The Crisis

by David Poyer

  The shed was covered with graffiti and colorful hand-painted signs advertising jitney buses and local restaurants. At least fifty locals, all male, sat or stood pierside. Lanky dark men in thin, worn-out short-sleeve button-up shirts, cut-off slacks, some sandaled, others with bony bare feet. They leaned against pilings or walls. A few smoked, but most were doggedly chewing sticks of something green. Part-time cargo wallopers and line handlers, Dan guessed, waiting for the next opportunity to turn a dollar, franc, euro, or riyal.

  Shamal was smaller than he’d expected. Only her bridge and mast even showed above the pier. Granted, nothing displacing a whisker over three hundred tons was likely to be huge, but even to his eye—accustomed to frigates and destroyers—she seemed barely larger than a toy. But when he stepped to the edge he got a different impression.

  Bow on, she seemed to be straining at her lines, a haze gray pit bull eager to fasten her jaws into something. Her superstructure looked as if someone had planed off all the right angles and painted them sky blue, a pattern that looked garish pierside, but that would break up her silhouette at dusk or daybreak. Her upthrust bow had the heavy-weather flare he’d appreciated ever since a winter cruise into the Arctic Sea. A subdued 13 was painted on it in darker gray. An automatic gun was aligned in the “ready air” position on her foredeck. Aft of that a boxlike hump angled up to an enclosed bridge structure, with a windshielded cockpit above.

  Dan noted .50-cal mounts on the wings, sheathed in gray covers, and the glint of cartridge belts. A swept-back mast supported levels of radars and sensors, two of which revolved steadily, flashing in the sun. As they paced nearer, deck houses came into view aft, with a raised catwalk that ought to be useful getting around in heavy weather, more antennas—one of the electronic intelligence packages, Bobcat or Privateer—and another gun. She had no stack, but when he peered down he caught mascara smeared back from waterline exhausts. She’d spent a lot of time under way at near idle. You didn’t get black soot like that when engines were running all out.

  A bo’s’n’s pipe, a flurry of uniforms as the welcoming party formed up on the quarterdeck. Henrickson and McCall fell back. Dan set down his gear at the brow. Catching a photographer atop the bridge, he straightened his cap and pressed his ribbons into his chest with his palm. The pipe went low, high, low, high, and held. When it cut off the 1MC announced, “Commander, United States Navy, arriving.”

  Dan stepped off the tinny-sounding brow, saluted the national ensign that dangled limply aft, pivoted, faced a chief in khaki. “Permission to come aboard?”

  “Permission granted, sir.” The chief’s salute could have opened cans.

  Dan turned to a squat, desert-booted, BDU-trou-and tan-skivvy-shirt-clad black man with a wrestler’s neck and a peanut-shaped head whose shaven scalp glistened even under a boonie hat. “Lieutenant Geller?”

  “Yessir, Connor Geller. Welcome aboard, Commander.” The skipper’s grip was hard and his palm wet. So was Dan’s, making for a squishy, gritty handshake.

  Dan waved his people forward. “Dr. Monty Henrickson, Lieutenant Commander McCall.”

  Geller shook hands with both, pointedly not looking at McCall’s chest. “Welcome to Africa, welcome aboard Shamal, welcome to the patrol coastal navy. Want to see where we’re bunking you? Or do the tour first? Petty Officer Dugan’ll get your gear.”

  “We could all use showers,” Dan said. “Then let’s meet someplace cool and get our heads together.”

  “Excuse me, Cap’n,” a radioman said. “Complan for the transit.”

  Geller scribbled a signature. “Works for me. Except for the part about cool. Dugie, put the commander’s bags in my cabin, okay?—Got a shower there, care to use it before you change?”

  “Works for me,” Dan said.

  GELLER’S stateroom was no larger than those aboard a submarine, porthole-less, and extremely hot despite two bulkhead fans shuddering at max rpm. Dan saw why T-shirts were the uniform of choice. “Not much AC aboard these things,” Geller said. “Up forward, where the electronics live, that’s about all. Shower help?”

  Dan tousled his head with the towel, feeling first gratefully cool, as the moisture on his skin evaporated, then stifling again. “Much.”

  “Sweet or unsweet?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Tea. Sweetened or not?”

