Standing on the tarmac with Blair, he waited impatiently for a call from his attorney. His wife had driven over from DC in the rain. It had fallen off and on since dawn as gray squalls blew in from seaward.
He patted her back, realizing just how much he’d missed her. Getting a smile in return. Yeah, absence did make the heart grow fonder.
But they were both so busy … she probably even more than he, trying to keep her head above water in Washington while the country struggled to recover. President Holton’s offer of a cease-fire had ended the active rebellions. Yet the Covenanters still held out in the Midwest, and the Reconstituted Confederacy was a power in the South.
“They’re pushing to defund the Department of Defense,” she was explaining to the captain who escorted their group. “And it’s hard to argue, considering how much needs to be rebuilt. Cities. Farmland. Industry. Eighty cents of every dollar we take in goes to war debt. Something’s got to give … but we can’t entirely gut the forces. There are still threats out there.”
Dan checked the charge on his phone. He didn’t want to miss this call.
Matters at Larson Hall were settling into the time-worn grooves of military administration. The investigation into Evans’s death had wrapped. Dan had imagined someone giving the sprinting white-power leader a shove at an opportune time. The jagged rocks would finish the job. But there was no video coverage of the seawall, and the DoD autopsy had come up with little more than Sick Bay had. Bruises, a cracked tibia, water in the lungs. Dan had approved a slip and fall as the official finding.
He regretted the death, as he would have regretted anyone’s under his command. The kid could have gone far, once he got rid of whatever misguided sense of superiority he’d carried.
And the missing rifles had turned up at last, hidden in the bottom of a laundry basket, ready to be smuggled out and presumably sold on the black market. One of the civilian cleaning crew had vanished the same day, an ex-con with a burglary record, making him the prime suspect in the theft.
The ’dant, Stocker, said the initial meeting of the Anglo-Saxon studies group had been yawningly unthreatening, devoted primarily to an argument over whether it had been Æthelstan of Kent or King Alfred of Wessex who’d founded the first English Navy. They’d elected a new president to replace Evans, Midshipman Galadriel Stewart.
So he seemed to’ve been granted breathing room on some of his concerns. The waiting passengers retreated under the terminal’s awning as rain spattered anew. Party of six: himself and Blair, the SecDef looking 1940s in a khaki trench coat and low pumps and her hair up. A shaky, graying codger in blues so faded they must have been pulled out of the back of his closet. He’d introduced himself as the CO who’d put USS Horn into commission.
That seemed fitting: his old destroyer’s first skipper, and her very last. And three enlisted plank owners. A separate group a few paces off would go in the second shuttle. Blair’s protective detail—two CID agents—and the shipyard personnel who’d tended to the old can during her long quarantine at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, across the Elizabeth River. Horn had moldered there pierside for fifteen years. She’d pegged the radioactivity meters, contaminated by alpha fallout hammered so deep into decks and bulkheads and cableways no high-pressure washer could flush it out.
But the readings had gradually fallen. And today his former command would perform her final duty.
He stood remembering the rain-soaked day he’d taken charge, over at Pier 8, not half a mile from where they stood now.
Remembered the disgraced and retiring skipper he’d relieved, and the cynical advice Carter Ross had offered.
“Ever heard about the three envelopes?” Ross had said, turning his coffee cup in gnarled fingers in the CO’s in-port cabin. Dan had wondered why the guy was so nervous, as if in the waning minutes of his watch some disaster might still overtake him.
Dan had cleared his throat. “Envelopes?”
“Fellow comes on board to relieve, the outgoing CO gives him three envelopes. Says, when you get in trouble, open the first one. When you get in real trouble, open the second. And when you’re ass-deep in gators and there’s no way out, open the last one.
“So sure enough the fella screws up and he opens the first one. It says, ‘Blame your predecessor.’ So he does and it works. Later on he gets in real trouble. He opens the second envelope, it says, ‘Reorganize.’ So he does and gets out of the shit. But then at last he gets in such deep kimchee he can’t see any way to avoid a court-martial. He opens the third envelope.”
