had a dream the likes of which surprised him. Floating in darkness in the air over the sea, without the oppressions of either gravity or pain, he looked up at the stars. But what he saw was not cold, distant, silver-white light, ethereal and detached. Every single star had vaulted over light-years of distance to show its true self, a roiling, orange, red, and white giant of ceaseless nuclear detonations, roaring like the fire in a forge. A trillion trillion stars, pulsing and hot, that even after the dissolution of humankind, much less Rensselaer’s unnoticed part in it, meant that if not life then motion, purpose, and a kind of passion would outlast human vanities, in quantities unfathomable and for time illimitable.

No matter what the outcome when they met Sahand, and no matter should he and the others perish, the fires of the world beyond would burn and the heart of everything would beat. Morning broke with a surprisingly cool and dry breeze, rippling the water enough so that the rising sun was reflected by uncountable flashing diamonds, as if a shower of burning stars had landed on the sea. Athena was all business. Very few of the men spoke. The training had stopped, and preparations for battle were everywhere underway on the busy decks.

She faced south, her unique periscope raised, the sailor staring at the monitor trying not to doze, when something that electrified him appeared on the screen. “XO!” he screamed. “Look at this! What the hell is this!?”

Movius nearly jumped to the monitor. There, its image waving as if elasticized, was the Sahand. It was, however, floating not on the sea but in the air, five or six ship-heights above the water.

“Is it the system?” the sailor asked. “I mean, how stupid is that?”

Movius didn’t answer, but summoned the captain to the bridge. And Rensselaer came at a run. As soon as he saw the Sahand floating in the air, he asked the OOD, “Did you download the NIMA calculator?”

“Yes sir.”

“Bring it up.”

It was up very quickly. “Running, sir.”

“Input the variables. . . .” Using as a scale Sahand’s height from the waterline to the tip of her mast, Rensselaer placed a rule against the screen to determine approximately how far above the water the image appeared to be. Then he followed with a few numbers, and after pushing a button the OOD announced, “A hundred and five nautical miles, sir.”

“That’s a gift,” Rensselaer said, “a great gift.”

“Sir,” the sailor could not restrain himself from asking, “what’s going on?”

“Fata Morgana,” Rensselaer answered.

“Fata who?”

“Ducting.” The distance meant he didn’t need to hurry, but Rensselaer compressed his explanation nonetheless. Though Sahand would not arrive for hours, he was eager to start taking advantage of what had just happened. “Fata Morgana is another name for Morgan le Fay, a fairy enchantress and the half sister of King Arthur.”

The rating failed to suppress a nervous laugh. Then he repeated what the captain had just said: “A fairy enchantress and the half sister of King Arthur?”

“It’s the name given to a physical phenomenon called ducting, a product of the refraction of light. You’ve heard of mirages?”

“Yes sir.”

“A mirage is an inferior refraction, meaning that something above the horizon appears to be below it. The Fata Morgana is a superior refraction, when something at or below the horizon appears to be above it. Sometimes if conditions are right you can see cities and mountains many hundreds of miles distant. From San Diego you can sometimes see San Clemente Island, sixty-five miles away.” Then, mainly to Movius and the OOD, “It’s more or less impossible that it happened in reverse, either visually or electromagnetically, enabling Sahand to see us. Unlikely this gift of God was offered to them as well, even though they think they’ve cornered the market on Him. Soon, though, they’ll pick us up on their radar. Let’s get everything into place. Shut down all machinery. Total EMCON. Don’t drop a wrench or bang your head. Nothing. Rig for quiet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re almost right on the line and only slightly east of it. Slowly and quietly—we have the time—all weapons to the port side. Camouflage up. When that’s done, general quarters, voice talkers, ballistic protection, medical prep. Make sure there’s extra ammunition port and starboard. Make the Harpoons ready to fire. Assume Condition Zebra. We’ll get it done one thing at a time, silently. Shut down the MC until the first shot is fired.”

He slowed himself deliberately, and was quiet for a moment. “Even though they’ve stripped the seventy-six-millimeter gun, they’ve got a forty, two twenties, six torpedoes, eight Qader missiles, and a helicopter. Let’s hope they don’t launch it to suss us out, because if they do we’re done.”

Somehow he seemed to know that they wouldn’t, although he did not know either how he knew or why they wouldn’t. Sometimes in battle a magnificent and intoxicating chain of luck arises. One can feel it as intensely as a wound. Confident that his orders had been assimilated and would be carried out, Rensselaer said, “Go,” and they did.

*

Knowing that in a few hours they might be dead, maimed, wounded, or adrift and doomed to starve or drown, the crew had the concentration of mind and movement in which things are done with speed and grace and not much talk: the intensity almost seemed to say that this was real life and all else was illusion.

Quiet, brief commands raised the camouflage and nets aloft until even from fairly close Athena was unrecognizable—no longer a tight, clean warship but a messy, disorganized hulk. The pulleys had run smoothly and the lines hadn’t tangled. Other than the softly spoken orders and the occasional click of fittings and closing of breeches, the only sound was that of the wind, and of waves slapping the hull more like the rapid oscillations of a lake than the muscular pounding of the ocean.

“I hope their radar isn’t advanced enough to read our steel and jagged projections as a warship,” Movius said to Rensselaer.

“I don’t know about their radar, XO,” Rensselaer answered, watching the transfer of weapons starboard to port, “but my hope is that we’re small enough and close enough to the water that they’ll take us for a fishing boat. And why would a coastal combatant be out in the middle of the IO all alone? Let’s say they did make us for what we are. They’ve got to figure that they could take us quite easily, so if we’re on the way to their launch point, why not put another feather in their bonnet?”

“Because they’ll concentrate on their mission.”

“A lot of people can’t resist taking a pawn.”

“Not good chess players. And they invented chess, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Rensselaer said, “but we invented the corn dog. Top that.”

The sailors on deck wondered somewhat nervously why the Captain and XO were laughing, but were comforted and somewhat amazed to see all the firepower that was now concentrated on the port side. Athena was a small ship, the smallest in the Navy but for the fact that she was a step up from her sister Cyclones. She didn’t appear lethal, but something extraordinary was falling into place behind the nets and tarps. Port-facing, three 7.62 miniguns—two on the bridge wing, one bow-mounted on the RHIB—were each capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute, 18,000 combined, at 300 per second. They didn’t have this much ammunition to match for long their rate of fire, but the initial intense blast of so many NATO rounds would be suppressive, mutilating, and terrifying.

