The Command (14 page)

Now it's starting to get dark. Cobie feels sick, almost like throwing up, from the T&O and the beers and all the meat, but she keeps trying to think about something else and it goes away.

Another bar, she's not sure where, someplace on the Strip. Guys from the ship in back. Lots of mirrors. Paintings on the walls. A little old guy with a beard is hunched on a stool with a bottle of Jack Daniel's and shot glasses on a metal tray painted in an Arabic pattern. The tray's cool, her mom would like it. Maybe she can find one at one of the shops.

The guys are getting tribal tattoos. Complicated designs on their chests and arms and shoulders. Barbed wire. Lion's heads. The old guy doesn't speak English. He pours shots of whiskey and shows them other designs. Butterflies. Teddy bears. Rainbows. Unicorns. He points to her neckline. A rose design looks pretty. She could feature that. But then the machine buzzes and blood runs down the guy's arm who's getting tattooed.

She's scared, but Ina gets a unicorn in a field of flowers, its hooves in the air. Cobie takes another shot of whiskey. At last she lies down on the damp blue plastic and peels down her jeans. The machine buzzes. She bites her lip at the sudden blazing pain, whispering softly ouch, ouch, ouch.

Back on the beach. It's cool now, and somebody lights tiki torches. Everybody's drinking daiquiris a woman shakes up at the bar. They go
swimming again. Her back stings when the saltwater hits it. There are more girls now, women the guys picked up and brought back to dance and swim. The English girls are going around topless, showing it off like they just invented tits.

Patryce takes her top off first. She teases Ina and Cobie when they won't. Lourdes tells her she'd better put it back on and stop drinking, but Patryce tells her not to be a poop. They're not gonna get to do this once they get to the Gulf, she'd better go back to the fucking ship if she's going to spoil her fun.

Cobie tries to ride the bull, but the shaking makes all the food and booze come up and she hunks all down the front of her new bathing suit. She rinses it off in the house, then goes into the water to wash her front off. But when she comes out her top's gone from where she left it on one of the lounge chairs. Then somebody hands her another daiquiri, and it's kind of fun walking around with the night wind on her chest and the guys all trying to act cool, like it's nothing. They take their shirts off, too, and pretty soon they're playing drunk volleyball down on the beach.

She has to pee bad but doesn't want to do it in the water. Something brushed her legs the last time she went in and now it's dark. The light's off when she goes into the bathroom. She switches it on and sees Wilson's head in this guy's crotch. His wet shorts are on the floor and Pa-tryce's going up and down on him. Bartlett, who runs the ship's store. A big dude who jokes about how he'll give them a break on the Slim Jims. Patryce's eating his Slim Jim now. It's huge and glistening, almost blue. Cobie stares. She's never seen a black man's dick before. His eyes open and he smiles at her over Patryce's head. She looks away quickly, hesitates, then goes into the stall and closes the door and pulls down her bottom. She has to pee forever, like she's soaked the whole ocean in through her skin. Meanwhile they're grunting and thumping on the other side of the partition. Finally she wipes herself and rushes out, bare feet clammy on the concrete. It's wet with piss and beer and saltwater and gritty with sand.

Outside the torches are still flickering but everything feels different. Her back burns where she got tattooed. She feels sick and dizzy and the beach is going around and around, like when you're down in the hole and the ship's rolling. Lourdes is standing alone, hugging herself.
Eyes wide, looking scared. Some guy's shirt's hanging on the railing. Cobie pulls it on, not caring whose it is, and the next thing they're on the bus, then there's the ship, and the ladder, and her rack. That's the last thing she remembers. In her fucking rack, with the motor droning next to her ear and the ship spinning and spinning like it's all going down the toilet. Vortex. To

nothing

but

black.

F
OUR days after they left Palma for operations with the battle group, the word arrived. Along with lessons learned, COMIDEAST-FOR instructions, and rules of engagement. The binder of messages and references was two inches thick.