“So what’s it say?”
“‘Prepare three envelopes.’”
Horn had been a challenge, all right. Not just an engineering nightmare, but an experiment: the first warship to integrate females into wardroom and crew. Commonplace these days, but revolutionary then, with a lot of voices predicting he’d fail.
But it hadn’t been the women who’d doomed her.
Blair looked up from her phone. “He hasn’t called yet?”
The International Criminal Court at The Hague had discussed holding trials after the end of the war. Generalissimo Zhang. Marshal Chagatai. Admiral Lianfeng. General Pei. For aggressive war, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. They’d planned to indict senior officers from the Allied side as well, to show impartiality. It had taken years, but now, after many delays, his turn in the barrel might be here. He smiled tightly. “Uh … nothing yet. No.”
“Like I said last night, he’ll want character witnesses. If they decide to prosecute. And if you decide to go. Which is up to you … If you do, I can’t accompany you. Administration policy: no interference in the judicial process.”
He nodded. “Copy. But I’m wondering if—”
Heavy wingbeats interrupted him. The aircraft droned in from seaward. It roared over, circled the basin, then transitioned from level flight to VTOL mode. It hovered, lowered itself, hovered again, finally settled.
“Don’t forget these.” The captain passed out cranials with ear protection. Dan arranged Blair’s, unsnagging a lock of her hair, then donned his own.
Bent low, they scampered across the tarmac toward the rear ramp. To the snarling thud of huge engines driving gigantic proprotors, they lifted into the overcast.
He peered out as they churned over Virginia Beach, giving Norfolk International a wide berth. Pink and white hotels reared from the sand to the sky. The twin lighthouses of Cape Henry dropped astern. The sky cleared as the land receded. Two-to-three-foot seas, he estimated, looking down, with predicted winds of ten to fifteen knots. Good sailing weather.
Except for a very few historically significant units, obsolete warships were worthless. The costs of disassembly, recycling, and safe disposal exceeded their scrap value. A SINKEX put decommissioned hulls to use one last time.
But first, the Inactive Ships Office scrubbed them down. They removed oils, fluorocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, and solid plastics. They pumped out fuel, lubricants, and hydraulic fluids, and steam cleaned tanks and piping. A tug towed the ship out to the exercise area. There, a party went through one last time, securing watertight doors and hatches and scuttles to reflect wartime compartmentation. After a final muster, they debarked, abandoning the forlorn vessel.
Then her executioners moved in.
Finally he glimpsed her, far ahead: a speck on the blue that grew quickly into the familiar shape of a Spruance-class destroyer. The bladelike bow. The towering, complex, nearly vertical superstructure, so unlike the smooth, slanted surfaces of newer ships, designed to shrug off enemy radars. That huge sail area had nearly blown him down on a Dutch frigate when a tug had dropped gears.… The V-22 lost altitude and made a circuit of the target, maintaining a half mile’s distance.
She looked the same, Dan thought, yet not the same. Rust stains ran from her scuppers, as if she were weeping blood. Her paint was faded, ghostlike, less haze gray than off-white. Holes gaped in her upperworks, where equipment had been stripped out. There were transplants too; new antennas, different from those sheared off by the blast. An unfamiliar enclosure, on the helo deck.
“Does it look like it used to?” Beside him, Blair squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back, but didn’t answer. Still staring out.
Horn had been his first real command. He remembered: Claudia Hotchkiss, his exec. Lin Porter and Kim McCall. Marty Marchetti, “Mister Machete,” hadn’t made it. Too close to the burst, and instantly vaporized.
And little Cobie Kasson, fireman, who’d given her life for her shipmates.
“I remember the day you left on her,” Blair said.
He nodded, pulling his mind back. Glancing at his wife.
She projected inaccessible professionalism in public. But she had a passionate, even reckless side. She had a doctorate in operations research, a Juris Doctor degree from George Mason, and a stepfather who owned six thousand acres in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He could see how some found her intimidating. Doubly so now, as secretary of defense.
