The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel

by David Poyer

  “Morning, sir. I mean, afternoon. The Troll here—”

  “The Troll?”

  “Sorry—the compartment seaman, here. He called the master-at-arms when he couldn’t get Goodroe up.” The corpsman nodded at the body. “Cold. No pulse. He’s been dead awhile.”

  Dan looked the corpse over. By no means the first he’d seen, but definitely one of the most peaceful-looking. The heavy-jawed face was expectant, as if at a joke just heard but not yet fully grasped. The nude chest was covered with thick curling black hairs that shriveled to stubs as they approached the beard line. A trace of what might be dried foam at the corner of bluish lips. He bent closer; a hint of brown in it? Started to reach out, then, at a cautionary flinch from the corpsman, retrieved his finger before touching anything. “Is that blood? At the corner of his mouth?”

  “Take a sample in a minute, sir. Downie here”—the compartment cleaner grinned, then sobered—“he says he, I mean Goodroe, felt a little down and had a cough. He was off watch, so he turned into his bunk. That’s all.”

  Usually you looked for an off-watch sailor in his work center during the day, but the era when all hands were expected to turn to at daylight was long gone at sea. These days, a sailor off watch, and not feeling well, might well decide to turn in for a Tallerigo. “What’d his work-center supervisor say?” Dan asked the CMAA.

  “On his way down, sir. He knew Goody was in his rack, but didn’t know nothing else.”

  “Any history? Anything … Any idea what’s going on here?” Dan scratched his head. He’d been talking to the man, what, just yesterday? A young, husky, jock-type guy. Maybe a little … antagonistic, with his remarks about how the crew needed to be in the picture more. But he hadn’t seemed ill. “Is this a natural death? Or what?”

  The corpsman frowned. “A lot of possibilities right now, sir. You know most of our guys are strong, healthy specimens of testosterone-filled manhood. So the first thing, you look for signs of strangulation, or beating. But I don’t see any. Could be a drug OD—”

  “I’ve seen those,” the CMAA murmured.

  “—or poisoning, accidental or deliberate. He could’ve had underlying valve disease. A heart murmur they let go, or didn’t hear, when he enlisted. If he got septic in the night, maybe endocarditis—the infected valve sends emboli to the rest of the body, like fingers. But, bottom line, this is gonna be a coroner’s case, sir. We got to handle it by protocol, and get the body to the medical examiner ASAP.”

  “Okay, I get it. Anything in his record?”

  The chief corpsman slipped a file folder from beneath a clipboard. “His last entry’s the final installment of the anthrax inoculation. That we got in Naples.”

  Dan scratched his head again. He’d had a course of what he assumed was the same vaccine, experimental then, during the Gulf War. “This vaccine. Is it, I don’t know, ever dangerous?”

  “It’s a mandatory inoculation.” The chief shrugged. Flipped pages. “A three-shot buildup and booster. No record of any adverse effects to the first two shots. No, wait … he reported fever and swelling after the second. Two days later, follow-up, he’s fine.”

  “Good records. When’d he get the booster?”

  “Two days ago. I gave him that myself.”

  “This is the AVA stuff, right? Is this a documented side effect? Sudden death, I mean?”

  “Anthrax vaccine adsorbed, yes sir. No sir, there’s no such warning on side effects.”

  “So what killed this apparently healthy guy? Best guess?”

  “Captain, I just can’t give you an informed opinion right now. If we had an MD aboard, maybe, but I doubt he’d want to come out and tell you something that might turn out to be a hundred and eighty wrong either.” The chief snapped the latex on one glove, then tore open the plastic wrapping on the flexible tube. He peeled down the corpse’s boxers, dug out the slack flaccid penis, spread its meatus, and began threading the tube into it.

  Dan said, “Uh, what exactly are you—”

  “Drug screen. Gotta catheterize him. And we’re gonna have to take lots of photos, at the highest resolution we can.”

  Dan got Almarshadi on the Hydra and told him to get the ship’s photographer down to forward berthing, and then to meet up with him. “Okay, do the protocol,” he told Grissett. “By the book. Then body-bag him, and back to the reefers until I can get direction on disposition. Can you decontaminate, I mean, disinfect the rack? Would that be something we’d want to do?”

  “Yes sir, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Once we get him out of the compartment. I can use an alcohol solution. A spray bottle. And take his linens to the laundry in a separate bag, do ’em in superhot water.”

  “Good. Anybody else touch him? Uh—Troll?”

  A flinch; a grin. “No sir, I didn’t touch him.” Then a frown. “Well, yeah, I did. To sort of shake him. To, uh, wake him up.”

  “I’ll get his hands disinfected too, just in case.” The corpsman studied the body and snapped the glove-rubber again. “You didn’t touch your face afterward, did you?”

  Dan left them there, gathered around the drawn-back curtain like a nineteenth-century tableau: grave visages around a sickbed, silent and respectful in the unexpected, yet never faraway, presence of the Dread Leveler.

  * * *

  ALMARSHADI caught up as he was letting himself out on the main deck. Dan wanted to get some fresh air; the old-socks-and-deodorant man-reek of the berthing space seemed ominous once associated with death.

  They stood by the lifeline, buffeted by a cold wind, as sailors ducked into the breaker—the covered walkway, almost like a highway tunnel, that led from the port side midships up to the forecastle. The sea roared as Savo ripped through it, peeling off curving chunks of whitecap that toppled to either side like dump-truck loads of shiny pale green and white marbles, and now and again she rolled and the wind tore a spatter of spray across them, the scent and taste sharp and refreshing. At intervals, when the sun broke through, crystalized salt sparkled on the bulkheads by the refueling station, on the chocks, bitts, life rails, the davit socket, like gypsum deposits in a cave.

