The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel
Read The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel Online
Authors: David Poyer
Tags: #Fiction, #Sea Stories, #Thrillers, #Military, #Action & Adventure, #General
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CONTENTS
The Afterimage: USS
Theodore Roosevelt
, CVN-71
He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act.
—P
LATO
THEY’D
been in the air for two hours from Spain when the copilot made her way toward him, bracing a hand on the back of each seat. “Coming up on Naples, Captain,” she murmured over the hum of the engines. As the wing of the vice CNO’s private jet lifted, she bent over him to point outside, giving a flash of cleavage at the neckline of her flight suit. “There’s Vesuvius, sir. Harbor’s coming up on your right.”
The immense double mounds of the volcano barricaded the sky. Below stretched miles of roofs, streets, apartments, their windows flashing flame-orange in the winter sun. The air was hazy with mist, or maybe smoke. What must it be like, living in the shadow of a volcano? The very volcano—if he remembered correctly—where Hephaestus had forged the weapons of Mars, the god of war.
Then a great glittering rose-silver arc rolled up into view, and Dan leaned into the seat belt, shading his eyes. The pilot kept the wing depressed, as if to give his only passenger the opportunity for a long look down.
Captain Daniel Valentine Lenson, U.S. Navy, traced the tracks and roads that edged the sweeping concavity of sea that was the Bay of Naples; the inner harbor; the stone moles, spidery thin and knobbed as a movie alien’s fingers. Cruise ships lay alongside the Mussolini-era passenger terminal, deck on deck shining in the sun like white steel wedding cakes.
A cliff of masonry, the fortification that had guarded the city in days past, frowned half a mile south of the inner harbor. Two hundred yards short of it lay the gray wedge of a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. A tug was nudging a barge alongside; smaller craft sketched foamy orbits around it. Those would be force protection, small boats guarding the helpless giant.
“Can you see it?” The copilot, leaning even farther over him. Blond hair swung forward, wafting a perfume he hadn’t caught before. “We can notify Traffic Control and circle. Get you a better look.”
“No, thanks.” One glimpse had seared it into his retinas. The orange of spill-containment booms. The blues and greens that paled abruptly to shoal water a third of the way back from the stem. USS
Savo Island
was hard aground. That much was clear, even from five thousand feet.
“We’ll be wheels down in ten, then. Is your seat belt secure? Just let me check—”
“I’ll snug it up, thanks.” Dan scratched his chin. He wore two rings: the heavy gold Annapolis one, and the thinner, traditional Navy wedding band, with stars and anchors. Glancing at his hand, she opened her mouth, as if about to say something. Then seemed to think better of it, and headed back to the cockpit. Still, he could appreciate the curve of her receding ass, firmly outlined by the tight-fitting flight suit.
The turbines whined up, then down, and dust floated and sparkled in the sunlight slanting through the window. No wonder Admiral Barry “Nick” Niles had diverted his personal aircraft to get a newly promoted surface line captain here as quickly as possible. An Aegis cruiser. The envy of other navies worldwide. Yet now she lay helpless on a shoal everyone knew was there, that was plainly shown on charts and even marked with a warning buoy.
How could it have happened?
And what was he going to do about it?
* * *
HE
descended the deplaning ladder feeling like a member of Congress, carrying his briefcase and with his notebook computer slung over the other shoulder. Into hot exhaust and chilly, smoke-smelling wind. Down the line, airliners nuzzled a glass-walled commercial terminal. The U.S. Naval Support Activity, Capodichino, shared the runway with Naples International Airport.
A tall, eager lieutenant in khakis. “Captain Lenson? Lieutenant Mills.… Matt. It’s a real honor.”
He returned the salute awkwardly, and the junior officer relieved him of the computer. “I need to see Commodore Roald as soon as possible,” Dan told him.
Mills glanced up from Dan’s ribbons. He swallowed, looking intimidated.
“They don’t make me any different from anyone else, Lieutenant. The commodore?”
A fresh blast of exhaust swept over them. Turning away, Mills yelled, “Right, sir. She, uh, told me she didn’t need you until tomorrow, sir.”
“My orders were to report to her.”
“It’s a legal issue, sir. She can’t meet with the relieving commanding officer until the decision’s made that the outgoing CO is actually outgoing. As I understand it.”
That made sense. Niles had insisted that he see Roald the instant he arrived. But Nick Niles wasn’t here. Mills was ushering him into a small room with a plush brown suede sofa, a low table, and a modernistic, chromed Italian coffeemaker. “This is our distinguished-visitor lounge, sir. The head’s through there. We’ll get your luggage and bring your sedan around.”
“I may not need a car. Where’s the court being held?”
“Court of inquiry’s in Admin Two. That’s further down the Spina. Or I can just take you to your quarters.”
Dan sank into the sofa. “So. Matt, is it? What do you do for Commodore Roald?”
“Actually, I’m the Aegis go-to guy on the DesRon staff. Did my previous tour on
Anzio
. Why she sent me to meet you, I think.”
“Can you give me any background? I know the investigation’s still in progress.…”
Mills closed a door Dan assumed led to the main passenger area. “I can tell you what I heard from the Port Ops guys. But I can’t vouch it’s true.”