  He said unsweetened. Sucking half the icy glass down at once helped. He sat back and plucked his skivvy shirt off his chest.

  “So, understand you’re gonna be riding us on patrol. First time you’ve been aboard one of these?” Geller asked.

  “First time. I mean, I’ve seen them going in and out, but as I said, never been aboard.”

  “They designed these to deploy special forces teams in near-shore operations. But the spec ops guys didn’t like ’em as much as they thought they would. We draw nine feet; that puts our operational envelope too far offshore. So then the Navy said, who wants these? And started getting rid of ’em.”

  “Like what happened to the hydrofoils.”

  “Yeah, and the PTs before that. Some went to the Coast Guard. The Philippines took one. Then we started getting serious about the Gulf.”

  “They’re smaller than I thought,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, your blue-water Navy isn’t impressed. We don’t carry the big gun, the sonar, can’t land a helo. So what good are we? Well, we’ve operated off Bahrain, guarding oil terminals. Did antidrug ops in the Ca rib be an. Did a forward deploy to the Gulf, five PCs and six Coast Guard WPBs. And that worked.” Geller nodded toward the porthole, out which the upper-works on the far side of the basin were visible. “And we’re training the locals.”

  Dan pulled khakis out of the hanging bag. “That’s them? Across the basin?”

  “Well, they aren’t seaworthy enough to trust out of the harbor. But we’re working on it. The MST’s got an engineman warrant over there. Maintenance support team. You’ll hear more about ’em on the Mountain.”

  Dan groped before he realized Geller meant Mount Whitney. “What’s the outback like? Have you been incountry?”

  “Flew over it, sir. It’s grim. Sand and scorpions. The Afars and the Issas with their goats and their guns, fucking the goats and shooting the guns, and you really don’t want to get in between them. Oh, and there’s the refugee camps, full of poor bastards nobody wants. It’s like, on the eighth day God said, Crap, I forgot . . . and he made East Africa. I know I shouldn’t say this, but whoever got my ancestors out of here, God bless ’em.” Geller checked his watch. “Seen the commodore yet?”

  “Thought I’d wait till it got cooler. After dark?”

  “It’s pretty much set on broil all the time. Hit a hundred and forty in the engine room last week. And we’re sked to get under way at eighteen hundred. So you better go pretty soon. I’ll walk you over. He wanted to see you as soon as you got here.”

  Dan wasn’t looking forward to meeting the squadron commander. All too often, the Visiting Expert was nothing more than a PITA. But you couldn’t ride one of his ships without shaking the guy’s hand. The Navy didn’t pay calls as formally as in 1900, with white gloves and engraved cards, but they were still a reality. “Anybody else I need to punch in with? Base commander? This isn’t a U.S. base, is it?”

  “Oh, hell no. If anything, it’s French. They’ve got their own flag now, but it’s still almost a colony. There’s a huge Foreign Legion camp. Usually a frigate or a sweeper at that pier over there. But we have an arrangement.”

  “I notice you’re at Condition Yellow. Live ammo, armed pier sentries.”

  “There’s a civil war going on. Low level, mainly out in the hinterland, but it’s there. The whole Horn’s boiling. Somalia’s been in the toilet for a long time. Looks to me like Ashaara’s going the same way. We had an amphibious ready group here for two months. Inchon, Trenton, Portland, Spartanburg County. All prepped to run up and evacuate Ashaara City. But things cooled off and they went back to Bahrain.”

  “Port
looks busy.”

  “Oh yeah. They closed Eritrea to Ethiopian trade. With the drought, that means all the aid shipments for Ethiopia have to come through here. We may have to vacate this pier space. I can anchor out if I have to. Might even enhance security.”

  “It’ll cut down on liberty.”

  “The guys get as much liberty as they can stand here the first night.” Geller grinned. “Okay, pull your shirt on and grab your pisscutter.”

  THE command ship loomed over the quay like a star cruiser. Dan had been aboard Mount Whitney before. He was used to its spacious spotless passageways, the icy air-conditioning, the quick, pleasant young crew. It was always a marvel to him, eighteen thousand tons of ship armed with nothing more lethal than a twenty-millimeter self-defense system. Her main battery was her forest of antennas. Her brain was the command quarters, where he sat now, doughnuts and coffee on the leather-covered table, with Geller and Commodore Carlos Goya. Shamal’s CO had sweated through his uniform blouse just in the couple hundred yards down the pier.

