THE rest of the day passed swiftly. He checked in again with Staurulakis, asking how she’d set up the watch rotation. The forty-eight-hour deadline would expire tomorrow; he wanted them ready for whatever happened. The senior watch officer said she was running an overlapping rotation. It was tight; the admiral’s mast, on top of Savo’s already reduced manning, had cut deep into their bench. She and Mills would be standing five hours on, five hours off. Either Dan or Almarshadi would be on call, again five and five, though they wouldn’t actually have to be in their seat in CIC. They had a bit more slack on the bridge, with three qualified officers of the deck: Pardee, Garfinkle-Henriques, and the comm officer, Dave Branscombe. She said Gene Mytsalo was doing well as JOOD and might be able to step up to OOD soon. “But I think we can keep them going up there for quite a while, four on and eight off.”
Next he went down to the engine spaces, undogging and then redogging each door and hatch as he passed through, observing the damage-control drills.
Almarshadi secured everyone from general quarters at 1400. The wind had increased to twenty knots, twenty-five in gusts. It stayed dark as hell all afternoon. Savo rolled, top-heavy like her sisters, but she could take six- to seven-foot waves forever. He ate evening meal in the wardroom, not contributing much to the conversation. He could feel himself starting to sag. Better sleep while he could.
Instead, he went back up to the bridge and stared at the running lights of the Israeli corvette, still soldered to the northeastern horizon. He contemplated the radio handset. Perhaps he should call Marom, ask him to increase the standoff distance, at least during the hours of darkness. Finally he decided, to hell with him. As night fell he went back down to his at-sea cabin. He stripped off sweat-smelling coveralls and stuffed them into his laundry bag. He picked up Freya Stark; read a page or two about Diocletian’s increasing recruitment of mercenaries for the defensive armies, rather than Roman citizens; and turned off the light. Sleep? Yeah, maybe …
* * *
THE fucking buzzer. No, the call note on his Hydra. He fumbled getting it out of the recharging base and it hit the deck. The leather case must have damped the impact, because it was still working when he hit the Reply button. “C’m,” he grunted. Then cleared his throat and said again, louder, “Captain!”
“Sir, maybe you better get up here.” Mytsalo, voice high and young, frightened as a child’s.
Dan dropped the radio, found his shoes, and sprinted out the door. But the left turn, or rather, the roll Savo had just plunged into, betrayed him, and he caromed full tilt off the opposite bulkhead. He groped for the ladder up in the dim red light, shoulder aching, cursing.
Utter darkness, pierced by the whine of the wind. He blundered into a soft short shape and heard a sharp intake of breath, a gasped-out, “Captain’s on the bridge.”
“Where’s the OOD? What’s the problem?”
Another shadow, and Garfinkle-Henriques’s voice. “Off to starboard, Captain. Constant bearing, decreasing range. I reported it to Combat—”
He couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath, at the icy wind on his underwear-clad skin, but much more at the closeness of the green and white and red lights. The other ship was nearly bow on. He couldn’t say how far because he didn’t know how large it was. But far too fucking close. He caught the distant wink of the corvette’s stern light. If that was five miles, this ship was only a few hundred yards off. Hell, he could hear it; the steady whoosh of machinery and ventilators even through the whine of the wind. What was this thing? It was enormous.
The supply officer, beside him. He could just make her out, binoculars clutched to her chest. “We’re stand-on vessel. I notified the XO, sir. He said maintain course, he’d warn it off on VHF—”
“Did they answer? You’ve got Channel 16 up here, right?”
“I didn’t hear an answer. No sir.”
“Where’s your rudder? Never mind. Right hard, right hard. All back full!” He gripped the pelorus, staring over it at approaching disaster. On second glance, it was much bigger than Savo. Which might not be bad; it might be slightly farther away than he’d thought. But it was hard to be certain. Spray or rain laced the night, making the port running light a carmine smear, the starboard a turquoise glow. The centerline white lights were blurry opals in a deep black velvet night. Was the uppermost very slightly to the right of the lower? A port bow aspect? It all felt so much like his nightmares he had to reach out and grind his knuckles into the gritty steel of the bulwark. No, fuck, it was real. Were the lights sliding left? Or was that the effect of their own rudder, hard over to the right? He couldn’t tell, but couldn’t wait to see. He turned back into the pilothouse and yelled, “Sound the collision alarm.”
“Lee helm control’s not responding.”
Oh, Christ. “You don’t have engine control up here! Remember? Call Main Control. All back full! All back emergency!”
