Dan, holding a laden plate on the helo deck, studied Mitscher steaming in company a mile off. Incredibly, no one had woken him again until 0730, and he felt almost rested, though his throat was raw and the cough worse. Around him the crew chatted and chowed down at folding tables, squatted cross-legged on the nonskid, or dangled legs through the deck-edge nets. Most wore trunks or bathing suits, predominantly issue gear, but some in colorful civilian attire. Especially the girls, a few of whom lay garnering what ultraviolet they could facedown on blankets on the hangar roof.
Looking down, Dan couldn’t help noting the tire marks and eroded surfaces where the helo had scraped the rough black nonskid off. They’d have to resurface the flight deck again.
“Bug juice, Cap’n. Orange or blue?”
“The orange, please.”
Hands full, he stood eating with a gathering of the chiefs, listening to “Red” Slaughenhaupt tell about the time he’d been on a boarding team deployed out here. They’d been doing maritime intercept operations with a Canadian frigate when they’d intercepted a heroin shipment. “We found two tons of brown powder, in plastic bags,” the lead fire controlman finished. “I had to witness the destruction. Felt pretty wasteful, dumping all that good shit over the side. You gotta wonder, it’s worth that much on the street, why don’t we just take it home and sell it? Buy ourselves another carrier battle group or something.” The other chiefs grinned, glancing from him to Dan.
He wandered from there into the hangar. Red Hawk squatted, folded-back blades nodding with the ship’s motion. The helo mechanics were disassembling equipment. “Thought this was a rope yarn afternoon,” he said to Strafer, who’d strolled over when he came in.
“You want us in the air tomorrow, gotta maintain today.” The lead pilot rubbed his crew cut. “Not to bring up business, but… we put a lot of hours on this bird. Coming up on Interval Two fast.” Wear was accumulating, and the bird would need serious attention soon. Wilker looked out to sea. “We have to put flight hours into this exercise? What’s it called?”
“Malabar.”
“And who else—”
“U.S., Australia, Japan, India, Singapore. This year, they’re gonna focus on ASW. So, yeah, you’re gonna be tasked. Plus, if we have to put you in the air to check out any questionable surface contacts.” Dan glanced at the worktables, where burgers and Cokes had been set aside. “We’re all getting tired. If there’s any way we can lighten your guys’ load, let me know. And if we’re getting close to the hairy edge on safety, let me know. I mean it. Don’t push any envelopes, just for an exercise.”
He wandered out onto the flight deck again and stood looking down on the fantail, eating baked beans with a plastic fork. Three dark-haired, swarthy men squatted on their haunches on the afterdeck. The Iranians they’d fished out the night before. They were looking out at the sea, not speaking or interacting, just staring, as if hoping to spot someone they knew was out there. The after gun was centerlined, threatening a distant, slowly rolling horizon. The wake unscrolled behind them, a smoothed path that gradually vanished as it approached the distant, jagged waves at his sight line. Several crew members stood along the lifeline, spaced like sparrows on a wire, holding poles or tending handlines. Seabirds whirled, making him shield his plate with one hand against errant squirts. Now and then a gull left the milling swarm to dive toward where the sailors’ bait skipped along the surface.
Then, from high above, a greater shadow descended. The gulls parted, shrieking and crying. Dan squinted up into the opal light, not quite believing what he was witnessing.
The thing’s wings were wider than a man was tall. It balanced on the wind like a Romanian gymnast. A black eye examined him from a cocked head. A hooked beak opened and closed. For an endless moment he met that dark soulless gaze. Then a wing tip twitched, and the great bird angled off, lifting without effort on some invisible draft Dan couldn’t even feel. But still, gazing down.
He suddenly became aware of others standing behind him, also goggling at the bird, and watching him. The crew, holding plates and cans.
Tausengelt stepped up. “A good omen,” the leathery old master chief said drily. “Or a warning?”
“Oh, they’re good luck.” Dan glanced over his shoulder and raised his voice. “Albatross. Good luck to a ship… unless you harm one. Let’s just make sure we don’t.”
The anglers murmured assent, looking up. The great bird soared far above, gradually dropping back until it hovered over their wake. And stationed itself there, motionless, as if pasted to the cloudy sky, until Dan turned away, and carried his plate to the plastic bins.
He was in some kind of boarding school. Run on English lines, but somehow in Pennsylvania. He and some other boys were siphoning gasoline from what seemed to be a swimming pool.
The Hydra woke him. A furious-sounding Cheryl Staurulakis was on the other end. “Captain? We have a situation.”
He blinked into the dark, the dream still inhabiting his mind. Shaking it off, he jumped up in his boxers and jerked the blue curtain from over the forward porthole. It looked out over the bow, but the night sea lay empty of lights. Not an impending collision, then. “What’ve you got, Exec? I was trying to get my head down—”
“A situation,” the XO repeated. “In my stateroom.”
“In your… stateroom. You want me to come down there?”
“If the captain pleases.”
He didn’t like her tone on that last, but bit back a snappish reply. If she thought it was important, it would be. He checked the bulkhead clock. Just past eight o’clock reports. “Let me pull my coveralls on.”
“Khakis might be best, sir.”
With lifted eyebrows, he signed off.
Five minutes later — the uniform races at the Academy had been, after all, a good preparation for eventual command — he knocked at her door. “Come in,” said a muffled voice.
He closed the door to a flushed, sweaty Staurulakis, swinging a leg from a perch on her fold-down desk, and a seated, slumped Petty Officer Terranova. The girl raised tearstained cheeks. Her usual presentation, of a junior high school band student, was gone. The chubby face looked more like that of a child who’d fallen and skinned her knee. Dan restrained his first impulse, to put an arm around her, as when his daughter had been little, and fallen off her bike. “What happened?” he murmured.
“Tell him,” Staurulakis said. Just from the speed at which her leg swung he could tell she was furious.
Dan’s leading SPY-1 fire controlman, the woman he depended on during general quarters, described in broken sentences how, back in Crete, she’d ordered a new bikini swimsuit from a Soft Surroundings catalog one of the other girls had. It had come in in their mail delivery at Jebel Ali. “And I thought, we’re having the picnic, I’d wear it. Sure, I’m… a little heavy, but I could get a tan. In CIC all the time, we all get pasty white.”
“I know,” Dan said. “Take your time.”
“Anyway I got in line and had a salad. Then took my blanket up on the 03 level. And Heather and Ashley and Reagan and I, we laid there and talked, and drank Cokes… and I bummed a cigarette off Reagan. Then after the bird came—”