“Always good to hear the scuttlebutt.”
“Yessir. Long’s you know I’m not exactly the burning bush …
Savo
went aground day before yesterday. Coming in early, in the rain, bound for anchorage A4. What I heard, the quartermaster chief noticed they were coming in off bearings. The navigator told the conning officer she was coming in too fast and to change course. She—the conning officer—she thought she was right, and the CO backed her. The navigator tried to relieve her, and the skipper told him to, quote, ‘shut the fuck up,’ unquote. Then ordered him off the bridge.”
Mills glanced at the door. “At that point—and again, this is secondhand—kind of an argument-slash-clusterfuck broke out. Suddenly the castle looms out of the rain. The bo’s’un sounds the collision alarm. The captain takes the conn, but they lose steering or maybe engine control, and when he orders the anchor dropped, the deck gang can’t get the brake released in time.”
A shiver harrowed Dan’s back. A concatenation of errors and failures leading to disaster. “How fast did they hit?”
“Fifteen, sixteen knots.”
He winced. “How bad’s the damage?”
“They’re still looking at it. A team from Surflant’s down there. And, um, a lot of Italians.” The aide’s cell went off. “Excuse me, sir.… Yeah … yeah, he’s here, in the DV lounge.… Yes ma’am. I’ll tell him.” He snicked it closed. “She says you might want to go down and take a look. I can drive you, if you want.”
Dan wavered, torn between waiting for Roald and wanting to see the ship that very soon might be his own. Then took a deep breath, and nodded.
* * *
FIVE
or six demonstrators pumped placards as Mills flashed his ID at a police barrier between crumbling ancient bastions. Some of the signs were in Italian; others, English. One read
NO TO SHOCK AND AWE
. They were waved through, though a car that tried to follow them in was surrounded by the shouting crowd. They rumbled over a concrete causeway, past a marina. A tunnel yawned in a looming pile of decaying volcanic stone. “The Castel dell’Ovo,” Mills said. Dan assumed they were headed for the tunnel, but instead the road zagged and they skirted the massive sloped buttresses until the Mediterranean, blue and soft as a newborn’s eyes, opened ahead.
Police and fire vehicles were jammed bumper to bumper. They had to pass three separate cordons. The first two were Italian; city police, then the federal carabinieri. The last was U.S. Navy, in helmets and black Kevlar and shorty carbines with black web slings. Guards examined their IDs, listened to Mills’s explanation of who Dan was, and directed them to where they could look out over a final barrier of tumbled riprap crusted with barnacles and drifted plastic bottles and lost beach sandals.
The exposed mud smelled like a sewage treatment plant, but probably wasn’t as ripe as it would get in summer. The cruiser lay motionless. Heat shimmered above the stumpy aux exhaust riser aft, but as far as he could tell, the main turbines weren’t lit off. The sheer of the hull, the towering bluff of the superstructure, echoed the ramparts inland, though its horizon-blending haze gray was lighter than the ash-gray volcanic tuff of the medieval fortification. Tugs lay alongside, and the barge he’d noted from the air had been joined by another. Dan guessed they were taking off fuel, water, and lube oil, starting the laborious process of lightening ship. A third barge with a crane hovered some distance off.
A chief in tac gear saluted. He was in charge of force protection; could he be of any help? Dan nodded toward the ship. “I may be relieving her skipper. Depending on the investigation. What d’ya know about how she went aground?”
“Not much, sir. My team’s out of Civitavecchia. We’re just helping the locals maintain the perimeter.” He glanced seaward. “I got tac comms with our RHIB, though. Want to take a look?”
Dan considered. “Can I borrow a helmet?”
“Certainly, sir. Spare in the boat.” He spoke into a Motorola, and one of the circling inflatables broke from orbit and turned a blunt nose for them.
They boarded from a floating pier at the boat basin. Not far away several yacht owners were talking rapidly in Italian, gesticulating contemptuously toward the grounded warship. Dan settled Kevlar on his head as the rigid inflatable purred back out into the smoky wind, the light chop.
The cruiser grew as they neared. It towered vertical, clifflike, unclimbable, with a lack of motion that struck a sailor as unnatural, although the steady roar of blowers and machinery, the mingled smells of exhaust and fuel and cooked food, were familiar. The overlofty, topheavy-looking superstructure was canted slightly to starboard. Aluminum, Dan remembered, and the whole class had been reporting cracks. A seaman in dark blue coveralls watched from the boat deck. Dan noted the colors had been shifted aft.
His gaze rose. Aloft, flags fluttered, the surface search radar rotated. Flat squarish panels with truncated corners, not quite octagons, were set like badges on the superstructure. They were the ship’s reason for being; in many ways, her main batteries, though ranks of missiles were hidden beneath hinged flush covers fore and aft.
Those bland panels were SPY-1 antenna arrays. The Ticonderogas had been designed around them, mating a Spruance-class hull and propulsion to the most powerful radars ever put to sea. Within a radius of three hundred miles, an Aegis cruiser could detect, track, identify, and reach out with missiles to destroy any aircraft threatening the massive carriers that centerpieced U.S. or NATO battle groups.
