DAN was napping in his chair in Combat when the message came in. He woke to Cher Staurulakis shaking his arm. “Captain. Captain!”
“Yeah!”
“The Air Force is hitting downtown Baghdad.”
His first instinct was to check his watch. 0440 local, Bravo time, one hour earlier than it was over what was now, officially, an enemy capital.
The warning order had come down several hours before. They’d gone to darken ship and full battle readiness. Everyone on the bridge was in flash gear, with goggles handy. Here in CIC, gas masks, life preservers, and helmets were stacked in neat piles or slung from consoles. He ran his eye over displays and status readouts. The starboard bow array wasn’t operating as well as it should. The chill-water flow was still a problem.
Other than that, and the slow engine response due to their artificially low patrolling speed, Savo was as ready as he could make her. Right now they were on a southeasterly course, which pointed the port quarter array out along the main threat bearing, but they were nearing the southern limits of their area. He’d have to turn north again in another hour or so, or lose geometry on the acquisition basket.
He’d come to visualize this as a circle hovering sixty miles above and slightly north of Amman. Ezekiel saw that wheel, way up in the middle of the air.… Donnie and Mills were down trying to improve the numbers on the other array. If they couldn’t get it above 80 percent, he’d have to head west rather than north. Which would gradually open the range, and thus reduce their probability of kill.
Stuck to them like a tick, the bright pip of Lahav rode five miles off. During the night the Israeli corvette had repositioned to the north. Staurulakis had interpreted that positively. “He’s clearing our downrange bearing. Letting us do what we’re here for,” she’d murmured, typing rapidly. She was monitoring the chat from the U.S. and British ships that had slammed open the doors of Iraq’s defenses with salvos of Tomahawks from the Gulf and the Red Sea. “There won’t be a long air campaign before the land assault this time. The Army and Marines are already crossing the Kuwaiti border.”
“They’ll burn the oil fields again,” Dan said. Remembering the stench of burning hydrocarbons that had hung over that land, like smoke over Mordor, during the last war.
“Maybe not, if we can take them down fast enough. SpecOps are mounting an amphibious assault on Basra. It’s going to hang on what happens when the Army hits the Republican Guard.”
“Good luck to ’em,” Dan said. When it came to war, the football-field enmity, always half a joke anyway, vanished, and the services rolled as one.
Terranova came out of the darkness holding a thermos and a plate. “Coffee, Captain? And they sent us up some cinnamon buns. Special, for the tracking team.”
“Nice. Thanks, Beth.” He took two; his mirror had been telling him he could afford some empty calories. He winced as the fresh charge of java burned his tongue. The buns were drizzled with crystallizing frosting; he wolfed one and half the second. Sucking the sticky sweetness off his fingers, he repositioned his keyboard and switched from one camera to the next. Damn, it was dark out there. Even in the infrared. He cranked up the magnification and searched the horizon, then guiltily switched it off. The gunners on the ROC consoles on the bridge were scanning, backed up by the CIWS watch team. He needed to stay up at angels one hundred. Keep his mind clear, his head on the main mission.
ALIS—the acronym dated from the LEAP Intercept program, but specifically, now, meant only the software patch in Aegis that drove the TBMD programming—was up. On the right-hand display, the spokes clicked back and forth with metronomic regularity. They’d turned off everything from 0 to 0.5 degrees elevation and put all the system resources into above-horizon search. He stretched his arms until tendons cracked. “Okay, where are we, Cher?”
“A reminder on the high side to watch for indications of missiles being fueled. Any intel will be forwarded to us Flash precedence, but we’ll probably hear it over chat first. Increased threats from enemy leadership—”
“Double-check on that.” So if the satellite chat went down, they’d lose time on getting the warning order. He had to talk to Branscombe, make sure their cybersecurity was up and they had backup receivers standing by on the satellite downlink. If they couldn’t get alerts fast, Savo was nothing but a fat target out here.
“Correct. Weapons posture to TBMD—check.” She tapped the keyboard, and dawn came up on the middle screen. Seen through the camera from the port 25mm, the horizon seesawed, rising and falling, since the gun’s gyros were in standby. A gradually brightening patch, far off, a cast-iron sky over a sooty sea.
Dan squinted. Leaned into it. “What’s that?” Tiny specks dotted on the screen, seemingly on the lens itself.
