The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (30 page)

When the postmortem ended, they’d regathered. Lifted the charred warhead, like firemen around an old-fashioned life net, and walked it toward the side. The boatswains had unreeved the deck-edge nets. The tumble home at that point bulged out slightly, so it wasn’t a straight drop. With cautious unanimity, they’d swung the net,
and-a one, and-a two
. At a muttered “three” they’d given it a last heave, and let go. Net and contents had vanished into the gathering dark with a muffled splash. As the disturbed patch eased aft, everyone concerned had straightened, sighing.

None more deeply than Dan. He’d given them all high fives, then gone below for a walk-through of the VLS interior.

The blowers had been howling, and the smells of burnt insulation and seawater were choking, but the metal trusswork bracing and the unaffected cells stood undamaged, though their corrugated white-painted exteriors were smoke-stained. Techs were disconnecting cables, running continuity checks with portable testers. They’d showed him a stub of connector. Quincoches and the chief electrician’s mate agreed it was the most likely place for the fire to have started. Most of it was burned away, though, so they couldn’t be sure.

Dan had walked the module from end to end and port to starboard. Then started to tell them they needed everything back up as soon as possible. But instead, bitten his tongue. They knew. Having the skipper say it again wasn’t going to get ordnance back on the status board any faster.

Now he stared out into the dark as
Savo
staggered and corkscrewed. She was on a southerly leg, the seas slamming into her quarter. The invisible beam lanced out from their port aft panel. He imagined it boring a hole through the overcast. They said the SPY-1, at full power, radiated enough microwave energy—four million watts, enough to power a good-sized town—to melt snowflakes. Fry seagulls in midflight. He hadn’t seen it do anything like that yet. Maybe in the morning, if it was still snowing, he’d go out and take a look.

“Captain?”

A vanishing shadow he identified only by voice. “Yeah, Cher?”

“You wanted to talk about rejuggling the watch bill. I made up a draft, taking the XO out of the rotation. For now.”

“Right. For now.”

“Who do you want to replace him with?”

“Put your name in there, Cheryl.”

She hesitated, then must have nodded; a faint red light illuminated a clipboard. “That makes you and me in the command seat. Lieutenant Mills as port section TAO. For starboard section, I recommend Mr. Branscombe.”

“I wish Noah had gotten to school.”

“I agree, sir. Mr. Pardees strikes me as levelheaded. But he hasn’t had the training—as you said. Nor has Lt. Singhe. The only other alternative is Chief Slaughenhaupt. Our leading fire controlman. But we need him as combat systems officer of the watch.”

“Okay, you’re right—make it Branscombe. How about our OODs?”

Staurulakis proposed moving Mytsalo up to officer of the deck. Dan kept his voice low, in case the ensign was on the bridge with them. “Who else’ve we got? An ensign—I don’t know. Who’re our other JOODs?”

“Sir, the officer of the deck under way doesn’t have the responsibilities he used to. A lot of that’s been absorbed by the TAO.”

“I know that, yeah. But still—”

“The only other possibility’s the chief quartermaster.”

“Van Gogh?” Dan ping-ponged that around in his skull. It’d mollify the goat locker, seeing one of their own fleeted up. “I don’t have any problem with a chief standing OOD. Not the navigator, anyway. He’d certainly be on the stick as far as where we are relative to the basket.… Okay. Make it Van Gogh. But give him Mytsalo as JOOD, and tell Gene he’s gonna be next in line, soon’s he gets a little more seasoning.”

“Good thinking, sir.” The clipboard light winked out.

“What about this freakin’ snowfall, Cher? Will this degrade our beam numbers?”

She explained the main problem was side-lobe visibility. “The snow adds more background clutter. We have better discrimination with the D, but especially in the high-clutter near-shore environment, along with all this sea return this wind’s kicking up … yeah, the snow can degrade us … especially for something like a low-flying C-802. But Chief Wenck thinks he can combine pulses to build what he calls a ‘synthetic wideband image’ out of one of the side lobes.”

“You lost me, Cher.”

“I mean, along with the main beam, you get side lobes—”

“I know that. Any beam has side lobes. Like harmonics.”

“Well, normally that’s wasted power. But he’s trying to tinker with the signal processing to turn that into an extra radar. To give us a better look along the coastline, to alert us to any cruise missile launch.”