Dit dit dit. Dit dit dit. The triple blips of the collision alarm stuttered over the 1MC. He glanced left, then ran back out onto the bridge.
To his astonished relief, the gap between the white lights had widened. The green starboard light was occulted; the port one shone out clear. But the ship was so close that even in the dark he could make out its silhouette, black against blacker black, in the same way the unlit circle of a new moon was visible against night sky. Pearly aureoles around sulfur-orange lights tapered back in a long line, fading along its … upper deck? In the dark, the obscuring mist, it was hard to tell exactly what he was looking at. Some sort of tanker, oil or natural gas. Or maybe a really huge bulk carrier.
“Main Control responds, all back emergency,” the OOD said, edging onto the wing with him. Still gripping her glasses. “They never answered on VHF.”
He took a deep breath to keep his voice from shaking. “All right, rudder amidships. Secure from collision alert. —You should have called me before this, Hermelinda.”
“I notified the XO. He said you were asleep. That he had the duty.”
She was right; in Condition III, whoever was in the CO’s seat in Combat was the go-to guy. But what had happened, that Fahad would let a contact get in this close? “O … kay. I’ll take it up with him, then.”
“Do you want me to ask for a relief, sir?”
“No. You have the deck. You never turned it over, I never assumed it.” He stared out the forward windows at the lights, already shrinking into the distance, and shivered; it had been all too fucking much like the last seconds of the doomed Reynolds Ryan. He wrapped his arms around himself, tightening his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. No wonder, he was still in shorts and undershirt. “Wait till he’s clear, then resume course. I’m going down to Combat.”
* * *
HE stopped for his coveralls, steadily growing angrier. That ship should never have gotten within miles. If she didn’t respond to a verbal warning, there were other ways of getting her attention. If all else failed, Savo should have turned away, long before the situation became dangerous, and opened the range herself.
Maybe there was a reason Imerson had kept Almarshadi off the bridge.
When he got to CIC the exec was sitting at the command desk, fingers laced over his face, thin shoulders hunched. Matt Mills glanced up from the TAO chair; Singhe watched from where she stood behind the Aegis watchstanders, dark eyes hooded. The compartment was crowded with men and women at consoles, but no one said a word. Dan slowed himself down by checking the screens. Only an occasional contact incandesced here and there, sparse stars where typically constellations boiled around the ports of the Levant. The contact they’d just missed was outbound, headed west. He took another deep breath, cleared his throat, and said to the hunched shoulders, “XO? Can you step out in the passageway for a minute?”
Almarshadi stood without a word, and followed Dan past the silent watchstanders.
Out into the passageway. Dimly lit. Not with red, because it didn’t open directly to the weather decks, but with half the fluorescents off. The ship creaked around them, and Dan braced an arm to an equipment enclosure as she rolled. When the door thunked shut he said, restraining himself with an effort, “What just happened, Fahad? Because what it looked like to me is, my XO’s a point of failure. And right now, I can’t afford any points of failure.”
“I guess I … I misread where he was going.” The XO wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“What was initial detection range?”
“We’ve only got the surface search radar. It came up at fifteen thousand yards.” Almarshadi hesitated. “Actually a little before that … an intermittent contact … but we thought it was sea state. Peaking waves.”
“Sea state? That thing was enormous. Forty, fifty thousand tons. And you’d pick up its radar on EW—”
“There was no EW detection,” the XO stated. His voice got a bit stronger. “His radar was off. Or broken. Anyway, he wasn’t radiating. And, Captain—he changed course on us.”
“Meaning?”
Still not meeting his eyes, the slight officer explained that although the other ship hadn’t answered their radioed warning, it had come right slightly. “It stayed on that course for about three minutes. That started to open the CPA on the VMS, so we thought it’d pass clear. The CIC officer thought so. And I concurred. But then it—it swung back. By the time we noticed it was closing again, it was inside two miles.”
Dan rubbed his forehead. The Vessel Management System was the digital replacement for the old grease-pencil-on-the-radar-screen method for figuring out if an approaching ship was dangerous. It computed closest points of approach, course, and speed, and displayed ships’ predicted tracks. It also recorded video, so it would be easy to go back and replay the near collision.
But he didn’t feel like doing that. He doubted Almarshadi was lying. It was something even more dangerous. “Okay, but when it was inside those two miles, why didn’t you call me? The first I heard was when the OOD buzzed me. By the time I got to the bridge, we were in extremis. We’re talking lives, Fahad. If that thing had hit us, we might well have gone down.”