They weren’t able to transfer the starboard hip-pocket to port, so the one on the port side, their only defense against incoming, sea-skimming missiles, would have to serve. The six, double-barreled, .50-caliber Brownings were theoretically capable of, collectively, 12,000 rounds per minute. Though a rate rather than an achievable salvo, the thousands of rounds of armor-piercing, explosive, incendiary, and airburst ammunition could drop a paralyzing curtain of steel and flame across the deck of any ship. Two grenade launchers, now port-mounted, could fire, collectively, at a rate of 700 rounds per minute, out to a range of a mile. Four sailors manned Stinger antiaircraft missiles they were to fire point-blank. Rensselaer had earmarked four of the remaining Griffin missiles and one of the Harpoons to be fired upon his order.

The six SEALs had at their disposal anti-tank rockets, light machine guns, and the two .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles. Holworthy was already concealed up top, tied in so that if he were hit he would not fall. He would use all his weapons but concentrate first on eliminating bridge personnel with the Barrett.

The biggest gun was the radar-and-optically-directed 30mm chain gun: 50 rounds per minute of either explosive, armor-piercing, incendiary, or airburst ammunition. The chief, gunners’ mates and Marchetti, the weapons officer, had carefully planned the load-outs and firing sequence for all weapons, to be modified as much as possible to meet changing circumstances, but no one in the midst of a battle was going to revert to the painstaking and time-consuming process of arranging rounds on a belt. The problem was partially soluble due to the plethora of guns, quite a few of which were loaded primarily with one type of ammunition, and could simply hold fire when it was not advantageous for them to participate.

Every man on deck, Holworthy in the yards, and the commanders on the bridge had ballistic armor and helmets. Corpsmen and damage control parties stood by their equipment. Watertightness was set. The mess stood ready for the wounded, saline and plasma already hanging on poles clamped to the laminate tables where the enlisted men ate, now like beds, with pillows at the head. And when all was ready, they waited. Sahand would be less than an hour away. They could almost feel her coming, and they hoped she would not launch her helicopter but rather come to take as close a look as possible.

*

Rather than encouraging of anxiety, the wait proved calming, as having done everything they could, they wanted to get on with it. “What are you thinking?” Rensselaer asked his XO as they peered from the bridge, knowing that the optics on the periscope would first show Sahand.

“Hava. I’ve never had opium, but when I think of her I imagine it’s like opium. The goodness and life that radiated from her, and the contrast of her military uniform and her femininity, just killed me. I can’t get over it. Hey, she’s going to Caltech. She’s as mature as a grown woman, and as enthusiastic and fresh as a girl. All I want is to be worthy of her so she might consider me.”

“I think she may have come to a similar conclusion.”

“Really? You think?”

“You didn’t see that the two of you locked onto one another with a billion volts?”

“I tried to hide it.”

“She did, too.”

“What about you, sir, what were you thinking?”

Rensselaer lifted his binocular and scanned ahead. “You know, the older you get, the weirder you get. So it’s not a fair question.”

“I answered mine.”

“All right. I was thinking about doors.”

“Doors.”

“In New Orleans sometimes it was so humid that the doors swelled, and to open or close them you had to attack with your shoulder and the full weight of your body. You’d think that, having been doors all their lives in New Orleans, they would have learned.”

“You’re not afraid, are you?” Clearly, Rensselaer was not.

“Would it help?” was his answer, betraying absolutely no fear, as there was no fear to betray.

If or when Movius would rise to command, this—Would it help?—would be the lesson he would most profitably recall.

*

After the midday meal and prayers on the Sahand, the captain had been on the bridge not ten minutes when he was told of a radar contact dead ahead at fifty-five nautical miles. He took note, assuming that by the time Sahand reached the reported position the contact would be many kilometers distant, even were it a slow-moving fishing boat. After a quarter of an hour, the radar operator called the captain to his monitor, which showed that the contact, which lay almost exactly athwart Sahand’s course, was not moving.

The captain asked what the radarman could deduce from the signal, and was told only that it suggested a ship the size of a trawler or even a dhow, and that the return was strong enough to indicate that it was constructed of steel. The captain told him to report in another fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, with distance shrinking, the contact remained unmoving as it sat neatly astride Sahand’s plotted course. The first officer proposed to dogleg around it. Without responding, the captain moved to the port side of the bridge, close to the windows. His pressed uniform, carefully trimmed black beard, and tense manner were nothing like Rensselaer’s impressive but relaxed bearing. For the captain of the Sahand was like someone who had been hurt and never gotten over it. He was perpetually alert, and perpetually reckless. With the consuming aggression of someone aggrieved, something in him made him always want to strike.

His order was spoken, the Farsi equivalent of Steady as she goes. Agitated by fear and opportunity, he maintained his rigid bearing, but the officers noticed that his speech was clipped and angry. Tension spread across the ship.

Ten nautical miles from Athena, a lookout high in Sahand’s super-structure reported a sighting at relative bearing 358 degrees. Having decided to investigate, the captain ordered two degrees to port and all hands to battle stations. Although it was done with urgency, it was nonetheless the urgency of a drill, for no one really thought it was anything but a precaution. All weapons came to the ready, but with no expectation that they would be used.

Though the captain knew he would be approaching port side to port side, he felt no need to cross-deck any of his armament, as Rensselaer had done. Not for a trawler or a dhow. Certainly it wasn’t a warship, and for sure not an American warship, which would have been moving fast, locking on its firing radars, launching a helicopter or a UAV.

The first officer said he didn’t like the way things felt—or that the ship sat motionlessly on Sahand’s course. Again he recommended avoiding it. The captain received this as an insulting challenge to his courage and judgment. He told the officer that what lay ahead was almost certainly a fishing boat, and that, whatever it was, they could deal with it.

Sahand plowed ahead without altering speed, and at their weapons and consoles the men were thinking of other things.

*

Twenty minutes before Sahand would come into sight, so as to let it see a column of smoke on the horizon, Rensselaer said, “Light the buckets,” a highly unusual command, and possibly unique.

Along the decks, sailors lit flares and pointed them into the buckets, which immediately sent up volumes of black smoke. When the buckets were steadily burning, the flares were thrown into the sea, hissing once and finally.