Dan flipped through it on the bridge while Hotchkiss and Camill stood waiting. The sun glared and swayed. A blue sea was running. A burnt-orange haze glowed around the horizon. Over the years Dan had watched that dirty halo creep farther and farther out over the Med.
Roosevelt, Anzio, Cape St. George,
and the amphibious ready group lay thirty miles behind them.
Horn
was out ahead in a screen station, maintaining tabs on aircraft and surface contacts as Task Force 61 plowed toward far-off Crete, with the sonar chanting its eerie, lilting whine.

He rubbed his temples, glancing at a chart of the northern Red Sea the exec had propped against the window. Operating areas and warning zones were outlined in red and green and purple. He read through tab after tab, orders, mission, rules of engagement, logistic requirements.

Horn
and
Laboon
would detach as the battle group passed 28 degrees east, about the longitude of Rhodes. Operating as Task Unit 61.1.7, under tactical command of
Laboon's
captain, they'd transit the Suez Canal and “inchop”—change operational commanders—to Commander, Mideast Force, for duty in the Red Sea. Their mission would be enforcing U.N. sanctions by interdicting traffic to and from the port of Al-Aqaba, Jordan, the transshipment point for imported goods and exported oil trucked out the Iraqi back door.

At its northern end, where it bounded Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, the Red Sea split into two estuaries. The Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba branched off like an index and little finger extended
to ward off evil. The two U.S. ships would be operating either just inside or just outside the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba, depending on which sector the Senior Combatant Commander assigned them on arrival. The British, French, and Australians each had a frigate on the Red Sea station. They'd be refueled by an oiler out of Jubail; mail and spare parts would stage out of Sicily via a weekly C-9.

The Red Sea. He'd transited it in
Van Zandt
during the Iran-Iraq War, on the way to Operation Earnest Will. Had run it again in the strangely fated
Oliver C Gaddis,
on her way to the Far East. But he'd never operated there long, not at night, in close proximity to land, under an air threat. And most of his people had never been here before. Many had never deployed before.

Maritime interdiction operations, MIO. Not the most technically challenging assignment he could imagine, but maybe that was for the best, given they'd just gotten here.

“Set up a preaction briefing. All officers, chiefs, tactical petty officers. How about during the canal transit, while we lay over?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He studied their faces. When he'd joined the navy, a black ops officer would have been unlikely, a female exec unthinkable. Their smooth young faces filled him with vague alarm. But he hadn't been any older when he'd filled their shoes…. He swung his legs down. “A thorough briefing,” he added. “I want everyone to see the big picture, not just his, uh, not just their own little piece of it.”

Camill left, but not Hotchkiss. “Captain, a word?”

“Sure.”

“Alone?”

“At-sea cabin?”

“That's fine, sir.”

Dan looked at the officer of the deck. Resisted the temptation to check the radar. He wasn't going to micromanage them, much though he wanted to. The tote board gave him no surface contacts inside fifteen thousand yards…. He felt uneasy leaving such kids in charge. Was this how Jimmy John Packer had thought of him, back on
Reynolds Ryan?

“Captain's off the bridge,” Yerega shouted behind him as the door to the pilothouse swung shut. He went down a short passageway, passing the nav shack.

His at-sea cabin was the size of a bathroom in a middle-class house. A leatherette settee stood along the starboard side beneath a blue-curtained porthole. Forward of that was a small desk with a shaded
light over his notebook computer. Inboard was a shower and water closet. That was it. The reward of the general, he thought, is not a bigger tent. He pointed to the settee, then raised his eyebrows as she closed the door. “We need it closed, XO?”

“Maybe so, sir.”

She looked calm and self-possessed, as usual, but slightly flushed. He couldn't tell whether it was anger or excitement, but it was intriguing. He steered his mind away from wherever it was going. “What you got, Claudia?”

She unclipped manila and spread the photos on leatherette.

They were of Palma. At least, the first two. The others were of
Horn
sailors having fun on liberty. On the beach. His heart sank as he thumbed through them. Eyes bleary, breasts bouncing as they ran into the sea. Lifting bottles, mugging for the camera. Not exactly pinup material, but that wasn't the point. The Bacchae had gotten drunk and naked, too. At the peak of their revels they'd selected a man, chased him down, and torn him into bloody lumps of flesh.

