The Command (19 page)

The blaze was fierce, considering it couldn't be thirty seconds old. It ate into the plastic bunk cover. Cobie couldn't help getting a lungful, and started to cough.

By the time she and Ina had it out, spraying purple K powder and beating it out with towels, the compartment was opaque. Girls were staggering around coughing and gagging, arms full of tapes and clothes. Some had the transparent plastic bags of the breathing devices inflated over their heads, as if their brains were being eaten by alien jellyfish. She lowered the nozzle and leaned against a bunk frame, panting.

The repair party investigator edged through the door. She waved him over and pointed to her bunk. A total mess, burnt and dirty, with smoke marks smeared up the bulkhead. And covered with the gritty purple powder. She looked at her rack of tapes. The plastic cases were melted. Totally ruined.

All at once she thought, I could have been
in
there.

She turned abruptly, dropping the extinguisher, and bolted for the head.

Chief Forker got hold of her when she came out. Still sweating from throwing up, but she felt better. Now there was lots of khaki, including, standing in the door, the exec.

“That your bunk?” the paunchy chief master at arms asked. “Kas-son?”

“Yeah. Myna here's in the middle, the girl in the lower must be on watch—she's one of the auxiliarymen.”

“Were you smoking?”

“I was in the head when it started, Chief. And no, I wasn't. I don't smoke. Nobody smokes in the compartment.”

“Nobody? Ever?”

The chief's bland disbelief enraged her. She grabbed his arm and towed him to her bunk. Pointed to the smoking mattress. “Smell that, Chief. Get your nose right down into it. That's right.”

He looked up. “Lighter fluid?”

“Some kind of fuel. With a pretty high flash point.”

Forker peered suspiciously into the overhead. She could almost scream… “It wasn't a
leak,”
she said tightly. “Somebody poured it here, or threw it, then lit it.”

A level voice said, “You're saying, arson.”

“That's right, ma'am,” she told the exec. “It's just lucky there wasn't anybody in one of these bunks.”

Hotchkiss looked grim. The other girls murmured uneasily. Forker looked at the door, seemed to be measuring a line between it and the bunks. He cleared his throat, as if they should all stop yakking and listen to him. “They came in, maybe with the stuff in a cup or something. Threw it, lit it, then left. You say you were where?”

“In the head.”

“See anybody come in?”

“I was looking in the mirror.”

Somehow he managed even to make a nod an insult. “Anybody else get a look at anybody didn't belong in here? Well, o-kay… I guess we'll have to investigate. But I wouldn't count on getting the guy. If it was a guy.”

“What do you mean by that, Chief?” said the exec. Cobie saw she was getting angry, too. “They live in here. Why would they torch their own compartment?”

Forker lifted his eyebrows. “I seen bunk fires before, ma'am. Half the goddamn time it's somebody trying to get back at somebody pissed them off. Just about always, somebody right there in the same space.”

He turned away to the repair party guys. They were recoiling their hoses, backing out. The 1MC said, “Class Bravo fire is out in compartment 3-382-3-Lima. Reflash watch is set.”

She looked after his retreating back, shaking. What did that mean? Wasn't he even going to try to find out? Then a hand tightened on her arm.

Close up, the exec had little lines around her eyes. Her lips were chapped and grim. “We'll find out who did this,” the commander told her. “I know what you girls have to put up with in the work spaces. But this is too much.”

Cobie looked back at her bunk. At the twisted, burnt remnants of all her letters…. “I hope so, ma'am,” she said. “Before somebody gets killed.”

…

THROUGH a bright noon
Horn
hunted with a turbine whine and a creaming hiss of foam. To port the rocky tip of the Sinai and the flat-topped, chalk-colored cliffs of the Ras Muhammad. To starboard, low barren islets, uninhabited and unmarked save for the occasional stranded wreck left from the 1972 war. The navigation team sang a litany of courses and distances.

Dan, in his bridge chair with a stack of traffic on his lap, tried to avoid fixating. It was hard, with the jewel-like tones of reef patches and the lighter brown of drying boulders so close in to port. The traffic separation scheme sent northbound vessels east of the reefs, southbound west. The easterly channel was wider, but it was all too damn tight. Fortunately, as Strong had said, there was no air threat. Iraqi aircraft had been grounded since the Gulf War, and Egyptian and Saudi activity was limited to the occasional patrol aircraft that obligingly squawked its identifying IFF. Dan still kept Condition Three watches manned in Combat and on the weapons stations, though.