“I was about to go up, Captain, and take the conn. I was on the ladder when I saw you bolt out of your stateroom. So I came back down.”
Dan looked away. He wanted to have confidence in people, but when it came to keeping the ship safe … tolerate substandard performance, and it would become the new standard.
On the other hand, he couldn’t be awake and alert twenty-four hours a day. And Almarshadi had done fine coming through the crowded, chaotic Strait of Messina, in Dan’s experience one of the tensest passages on the planet.
He blew out. “I’m honestly not sure what to do about this, Fahad. Is something like this why Captain Imerson didn’t allow you on his bridge?”
“No sir.”
He waited, but the guy didn’t elaborate. “Right now, I’m pretty angry. Right this second, I’d rather have Cheryl Staurulakis as my stand-in than you.”
Almarshadi nodded but, again, said nothing, his gaze aimed somewhere in the area of Dan’s belt buckle. Despite himself, he glanced down to see if his fly was open. It wasn’t.
Savo rolled and plunged around them. Metal protested, yielding and rebounding against the strain. In the closed space, the dim light, Dan felt nauseated. He took a deep breath. “But I need you. I need every man, and woman, right now. Mission accomplishment, Fahad. ‘Hard blows.’ I’m going to give you one more chance. But also, a warning. If this happens again, you won’t be standing any more watches aboard Savo. And I’ll put you ashore at the first opportunity.”
“… happen again,” Almarshadi murmured.
“What’s that?”
“It won’t.”
“Once again. So I can hear you.”
“I said, it won’t happen again!” the man blazed out suddenly. His head snapped up, and his cheeks flushed. His fists rose too. Dan would have stepped back, but there wasn’t any room in a passageway so crammed with equipment enclosures that two men going in different directions would’ve had to slide past each other sideways.
But there it was, a reaction, at last. Did you have to insult him, to rouse his pride? It wasn’t how Dan liked to operate, but if that was the only way to get the son of a bitch on the stick, fine. He’d press any buttons he had to, to get his XO up on step. But it was time to back it off a notch. He gripped the smaller man’s arm, extended a hand. “Fahad … I can’t do this alone. The consequences … I’ve seen what happens at sea when somebody looks the other way. That’s not going to happen on my watch.”
The thin shoulders straightened; the chin came up. Deep brown eyes met his at last, and Almarshadi returned the handshake. “I understand, Skipper.”
“Okay then. Review those new ROEs. Let me know how they bounce against the theater Conops in the morning.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Dan eyed him a moment longer, then nodded curtly and turned away toward the ladder.
Climbing it, he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake. If his exec was a failure node, they were in trouble. But a Zero Defects Navy wasn’t his Navy. Daniel V. Lenson had looked less than stellar now and then himself.
He did need to control his temper, though. Did he really have what it took to be a good CO? He’d thought so, once. Now he wasn’t sure.
Not for the first time, he closed his eyes and silently asked for help.
* * *
BACK in his cabin, he couldn’t get back to sleep. But he didn’t want to go down to CIC, or up to the bridge. That would signal distrust. Plus, he was probably getting some rest just lying here, even though his brain seemed to be on some kind of naturally secreted speed. He kept replaying those looming lights like a preview of coming attractions.
If he did fall asleep, he knew exactly what he’d dream, and what he’d hear. The screaming in the dark, from when the first ship he’d ever served on had gone down in the Irish Sea.
He picked up the Freya Stark book again, found where he’d bent down a page, and read a few more paragraphs. About the Parthian Empire. How Rome had tried again and again to outflank and break it, and finally succeeded. But the ship rolled again, and he clutched the bunk frame until his fingers cramped. This high in the superstructure, you really felt the motion.
Enough. He got up and shaved, wedged into the narrow space in front of the sink, shoulders braced. Rinsed his mouth, shook out a fresh set of coveralls, and pinned on the eagles and rather tarnished surface line insignia and name tag. And last, the circled dull-gold star of command at sea. He pressed it gently into the blue cloth, feeling like the Cowardly Lion again.
He peered into the mirror once more. Not looking so alert yourself there, Lenson. Red-rimmed eyes. Those crow’s-feet were getting deeper. And was that more gray on the sides?
He remembered what he’d called his skippers. Not to their faces, but what everyone else had called them too.
Now he was the Old Man.
