The Command (5 page)

“It's just buying votes,” Chesko said. “Fucking liberals, trying to brownnose the lezzbos. Like at the yard. We're plowing billions into ship mods so they can sit down to pee while we're scrubbing sonar upgrades because there's no funding. How about you, Chief? When you gonna get them in the SEALs?”

The waitress came over to check on them. All three men watched her ass as she walked away. “We'll never see them in special ops,” Devlin said. “I get a few at the range. Some of 'em can shoot. But that's not all there is to it.”

Chesko said, “Take my advice, don't let it start. I remember when they first put them on the tugs, my fuckup detector went off. Most of 'em was dykes, but if they got pregnant, they got a admin discharge automatic. That was bad enough, you train them and then they want out, so they forget to take their pill. But now, babysitting's gonna be part of the defense budget. Like, they're thinking, now the Russians are gone, we don't have an enemy anymore, what do we need the military for?”

“We've got other enemies,” Devlin said.

“Sure, this is just a breathing space. But Slick Willy's so hot to load us up with fruits and feminazis, sometimes I wonder if he's actually trying to fuck us, so when the fucking Chinese land … Hey, I ain't no dittohead.”

Marchetti said, “I like Rush all right. He's got the right idea.”

“Well, he's out there sometimes … but, like, one of my collateral duties, I get to escort people to the decommissionings and shit. Last week I get this female E-8, she's bulging out to here in her maternity
uniform. I still got scars from biting my tongue. I wanted to ask her what the fuck she was gonna contribute if war broke out the next day. And some guy probably's still walking around a first class because of her.”

“It's not gonna be good,” Marchetti said. “You can tell that already.”

“Ask any guy on the tenders. They'll tell you, it's a circus.” Chesko told a story about a salvage and rescue ship out of Little Creek whose CO got caught porking the ops officer in the backseat of a ship's van the command chief had fixed up as a love wagon. “And even if they ain't fucking themselves silly, one thing always made me respect a guy was, he went through the wickets to get what's on his sleeve. All these split-tails got to do is keep showing up and they make rate. What kind of skipper you got this time?”

“Tough to tell,” Marchetti said, trying to think what kind of CO he had. He'd seen the guy at the change of command, then he came down to the chiefs' mess, and then around the ship here and there. Actually a lot more often than he'd used to see Ross. “He's got a shitload of sea time. And a Congressional for something he did in the Gulf. I don't know what, but—”

“A Congressional?” said Devlin.

Chesko said, “I thought you had to be dead.”

“Well, this dude's alive,” Marchetti said. “His wife's some heavy hitter in D.C., too.”

“That why he got the ship?”

“Hey, fuck if I know, man.”

“What's he think about the girls?”

“He probably don't like it any better than we do.” Marchetti took his last bite and said through it, “It's just not ever gonna be possible just to be a team, you know? There's always gonna be the sex thing. No matter what. So that's all she wrote for me, you know?”

Chesko said, looking at his plate, “You want those fries?”

Marty pushed back and told him no, go ahead. His old shipmate slopped catsup on them as the others looked on with the unspoken contempt of men who stayed in shape. “I know they can fly and all that shit, but one of these days we're going to get mixed up with somebody who knows how to fight. They're gonna get captured and raped and start ratting the other POWs out. Then, you watch, everybody's gonna say, ‘Why didn't the military tell us they were gonna get hurt?' Hell, we already got ships that can't sail because there's too many of 'em knocked up to go to sea.”

Marty didn't say anything, but Chesko was starting to irk him. Probably because he was putting the mouth on his ship.

Devlin glanced at his watch. “Ready?”

Chesko said he had to pony home to mama-san, give him a call before they deployed, they'd get together. Marty said yeah, they'd have to do that.

Walking to Devlin's truck, Marchetti said, “I don't know how much these melonheads are going to pick up in an afternoon. Or even if I'm going to keep too many of this bunch.”

“I see a couple you can lose without hurting anything.”

“I figure whatever they learn, it can't hurt. We'll just have to work at it.”