Hotchkiss, clipboard under her arm. The worry about close quarters receded, to be replaced with a different apprehension. One could run one's career aground in other ways than the gnash of steel on coral. He hesitated, then beckoned her. “Exec, what you got?”

“We need to talk about this situation.”

“The fire in women's berthing.”

“That's right.” She moved in close and held out a soda can. Dan let her put it under his nose. A petroleum scent.

“What is it?”

“Most likely distillate fuel, marine. Could be a couple of other things, including lighter fuel. Which we sell in the ship's store.”

“Great, that narrows it down. Dusted?”

“No prints. Or so Forker says.”

“You don't sound convinced.”

“I think it's beyond either his capabilities, or his motivation. To put it bluntly, he doesn't give a shit who did it or why.”

“Do I need to recalibrate him?”

“No. You need to sign this.”

The clipboard held a message to COMIDEASTFOR, requesting assistance from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service station in Bahrain. COMDESRON 22, COMNAVSURFLANT, COMSECONDFLT, and the JAG office in Washington were info addees. Along with arson
in the berthing space, it mentioned the photo incident and other insults to the female crew. A pattern of gender discrimination and harassment had escalated to an attempt on women's lives. In as many words, it said USS
Thomas W. Horn
was sick and needed major attention.

“Well, now,” he said.

“You send it, we get to the bottom of this,” Hotchkiss told him. “You don't, I resign and go to the press. Sir.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is. I have to protect these kids.”

“I have to think of all my crew, Claudia. I understand where you're coming from. Believe me.”

“Do you?”

“Give me one more chance to prove it,” he told her. “I need to take this to the senior enlisted. They're the only ones who can solve this.”

“They're the ones who
encourage
it. Like your command master chief. And Forker. And that testosterone-laced prick Marchetti.”

“I know how you feel,” Dan told her. “But I don't think a witch hunt's the way to handle this. Three months is not a lot of time to change two hundred years of tradition. And regardless of how impatient we get with the pace, blowing it open with higher command, and with the media, isn't the way to make progress.”

“Or to advance the CO's career,” she said. “Is it?”

He stiffened in his chair. Almost spoke angrily back, but restrained himself. Remembering the times he'd felt exactly the way she did. Not about women, but about the other things that seemed to get overlooked or set aside when the men at the top put their own interests first. She'd carry out her threat. He could see it in the set of her lips.

“Neither yours nor mine,” he said at last. “And I'm closer to the end of mine than you are to yours, Claudia. The navy needs officers like you. Let me work this a little longer. I promise you, I will work it.”

“Don't stonewall this,” she told him. “Sunlight on crap is the only way it ever gets cleaned up. The navy doesn't change by itself.”

He opened his mouth to contradict this, but had to close it. As far as he could remember, she was right. The U.S. Navy didn't change unless the alternative was ruin. On the other hand, once it did, that, too, became Tradition. That massive institution ratcheted forward in microscopic increments, with bursts of sparks and deafening noise and heat, but it never ratcheted back.

“Put that in your safe,” he told her. “Give me one week. Then, if you still want to send it, I'll sign it without changing a word. That's a promise.”

She stood still. Then nodded curtly, and was gone.

He breathed out, leaned back. Feeling drained. Was this all going to be a bust? He hated to think so. Everyone had worked so hard.

No, he thought. I have good chiefs. They'll come through.

At his elbow, the comm petty officer cleared his throat. He remembered the traffic, still on his lap, and went through it quickly, penciling the appropriate department where there was any chance of misunderstanding.

BY 1700 they were on station, under way at bare steerageway between the incoming and outgoing traffic lanes. Dan left the bridge after a renewed warning to Osmani, who'd just qualified as officer of the deck, to maintain a 360-degree awareness. He had no desire to get run down by a sleepy tanker skipper.

He took his place at the wardroom table, freshly showered and feeling more human than he had most of that day. Baked haddock, one of his favorites. The first bite was halfway to his mouth when his radio sounded off. “Captain, bridge.”