* * *
THE mess decks were bustling. He slid his tray along the stainless rails, grabbed French toast with greasy aluminum tongs and added a sloppy spoonful of eggs. When he zigzagged out into the dining area DC3 Benyamin stood. He pointed to his table and Dan wobbled over. “Gonna get rougher, I hear, Skipper,” he said as Dan climbed into the bench seat. The other men and women shoved over, making room.
“Yeah, we could be in for a blow.” Dan blinked at the damage controlman’s scarred pale arms. Wondering what his tattoos had been, and why he’d had them lasered out.
“Sir, hear anything back yet about Smack? What happened to him?”
“I’m sorry—Smack?”
A silence, broken only by the roar of engines from the big screen up front. Dan glanced that way; Pierce Brosnan was piloting a hovercraft in a chase scene. The men at the front tables stared at the screen, hardly eating. “That was Seaman Goodroe, sir,” another man supplied. “You know, the guy who—”
“Right, right. Sorry, the chief corpsman wasn’t able to make a determination. As to cause of death. And we haven’t heard anything back yet from Bethesda.”
An acned young woman said softly, “Somebody said it might be those anthrax shots they gave us.”
“I don’t think so, but I haven’t totally ruled it out as a possibility.”
“You’d let us know if there was … like … a plague aboard,” a palely mustached young sailor said hesitantly.
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Dan told him, trying to sound kind but firm. “But for the record, yeah, I would tell you. But there’s no plague. No curse, either.” He grinned, sorry he’d even repeated the words. “Look, we’ve been pushing you guys pretty hard. But you know why now. Right?”
They nodded, more or less together. “So you realize, we could very well take a hit out here? Our radar’s focused inland. Somebody could kick us in the ass and we wouldn’t see him coming. So we need to be ready to fight fires and flooding. That’s why Mr. Danenhower and the DCA, Mr. Jiminiz, and Chief McMottie are working your tails to the bone right now. Is that the word you’re getting? I want to make sure everybody knows why we’ve got our balls … our hair on fire about this.”
On the screen Halle Berry undulated out of the ocean in an orange-and-white bikini. The sailors hooted and hammered the deck with their boots.
“I think we get the picture, sir,” Benyamin said. “You’re takin’ us into harm’s way, like they say in The Bluejacket’s Manual. And we gotta be ready to take a licking and keep on ticking.”
Dan looked at the sobered young faces, most sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed. Some still acned with youth. Some with hair too long, or buzz-cut violently short. Black and white and brown and Asian. “I know it’s a lot of work, a lot of stress, but this is what we’re out here for,” he told them. “What the country expects of us. And any problems your chief or div-O can’t help you with, my door’s open. I mean … right now, I couldn’t give you an uninterrupted hour, but I’m there if you need me. Okay?”
“Hoo-ah, Skipper.”
“Yes sir.”
When he turned his tray in the same kid took it who’d been there the first time. “What, you got permanent crank duty?” Dan asked him. But the kid just squinted at him, scraping the remains off into a garbage pail, as if he had no idea who Dan was.
* * *
THEY patrolled through seven- to eight-foot seas black as gangrened flesh. Long, deep seas, along the troughs of which he could look for hundreds of yards. Squalls spattered on the windscreen. The wipers whipped the raindrops away. Everyone on the bridge was in heavy sweaters or bulky green foul-weather jackets. Around noon the lead helo pilot, “Strafer” Wilker, came up to give him his cap, which Dan had apparently left on the mess decks, and to brief him on whether they were going to be able to operate. Dan watched him sway to the roll in his flight suit, palms clamped over elbows, and wondered why pilots were so different from surface officers. Perhaps their DNA was the same, but that was about all. “So, why ‘Strafer’?” Dan couldn’t help asking.
“Oh, I happened to come in a little too low once, on a pass over a reviewing stand.”
Dan raised an eyebrow. “I see. Well, we might need you in an antiship role.”
Wilker looked out toward the corvette. Savo was plodding south, so the distant dot winked on and off out on their port beam. “We got Hellfires. Like, you mean, this guy? Or is he a friendly?”
“Him? I think he’s more of a … well, I don’t really know yet.” Dan explained his argument with the Israeli. “My impression is, he’s waiting for orders. The main threat I’m looking at is antiship missiles from shore. But we might see small boats, a leaker.” He massaged his eyes. “Even a Syrian patrol boat.”
“Coffee, Captain?” The boatswain, Nuckols, stone-faced, with the stainless-steel ovoid of the bridge pot.
“Yeah, top me up. —Main thing that worries me is a trawler. Like what happened to Horn.”
