The Command (9 page)

The boarding and search went well at first. One of the RHIBs, the twenty-foot rigid-hull inflatables that had replaced the old motor whaleboats, cast off and half-planed, half-wallowed across the green swells. It circled the other vessel for a visual check, then closed to board over the stern. They found the stowaways. But one crewman had a rifle concealed under a windbreaker on his lap, and none of the boarding crew bothered to search him. The chief observer said he could have mowed down every man on deck before they could get their pistols out of their holsters. Also the boarding team had no climbing gear, no keys to their handcuffs, and so on down a long list of shortcomings and miscommunications.

…

TWELVE hundred, noon, after a wolfed lunch of grilled cheese and fries that felt like it had wedged six inches down his gullet. “Range to the carrier?”

“Forty-one miles, sir.”

“Captain, we have a low-flying contact just popped up 031 nine miles, outbound.”

“Bridge, TAO, hold air contact bearing 005, range 32 nautical miles… Come to 160 for two minutes, then come back to base course.”

The Combat Information Center. “Combat.” Sitting in the blue leather elevated chair while around him in a space no bigger than a good-sized living room eighteen people worked in dim blue light. Five different conversations were going on over sound-powered phones and radio headsets. Helo land/launch, battle group common, fleet anti-air warfare control net, the surface control circuits, and screen commander circuits.

Combat was laid out concentrically, though it took familiarity to distill that arrangement from the dozens of screens, circuits, tote boards, and comm gear that festooned every flat inch above the green rubber decking. His chair overlooked the tactical action officer's station, the surface weapons controller, and the Harpoon and Tomahawk engagement planners. To his left, tote boards listed the ships involved in the exercise, the day's call signs, and
Horn's
comms status. Behind him was the dead-reckoning tracer—dark at the moment, since no antisubmarine play was scheduled. Those could be considered the inner ring. Farther out, along the bulkheads, were the underwater fire control panel and the helo controller's station, with a grainy black-and-white TV that showed the flight deck, empty, at the moment, as just now a refueled 191 was twenty-five miles distant, checking out a contact suspected to be USS
Briscoe.
To the left were the fire control radar consoles, gun control consoles, and, along the forward bulkhead, the electronics warfare stack, nav table, and the Tomahawk launch console. On the far side of the bridge ladderway was the curtained-off alcove of sonar.

When he'd started out, a captain fought his ship from the bridge. Now destroyer COs fought from Combat. Dan intended to spend the bulk of his time here, at least until he was satisfied Camill could defend the ship in his absence. Directly in front of him the TAO was working the radar repeaters and radios and the blue screens of the

JOTS, the Joint Operational Tactical System, like a croupier on a heavy night. He was drinking coffee with one hand, tapping at a keyboard with the other, and carrying on two different conversations over the air while reporting over his shoulder to Dan about a generator bearing failure light the helo said just came on. Dan told him to bring him back in, get the generator checked out.

“Sir, OPFOR commander wants to know why we're not moving out there at flank speed.”

“Let me talk to him.” Dan informed Hotel Juliet, the Red Force commander, about the trouble light and promised he'd be proceeding north at flank speed as soon as his aircraft was secure on deck.

Sitting back again, one segment of his consciousness monitoring the sputter of speech and the jerky prance of digital symbology, another reflected on how free-form and inchoate operations at sea seemed now. The navy had once moved across the face of the planet in great ordered formations. At Armageddon battle groups would march in great phalanxes into the northern waters of the USSR, while submarine fleets collided north of the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap. Flag officers had plotted strategy that stretched across time zones, and commanding officers followed written orders and stayed in their sectors.

Now Blue and Red and merchant traffic interpenetrated, zones overlapped, no identity was certain. Chaos had been loosed on the deep.

Camill, interrupting his increasingly gloomy thoughts. “Sir, prefire brief complete, safety walk-through complete, we're ready to start.”

“Make it so,” Dan said.