  Goya looked more German than Hispanic, with gangly arms he didn’t seem to be able to find a comfortable place for and a small black mustache. Which right now he was plucking at, frowning. He and Dan had gotten past whom they both knew and where they’d both served.

  “What I don’t understand is why Vince Contardi’s interested in the patrol coastal community. I’d think this’d be about the least transformation-izational, if that’s a word, community around. Given our lack of advanced sensors and computers.”

  “Well, yes and no, Commodore.” Dan had thought this over in light of Contardi’s speeches and papers, most of which he suspected Fauss had ghostwritten. “As best I can tell, you could test-bed two aspects of transformation. The first is the idea we can use, uh, ‘sensor nodes,’ to target ordnance from larger units via something like a cooperative engagement capability. Those could be small, lightly manned surface craft, operating in littoral environments—like what you do. Eventually some nodes could be robotic, autonomous small craft and subs and UAVs. The second aspect would be crew swapping. Instead of rotating the ship back to home port every deployment, you leave the hull in place and change the crews out.”

  Goya’s quirk of the lips might have been skepticism. If so, it was quickly masked. “I’ve read a couple of pieces in Proceedings and Surface Warfare. Sounds like upsides and downsides. But you’re here. Tell me what you need.”

  Dan thought about confessing his own doubts, but undercutting his orders wouldn’t be a good way to kick off his stay. He front and centered his notebook. “First, I guess, is the command structure.”

  “Right now I’m CTG 156.4. Report to COMNAVCENT in Bahrain.”

  “You have three PCs out of Djibouti?”

  “Only temporarily. We had a larger squadron with some amphibs when it seemed like we might have to implement Hasty Exit—that was a NEO from Ashaara City.”

  NEO was navalese for noncombatant evacuation operation, what the Navy and Marine Corps executed when a country went to shit and the State Department people, residents, and dependents had to be whisked out before being used for target practice. As Dan nodded Goya went on, “I’m running four hulls out of here on the maritime security mission, with an MST of twenty-two guys living in tents north of town. EMs, ETs, electricians, a welder, and a crusty old chief warrant named Wronowicz.”

  “Fuel? Food?”

  “We refuel from Whitney and get food through the Foreign Legion out at Camp Limonier. We’re actually growing a working relationship with the small navies around the area. The platform’s not as threatening as it is when we come in with a Burke-class. It’s working peer to peer rather than gawping up at this huge thing you can’t even grasp what weapons systems it has, much less operate it. We work with them on interdiction ops, antipirate missions, maritime security.” Goya cocked his head. “Understand you’ve had experience along those lines.”

  “Now and then. Like most surface line officers,” Dan said, disguising the particular in the general. “So the infrastructure, if we were to maintain ships on station two, three years at a time—rotating crews—it’s adequate?”

  “Not for long-term maintenance. Especially how fast bottom fouling builds up here, biofouling in the intercoolers, et cetera. We’d need either a permanent base, which we aren’t going to get in this region, or what we used to have in Bahrain—an LPD or an LSD as a mother ship, machine shop, someplace the guys can hang out where there’s room to move around. You’ll see how true this is”—the commodore checked the bulkhead clock—“once you’ve operated aboard them, which I guess you’ll be doing for the next week. We need to pull the guys off once in a while and let them breathe. Of course”—Goya touched his mustache again—“if we were rotating them every three or four months, they’d be happier with the living arrangements.”

  Dan went over some other issues, knowing McCall was doing the same thing in greater depth with the chief staff officer, and Henrickson would be huddled with the N-4, going over parts requirements and how the supply system would have to be jimmied to keep a ship on station for three or four years at a time. Finally he turned off his notebook. “Commodore, thanks for your hospitality. We’ll have more questions once we get back from our underway, but this should get us started.”

  For the first time Goya looked ill at ease. “Well, you’re all welcome. But there’s a little hitch.”

  “What’s that, sir? I thought we had advance clearances, visit approval—”

  “Right, but thing is, these PCs are real tight berthing wise.”

  “We’re used to stowing our gear pretty much anyplace—”

  “It’s McCall.” Goya grinned unhappily. “There’s no separate berthing on PCs for females. Unless they’re CO—he, I mean she, gets a separate stateroom. Everybody else is in bunkrooms.”

