The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (20 page)

The deck had jolted upward as he’d crashed down onto it, whiplashing him back up into the air. Dust and paint chips had leaped out of cable runs to fog the pilothouse. An instant later the windows had come in on them with a crack like lightning tearing an oak apart. Only the sound had gone on, and on.…

He came back now to find himself staring white-eyed into his own reflection, kneading his neck. The old fracture. Then, as he blinked, his gaze suddenly plunged through, past the wing window he was looking into, to meet the puzzled eyes of a slight young seaman manning the remote operating console for the port 25mm. The squished-together, almost toothless-looking old man’s face was familiar.

Downie. “The Troll.” The goofball who’d left his pistol unattended on the quarterdeck just long enough for it to be stolen. The compartment cleaner who’d discovered a corpse cold in its bunk. They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. Then Downie half-grinned, dropped his gaze, and squatted to adjust his gas mask carrier.

Almarshadi bustled up in flash gear and flotation vest, carrying a rolled-up sheaf of bond. Dan beckoned him closer. Trying to control suddenly ragged breathing, a racing heart, reaching for the cool impassivity everyone expected of him. Trying to forget
Horn,
and what had happened to all too many of her crew.

Under his command.

“Fahad, good morning. Fine Navy day, right?”

The exec shivered. He cast a doubtful eye at the clouds. “Absolutely, Captain. Spectacular Navy day.”

“Built the training package?”

“Bart and I got it written up last night.”

“Good. Couple of issues on the bridge team. I want protective goggles for them too. Have them wrap a pair in the flash gear hood so they get them on at the same time as the hoods. Second, aren’t they supposed to have flak jackets? Do we have those?”

“Hermelinda might have goggles in stock. And we … not flak jackets … we have, um, ballistic protection gear for the boarding party.”

“Move it up here. We won’t be doing any opposed boarding. I’d rather have the bridge team ready to keep fighting if we take a fragmentation hit.”

“Time: plus two minutes.”

The OOD leaned out. “Captain, XO: General quarters set. All stations report manned and ready. Time, two minutes and fifteen seconds.”

Dan gave Almarshadi the gimlet eye. With a ready time like that, someone had leaked the drill. He got a shamefaced grin back. “All right,” he told the OOD. “Have the bo’s’un pass, ‘Work center supervisors, now carry out EBD and emergency egress drills.’” Almarshadi waited, tapping the rolled-up papers against his thigh. Dan looked aft, then up, giving the crew a few more minutes to get set. But something was missing. After a moment he realized what. “Get our battle colors up!” he yelled into the pilothouse, and added, to Almarshadi, “And leave them up, as long as we’re on station out here.”

“Aye sir. Goggles, ballistic vests, battle colors.”

A quartermaster—there were no signalmen anymore—double-timed to the flag shack and began breaking out the oversized Stars and Stripes. When it was snapping free against the gray sky, huge and bright and crackling in the cold wind, he looked up for a long time. Filling his sight with red and blue and white like some essential nutrient he’d been short on for too long.

Reynolds Ryan
was gone.
Van Zandt
was gone.
Horn
was still radioactive, but he’d brought her back. Less than half as many ships out here now as when he’d stepped aboard his first destroyer so many years before. But the U.S. Navy was still on station.

Still on station.…

He took a deep breath, wondering why he was suddenly fighting tears. Fuck.
Fuck!
What would happen to these kids? Was
Savo
doomed too? He’d
just left
the Navy command center when Flight 77 had punched through the limestone skin of the Pentagon, blasting the space and everyone in it with fuel-flame and razor-sharp metal, turning everything in the C ring into fire and collapsing concrete.

Niles, and the others who’d called him a Jonah, a curse, a doom—were they right?

No. They couldn’t be. He’d never have taken this command if he’d really believed that.

So why was the imp of self-doubt still whispering in his ear that he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t competent enough? That when the chips were down, he’d lack what it took.

He’d always come through before, true.
Oh, sure,
the imp sneered.
But one of these days.
…

A clearing of the throat beside him. Dan looked down from the streaming colors to find the XO regarding him. He dragged himself back into the present, into the bite of a frigid wind. And told Almarshadi, “Okay, that your drill schedule there? No, I’m sure it’s fine. Take charge, Fahad. Go ahead and take charge.”

*   *   *

“CAPTAIN’S
in Combat” passed mouth to mouth. The lights were dimmed. Every seat was occupied. Everyone in CIC was in flash gear too, but their helmets lay on the deck beside them. He’d told Cheryl she could relax her battle dress if she wanted, once she was satisfied.

