The Command (24 page)

The Australian glanced around the in-port cabin the same searching way he'd examined the flight deck. A carafe stood on the table. “Coffee, sir?” Dan asked him.

“No thanks. Comm arrangements?”

“My Comm-oh's already arranged that with yours. We'll have additional circuits on the bridge and in Combat for your staffers, and I'm putting an extra radioman on watch.” He showed him the sleeping cabin behind the reception and work area, giving it just a word or two. Strong must have been aboard Spruances before and there wasn't anything remarkable about
Horn.
Other than the obvious.

As if Strong was thinking the same thing, he said, “I saw some sheilas back on the flight deck.”

“We're an integrated ship. The first one, actually.”

“Interesting. I rather doubt we'll ever go that way, but… How are they working out?”

“They're doing a good job.”

“Friction?”

“There've been a couple of incidents.”

“Such as?”

Dan told him the basics, neither emphasizing nor downgrading them. Just the facts. The commodore didn't seem interested in long explanations. Dan felt condescended to somehow, though that might be merely the man's manner, and had to take care not to be brusque back.

“Anything since this berthing fire?”

“No, sir, nothing since. I'm hoping whoever set it has either changed his mind or at least gotten scared off. Things are going better since I had that talk with the chiefs. Maybe they're getting used to them.”

“The chiefs?” said Strong briskly.

“No, sir. The women,” Dan said, wondering if he'd been listening.

A tap at the door, and the mess specialists began bringing in the commodore's gear. A much-abused duffel bag, boxes of records, a Toshiba notebook in a black case. Strong asked several questions about his Tomahawk loadout. As he talked, he opened the boxes with
a pocketknife, one slice each, like a surgeon doing assembly line hernias. He cut open the bottom, not the top, so he could flip it over and all the files dropped into the open drawer at once. Dan gave him the password to the computer on his desk, and waited for him to write it down. Strong just nodded.

The commodore looked up, seemed to realize his discomfiture. “That'll be all. I'll come up to the bridge later,” he said. He gave Dan a quick handshake and opened the door with the other.

In the passageway he watched the commodore's staff bustle past. They gave him quick neutral glances, as if he were a bollard or a piece of gear they might or might not use.

STRONG had a U.S. officer attached. “A. J.” Lambert was a commander, as was Dan. He wore the gold dolphins of a submariner. Lambert told him
Laboon
and
Horn
were headed back to Oparea Adelaide, while
Georges Leygues
took
Laboon's
place inside the Gulf of Aqaba. The U.S. ships would be doing two missions now. One was the usual, maritime interdiction. The second was setting up for strike ops against Iraq.

“Saddam's resisting the inspection regime. The White House wants what they call an ‘appropriate response.' Something that makes headlines but doesn't kill civilians. You know, like always, they want to have it both ways. What it bottlenecks down to is either an air force strike with smart bombs, or Tomahawk. They shoot a plane down, they've got a hostage. So we'll probably get the job.”

Dan contemplated the flat area on his foredeck, the armored hatches. It was easy to overlook them at a glance, and they were so low maintenance he could all but forget about them day to day. But the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System was
Horn's
main battery. His current loadout was sixty-one land-attack Tomahawks, with either conventional warheads or a thousand pounds of bomblets. They made
Horn
a strike destroyer, able to download data via satellite and destroy targets up to twelve hundred miles away.

A dependable weapon, but not a perfect one. As he knew from helping develop it. Sometimes you launched them and the engine didn't start and they went on over, falling out of the sky. Sometimes they missed. At best, they were only as good as the intelligence that selected their targets.

Which he had no input into. The team in Combat downloaded the
strike package, programmed the missiles, and fired them as directed. Not only did they never see their target, there was no requirement they even know what it was.

Lambert lit a cigar. “Penny.”

“We used to shell their forts when things didn't go like we wanted. Now we clobber them with missiles.”