“Right,” said Devlin. He buckled the seat belt and adjusted it. Then squinted through the windshield. “But if you can get one thing across … Machete? That what he called you?”

“Yeah.”

“Your team. The mind-set.”

“I'm listening.”

“You've got to make a decision. Are you the hunter, or the prey?”

Marchetti said, “Okay.”

The SEAL said, squinting into the sun, “I say that having been in a few gunfights. Remember, a lot of the guys you'll go up against, they've never had to take on a real opponent. Don't be afraid of them. Let them be afraid of you.”

“Got it,” Marty said.

“You're going to make mistakes. You might even get shot. But as long as you're still shooting back, you're not dead. And even if you die, if you've trained him right, the guy behind you will win.” Devlin looked at him level. “If you can pass that on to your team, you'll be okay.”

He nodded.

“Ready for the Killing House?”

And Marty Marchetti said yeah, he was ready to strap it on.

S
OME weeks later Dan was in his at-sea cabin, just behind the
J
bridge, talking to Lieutenant Herbert T. Camill.

“The Camel” was the operations officer, one of the department heads. He'd grown up in Muncie and gotten an NROTC commission at Ball State. His shaved head glowed in the overhead light. He spoke ver … y … slow … ly, with pauses not just between words but within them. They'd been out to sea every week since the change of command, and every time Camill went on the net, Dan itched to snatch the handset away from him. But he'd come with a solid recommendation from Tactical Action Officer School. He also had a full multiwarfare drill schedule planned, set to start slow and peak with the joint task force exercise. This morning Camill was briefing him about Evinrude, the electronic surveillance package they'd take to the Mideast with them.

As soon as the Camel left, the phone trilled. Hotchkiss, was he free? Dan said sure, wondering why the exec always called first. He'd told her his door was open twenty-four-seven. As long as he lived aboard, and they had so much ground to make up. “Meet you on the bridge,” he told her. They were making their approach to the Capes, and he liked to be on hand when they were in sight of land.

One of the electronics technicians was coming aft as he went forward. “Petty Officer Leatherbury,” Dan said.

“Morning, sir.”

“Tweaking the TACAN?” A radar beacon that friendly aircraft could use to home in on the ship.

“The new board's in, she's doing good now, sir.”

“How about those fifty-cals?”

“Fired them again yesterday, sir. Still rusty on what to do when it jams, though.”

He was working his way through the crew. Five or ten minutes with each man. Something Chief Woltz said Ross had never bothered to do, that he hadn't even seemed to know some of the chiefs. Dan felt he owed it to the men he served with to at least know their names. To know a little about each one, where he was from, if he had a family, what he hoped for from his time in the navy.

He tried to use those minutes to get his own message across, too. That admin inspections and meticulous cleanliness were less important now than honing combat skills, firefighting, and damage control. That everyone aboard would qualify with the pistol, rifle, shotgun, and fifty-caliber machine gun, no matter what their job on the watch, quarter, and station bill.

In fact, he'd been unpleasantly surprised, looking over the records with Hotchkiss, to see that although their deployment date was rapidly bearing down on them, his crew wasn't fully trained.

He couldn't pull Ross's famous first envelope on this one. It wasn't his predecessor's fault. Cut past the bone on personnel and operating funding, the navy had pulled its training cadre out of Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo experience dreaded, suffered, and valued afterward by generations of sailors—isolated weeks of grinding training, varied by nights on the gun line in case the Cubans came through the wire—was no more. These days, the Afloat Training Group did an assessment, identifying areas the command needed to focus on. The ships did tailored training in home port, finishing with a battle problem. The up side was, it cost less. The down side was, the ship ended up training itself. In
Horn's
case, with the women joining either from noncombatants or straight from boot camp, the learning curve would be even steeper.

Together with the problems in engineering, he'd even thought of reporting to Aronie that
Horn
couldn't meet her sailing date. It might not end his career, considering he'd just taken over. But he'd decided not to—yet.