Two of the buckets were hoisted, one a third the way and the other halfway up. The early smoke from all of them immediately fouled the nets and tarps, painting them in random patterns convincingly like either the works of abstract expressionists or the products of destruction, if indeed there is a difference.

Not long after, Sahand was visible on the horizon, moving fast. Rensselaer passed his next order through the sound talkers so that everyone who had them could inform those who didn’t. “Fire only when opportune, and, I stress, only after I give the order for the first salvo. Until then, stay quiet and concealed.”

At three kilometers, the Iranian ship cut its engines and glided forward, losing speed with the drag of its hull and stilled propellers. In sight was a burning hulk shaped unlike anything anyone on Sahand had ever seen. Brown and black, obscured by smoke, it was shaped like a sailing ship and it did have sails. Had Sahand been off Athena’s port or starboard beam, Athena’s length would have made clear that this was not so. But from directly ahead, foreshortening prevented the observation that the masts were not high enough for a sailing vessel of Athena’s proportions.

Sahand’s captain told his officers that despite the unthreatening appearance of the vessel in their path, he didn’t want to get too close. Rather, they would send a boat to reconnoiter. The order went out to launch a RHIB. As the deck crew swung their RHIB outboard on its davits and the boarding party transferred, their ship had come almost to a stop about fifteen hundred yards from Athena.

On the sound talker, Rensselaer spoke to the engine room. “Are you prepared to go to full power on my order?”

“Aye, sir. On your order.”

“Spare nothing when you do. Hold. Hold.”

The RHIB from Sahand, with a flak-jacketed, helmeted complement of eight, was lowered toward the waterline. On the bridge, quite naturally, all eyes were on it as it descended, and no one was watching the curious wreck ahead. When a boat is lowered, fascination is magnetic.

Although he couldn’t count on it, Rensselaer knew this. When the RHIB was three-quarters of the way down, he ordered, “Full power.” Quietly at first, Athena’s turbines began to turn. As they advanced to maximum rpm they made an indismissible whine, but not the throbbing of diesels one would expect at sea, and although on Sahand they heard it vaguely, they thought it might be from Sahand itself, or the sound of a distant commercial airliner, the sight of which is tantalizing to sailors on long and difficult deployments, who imagine the comfort and luxurious destinations of those above. As Sahand’s diesels were still throbbing, its sailors and officers who tried to place Athena’s faint hum could not.

When Rensselaer saw that the generators were at full power he commanded, “All engines ahead, flank. Helmsman, steady as she goes, rudder amidships.”

With the highest horsepower-to-weight ratio the Navy had ever built, Athena could reach top speed in less than a minute, a miracle for such a fast and relatively large ship. The resistance in air of the canvas and nets slowed her down, but, reaching almost sixty miles per hour in that time, she closed on Sahand in about fifty seconds.

In the first ten seconds, no one on Sahand’s bridge was looking. In the next ten seconds, someone did look, and called out. In the following ten seconds, everyone had a great deal of trouble assimilating what was happening. The disheveled, smoking wreck had accelerated at a rate they had never seen a ship attain. After forty seconds, as Athena’s camouflage was collapsed and dropped, Sahand’s officers began shouting commands. But not until Athena was practically abreast were those commands sufficiently coordinated so as to make sense. The first order was to engage the engines. The second, to bring in the RHIB. The third, for the RHIB to cast off. The fourth—to the gunners and weapons officers—to fire. They, however, were not fast enough. Before Sahand could let off a single shot, Athena had come to a point-blank firing position and Rensselaer gave the order to open up. Then, as he was about to pass by Sahand at high speed, he ordered Athena’s engines into reverse to slow her down.

The first shot was Holworthy’s. Because of light reflecting from its windows, he couldn’t see into the bridge, so he took his sniper’s shot at one of Sahand’s sailors manning a machine gun at the rail, and killed him. Then he used his own light machine gun to rake the bridge windows.

By this time, every one of Athena’s guns was firing. The noise was a weapon itself. Twelve .50-caliber barrels firing explosive, airburst, incendiary, and armor-piercing shells tore into the decks, bridge, and mounted weapons on Sahand. Stinger missiles were fired point-blank at the super-structure. Holworthy aimed his anti-tank rocket at a point just below the bridge, guessing that it might penetrate into a weapons-control space. It hit, and exploded within.

Miniguns poured such a high volume of 7.62 slugs across the decks and into the bridge that it was as if Sahand were subsumed in an immense swarm of bees. Hundreds of grenades burst above the decks and against the superstructure. The 30mm chain gun fired 40 rounds that slammed into Sahand at the waterline before Athena cleared its stern and resumed full speed ahead.

In less than a minute, Athena was a mile off Sahand’s stern. The Iranian ship was issuing not just smoke, as had come from the oily buckets on Athena before they had been tossed into the sea, but sheets of flame that were ballooned now and then by explosions. As the over-pressure from the detonations pumped air into the burning vapors and pushed them into yet more air, the colors of the flames changed from orange to yellow to white before they contracted back to the fires whence they had originated.

Sahand had not fired even one shot, and was in such distress that Rensselaer, looking astern, was sure she would surrender. He was about to make radio contact when he saw Sahand, now slowly underway, turn to starboard. On her starboard side, sheltered in the lee of Athena’s assault, some weapons had survived, and Sahand was about to fight.

Two Qader missiles rose from her smoke-obscured decks. Seeing this, Rensselaer ordered flank speed ahead. Seconds later, he called for chaff, and the chaff cannons shot a spray of shiny streamers and confetti that bloomed and sparkled in the sunshine like fireworks at night. Then he ordered hard left rudder to the stops. Athena slid into a nearly right angle turn to port, heeled over as if to capsize, and straightened back up at full speed. The action was so quick that, relying on the good sense of the helmsman, he had abbreviated the standard commands and simply said, “Bring her over to port at flank speed.”

The first missile homed to the chaff and plunged into the sea. The second made a quick turn, almost echoing Athena’s skate, only sharper. They saw it coming. Again Rensselaer ordered hard left rudder to the stops, at full speed. The Qader was evidently not built for such a fast ship at such close range. It could not adjust, and exploded close to Athena’s starboard beam, sending shrapnel across the decks. One of the bridge windows was blown out, slamming down Josephson. Lacerated by shrapnel and shards of metal and glass, he bled profusely. On the main deck, a SEAL was hit, as were two sailors, one standing ready for damage control, the other carrying ammunition. Speight, the ammunition carrier, was blown overboard, a tremendously heavy belt of .50-cal rounds garlanded around his neck, his legs severed from his body and flying ahead of him as he tumbled into the white froth of the turn.

