The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (10 page)

The scream of a jet engine outside.
“Playmate, mark on top,”
someone said in his headphones. He took them off and massaged his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. Someone had said you could reset eyestrain by doing that.

“Dinner, Captain.” His steward slid a napkin-covered tray in front of him and snatched away the napkin like a conjurer. “Wednesday’s slider day.”

“Sliders. Great.” For some reason this had become the Navy word for burgers, conjuring an image of pink patties skidding in hot grease when a ship rolled. The fries were still warm, and there was even a shaker of salt on the tray. “Thanks, Longley.”

“What I’m here for, sir.”

He ate slowly, one eye on the screens. The ship’s tactical action officer sat atop a reporting pyramid. Below him or her was the antisubmarine-warfare coordinator, the antiair coordinator, the antisurface coordinator, and the bridge team, all feeding information and recommendations. The TAO controlled the ship’s weapons and radars, fighting in concert with friendly, “blue,” forces in his or her area. The TAO actually fought the ship; if he or she was skilled, the CO’s can in the next seat was nice, but not essential.

Dan was using this exercise to evaluate his three school-qualified TAOs, Mills, Staurulakis, and Almarshadi. So far the operations officer would be his first choice in actual combat. Petite, pale-haired, sharp-faced, unflappable, Staurulakis tended to be faster on the trigger than he liked, but she read a scenario quickly and her solutions were as good as his own. A few more hours together and they’d be one dangerous beast with two brains.

Savo Island
was still headed east, but he hadn’t wanted to arrive at Point Hotel without a firm idea of just how sharp was the blade that had been thrust into his hands. So far, Engineering had reported no problems, and his bridge team seemed to be on top of things. Their test would come late that night, as they transited the Strait of Messina, a choke point dreaded by everyone since the Greeks had ventured to challenge Scylla and Charybdis.

“Captain?” He looked up at Fahad Almarshadi, who was slightly bent, smiling radiantly. The exec’s smile lessened as Dan didn’t return it. “The, uh … thought I’d give you an update.”

“Cheryl, I’m going offline, talk to the XO. —What have you got, Commander?”

“The results of the sonar self-noise test you asked for.” He swallowed visibly. “It’s … not as good as I’d hoped.”

Dan flipped through the report. “Why’s our throughput so low?”

“One thought is, there might be water vapor in the transducers.”

Which could trace back to the grounding damage; his decision to bypass a dry-docking might be coming home to roost. He grimaced. “We checking it out?”

“Yessir, the STGs are doing that.”

“Rit Carpenter made it aboard, right? He on it?”

“He’s down there with them, sir. A big help, from what I hear.”

“Good. Have him come up and … no, belay that. What else?”

Almarshadi went over their progress on testing the other cooling hoses in the electronics, then on how the Aegis team was doing against their proficiency milestones. When he paused, Dan lowered his voice. “No joy on finding that missing pistol, I take it?”

“No sir. It just … disappeared. I’ve got the loss report ready for you to sign out.”

Great. “Fahad, why exactly do I get the impression that, like, something’s not exactly
right
aboard this fucking ship?”

The exec’s dark brown eyes slid off his as if Teflon-greased. “I’m not sure I … understand what you’re referring to. Captain.”

“I went over the records. We had liberty misconduct in Gibraltar. The Command Climate Survey … it’s pretty obvious there was a hostile work climate in some of the departments. I also saw that the commander master chief, I mean, the previous one, not Tausengelt, had a request in for transfer. How did all that connect to what happened coming into Naples? That’s a symptom, not the cause. Or am I pissing up the wrong rope?”

“I wasn’t on the bridge then, Captain.”

“Which leads to the question, why were you below decks, Fahad? Why was the XO not on the bridge, coming into port in poor visibility?”

Another visible swallow. “Captain Imerson did not like me in the pilothouse when he was there.”

Aha. Dan put his next question in the least judgmental phraseology he could think of. “I see. Okay. And why do you think he felt that way?”

Almarshadi seemed to grab his gaze and steer it, consciously, like a radar beam, back up into Dan’s face. A spark of—anger? resentment?—flared in those dark pupils. “I believe it might have had to do with my being an Arab.”