They’d met in the Persian Gulf, in a sandstorm, when he’d been exec of Turner Van Zandt and she the defense aide for the late Senator Bankey Talmadge. Then again in Bahrain, where one passionate night had interlocked their lives like enzyme molecules.
It had never been a traditional marriage. They’d grabbed weekends and holidays together, flying from coast to coast, scheduling meetings around each other’s commitments. Sometimes he honestly didn’t understand how it worked. They were just both so damned busy.
But maybe once he was out of the Navy, and she retired too, they’d get to spend some good years together at last.
He squeezed her hand again. Shit! He was going soft. Mooning over an old ship. Which was after all just a hunk of rusty metal.
Except … no. A ship wasn’t just steel and copper and paint. It was freighted with memories. Joys, and terrors, and regrets.
This one had been sentenced to a deep grave, far beyond the hundred-fathom line.
USS Ffoulk was a wartime Burke-class destroyer, named after a Marine hero of the Taiwan campaign. Dan and Blair airlocked in and were led to the wardroom for coffee and cookies. The skipper explained there’d be a holdup. One of the prep crew had fallen down a scuttle and injured his leg. Meanwhile, they were welcome to relax in the wardroom, or observe from the bridge.
Blair settled in with her tablet; Dan took the offer, and climbed to the pilothouse. A junior officer handed him a printout, and he ran his gaze down the exercise order.
It would begin with Horn under power at fifteen knots. A single turbine and screw had been returned to service for the exercise, remotely steered by a joystick-and-console on Ffoulk. The first attack would come from massed drones. Following that would be cruise missiles from a German destroyer, with dummy warheads to prolong the testing opportunity. The next assault would be something classified, still in prototyping. The op order also mentioned a countermeasure, though it didn’t specify what. The final event was left open too.
He unsheathed binoculars from a holder. Horn leapt closer, sharpening as he focused. An ache ignited in the region of his heart. Dropping the RHIBs in the Gulf for boarding and search. Liberty in Bahrain, and the captain’s mast he’d held afterward, when he’d caught the male crew circulating topless photos of their shipmates. Then Operation Adelaide, in the Red Sea.
Ffoulk’s CO drifted over. “Understand you were her skipper when the bomb went off, Admiral,” he essayed.
Dan lowered the glasses. “Uh-huh.”
“A stolen nuke, in a dhow, is what I heard.”
“Pretty much it, Captain,” Dan said. “Fallout-enhanced with strontium-based animal feed. Would have poisoned a lot of innocent people, if it had gone off closer to land.”
The skipper stood beside him for a few more seconds, probably yearning to know more, but finally was called down to Combat for STARTEX. He invited Dan to accompany him, but he said he’d stay topside, at least for a while.
Blair came up, and was ushered to the captain’s chair. Her protective detail stood back by the chart room.
The exercise creaked into motion, the drone-swarm buzzing in from seaward like killer wasps. Launched from a sub, apparently. Small, dangerous-looking cruciforms skimmed the wave tops. As they jinked and dodged, even diving in and out of the sea now and then, Horn changed course to uncover her stern. Fighting on her own, like another ship he’d known long before: USS Barrett, in the Windward Passage.
So many ships. So many memories … Reynolds Ryan, Bowen, Barrett, Van Zandt, Oliver C. Gaddis, Horn, the two Savo Islands. And the missions: Iraq, the White House, the Tactical Analysis Group … then, crowning everything, commanding fleets in wartime.
He’d dreamed of such a career, as a mid. But resigned himself to the probability his fantasies could never come true.
Yet somehow, they had … just not in the ways Midshipman D. V. Lenson had expected.
His musings were interrupted as a nearly invisible beam from Horn boiled the air. It flicked from one flying shape after the other. They fell, spinning, drawing sketches of charred-plastic smoke against the blue. The needle-beam stabbed so rapidly here and there across the sea that he wondered if it was a laser at all. Hadn’t Naval Research been working on a particle-beam weapon?