Staurulakis murmured, “Snow.”
“Crap,” he muttered. They really didn’t need the blizzard that Fleet Weather had said for days was coming down from Europe. He didn’t mind degraded visibility. If a small boat or an explosive-laden trawler was out here trying to find them, reduced viz would be a plus. But heavy snow could degrade the tightly focused SPY-1 beam, searching like the flaming Eye of Sauron far out over Palestine and Jordan and the Iraqi desert. Searching for that ascending spark that meant missile.
From that first instant, assuming they picked it up as it cleared the radar horizon, he’d have roughly fourteen seconds to lock, track, evaluate, and launch. They might get a few seconds more if the Obsidian Glint, far overhead, caught the heat plume from the booster. But he wasn’t confident about the handoff from the Defense Support Program satellites. No one had tested the cuing procedure, and he wasn’t getting actual video, just text from the ground station. The Army had space-based imagery in real time, but the Space and Missile Defense Command Operations Center hadn’t responded to Dan’s request that Savo be placed on distribution too. Not that he had the intel capability to interpret photos, but access would be nice. AWACS, orbiting over Saudi Arabia, might also pick up the ascending weapon.
But all in all, his response time was disappearingly meager.
A cough, a sniffle from over by the Aegis area. When he looked that way Noblos was wiping his prominent schnoz, bent over, staring blearily at the screen. “Doctor.” Dan raised his voice. “Bill!”
Noblos looked his way. “How you feeling?” Dan called.
“Recovering. I believe.”
“Good.”
“I wish I could say the same for your system.”
Dan motioned to a seat. Noblos pulled it out and settled. He coughed and muttered, “I was out, but not idle. I read up on what type of warheads we might be intercepting.”
“Scud-type missiles. Right?”
“Those would be our most likely targets. True. But did you read the DIA report?”
“Which one? I read one that said they believed Saddam had both bulk chemical and biological weapons.” What he didn’t add was that the report had referenced the report of the Signal Mirror team—which, by the way, he’d written—to indicate the possibility of weaponized biological submunitions. Lower on the list, but not ruled out, was the possibility of what the report called a “baseline fission weapon,” defined as a fifteen-kiloton, single-warhead design.
Blinking at the GCCS screen, Noblos muttered, “Here’s what I wonder. Why make Tel Aviv the target? They only have a few missiles. We’re scouring the desert, blowing away any we find. But why not use them against the Coalition forces? The amphib landings at Basra? That’d be a more rewarding target set.”
“The Army will be shielding those,” Dan said. “They’ve got THAAD and Patriot. We’re holding the back door while the Army and Marines are going in the front.”
“The point I’m making is, we keep assuming they’re using countervalue targeting. What if they start with counterforce?”
“Countervalue” was strategic shorthand for striking enemy population centers and political targets. “Counterforce” meant targeting the enemy’s armed forces, particularly his strategic missiles, command, control, and air defenses. Dan frowned. “You mean—what? The task force? They’re out of range of a Scud. Even with that uprated booster they’re supposed to have developed. The, uh, the Al-Husayn.”
“Right.” Noblos coughed, covering his mouth. “But we’re not.”
Dan leaned back, nodding as he tumbled to where the scientist was going. “You’re saying, the first couple could be aimed at us? Well … maybe. But nothing I’ve seen argues they’ve achieved that level of accuracy. We’re a damn small bull’s-eye. And we’re not moving that fast, but we are moving.”
“We can be tracked from shore,” Noblos pointed out. “In fact, the EW chief told me we are being tracked—by that coastal radar in Tartus.”
Dan massaged his throat. He’d expected radar surveillance from Syria. After all, they were only about thirty miles off the coast at the north end of their patrol area. But what Noblos was suggesting was more ominous. “You’re saying they might pass cuing to Iraq.”
“Exactly. We share data with our Coalition allies. Why can’t Syria share with Iraq? They have landline connections. They’re both Ba’athist regimes. All they’d need is GPS coordinates and some kind of terminal homing on the missile. If they can take us out, along with Israel’s own BMD capability, Tel Aviv’s defenseless. At that point Saddam says, Yeah, I’m dirty, I do have WMDs—and I’ve got seven million Israelis as hostages.”
