Downie. “The Troll.” The goofball who’d left his pistol unattended on the quarterdeck just long enough for it to be stolen. The compartment cleaner who’d discovered a corpse cold in its bunk. They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. Then Downie half-grinned, dropped his gaze, and squatted to adjust his gas mask carrier.
Almarshadi bustled up in flash gear and flotation vest, carrying a rolled-up sheaf of bond. Dan beckoned him closer. Trying to control suddenly ragged breathing, a racing heart, reaching for the cool impassivity everyone expected of him. Trying to forget Horn, and what had happened to all too many of her crew.
Under his command.
“Fahad, good morning. Fine Navy day, right?”
The exec shivered. He cast a doubtful eye at the clouds. “Absolutely, Captain. Spectacular Navy day.”
“Built the training package?”
“Bart and I got it written up last night.”
“Good. Couple of issues on the bridge team. I want protective goggles for them too. Have them wrap a pair in the flash gear hood so they get them on at the same time as the hoods. Second, aren’t they supposed to have flak jackets? Do we have those?”
“Hermelinda might have goggles in stock. And we … not flak jackets … we have, um, ballistic protection gear for the boarding party.”
“Move it up here. We won’t be doing any opposed boarding. I’d rather have the bridge team ready to keep fighting if we take a fragmentation hit.”
“Time: plus two minutes.”
The OOD leaned out. “Captain, XO: General quarters set. All stations report manned and ready. Time, two minutes and fifteen seconds.”
Dan gave Almarshadi the gimlet eye. With a ready time like that, someone had leaked the drill. He got a shamefaced grin back. “All right,” he told the OOD. “Have the bo’s’un pass, ‘Work center supervisors, now carry out EBD and emergency egress drills.’” Almarshadi waited, tapping the rolled-up papers against his thigh. Dan looked aft, then up, giving the crew a few more minutes to get set. But something was missing. After a moment he realized what. “Get our battle colors up!” he yelled into the pilothouse, and added, to Almarshadi, “And leave them up, as long as we’re on station out here.”
“Aye sir. Goggles, ballistic vests, battle colors.”
A quartermaster — there were no signalmen anymore — double-timed to the flag shack and began breaking out the oversized Stars and Stripes. When it was snapping free against the gray sky, huge and bright and crackling in the cold wind, he looked up for a long time. Filling his sight with red and blue and white like some essential nutrient he’d been short on for too long.
Reynolds Ryan was gone. Van Zandt was gone. Horn was still radioactive, but he’d brought her back. Less than half as many ships out here now as when he’d stepped aboard his first destroyer so many years before. But the U.S. Navy was still on station.
Still on station.…
He took a deep breath, wondering why he was suddenly fighting tears. Fuck. Fuck! What would happen to these kids? Was Savo doomed too? He’d just left the Navy command center when Flight 77 had punched through the limestone skin of the Pentagon, blasting the space and everyone in it with fuel-flame and razor-sharp metal, turning everything in the C ring into fire and collapsing concrete.
Niles, and the others who’d called him a Jonah, a curse, a doom — were they right?
No. They couldn’t be. He’d never have taken this command if he’d really believed that.
So why was the imp of self-doubt still whispering in his ear that he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t competent enough? That when the chips were down, he’d lack what it took.
He’d always come through before, true. Oh, sure, the imp sneered. But one of these days.…
A clearing of the throat beside him. Dan looked down from the streaming colors to find the XO regarding him. He dragged himself back into the present, into the bite of a frigid wind. And told Almarshadi, “Okay, that your drill schedule there? No, I’m sure it’s fine. Take charge, Fahad. Go ahead and take charge.”
“Captain’s in Combat” passed mouth to mouth. The lights were dimmed. Every seat was occupied. Everyone in CIC was in flash gear too, but their helmets lay on the deck beside them. He’d told Cheryl she could relax her battle dress if she wanted, once she was satisfied.
He settled into his command seat with a sigh, unbuckled his own helmet, and set it aside. His neck, injured in that nuclear whiplash aboard Horn, was grateful for the lessened weight. He kneaded it as he took in the screens. They shifted as Staurulakis tested inputs and cameras. Only the Aegis picture stayed constant. A gimlet gaze, but so exquisitely honed that as the spokes clicked back and forth, refreshing forty times a second, every desert wadi and ridge glowed green and gold.
Fractured neck, scarred airway, burn tissue in one shoulder from a hellish night in the Irish Sea … his body was a palimpsest. Niles had offered medical retirement. He could still run a mile in nine minutes, but he could envision a day when pelting through a ship, sliding down ladders, would be just too much.
What would he do then?
Agonize about that later, Lenson. Just now his ship, his ship, throbbed and whined around him. The turbines buzzed through the rubber-coated steel under the flight deck boots he wore for GQ. The ventilation whooshed, and keyboards clattered. The high lilting whalesong of the sonar trilled through alloy before hurtling out into miles of chilly sea. His elbow jerked and a paper cup of coffee he hadn’t noticed being placed there spilled over the gray metal desk-shelf. He mopped the keyboard with a paper towel that Staurulakis, eyes narrowed, handed him.
You are in fucking command, boy, he told himself. Get a grip.
He skimmed his message queue, reading the header on each, then either deleting or filing it. CTF 61 had acknowledged last night’s question, about backloading Ammermann at the first opportunity. It wasn’t an answer, just acknowledging receipt. The Early Bird carried Iraq’s defiant response to the forty-eight-hour deadline. In the next article, Israel’s prime minister announced that if attacked with WMDs, his country would retaliate in kind.
Dan forwarded those to Almarshadi for the daily news summary, then studied the fleet weather forecast. Up to twenty-knot winds and high seas for the rest of today. A high-latitude ridging event over Germany could lead to cyclogenesis over the east Med. A cold air surge over the region could drop temperatures to 10 °C, and bring high winds and heavy snow. Snowfall-affected regions could spread out from southern Turkey to the coast of the Levant.
“Shit,” he muttered. They really didn’t need bad weather just now. Well, maybe it’d miss them.
He blotted surreptitiously at the now icy-cold remnants of the spilled coffee that had dripped down onto his crotch, and pulled up the message he’d started to draft the night before. It was to both his “masters”—CentCom and EuCom, info to CNO and State.
“Captain?”
He looked up at Bart Danenhower’s broad, blank face. The engineer nodded, taking off the locomotive driver’s cap and wiping his forehead on one sleeve. He shuddered. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”
“How you doing, Bart?”
“Okay, sir. I did the math you wanted. On fuel.”