The Cruiser (27 page)

At 1000 Branscombe called to ask if he wanted a CNN feed to the mess decks. After a few seconds' consideration, Dan said no, at least not for the moment. He wanted everyone's head on his or her own job, not on what was going on to the east. There, the Army was punching hard into southern Iraq. The Air Force was laying down ordnance across the country, hitting command and control, trying to decapitate the regime.

How would “decapitation,” if they could pull it off, affect his mission? If the Iraqi command structure got turned into shredded meat in a bunker, what were the enemy's rocket forces' standing orders? Stand down? Acquiesce in occupation? Or unleash a last spasm of destruction? The last sounded a lot more likely.

He'd just socketed the J-phone when Almarshadi undogged the bridge door, shaking snow off his foul-weather jacket. A few flakes blew in with him. Dan returned his salute gravely. The XO sighed, glanced at the OOD, and sidled close. At some unseen signal the rest of the bridge team drifted to the starboard side, giving them privacy, as long as they kept their voices low.

Which his second in command did. “Sir, we've scrubbed down the LAN. That … program … is no longer available on it. And we made sure there's no backup. At least on the ship's network.”

“There's no backup on the LAN? What if the downlink goes … wait a minute. You're talking about that fucking rape game.”

“Yessir. Sorry, I wasn't clear.”

“My bad, my head was on something else I have to talk to Dave B. about. If you see him, send him up. So, you don't think I was overreacting? There seemed to be a lot of resentment among the female crew.”

“No sir, that was probably the right call. Considering … I guess, considering how ready everybody seems to be to jump on anything like that these days.” He pulled paper from inside his jacket. “Here's the list you wanted. Everyone who accessed or downloaded it. The game kept a players list, so you could see how your, um … scores … compared with the others. That's the number to the right of the name. Where it says ‘player,' ‘thug,' ‘hustla,' ‘gangsta,' ‘baller,' that's your ranking.”

Dan didn't want to know how you got points in a game called Gang Bang Molly. He almost said just shred it, but at last accepted it. The list wasn't as long as he'd feared. Maybe a dozen names, and all junior enlisted. No chiefs. One first-class petty officer. Carpenter, of course, was the high scorer. Benyamin was number two. He grunted. “Okay. What do we do with this?”

“Do you want to take disciplinary action, sir?”

“Of course we do, XO. I don't give a shit about swimsuit posters in the work spaces, the women can put up beefcake too. But a rape game's over the line. Tell me if you disagree.”

“No sir, I think you're right.”

“At the same time, I don't want it to be a career breaker. I know things have changed since I had
Horn
—”

“Yes sir. They have. The guys call a captain's mast a ‘delayed admin discharge.' One conviction at mast, they can deny your reenlistment.”

“Well, I don't want that. Can you do XO's mast? What exactly are the regs now?”

“I can do XOI, yessir. The maximum award is twenty hours of extra military instruction.”

The newest euphemism for punishment detail. “What kind of EMI?”

“Typically mess duty, or extra cleaning.”

Dan said, “I don't want to be too much of a stickler here, Fahad, but I'm recalling extra military instruction can't be punitive, it has to be actual training.”

“Yessir. That's OPNAV Instruction 3120. It has to be bona fide training to improve unit efficiency, not a substitute for punitive action under the UCMJ.”

No question, the days when a captain could lash a recalcitrant to a grating and let the cat out of the bag were long gone. “So we can't punish them without mast, but if we do take them to mast, they won't be able to reenlist?”

“About the size of it, Captain.”

They went back and forth about this for a while, Dan actually enjoying the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate on Navy regs and how to best skate around or in between them. It was more pleasant than thinking about what occupied most of his plate. Finally they got it boiled down to an agreement. Almarshadi made a note, then glanced around, as if making sure the others on the bridge were still out of earshot. “However, this brings up another issue. A personal one, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“I would like to be relieved.”