Dan slumped in his seat as he thought it through. The Syrians were supposed to hate Saddam. But did they hate him more than they loathed Americans and Israelis? Probably not. The modified Scud-Bs the Iraqis had employed in the Gulf War had been notoriously inaccurate. But since then, according to the informed speculation he was reading, both range and throw weight had been upgraded. Why not accuracy?
He shivered in his chair, but it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. Actually, they didn’t even need terrific accuracy, in the old sense that the ballistic missileers had inherited from the artillery community. All they’d have to do was bolt on a radar-homing antiaircraft missile—like the ones the French and Soviets had sold them—as the upper stage. Dial in Savo’s track, relayed from the Syrian coastal radar—and fire. Savo Island would light up the path for her own attacker; Aegis was putting out so much energy, a homing warhead could fly right down the beam.
Unfortunately, there was no way to tell, until it was well into endoatmospheric phase, where a ballistic missile was aimed. And with the malfunctioning of her space tracking system, to calibrate against satellites of known altitude and speed, Savo’s track precision was itself in question.
“Doc, what about SCUS? It’s still degraded. The Block 4 warhead guides itself in terminal phase. But to predict point of impact, we’ve got to have track precision.”
“Correct. You can’t predict POI without SCUS.”
Noblos sounded so unconcerned, so lofty, Dan had to turn away and run his hands through his hair. He made himself turn back. “Well, maybe it’s better if we are the target. At least we’ll be decoying the missile away from population centers.”
Noblos shrugged. Looked over Dan’s head. Sniffled, and wiped his nose again. “Was there anything else?”
Dan sighed. “Guess not.” He shook his head at the scientist’s ramrod posture as he stalked away. Fucking … great. He just hoped they had some warning before the first missile lifted off its portable erector-launcher. And that their hastily upgraded Standards worked. A warhead coming in at them, at the velocities they were talking about, would be well beyond the intercept capabilities of anything else the Navy carried.
Someone cleared his throat behind him. The corpsman, Grissett, was holding a clipboard. “Yeah, Chief?”
“Sir, you asked me to let you know if we saw any more respiratory illness. I’ve got a sick-call case with mild fever and a good deal of congestion. One of the helo crew.”
Not without an effort, Dan extracted his head from ballistics and radar. “Uh, right. We’re seeing a lot of that, seems like. Flu? Like what Doc Noblos had?”
“No sir. This looks like just a bad cold. He says he probably picked it up on the carrier. That makes sense. On a long deployment, whenever you have liberty the troops tend to bring back these minor upper-respiratory infections. On a small ship, they burn out quick. On something the size of a carrier, they can pass it around for quite a while. I’m keeping an eye on him.”
“Actually … is there any way we can isolate him until he’s not infectious? We’re so shorthanded up here, even passing a cold around could degrade readiness.”
The corpsman shrugged and said he could check him into sick bay, but it was probably already too late; the mechanic had been walking the passageways for two days now. “But you asked me to report.”
“Right, I did. Thanks, Doc.” Dan checked his watch, suddenly conscious the cinnamon buns had worn off. 0700. “Cher, I’m going down to breakfast. I’ll leave my Hydra on.”
* * *
SAVO plowed on through the morning, bucking seven-foot seas and the occasional snow flurry. Dan told Almarshadi to scrub all training and relax berthing restrictions. If people weren’t on watch, he wanted them to catch up on sleep or maintenance. He’d love to get his own head down, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. High-side chat said both Lebanon and Syria had filed protests about Savo Island’s presence so close to their coasts. Dan filed that for reference, but not without wondering why Lebanon was even bothering to get its stick in.
At 1000 Branscombe called to ask if he wanted a CNN feed to the mess decks. After a few seconds’ consideration, Dan said no, at least not for the moment. He wanted everyone’s head on his or her own job, not on what was going on to the east. There, the Army was punching hard into southern Iraq. The Air Force was laying down ordnance across the country, hitting command and control, trying to decapitate the regime.
How would “decapitation,” if they could pull it off, affect his mission? If the Iraqi command structure got turned into shredded meat in a bunker, what were the enemy’s rocket forces’ standing orders? Stand down? Acquiesce in occupation? Or unleash a last spasm of destruction? The last sounded a lot more likely.