He settled into his command seat with a sigh, unbuckled his own helmet, and set it aside. His neck, injured in that nuclear whiplash aboard
Horn,
was grateful for the lessened weight. He kneaded it as he took in the screens. They shifted as Staurulakis tested inputs and cameras. Only the Aegis picture stayed constant. A gimlet gaze, but so exquisitely honed that as the spokes clicked back and forth, refreshing forty times a second, every desert wadi and ridge glowed green and gold.

Fractured neck, scarred airway, burn tissue in one shoulder from a hellish night in the Irish Sea … his body was a palimpsest. Niles had offered medical retirement. He could still run a mile in nine minutes, but he could envision a day when pelting through a ship, sliding down ladders, would be just too much.

What would he do then?

Agonize about that later, Lenson. Just now his ship,
his
ship, throbbed and whined around him. The turbines buzzed through the rubber-coated steel under the flight deck boots he wore for GQ. The ventilation whooshed, and keyboards clattered. The high lilting whalesong of the sonar trilled through alloy before hurtling out into miles of chilly sea. His elbow jerked and a paper cup of coffee he hadn’t noticed being placed there spilled over the gray metal desk-shelf. He mopped the keyboard with a paper towel that Staurulakis, eyes narrowed, handed him.

You are in fucking command, boy, he told himself. Get a grip.

He skimmed his message queue, reading the header on each, then either deleting or filing it. CTF 61 had acknowledged last night’s question, about backloading Ammermann at the first opportunity. It wasn’t an answer, just acknowledging receipt. The
Early Bird
carried Iraq’s defiant response to the forty-eight-hour deadline. In the next article, Israel’s prime minister announced that if attacked with WMDs, his country would retaliate in kind.

Dan forwarded those to Almarshadi for the daily news summary, then studied the fleet weather forecast. Up to twenty-knot winds and high seas for the rest of today. A high-latitude ridging event over Germany could lead to cyclogenesis over the east Med. A cold air surge over the region could drop temperatures to 10°C, and bring high winds and heavy snow. Snowfall-affected regions could spread out from southern Turkey to the coast of the Levant.

“Shit,” he muttered. They really didn’t need bad weather just now. Well, maybe it’d miss them.

He blotted surreptitiously at the now icy-cold remnants of the spilled coffee that had dripped down onto his crotch, and pulled up the message he’d started to draft the night before. It was to both his “masters”—CentCom and EuCom, info to CNO and State.

“Captain?”

He looked up at Bart Danenhower’s broad, blank face. The engineer nodded, taking off the locomotive driver’s cap and wiping his forehead on one sleeve. He shuddered. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”

“How you doing, Bart?”

“Okay, sir. I did the math you wanted. On fuel.”

“Yeah, we got to talk about that. Drills going okay?”

“DCA’s running them. Concentrating on fire and flooding.”

“We still seeing water in the CRP system?”

“No more than usual.”

“Engine control consoles? Any more groundings?”

“Not so far.” The CHENG laid out xeroxes of their fuel-consumption curves and positioned a calculator. “We refueled to 100 percent two days ago. Fast transit to patrol area, so we’re down to 95 as of today. Our bottom’s clean so I’m going to use the class manual for consumption curves. Here’s our options. Our quietest patrol speed is thirteen knots.”

Dan lifted his eyebrows. “That high?”

“Yeah, not what you’d expect, but we’re actually quietest with both shafts powered and both props at 100 percent pitch. Got to realign the masking system, but that’s the way we put the least noise in the water. See, below 100 percent, your props cavitate. Slowest we can go at full pitch on both shafts is about 12.8 knots.”

“That’s going to cut way down on our on-station time.”

“I get six days to 50 percent. Factoring in electrical load, with the radar going full power.”

“Damn it, Bart. I just don’t know if they’ll be willing to break me out a tanker six or seven days from now. Anything could be happening by then.” At 50 percent fuel he had to holler for help. At 30 he had to leave station, unless ordered to remain. He grimaced, remembering the weather report; heavier seas would increase fuel consumption too. Jamming him tighter and tighter into a very narrow corner. He sighed. “You said there’s another option?”

“Kind of out there, but I can shift to a one-shaft, nonstandard-configuration low-speed mode. That gets me down to six knots. Not as quiet, but close.”

“How many days does that buy us?”

“Eight days to 50 percent, ten days to 30.”

