The Cruiser (10 page)

“Permission to engage Goblin track 34 with SM-2, Captain.”

He recognized a scenario from his nightmares. The numbers on the weapon inventory screen were dropping. They were attriting the enemy, but their own magazines were almost empty. He had one Standard left. Save it, and accept the risk of missing the incomer with his close-in weapons? Or use his last long-range round? The right answer depended on how long the engagement would continue. How much longer the enemy could keep taking losses. Staurulakis broke her fixation on the display and glanced at him, pale eyebrows lifting as she coughed.

“Kill track 34 with Standard,” Dan said. He closed his eyes and found the red switch marked
FIRE AUTH
by feel. To his right Staurulakis typed rapidly, echoing the command as computer code, a backup for switch failure or battle damage.

“Birds away.” A bright symbol detached from the circle-and-cross and winked into a blue semicircle rapidly tracking outbound. It curved, then steadied on a collision course with the red caret. No one around him spoke, though back in the curtained alcoves of Sonar murmurs testified to the slow deadly wrestling match of the antisubmarine battle going on at the same time deep beneath the sea.

The two symbols neared, then flashed. When the flashing stopped one had vanished. Dan shook his head; it had been their missile, not the incomer.

“No kill, no kill.”

“Three-four is leaker, leaker!”

“TAO, Sonar: We have tube opening sounds from Kilo. Torpedo firing imminent.”

“Fuck,” Staurulakis murmured. “Mount 51, engage.”

“Tell the bridge to come right, unmask mount 52 as well,” Dan told her. “But remember to minimize your radar cross section.” He told her to prosecute the submarine contact with torpedoes, and to stand by to fire their two antisubmarine-rocket-launched torpedoes out of the vertical launchers if the fish failed to connect. They had no more missiles; the next layer of defense was guns, and last, the rapid-fire automatic 20mm of the Phalanx. If the enemy sub put a torpedo in the water, the situation would become desperate. She nodded tersely and snapped into her boom mike, “Batteries released, mount 51 and 52, mount 21 and 22, arm CIWS and deselect hold fire.”

“System in high power.”

“Range, fifteen miles and closing. Speed seven hundred.”

“Watch for a pop-up maneuver at five miles. Reduce your radar cross section. Stand by for jamming. And don't forget chaff,” Dan told her. She nodded without replying.

“PASS loaded … RCS control … AAW autoselected.”

He leaned back and combed fingers through hair soaked with sweat despite the blast of icy air. Behind him and stretching back into CIC the tactical team squinted into screens, each intent on his own lines in the drama. An occasional cough was the only sound, and now and then a murmur into a voice circuit, though most of their interaction was via the keyboard.

There was, of course, no submarine, and no supersonic missile turbojet-howling toward them yards above the waves, its silicon brain fighting off
Savo Island
's jamming. The missile firing keys didn't hang around his neck on their beaded steel chain, but were in the weapons safe in his at-sea cabin. There
was
an aircraft, a Falcon configured to emulate various enemy missiles. Out of NAS Sigonella, for two hours of area/own-ship exercise. The contacts and landforms on the right three displays were a virtual-training scenario, carefully firewalled from the actual surface and air picture on the leftmost screen: the slowly passing coast of Sicily and the crooked, horned toe of the Italian boot at Capo Vaticano.

The scream of a jet engine outside.
“Playmate, mark on top,”
someone said in his headphones. He took them off and massaged his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. Someone had said you could reset eyestrain by doing that.

“Dinner, Captain.” His steward slid a napkin-covered tray in front of him and snatched away the napkin like a conjurer. “Wednesday's slider day.”

“Sliders. Great.” For some reason this had become the Navy word for burgers, conjuring an image of pink patties skidding in hot grease when a ship rolled. The fries were still warm, and there was even a shaker of salt on the tray. “Thanks, Longley.”

“What I'm here for, sir.”

He ate slowly, one eye on the screens. The ship's tactical action officer sat atop a reporting pyramid. Below him or her was the antisubmarine-warfare coordinator, the antiair coordinator, the antisurface coordinator, and the bridge team, all feeding information and recommendations. The TAO controlled the ship's weapons and radars, fighting in concert with friendly, “blue,” forces in his or her area. The TAO actually fought the ship; if he or she was skilled, the CO's can in the next seat was nice, but not essential.