He’d just socketed the J-phone when Almarshadi undogged the bridge door, shaking snow off his foul-weather jacket. A few flakes blew in with him. Dan returned his salute gravely. The XO sighed, glanced at the OOD, and sidled close. At some unseen signal the rest of the bridge team drifted to the starboard side, giving them privacy, as long as they kept their voices low.
Which his second in command did. “Sir, we’ve scrubbed down the LAN. That … program … is no longer available on it. And we made sure there’s no backup. At least on the ship’s network.”
“There’s no backup on the LAN? What if the downlink goes … wait a minute. You’re talking about that fucking rape game.”
“Yessir. Sorry, I wasn’t clear.”
“My bad, my head was on something else I have to talk to Dave B. about. If you see him, send him up. So, you don’t think I was overreacting? There seemed to be a lot of resentment among the female crew.”
“No sir, that was probably the right call. Considering … I guess, considering how ready everybody seems to be to jump on anything like that these days.” He pulled paper from inside his jacket. “Here’s the list you wanted. Everyone who accessed or downloaded it. The game kept a players list, so you could see how your, um … scores … compared with the others. That’s the number to the right of the name. Where it says ‘player,’ ‘thug,’ ‘hustla,’ ‘gangsta,’ ‘baller,’ that’s your ranking.”
Dan didn’t want to know how you got points in a game called Gang Bang Molly. He almost said just shred it, but at last accepted it. The list wasn’t as long as he’d feared. Maybe a dozen names, and all junior enlisted. No chiefs. One first-class petty officer. Carpenter, of course, was the high scorer. Benyamin was number two. He grunted. “Okay. What do we do with this?”
“Do you want to take disciplinary action, sir?”
“Of course we do, XO. I don’t give a shit about swimsuit posters in the work spaces, the women can put up beefcake too. But a rape game’s over the line. Tell me if you disagree.”
“No sir, I think you’re right.”
“At the same time, I don’t want it to be a career breaker. I know things have changed since I had Horn—”
“Yes sir. They have. The guys call a captain’s mast a ‘delayed admin discharge.’ One conviction at mast, they can deny your reenlistment.”
“Well, I don’t want that. Can you do XO’s mast? What exactly are the regs now?”
“I can do XOI, yessir. The maximum award is twenty hours of extra military instruction.”
The newest euphemism for punishment detail. “What kind of EMI?”
“Typically mess duty, or extra cleaning.”
Dan said, “I don’t want to be too much of a stickler here, Fahad, but I’m recalling extra military instruction can’t be punitive, it has to be actual training.”
“Yessir. That’s OPNAV Instruction 3120. It has to be bona fide training to improve unit efficiency, not a substitute for punitive action under the UCMJ.”
No question, the days when a captain could lash a recalcitrant to a grating and let the cat out of the bag were long gone. “So we can’t punish them without mast, but if we do take them to mast, they won’t be able to reenlist?”
“About the size of it, Captain.”
They went back and forth about this for a while, Dan actually enjoying the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate on Navy regs and how to best skate around or in between them. It was more pleasant than thinking about what occupied most of his plate. Finally they got it boiled down to an agreement. Almarshadi made a note, then glanced around, as if making sure the others on the bridge were still out of earshot. “However, this brings up another issue. A personal one, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“I would like to be relieved.”
Dan tried to mask his surprise with a squint out the window. Through a gauze of snow the Israeli corvette seemed, through some queer fluke of the waning light, closer than ever. In the U.S. Navy, officers didn’t ask to be relieved. It was theoretically possible, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing of such a thing. “Uh, Fahad, what exactly are you telling me here? Relieved as what?”
“As exec. I do not feel, any longer, I am performing to your satisfaction.” When the Arab inclined his head with a dignified courtesy Dan caught the beginnings of a bald patch under a careful comb-over. “You said I am the … point of failure in our system. I don’t want that responsibility. Therefore, I would like to be released … I mean, relieved.”
“This is a surprise. I don’t really know how to respond.”
“I am being accurate? That I am not fulfilling your expectations?”
“Hey now. I admit I was ticked off the other night. About the near miss. And I chewed your butt. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to fire you. Believe me, if I did, you’d have been on that helo to the task force, the one we sent back with Goodroe.” He glanced away, then back, trying to read the closed stubborn face. Remembering the anger and pride he’d seen a flash of, there in the passageway, when he’d used that phrase. Point of failure. Obviously it had sunk deep into this man’s soul.