“They're all over the ship,” Hotchkiss told him. “Lin Porter walked into the first-class lounge in the middle of the movie. She found this set on the table.”

Dan looked through them again, playing for time. But Hotchkiss must have gotten the wrong idea, because she said sharply, “Do you find them exciting?”

He decided he'd better miss her point. “What I find interesting is that they're enlargements. Not Polaroids.”

“Which means they were printed aboard.”

“In the Evinrude spaces,” Dan said.

The intel weenies were the only ones who had darkroom capability. He turned the photos facedown and cleared his throat. “It's not what I'd call good news. But it's not the end of the world, either. Sailors are sailors, I guess, of either gender. Sometimes they get drunk on liberty. Sometimes they display poor judgment. Occasionally they've even been known to take their clothes off.”

“With all due respect, I don't like that comment, sir. It strikes to the root of the problem on this ship, and I think it requires corrective action.”

So the pink tinge to her ears was anger. He filed that for reference, and leaned back, clasping his knee. He gained a few seconds from the phone, which beeped to inform him of a crossing contact on the starboard bow. He told the officer of the deck to maneuver to avoid and to make sure CTF 61 and CTG 61.1 had the same track data. Then shuffled
the pictures and squared the edges, careful not to look at them again, and put them back in the envelope, wishing it was as easy to get the issue out of sight.

“Okay, you may have something there. What's your suggestion? How should we handle it?”

“We need an outside investigation.”

He quelled his first impulse, which was to say that might be overreacting. Instead he went to the porthole and pushed the curtain aside, looking out.

Beer and partying and the shirts come off. Some might see it as harmless. But Tailhook had changed the way the U.S. Navy thought about what had once passed for innocent fun. If it pissed Hotchkiss off, he'd better think about it again.

On the other hand, reporting it up the chain of command would mean what Aronie and Blair had asked him to do, make this experiment work, would go up in smoke.

Or was he starting to think like the senior officers he used to hate? Covering his ass. Trying to keep bad news from going upstairs.

No, this wasn't about him. They were all in unfamiliar waters, the leadership as much as the rank and file. He didn't think a couple of topless pictures were a big deal, as long as he didn't know about them. But the longer he pondered, the more he saw that now they'd found them, the leadership had to react. To let it go would send the message it was okay to ridicule and belittle the women. Inviting Blair's hostile ten percent to go a little further, and a little further after that.

To react too harshly, though, would drive the splinter of the male crew's irritation under the skin, to fester and turn ugly.

When he thought he was there, he turned from the sea. “I'd like you to hold off taking it outside the ship. At least for now. I'm not ruling it out. It may be the way we'll go eventually, but before we do, I want you to conduct your own investigation.”

“An XOI?”

Dan said yes, an XO's investigation. He told her to start with Lieutenant Sanduskie, the intel officer, to find out who'd developed the photos, presumably using the ship's equipment, chemicals, and paper. That should lead to whoever had snapped them. Hotchkiss asked how she should charge him, and Dan suggested Article 134, disorders to the prejudice of good order and discipline. He then stopped her dead by saying, “I want the women charged, too.”

“I'm not sure I heard that right, sir. That's blaming the victim.”

“Not quite. If one of my male sailors decided to disrobe in public, I'd expect to see him at mast. Granted, it's a topless beach, but it's still conduct prejudicial to good order. Discipline applies to all hands.” He glanced at his watch and said, more harshly than he actually felt, “Clear?”

Hotchkiss hesitated, then nodded.

“As long as you're here. I want the chain guns and fifties manned as we go through the Ditch.” She started jotting on her clipboard. “Make it a rule, as long as we're within sight of land in the Red Sea and Gulf, I want the ship's self-defense team manned up. Check the rotation and get more people trained if we need to. I want at least three sections qualified. We'll stay in three sections in Combat, too, with a qualified TAO on watch at all times.