“Not sure I recall that, sir. Heard something about it, but—”
“A dirty bomb in a trawler. It looked like a plain old fishing boat. But it wasn’t.” He blinked and swallowed, looking out to sea. Hell, was that a swirl of snow? No, just spray. The bridge heaters clanked and popped, but he still shivered. Having a helo patrolling out there with infrared vision, a laser designator, .50 cals and five-mile-standoff missiles, even if the warheads weren’t quite big enough to take out a ship, would definitely make him sleep better. “How close are we getting to your wind limits?”
Strafer broke out a blue plastic-backed NATOPs manual from a cargo pocket and went over the diagrams. The limiting factor was pitch and roll. Savo had the RAST sled, a car that ran on rails on the flight deck. It was designed to winch the helo down out of the sky if they had to land in heavy seas. Dan had seen it get very white-knuckled at times. “I know this isn’t the best weather we could have. But I’ve got to launch you,” he told the pilot.
Strafer shrugged. “I’ll tell you if I think it’s not safe. But you’re the guy who bottom line says go or no go. If it’s an operational necessity.”
“Well, I definitely want your input on that. Ideally, I’d like two missions per twenty-four-hour cycle. One starting an hour before dawn. The other, at dusk. That’s when we’ll be most vulnerable. Fly a circle, but with the wider radius to shoreward. The rest of the time, maintain as close to a five-minute standby as you can get.”
“When we launch. Armed? Hellfire?”
“Absolutely. Hellfire, EW, and FLIR. But stay data-linked. And I retain positive control. Weapons are tight unless specifically released. Unless you’re attacked, of course—that’s in your rules of engagement.”
“How long? Our endurance is four hours.”
“If you can do two four-hour patrols a day, that’d be great. But I won’t hold you to that. Two hours at dawn, two at dusk would make me happy. Don’t push so hard you degrade. Clear?”
Wilker nodded and left. Dan mused for a while, then crooked a finger at the OOD. “Hermelinda?”
“Yes sir.” She came over, still clutching her binoculars to her chest.
“I was down on the mess decks this morning, and I saw the same kid scraping trays in the scullery as last time I was there. That duty gets rotated, right?”
“I’m not sure who you mean, sir.”
“I mean, make sure your crank duty gets rotated, okay? Don’t let the divisions send you the same bodies over and over. Some of ’em’ll do that if you don’t stir the pot.”
He settled back into the padded seat, and the next thing he knew, he didn’t know anything at all.
* * *
HE woke with a snort and a flinch, realizing he’d been snoring. He cleared his throat and swung down, catching sidelong glances from the bridge team. Not sharp, Dan. A skipper was human, he needed to sleep, but it didn’t help to do it in front of the crew. “Captain’s off the bridge,” he heard as the door closed, and waited, listening for chuckles, or any comment loud enough to hear.
But neither came, and he stopped at his cabin and shaved, then nosed himself and decided he could use a quick washup, too. A Navy shower: a quart to wet down, the shower turned off; lather up thoroughly; one last quart to rinse off. He threw his coveralls back on and rattled down the ladder to Combat. He was pulling up the SH-60B Tactical Manual on the LAN for a quick review when his Hydra beeped. He snatched it, heart instantly accelerating. “Skipper.” Beside him Mills glanced over from the TAO position.
“Sir, this is Sid Tausengelt. Where are you right now?”
“In CIC.”
“Be there in five.”
“What’ve you got, Master Chief?”
“Better in person, Captain.”
What fresh hell? He checked the vertical displays. Air and surface traffic had vanished east of Cyprus. Even the regularly scheduled commercial airlines had cancelled or diverted. The shadow of war lay across the Mideast. He checked the stats on Aegis. The system was at 87 percent. Not great, but not quite mission-compromising, either.
Tausengelt’s seamed visage appeared, lit from below, back by Sonar. He peered around the darkened space uncertainly, then felt his way forward. Dan wondered if the older man was losing dark adaptation. Then he oriented, homed in, lifted his chin, and Dan saw that Chief Van Gogh was behind him. Zotcher as well. The sonar chief was in an ivory plastic neck brace. He glowered at Dan.
“Captain,” the command master chief muttered, “you real busy?”
Dan wanted nothing less than to go into this, but nodded and got up. But Tausengelt motioned him back down and sidled past. He said a few words to Amy Singhe, who was perched on a stool in the Aegis area. Dark eyebrows knitted; she looked past him at Dan; her face darkened. She nodded abruptly, and stood.
“What is all this, Master Chief?”