He had to try harder to remember how powerful a CO’s words could be. But couldn’t the guy take a reaming and keep on steaming? Any XO, by design, had a stressful job: to demand more than anyone could offer, and keep the standards of performance, cleanliness, and professionalism in the stratosphere.
In other words, he was almost guaranteed to be unanimously hated by everyone beneath him. Dan smiled as he recalled the joke about it, about why the insignia for lieutenant commanders and commanders was an oak leaf. The punch line was “So the pope gave the order to cover all the pricks with leaves.” Dan had been there, executive officer aboard USS Turner Van Zandt, in the Gulf, under Benjamin Shaker, for Operation Earnest Will. It was a hard role. Was Fahad Almarshadi just not going to fill the bill?
“Fahad—surely you’ve gotten chewed out before. The idea’s to take direction, reorient, and keep charging.” The head remained stubbornly lowered; the dark gaze didn’t rise. Past him the helmsman and JOOD were watching curiously. They looked away quickly.
Or was something else going on here? “Wait a minute. This wouldn’t be about Iraq, would it?”
That called forth a furrow down Almarshadi’s brow. “Iraq?”
“It’s not that, then. For a minute, I wondered—never mind.”
“You wondered that since I was Arab, I would be on their side?”
“I didn’t say that, Fahad.”
“Now you insult me. First I am a point of failure. You would rather have Cheryl as your XO. Now I am disloyal, not to be trusted.”
Jesus. The guy had remembered every word he’d said, then made up some he hadn’t. “Cool the fuck down, XO. And lower your voice.” Dan swung out of his chair. “We’d better take this to my cabin.”
“No sir. I think we have said what we both needed to say.”
Almarshadi started to turn away, but Dan caught his shoulder and none too gently jibed him back around. “I’m not done talking, XO. You’ll stand there and listen. And look me in the eye when I’m speaking to you.”
“Yes sir.” The murmur was submissive, but the dark eyes were blazing now, as they had been once before.
“You need to start paying less attention to what I say to you, especially when I’m not getting enough sleep, and more attention to your job. The only thing I see wrong here is that you lack self-confidence. But do you think you’re the only one who feels that way?” No answer. “Do you?”
“I do not know.”
His gaze had dropped again, but Dan saw he’d hit some kind of nucleus. Maybe not hard enough for fission, but the angry flame seemed to be turning down to simmer. He started to lower his voice, then looked past the small man and instead raised it, so the others in the pilothouse could hear. “XO, sorry for losing my temper last night. Hear me?”
“I hear you, sir.”
“I have every confidence in you. Do you hear me?”
“Yes sir. I hear you.”
He lowered his voice again. “And something else. If you don’t think you’re up to the job? Neither do I.”
“Yes, you made that very—”
“No. I mean I don’t feel, deep inside, that I’m up to mine either.”
Almarshadi’s eyes widened. They came up and locked with his.
“That’s right,” Dan said, still keeping it low, between them, his grip on the guy’s shoulder digging to thin bone beneath the slight musculature. “I feel like I’m going to fail and give way. Like I’m making it up as I go along. And I’m never sure I’m doing the right thing.”
“But … you are the captain,” the little man whispered. “You have the … you have the Medal of Honor. You mean you do not…”
“No,” Dan said. They stood there face-to-face for a second, then another. Then he added, turning on just a little anger again, “So get used to it, and grow the hell up. We’re at war. Do your duty. Get us ready to fight. Press on. Then you’ll do everything I expect of you, and you’ll be a leader, Fahad.”
He opened his hand, releasing his grip. The little man held his gaze, still looking as if he did not quite believe, but in that moment unguarded as Dan had not seen him before. He nodded, once, then again. Stepped back, and turned away, catching himself with an outstretched arm as Savo rolled.
He vanished down the ladderway, leaving Dan, soaked with sweat and feeling as if he’d run many miles, listening to the hissing whisper of the snow.
* * *
HE was back in Combat when GCCS and high-side chat came up more or less at the same time. He narrowed his eyes at the screens, then called up the DIA classified site and looked up the ship.
A premonitory—no, a remembered—chill trailed cold fingers up his spine.