A pause, then Phase Two began. The old destroyer swerved east and accelerated to twenty knots, her max speed, as he recalled, on one screw. He lifted the glasses again. She still looked regal, even dangerous, with a white-foam bone gripped in her teeth. Driving over three-foot seas smoothly as a big Peterbilt down a Texas interstate.
Just as she had that day off the coast of Israel.…
Assigned to a barrier patrol, they’d intercepted a pair of incoming Osa/Komar attack craft. When he’d illuminated them with radar, the response was a salvo of Styxes. Horn had batted them down, and he’d sunk the Osas with Harpoons.
But the contact behind them had been a small trawler, looking as innocent as a fisherman could well be. But then, what had the shooters been protecting?
He closed his eyes, gripping the handrail as pain jabbed his neck like a hot needle. Fighting the old terror, suddenly just as strong as it had been for months afterward.
The German frigate reported a glitch, so the exercise coordinator called a two-hour delay. A helicopter appeared from landward, settled over Horn’s fantail, and figures fast-roped down. It moved off to hover a hundred yards away. Minutes ticked past.
A small craft he hadn’t noticed before—likely lashed to the far side of the old destroyer’s hull—emerged from behind it. The inflatable fell astern, then turned and motored for Ffoulk.
His former command turned away, accelerating again. Her wake broadened as she smashed into the seas, boiling the blue into a froth hearted by swirling pools of moss and lime and absinthe. An amber haze seethed above her stack. Caught by the wind, it streamed out over the sea until the horizon shimmered like a Gulf mirage.
Dan bent hunched over the splinter shield, binoculars welded to the shrinking silhouette. Ignoring the pain in his neck, his back, his legs.
Pain he’d carried ever since the blast.
He’d been looking away when it happened. Even so everything around him, sea, steel, uniforms, had blazed into the brightness of the noon sun. The lookout screamed, clutching his eyes. The dreadful, burning light went on and on, as if someone had opened the scuttle to Hell.
He lunged across the bridge, to shout into the 1MC, “Nuclear detonation, brace for shock!”
The deck jolted upward as he dove for it, whiplashing him into the air. An instant later the windows disintegrated with a crack like a bolt of lightning tearing an oak apart.
As the hellish light waned to a red glow, Horn inclined to port. A clamor reached him, a clanging racket like a boiler factory stood on end and shaken. Then water crashed down, the base surge, with shards and debris clattering on the decks.
With a massive groan, Horn staggered back upright. She rolled to starboard, then back to port. Sluggishly, as if trying to sense how badly hurt she was.
Dan pried himself off the deck. His hands came away bloody from his face. Something was wrong with his neck. The others hoisted themselves to their feet. The exec was on the phone, demanding damage reports.
When he felt his way out onto the wing, a queer beige fog hung above the waves. He swept the sea where the trawler had drifted seconds before. Waves rocked crazily, radiating from an inchoate jumble of boiling whitecaps. A column of dirty vapor towered from a misty base.
He turned, to look the length of his ship.
Horn had been blasted broadside, and the radar-absorbing tiles were peeling like sloughing skin. All her antennas were gone. Life rafts, davits, stanchions were swept clear or bent at strange angles.
With sudden horror he realized what the gritty mist on his face was, and what might be filtering into the ship with it. He slammed the door, dogged it, and roared at the dazed-looking boatswain, “Set Circle William throughout the ship. Commence water washdown.”
Yet when he’d peered out again only a few nozzles spurted. Instead of being shriven in cascades of water, Thomas W. Horn had wallowed, scorched and flayed, as the radioactive rain pelted down.
Now, decades later, he blinked, gripping Ffoulk’s splinter shield. Hollow, as if he’d left part of himself back there. Some part that believed the worst could never happen.
“Recommence exercise, Phase Three,” an overhead speaker intoned.