“Whatever. Get your guys ready to receive an updated package. When we're in position, the commodore'll want a rehearsal. He's interested in the strike concept, wants to bring it back to the Aussie navy.”

Dan had never seem a non-U.S. officer in the chain of a strike command. “I thought Tomahawk was still NOFORN.” No foreign nationals, U.S. personnel only.

“I'll show you the message appointing him launch area coordinator. So he'll need a red phone and a table, and connectivity to the strike commander and to
Laboon.”

“All right,” Dan told him, though he was still uncomfortable with his own limited input. He'd always felt real weapons, meant to kill real people, needed human control all the way down. “We have all the taped missions loaded. The ones the theater commander thought we better have ready to fire. He can come down anytime we're at General Quarters Strike and we can walk him through a launch in training mode.”

They discussed the patrol area and whether there was any air or missile threat. Lambert thought not, but had to admit there was be mines. “There's no reason one of these smugglers can't push a few over the fantail. It'd really screw up traffic coming down out of Suez.”

“What do the Iranians think?” Dan asked him.

“Making hostile noises, as usual. But they lost half their navy the last time they tangled with us.” He hesitated. “You were there, weren't you? Praying Mantis?”

“I was on
Van Zandt,”
Dan told him, and watched the name trigger its usual effect. Like
Samuel B. Roberts
and
Stark.
Navy people had long memories for lost ships.

“But I don't think they're going to stick their hand in the meat grinder again. I don't think there's going to be much chance of anything on this side of the Sinai. But stay alert, that's all I can say.”

“Commodore's on the bridge,” Yerega sang out, and Dan turned.

Strong had shucked the flight suit for khaki shorts. He climbed up into what had been Dan's chair. Held out his hand, and a staff officer put a folder into it. He didn't say word one to anyone, and the other

conversations on the bridge had gone silent. So had Lambert, so Dan went over to the nav table. The quartermaster had laid out their track. They'd reach their assigned operating area around 0300 the next day.

“Captain.” It was Lin Porter. “Contact bearing zero-three-zero, fifteen thousand seven hundred yards, course zero-four-zero, speed fifteen. Seems to be outside the traffic separation scheme.”

Dan went over to the Furuno. He liked the little radar in close quarters, because it showed course and speed arrows for each contact, which made it easier to prioritize when you had ten or fifteen on the screen. This blip jumped out at him. A big return, its course arrow aimed right down their throats. Still, it was a good distance away, and there'd be time to maneuver. The catch was, they were the stand-on vessel, bound not to change course or speed, but to wait for the other to change his. In fact, from what he recalled of the International Maritime Organization rules from the
Sailing Directions,
vessels outside the channels were doubly burdened.

“Get him on Channel Sixteen,” Dan told her. “Ask his intentions.”

Combat passed the word up that the contact they were calling Bravo Delta had a closest point of approach of less than a thousand yards in twelve minutes, and recommended coming right to course 000 to open. Dan went to get his glasses, found Strong using them. He borrowed the quartermaster's and tried to get them focused. At last he had it, a speck, but high enough to tell him what it was. An empty tanker out of Italy or France or Spain, bound south for another holdful of crude. Out of position for some reason. Still, it should be easy enough to sort matters out.

“No answer on Sixteen. Bravo Delta bears zero-three-zero, nine thousand yards and closing. Combat recommends coming right to zero-one-zero at this time.”

Now the broad bow was clearly visible, and the bulge of green sea over a submerged stem-bulb before it broke in a churn of white.

“Captain? Come right.”

He lifted his head, startled. Strong was still examining his traffic. Had he spoken? As he hesitated the commodore added, annoyed, “Did you hear me? I said, come right.”

“We're the stand-on vessel, sir.”

“I don't give a bloody damn who's got the right of way, get out of his path.”

Dan snapped an order, then turned away, seething at being overruled so casually in front of his crew. He stood on the starboard wing with hands jammed into his pockets, trying to reason with himself.