A Vosper Mark V frigate. Fourteen hundred tons. And heavily armed, including Chinese-supplied antiship missiles.
He knew this ship. Had sweated under its prosecution before, scraping the keel of a stolen submarine across the shallow sands of the eastern Gulf. Had fired his last and only weapon at its consort as it charged in to destroy him. It had connected, but the sister frigate, this one, had swung in next. Only an unexpected intervention had saved him.
Now INS Alborz was exiting As-Suwys—the mouth of the Suez Canal—accompanied by a second combatant and a supply ship. A small Iranian task force, according to the intel summary. Heading in his direction?
“A hundred and forty miles,” Matt Mills murmured from the TAO chair. Damn, Dan thought, am I getting that transparent? Or was it good that he and his TAOs were thinking along parallel lines? He sucked the inside of a cheek, replaying bad memories about that area of the Egyptian coast. That was where he’d patrolled with Moosbrugger and Horn, and intercepted the battered trawler that had turned out to be carrying something the West had dreaded for years.
He sighed, and reached for the phone.
Ammermann answered on the first ring. Dan asked him if he could come to CIC. While he was waiting, he researched the rest of the task force. The second combatant was a Sina-class missile boat, built to a French design in Iran. It too carried antiship missiles. The third must have been a support or logistics ship, or even civilian general cargo. His references didn’t list it, though the intel report gave a name. “Make sure the EW team has the specs on their emitters,” he told Mills.
The West Wing staffer looked around, as if impressed, when he let himself in. But the guy surely was used to large-screen displays if he’d ever been in the Situation Room. Dan motioned him over. “Matt, give Adam your seat for a little while. Take a pee break, or whatever. I’ll watch your screen.”
“Yes sir. Remember, Weps is starting morning systems-operability tests. You might see the ‘missile ready’ numbers going up and down as they take them off the line.”
“Okay, thanks. —Adam, sorry, we’ve sort of neglected you.”
“That’s perfectly okay, Dan. I know things must be getting tense for you.”
Was that a dig? He couldn’t read this guy. He acted sincere, open, but what political animal, from either party, didn’t have layer beneath layer, motivation beneath motivation? Maybe this one just had a better poker face, but his smooth, wide, roughly shaven visage looked guileless and eager to please. Dan noted a simple yellow-gold ring with a deeply embossed crest he couldn’t see well enough in the subdued light to identify. He tapped it. “Harvard?”
“Yale.”
“Like the president.”
Ammermann looked humble. “Oh, sure. But years later, of course.”
“You know, Adam, I keep feeling like I should recognize your name. Why is that?”
“The heavy-equipment manufacturers. My family.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Close to the administration?”
“We’ve been supporters, over the years. What did you need me for, Captain? Some way I can help?”
Dan explained the tight quarters of the launch box; the window they had to hit; the Israeli, still guard-dogging them to the northeast. “He’s staying clear of our firing bearing, which is good. But I’m not entirely sure what he’s doing out here.”
“I could try to find out,” Ammermann said earnestly. “Go right from our office to the ambassador. I believe that’s possible.”
Dan thought it over. He had his own contact with the Israelis, although he wasn’t sure of the man’s name: the smooth little diplomat, or spy, who’d surreptitiously slipped him the Israeli Medal of Courage at a party at the vice president’s house. Back when he’d worked in the West Wing himself.
How ironic that he was now trying to safeguard the same city for the second time. “Well, that’s not actually what’s bothering me at the moment.”
“What’s eating you, Dan? Fuel consumption?”
A flicker on the status board caught his eye; a missile had gone offline. Daily testing, right. Where had Ammermann heard about their fuel state? “Yeah, that, and other things, but what I’m wondering about is this Iranian, uh, task force, I guess, that’s entering the Med. They’ve never done that before, operated up here, and I’m not clear on what might be the motivation. We’re taking on Iraq—their enemy—the Iranians, I mean. Sort of like the Romans took out the … well, never mind that. Any ideas on what they might have in mind?”
Ammermann made a strange side-to-side motion of the head, almost, Dan thought, a gesture he’d seen Indians make. A snakelike weave that conveyed something, but he wasn’t sure what. “You think they’ve got their eye on Savo? Or on you?”
“Call me paranoid. We’ll know more in a few hours, when we get a reading on their track. But it isn’t that far from Suez to here.”