  Geller said, “She can have my stateroom, Commodore. I generally nap in my bridge chair under way. SEAL berthing, if I have to hot-bunk it, no problem.”

  “We can’t take your cabin,” Dan told him. “I didn’t realize space was that tight. Nice of you to offer, but I’m going to make a command decision and leave Commander McCall here to drill down into the logistics and maintenance, okay? You can bunk her aboard the uh, the Mountain, right, Commodore?”

  “Certainly, if you’re sure.”

  Dan nodded, knowing McCall wasn’t going to be happy, but she wasn’t being paid to be happy, only to do what she was told. As he’d heard himself more than once since signing on the dotted line those many years before.

  “STAND by to test engines,” Geller called into the pilothouse, mopping his bare glistening scalp with his bare glistening arm. Not the slightest hint of wind. Heat like Dan had never known broiled off galvanized iron roofs, the mirrorlike glaze of the basin. Behind them the ten-by-ten pilothouse was cheek by jowl with crew. There were no phone talkers looking stoned as they listened to headphones, dragging wires around for everyone to trip on. Instead every crewman carried a black Motorola portable. It looked insecure, but Geller said their range was so short it wasn’t an issue. Besides, anything classified still went by naval message over the big white dome of the Inmarsat antenna.

  Dan was looking back at several men doing push-ups on the afterdeck, near a rigid-hull inflatable cupped in a well, when a startlingly loud ba-ROOM came from aft. A terrific burst of white-yellow smoke rose between Shamal and the pier, mushrooming till it blotted out the sun. Dan blinked as it expanded, shrouding them in a sulfurous murk.

  One of Geller’s junior officers had the conn, with the CO hovering. Sweating, the jaygee advanced control levers on the bridge wing console. “Ahead thirty on number one . . . back thirty on number four. Cast off the spring.” They could control the engines from out here, but oddly enough there was no remote rudder control, so they still had to bawl helm orders in through the door. The sound of a gigantic cat barfing a hairball aft must be the clutch going in.

  “Four screws, total fourteen thousand shaft horse
power,” Geller yelled. “You can torsion your way in to a pier if you have to. One and two to starboard, three and four to port, and the inner two turn clockwise, so you can actually back down in a straight line.”

  Dan nodded as the smoke became so dense Geller faded to a yellowish ghost. He sneezed, wondering if something was on fire. But apparently this was normal; no one remarked on it.

  “Cast off number one. Then back down and twist out. You don’t need your rudder yet,” Geller told the conning officer.

  Dungareed line handlers from Whitney cast off lines that the deck parties hauled in hand over hand. A horn that sounded like it had been salvaged from a Trailways bus went BLAAT. BLAT-BLAT-BLAT. The pier started to move ahead. Geller ducked behind the 01 level superstructure to the far side. Dan followed, keeping tabs. Geller was the skipper, but as the senior officer aboard, if they ran into anything his butt would be on the line too.

  The inlet was clear, though, only one speedboat two hundred yards off. The starboard gunner had the big .50 level on its pintle mount, brass belted into the loading tray. His binoculars were aimed at the speedboat.

  Geller caught his glance. “Booty’s a friendly port, but since that dhow attack in Bahrain we’ve put more effort into force protection.”

  Dan nodded and faced aft, sneezing again. Shamal was backing slowly, but still lay swathed in a thick bank of her own smoke. The bearing taker was talking into his Motorola, but Dan couldn’t see what he was using for marks.

  They emerged from the cloud bank, smoke still billowing up, but lighter now, shading to reddish brown, and Dan lifted his head, looking out past only two channel markers, to open water.

  The Red Sea. He’d sailed it before, but still felt awestruck at its sere, remote beauty. The Gulf must have been like this before oil and the demands of commerce. But this shallow wide sea was still nearly untouched. Today the sky was all but dustless, so bright it hurt. The sea was a polished golden bronze shading to an opulent green, disturbed only a little, where the sun winked off it, as the waves of Shamal’s advent eddied outward. The pintles creaked as the gunner swung to track the speedboat. The engines hairballed again, and Geller murmured to the conning officer, who shouted, “Come right, one five five.” The drowsy singsong of the helmsman echoed the order.