Dan tried to mask his surprise with a squint out the window. Through a gauze of snow the Israeli corvette seemed, through some queer fluke of the waning light, closer than ever. In the U.S. Navy, officers didn't ask to be relieved. It was theoretically possible, but he couldn't remember ever hearing of such a thing. “Uh, Fahad, what exactly are you telling me here? Relieved as what?”

“As exec. I do not feel, any longer, I am performing to your satisfaction.” When the Arab inclined his head with a dignified courtesy Dan caught the beginnings of a bald patch under a careful comb-over. “You said I am the … point of failure in our system. I don't want that responsibility. Therefore, I would like to be released … I mean, relieved.”

“This is a surprise. I don't really know how to respond.”

“I am being accurate? That I am not fulfilling your expectations?”

“Hey now. I admit I was ticked off the other night. About the near miss. And I chewed your butt. But that doesn't mean I wanted to fire you. Believe me, if I did, you'd have been on that helo to the task force, the one we sent back with Goodroe.” He glanced away, then back, trying to read the closed stubborn face. Remembering the anger and pride he'd seen a flash of, there in the passageway, when he'd used that phrase.
Point of failure.
Obviously it had sunk deep into this man's soul.

He had to try harder to remember how powerful a CO's words could be. But couldn't the guy take a reaming and keep on steaming? Any XO, by design, had a stressful job: to demand more than anyone could offer, and keep the standards of performance, cleanliness, and professionalism in the stratosphere.

In other words, he was almost guaranteed to be unanimously hated by everyone beneath him. Dan smiled as he recalled the joke about it, about why the insignia for lieutenant commanders and commanders was an oak leaf. The punch line was “So the pope gave the order to cover all the pricks with leaves.” Dan had been there, executive officer aboard USS
Turner Van Zandt,
in the Gulf, under Benjamin Shaker, for Operation Earnest Will. It was a hard role. Was Fahad Almarshadi just not going to fill the bill?

“Fahad—surely you've gotten chewed out before. The idea's to take direction, reorient, and keep charging.” The head remained stubbornly lowered; the dark gaze didn't rise. Past him the helmsman and JOOD were watching curiously. They looked away quickly.

Or was something else going on here? “Wait a minute. This wouldn't be about Iraq, would it?”

That called forth a furrow down Almarshadi's brow. “Iraq?”

“It's not that, then. For a minute, I wondered—never mind.”

“You wondered that since I was Arab, I would be on their side?”

“I didn't say that, Fahad.”

“Now you insult me. First I am a point of failure. You would rather have Cheryl as your XO. Now I am disloyal, not to be trusted.”

Jesus. The guy had remembered every word he'd said, then made up some he hadn't. “Cool the fuck down, XO. And lower your voice.” Dan swung out of his chair. “We'd better take this to my cabin.”

“No sir. I think we have said what we both needed to say.”

Almarshadi started to turn away, but Dan caught his shoulder and none too gently jibed him back around. “I'm not done talking, XO. You'll stand there and listen. And look me in the eye when I'm speaking to you.”

“Yes sir.” The murmur was submissive, but the dark eyes were blazing now, as they had been once before.

“You need to start paying less attention to what I say to you, especially when I'm not getting enough sleep, and more attention to your job. The only thing I see wrong here is that you lack self-confidence. But do you think you're the only one who feels that way?” No answer. “Do you?”

“I do not know.”

His gaze had dropped again, but Dan saw he'd hit some kind of nucleus. Maybe not hard enough for fission, but the angry flame seemed to be turning down to simmer. He started to lower his voice, then looked past the small man and instead raised it, so the others in the pilothouse could hear. “XO, sorry for losing my temper last night. Hear me?”

“I hear you, sir.”

“I have every confidence in you. Do you hear me?”

“Yes sir. I hear you.”

He lowered his voice again. “And something else. If you don't think you're up to the job? Neither do I.”

“Yes, you made that very—”

“No. I mean I don't feel, deep inside, that I'm up to mine either.”

Almarshadi's eyes widened. They came up and locked with his.

“That's right,” Dan said, still keeping it low, between them, his grip on the guy's shoulder digging to thin bone beneath the slight musculature. “I feel like I'm going to fail and give way. Like I'm making it up as I go along. And I'm never sure I'm doing the right thing.”