There were always frictions between the ship and the flag. Especially when the ship wasn't flag configured, which meant the staff didn't have separate spaces and comm facilities, usually even a separate bridge of their own.

Or … was it possible Niles was right, and Dan Lenson was projecting his ingrained distrust of authority? He remembered how unhappy he'd been, being a staff puke for Isaac Sundstrom. Yes, Sundstrom … Krazy Ike … so far, compared to that incompetent and self-centered clown, Strong rated up there with Nimitz or Spruance.

OVER the next several days traffic was heavy. Both the Blue and Gold teams were called away several times a day.
Laboon
reported commerce as dense proceeding northbound.

Meanwhile the tasking message for the strike came through. Looking over the launch sequence plan when Kim McCall brought up
Horn's
answering status report—line A, line B, reporting that the missions were executable—Dan saw the package included strikes from both the Red Sea,
Laboon
and
Horn,
and from the east, from the Gulf. When he plotted their targets, he got remote-looking locations in western Iraq.

The day after that, the mission data update and associated command information came down, revised missile flight data from Norfolk via a 9600-baud, secure, download-only satellite link. This updated the missions they'd brought with them on tape.

He had confidence in his team, but went down anyway and watched as they rehearsed, from simulated engagement order to system warm-up, load, entry of ship position, launch direction, and prelandfall way-points. A Red Sea launch would be tricky. They'd have to stay in a tightly circumscribed area to fire all the missions. He joined McCall and the first-class fire controlman at the chart table. “Strike, looks like the launch baskets can all be hit from … let me see … about here?”

The first class looked at him. “You done this before, sir.”

Dan had to grin. The first class said it like an accusation, as if having a skipper who actually knew what he was doing wasn't playing fair. “You get a feel for where you ought to be. Kim, we need to make sure VLS is ready. Who's got the key?”

“Mr. Camill has one, sir. But if you want to be able to launch, he should have both Remote Launch Enable keys.”

“We don't have an Indigo message yet.” Of course, they couldn't launch without both fire-enable keys. Dan kept his locked in his
safe … in his in-port cabin. He made a mental note to get it out, since that was Strong's space now.

They sent the missions to the launch control console and loaded data to twelve missiles, four for each of the three targets; then simulated the rest of the sequence in training mode.

Back in his elevated chair, it occurred to him that, theoretically, at least, Dan Lenson now had the power to kill any human being within a twelve hundred mile circle. He had the keys and sixty-one live missiles. The guys would launch on his word. Actually, since he also knew how to program the missiles, it wasn't just theoretical.

He tried to take his mind off it by looking at the large-screen display, the northern Red Sea and the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba. But it only shifted his thoughts toward what exactly they were doing here.

Because he often wondered what exactly they
were
doing here. The forward-deployed U.S. fleet was supposed to be a stabilizing presence. The Mideast needed stability. But more and more, it seemed that the American presence was more of an irritant than anything that seemed to give the locals confidence, or fear, or anything else constructive.

But without them, who would deter Saddam and the expansionist Shi'ite fanatics of Iran? There were progressive tendencies in Islam. Regimes inching toward tolerance, circling around popular participation and limited forms of democracy. The United States had to back them up, not write all Muslims off as terrorists and dictators.

You couldn't be neutral toward change. You either welcomed it or feared it. When you feared it, you fought to keep things the way they were. Using whatever came to hand; the Qu'ran or the Bible, or slurs about combat effectiveness that seemed to him to have less and less justification the closer he watched his own crew approach the battle zone.

But what about his own doubts? His own ever-altering, changeable, always-questioning incertitude? Where did that place him?

He rubbed his face, features lit the hue of malachite by the flicker-running, never-constant imagery of the digital displays.

OFF Ras Muhammad they intercepted the largest ship to date. The database said it was a thirty-thousand-ton motor containership, Indian registry, chartered to the Chinese, with a master from Singapore and crewed by the scrapings-up of three continents they'd gotten used to seeing on these trampers. So obviously they'd been boarded before.