“Flash gear, Admiral. Going to the main event.” A petty officer held out hood, goggles, heavy gloves. Dan accepted them reluctantly—they carried bad memories—but drew the hood over his head and snapped on the goggles. He had to grin then; the usually sweat-stinky hood had obviously been freshly laundered for the admiral. He drew the gloves on last.
The OOD poked her head around the wing door. “Setting Condition Zebra, Admiral. Did you want to come inside?”
“Surely we’re far enough away. And upwind, right?” The target was a speck on the horizon.
“If you insist, sir. But I’m pulling everyone else in.”
Dan nodded abstractedly. He fingered the glasses, torn between wanting to watch and fear he’d burn his eyes out. Then stepped inside.
The exercise circuit announced, “Stand by for impact.”
The sea rolled under a clear sky. Horn was a pinpoint, barely distinguishable from the sawtooth shapes of the distant waves.
A prick of light ignited high in the blue. A white, perfectly straight line unrolled behind it, like the track of a skate on ice. Thin almost to disappearance, it drew with incredible rapidity downward, out of the heavens.
As if in response, that nearly invisible beam reached up again. Like those that had incinerated the drones, but thicker. Denser. It locked onto the descending point, tracking as it fell. Holding steady.
Yet the descending fire refused to alter. Faster than he could draw a breath, it completed its fall. Straight from the zenith down to the afterdeck of the fleeing destroyer.
A blinding flash, white-hot, swiftly expanding.
The ship seemed to swell, expand, rise slightly out of the sea.
Then it exploded, wiped out in a white cloud of smoke, steam, and vaporized metal. The cloud expanded, covering five times her length, blotting out whatever was happening within.
He realized he was gripping the binoculars so hard his hands cramped. After nearly a minute the fog thinned. The wind peeled it away to reveal a rocking, smoking, foaming sea, and amid it, the after half of a ship just slipping beneath the waves. The bow half, forward superstructure and hull, rolled in a strange nose-down attitude. Dan could see the interior. Whatever that had been, it had broken the old destroyer’s back.
“Effective compartmentation,” the junior officer muttered beside him.
Dan flinched. In his imagination he’d been aboard her, groping through canted, smoke-filled passageways, calling out for anyone still trapped below. He cleared his throat, blinking back a stinging in the eyes. “What was that?” he managed. “A hypersonic, I assume.”
“A deorbiting kinetic energy weapon, Admiral,” the JO said. Her tone both humble and a little proud, no doubt to be able to explain something to someone so senior. “A satellite-launched, gravity-powered, hypervelocity projectile.”
“A contract with SpaceX,” Blair added. “We put ten-meter-long heavy-metal shafts in circumpolar orbits. An onboard system calculates trajectories to the target, then fires braking rockets. The shafts hit at twenty times the speed of sound.” She put her hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah … yeah.” He nodded, sucking air. Even with the particle beam going all out trying to deflect them, the bolts had fallen as inexorably as the thunderbolts of Jove. They’d torn his old ship apart, probably less by the damage they did going through, than the bubble their impact created under the keel, as all that energy was converted instantly to steam.
And they could strike any point on earth or at sea.
“Continue exercise, Phase Four,” the overhead speaker said. The coordinator’s voice flat, as if even he had been sobered by the violent death of a ship. Not to mention what it boded for the future of the Fleet.
Dan accepted a chief’s offer of coffee, and carried it out on the opposite wing. A torpedo slammed into Horn’s bow section. A few more seconds and that wallowing hulk slipped beneath the seething chop as well, gushing foam and veils of steam.
He closed his eyes, imagining her settling to the distant bottom. To be crewed only by groupers, the lurking moray, and the poison-spined lionfish.
Ffoulk approached warily. A mile. A thousand yards. The empty sea still smoked as crew members held up phones, videoing the end of what to them was a legend from the distant past.
At last the smoke and bubbles ceased, and the sea rocked on, as it had forever. Only a few patches of creamy froth swirled, to mark where a ship had died.
He stood alone, trying to suppress a nausea that wasn’t only from the overcooked, too-strong coffee. Surely it was better this way. For her to make a final contribution. Instead of rusting away in some backwater, since she was still too radioactive to be recycled.