Dan contemplated this, along with the gold cross he’d glimpsed underneath Almarshadi’s T-shirt. There were a lot of Christian Arabs, although the uneducated didn’t seem to grasp this. It was true, a few individuals didn’t leave prejudice behind when they put on a uniform. On the other hand, he’d run into his share of minorities who played the race card when they were just plain incompetent.

He let the silence rubber-band, not meeting the XO’s gaze, just staring up at the display. Staurulakis was cat-and-mousing three Houdong-class patrol boats. Houdongs were Chinese-built, part of the progressively closer alignment of that country with Iran. They were filtering in, jockeying for the classic noon, four, and eight o’clock positions. Faced with that, she’d fight at a disadvantage, since warding off an attack from one sector left her vulnerable in the others. He realized Almarshadi was still gazing at him expectantly. “Uh, okay. Anything else?”

“No sir. That is about it. Oh, and Lieutenant Singhe has requested to see you. When it is convenient.”

“Amy Singhe? What’s it about?”

“She didn’t want to say.”

“Uh-huh. Okay.” He checked the TAG Heuer that Blair had given him as a wedding present. “I’ll be in my at-sea cabin after evening meal if she wants to come by.”

Almarshadi stood, pocketing his BlackBerry, but Dan snagged his sleeve as he turned away. “One second.”

“Sir?” The XO turned back quickly, as if startled.

“I’m not sleeping that well. I thought tonight … we’ll be headed through Messina between 01 and 0300.”

“Yessir?”

“I need to get my head down awhile, so I want you on the bridge. Back up whoever’s OOD.”

Almarshadi seemed to grow an inch taller. His head came up. “Yes sir,” he said. “I will be there.”

*   *   *

HE
told Staurulakis to drill the other Condition Three sections and continue the tracking exercise until they ran out of aircraft time. And to continue after that with the canned Hormuz scenario. He stopped at the equipment room to find the cleanup progressing, with Dr. Noblos hovering. Dan asked how the reduced redundancy would hurt their tracking abilities. Noblos said it wouldn’t help, but the effect would depend primarily on the geometry between the launch area and their patrol area. The rider seemed less prickly than the first time they’d interacted, so Dan kept it short. Let whatever had irked the man heal. He’d need Noblos when they got on station.

He climbed to the bridge and rode his chair for a while, seemingly intent on his message traffic, but actually observing the bridge team from the corner of his eye. Four contacts were in sight, with five more over the horizon, being plotted on the radar and on the contact board. Nearly all were headed south, probably for the strait, the narrow bottleneck between the Tyrrhenian and the central Med. The wintry light glinted off flinty waves. The sun peered out only now and then through a scrim of high cloud. Other clouds, lower, fluffier, lay far off to the east, marking the mainland of Italy.

The Falcon made another low pass, its roar rising as it neared, dwindling as it parted. Motors whined as the tapered tube of the five-inch swung after it, its slow elevation, quivering indecision, then sudden whiparound as it crossed the zenith somehow comical. The 21MC said,
“Bridge, CIC: Event 0265 complete. Falcon 03 requests permission to take it to the barn.”

He nodded. The jet waggled its wings and banked away, shrinking to southward.

Dan swung down. He called the quartermaster over and pulled up their track on the nav screen. Through Messina, then south and east past the cow’s-udder peninsulas and islands of Greece. They’d pick up the task force south of Crete. He sketched an adjustment, and the QM, a reedy deliberate fellow whose accent said Jamaica, said he’d take it from there. “Have the navigator see me when you get it laid out,” Dan told him. “What’s our first course? For the strait?”

The quartermaster set it up on the screen. “One one three, Captain.”

“One one three, and pick it up to twenty knots.” The OOD echoed the command, passing it to the helm, and
Savo Island
came around to the southeast.

*   *   *

AFTER
dusk, after dinner. The porthole in his cabin was moon-dark. He was unbuttoning his shirt, contemplating reading a few more pages of
Rome on the Euphrates
before some serious bunk time, when someone tapped at the door. “Come in,” he called.

“Lieutenant Singhe, Captain.”

“Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Come in, Amy. Uh—leave that cracked, please.”

Singhe took the chair two feet from him with a fluid motion. Her boots were polished glassy, which was not really required at sea, and her coveralls fitted as if tailored. Only at the knees did they look even slightly worn. She wore a khaki belt with the
Savo Island
belt buckle: bronze field, the outline of Ironbottom Sound in silver, and the silhouette of USS
Quincy
superimposed in gold. Below it was the ship’s motto in black enamel:
Hard Blows
. Not one he cared for, but not worth the effort of changing. Her coveralls were open at the throat; that glossy hair was pulled back, and she brought some scent with her, sandalwood, at the same time clean and exotic.