Rensselaer had no time to take any reports, for at least two of Sahand’s cannons were firing at Athena as she headed at high speed toward the Iranian ship’s starboard beam. “Fire the Griffins,” he ordered. The weapons officers had been waiting. Three Griffins ascended simultaneously and headed toward Sahand, which had no functioning chaff to launch, and was not at all agile enough for evasion.

Even before the Griffins struck, Rensselaer ordered hard right rudder at full speed and let Athena make a 180-degree turn to starboard, running from Sahand, before ordering rudder amidships.

“Are we far enough to launch Harpoon?”

“No sir! We need another mile.”

“Ready to launch?”

“Ready to launch.”

Rensselaer looked back as the Griffins exploded on and against Sahand. He called for damage and casualty reports. As they began to come in, Marchetti, the weapons officer, reported that Harpoon range had been achieved.

“Launch Harpoon.”

When it launched, the Harpoon made Athena roll a little as the missile roared upward.

With movement that appeared to be immensely purposeful and determined, almost as if it were conscious, it arced toward Sahand, climbing to perhaps a thousand or two thousand feet. Everyone on Athena’s decks smelled its fuel. It then jerked, and plunged down at tremendous speed, striking its target amidships and centered. In the first second, nothing happened. But then the Harpoon’s 500-pound, high-explosive warhead detonated in the interior of the ship.

As her magazines blew, Sahand’s midsection appeared to jump from the water, leaving bow and stern behind. This broke her in half, and she went under so quickly those on Athena who were watching found what they had just done so difficult to assimilate that, matching the sudden silence after Sahand disappeared—as if it had never existed—they were struck dumb. Such a large ship, and now nothing but a flat sea and gently drifting debris.

*

Battles are not always over even when they’re won. The greater a breaking wave, the fiercer its undertow. There was neither celebration nor relief as Athena’s crew worked and assessed with almost the same urgency they had had going into the engagement.

Rensselaer called again for damage reports. The wounded men had been carried to the mess, where the corpsman and one of the SEALs who was corpsman-trained were working to save them. The hull had been breached below the waterline in two places.

“What have we got?” Rensselaer asked over the 1MC.

A panicky voice answered, “Two holes a few feet below the waterline. We can’t stop it. It’s flooding like crazy.”

“Pisecki to the breach,” Rensselaer ordered, believing that if the flooding could be stopped, Pisecki could stop it, and if Pisecki couldn’t stop it, no one could.

Anyone in Pisecki’s way would have been flattened as his speed times his mass in the passageways and on the ladders made these places dangerous. When he arrived at the bakery stores compartment, where the water was coming in, he ordered, “Kill the switches, tell the captain two hundred gallons a minute, and seal the doors.”

The eight men of the damage control party followed through immediately, with a hollow feeling of terror when they heard the closing of the dogs on the doors. They would seal the breaches or they would die. One of the holes was the size of a dinner plate, the other twice that big. “Where’re the fucking screw plates?” Pisecki yelled.

“There,” a sailor answered, pointing to the water, now about three feet deep beneath the holes. With the switches killed, only the emergency lanterns provided light. The plates were not visible. Pisecki dived down. He stayed underwater for at least a minute as the level inched higher. Then he surfaced, a patch plate in each hand.

“It’s impossible to press it against the inflow,” one of the sailors shouted. Everything had to be shouted.

“We do it or we die,” Pisecki told him, handing off one of the plates and moving toward the bigger breach. As he went he called out, “Pump to the maximum.” They were, but the pumps could only do so much.

At first the thick stream of incoming seawater would push Pisecki and the men who followed him back almost as many steps as they took. When he got into a position from which he could try to put the clamping mechanism into the hole so its bar would slap against the outside of the hull and the plate could be screwed into place, it was as if he were balancing on a tiny ledge. Every movement had to be carefully accomplished so his weight was in perfect opposition to the inflow, or he would be swept back. And because his range of movement was so restricted, much of the time his face had to be submerged in the stream of water and he couldn’t breathe. To get a breath, he had to move slowly and, while maintaining his balance, momentarily exit the stream. He would emerge, his hair and mustache shedding streams of water, take an enormous breath, and then disappear in the silvery inrush, all the while maneuvering the hundred-pound plate.

It was so difficult that he thought his lungs would burst or his heart stop. He said to himself over and over that although it seemed he could not do it, if he wanted to live, he had to do it. So he found himself pushing beyond any strength he had previously known, while holding his breath and balancing precariously. Blinded by the water, he worked not by sight but by feel.

Then, in the darkness, half smothered, he heard the crossbar grip the outside of the hull. He turned the screw as much as he could, came up for air, and went back to turn it some more. Five minutes, ten breaths later, and the plate began to clamp against the inner surface of the hull. Then he ordered a young seaman to tighten it, and the water stopped.

He had dropped the other plate, so he dived for and found it, and repeated his actions, this time with much less strain, sealing off the smaller hole more easily—as the column of inflowing seawater was small enough and the breach positioned so that he could place and clamp the plate, breathing all the while.

When he finished, the water was up to his chest, but then again he was quite short. He asked if the 1MC was working, and the sailor answered in the affirmative, handing over the mic. Pisecki held it for a while, and then, having almost caught his breath, the water still dripping from his hair, clicked on.

“Damage control to bridge.”

“Bridge.”

“Inflow contained, positive outflow with pumping. Will weld plates fast to make completely watertight.”

“Well done,” was the answer.

Left up in the rush, the telescoping mast had been severed by the missile blast and propelled into the sea, followed by the main radome. Though the rest up top, including Holworthy, had been spared, Athena was scarred by shrapnel and stained by oil smoke. Tarps and nets had now been thrown overboard, but the ship still looked a wreck. However, weapons, engines, and most systems were intact.