“But … you are the captain,” the little man whispered. “You have the … you have the Medal of Honor. You mean you do not…”

“No,” Dan said. They stood there face-to-face for a second, then another. Then he added, turning on just a little anger again, “So get used to it, and grow the hell up. We're at war. Do your duty. Get us ready to fight. Press on. Then you'll do everything I expect of you, and you'll be a leader, Fahad.”

He opened his hand, releasing his grip. The little man held his gaze, still looking as if he did not quite believe, but in that moment unguarded as Dan had not seen him before. He nodded, once, then again. Stepped back, and turned away, catching himself with an outstretched arm as
Savo
rolled.

He vanished down the ladderway, leaving Dan, soaked with sweat and feeling as if he'd run many miles, listening to the hissing whisper of the snow.

*   *   *

HE
was back in Combat when GCCS and high-side chat came up more or less at the same time. He narrowed his eyes at the screens, then called up the DIA classified site and looked up the ship.

A premonitory—no, a
remembered
—chill trailed cold fingers up his spine.

A Vosper Mark V frigate. Fourteen hundred tons. And heavily armed, including Chinese-supplied antiship missiles.

He knew this ship. Had sweated under its prosecution before, scraping the keel of a stolen submarine across the shallow sands of the eastern Gulf. Had fired his last and only weapon at its consort as it charged in to destroy him. It had connected, but the sister frigate, this one, had swung in next. Only an unexpected intervention had saved him.

Now INS
Alborz
was exiting As-Suwys—the mouth of the Suez Canal—accompanied by a second combatant and a supply ship. A small Iranian task force, according to the intel summary. Heading in his direction?

“A hundred and forty miles,” Matt Mills murmured from the TAO chair. Damn, Dan thought, am I getting that transparent? Or was it good that he and his TAOs were thinking along parallel lines? He sucked the inside of a cheek, replaying bad memories about that area of the Egyptian coast. That was where he'd patrolled with
Moosbrugger
and
Horn,
and intercepted the battered trawler that had turned out to be carrying something the West had dreaded for years.

He sighed, and reached for the phone.

Ammermann answered on the first ring. Dan asked him if he could come to CIC. While he was waiting, he researched the rest of the task force. The second combatant was a Sina-class missile boat, built to a French design in Iran. It too carried antiship missiles. The third must have been a support or logistics ship, or even civilian general cargo. His references didn't list it, though the intel report gave a name. “Make sure the EW team has the specs on their emitters,” he told Mills.

The West Wing staffer looked around, as if impressed, when he let himself in. But the guy surely was used to large-screen displays if he'd ever been in the Situation Room. Dan motioned him over. “Matt, give Adam your seat for a little while. Take a pee break, or whatever. I'll watch your screen.”

“Yes sir. Remember, Weps is starting morning systems-operability tests. You might see the ‘missile ready' numbers going up and down as they take them off the line.”

“Okay, thanks. —Adam, sorry, we've sort of neglected you.”

“That's perfectly okay, Dan. I know things must be getting tense for you.”

Was that a dig? He couldn't read this guy. He acted sincere, open, but what political animal, from either party, didn't have layer beneath layer, motivation beneath motivation? Maybe this one just had a better poker face, but his smooth, wide, roughly shaven visage looked guileless and eager to please. Dan noted a simple yellow-gold ring with a deeply embossed crest he couldn't see well enough in the subdued light to identify. He tapped it. “Harvard?”

“Yale.”

“Like the president.”

Ammermann looked humble. “Oh, sure. But years later, of course.”

“You know, Adam, I keep feeling like I should recognize your name. Why is that?”

“The heavy-equipment manufacturers. My family.”

“Oh yeah, sure. Close to the administration?”

“We've been supporters, over the years. What did you need me for, Captain? Some way I can help?”

Dan explained the tight quarters of the launch box; the window they had to hit; the Israeli, still guard-dogging them to the northeast. “He's staying clear of our firing bearing, which is good. But I'm not entirely sure what he's doing out here.”