CHICKEN, steak, and burgers were grilling over charcoal in torched-apart fifty-five-gallon drums. The smells of barbecue mingled with those of baked beans, coleslaw, chips, and stack gas. Gulls darted overhead, shrieking with rage and envy as Savo rolled eastward at a casual ten knots, barely fast enough to push a bow wave. Two hundred and fifty miles out of Hormuz, the atmosphere was nearly clear of sand. Still cloudy, still monsoon weather, and the wind still kicked up a blue sea.
Dan, holding a laden plate on the helo deck, studied Mitscher steaming in company a mile off. Incredibly, no one had woken him again until 0730, and he felt almost rested, though his throat was raw and the cough worse. Around him the crew chatted and chowed down at folding tables, squatted cross-legged on the nonskid, or dangled legs through the deck-edge nets. Most wore trunks or bathing suits, predominantly issue gear, but some in colorful civilian attire. Especially the girls, a few of whom lay garnering what ultraviolet they could facedown on blankets on the hangar roof.
Looking down, Dan couldn’t help noting the tire marks and eroded surfaces where the helo had scraped the rough black nonskid off. They’d have to resurface the flight deck again.
“Bug juice, Cap’n. Orange or blue?”
“The orange, please.”
Hands full, he stood eating with a gathering of the chiefs, listening to “Red” Slaughenhaupt tell about the time he’d been on a boarding team deployed out here. They’d been doing maritime intercept operations with a Canadian frigate when they’d intercepted a heroin shipment. “We found two tons of brown powder, in plastic bags,” the lead fire controlman finished. “I had to witness the destruction. Felt pretty wasteful, dumping all that good shit over the side. You gotta wonder, it’s worth that much on the street, why don’t we just take it home and sell it? Buy ourselves another carrier battle group or something.” The other chiefs grinned, glancing from him to Dan.
He wandered from there into the hangar. Red Hawk squatted, folded-back blades nodding with the ship’s motion. The helo mechanics were disassembling equipment. “Thought this was a rope yarn afternoon,” he said to Strafer, who’d strolled over when he came in.
“You want us in the air tomorrow, gotta maintain today.” The lead pilot rubbed his crew cut. “Not to bring up business, but … we put a lot of hours on this bird. Coming up on Interval Two fast.” Wear was accumulating, and the bird would need serious attention soon. Wilker looked out to sea. “We have to put flight hours into this exercise? What’s it called?”
“Malabar.”
“And who else—”
“U.S., Australia, Japan, India, Singapore. This year, they’re gonna focus on ASW. So, yeah, you’re gonna be tasked. Plus, if we have to put you in the air to check out any questionable surface contacts.” Dan glanced at the worktables, where burgers and Cokes had been set aside. “We’re all getting tired. If there’s any way we can lighten your guys’ load, let me know. And if we’re getting close to the hairy edge on safety, let me know. I mean it. Don’t push any envelopes, just for an exercise.”
He wandered out onto the flight deck again and stood looking down on the fantail, eating baked beans with a plastic fork. Three dark-haired, swarthy men squatted on their haunches on the afterdeck. The Iranians they’d fished out the night before. They were looking out at the sea, not speaking or interacting, just staring, as if hoping to spot someone they knew was out there. The after gun was centerlined, threatening a distant, slowly rolling horizon. The wake unscrolled behind them, a smoothed path that gradually vanished as it approached the distant, jagged waves at his sight line. Several crew members stood along the lifeline, spaced like sparrows on a wire, holding poles or tending handlines. Seabirds whirled, making him shield his plate with one hand against errant squirts. Now and then a gull left the milling swarm to dive toward where the sailors’ bait skipped along the surface.
Then, from high above, a greater shadow descended. The gulls parted, shrieking and crying. Dan squinted up into the opal light, not quite believing what he was witnessing.
The thing’s wings were wider than a man was tall. It balanced on the wind like a Romanian gymnast. A black eye examined him from a cocked head. A hooked beak opened and closed. For an endless moment he met that dark soulless gaze. Then a wing tip twitched, and the great bird angled off, lifting without effort on some invisible draft Dan couldn’t even feel. But still, gazing down.
He suddenly became aware of others standing behind him, also goggling at the bird, and watching him. The crew, holding plates and cans.
Tausengelt stepped up. “A good omen,” the leathery old master chief said drily. “Or a warning?”
