The Command (18 page)

They were going to do tanker inspections, stop fuel and weapon smuggling into Iraq. So he started off by telling them what he knew from doing the same thing in the Gulf. What to look for: recently painted areas, fresh concrete, hidden tanks in the chain lockers, tanks with water made to float on top of the oil somehow. But most shippers didn't get that cute. He told them to take out their conversion tables.

“So, say ship's records list a fuel tank capacity of two hundred metric tons and it topped off two days ago in its last port of call. The question's gonna be, how much tank stowage, in cubic feet, is the ship going to need to hold this much fuel? Because if he's smuggling fuel or crude, the only way we're going to find it is to match the tankage we
find and what's in it against his constructed or installed fuel tankage and what's supposed to be there for his legal fuel to get wherever he's going and back. The difference will be what he's trying to smuggle. If they can hide it in amongst the fuel tankage, they can walk past us with two thousand tons of contraband crude.” He took a breath. “Now, how do we know what he tells us is diesel fuel is really diesel fuel? Who knows the specific gravity of gasoline?”

“Point seven three five is gasoline,” somebody said behind him. “Point nine is heavy crude. Point nine five is bunker C oil.”

The stocky blonde in coveralls had baby blue eyes and a round face. “Patryce Wilson,” she said, grinning at the guys on the deck. “GTE third. XO sent me.”

He put his hands on his hips. “Sorry, lady. We're full up.”

“You the senior chief? The one they call Machete? She said all I had to do was pee up a rope.”

The men grinned at each other. Marty cleared his throat, unsure how to take this but not liking it. “I said you had to climb a rope, not piss up it. That one.”

He pointed to the two-inch hemp line that went up to the ceiling of the hangar. Every time they mustered he made the team climb the rope. At first without gear. Then, as they got in shape, with full gear. It might save their lives to be able to get up, or down, the side of a ship, a stack of containers, an escape scuttle. Just getting aboard a rolling trawler in heavy seas took a lot of physical strength.

Wilson looked at it. She wiped her hands on her coveralls, then took a jump. She got a few feet up, then stalled out. Hung there.

A chuckle, a snigger went around.

She twisted her legs in the rope, resting. Then hauled herself up, inch by inch, locking the line with her boots at each hitch. Marchetti didn't know where she'd learned that one. She grunted and farted, and the guys groaned, but now they weren't laughing.

She got to the top. Way up in the overhead. Hung there, puffing. Then started to slide.

Marty started forward, wincing. She was letting the rope slip through her bare hands. He reached out, but she said in a muffled voice, “Hands off, till you get invited.” Then let go and fell in a panting, tumbled pile.

“There,” she said. She got up, looking at her hands. Wiped them on her coveralls, leaving dark patches.

“Nice job,” he told her contemptuously. “I'd high-five you, but I just had my dick in my hand.”

“Don't let that stop you. I just had my finger up my snatch.” She planted herself down with the men.

This dirty-mouthed bitch snapped back like a nylon line. He just needed a little time, to figure out how to ditch her. Though probably like most girls, she'd drop out all by herself, once it got really tough.

“All right,” he said, “We'll call you … a supernumerary. Any of these limp ladies wimp out, you step in. That should motivate you melon-heads. … Your teammates are Crack Man, Sasquatch, Lizard, Snack Cake, Deuce, Amarillo, and Turd Chaser. Your name'll be … Spider. Cause you climb like a sick one.

“Okay, that's enough, listen up. Now we're going to talk about a UN 986 Letter and what's gonna be on it and what's not. Pay attention, because we're gonna be doing this for real starting about two days from now.”

They bent their heads over the handout while he went on talking. Thinking, beneath what he was saying, that she still didn't belong here. He wasn't going to let her put the team, the mission, at risk.

But he'd take care of that his way.

T
HE high sharp mountains lined the coast, lavender violet in the morning, red as candlelight through wine in the evening sun. They cut the horizon jagged and cruel for miles inland and never seemed to be out of sight, no matter where
Horn
went in the narrow band of sea that slipped like a crack through the most storied desert on earth.