Rensselaer called in Velez. “Break EMCON to send to Fifth Fleet, CENTCOM, and anyone who was messaged about Sahand: “Sahand sunk at three degrees, thirty-two minutes, five seconds north, fifty-three degrees, thirty-seven minutes, fifty-one seconds east. Athena underway, major systems intact, attending to wounded and searching for K.I.A. overboard. Will look for Sahand survivors next. We have casualties. Advise immediately as to nearest medivac facility and, as Sahand survivors may be located, brig.”

Rensselaer ordered an Anderson turn and summoned all unengaged hands on deck to search for Speight, although everyone knew his body wouldn’t be found. Legs, with no hollow spaces, would sink and never rise. Head and trunk would have sunk as well, as the lungs filled with seawater, and the ammunition belts would have carried him into the blackest deep. Athena would cover the area ten times, mostly to honor him in searching the small patch of sea where he had disappeared, and as an obligation to his family. In answer to Movius’s query, about when to search for Sahand’s survivors, were there any, Rensselaer said, “They’ll wait until we’re sure Speight can’t be found.”

The officers hardly knew Seaman Speight. Twenty-three years old, in the Navy since eighteen, unmarried, with a chipped front tooth, freckles, silver, wire-rimmed glasses, and a slight build, he was known for having pronounced antiques as antikews, a fondness for swimming, and for being harmless, unremarkable, uncomplaining, easy to please, and liked by the chiefs. But no one knew his heart.

As the ship moved back and forth over the search grid, Rensselaer went to the mess. Martin, the damage-controlman, wounded and still in his fire suit, lay silent and dazed on one of the makeshift beds. The two medics were standing next to Josephson, having done what they could. They turned to the captain, and one, indicating Martin with a quick lift of his head, said, “Concussion, maybe cerebral hematoma. Gotta get him to a hospital.”

But they said nothing about Josephson. When Rensselaer approached, he winced, and said, “Jesus Christ. I didn’t realize.”

“We brought him down here real quick. You couldn’t have seen.”

“What is that?” Rensselaer asked, looking at Josephson’s neck. The left side was open, part of the thyroid was visible, and two clamps were resting across his neck so as not to hang their weight on the two halves of his severed left carotid artery.

“How can he live?” Rensselaer asked.

“The other carotid artery is untouched, as are the two vertebral arteries, we think. But he’s gotten worse. We’re not microsurgeons. If we try to sew it up, it won’t work.”

“Can you clamp down both parts of the artery on a tube linking them?”

“We don’t have a round clamp, or a tube.”

“We must have hose clamps small enough,” Rensselaer said. He went over to the 1MC. “This is the captain. Engineering, bring small hose clamps, all sizes, to the mess, on the double.”

“What will we clamp the arteries to?”

Rensselaer had no answer, but he felt stress close to that of combat—in fact, more so, as in combat the key to survival was to banish stress, and he had always managed that. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. As his eyes swept the room he was mentally inventorying the whole ship. And yet that became unnecessary when he hit upon the drink machine. Next to it was a cylindrical container of drinking straws. He dashed to it and brought one back. “They’re plastic, thank God, the larger kind. They’re supposed to be phased out.”

“It’s still small,” the SEAL corpsman said.

“What else are we gonna do?” his colleague replied. “He’s getting plasma. We can get whole blood into him.”

“He’s fading. You know it.”

“Okay.” Turning to Rensselaer: “Captain?”

“If he’s going anyway.”

A chief arrived with a box full of small hose clamps. They found two of the right size, opened the straw, cut it down, and dropped it and the clamps into a glass of alcohol. “We need a screwdriver, Chief, for Christ’s sake. How the hell are we going to close the clamps?”

The chief rushed off.

One of the corpsmen took Josephson’s blood pressure. “He’s in shock. Almost gone.” The chief arrived with a handful of screwdrivers. The corpsman picked a screwdriver and swished it in the container of alcohol.

They worked fast, gloved and masked, first spraying the open wound with antibiotic and applying coagulant to the capillaries. Then they opened the clamps and partially closed them over each section of the artery before gingerly inserting the straw into each, inching the rubbery artery up until it was within a few millimeters of the center. They slowly tightened the hose clamps, careful not to tighten them too much, until the straw began to deform, and then loosened them until it returned to its proper shape.

“Okay, let’s see.” They opened and removed the surgical clamp on the brain side, and very gradually opened the heart-side clamp. They could see the blood as it started to flow through the straw. “It’s working.”

When the surgical clamp on the heart-side was removed, the blood pushed through the straw. Just a little came out from the heart-side juncture. They put a drain in near it and began to sew up the wound.

“We can give him blood to make up for what drains, Captain, but even if the contraption holds, if we don’t get him into a real hospital . . . ” and here the corpsman shook his head, aware that even though the patient was unconscious, there was no telling what the unconscious could know.

Again Rensselaer went to the 1MC. “Captain to COMMS. Urgent message to all controlling commands. We need medivac, highest priority. Get it out with our position.” Velez repeated the message. Rensselaer had heard him typing even as he spoke. “Do you need me for anything else here?”

“No sir. We’ve typed the blood and we’re on it.”

“I’ll be on the bridge.”

*

When Rensselaer reached the bridge, Movius asked how they were down below.

“Martin has a bad concussion, Josephson’s touch and go. What search evolution are we in?”

“Seven.”

“This is the captain,” Rensselaer said on the 1MC, abandoning his sound talker, which he had forgotten he was wearing. “Commander Holworthy to the bridge.”

Soon thereafter, Holworthy showed up, his head bandaged. “It’s nothing,” he said, “just a little piece of the Qader.”

“Launch the RHIB and go back to the Sahand’s flotsam and see if there are any survivors. Be armed and take restraints. We’ll start for an evac point when they assign us one.”

“Yes sir. How hard shall I look?”

Rensselaer thought. “As soon as we get the evac point, we’re out of here at full speed. That’s your window.”

It was remarkable how quickly the SEALs were ready and the RHIB hit the water, as if they had not only drilled this again and again—as they had—but as if they had habitually dreamt it in full detail. All the small movements seemed jointless, flowing together, like the water of a fast stream, inseparable and indivisible.

While still sighted from Athena as almost a small dot, the RHIB had been gone for ten minutes and Athena had just finished the tenth evolution when messages came back from Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM. Medical evacuation was not possible for Mogadishu, the nearest port, as all assets were deployed to the Gulf. However, ESB-3, the Puller, one of the strangest and most welcome vessels of the Navy, had just cleared the Suez Canal and would rendezvous with Athena at 13°, 04', 60" N; 51°, 29', 50" E in the Gulf of Aden just south of the Alula-Fartak Trench, 595 nautical miles north-northeast of Athena’s current position. This was not that much farther than Mogadishu. At maximum sustainable speed, it would take about sixteen hours to get there. That is, in a cooperative sea, for which every man on Athena prayed in his own way.