“Not great, but better. What’s the downside? Of this nonstandard configuration?”

“Got to run everything from Main Control. Not the bridge. So if you suddenly need to crank on the knots, it’ll take longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Depends on how much faster you want to go, but it won’t be
that
long. Maybe five, ten minutes.”

Dan blew out and scratched his head. “I don’t like it. But I guess we have to. At least until we get some clue how long we’ll be out here. —Cheryl, d’you hear that? We’re going down to six knots, but—”

“I have it, sir.” Staurulakis rattled her keyboard.

Danenhower didn’t linger once a discussion wasb over; he nodded and left, taking the calculator and graphs but leaving a one-page summary. Dan folded it into a pocket. “Shit,” he muttered. Then went back to the message he was writing. He read the last paragraphs on the screen once more.

4. (S) IN VIEW OF THE FOLLOWING:

A) INADEQUATE TBMD LOADOUT (ONLY 4 SM-2 BLOCK 4A WEAPONS)

B) MARGINAL CREW TRAINING AS EVALUATED BY BOTH JOHNS HOPKINS CONTRACTOR RIDER AND OWN SHIP TEAM

C) AEGIS REDUCED REDUNDANCY FROM SPY-1 DRIVER-PREDRIVER FIRE (CASREP REF C)

D) POSSIBLE MUTUAL INTERFERENCE WITH ISRAELI PATRIOT AND ARROW

E) SEVERELY LIMITED SELF-DEFENSE CAPABILITY IN ABM MODE

CO CONCLUDES SAVO ISLAND’S MISSION CAPABILITY FALLS BELOW ACCEPTABLE READINESS.

5. (S) IN VIEW OF POSSIBLE GEOPOLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF A FAILED INTERCEPT ATTEMPT, IT MAY BE PREFERABLE TO RETRACT WHATEVER COMMITMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE, AND RETURN SAVO ISLAND TO TASK GROUP DEFENSE OR TOMAHAWK STRIKE ROLE RATHER THAN CONTINUE AS INDEPENDENT TBMD GUARD.

6. (S) IF MISSION JUDGED POLITICALLY NECESSARY, REQUEST ADDITIONAL SURFACE ESCORT FOR ASCM OWN SHIP DEFENSE.

BT

He stopped typing, hunched over the screen. As if, he realized, trying to shield what he was writing from everyone around him. Up on the readouts, the ship’s speed was already dropping.

He wasn’t just saying
I don’t think we can do the mission
, but also
Should we even have been committed?
If he’d sent it the day he took command, it would’ve looked bad enough. To send it now, when he was actually on station, would make him look … negative. Even craven.

No, they probably wouldn’t think that. Not with his record.

And it was the truth. If anything, he was overestimating their capabilities.

But it wasn’t the kind of message any commanding officer wanted his name on. His cursor hovered over the Send button. Then dropped to Save As and filed it as a draft once again.

Beside him Cheryl murmured, “Sir, sending the revisions to the steaming orders you asked for. Incorporating the lowered patrol speed discussed with the chief engineer. Warning and exclusion zone. No approach within two miles. Random course changes at least every twelve minutes. Doubled lookouts, with focus on threat bearings to landward. Anything more?”

“Sounds good.” It was sobering that their first warning of a sea-skimming cruise missile might be a distant glint between the waves, observed by a sharp-eyed seaman with binoculars. But antiship missiles were designed for minuscule radar signatures. The types they were facing out here—the C-802s, the Bastions and Onyxes the Russians had supplied their Syrian client state, the sea-launched Styxes Syrian Komar boats carried—could target them from over the horizon, if their quarry had its radars on.

Which
Savo
definitely did. Electronically, they were standing out like a lighthouse, with the huge pulses of power they were putting out. And now, of course, they’d be poking along, with five to ten minutes’ lag before they could come back up to full speed. “Which reminds me. Phalanx is in automatic?”

“Sea Whiz has been in auto mode since we arrived on station, Captain. I briefed you that yesterday. Like our chaff system and the rubber duckies. I’d like to do a program reload soon, though. We’re overdue on that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember now. Not just yet. Unless you think there’s some kind of software corruption going on … No, wait a minute … it might be better to do it now rather than later. Yeah.” He was starting to babble. Was she looking at him differently than usual? Was that a suspicious squint? He should just buckle the fuck down, and stop obsessing. Okay, slow deep breath. Another. On the display the spokes glittered. Faces hovered green-lit above screens.