And again: Carpenter nearly getting them whacked after a sharia court in the Philippines, when he’d gotten caught banging the wife of one of the imam’s best friends.
Same old Rit. Never overly concerned with political correctness, or even halfway decent taste. Pretty much a caricature of what the typical U.S. Navy sailor had once been stereotyped as, but which, since Tailhook at least, was supposed to no longer exist. Dan had thought it would be safe having him aboard, to help with the manning shortfall. But apparently Carpenter had managed to get on Singhe’s bad side. Dan gripped the expostulating sonarman’s hand and examined the screen. At the ladder, a seaman tried to maneuver past a glowering Amarpeet Singhe. Her raised arm blocked the exit, and he shrank back.
“So, boss, come down about that self-noise figure? We got the whole stack dried out. Purged it with nitrogen and a hot plate. Learned that trick on Skate. I got the numbers here someplace—”
“Who’s Molly, Rit? Are you screwing around with one of the female enlisted? I’m only gonna ask once. So how about a straight answer?”.
“Molly?” Carpenter reared back in the chair, which protested alarmingly. “What, you wanna meet her? Can do, amigo.” He turned the monitor toward Dan, chuckling.
“Fuck,” Dan breathed. He touched the keyboard gingerly. It felt sticky. He hoped it was from the empty Pepsi cans heaped in the wastebasket. “What … where the hell did this come from?”
Carpenter shrugged. “Brought it along for shits ’n’ grins. The boys need a little R&R, and they ain’t getting any shore time.”
The game was called Gang Bang Molly. Cycling through three scenes told him all he needed to know. Dead silence reigned in the confined space, except for the whoosh of passing seas and the never-ending, very loud creaking of the sonar, like an iron wheel slowly revolving inside a too-tight, never-oiled socket.
“Just harmless fun,” Carpenter suggested, but sweat glistened at his hairline.
Dan took a deep breath. “This is about the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever seen. I know you’re retired, Rit. But we have standards of conduct. Which you must have at least heard about.”
Carpenter grinned, lopsided, the same little-boy-caught-and-unjustly-persecuted half-smile he’d offered before. “Hey — boss man — tell me you ain’t taking this seriously.”
“I take anything that contributes to poor crew morale and a hostile command climate seriously.” He snapped his fingers. “The disk.”
“The what?”
“The disk. The game disk.”
“Hey, there’s no disk. This puppy’s on the LAN. Brought it aboard on a thumb drive. You can have that if you want, but—” Carpenter began making a show of slapping his pockets, looking around his pookah.
An audible intake of breath from Singhe. Dan closed his eyes. On the LAN? Being played all over the ship? He asked Tausengelt, “You knew about this, Master Chief?”
“No sir. I didn’t.” The leading enlisted looked as angry as Dan felt. “Well — I did hear a rumor. But I had no idea it was — basically, I agree, this is beyond the — this is not what people should be putting on the ship’s network.”
“Track it down. Pull it. And I want a list of everyone who’s downloaded it.” He snapped his fingers again and Carpenter reluctantly yielded up a small black memory stick. Dan buttoned it into a pocket. “I’m confiscating this. Delete it from the LAN. And get me that list of names,” he repeated, and headed for the ladder up.
Topside, main deck. With Singhe standing silent beside him, he held the drive out between thumb and forefinger over the braided sea. A cloud trailed silver skirts miles off, but for the moment, though the decks glistened with rolling laminations of condensed spray, it wasn’t raining. “Thanks for bringing this to my attention,” he told her. “How long did you know?”
“One of the girls e-mailed me this morning.” She stood erect by the lifeline, hands locked behind her in a textbook parade rest, looking out to where a distant silhouette melted into the squall. When she turned her head, those remorseless dark eyes set in that goddesslike face met his. “Are you saying you didn’t know? Sir?”
“Of course not! No.”
“Carpenter’s one of yours. You brought him aboard. You didn’t know he’d do something like this?”
Dan had to look away. Because the uncomfortable truth was, the guy did have a history. He’d never expected this … but on the other hand, he wasn’t exactly surprised, either.
She added, “The truth is, sir, the chiefs on this ship — okay, some, not all — but the majority are more of a barrier between the enlisted and the officers than a link. They don’t want change. They obstruct and stonewall organizational innovation. That’s the kind of middle management an effective CEO gets rid of. Or at the very least, isolates and bypasses until he can downsize them.”
“Uh, that’s a pretty damn harsh indictment, Amy,” Dan said. “I’m not sure I can totally buy into that. It takes a little while for everyone to get with any new program, and the Navy’s not exactly out front in managerial reform. I’m sure most of the chiefs are doing the best they can.”
“Really.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Then how do you explain obscene games like that? And not even played privately, but on the ship’s network? I’m glad you saw it. Now you know what they’ve been trying to do to me. And to the other women aboard. They failed with the board of inquiry. But they haven’t quit.”
To her? To the other women? The grounding board? Somehow she thought this was all aimed at her. Dan looked down at her hand, the tapered graceful fingers, and suddenly felt like shaking them off, as he would some poisonous centipede. The brown eyes burned into his, trusting, demanding, but with something else behind them.
He wasn’t attracted. Quite the opposite. But some instinct warned him not to reveal that. So he smiled back, held the little plastic device out farther, and let it drop. The wind caught the drive as it fell, curving its path. Then it vanished into the heaving sea, leaving a widening ripple that only slowly moved aft, visible for a long time, before Savo finally left it behind.
12
Dan was napping in his chair in Combat when the message came in. He woke to Cher Staurulakis shaking his arm. “Captain. Captain!”
“Yeah!”
“The Air Force is hitting downtown Baghdad.”
His first instinct was to check his watch. 0440 local, Bravo time, one hour earlier than it was over what was now, officially, an enemy capital.
The warning order had come down several hours before. They’d gone to darken ship and full battle readiness. Everyone on the bridge was in flash gear, with goggles handy. Here in CIC, gas masks, life preservers, and helmets were stacked in neat piles or slung from consoles. He ran his eye over displays and status readouts. The starboard bow array wasn’t operating as well as it should. The chill-water flow was still a problem.
Other than that, and the slow engine response due to their artificially low patrolling speed, Savo was as ready as he could make her. Right now they were on a southeasterly course, which pointed the port quarter array out along the main threat bearing, but they were nearing the southern limits of their area. He’d have to turn north again in another hour or so, or lose geometry on the acquisition basket.