OF four attacking aircraft,
Horn
splashed one. The designators reacted slowly and had trouble keeping the radars on the targets. The combat direction system dropped track while they were being passed from the consoles. The automatic tracking systems either failed or were applied haphazardly. When the hits started fires, the repair parties reacted hesitantly and probably would have passed out from smoke inhalation because their masks didn't fit right. The main space fire drill and mass casualty drills dissolved into confusion and recrimination. They were even less ready for chemical attack.

NINETEEN hundred in the wardroom. Officers, chiefs, tactical petty officers held up the bulkheads, nodding with fatigue. They presented
weather, equipment status, operations, intelligence, and rules of engagement. They discussed Q-routes and frag orders. The observer-liaison reminded them of the data collection requirements, sheets that had to be filled out hour by hour so that after the exercise ended their tactics could be graded.

TWENTY-THREE hundred. He tossed in his at-sea cabin, tormented by dreams. They switched between his father and the Mukhabarat torturer named Major al-Qadi. The dream was bad enough. But then he came to the part where they doused Sergeant Zeitner with fuel and set him on fire. It was that, the smell of oil and flame, that jerked him awake.

Only to remember, sweating, staring into the darkness, it hadn't been a dream. And that he himself had not been as brave as Zeitner. He didn't deserve the decoration he wore, or the respect.

He lay with palms blanking his eyes, denying, minute by minute, the voice in his heart that told him to take the pistol out of his safe and make the guilt and terror stop. He kept telling himself this voice lied, that it was trauma, stress, the aftermath of torture. But he didn't believe it.

It came to him with dreadful certainty that he was going to do something irreversible. Shoot himself, or go mad, or pull up the dogging bar on the watertight door next to his bank and step out into the dark sea.

The bridge buzzer went off beside his ear, and his whole body jerked. He grabbed it and half barked, half moaned, “Captain.”

The officer of the deck said they had a contact at eight thousand yards, closing, with a closest point of approach of two hundred yards. He stepped into his pants and got to the bridge barefoot to find it coming in fast on his port bow, a containership or cruise liner, much larger than
Horn,
a huge and confusing array of white and red lights that made no sense to the eye. The little Furuno radar was obviously not giving correct courses. Combat seemed to be tracking not the ship he was looking at, but another ten degrees off and fifteen thousand yards away. He could not slow his engines, the reflex action in a serious and quickly worsening situation; another contact was following them close astern to starboard, reducing their maneuvering room to zero, unless he cared to cut across the steadily nearing ship's bow.

And to his horror, faced with the necessity for immediate action, his mind did not respond. He seemed to be back in the dream, suspended, yet at the same instantly conscious of others around him waiting for orders.

Inside his skull seethed dazzling white pain and the smell of burning fuel.

He put his hands out in the darkness, groping, and felt cloth. His shaking fingers dropped to the knobbed controls of a radar repeater. He leaned forward, hammering his knuckles into them over and over. Till the pain penetrated the milling turmoil of what passed for his mind. He took a deep breath. Then another.

At last, though he could not have said from where, an order occurred to him. He gave it. Then another.

He escaped by putting all engines on the line and accelerating out of the closing jaws. But as he walked aft on trembling legs, seeing blood drip black from his hands in the red passageway light to explode inky ellipses on the buffed and slanting tile, Dan Lenson reflected with utter cold lucidity that the greatest danger to USS
Horn
might be the tormented brain of her commander.

THE exercise peaked the next day in an intense swirling battle that had no clear front and no clear development and no clear outcome, except that everyone seemed to be getting clobbered. Hostiles, neutrals, unknowns popped up, seethed, and vanished between the imaginary landmasses. Cruise missiles from nowhere blitzed
Theodore Roosevelt.
Two Red Force units were sunk by air strikes, one by surface-to-surface missiles, two more by Blue submarines, while Blue suffered from mines in the approaches to Kartuna City and from land-based missiles while transiting the straits. As far as he could judge, if the referees hadn't kept “reconstituting” sunken ships and shot-down aircraft, the exercise would have ended after the first hour with the destruction of every unit from both sides.
Horn
was hit over and over, and the observers imposed casualty after casualty as the day went on: missile strikes forward, midships, and aft, class A fire in supply berthing, class A fire in the admin office, flooding in Aux One, flooding in the Mount 51 passageway, class B oil fire in main engine room number two, flooding in shaft alley, electrical power failure forward, ruptured firemain piping. On and on till the crew slumped glassy-eyed to the decks.

