The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel

by David Poyer

  “Captain?” He looked up at Fahad Almarshadi, who was slightly bent, smiling radiantly. The exec’s smile lessened as Dan didn’t return it. “The, uh … thought I’d give you an update.”

  “Cheryl, I’m going offline, talk to the XO. —What have you got, Commander?”

  “The results of the sonar self-noise test you asked for.” He swallowed visibly. “It’s … not as good as I’d hoped.”

  Dan flipped through the report. “Why’s our throughput so low?”

  “One thought is, there might be water vapor in the transducers.”

  Which could trace back to the grounding damage; his decision to bypass a dry-docking might be coming home to roost. He grimaced. “We checking it out?”

  “Yessir, the STGs are doing that.”

  “Rit Carpenter made it aboard, right? He on it?”

  “He’s down there with them, sir. A big help, from what I hear.”

  “Good. Have him come up and … no, belay that. What else?”

  Almarshadi went over their progress on testing the other cooling hoses in the electronics, then on how the Aegis team was doing against their proficiency milestones. When he paused, Dan lowered his voice. “No joy on finding that missing pistol, I take it?”

  “No sir. It just … disappeared. I’ve got the loss report ready for you to sign out.”

  Great. “Fahad, why exactly do I get the impression that, like, something’s not exactly right aboard this fucking ship?”

  The exec’s dark brown eyes slid off his as if Teflon-greased. “I’m not sure I … understand what you’re referring to. Captain.”

  “I went over the records. We had liberty misconduct in Gibraltar. The Command Climate Survey … it’s pretty obvious there was a hostile work climate in some of the departments. I also saw that the commander master chief, I mean, the previous one, not Tausengelt, had a request in for transfer. How did all that connect to what happened coming into Naples? That’s a symptom, not the cause. Or am I pissing up the wrong rope?”

  “I wasn’t on the bridge then, Captain.”

  “Which leads to the question, why were you below decks, Fahad? Why was the XO not on the bridge, coming into port in poor visibility?”

  Another visible swallow. “Captain Imerson did not like me in the pilothouse when he was there.”

  Aha. Dan put his next question in the least judgmental phraseology he could think of. “I see. Okay. And why do you think he felt that way?”

  Almarshadi seemed to grab his gaze and steer it, consciously, like a radar beam, back up into Dan’s face. A spark of—anger? resentment?—flared in those dark pupils. “I believe it might have had to do with my being an Arab.”

  Dan contemplated this, along with the gold cross he’d glimpsed underneath Almarshadi’s T-shirt. There were a lot of Christian Arabs, although the uneducated didn’t seem to grasp this. It was true, a few individuals didn’t leave prejudice behind when they put on a uniform. On the other hand, he’d run into his share of minorities who played the race card when they were just plain incompetent.

  He let the silence rubber-band, not meeting the XO’s gaze, just staring up at the display. Staurulakis was cat-and-mousing three Houdong-class patrol boats. Houdongs were Chinese-built, part of the progressively closer alignment of that country with Iran. They were filtering in, jockeying for the classic noon, four, and eight o’clock positions. Faced with that, she’d fight at a disadvantage, since warding off an attack from one sector left her vulnerable in the others. He realized Almarshadi was still gazing at him expectantly. “Uh, okay. Anything else?”

  “No sir. That is about it. Oh, and Lieutenant Singhe has requested to see you. When it is convenient.”

  “Amy Singhe? What’s it about?”

  “She didn’t want to say.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay.” He checked the TAG Heuer that Blair had given him as a wedding present. “I’ll be in my at-sea cabin after evening meal if she wants to come by.”

  Almarshadi stood, pocketing his BlackBerry, but Dan snagged his sleeve as he turned away. “One second.”

  “Sir?” The XO turned back quickly, as if startled.

  “I’m not sleeping that well. I thought tonight … we’ll be headed through Messina between 01 and 0300.”

  “Yessir?”

  “I need to get my head down awhile, so I want you on the bridge. Back up whoever’s OOD.”

  Almarshadi seemed to grow an inch taller. His head came up. “Yes sir,” he said. “I will be there.”

