Police and fire vehicles were jammed bumper to bumper. They had to pass three separate cordons. The first two were Italian; city police, then the federal carabinieri. The last was U.S. Navy, in helmets and black Kevlar and shorty carbines with black web slings. Guards examined their IDs, listened to Mills’s explanation of who Dan was, and directed them to where they could look out over a final barrier of tumbled riprap crusted with barnacles and drifted plastic bottles and lost beach sandals.
The exposed mud smelled like a sewage treatment plant, but probably wasn’t as ripe as it would get in summer. The cruiser lay motionless. Heat shimmered above the stumpy aux exhaust riser aft, but as far as he could tell, the main turbines weren’t lit off. The sheer of the hull, the towering bluff of the superstructure, echoed the ramparts inland, though its horizon-blending haze gray was lighter than the ash-gray volcanic tuff of the medieval fortification. Tugs lay alongside, and the barge he’d noted from the air had been joined by another. Dan guessed they were taking off fuel, water, and lube oil, starting the laborious process of lightening ship. A third barge with a crane hovered some distance off.
A chief in tac gear saluted. He was in charge of force protection; could he be of any help? Dan nodded toward the ship. “I may be relieving her skipper. Depending on the investigation. What d’ya know about how she went aground?”
“Not much, sir. My team’s out of Civitavecchia. We’re just helping the locals maintain the perimeter.” He glanced seaward. “I got tac comms with our RHIB, though. Want to take a look?”
Dan considered. “Can I borrow a helmet?”
“Certainly, sir. Spare in the boat.” He spoke into a Motorola, and one of the circling inflatables broke from orbit and turned a blunt nose for them.
They boarded from a floating pier at the boat basin. Not far away several yacht owners were talking rapidly in Italian, gesticulating contemptuously toward the grounded warship. Dan settled Kevlar on his head as the rigid inflatable purred back out into the smoky wind, the light chop.
The cruiser grew as they neared. It towered vertical, clifflike, unclimbable, with a lack of motion that struck a sailor as unnatural, although the steady roar of blowers and machinery, the mingled smells of exhaust and fuel and cooked food, were familiar. The overlofty, topheavy-looking superstructure was canted slightly to starboard. Aluminum, Dan remembered, and the whole class had been reporting cracks. A seaman in dark blue coveralls watched from the boat deck. Dan noted the colors had been shifted aft.
His gaze rose. Aloft, flags fluttered, the surface search radar rotated. Flat squarish panels with truncated corners, not quite octagons, were set like badges on the superstructure. They were the ship’s reason for being; in many ways, her main batteries, though ranks of missiles were hidden beneath hinged flush covers fore and aft.
Those bland panels were SPY-1 antenna arrays. The Ticonderogas had been designed around them, mating a Spruance-class hull and propulsion to the most powerful radars ever put to sea. Within a radius of three hundred miles, an Aegis cruiser could detect, track, identify, and reach out with missiles to destroy any aircraft threatening the massive carriers that centerpieced U.S. or NATO battle groups.
“So, Lenson,” Nick Niles had rumbled four days before, slapping his desk, “I keep my promises. Still want a ship?”
Dan had stood by the window of the vice CNO’s temporary office at the Buchanan House, looking out toward the Pentagon. The offices he and Niles had staggered out of together, through burning fuel, under collapsing ceilings, over torn-apart bodies, were being gutted and rebuilt.
“Yes sir,” he’d murmured. Niles had stalled his career, blocked his promotion, spread the word that the most highly decorated officer in the sea services was a hothead, an individualist, reckless, cavalier, unaccountable. He seemed to have changed his mind after 9/11. Somehow he’d engineered Dan’s fourth stripe, though his fingerprints were nowhere to be seen. But Dan was still wary of African-American admirals bearing gifts.
“You made captain. Sure you don’t want to cash in your chips? Take a medical retirement on those wheezy lungs, go make some real money?”
He didn’t answer, and a hollow boom quivered the air as a big palm walloped the desk again. “Okay. A command? I got one. You might actually be a good fit. Your background with missiles. Think about who you can cherry-pick from TAG to take with you. Fill in the holes.”
“Well, I—”
“But you won’t have long.” A sausagelike finger had boresighted him. “I can’t wait for results. She’s out there on a national-level mission. If this ship doesn’t turn around, and I mean on a dime, I’ve got another O-6 with his bags packed. And tread light this time, Lenson. No more Gaddises. No more Horns.”
“What’s the mission, sir?” Dan had asked.
And Niles had told him.
“We can look at the far side, sir,” said the coxswain, beside him in the boat. Dan nodded. Binoculars flashed from the bridge wing; he turned his collars up to hide his rank insignia. On the port side the red antifouling coating rose several feet above the waterline. “The screws seem to be in deeper water,” Mills yelled, and Dan nodded again. That’d be a plus, if the shafts and screws weren’t damaged. He could borrow fins and take a look, if that wasn’t beneath the dignity of a skipper. Still, the sonar dome, all the way forward, looked as if it had been driven right up onto the shoal.
He took one more long survey, stem to stern, all 570 gray humming, roaring feet of her; at men and women standing about on the fantail, gazing longingly at the city that stretched away into the hazy distance, climbing the slopes of silent ominous peaks. Then said to the coxswain, “Thanks for the look. You can put us ashore now.”
Driving back to the base, Dan remembered coming here as a lieutenant (jg), aboard USS Guam. Naples had been a grim, depressed city of blowing trash and sullen crowds and wash hanging from shabby tenements, with too many people and far too little employment. In those days every bullet-chipped wall had been plastered with Communist posters, and sailors on liberty had been warned to travel in groups.
There was still trash back in the alleys, and the streets were no wider, but the Terminale Marittima had been freshly repainted and the cars they idled behind were new. The shops were all open, with bright signs and fully stocked windows. The women who crossed in total disregard of whether or not the lights said to walk swung along jauntily in glossy leather boots and stylish coats, and the men looked far more hopeful. Italy seemed to be doing well, even in what had always been one of its least-advantaged cities. Maybe the protection of the U.S. Navy had helped it get there. He liked to think so, anyway.
Mills was slowing the sedan at the entrance to the base when Dan noticed another crowd. The guardhouse lay at the end of a cul-de-sac walled off from the main terminal by blocks of warehouses and trucking garages and the concertina wire surrounding the Alitalia repair shops. A line of cars waited to enter, but between them and the guard shack a chain of demonstrators were waving signs, gesticulating, and marching back and forth. Their shouts echoed down the cul-de-sac, amplified by the concrete walls.
“What’s going on up there, Matt?”
“I’m not sure. Work disagreement, I think. There’s always a strike someplace in town.”
“That hasn’t changed.”
“Usually it’s pretty tame. They even announce the time it’ll be over, when they strike the train lines. So everybody can plan. It’s pretty civilized.” Mills touched the pedal and the sedan edged up. He slid out a sign that read AUTOVETTURE DI SERVIZIO — US NAVY and propped it on the dash.