“Go.”

“Message from the commodore via voice, Captain, relayed through
Georges Leygues.
Intercept, board, and search.”

He started to say, “I'll be right up,” but instead stopped himself and told Osmani to have the TAO plot a course and speed to intercept and get back to him. He got halfway through the fish before the wardroom phone rang.

“NOW away the boarding and search team. Section Gold. That is, away the boarding and search team. Team Gold provide.”

Marchetti came to, pulled from the depths of exhaustion and the strange dreams he got when he had to sleep in a hot compartment. In this one, he'd been a helicopter pilot in Somalia. Wounded and left behind, with thousands of pissed-off skinnies with guns searching for him. A nubile Arab woman had hidden him. He'd undressed her, been on the point of entering a velvety softness. For some reason they'd both been speaking German. He stared at the underside of the bunk
above, hearing the ship creak and sway around him. Then swung out and dropped into his coveralls, stacked around his boots fire-station style. He bloused the cuffs and buckled his belt and was ready to go. Pulled his cap off the bunk light and was out the door, through the mess. The other chiefs were eating. He grabbed a biscuit off Forker's plate and gnawed at it as he went up two decks.

Goldstine was handing out the weapons and ammo at the ready locker. The guys grabbed their iron without expression, haggard, silent. Too many boardings. Too many condition-three watches. He'd thought they might get a break, running in to Aqaba. Guess not. He slung the shotgun and stuck the .45 he'd started carrying as backup in his belt. “What is it this time,” he asked the boarding officer, Ensign Cas-sidy A porky, scared-looking kid who didn't seem to have any idea how to lead a boarding team—or anything else. It didn't seem fair the chiefs had to train the officers. Marty figured they'd given him Cassidy to either harden him up or break him, and so far the odds were not good.

“Motor vessel
Yazd.
Bound for Aqaba. She hove to on the radio call.”

“Flag?”

“Iranian.”

On the rolling fantail the red plastic-and-nylon jacob's ladder was laid out ready to drop. He saw the other ship, tilting slowly back and forth ahead.
Horn
was making up on it, slipping through deep blue four-foot seas. A rust-streaked white deckhouse on a black hull. No net gear. Maybe a thousand tons, the typical small merchant that ran around from the gulf. Heaving to on the call was a good sign. More than once in the last few weeks they'd had to chase them down, threaten them, before they hove to.
Horn
rolled to a sea, and the choking hot breath of turbine exhaust blew down on them. He didn't need that, looking at a two-mile ride in a small boat.

“Go ahead and load,” he told them. “Mags only, chambers empty.”

Fear,
the port RHIB, came up from astern with a rocking roar, leaping over the wake that dragged behind
Horn's
vertical stern. The coxwain raised a glove, then twisted the wheel to come in. “Kick that ladder over,” he told one of the men, then looked back along them, lined up ready to go. Crack Man, Sasquatch, Lizard, Snack Cake, Deuce, Amarillo, Turd Chaser.

The supernumerary, Wilson, stood back a few feet, weaponless because he'd told Goldstine not to issue her anything. He waved her back impatiently. Seven men plus himself and Cassidy. It made for a crowded ride but the semi-inflatables could carry more than the old rigid whaleboats. He didn't miss them. Just the fact the soft side of the
RHIB wouldn't crush your arm or your leg if you got caught between it and the hull paid their way as far as he was concerned.

“Gold team, move out,” he shouted, and swung over the rail.

THE helo was up. Standard when they ran a boarding and search. A close pass, letting the target see the barrel of the gun poking out of the door, tended to meek down your average merchant master. Plus with all the protuberances and gear the SH-60 had fitted it looked even more dangerous than it actually was. It roared low, then curved away, gaining altitude, leaving caramel smoke and a racketing roar.

He pulled his attention back to clinging heavily loaded to a swaying ladder above a turbulent sea. He glanced down to where the RHIB surged and lunged, then dropped. Landed in the floorboards. He un-fouled the sling and moved aft, perching on the gunwale. It got wet back here but he didn't mind. One by one the guys picked their way down the ladder and dropped. When Cassidy held up a hesitant hand the coxswain gunned it, the bow hook tossed off the painter, and they surged forward so suddenly he almost toppled backward.