  * * *

  HE told Staurulakis to drill the other Condition Three sections and continue the tracking exercise until they ran out of aircraft time. And to continue after that with the canned Hormuz scenario. He stopped at the equipment room to find the cleanup progressing, with Dr. Noblos hovering. Dan asked how the reduced redundancy would hurt their tracking abilities. Noblos said it wouldn’t help, but the effect would depend primarily on the geometry between the launch area and their patrol area. The rider seemed less prickly than the first time they’d interacted, so Dan kept it short. Let whatever had irked the man heal. He’d need Noblos when they got on station.

  He climbed to the bridge and rode his chair for a while, seemingly intent on his message traffic, but actually observing the bridge team from the corner of his eye. Four contacts were in sight, with five more over the horizon, being plotted on the radar and on the contact board. Nearly all were headed south, probably for the strait, the narrow bottleneck between the Tyrrhenian and the central Med. The wintry light glinted off flinty waves. The sun peered out only now and then through a scrim of high cloud. Other clouds, lower, fluffier, lay far off to the east, marking the mainland of Italy.

  The Falcon made another low pass, its roar rising as it neared, dwindling as it parted. Motors whined as the tapered tube of the five-inch swung after it, its slow elevation, quivering indecision, then sudden whiparound as it crossed the zenith somehow comical. The 21MC said, “Bridge, CIC: Event 0265 complete. Falcon 03 requests permission to take it to the barn.”

  He nodded. The jet waggled its wings and banked away, shrinking to southward.

  Dan swung down. He called the quartermaster over and pulled up their track on the nav screen. Through Messina, then south and east past the cow’s-udder peninsulas and islands of Greece. They’d pick up the task force south of Crete. He sketched an adjustment, and the QM, a reedy deliberate fellow whose accent said Jamaica, said he’d take it from there. “Have the navigator see me when you get it laid out,” Dan told him. “What’s our first course? For the strait?”

  The quartermaster set it up on the screen. “One one three, Captain.”

  “One one three, and pick it up to twenty knots.” The OOD echoed the command, passing it to the helm, and Savo Island came around to the southeast.

  * * *

  AFTER dusk, after dinner. The porthole in his cabin was moon-dark. He was unbuttoning his shirt, contemplating reading a few more pages of Rome on the Euphrates before some serious bunk time, when someone tapped at the door. “Come in,” he called.

  “Lieutenant Singhe, Captain.”

  “Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Come in, Amy. Uh—leave that cracked, please.”

  Singhe took the chair two feet from him with a fluid motion. Her boots were polished glassy, which was not really required at sea, and her coveralls fitted as if tailored. Only at the knees did they look even slightly worn. She wore a khaki belt with the Savo Island belt buckle: bronze field, the outline of Ironbottom Sound in silver, and the silhouette of USS Quincy superimposed in gold. Below it was the ship’s motto in black enamel: Hard Blows. Not one he cared for, but not worth the effort of changing. Her coveralls were open at the throat; that glossy hair was pulled back, and she brought some scent with her, sandalwood, at the same time clean and exotic.

  He wrenched his mind back from wherever it was headed. “XO said you wanted a word,” he opened.

  “Yessir, if you have time.”

  Someone tramped past the slig
htly open door, and footsteps rattled on the ladder. The passageway illumination winked off, then on again, a deep scarlet, for the dark-adapted eye. He reached up and slid the darken-ship curtain across his porthole. “Turn that overhead off? Thanks.”

  With just the desk light on, only the blue glow from his desktop screen, and the fainter jade-green illuminations from the gyrocompass and radar repeaters above his bunk, relieved the darkness. That and the ruby glow that seeped past the jamb, limning her silhouette in carmine. She nodded toward his bunk. “Good book?”

  “Huh? Oh … just ancient history.”

  “You’re interested in history, sir?”

  “Just something I picked up.” He cleared his throat. “What’s on your mind, Lieutenant? I mean, Amarpeet?”

  “I wanted to talk about something I’ve been trying to initiate aboard, since my piece on leveling military management came out.”