All the coasts looked the same, brown, hot, barren. The steady northeast wind was lip-cracking dry. It brought a fine invisible dust that lodged in the pores of the skin and could filter through a watertight door, especially if there was precision machinery on the other side. The dryness was only occasionally varied with a land squall that fogged the air like battens of fiberglass packed around the slowly moving ship.

Over the past weeks Dan and
Horn
had come to know the upper portion of the Red Sea well. It was shallow, except in the shipping channels, which ran from the scatter of islands at the foot of the Gulf of Suez south more or less down the center of the Red Sea itself. And narrow: at its widest it was only a hundred miles across, and up in the tributary gulfs the coasts closed in alarmingly. It felt strange being under way on patrol where one could see land on either hand.

This early July morning he stood sweating in the pilothouse, alternately looking down at the chart and out at the mountains as the quartermasters laid out a revised oparea grid that had just come down from the commander, Task Group Red Sea. From Commodore Cavender Strong, Royal Australian Navy, embarked aboard HMAS
Torrens,
a River-class frigate of British lineage. His force consisted of
Torrens, Horn, Laboon
and a French destroyer,
Georges Leygues.

Dan had not yet met Strong personally, but he'd gone on the scrambler phone with him the day
Horn
reported in.

Strong had laid out their assignment in spare sentences. The coalition group had been here for a year. Their operating area was bounded
by the Sinai to the north, the Hejaz to the east, and the coast of Egypt to the west. The entrances to both the Gulf of Suez and of Aqaba were choked with small jazirats, islands, and coral reefs and sand shoals. The islands were low and rocky, with few lights or other navigational aids. The commodore emphasized Dan should take the utmost care when transiting and not to depend on any one navigational method. The year before, a British warship had grounded on the Sha'b Ali on the way from Suez, not even reaching her patrol area before she had to turn back on a long voyage homeward.

Essentially, Strong said, they were conducting a modified blockade, although the word “blockade” could not be used publicly. “Interdiction operations” or, better yet, “enforcing UN sanctions” was the preferred phraseology. They were here to prevent embargoed goods from reaching Iraq and illegally exported oil or oil products from leaving it.

It was a delicate assignment. They'd be inspecting not just Iraqi flag vessels, but ships from every nation bordering the Indian Ocean and many from farther away. Few of these countries liked Westerners and many considered their presence a violation of Islam, or, at the least, an insult to local sovereignty. They could expect diplomatic protests, legal threats, and occasional danger, especially for the boarding parties. The best approach was to go in with overwhelming force behind you; but to act with as much courtesy as the master concerned seemed responsive to. Allegations of excessive use of force or other illegal or dangerous acts would be subject to judicial review.

Strong had positioned his force in three sectors, two blocking positions south of Sinai and one in the Gulf of Aqaba. Each unit spent three weeks on station and then a week transiting to her liberty port and back, usually Hurghada, but to Jiddah about every third trip off the line, for the English-speakers, or Djibouti, for the French. An oiler came up from Jiddah once a week with free Saudi fuel. Limited amounts of fresh food were available, but the choice was small and the cost high. The U.S. units would most likely prefer to rely on the joint defense logistics system now operating in Saudi. Strong had then sketched out his operating procedures in sentences dry as the air, emphasizing again the danger of reefs, tidal currents, and squalls, especially in the Gulf of Aqaba itself.

Here at the intersection of the great Y formed by the intersecting gulfs, sea traffic divided. As it came up through the central passage from the Indian Ocean, by far the greatest part turned west for As-Suways and the Canal—and the Med and Europe and America. Those
ships, gigantic oil tankers plowing along so low in the water their freeboard was barely visible, and huge liquid natural gas tankers with their white bulbous tanks of refrigerated gas, were not the concern of the multinational force. Their lookout was for those that turned east, bound for Jordan and Israel, Al-Aqaba and Eilat. For as remote and deserted as the land around them was, an astonishingly numerous cavalcade of coasters and merchants marched steadily as foraging ants through these narrow passages.

In her first week on station
Horn
had boarded and searched twenty-two ships. So far they'd found no oil, no weapons, no contraband, and had nearly come to grief one hazy night on a course laid too close to the westward reefs off the Jazirat Shakir.