The Puller, an expeditionary support base on its way to the Gulf, had a fully equipped surgical module, a brig, and the potential of receiving, refueling, and relaunching a V-22 to evacuate casualties to Lemonnier, thence to be medivaced to Landstuhl in Germany, and then to the United States.

Buck Lanham was setting the course for the rendezvous—straight up and between the Horn of Africa and the little island of Abd al-Kuri—when he was interrupted as Athena made her last pass in search of Seaman Speight. The ensign was lowered to half-gaff and Athena briefly slowed to five knots. All hands turned to the sea and saluted the shipmate who, someday, in one way or another, they would follow. And then they left him to eternity in the deep.

*

Never out of sight of Athena, Holworthy, O’Connor, and three other SEALs in the RHIB motored through the slick and debris left by Sahand. Oil covered several acres and calmed the sea until it was almost flat, with only deep waves of long periodicity, as if the whole ocean were gently rising and falling. The water was green and black. Detritus here and there—an empty plastic jug, pieces of wood and insulation, cloth, garbage—easily caught the eye.

Among this were floating bodies, facedown and limp. And then there were the living, whom the SEALs pulled out of the water at gunpoint and immediately restrained with plastic cuffs.

They were nine all told, ratings of some sort, and two officers, distinguished by their insignia. It was puzzling to Holworthy, as one set was black and gold, and the other black and green.

The man with the green and black, which matched the colors of the water, had tried to remove his shirt as the RHIB approached him. Known for decisiveness, the SEALs—in this case O’Connor—fired a burst near him to get him to stop. He didn’t. The RHIB closed, and O’Connor slapped him on the side of the head with a paddle, reached down, and yanked him into the boat as if he had been a sardine. The Iranian was at most five-foot-three and 125 pounds, and O’Connor, one of the bulls found in every SEAL team, was six-foot-eight and 250 pounds of muscle. Dazed by the blow and his sudden ascension, the Iranian officer nonetheless was admirably defiant. It was clear from his eyes and the taut muscles of his face that he would keep fighting, so they knew to watch him.

Athena did not head directly to the RHIB but in a line offset to the west. This told Holworthy that she was on course to make for the evac point. His complaint heretofore was that Athena, and therefore he and his men, had suffered a lack of action and purpose. Now, from a distance, he was almost awed by the little ship. Already it had been involved in three combats, it had taken casualties, and it had sunk a far larger and very important vessel. And it would be off to somewhere else, with men to save and prisoners to hold and interrogate.

Holworthy had the sense that things were hardly over, that Athena would be engaged more than he had ever thought, that she would find enemies and enemies would find her. For the first time on the deployment he felt enveloped in an almost mystical purpose, even as it was unknown to him. As she came into view, battered, smoke-stained, but still fully capable, her ensign a bright shock of color snapping in the wind she generated at speed, she seemed entirely different. Perhaps this came from viewing her whole and from afar. For, apprehended from without, she was graceful and strong, and although she was a new ship, she now had the scars of age. Vectoring the RHIB to meet her, he felt as if he were returning home.

*

Still forging ahead, Athena slowed for the RHIB, which sidled aft and bumped her stern ramp. After an exchange of signals, it shot forward and skied up the ramp, its propeller rising in pitch as it turned the froth of Athena’s immediate wake. The Iranian prisoners were impressed by the speed of this operation. The capture of the RHIB, the slowing and then increase of Athena’s speed, the orders, and the acknowledgments, were all of a piece and so quickly completed that it was like the closing and locking of a rifle bolt.

Prisoners were taken beneath an awning amidships. There, one by one, they were stripped of their oil-soaked uniforms, treated for superficial wounds and burns, given Navy BDUs to wear until their clothes were washed and dried, and then they were shackled. To keep track of their ranks and identities, the uniforms had numbers pinned to them, matching the numbers etched on the shackles.

All this proceeded under the guns of the SEALs. Di Loreto welded two eyebolts onto the deck, after which a chain was run from one to the other, and each shackle chain padlocked to it so prisoners could be removed individually for treatment, to go to the head, or for interrogation. When this was completed, Rensselaer appeared. He looked at them dispassionately. He was all business, and other than that they could not assess his attitude.

“Does anyone speak English?” he asked.

The one who had tried to rid himself of identification, said, “I.”

“Are you the ranking officer?”

“No.”

“Him?” Rensselaer asked, pointing to the next man. Their clothes were for the moment laid out in front of these two, the gold and black naval insignia their only identification.

“You don’t speak English?” Rensselaer asked the ranking officer, who stared ahead uncomprehendingly. Rensselaer then astounded his own men by asking in the languages themselves if the naval officer whom he addressed spoke Arabic, French, German, Italian, or Russian. He didn’t, so Rensselaer turned to the one who spoke English.

“Please tell your people that as prisoners of war you’ll be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. We have no room for you below, but will do our best to attend to your needs while you’re on deck. You will be adequately fed and clothed. We’ll try to keep you cool during the day and warm at night. We hope to transfer you to a proper brig in less than a day.”

The English-speaker nodded. “What is a brig?”

“Jail.” Rensselaer looked at his uniform and read the Farsi nameplate, pronouncing it in Arabic. “Atash Farrakzad.”

“Farrokhzad,” he was corrected.

“Farrokhzad,” Rensselaer replied politely. And then, to Holworthy, “Mr. Holworthy, when the uniforms are washed, bring them to me.”

“Aye sir. I’ll make sure the officers’ are done first.”

“Very well.”

Rensselaer went back to the bridge. Athena was now at full sustainable speed on her northward course, and Josephson was still alive, attended continuously in shifts, while the crew and prisoners made do with MREs so Josephson wouldn’t have to be moved from the mess.