  “I read that. Good article,” Dan said. “Thought-provoking. You wanted to apply certain, uh, modern principles to the Navy.”

  “It fits in better with how the world does business now, sir. Communication at the speed of light. The drive toward reduced manning. Most of all, the professionalism of today’s enlisted. Our command structure was set up for a small educated class and a large group of unskilled and more or less unwilling draftees. But the old, hierarchical information-flow model … it’s dead. It’s wasteful. And quite frankly, it turns our best enlisted off.”

  Dan considered this. She was absolutely right about the way the Navy was designed. How had Herman Wouk described it? “Designed by geniuses, to be run by idiots”? But the idea of cutting midlevel management didn’t thrill him. The one time he’d had to—trying to run a ship without a flag in the China Sea, without chiefs and department heads, basically just himself, a worthless exec, and a ragtag crew no one else wanted—hadn’t worked out well. “Uh—did I see you have an MBA?”

  “Yes sir. From Wharton.”

  “We don’t see many people with those kinds of degrees in the Navy. At least at the JO level.”

  “I’d like to make that count, sir. Is there any possibility we can do an experiment aboard Savo Island?” She reached to the small of her back, bending forward as she did so, and he had to avert his gaze. “Here’s a copy of my proposal for reorganizing the chain of command.”

  “Well, hold on a sec, Amy. There’s more to this than management. There’s also leadership.”

  A shadowy form paused outside, might have looked in at them, but then continued aft.

  “Leadership’s just another word for charismatic management, sir. If we want to get hard-nosed about it.”

  “The core tenets: unity of command, chain of command, the ability to verify a command—”

  “Again, irrelevant to the way we actually do business. Where do the guidelines for our most important decisions reside today, anyway? In computers. Doctrine’s preset now, in hardware and software, not in top-down relationships. And as computing power proliferates—”

  “I guess we could argue that both ways,” Dan said. “And there are legal issues … UCMJ, Navy Regs, laws of war … but I don’t want to sound negative.” He flattened the still-warm pages under his hand. Cleared his throat. “But I’ll offer a caveat up front, Amarpeet.”

  “Amy.”

  “Amy. A personal warning. I’ve seen JOs who don’t have good relationships with their chiefs. Not only do they screw up their divisions, they get ostracized within the wardroom. Since they don’t have the technical expert backing the stuff they say. And it’s hard for them to get deckplate compliance without support from the chiefs. Uh … that said, I’ll be happy to look this over. With an open mind. And then discuss it further.

  “Any other issues you’re aware of aboard, Amy? Seeing as how this is the first time we’ve had a chance to really sit down together.”

  Hands on knees, she’d started to rise, but sank back. “Well, sir, you may be aware that, just like you said, there’s some pushback from the chiefs’ mess.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean. What kind of pushback?”

  “Maybe not so much even that, as a certain mind-set. I hear what you’re saying, about making things difficult for myself. But these men really don’t understand their sailors. They know their technical fields—most of them, anyway—but today’s young sailor is foreign to them. Even more so, the women. Also, I’m convinced ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will be repealed soon. They’re not ready for it. At all. And speaking of men, have you noticed, we don’t have a single female chief?”

  Dan blinked. “I hadn’t, but you’re right. But can you point to a specific example? Any chief in particular?”

  “Actually, one of the worst was the former command master chief.”

  “The one who got D/S’d with Captain Imerson.”

  “Yessir. But by no means was he alone. I don’t want to name names. And I don’t think you meant to put me in that kind of spot—” She stretched an arm around the back of her neck to massage her nape. Grimacing, as if it hurt. “So I’ll sort of slide past that question.” She made as if to rise again. “Is that all, sir?”

  “I guess so.” He lifted the paper. “I’ll read this. And thanks for bringing it to my attention. Especially about us needing a female chief. I’ll ask Sid Tausengelt to look at our E-6s, see if we can identify a candidate.”

  “Yes sir; I’ll be glad to provide input. Want me to close this door? Oh, and one last thing … I do a yoga class Tuesdays and Wednesdays, back in torpedo stowage. If you wanted to join us, you’d be welcome.”