He straightened, shaking off the gloom. Was he projecting?
He still had work to do.
Blair called her staff. She’d overnight in Hampton Roads. After a sit-down in the morning with the NATO allied commander, she’d return to the Pentagon on the evening helo shuttle. Dan would have been happy to stay at the BOQ, but she’d reserved a room at the Cavalier, an old, beautifully landscaped hotel in Virginia Beach. They showered, changed, and took a dignified promenade on the boardwalk, her security detail trailing them a few yards back.
Back in their room, unchaperoned at last, she put her arms around him. Whispered in his ear, “Remember when we used to hole up in Bahrain?”
“I do.”
“Remember what we used to do?”
“Uh … sort of.”
“Guess I need to remind you.”
He was pulling off his pants when his phone chimed. A glance at the screen sobered him. “Hold that thought. I need to take this.”
She sighed. “Burke-Bowden?”
“Switzerland.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess you better.” She pulled her blouse together, and gave him a final, rousing squeeze. “Put it on speaker, so I can hear.”
“Lenson,” Dan said into the phone.
“Mukhtar Corris here. Very sorry, I was not able to return your call until just now.”
“No problem. What’ve we got?”
“Well, not good news, I am afraid. The high commissioner for human rights wants to move forward on your charges. He has just appointed your prosecutor.
“Dr. Amir Al-Mughrabi started his career investigating American atrocities in Afghanistan. He’s prosecuted civil war and genocide in Lebanon, Rwanda, Syria, and Ukraine. He specializes in Article Seventeen cases—where the state in question, that’s the US in your case, is unwilling to prosecute. So that is like, as you say, two strikes out of four.”
Blair touched his knee. Whispered, “Did he say ‘Al-Mughrabi’?”
Dan muted the phone. She muttered, “I met him. Twice. In Zurich, setting up the UN monitoring team for the war. And in Singapore, at the peace conference.”
He nodded. “Anything I need to know?”
“Probably nothing your attorney doesn’t. The guy’s definitely not pro American. But he’s not the one who’ll pass judgment.”
Dan unmuted the cell. “Um … okay. And by the way, it’s three strikes, not four. Before you’re out.”
“Thank you for the correction. Yes, it will make my defense, I mean, our defense, more difficult. And your chances, I am sorry to say, less sanguine. On the other hand … as we discussed … most likely one reason you are being indicted is to justify the prosecution of senior officers and political leaders of the former Associated Powers for more serious crimes. So the ICC does not look like it is levying victors’ justice.”
Dan nodded. Yeah, he could think of several people who belonged in front of a court. Or better, a firing squad. “Roger. What do I need to do?”
“Mainly, it is time for you to decide, Admiral. I know your country’s policy. You will not be forcibly extradited. But the final decision, sir, is up to you.”
Dan exchanged glances with Blair. She tucked her chin, looking away. The message was clear: It’s up to you.
He drew a breath. Then said, as he pretty much knew he would all along, “I think I acted properly, Doctor. And if I didn’t, I need to accept my punishment. It’s a matter of honor.”
A pause, a hiss on the line. “Honor?” Corris said at last, astonishment, or maybe incredulity, salting his tone. As if he’d never heard the word before, at least in a legal context. Blair put a hand on his arm, eyebrows raised.
He shook her off. Gently, but getting the message across. You left it up to me. So let me handle it.
At the same time wondering if, as he’d managed too fucking often in his star-crossed career, he was galloping full tilt down the wrong road. Screwing it all up, from some misplaced sense doing it the easy way wasn’t right.
He inhaled deeply. Ever since the Academy, some people had considered him a straight arrow. Locked on, as they said in Bancroft. Maybe too straight. Rigid? Unrealistic? Holier-than-thou?
But he’d accepted that, about himself. It was too late to change.
“I’ll be there,” he told the attorney. Catching one last horrified look from his wife; her shake of the head; and signed off.