“That’s great, but I don’t want it tuned in such a way it degrades our ABM search function.”

“Noted, sir.”

“Have Donnie give me a call. I really don’t want to trade main mission for self-protection.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Will the cloud cover degrade satellite cuing?”

“Obsidian’s more of a sideways-looker. And it’s an infrared sensor. I’m not sure how much snow or cloud would degrade that.”

The STU-3 beeped. Dan flinched. The scarlet light above it was flashing so brightly it lit up this whole end of the pilothouse. The boatswain hurried over with masking tape. “Stand by, please, Ops,” Dan said, and got the phone to his ear. “
Savo Island
actual here.”

“This is Jen Roald. Over.”

“Commodore. Lenson here. Over.”

“Dan. I just got this. You had
another
fire?”

“More serious this time. In the aft VLS. Lost eight missiles to fire and flooding.” Staurulakis put her hand on the remote box; he nodded; she turned the speaker on.

“That’s not good. But it wasn’t the Block 4s? Are the rest of your cells back up? Over.”

“We’re running operability tests now. I’m hoping to get them back up shortly.”

“Message on the way. Things are moving faster than anyone expected. The Army’s crashing through the border defenses. Also, and this may be of interest to you, there are mutterings of support from Iran.”

“Meaning, their task group? Over.”

“They’ve announced their first port call. Syria.”

Dan shook his head. “Taken on board.”

“Good. We also have a warning order from EuCom. We want your total attention focused on the western part of Al-Anbar Province. CentCom’s trying to interdict the launchers with air and ground teams, but you’re the backstop.”

“Copy, over,” Dan said into the phone. “Map of Iraq,” he asided. The clipboard riffled. A moment later it was in his lap, with Staurulakis’s red penlight illuminating the area just east of the Jordanian border. From the topo, it looked like desert. Nearly unpopulated, and unroaded, too, from the absence of town or road symbology. He’d seen Saddam’s hulking Russian-supplied TELs—transporter, erector, launchers—with his own eyes, in a secret installation beneath Baghdad, during Signal Mirror. Obviously they weren’t in the capital anymore, and their eight all-terrain wheels, much taller than a man, meant they could go cross-country, hide in wadis or under overpasses. The intel said it took half an hour from parking to launch.

“Commodore, that’s where we’ve been looking. But can anyone neck it down a little more? The more localization we have, the narrower we can set the gate functions, and the more confident I’d feel about early detection. Over.”

“Stand by.”

A short pause, during which Dan shifted in his chair. When she came back on, Roald read off six-figure geocoordinates. Dan jotted them on the map’s margin, glanced at Staurulakis; she nodded. He read them back, slowly, enunciating in the exaggerated radio speech learned so many years before. “Thuh-ree. Zee-ro. Nine-er.”

“That’s correct. Not to limit your search to that area, but that’s what they’ve given us as what they’re calling the Western Complex. They operated from there during the Gulf War, too, and we had a hard time locating them then.

“What’s it like weather-wise on your end? I’m seeing this cold-air surge hitting you soon.”

He looked out the window but couldn’t see much in the darkness. “Correct, the front’s hitting now. We’re getting snow and six-foot seas.”

“What’s your Israeli friend doing?”

Dan craned down for the repeater but couldn’t quite reach it. The OOD came in from the darkness. He muttered, “Still out there, sir. Ten thousand one hundred yards.”

“Any other surface contacts?”

“No sir. Not for this whole watch.”

“He’s still with us, Jen. Like a bur. Any progress on that link to the Patriot battery at Ben Gurion? It would really help.”

“I knew there was something else. I think we’ve got you up at least on voice. I’ll get the freq to you. Watch your TAO chat.”

Roald signed off. As Dan socketed the handset he was suddenly racked with nausea. Up here, in the dark, the motion seemed to be getting worse. He envisioned his bunk with the hopeless yearning of unrequited love. Deep … slow … breaths. The sickness backed off and he fumbled for the reclining knob on the seat. Dropped it as far as it would go, and leaned back with a sigh. Closed his eyes, and listened to the regular
whip-whip
of the wipers.
Whip-whip. Whip-whip.
…

*   *   *

“CAPTAIN?
You awake?”

“Uh … yeah.”

The dream had been so real, so detailed, waking was like coming back from another life.