*

On the now quiet and partially shattered bridge as Athena was sailing for the Gulf of Aden, Rensselaer studied the newly washed uniforms of the Iranian prisoners. Relaxing EMCON, he was quickly able to see from open sources on the internet that Farrokhzad was in fact the senior officer—he had lied: what a surprise—and the regular naval officer to whom he had pointed was clearly subordinate. Farrokhzad had green shoulder boards with black sleeves, upon which were three yellow-and-green rosettes. That meant he was a Guardian Colonel in the NEDSA, the IRGC Navy. Rensselaer then consulted the classified networks to further his understanding, after which he ordered the uniforms returned and Farrokhzad—who had been given the number six—brought unshackled to the wardroom.

As O’Connor had experienced directly, Farrokhzad was quite a little fellow, with coal-black, piercing eyes, and a neatly trimmed beard. His anger was unconcealable and irrepressible. Seeing this, Rensselaer told the sailor guarding him, “This guy has a bug up his ass. If he attacks me, shoot him. If he attacks you, I’ll do the same.” (When the prisoners had been taken aboard, all officers had been issued sidearms.) Turning to the Iranian, Rensselaer asked, “You heard that?”

Farrokhzad smiled with contempt. “You think I’ll take over your ship?” He looked about. “Your boat?”

“Is that supposed to be insulting?” Rensselaer asked. “My boat, you may recall, sank your ship. And, yes, were I in your position, I would be working on that.”

“You can waterboard me, or kill me,” Farrokhzad stated, for he had certainly thought it out beforehand, “but I will tell you only name, rank, serial number—as you say.”

Rensselaer shifted in his chair and listened with pleasure to the steady hum of the generators and electric engines driving Athena through the waves. “We won’t kill you,” he said. “And we can’t waterboard you. Where would we get the water?” He glanced at the bulkhead, communicating that, outside, they were surrounded by ocean. “And we don’t have a board. I was waterboarded in training. I’m not going to be overwhelmed with guilt because you brought up waterboarding, if that’s what you had in mind.

“Also, your serial number is of no concern to me, and as you’ve seen, I know your name even if I mispronounced it.”

“You know Arabic. Good for you. You don’t know Farsi.”

“I do know, however, that you are a Sarhank Yakun. . . .”

“Sarhang-e Yekom.”

“I stand corrected. Sarhang-e Yekom, a Pasdaran, Guardian Colonel in the NEDSA. I know that your father was one of the terrorists. . . .”

“Patriots.”

“We’re speaking English now . . . terrorists, who seized our embassy in nineteen seventy-nine. You were a boy, but you must’ve been proud of him.”

“I still am.”

“Yes. Taking diplomats hostage, an old Persian tradition. You studied engineering in Birmingham.”

“Electrical engineering.”

“Which is why your English is so good, and why, I would warrant, that you were on the Sahand. For the Tsirkon. Not only to supervise and possibly direct its deployment, but because the NEDSA—and by that I mean the Pasdaran—wouldn’t want the regular Navy to take credit for such a prestigious weapon, and, had things worked out, the sinking of a carrier—or two carriers. Who was in charge, the captain, or you?”

“The captain is dead, and he was a fool.”

“I see. You were entirely focused on the mission, and were driven half mad because the captain didn’t bypass the trap we laid for him.”

“Naval habits.”

“I have them, too, and would venture that you would have taken over the Sahand by force had you enough Pasdaran aboard. But you didn’t, did you?”

Although Farrokhzad said nothing, Rensselaer could almost see in his eyes not only the replaying of just what had been described but the longing for a different outcome.

“You don’t want to talk about it. Why? Do you think I’ll glean enough so I can sink your ship? You know, I’ve already done that.”

“For why? So you can attack my country?”

“We attacked your ability to make the nuclear weapons and ICBMs with which, even though you don’t have them yet, you threaten us and our allies, very clearly, daily, almost on the hour. What the hell did you expect?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll collapse from within because you are corrupt, racist, and degenerate.”

“We are corrupt, you’re right, but only about a tenth as corrupt as you. I guess that in some respects we’re more degenerate, which I don’t like either, but we don’t treat our women—more than half the population—like slaves who must be hidden lest their very being corrupt the virtuous. And racist? Once, but look around. A fifth of my crew is black.

“You know what I tell every one of my crews at the outset? I tell them that I’m partially color-blind. I am, which is why I couldn’t fly—I wanted to. I say to them that I can’t tell the difference between navy blue and black. They get it, and it’s true in both senses. We get along fine, we’re brothers, and we bring that home.”

“You speak so much to get me to speak, but I give no information,” Farrokhzad ventured, “because, as you and I know, little bits of harmless information can combine in a mosaic. Don’t forget, we have the art of patterns: we weave carpets. We have been at war with you for a thousand years, and you’re too stupid to know it. We say it, but you don’t hear it.”

“I hear it.”

“Then you are an exception. You countrymen are deaf. The war may continue for another thousand years, and only one thing is for sure: we will win. Oh yes, you love your machines. You are so good with machines. You see, you have the clock, but we have the time.”

“That really, really sounds like an advertising slogan. You should work on Madison Avenue,” Rensselaer told him. “And as far as what you say, I wouldn’t bet on the outcome.”

“I would. America can fight only when it does so from the air, with machines, and against a weaker enemy. You don’t have the strength or will to sacrifice or to win. As things level and you have no great advantage, you’ll run, and die.”

“Really,” Rensselaer asked rhetorically. “From what do you think we’ve sprung? Before we were Goliath, we were David. When the layers of corruption, riches, and ease have been blasted away, that’s what we really are. At the heart of every American soldier and sailor is the willingness to take on superior forces and prevail. You haven’t even begun to see us fight. In taking on Sahand, every one of my crew was willing to die. Every one of my crew was focused, determined, and brave. Don’t misinterpret us, for when we awake and when we unite, your hopes, your ambitions, your dreams of conquest, will, like Sahand, sink to the bottom of the sea.

“Athena is just a little ship, but she’s taken forth the souls of her predecessors in battles great and small. It’s true that Americans fail to see how the Navy, hidden by distance but nonetheless in the bright light of the other side of the world as they sleep, embodies the spirit and courage of the America they sometimes forget. And Colonel, if I were you, I’d pray that you’ll never live to see us fight without restraint.”

“Do you think,” Farrokhzad asked, “that you’ve come even close to crushing my spirit?”

“No. I don’t care about your spirit. Be as spirited as you like. You’re chained to my deck. I merely stated the facts. And I can imagine exactly how you’ll feel when you and your men are swallowed by the brig of the Puller and brought close to your country in an enemy fleet. Your spirit may not be crushed, but you will suffer, as I would in your place. Would I have it any other way? No. But am I sorry for you? Yes, I am.”

