Dan allowed himself ten seconds to stand in silence, swaying with the roll, one with the morning and the wind and the endless topple of the bow wave. Communing, for just a moment, with the ancient sea, the mariner’s eternal mother and eternal enemy. Then told Almarshadi to report the death to CTF 60 and request instructions.
“But we outchopped … right?” The smooth dark face was uncertain; the black hair ruffled in the breeze. Dan smelled cigarette smoke. Red coals glowed in the dimness of the breaker. The best execs were shadow selves, masters of detail within the skin of the ship. They freed the commander, instead of continually pulling him in, as this sparrowlike Arab seemed to do all too often. But he’d had worse seconds. Remembering Greg Juskoviac, his totally worthless XO aboard Gaddis, he could appreciate Almarshadi a little more. At least the guy was trying.
“We’re not under his tactical command, no, but he’s the closest force commander. So let’s see what he can do for us. Meanwhile, I’ve told Grissett to clear out one of the freezers. And not to let anyone else touch the body.”
The exec inspected his boots. Scuffed the nonskid. “Do we want to slow down? In case they want to offload it?”
Dan frowned. “No. I want to reach station as soon as possible.”
Almarshadi kicked at a scupper. “Okay, sir. Oh. By the way. I think you did the right thing. About Zotcher.”
Dan looked aloft, at the snapping flags atop the signal bridge. A lookout was studying them from the wing, decks above; when he caught his captain’s eye he swung his binoculars out again to sea. The barrel of a machine gun pointed in the same direction. “Glad I have your confidence. What about Amy Singhe? Am I picking up bad blood between her and some of the chiefs?”
“Amarpeet doesn’t get along with them. Considers them beneath her, I guess. You know she’s got an MBA from Wharton?”
“Yeah, I knew that. You call her Amarpeet? Not Amy?”
“That’s her name.”
Dan looked aloft again. “Not a smart attitude. Looking down on the chiefs, I mean.”
“I’ll counsel her.”
“Okay. But first check on how they’re doing with Goodroe. And get that message out.”
He walked the deck yearning to try to nap again, but knowing he wouldn’t. The immobile heavy-jawed visage, its last sight on earth probably the stained underside of the next mattress up, haunted him. One day joking on the mess decks. The next, in olive plastic, being slid into cold storage.
You expected death in battle. And going to sea in ships crammed with explosives and fuel and heavy machinery was always dangerous. You lost people overboard, or sucked into turbine engines on carriers, or from smoke inhalation, or asphyxiation in voids. But what killed healthy young men in their bunks? Cocaine? Didn’t that stop the heart? But there’d been no sign of a coke problem in the Command Climate Survey, and it usually showed up either there or in the urinanalysis program. Navy drug use was way down, and Goodroe’d had no record. Heart attack? The man had been in his late twenties; it seemed unlikely.
He dropped down a deck and strolled the length of the ship, stepping over knee-knockers, absentmindedly noting the condition of firefighting stations, dogging mechanisms, repair-party lockers. Putting a hand up now and then to check for dust on the top of the insulated ducts that ran along the overhead, painted cream-white and stenciled every few yards with black arrows denoting direction of flow. A knot of men and a blond woman stood around by the barbershop, nearly all the way aft. Navy didn’t salute inside the skin of the ship, but they came to their feet, nodded, murmuring, “Afternoon, Captain.”
“We doing okay? How’s the service here?”
“Turbo Mouth, he does okay. Talks pretty much nonstop, but he does a good haircut.”
“Price is right,” another sailor said. “Go on ahead if you need a trim, sir. We can wait.”
“Thanks, maybe tomorrow.”
The woman asked, “We keep hearing rumors on the news, sir. We gonna invade?”
“Seems to be a possibility.”
“I hear they’re threatening that if we attack, they won’t limit the war to the Mideast. What do you think that means?”
“That’s a good question. It might be why we’re headed where we’re going. But all I can really say is, we just need to be ready. Just all do our jobs and stand by.”
They didn’t look satisfied, but there weren’t any more questions. Strange that they hadn’t gotten the word about the death yet. Or maybe they had, and were just wary about bringing it up. He’d ask the corpsman to put something out, to all hands, before the scuttlebutt started to fly.
He looked into torpedo stowage, had a short discussion with the leading torpedoman, then ambled forward again up the port side. Halfway to the mess decks his radio crackled. “Skipper, XO.”
“Go, Fahad.”
“Got that message done, about Goodroe. Waiting for your chop.”
“Run it past Chief Grissett.”
“Already did, Captain.”
“Okay, good.”
“There’s a message from DesRon in your in-box. They want to schedule a red phone call at 1500 local with Two Six Actual.”
Jen Roald. His commodore. He checked his watch. The sea; the ship, the crew. And the captain. Like the old game played for decades with dice and drinks. Did they still play that, in officers’ clubs, in petty officers’ clubs, in what had once been Acey-Deucey clubs? Or had it too gone, another tradition eaten by the locusts? “Okay, XO, thanks. I’ll take that in CIC.”
He got there at 1445 and logged in at his chair. The vertical displays were blank, all but the central one, which showed the Global Command and Control picture. A lot of air traffic to the east. To the west, far behind now, glowed the bright pips of the battle group. He found Almarshadi’s draft message about Goodroe, went through it, started to correct a phrase, then shrugged and hit Send. Too many skippers wasted time massaging text. If it said what it meant to say, without having to be read twice, so be it.
The news summary carried press speculation that operations against Iraq were about to start, but there was no confirmation in the official traffic. A Chinese general had made threats against Taiwan. “Kill one rabbit, to scare the monkeys,” he’d said. A message slotted to both Matt Mills and himself from Naval Weapons Center Dahlgren, Network Systems Directorate, caught his eye. The header: SPY-1 Flight 7 Upgrade. He opened it.
Referring to the request Donnie Wenck had sent, it turned down Savo Island’s request for new software. The upgrade was in Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE) Category 3 infrastructure, which had not yet been approved for fleet issue due to considerations of operational security.
Which, he guessed, frowning, meant they were unsure it was hardened against hacking. Everybody wanted open architecture, but the easier programming was to write and change, the more vulnerable it became. He started a reply, then saved it to his draft folder.
As usual with Jennifer, she called five minutes early. “Commodore,” he said, then released the button on the handset.
“Dan. I guess you saw the response to your message to Dahlgren.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You made a good case, but you might want to hold off on pressing that issue. You’re handling an emergent tasker. You don’t want to degrade your system right now. Believe me.”
“I was thinking along those lines. Any, uh, idea when the balloon goes up?”
“You know as much as we do. I called my relief at the Sit Room and he can’t shed any light.”