Which brought them to this summer morning. Fortunately, Dan thought, seeing what was taking shape on the chart, it looked like the day would be clear. Because Strong had ordered them to the inner station. They'd transit the Madiq Tiran, Tiran Strait, and take a blocking position in Oparea Sydney, sixty kilometers inside the Gulf of Aqaba.

He shook himself awake and went out on the starboard wing.

Early though it was, the air was so hot it parched throat and nose instantly. The sun glared up from the flat water and down from the sky. The panting heat, the concentrated light, warned that it would really be searing by, say, thirteen hundred. He balanced on his heels, blinking grit from his eyeballs as a tanker transited the horizon with the inevitability of mercury rising in a thermometer. A thin brown haze boiled off its stack into a sky brilliant blue directly overhead, hazy tan with suspended dust lower down.

He looked down. As
Horn's
hull rolled through blue transparence it churned the sea into a roiling, turbulent, somehow colder-looking lamination of translucent jade, a milky greenish film that slid aft slowly and was replaced again and again. Not for the first time, he wished he was swimming in it. To strap on a mask and drop over the side …

But duty could not be evaded. Not even for a moment.

The door dogged behind him against the heat and dust, he looked at the chart again, and picked up a pair of dividers. Pricked off distance, and ran numbers through his brain.

“Bring her around to zero-niner-zero,” he told the officer of the deck. “And bring her up to standard. We'll set the navigation detail ten nautical miles off the Madiq Tiran.”

…

COBIE was in the women's head, glad to be off watch at last. She was looking forward to breakfast, then maybe half an hour on her back with her eyes closed. But first, something more important.

She carefully blotted the dregs from a bottle of clarifying lotion across some pimples that had appeared at her hairline. Little, white-hearted buggers. She'd never had an outbreak there before. It was all the sweating they were doing down in the hole. Helm said this was nothing compared to a steam plant, but in the last few days the temperature in Main One had gone over a hundred and ten. Coveralls, forget it. She wore dungaree bottoms and a tee. The guys went around in gym shorts and bare chests. It looked good on some, not so good on others.

Hair on guys, you could keep it. Looking at them one after another in her mind, like flipping pages in a magazine. Akhmeed, not her type. Ricochet wasn't that fuzzy, but he wasn't built either, his chest thin as a little boy's.

She cocked her head, looking into her eyes in the mirror and smiling just the littlest bit. If she had to pick, she'd go for Mick Helm. A decent build. Not hairy all over. And he liked her, too. She was picking up something there, not just a work center supervisor trying to get somebody new off on the right foot.

When she shook the bottle again, it was empty. Fa-a-wk, she thought. She thought of going to shorts and a sports bra. Imagined the Porn King looking up from
Hustler
to check her out. No way in hell.

She was wondering where she was possibly going to get more Clin-ique when she heard a
whoomp
and a scream from back in the compartment. She dropped the bottle and ran to the door, looking the length of women's berthing.

Smoke, lots of blue smoke … and yellow light, flames. Coming from the outboard stack of bunks, up against the hull. Coming from …

“Goddamn it,” she yelled, and grabbed the extinguisher off the bulkhead.

Her bunk tier was flaming black oily smoke. The heavy extinguisher almost dragged her arms off. But she towed it bumping and scraping across the terrazzo. Some black dude gaped in from the passageway. “Class Bravo fire,” she screamed at him. “Call DC Central. Call 211.”

“God, what is going on—”

“Cobie, what happened—”

The other girls had leapt from their bunks. Now they were yelling and screaming and rushing around. One was cursing, trying to get her
emergency breathing device on over her head, catching it on her braids. Cobie banged the extinguisher down and pulled the pin. “Back off,” she yelled to Myna, who had the bunk below hers. She was trying to claw her bedding off, trying to get to something under it. “Get out of there! That's a fuel fire. Give me a clear shot.”

“Fire, fire, fire in the Lezzie Locker! That is … right, sir… fire in compartment 3-382-3-Lima, after women's berthing. Repair five provide. Fire in compartment 3-382-3-Lima, after women's berthing. Repair five provide.”