“Oh, they’re good luck.” Dan glanced over his shoulder and raised his voice. “Albatross. Good luck to a ship … unless you harm one. Let’s just make sure we don’t.”
The anglers murmured assent, looking up. The great bird soared far above, gradually dropping back until it hovered over their wake. And stationed itself there, motionless, as if pasted to the cloudy sky, until Dan turned away, and carried his plate to the plastic bins.
* * *
HE was in some kind of boarding school. Run on English lines, but somehow in Pennsylvania. He and some other boys were siphoning gasoline from what seemed to be a swimming pool.
The Hydra woke him. A furious-sounding Cheryl Staurulakis was on the other end. “Captain? We have a situation.”
He blinked into the dark, the dream still inhabiting his mind. Shaking it off, he jumped up in his boxers and jerked the blue curtain from over the forward porthole. It looked out over the bow, but the night sea lay empty of lights. Not an impending collision, then. “What’ve you got, Exec? I was trying to get my head down—”
“A situation,” the XO repeated. “In my stateroom.”
“In your … stateroom. You want me to come down there?”
“If the captain pleases.”
He didn’t like her tone on that last, but bit back a snappish reply. If she thought it was important, it would be. He checked the bulkhead clock. Just past eight o’clock reports. “Let me pull my coveralls on.”
“Khakis might be best, sir.”
With lifted eyebrows, he signed off.
Five minutes later—the uniform races at the Academy had been, after all, a good preparation for eventual command—he knocked at her door. “Come in,” said a muffled voice.
He closed the door to a flushed, sweaty Staurulakis, swinging a leg from a perch on her fold-down desk, and a seated, slumped Petty Officer Terranova. The girl raised tearstained cheeks. Her usual presentation, of a junior high school band student, was gone. The chubby face looked more like that of a child who’d fallen and skinned her knee. Dan restrained his first impulse, to put an arm around her, as when his daughter had been little, and fallen off her bike. “What happened?” he murmured.
“Tell him,” Staurulakis said. Just from the speed at which her leg swung he could tell she was furious.
Dan’s leading SPY-1 fire controlman, the woman he depended on during general quarters, described in broken sentences how, back in Crete, she’d ordered a new bikini swimsuit from a Soft Surroundings catalog one of the other girls had. It had come in in their mail delivery at Jebel Ali. “And I thought, we’re having the picnic, I’d wear it. Sure, I’m … a little heavy, but I could get a tan. In CIC all the time, we all get pasty white.”
“I know,” Dan said. “Take your time.”
“Anyway I got in line and had a salad. Then took my blanket up on the 03 level. And Heather and Ashley and Reagan and I, we laid there and talked, and drank Cokes … and I bummed a cigarette off Reagan. Then after the bird came—”
“The albatross?”
“Yessir. The, um, albatross. The sun started to go down, and they packed up. But I didn’t want to leave. You never get to be alone. So I stayed. And it got dark. Finally I got everything packed up and I left too. I was going down the port side, in through there, in my flip-flops, carrying my blanket—”
“Go on,” Dan said, though from the exec’s bouncing leg and the Terror’s averted gaze he had an idea what was coming.
“Anyway, somebody … grabbed me, there, inside the helo hangar passageway, and pulled me behind the darken ship curtains. Where they fold against the bulkhead. And put a knife to my throat—”
“A knife?” Dan repeated. “A knife?”
“That’s what I said. I felt it—it was fucking sharp, too.” The petty officer gulped and straightened. “He pulled me behind the curtain, there, and felt me up. Stuck his hand under my top, and down the back of my—bottoms.”
“I see. Was there actual—”
“There wasn’t,” Staurulakis said, flat-faced. “We already discussed that.”
“I see. Well … then what?”
“I felt him … jerking off. Then he whispered in my ear to stay there for five minutes, or he’d cut me when I wasn’t expecting it. In the mess line, or wherever.” She took a deep breath. “So I did. And got myself back together, then came—”
“Then came to me,” Staurulakis said. “You did exactly right, Beth.”
Dan cleared his throat. “That’s right, Terror. You didn’t mention this to any of the other girls? En route? Straight here, to the exec’s cabin?”
“I asked Donnie where the exec was. He said, probably in the combat passageway, observing eight o’clock reports. But I didn’t tell him why I wanted her.”
“Where did you see Wenck?” Staurulakis asked.
“On the way down to berthing. I would’ve come right here, ma’am, but I was still in my swimsuit and—”
Dan said, “Exec, we need the chief master-at-arms in on this. Terror, you said he, um, hand-jobbed himself. Did anything get on you? On your suit, or your blanket?”