Dan was using this exercise to evaluate his three school-qualified TAOs, Mills, Staurulakis, and Almarshadi. So far the operations officer would be his first choice in actual combat. Petite, pale-haired, sharp-faced, unflappable, Staurulakis tended to be faster on the trigger than he liked, but she read a scenario quickly and her solutions were as good as his own. A few more hours together and they'd be one dangerous beast with two brains.

Savo Island
was still headed east, but he hadn't wanted to arrive at Point Hotel without a firm idea of just how sharp was the blade that had been thrust into his hands. So far, Engineering had reported no problems, and his bridge team seemed to be on top of things. Their test would come late that night, as they transited the Strait of Messina, a choke point dreaded by everyone since the Greeks had ventured to challenge Scylla and Charybdis.

“Captain?” He looked up at Fahad Almarshadi, who was slightly bent, smiling radiantly. The exec's smile lessened as Dan didn't return it. “The, uh … thought I'd give you an update.”

“Cheryl, I'm going offline, talk to the XO. —What have you got, Commander?”

“The results of the sonar self-noise test you asked for.” He swallowed visibly. “It's … not as good as I'd hoped.”

Dan flipped through the report. “Why's our throughput so low?”

“One thought is, there might be water vapor in the transducers.”

Which could trace back to the grounding damage; his decision to bypass a dry-docking might be coming home to roost. He grimaced. “We checking it out?”

“Yessir, the STGs are doing that.”

“Rit Carpenter made it aboard, right? He on it?”

“He's down there with them, sir. A big help, from what I hear.”

“Good. Have him come up and … no, belay that. What else?”

Almarshadi went over their progress on testing the other cooling hoses in the electronics, then on how the Aegis team was doing against their proficiency milestones. When he paused, Dan lowered his voice. “No joy on finding that missing pistol, I take it?”

“No sir. It just … disappeared. I've got the loss report ready for you to sign out.”

Great. “Fahad, why exactly do I get the impression that, like, something's not exactly
right
aboard this fucking ship?”

The exec's dark brown eyes slid off his as if Teflon-greased. “I'm not sure I … understand what you're referring to. Captain.”

“I went over the records. We had liberty misconduct in Gibraltar. The Command Climate Survey … it's pretty obvious there was a hostile work climate in some of the departments. I also saw that the commander master chief, I mean, the previous one, not Tausengelt, had a request in for transfer. How did all that connect to what happened coming into Naples? That's a symptom, not the cause. Or am I pissing up the wrong rope?”

“I wasn't on the bridge then, Captain.”

“Which leads to the question, why were you below decks, Fahad? Why was the XO not on the bridge, coming into port in poor visibility?”

Another visible swallow. “Captain Imerson did not like me in the pilothouse when he was there.”

Aha. Dan put his next question in the least judgmental phraseology he could think of. “I see. Okay. And why do you think he felt that way?”

Almarshadi seemed to grab his gaze and steer it, consciously, like a radar beam, back up into Dan's face. A spark of—anger? resentment?—flared in those dark pupils. “I believe it might have had to do with my being an Arab.”

Dan contemplated this, along with the gold cross he'd glimpsed underneath Almarshadi's T-shirt. There were a lot of Christian Arabs, although the uneducated didn't seem to grasp this. It was true, a few individuals didn't leave prejudice behind when they put on a uniform. On the other hand, he'd run into his share of minorities who played the race card when they were just plain incompetent.

He let the silence rubber-band, not meeting the XO's gaze, just staring up at the display. Staurulakis was cat-and-mousing three Houdong-class patrol boats. Houdongs were Chinese-built, part of the progressively closer alignment of that country with Iran. They were filtering in, jockeying for the classic noon, four, and eight o'clock positions. Faced with that, she'd fight at a disadvantage, since warding off an attack from one sector left her vulnerable in the others. He realized Almarshadi was still gazing at him expectantly. “Uh, okay. Anything else?”

“No sir. That is about it. Oh, and Lieutenant Singhe has requested to see you. When it is convenient.”