“I could speculate, but it wouldn’t be more than that.”
“Okay. What would you speculate?”
The younger man shrugged. “Even if we’re taking on one of their enemies, we’re still an enemy too. Probably a more hated one, given the history—our support of the shah, the hostage drama, et cetera, et cetera. So if we’ve made a commitment to defend one of our allies—Israel—and we can’t follow through for some reason, we take a pie in the face. How they could do that, how they might interfere—that’s more in your area of expertise, Captain. The alternative might be, they’re just showing the flag. They do seem eager to assert themselves, since Zhang’s been backing them. Especially anywhere we show up first.”
Dan tapped his teeth with a thumbnail. Just the mention of Zhang Zurong brought back bad memories. When they’d first met, at a restaurant near the Gallery Place Metro stop, “Uncle Xinhu” had been a colonel. Ostensibly a defense attaché, he’d actually been a member of the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army, supervising a massive program of technology theft. Dan remembered him as a middle-aged businessman in a dark suit, wearing metal-on-plastic Yuri Andropov glasses. Many years later, he’d suddenly emerged from the deliberate obscurity of the Chinese Politburo as minister of state security. And now, years after that, as the premier, with a new policy: testing and, when possible, displacing U.S. power.
To some extent, it was inevitable; as the U.S. fleet drew down, as the American presence became less imposing, rising powers would be tempted to help push them out. Maybe the Iranians were just showing the flag. But as CO of a task force himself, even if only of Savo Island and Pittsburgh, he was bound to put the most threatening construction on any new player in the east Med.
He glanced up as Ammermann was lighting a cigarette. Dan plucked it from his fingers before the flame from the Zippo could touch its tip. “Not in CIC.”
“Sorry … wasn’t thinking. What d’you want me to do?”
Past him Mills was balancing a fresh cup of coffee, listening. Dan nodded to him. “Matt, anything to add?”
“If Mr. Ammermann can find out what’s behind this, it could help.”
“Okay, Adam, I’m going to give you a covered line. Work your magic.”
“I can’t promise anything, Captain.”
“Just do what you can. If there’s any way we can persuade these guys to turn around and go home, or even just tie up someplace until this thing’s over, it could deconflict the situation. Especially with Captain Marom on a hair trigger over there.”
“Captain who?” Ammermann asked.
“Skipper of that Israeli corvette. That complicates it too—my chain of command.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“I mean, Iraq’s a CentCom responsibility, but Israel’s always been a EuCom country. And my opcon, and tacom, as CTG 161 is to Sixth Fleet, which is under EuCom. But I’m supporting a CentCom mission—Infinite Freedom.”
The staffer frowned. Dan got up and stretched. Something cracked in his neck, like a pretzel stick breaking, and he flinched. “Like I said—it’s complicated. But don’t worry about that.” Ammermann rose too, and extended a hand. Dan shook it. “I’ll have Dave Branscombe get in touch. He’s the comm officer. He’ll set you up. It’ll be a secure circuit, but I don’t have to warn you not to pass anything classified you don’t absolutely have to.”
“Do you still want me recalled? Sent back?”
“Well … I just don’t think this is a good use of your expertise and influence, Adam.”
Ammermann grinned, as if recognizing a clumsy attempt at disguising rejection. “I see why they still tell stories about you in the West Wing, Captain. You’re not going to make it in politics.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Though I understand your wife’s thinking about a run. She’s a brave gal. After all that. The injuries. Don’t quote me on this, but good luck to her … even if she’s on the wrong side.”
Dan shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about Blair with this guy. For a second he missed her, terribly. He had to look away and take a deep breath. Even just talking to her would help. But he couldn’t cut off phone comms for the crew, then make personal calls himself. He was starting to say thanks, already tapping the keyboard to go back to the high-side chat, when the 1MC chanted, “Fire, fire, fire. Class Charlie fire in Aft VLS. Repair Five provide. I say again—”
Not again was his first conscious thought. Not now. He was on his way out, headed for the bridge, before the word came over again, but doubled back in the doorway, almost knocking down a petty officer. The man backed into the bulkhead, looking alarmed. Dan crossed CIC at a run, barking his shin on the corner of a terminal, and went out the other way, grabbing his Hydra, which he’d socketed into a recharge holder, en route.