“I didn’t look.”
“We need to sequester them, inspect for semen.”
The exec murmured, leg slowing a bit, “Yessir, we can do that. But about the master-at-arms…”
“What about him?”
“Can we, um, talk offline?”
Out in the passageway, door closed, Staurulakis murmured, “Toan’s not going to be that interested. You heard them, when we took Peeples to mast over what he said to Scharner.”
“Oh, he’ll be interested,” Dan said. “This isn’t verbal harassment. Calling somebody a kunk, or whatever it was. This is assault with a deadly weapon. A threat of bodily harm. If he doesn’t take this seriously, I’ll recalibrate him. I won’t have my sailors terrorized. Also, I want to know where Peeples was during the picnic and afterward. Who he was with. And if he owns a knife.”
“All right, sir.” The exec hesitated, then added, “But you have to realize, just about everybody on the ship owns a knife.”
“I asked whether he owns one, XO.” He nodded toward the door.
Back in the stateroom, Dan told Terranova, “Okay, we’re going to get the sheriff up here, fill him in on what happened. He’ll take an official statement. Anything else you can remember, Terror? What he smelled like? Was he big? Fat? Thin? Could you tell what uniform he had on?”
“I couldn’t tell much … I was sort of in shock … and he was behind me, feeling me up, and we were behind the darken ship curtains, with the door closed. The lights were off.”
He was turning to go, but halted. “Wait a minute … the door was closed, but the lights were off?”
“Yessir.”
Staurulakis was frowning too. “But when the doors giving onto the main deck open, the lights automatically go off. And on again, when they close. You’re sure the vestibule light was off?”
“Check and see if the switch was broken, or maybe fucked with,” Dan said, then immediately regretted the last phrase. “I mean, interfered with. If so, this wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. It was planned.”
Staurulakis said she’d check it out with the compartment petty officer. Dan hesitated, was contemplating where this could go, when she said, “Shouldn’t we add some … horsepower to this, Captain? To, you know, help the chief master-at-arms with the investigation?”
“Um, I guess so,” he said reluctantly. Remembering ex-USS Gaddis, the mutilations and murders that had followed her from port to port. And how fruitless his own investigations had been, and why. “What d’you suggest?”
“A joint investigation. Chief Toan and a female officer. Somebody sharp. With an inquiring mind. Say … Lieutenant Singhe.”
“Amy,” Dan said slowly. True, she was one of the keenest minds aboard. On the minus side, she’d already estranged the senior enlisted, and something like this could get messy fast. “Okay, but warn her not to play bull in the china shop … throw around blanket accusations, accuse people of sexism, et cetera. This is an assault investigation, not a chance to work an agenda. Or write her next article.”
Staurulakis nodded, and Dan patted Terranova’s shoulder. “We’ll get this asshole, Terror. Like the XO says, you did the right thing, reporting it. But just for the present … try to stay with your friends, or in your work spaces. No more hanging out alone.”
The exec’s expression made him feel as if he’d just said something wrong. He was about to try again when Staurulakis’s Hydra beeped. “XO, OOD. Know where the captain is? I buzzed his at-sea cabin and tried his Hydra, but no joy.”
“He’s here with me.”
A hesitation.”Discussing ship’s business,” Staurulakis added in an icy tone.
“Yes ma’am. Commander, just tell him we have USS Pittsburgh, reporting in VHF voice.”
The exec double-clicked. “Did you get that, Captain?”
He nodded. Youngblood was early; the sub wasn’t supposed to join up until tomorrow. And the day after, they’d start the exercise, though he’d barely glanced at the op order.
But that wasn’t his major problem. Not now. As of today, he had a molester in the crew, one not afraid to use a knife. And every male was a suspect.
Just fucking great. He only hoped they could find him before Singhe split the crew down the middle.
He climbed heavily back to his sea cabin, undressed again, coughing, limbs feeling like waterlogged wood and his eyelids lead-loaded. He rolled into his bunk. Then stared at the overhead, his anxiety program rebooting. He rolled over, snapping it off. Remember the albatross. The castaways they’d rescued. Both seemed like good omens. Maybe they’d find the molester. Lock him down, get him off the ship. It could happen.
The creak and sway of a seaway, the muffled voices, the hiss of radios, faded. And gradually, imperceptibly, he became one once more with the blackness that surrounded them all.