He’d been much older. Gray. Bent. And, weirdly, he’d been some kind of pastor—Lutheran? It hadn’t been exactly clear. He’d been in a concentration camp, with barbed wire around it. Just before he’d been awakened, the guards had been herding a group of prisoners past. They were ragged, starved, in much worse shape than he. Though he was also an inmate, there was some deep difference between them. Some profound foreignness about their features, and the language they gabbled as their captors harried them along with bayoneted rifles.

He’d stood at the gate, watching the others being shoved and cursed past to another part of the camp. He didn’t know why, but something irrevocable would happen to them there. And for some reason, though he too was a captive, he felt intensely guilty. He’d reached out to one woman. “I’m sorry,” he told her. Raised his arms, as if to bless them, and called, “And may God keep you all.” Dark eyes rose, but no one spoke. The guard growled some harsh phrase he did not understand, and someone’s hand gripped his arm—

“Who’s that?” he muttered, trying to retrieve who and where he really was.

“Chief Grissett, sir. This a bad time?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“Local 2310, sir.”

He cleared his throat. He was on the the bridge. USS
Savo Island.
Still dark. Still snowing. And in fifty minutes, he’d have to relieve Cheryl Staurulakis in CIC. “What’ve you got, Doc?”

“Sir, if you’re trying to sleep—”

He snapped, “You woke me up. Now what the fuck d’you want?” Then winced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean that. Just tell me it’s not another death at least.”

“That’s all right, sir. No, not another. I’ll come back—”

“What is it?” he said, trying not to put
I am being so immensely patient
into his tone.

“Sir, it’s the XO.”

He hitched upright. “The exec? What about him?”

“I looked in on him. In his stateroom.”

“You … why?”

“Well, that’s sort of my job, sir.”

“And?”

“Well, he seems depressed.”

The ship leaned. Something rattled and clattered on the darkened bridge. He wanted to say, “And this is my problem because…?” But didn’t. “He’s in his stateroom because I put him there. Occasionally, Chief, we still have to discipline people in this organization. That goes for O-5s, too. Not just E-2s.”

“Yessir. I grok that. But he’s not responding to conversation.”

Dan frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Monosyllabic replies. Not making eye contact.”

Dan remembered the wet uniform. Almarshadi’s repeated statement he’d been in the breaker. Of course, the guy usually
didn’t
meet your eye. That was normal—for him. But what
had
he been doing in the breaker? Just smoking and looking idly down into the passing sea?

Or wondering if he should sling a leg over the lifeline, and let it all go?

“Okay, Chief. Thanks for bringing me this. You think he could be suicidal?”

“Not crossing that off the list, sir.”

Dan hitched himself erect again. “Is he alone down there?”

“I have the duty corpsman posted in the passageway outside his room.”

“Think it’s that serious?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Right. Well, do you think he should be medicated?”

Grissett cleared his throat. “Well, sir, I’m not qualified to dispense psychoactive medication. I’ve got it, but there are a couple of complications. Sometimes it actually makes people more prone to … offing themselves. According to the literature. And another thing. If I dispense, I have to certify the member as unfit for duty. It’s a disqualifying condition. That should be certified by a qualified medical representative. If there isn’t an MD around to do that, in an emergency, I can dispense it. But I have to report it to the CO. And put it in the member’s record. There’s a waiver process, but … it’s complicated.”

“I’ll bet. You’re saying, if he goes on these meds, he’s unfit for duty?”

“Yessir.”

“And that’s it for his career.”

“That toy’s out of my playpen, sir.”

“Uh-huh. Do you think he needs it? Medication, I mean?”

“Right now, it’d be even money, in my humble opinion.”

Dan kicked back in the chair again. “Unfortunately, we just rebuggered the watch bill … put Chief Van Gogh on as OOD.… Okay, you brought me the issue, now give me a recommendation.”

“I’d say put him back on duty. Unless you’re absolutely convinced he’s, I don’t know, totally incompetent,” Grissett said. “But is that the case, sir? I see a lot of him for medical stuff and XO’s masts and so on. I guess what I’m asking, is he really that bad? If he isn’t, lighten his load. Don’t wall him up. Maybe I didn’t get the whole story, but the word going around is, he took a smoke break, and now he’s being hammered for it.”