It was a sobering foretaste of an all-out littoral action fought with computer-aided data availability and long-range, high-speed weapons. He hoped the U.S. Navy never faced an opponent of even roughly equal numbers and weaponry. The carnage would be immense and the victor anybody's guess. Like the confused and bloody nights off

Guadalcanal, where shadows loomed suddenly from the dark and the first who drew would either win the gunfight or bear the crushing responsibility of blotting out the lives of fellow Americans.

This was the kind of war
Horn
might be headed for.

This was the kind of war they had to be ready to win.

DUSK, and they were steaming north along the coast. Lights twinkled on the horizon. He looked toward them, wishing he could get ashore. Just for an evening. Just to be no longer the captain. He'd never understood before, watching those he'd served under, second-guessed, criticized, how crushing heavy it all could weigh.

Instead he nodded to Yerega, who flicked switches and handed him the mike.

“This is the skipper speaking.”

He paused, hearing his voice echoing, then went on. “The JTFEX is over. The observer-liaison team has just given me our raw scores. In some respects we've done well. In others, not so well.”

He went over the shortcomings: failure to set Zebra, absences from watch stations, inadequate training of firefighting and damage control teams, improper readiness of casualty power cables, inadequate marking of casualty power terminals, unfamiliarity of personnel with dewa-tering procedures. Then he paused.

“To sum up: I'm not happy. My choice is whether to accept our performance, go to the Gulf the way we are, or to go back and do it over.

“I don't like that first choice. We're going in harm's way. It would not be fair to you, nor to your families, if I took you there less than fully prepared.

“Horn
will no longer accept mediocre performance. Our new motto says it: ‘Aggressive and proud.' I believe we can be the best ship in the United States Navy. But to get there, we'll have to do better.

“We have clearance to enter port, but I've advised the squadron we won't be alongside tonight. I've asked our observers to help us conduct additional training tomorrow. And the day after, if necessary. Until we're ready to fight our ship, and save her when she's hurt.”

He lowered the mike, then set it back in its receptacle. Catching the bridge team's looks of resentment and disappointment. That was okay. Nothing in a skipper's billet description said he had to be liked.

The faces of the dead haunted him. He wasn't going to add to their number.

He owed his men—correction, his
people
—no less than that.

T
HE city was a thousand years old. Its name meant “Place of Martyrdom.” Most of its inhabitants were not yet awake, though here and there chimneys smoked, fires glimmered, where bakers were preparing the morning bread. The cool air was an acrid musk of wood smoke and saffron and centuries-dry dust. In an hour the muezzins would call the city to wakefulness and prayer, but now it lay sleeping under the stars.

The third team had been at it since midnight, in a littered, oil-reeking loading bay with a rolling steel door to conceal their work lights. First to be chain-hoisted into the truck were two rusty but incredibly heavy half-inch-thick steel slabs. They fit flat on the bed of the rented Fiat. On top, wrapped and taped in black plastic bags, went twenty kilos of the Polish explosive the man who called himself Malik had brought with him.

After that, the bricks. With muffled grunts, they stacked them along the left side, up to the scarred metal ceiling. Thick, heavy pavers, dug out of a road sometime past and left at a corner of the plastic company's sprawling and dilapidated site. Malik had lighted up seeing them, and drawn them into his diagram. They boxed the bricks into place with plywood and braced them with planks.

In the darkness they trudged in and out of the factory, carrying sacks and containers. The second team had bought what they carried here and there around the city, from dealers and resellers the first team had located months before.