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Fifteen months ago, Captain Jane Mercier, U.S. Coast Guard, Chief of the Office of Response for the Seventh Coast Guard District, received a phone call she had been dreading for several weeks from Captain Nathan Worley, Commander of Coast Guard Sector Miami. The patrol boat USCGC Kauai was en route to her homeport in Miami; her Alien Migrant Interdiction Operations patrol cut short by a fatal mishap. Two migrants were dead, several injured, and the boat’s second-in-command and senior boatswain’s mate were also severely injured and medically evacuated.
“Jane, I have no choice. I have to yank him,” Worley said, referring to the cutter’s commanding officer. “Is there anything you can do to help me with a quick replacement?”
“What about the XO?” Mercier asked, referring to Kauai’s second-in-command, or Executive Officer.
“We had to medevac him for a head injury. Besides, you know he isn’t up to it.”
“Yes, I know,” Mercier said. Kauai had been on their mutual radar for several months, with materiel discrepancies and adverse personnel actions well above the norm. They had sent a “fixer”, a Chief Machinery Technician named James Drake, known for his ability to ferret out and solve problems, to replace the chief on board and privately provide a report on the command. Drake’s account had been shockingly frank—the boat was in a downward spiral only a change of command could fix. Mercier and Worley had been working through the administrative details to make that happen quietly when the incident had forced their hand.
Kauai was an Island Class Patrol Boat, 110 feet long and displacing 168 tons, with a crew of fourteen enlisted and two officers. The last of her class built, and among the last few still serving with the Coast Guard, Kauai was scheduled for decommissioning within two years. The issue with the command presented a dilemma—should they invest in repairs and the disruption of a relief for cause, or just call it a day and move up the decommissioning?
Drake’s report also said the hull was in good shape, and he could turn around the engineering department with a bit of help. Mercier was reluctant to throw Kauai away early because the boat had been upgraded with a prototype of the automated main gun installed on the new patrol boats and the hull had plenty of life left. For a replacement commanding officer, she had her eye on a lieutenant in her department named Sam Powell, who was working through the command center controller syllabus after a very successful command tour on a smaller eighty-seven-foot coastal patrol boat. The need to replace the injured executive officer was unexpected, and she would have to scramble through the recent list of screened officers to find an available replacement.
Sam was stunned when Mercier pulled him into her office a few minutes later and ordered him to report to Base Miami Beach and assume command of Kauai as soon as the Sector Commander relieved his predecessor. But, like any officer of his high caliber, he said “aye, aye” and carried out his orders. Within two weeks, Mercier had identified and transferred in the new second-in-command, Lieutenant Junior Grade Ben Wyporek.
Sam and Ben’s job was to restore the ship and crew to operational readiness as soon as possible. This they did within a few months, despite the damage from mishap and the critical morale problems their predecessors had left behind. After the restoration period was complete and a few operational wins were under their belt, Sam and Ben pivoted to building the crew’s esprit de corps.
Kauai’s crew became Mercier’s special project, and even Sam was surprised with the ease with which they could swap out the few irredeemable troublemakers and slackers for top performers. Given their proximity to decommissioning, he had feared Kauai would become a dumping ground for malcontents. Over time, the combined efforts of Mercier directing top-notch personnel into the crew, Drake’s wheeler-dealer skills with maintenance and parts, and Sam and Ben’s leadership acumen brought Kauai to a peak of operational competence and readiness unimaginable a year earlier.
Kauai was about halfway through a routine law enforcement patrol when she encountered a derelict sailboat laden with illegal narcotics, wrecked and devoid of a crew except for a single corpse trapped inside the cabin. Within hours of reporting their unusual find, they were detached from their normal operations and assigned to a national defense mission under the control of a mysterious Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Dr. Peter Simmons. After a couple of days of being kept in the dark about their purpose, ending in a deadly car chase that nearly cost Ben his life, the two officers confronted Simmons with a “come clean” or “abort mission” ultimatum. The answer they received was astounding—they were actually searching for a stray nuclear weapon believed to have landed in the area.
The search had begun five days earlier. A U.S. fighter intercepted a Russian Backfire bomber on the edge of U.S. airspace and they collided, triggering a nuclear-tipped hypersonic missile’s uncommanded launch. Contact was lost almost immediately after the launch and never recovered. Despite the relief that the warhead had not detonated, the peace of the world depended on locating the weapon and keeping it and the circumstances of its launch under wraps. The government had performed those search actions that could be completed covertly, without result. Kauai’s discovery of the wreck and Simmons’s confirmation that the damage was consistent with what would be expected in a near-miss by a hypersonic vehicle had opened another avenue of opportunity for covert search.
After a few days on the search, Ben, ashore at the time with Simmons assisting his team in their land-based efforts, deduced the warhead’s location. While investigating, they drew in a heavily armed seizure team from the same criminal organization that owned the derelict drug vessel. Ben and Simmons engaged the criminals and held them off. Both were wounded, and without Kauai’s arrival, literally at the last second, they would have been killed. Or worse.
After being “honorably acquitted” in the formal, but highly secret debrief of the mission for a committee of senior officials in the U.S. intelligence community, Mercier pulled Ben and Sam aside for a private chat. She explained to the two officers that she had taken advantage of the replacement of Kauai’s former command to experiment with building an elite crew that could be used for complicated and sensitive missions like this one. Because of their excellent performance, the patrol boat was given a new lease on life, with additional training and crew and an upgrade of her electronics and propulsion systems paid for by the Director of National Intelligence. The Coast Guard would retain and use Kauai as it saw fit, with the caveat she would be made available immediately should the DNI need her for any sensitive missions.
Kauai was transferred from Sector Miami to work directly for the 7th District Commander. Her homeport was moved from Miami to Port Canaveral, ostensibly to serve as the permanent range safety cutter for Cape Canaveral rocket launches. In fact, it kept her mostly out of sight, avoiding awkward questions of why the Coast Guard was retaining and upgrading a nominally obsolete patrol boat. She continued performing standard patrol boat operations when not offline for upgrades or special training, but was kept close at hand to respond as needed for DNI-assigned missions.
The true nature of their fateful mission remained unknown to Kauai’s crew, other than Ben, Sam, Operations Specialist Hopkins, and Drake. For the rest, the action was a lethal encounter with a vicious transnational criminal organization, and their prompt intervention prevented Ben and the DIA officer from being killed, which was factual as far as it went. Still, the crew was sharp and knew the upgrades conveyed a special status that recognized their high performance, leveling-up the pride they already enjoyed.
“There are no great men; there are only great challenges, which ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.”
Attributed to Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., US Navy
