Benyamin gaped. “You know I work in…? Sorry, sir … I was just surprised to hear you…”
“Relax. I see your name every day in the POD. Junior sailor of the month? Too bad that reserved parking space isn’t doing you any good in the Med.”
“Yessir. Uh, nosir.” Benyamin looked right and left, as if seeking someone else to step in and help him out. None of his shipmates did. “Uh, where’d you serve before, sir?”
“My last ship was USS Horn. Then I was at the Tactical Analysis Group before coming out here.”
“Horn,” someone murmured, and the name fizzed down the queue like a burning fuze. The faces changed, as if confronted by some figure they’d considered up until now mere legend — the dog-wolf of Minnesota, or Vlad Dracula himself.
He wondered exactly what they’d heard. But no one seemed to want to ask anything more, and if they had, he couldn’t have elaborated. So he just nodded in what he hoped was a friendly way and slid his tray along stainless rails. Mexican day: chicken fajitas, enchiladas, beef and bean burritos, Spanish-rice-and-tortilla soup. He carried his meal out into the dining area and found a table at random, noting the mess decks master-at-arms heading his way. A flash of memory: the first day in junior high, or maybe high school, looking for a place in the clattering shouting throng. A metaphor for life itself, maybe. Each man and woman had to … not so much find, or discover, or be given that spot in the world, but rather elbow and pry one out from amid the seething multitude of those already here.
“Mind if I join you?”
Startled faces looked up. “Captain,” one sailor said. Benyamin hesitated, then put his tray down opposite.
A heavyset black man muttered, “Come down to sample the chow, Skipper?”
“It’s exactly the same in the wardroom, Seaman Goodroe. Except cold, since they have so far to carry it up.” He started on the enchilada. Not bad.
The master-at-arms set a glass of bug juice the color of brake fluid beside him. Dan nodded thanks. Benyamin murmured tentatively, “They say, Captain — they say you have the Medal of Honor.”
“That’s what’s in the official bio,” Dan said, trying to make a joke out of it. “But I still can’t walk on water.”
The buzz of talk, the jangle of silverware, gradually welled up again to fill the low compartment. Up in front a row of crewmen watched satellite-televised basketball as they ate, abstracted gazes six thousand miles distant.
A slight pale kid with the beginning of a mustache cleared his throat. “So, Captain, I hear we’re gonna pull into Haifa for a week.”
“Really? Guess it’s possible, but there’s nothing like that in the schedule.”
“Can’t you put in for a port visit?”
“It doesn’t work that way, exactly. Not with the … op schedule the way it’s looking.”
A pixie-faced Hispanic-looking girl said, “Is it true we’re attacking Iraq?”
He shrugged. “Above my pay grade, seaman … Colón. Our job’s to be ready if we do.”
“But it’s a possibility? Sir?”
“Looks more like it every day. But like I said, we’re only going to know once we get the tasking.”
“Captain Imerson never told us shit,” the heavyset seaman said. “We’re out there on the deck, and we don’t know where we’re going, or how long we’ll be out, or what we’ll have to do. Is it gonna be like that the rest of this deployment, sir? Any way we could sorta get, like, more in the picture?”
Dan felt ashamed. Amid all the things he had to catch up on, he’d overlooked including his shipmates. Who did the work. Whose blood would pay the price if he screwed up, made a wrong decision. “That’s a great suggestion, Goodroe. Tell you what: I’ll get with the XO, see if we can have him do a daily ops brief over the 1MC.” He got out his BlackBerry and made a note, their gazes following his finger.
“Hey, let’s let the skipper eat his lunch, dudes,” the master-at-arms suggested. From that point on the talk subsided, though the side glances continued; and all that was heard was the murmur of conversation at the other tables, the rattle of crockery and silverware, and the clatter from back in the scullery when he pushed his tray through the opening and met the startled gaze of the aproned, bespattered mess crank immured back there in heat and steam and stinks. To him too Dan gave a solemn nod of recognition and thanks, and received it back with a graceful inclination of the head.
Long after midnight, in CIC, he nursed yet another paper cup of sonar shack joe, fighting a headache and blinking tiredly at the large-screen displays.
COMEX — commence exercise — had been promulgated three hours before. The Orange surface action group had kicked off with a Harpoon attack on the northern screening units, followed by a Tomahawk salvo targeted on Roosevelt. They were overwhelmed by a Blue missile and air counterstrike, but Dan figured that if anything, this first attack was a diversion. Trying to anticipate the land-based threat, he’d moved Savo up to the outboard edge of her station and concentrated his team’s attention on the northeast quadrant, letting his gun-laying radar handle the all-around watch.
For half an hour nothing had developed. He’d begun to wonder if he’d been suckered out of position when the F-5s had suddenly popped up, not out of Izmir, where Terranova had been looking, but low and fast out of the mountains of Caria. “They’re trying to hide in among the islands,” the FC had said, hooking three pulsating squares and turning them to carets. “But see how clearly the Doppler lock picks them out?”
“Range?”
“Hundred and ninety miles.”
Dan leaned closer, marveling. The vibrating spokes of the radar clicked around as if escapement-driven. For each of the hurtling contacts a profile read off elevation, speed, course, and electronic identification. “We can do an alert script,” the FC2 murmured. “Write it into the doctrine from the console. Specify elevation, speed, and course, and the system will alert and track automatically. You get the buzzer if it classifies hostile. In self-defense mode, the system takes it from there through firing. Once we tell it what we want to guard against, Aegis doesn’t actually need us in the loop anymore.”
For some reason this reminded him of what Amy Singhe had said in his cabin the night before. “Doctrine is preset. It resides in our computers.” He scratched his head, turning this over like some clumsy piece of tool-flint with a brain designed hundreds of thousands of years in the past. He’d watched commanders dither. Try to sort dozens of variables, match them against doctrine, and all too often make bad calls. Or at least suboptimal decisions. Against supersonic threats, a mistake left no second chance. Maybe they had to depend on silicon and code, then. But it still didn’t sit well.
“I think we want to be,” he said. “In the loop, that is.”
“Sir, that’s your decision as CO. But Captain Imerson had no problem running everything in automatic.”
“Let’s not go through that again,” said Matt Mills. The lieutenant had come in and stood by now to take over on the nickel-and-dime, five-on-and-ten-off schedule the TAOs were standing. “Evening, Captain.”
“Matt. Say, you run into Dr. Noblos? Haven’t seen much of him the last couple of days.”
“The good doctor’s got some kind of respiratory infection. Corpsman said he needed rest more than work.”
Dan reflected. According to the last report from the Johns Hopkins consultant, both Savo’s SPY-1 system and its team’s watchstanding skills were still marginal. “He’s, um, really sick?”
“What I heard.”