The ship’s senior enlisted said, “Can we talk out in the passageway, sir? And I wanted the lieutenant there too. ’Cause, basically, it’s mostly about her.”
“Have you taken this up with Commander Staurulakis, Master Chief? She’s the department head. And the XO?”
“Sir, with all due respect, I think this is becoming a CO-level matter,” Tausengelt said with great dignity. The others, behind him, nodded.
* * *
DAN told Mills where he’d be, and followed the command master chief and the others to an equipment room. A petty officer was hunched over a pulled-out rack with a tester. Tausengelt asked him gravely if he’d give them a few minutes. Wide-eyed, he slotted the computer blade back into place and left. Singhe stood with arms folded, glaring with such dark intensity that she seemed to be radiating in the far infrared. The three chiefs ranged themselves opposite her. “What’s this little kangaroo court?” she said harshly, before anyone else could speak. “Should I have representation?”
“I’m not sure, Lieutenant. Master Chief, what’s this about?”
“You said your door’s open, Captain. Basically we—that is, some of the chiefs—have a grievance. I’m hoping we can defuse it before it escalates to the official level.” Tausengelt eyed Singhe. “Which would not look good for any of us. As I’m sure the lieutenant will agree, if she takes a moment to think it over.”
She started to speak; Dan held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s hear what the senior enlisted have to say first, Lieutenant. You’ll get to respond.”
Tausengelt said, “Well, basically, sir, we’ve all been excluded from the discussion groups the lieutenant here’s been running. The chat rooms. I believe I informed you about that.”
“You did. Yes.”
“And you said we should run with it and see where it went. But today Chief Van Gogh here logged on under the name of one of his petty officers.”
“He lied to get into the chat room?” Singhe said, voluptuous upper lip curling.
“The petty officer gave me his password voluntarily,” Van Gogh said, his anger just as apparent. “He wasn’t comfortable with what was being said on there. And when I saw it, I wasn’t very fucking comfortable either.”
“What exactly was being said?” Dan asked.
Zotcher held out a printout. Dan ran his gaze down it, noting the exchanges highlighted in yellow. He pursed his lips. The foregrounded quotes seemed to be pretty much the kinds of summary and largely unfavorable judgments sailors had probably always made to each other around the scuttlebutt about their immediate bosses. Anatomically questionable references were made to the location of their heads vis-à-vis their anal canals, for example. But it did feel different seeing it in print. In particular, Zotcher and Van Gogh were coming in for a lot of criticism. At one point, where Singhe, leading a discussion on management styles, had asked the crew members to rate the chiefs in order of effectiveness, they’d tied for last place.
He cleared his throat. “Uh—interesting. All right … Lieutenant? Your response?”
Singhe cupped her elbows in both hands. “My response? The military’s got to follow the path private businesses are blazing, as computerization and the importance of human capital increase. That means a less hierarchical, more direct interchange between the deckplates and upper management. I’m acting to facilitate the transition. You read my article, Captain! Our command structures are too slow, too cumbersome, and they stop us from adapting. Open and uninhibited discussion is essential to that process.” She scowled at the chiefs. “Which is exactly why I excluded these men. Having them in the loop would make frank interchange impossible. As you can see.”
Tausengelt shook his head. “Basically, nobody wants to escalate this. Like I said. But I’m sort of coming in on the middle. I understand the previous CO more or less tolerated this sort of thing. The lieutenant’s … hobby.” Singhe bristled and he amended, “I mean, research. But Captain Lenson may have a different point of view.”
At that moment a sharp, loud crack reverberated through the metal around them. Dan flinched. He couldn’t pin the sound down, but it hadn’t been a noise he liked to hear a ship make in a seaway. He lifted a palm and they all fell silent, but it didn’t come again. He thumbed his Hydra. “DC Central, skipper here. I just heard a cracking noise, below and just aft of CIC.… Uh-huh … Yeah, pretty loud … Right. Let me know what you find out.”
He holstered the radio, both wondering what it had been and grateful for the moment it had given him. “Well, to get back to what we were discussing. My ‘point of view’ isn’t really what’s relevant here.”
Singhe’s angry frown was focused on him now. He chose his words carefully. “I think both sides have valid points. But what really matters here is what Navy regs say. Encouraging discussion—that’s a good thing. But, Lieutenant, I do think—and I know this wasn’t your intent—but encouraging this kind of speech, especially the personal remarks, can be prejudicial to good order and discipline. A lot of it reads like the loudmouths you get on every ship, blowing off steam just because you’ve given them a forum. Isn’t it possible to let the chiefs monitor the discussions? Or even participate? You’d get more informed opinions then.”