“Amy Singhe? What's it about?”

“She didn't want to say.”

“Uh-huh. Okay.” He checked the TAG Heuer that Blair had given him as a wedding present. “I'll be in my at-sea cabin after evening meal if she wants to come by.”

Almarshadi stood, pocketing his BlackBerry, but Dan snagged his sleeve as he turned away. “One second.”

“Sir?” The XO turned back quickly, as if startled.

“I'm not sleeping that well. I thought tonight … we'll be headed through Messina between 01 and 0300.”

“Yessir?”

“I need to get my head down awhile, so I want you on the bridge. Back up whoever's OOD.”

Almarshadi seemed to grow an inch taller. His head came up. “Yes sir,” he said. “I will be there.”

*   *   *

HE
told Staurulakis to drill the other Condition Three sections and continue the tracking exercise until they ran out of aircraft time. And to continue after that with the canned Hormuz scenario. He stopped at the equipment room to find the cleanup progressing, with Dr. Noblos hovering. Dan asked how the reduced redundancy would hurt their tracking abilities. Noblos said it wouldn't help, but the effect would depend primarily on the geometry between the launch area and their patrol area. The rider seemed less prickly than the first time they'd interacted, so Dan kept it short. Let whatever had irked the man heal. He'd need Noblos when they got on station.

He climbed to the bridge and rode his chair for a while, seemingly intent on his message traffic, but actually observing the bridge team from the corner of his eye. Four contacts were in sight, with five more over the horizon, being plotted on the radar and on the contact board. Nearly all were headed south, probably for the strait, the narrow bottleneck between the Tyrrhenian and the central Med. The wintry light glinted off flinty waves. The sun peered out only now and then through a scrim of high cloud. Other clouds, lower, fluffier, lay far off to the east, marking the mainland of Italy.

The Falcon made another low pass, its roar rising as it neared, dwindling as it parted. Motors whined as the tapered tube of the five-inch swung after it, its slow elevation, quivering indecision, then sudden whiparound as it crossed the zenith somehow comical. The 21MC said,
“Bridge, CIC: Event 0265 complete. Falcon 03 requests permission to take it to the barn.”

He nodded. The jet waggled its wings and banked away, shrinking to southward.

Dan swung down. He called the quartermaster over and pulled up their track on the nav screen. Through Messina, then south and east past the cow's-udder peninsulas and islands of Greece. They'd pick up the task force south of Crete. He sketched an adjustment, and the QM, a reedy deliberate fellow whose accent said Jamaica, said he'd take it from there. “Have the navigator see me when you get it laid out,” Dan told him. “What's our first course? For the strait?”

The quartermaster set it up on the screen. “One one three, Captain.”

“One one three, and pick it up to twenty knots.” The OOD echoed the command, passing it to the helm, and
Savo Island
came around to the southeast.

*   *   *

AFTER
dusk, after dinner. The porthole in his cabin was moon-dark. He was unbuttoning his shirt, contemplating reading a few more pages of
Rome on the Euphrates
before some serious bunk time, when someone tapped at the door. “Come in,” he called.

“Lieutenant Singhe, Captain.”

“Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Come in, Amy. Uh—leave that cracked, please.”

Singhe took the chair two feet from him with a fluid motion. Her boots were polished glassy, which was not really required at sea, and her coveralls fitted as if tailored. Only at the knees did they look even slightly worn. She wore a khaki belt with the
Savo Island
belt buckle: bronze field, the outline of Ironbottom Sound in silver, and the silhouette of USS
Quincy
superimposed in gold. Below it was the ship's motto in black enamel:
Hard Blows
. Not one he cared for, but not worth the effort of changing. Her coveralls were open at the throat; that glossy hair was pulled back, and she brought some scent with her, sandalwood, at the same time clean and exotic.

He wrenched his mind back from wherever it was headed. “XO said you wanted a word,” he opened.

“Yessir, if you have time.”

Someone tramped past the slightly open door, and footsteps rattled on the ladder. The passageway illumination winked off, then on again, a deep scarlet, for the dark-adapted eye. He reached up and slid the darken-ship curtain across his porthole. “Turn that overhead off? Thanks.”