So when he spoke to each man or woman, he laid the problem in front of them. Along with his solution: to go to full-time training, every possible day under way, and a final battle problem refereed by observers. This would cut down on time with their families. But he owed it to those families to bring them back. And last, he told them that if things really went to hell, the women would be just as much on the line as the men. So instead of bitching about them, they'd all better help train them. He'd backed up the one-on-ones with a shakeup of the watch bills, to make sure everyone knew a new era was here.

There was grumbling about things like actually setting Condition

Zebra when they went to general quarters instead of simulating it. Zebra was the highest level of compartmentation, sealing every hatch and scuttle below the waterline. The downside was it stopped ventilation and crew movement. But most seemed to agree. The navy didn't salute indoors, but you could greet a skipper pleasantly or grudgingly. So far, the reactions were reserved, as if they'd taken in what he said but were suspending judgment.

Spruances had wide, spacious pilothouses, with big square windows angled outward. In the morning sun they flooded the bridge with light. “Captain's on the bridge,” the boatswain announced, and the officer of the deck came in at once from the port wing, where she'd been examining a collier behind them through her binoculars.

Lieutenant Lin Porter wore her dark hair back in a ponytail. Intense, meticulous, with a roundish Slavic face,
Horn's
new engineering officer had taken a grip on the confusion below. She'd demoted two chiefs, fleeted first class up to replace them, and reorganized the engineering office. Porter had served aboard
Yellowstone
and
Recovery
before an exchange tour with the newly reunited German Navy, where she'd gained the experience on gas turbine engines she'd need on this tour. She was married to a Marine Intruder pilot who'd probably retire and sell insurance when his squadron transitioned to the F/A-18. Porter reported on the contacts around them, courses, speeds, closest points of approach. Dan liked her no-nonsense, deadpan delivery.

Land was a dark green line sketched beneath scattered clouds. He looked at the chart, glanced at the radar repeater. Satisfied everything was in hand, he went out to the wing. The boatswain of the watch, Antonio Yerega, was taking the cover off the padded leather chair reserved for the commanding officer. Dan was hoisting himself to a position of vantage when Hotchkiss came out carrying her signature loaded clipboard. “Good morning, sir.”

“XO. What's on your mind?”

“I finally got through to SURFLANT, got the revised services schedule.
Nicholson
may drop out of a gun shoot Friday. We can have her services if we want. Also, got a call from Com Second Fleet. Admiral Niles is back from Europe.”

Dan asked her to load a briefcase with the ship's schedule, the current maintenance plan, and the training plan and have it on the quarterdeck when the brow went over. He told her to have one of the junior officers there, too.

…

COMING in through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The murmur of the plotters, the navigator calling ranges and distances to hazards and obstacles.
Horn
passed the rocky riprap of the tunnel islands and pivoted to look down the line of gray ships nestled at the Naval Operating Base, Norfolk, Virginia. Dan sat back, trying with all his might to relax.

Ross had let his officers maneuver only in the open sea. Never during underway replenishments and pier approaches, when the danger of collision was highest. It had probably kept his blood pressure down, but the result was they were afraid to handle the ship and uncertain in close quarters.

Dan had decided to work with Hotchkiss first. As the bow passed the clifflike stern of USS
Nimitz,
she reported, “Sir, I have the conn.”

“Very good, Commander. Watch that offsetting wind.”

He tried to look calm. Spruances had two controllable rotating pitch screws. Below twelve knots, the ship's speed was a function of the pitch of the blades; the shaft itself rotated at a constant rate. Above twelve, the screws stayed at maximum pitch and the shafts sped up. The turbines reacted fast and had a lot of power. Normally, you approached a pier at an angle, shallow or sharp depending on the wind, and stopped engines to let the ship bleed off speed. But today's berth was all the way inboard, past a destroyer and an amphib already alongside pier five. The north face of pier six, on their starboard hand, was stacked deep with nested ships, further narrowing their maneuvering margin. Claudia would have to run straight in, despite a brisk northerly breeze, then move
Horn
bodily sideways, into that wind, to place her alongside the pier.