Afterward, alone in the wardroom, Rensselaer felt the rhythm and thrust of Athena moving forward. Nothing was certain, he thought, and when nothing was certain, all was alight.

*

Not, of course, for the Iranians, who were enraged by their defeat. Their hands were free, but although they could sit, stand, or lie down, they couldn’t move about. Furthermore, they objected strenuously to the MREs. Farrokhzad was silent on this matter, perhaps thinking that it was below his dignity to complain, but he did translate the protests.

In return, the XO addressed the prisoners. “We have a gravely injured officer in the mess, which because of that is inoperative. Everyone on board is eating MREs and only MREs.”

“They’re garbage,” the naval officer replied through Farrokhzad.

“They’re food, so they tell us. They may not be what you’re used to eating or to your taste, but we’re not thrilled with them either. Maybe when you’re transferred to the Puller, a Michelin chef will cook for you. Meanwhile, suck it up.” This didn’t translate well to Farsi.

Number three, who was as perpetually angry as Farrokhzad but primitive, coarse, unintelligent, and chunky, shouted something in Farsi, jerked his chains, and tried to throw the MRE overboard, but, because he was stupid, to windward. It stopped short in the air, pieced apart, and fell back over the deck.

“That’s unfortunate,” said Movius. “You should clean this up, but I can’t let you loose.” He summoned a sailor, who brought a high-pressure hose and began to wash down the deck. As the last of the macaroni and cheese cleared the safety lines, Movius said to the sailor with the hose, “I believe that in discarding his meal this gentlemen—that is, number three over there—partially soiled his clothing.” Nothing was visible on number three’s uniform. “Why don’t you help him get clean?”

“You mean . . . ?”

“I certainly do, Ollie,” Movius said, imitating Stan Laurel.

“Aye sir.” He turned the hose on number three and kept it on him for a minute or two. This was perhaps not in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, but perhaps not such a major infraction on such a hot day.

*

As a steady, cold breeze moves through a winter forest in a gentle current, subdued light and lack of life give rise to peace and tranquility. Where once the undergrowth teamed with insects, and birds had hopped and sung in the branches, the plants have lost their color and mass, and the animals are gone.

So it is on the sea beyond the continental shelves, off the trade routes, out of sight of land, in blue water with very little life in it, and the sea floor lightless several miles below. In these seemingly never-ending, open stretches it seems appropriate that death can elide with life smoothly, with neither shock nor pain.

The Navy corpsman climbed to the bridge. Approaching Rensselaer, he stood at attention, covered. He saluted. Though uncovered, Rensselaer stiffened and returned the salute. Everyone present became still. “Captain,” the corpsman said, “Lieutenant Josephson has passed.”

Rensselaer exhaled, briefly closed his eyes, and answered, “I see.” A long pause followed. Then, “We have ice. Soon we’ll meet up with the Puller.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gather his things, respectfully.”

“Yes sir.”

“After we transfer the prisoners, Lieutenant Josephson will leave the ship, with full honors. XO, you have that?”

“Aye, Captain. Yes sir.”

“Very well. Carry on.”

And, of course, they did, as soldiers and sailors have done since the beginning of time. Soon the mess was reopened, and regular meals resumed, even on the table where Josephson had died.

“Anyone want grief counselors?” a machinist’s mate asked as he entered the full mess.

“Yeah, I do,” a rating replied. “As many as possible.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“So I can kill them, that’s why. When someone dies, you’re supposed to feel grief and suffer, aren’t you? These grief counselors, they go all over the place and counsel people who never even met or were aware of the people who died. One fake to another. Gimme a break. What’s next, massage oils and rose petals in the bathtub?”

“That’s enough,” Pisecki barked. “Josephson died here, for God’s sake, on this table. Shut up. As long as he’s aboard, you’ll eat in silence in this mess. Out of respect. Is that clear?”

*

Josephson had died just north of Abd al-Kuri Island, an uninhabited, mountainous desert with, on its eastern side, perhaps the world’s wildest and finest beach. To mollify Holworthy, in a moment of weakness not long after they had departed Lemonnier, Rensselaer had considered leaving a few SEALs there on the way south, to observe traffic, as on occasion irregular forces were ordered to do. But he had decided then that rather than mollify Holworthy, he would keep him down.

The rendezvous point with the Puller wasn’t far, and, arriving first, Athena waited. The Puller was out of sight but in radio contact. Eventually they saw her to the west, and she came even with Athena at dusk, although in that latitude, as Josephson had learned, dusk is so short it hardly exists. With the lights of the Puller blazing despite wartime conditions, her vast superstructure, hollow and beamed like a box-girder bridge, was cast in flares and shadows. A brow was extended from a door in the side and fixed to Athena’s main deck. As a gentle swell moved the two ships up and down at different rates, the hinged brow tilted slightly one way and then another.

The Iranian prisoners were escorted over the brow and to the brig in the Puller, which would take them very close to their own country, but then to the United States. They were bitter and depressed. The huge ship into the darkness of which they were swallowed seemed like an alien craft from another civilization, which, for them, it was.

A gray metal coffin was carried to Athena by a detail from the Puller. This was a sad thing to see, sadder than struggle, sadder than blood. It disappeared below. Josephson’s body was placed inside it and the flag draped over it. Six of Athena’s crew in dress uniform carried it slowly to the brow and set it on deck. After a long silence, Rensselaer spoke a few words.

“Our shipmates Speight and Josephson are no longer with us—Speight committed to the deep, lost except to God. And Josephson, who will go home. Neither of these men is unique in death. They are still very much like us, and we are like them: it’s only a matter of time—however long, however short. If upon gazing at this coffin you feel a gulf between you, the living, and him, one of the dead, remember that our fates are the same, and he isn’t as far from us as we may imagine.

“At times like this I question our profession. I question the enterprise of war. And then I go on, as we shall, and as we must. In this spirit we bid goodbye to Ensign Josephson, to whom you might have been brothers, and I and the chiefs, perhaps, fathers. May God bless and keep him.”

Then the captain read the 23rd Psalm, a salute was fired, and Josephson’s coffin was lifted to the shoulders of its bearers and slowly carried into the depths of the Puller. When he died, he was very young.