He wrenched his mind back from wherever it was headed. “XO said you wanted a word,” he opened.

“Yessir, if you have time.”

Someone tramped past the slightly open door, and footsteps rattled on the ladder. The passageway illumination winked off, then on again, a deep scarlet, for the dark-adapted eye. He reached up and slid the darken-ship curtain across his porthole. “Turn that overhead off? Thanks.”

With just the desk light on, only the blue glow from his desktop screen, and the fainter jade-green illuminations from the gyrocompass and radar repeaters above his bunk, relieved the darkness. That and the ruby glow that seeped past the jamb, limning her silhouette in carmine. She nodded toward his bunk. “Good book?”

“Huh? Oh … just ancient history.”

“You’re interested in history, sir?”

“Just something I picked up.” He cleared his throat. “What’s on your mind, Lieutenant? I mean, Amarpeet?”

“I wanted to talk about something I’ve been trying to initiate aboard, since my piece on leveling military management came out.”

“I read that. Good article,” Dan said. “Thought-provoking. You wanted to apply certain, uh, modern principles to the Navy.”

“It fits in better with how the world does business now, sir. Communication at the speed of light. The drive toward reduced manning. Most of all, the professionalism of today’s enlisted. Our command structure was set up for a small educated class and a large group of unskilled and more or less unwilling draftees. But the old, hierarchical information-flow model … it’s dead. It’s
wasteful.
And quite frankly, it turns our best enlisted off.”

Dan considered this. She was absolutely right about the way the Navy was designed. How had Herman Wouk described it? “Designed by geniuses, to be run by idiots”? But the idea of cutting midlevel management didn’t thrill him. The one time he’d had to—trying to run a ship without a flag in the China Sea, without chiefs and department heads, basically just himself, a worthless exec, and a ragtag crew no one else wanted—hadn’t worked out well. “Uh—did I see you have an MBA?”

“Yes sir. From Wharton.”

“We don’t see many people with those kinds of degrees in the Navy. At least at the JO level.”

“I’d like to make that count, sir. Is there any possibility we can do an experiment aboard
Savo Island
?” She reached to the small of her back, bending forward as she did so, and he had to avert his gaze. “Here’s a copy of my proposal for reorganizing the chain of command.”

“Well, hold on a sec, Amy. There’s more to this than management. There’s also leadership.”

A shadowy form paused outside, might have looked in at them, but then continued aft.

“Leadership’s just another word for charismatic management, sir. If we want to get hard-nosed about it.”

“The core tenets: unity of command, chain of command, the ability to verify a command—”

“Again, irrelevant to the way we actually do business. Where do the guidelines for our most important decisions reside today, anyway? In computers. Doctrine’s preset now, in hardware and software, not in top-down relationships. And as computing power proliferates—”

“I guess we could argue that both ways,” Dan said. “And there are legal issues … UCMJ, Navy Regs, laws of war … but I don’t want to sound negative.” He flattened the still-warm pages under his hand. Cleared his throat. “But I’ll offer a caveat up front, Amarpeet.”

“Amy.”

“Amy. A personal warning. I’ve seen JOs who don’t have good relationships with their chiefs. Not only do they screw up their divisions, they get ostracized within the wardroom. Since they don’t have the technical expert backing the stuff they say. And it’s hard for them to get deckplate compliance without support from the chiefs. Uh … that said, I’ll be happy to look this over. With an open mind. And then discuss it further.

“Any other issues you’re aware of aboard, Amy? Seeing as how this is the first time we’ve had a chance to really sit down together.”

Hands on knees, she’d started to rise, but sank back. “Well, sir, you may be aware that, just like you said, there’s some pushback from the chiefs’ mess.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean. What kind of pushback?”

“Maybe not so much even that, as a certain mind-set. I hear what you’re saying, about making things difficult for myself. But these men really don’t understand their sailors. They know their technical fields—most of them, anyway—but today’s young sailor is foreign to them. Even more so, the women. Also, I’m convinced ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will be repealed soon. They’re not ready for it. At all. And speaking of men, have you noticed, we don’t have a single female chief?”