  He said thank you, he’d keep that in mind, and the ribbon of ruby narrowed, shrank, vanished. He sat alone in the near darkness, still enjoying her scent. For a moment he imagined shaking that dark hair down over what were, by the way she filled out those coveralls, all too evidently more than adequate … no. He took a deep breath and let it out. God. He even had an erection.

  Chill, Lenson. You’re twenty years older than she is. Well, maybe not. Maybe eighteen. Still, old enough to be her father.

  What about her ideas? Think about that, not her tits. “Flattening management.” His initial reaction was skeptical. But hadn’t he felt exactly the same when he’d been her age? Enraged at the iron-rigid hierarchy of seniors who all too often seemed incompetent, if not, occasionally, clinically nuts? More serious was her charge about the goat locker. But received wisdom in the fleet was that a sure route to big trouble was to bypass or downgrade the chiefs and senior enlisted. They ran the ship, after all.

  The muted shriek of the J-phone. He snatched it off the bulkhead. “Captain.”

  “OOD, sir. Sorry to wake you—”

  “Wasn’t asleep. Whatcha got?”

  “Sir, we’re at course one one four, speed fifteen. Entering the Strait of Messina. Twenty-four contacts on the screen. Crossing contact, Skunk Bravo Lima, range eight thousand yards, bearing one three zero. Closest point of approach, time three zero, bearing zero nine four, two thousand yards—”

  “Is the XO up there?”

  “Yessir, Commander Almarshadi’s here. Did you want him on the line?”

  Dan closed his eyes. Remembering how it had been with Crazy Ike Sundstrom. Whatever else, the Commodore from Hell had taught him what not to do. The commander bore the ultimate responsibility. True. But he had to trust. He had to trust.

  He took a deep breath. “Not necessary. Log this: Commander Almarshadi is in charge. Maneuver according to his instructions. Call me only if we’re in extremis.”

  A moment’s astonished pause, behind which he heard the crackle of the bridge to bridge; a warning going out. “Aye aye, sir,” the young voice said at last, its tone falling, as if doubting. But acknowledging the order. “I’ll log that.”

  He hung up, figuring he wouldn’t get any more actual sleep that night than he would if he were in his bridge chair. But he had to build up his XO’s confidence. Where they were going, he’d need someone he could depend on for backup.


  But Singhe. Hard to stop thinking of her. Was he too susceptible to an attentive young woman? He didn’t think so. She was ambitious. Hard-charging. Innovative. All the things that were supposed to rank JOs in the top 1 percent in their fitness reports. All the things he was supposed to nurture. As her commanding officer.

  He felt around on his desk for the papers she’d left. When he lifted them to his face, he could still smell sandalwood.

  7

  Point Hotel

  Latitude 33° 36' N,

  Longitude 28° 35' E

  The Eastern Mediterranean

  “CAPTAIN, your presence is requested on the bridge.” Two days later Ensign Mytsalo, chubby cheeks glowing bright pink at actually speaking to his CO, held the J-phone up. Looking uncertain, as if unsure of the ceremonial involved in passing such a request.

  They were in the wardroom. Dan blotted his lips, looking regretfully at the steaming tomato bisque, the hot turkey sandwich on white-and-blue Navy china before him. “Uh … ask if it’s urgent.”

  “XO says the task force is in sight, sir.”

  “Range?”

  “Just on the horizon … closest unit twenty-three thousand yards.”

  “Tell him I’ll be up in three.” He’d have time for soup, at least.

  He savored a spoonful, but it soured as he remembered another time, on another ship. He’d been on the bridge, and they’d been making an approach on a carrier battle group. But the carrier did an unannounced 180. The result was that instead of approaching from the stern, they’d suddenly found themselves on a collision course with upwards of seventy thousand tons of steel coming down the ship’s throat at a combined closing rate of seventy miles an hour.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the assembled wardroom. They started to rise too, until he motioned them back down. “Don’t get up. Ops, Nav, and Training, how about joining me on the bridge when you’re done with your meal. Don’t hurry. I’ll be up there awhile.”

  * * *