Singhe planted her boots farther apart. They all swayed together, as the passageway funhouse-leaned around them. “Then what’s the point, sir? The whole idea’s to surface issues that aren’t being discussed, or can’t be discussed, in the current forums. We have one group just for female crew. You might be interested, Captain, in what goes on. What they have to put up with, when the khaki’s not around.”
Dan couldn’t help his eyebrows lifting. “Are you telling me there’s—what? If there’s any harassment, hazing, criminal activity, I want that reported immediately. Not walled off in some special chat room.”
“Criminal activity? Maybe. Maybe not,” Singhe flashed back, as much to the chiefs as to him. “But let’s get this straight. You’re backing them? Instead of me?”
“Let’s not make this a personal issue, Lieutenant. It’s a question of command philosophy and discipline. We all have to work together, officers, chiefs, and enlisted. Not create splits in the crew.”
Singhe’s face had gone mottled, blood suffusing her smooth cheeks. “Personal? Who’s getting personal here, Captain? Maybe you should be asking them who Molly is. Instead of accusing me of undermining discipline.” She said the last word as if it left a poisonous taste.
Dan looked from her to Van Gogh, who’d paled. “Molly?” Dan asked. “Who is that? Chief?”
“Nobody.”
“Molly’s nobody?”
“Right. There isn’t any such person.”
Singhe shook her head sadly. “Isn’t that the point?”
Dan looked from face to face. Then, abruptly, lost his patience. “Okay, what kind of game is this? We’re on TBMD station. A war’s about to start. Who the fuck’s Molly, and what’s Lieutenant Singhe hinting around about?”
“Yeah,” said Tausengelt, and the steel in his voice this time was for his fellow chiefs. “Who is it? Come on. Give.”
Zotcher and Van Gogh glanced at each other, deflating inside their coveralls. The sonar chief jangled keys in his pocket, avoiding Dan’s eyes. Van Gogh was examining the overhead as if inspecting a diamond for inclusions.
“I get a straight answer, right now,” Dan said, and despite his resolve to stay cool he couldn’t keep his volume down. “Or everybody here’s going to regret it.”
Zotcher looked at his boots, or tried to; the neck brace brought him up short. Despite the seriousness of the situation, and what looked like embarrassment, he also seemed to be stifling a laugh.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you down to meet her.”
* * *
DAN called Almarshadi and asked him to take the chair in CIC, then followed the party down and aft. Aft and forward, then down again, until they were far below the main deck level and had to wriggle through scuttles feetfirst. Finally he pushed open a door inscribed SONARMEN DO IT AURALLY. The space was so far forward in the stem that its bulkheads slanted inward. He’d poked his head in here during his initial inspection, but now faces turned, more men than one would expect in such a remote space. Guilty, startled faces. And all male.
Rit Carpenter rolled his chair forward and reached for a computer keyboard. Dan’s hand intercepted his wrist. “Rit. I should’ve guessed.”
“Guessed what? Hey, Dan. Good to see you down here with us peons. And who’s this? The beauteous Lieutenant Singhe? Oh, yeah.” The retired submariner had established his own nook, with a black-and-white photo of his beloved Cavalla taped above it and his copies of Hustler and a shot of him with a fourteen-year-old Korean girl, both players naked from the waist up. Dan remembered that girl, and her little friend Carpenter had sicced on him, and how narrowly all of them had evaded a military prison.
And again: Carpenter nearly getting them whacked after a sharia court in the Philippines, when he’d gotten caught banging the wife of one of the imam’s best friends.
Same old Rit. Never overly concerned with political correctness, or even halfway decent taste. Pretty much a caricature of what the typical U.S. Navy sailor had once been stereotyped as, but which, since Tailhook at least, was supposed to no longer exist. Dan had thought it would be safe having him aboard, to help with the manning shortfall. But apparently Carpenter had managed to get on Singhe’s bad side. Dan gripped the expostulating sonarman’s hand and examined the screen. At the ladder, a seaman tried to maneuver past a glowering Amarpeet Singhe. Her raised arm blocked the exit, and he shrank back.
“So, boss, come down about that self-noise figure? We got the whole stack dried out. Purged it with nitrogen and a hot plate. Learned that trick on Skate. I got the numbers here someplace—”
“Who’s Molly, Rit? Are you screwing around with one of the female enlisted? I’m only gonna ask once. So how about a straight answer?”.
“Molly?” Carpenter reared back in the chair, which protested alarmingly. “What, you wanna meet her? Can do, amigo.” He turned the monitor toward Dan, chuckling.
“Fuck,” Dan breathed. He touched the keyboard gingerly. It felt sticky. He hoped it was from the empty Pepsi cans heaped in the wastebasket. “What … where the hell did this come from?”
Carpenter shrugged. “Brought it along for shits ’n’ grins. The boys need a little R&R, and they ain’t getting any shore time.”
The game was called Gang Bang Molly. Cycling through three scenes told him all he needed to know. Dead silence reigned in the confined space, except for the whoosh of passing seas and the never-ending, very loud creaking of the sonar, like an iron wheel slowly revolving inside a too-tight, never-oiled socket.
“Just harmless fun,” Carpenter suggested, but sweat glistened at his hairline.
Dan took a deep breath. “This is about the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever seen. I know you’re retired, Rit. But we have standards of conduct. Which you must have at least heard about.”
Carpenter grinned, lopsided, the same little-boy-caught-and-unjustly-persecuted half-smile he’d offered before. “Hey—boss man—tell me you ain’t taking this seriously.”
“I take anything that contributes to poor crew morale and a hostile command climate seriously.” He snapped his fingers. “The disk.”
“The what?”
“The disk. The game disk.”
“Hey, there’s no disk. This puppy’s on the LAN. Brought it aboard on a thumb drive. You can have that if you want, but—” Carpenter began making a show of slapping his pockets, looking around his pookah.
An audible intake of breath from Singhe. Dan closed his eyes. On the LAN? Being played all over the ship? He asked Tausengelt, “You knew about this, Master Chief?”
“No sir. I didn’t.” The leading enlisted looked as angry as Dan felt. “Well—I did hear a rumor. But I had no idea it was—basically, I agree, this is beyond the—this is not what people should be putting on the ship’s network.”
“Track it down. Pull it. And I want a list of everyone who’s downloaded it.” He snapped his fingers again and Carpenter reluctantly yielded up a small black memory stick. Dan buttoned it into a pocket. “I’m confiscating this. Delete it from the LAN. And get me that list of names,” he repeated, and headed for the ladder up.
* * *
TOPSIDE, main deck. With Singhe standing silent beside him, he held the drive out between thumb and forefinger over the braided sea. A cloud trailed silver skirts miles off, but for the moment, though the decks glistened with rolling laminations of condensed spray, it wasn’t raining. “Thanks for bringing this to my attention,” he told her. “How long did you know?”
“One of the girls e-mailed me this morning.” She stood erect by the lifeline, hands locked behind her in a textbook parade rest, looking out to where a distant silhouette melted into the squall. When she turned her head, those remorseless dark eyes set in that goddesslike face met his. “Are you saying you didn’t know? Sir?”
“Of course not! No.”
“Carpenter’s one of yours. You brought him aboard. You didn’t know he’d do something like this?”
Dan had to look away. Because the uncomfortable truth was, the guy did have a history. He’d never expected this … but on the other hand, he wasn’t exactly surprised, either.
She added, “The truth is, sir, the chiefs on this ship—okay, some, not all—but the majority are more of a barrier between the enlisted and the officers than a link. They don’t want change. They obstruct and stonewall organizational innovation. That’s the kind of middle management an effective CEO gets rid of. Or at the very least, isolates and bypasses until he can downsize them.”
“Uh, that’s a pretty damn harsh indictment, Amy,” Dan said. “I’m not sure I can totally buy into that. It takes a little while for everyone to get with any new program, and the Navy’s not exactly out front in managerial reform. I’m sure most of the chiefs are doing the best they can.”
“Really.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Then how do you explain obscene games like that? And not even played privately, but on the ship’s network? I’m glad you saw it. Now you know what they’ve been trying to do to me. And to the other women aboard. They failed with the board of inquiry. But they haven’t quit.”
To her? To the other women? The grounding board? Somehow she thought this was all aimed at her. Dan looked down at her hand, the tapered graceful fingers, and suddenly felt like shaking them off, as he would some poisonous centipede. The brown eyes burned into his, trusting, demanding, but with something else behind them.
He wasn’t attracted. Quite the opposite. But some instinct warned him not to reveal that. So he smiled back, held the little plastic device out farther, and let it drop. The wind caught the drive as it fell, curving its path. Then it vanished into the heaving sea, leaving a widening ripple that only slowly moved aft, visible for a long time, before Savo finally left it behind.