  Dan allowed himself ten seconds to stand in silence, swaying with the roll, one with the morning and the wind and the endless topple of the bow wave. Communing, for just a moment, with the ancient sea, the mariner’s eternal mother and eternal enemy. Then told Almarshadi to report the death to CTF 60 and request instructions.

  “But we outchopped … right?” The smooth dark face was uncertain; the black hair ruffled in the breeze. Dan smelled cigarette smoke. Red coals glowed in the dimness of the breaker. The best execs were shadow selves, masters of detail within the skin of the ship. They freed the commander, instead of continually pulling him in, as this sparrowlike Arab seemed to do all too often. But he’d had worse seconds. Remembering Greg Juskoviac, his totally worthless XO aboard Gaddis, he could appreciate Almarshadi a little more. At least the guy was trying.

  “We’re not under his tactical command, no, but he’s the closest force commander. So let’s see what he can do for us. Meanwhile, I’ve told Grissett to clear out one of the freezers. And not to let anyone else touch the body.”

  The exec inspected his boots. Scuffed the nonskid. “Do we want to slow down? In case they want to offload it?”

  Dan frowned. “No. I want to reach station as soon as possible.”

  Almarshadi kicked at a scupper. “Okay, sir. Oh. By the way. I think you did the right thing. About Zotcher.”

  Dan looked aloft, at the snapping flags atop the signal bridge. A lookout was studying them from the wing, decks above; when he caught his captain’s eye he swung his binoculars out again to sea. The barrel of a machine gun pointed in the same direction. “Glad I have your confidence. What about Amy Singhe? Am I picking up bad blood between her and some of the chiefs?”

  “Amarpeet doesn’t get along with them. Considers them beneath her, I guess. You know she’s got an MBA from Wharton?”

  “Yeah
, I knew that. You call her Amarpeet? Not Amy?”

  “That’s her name.”

  Dan looked aloft again. “Not a smart attitude. Looking down on the chiefs, I mean.”

  “I’ll counsel her.”

  “Okay. But first check on how they’re doing with Goodroe. And get that message out.”

  * * *

  HE walked the deck yearning to try to nap again, but knowing he wouldn’t. The immobile heavy-jawed visage, its last sight on earth probably the stained underside of the next mattress up, haunted him. One day joking on the mess decks. The next, in olive plastic, being slid into cold storage.

  You expected death in battle. And going to sea in ships crammed with explosives and fuel and heavy machinery was always dangerous. You lost people overboard, or sucked into turbine engines on carriers, or from smoke inhalation, or asphyxiation in voids. But what killed healthy young men in their bunks? Cocaine? Didn’t that stop the heart? But there’d been no sign of a coke problem in the Command Climate Survey, and it usually showed up either there or in the urinanalysis program. Navy drug use was way down, and Goodroe’d had no record. Heart attack? The man had been in his late twenties; it seemed unlikely.

  He dropped down a deck and strolled the length of the ship, stepping over knee-knockers, absentmindedly noting the condition of firefighting stations, dogging mechanisms, repair-party lockers. Putting a hand up now and then to check for dust on the top of the insulated ducts that ran along the overhead, painted cream-white and stenciled every few yards with black arrows denoting direction of flow. A knot of men and a blond woman stood around by the barbershop, nearly all the way aft. Navy didn’t salute inside the skin of the ship, but they came to their feet, nodded, murmuring, “Afternoon, Captain.”

  “We doing okay? How’s the service here?”

  “Turbo Mouth, he does okay. Talks pretty much nonstop, but he does a good haircut.”

  “Price is right,” another sailor said. “Go on ahead if you need a trim, sir. We can wait.”

  “Thanks, maybe tomorrow.”

  The woman asked, “We keep hearing rumors on the news, sir. We gonna invade?”

  “Seems to be a possibility.”

  “I hear they’re threatening that if we attack, they won’t limit the war to the Mideast. What do you think that means?”

  “That’s a good question. It might be why we’re headed where we’re going. But all I can really say is, we just need to be ready. Just all do our jobs and stand by.”

  They didn’t look satisfied, but there weren’t any more questions. Strange that they hadn’t gotten the word about the death yet. Or maybe they had, and were just wary about bringing it up. He’d ask the corpsman to put something out, to all hands, before the scuttlebutt started to fly.

  He looked into torpedo stowage, had a short discussion with the leading torpedoman, then ambled forward again up the port side. Halfway to the mess decks his radio crackled. “Skipper, XO.”

  “Go, Fahad.”

  “Got that message done, about Goodroe. Waiting for your chop.”

  “Run it past Chief Grissett.”

  “Already did, Captain.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “There’s a message from DesRon in your in-box. They want to schedule a red phone call at 1500 local with Two Six Actual.”

  Jen Roald. His commodore. He checked his watch. The sea; the ship, the crew. And the captain. Like the old game played for decades with dice and drinks. Did they still play that, in officers’ clubs, in petty officers’ clubs, in what had once been Acey-Deucey clubs? Or had it too gone, another tradition eaten by the locusts? “Okay, XO, thanks. I’ll take that in CIC.”

  * * *

  HE got there at 1445 and logged in at his chair. The vertical displays were blank, all but the central one, which showed the Global Command and Control picture. A lot of air traffic to the east. To the west, far behind now, glowed the bright pips of the battle group. He found Almarshadi’s draft message about Goodroe, went through it, started to correct a phrase, then shrugged and hit Send. Too many skippers wasted time massaging text. If it said what it meant to say, without having to be read twice, so be it.

  The news summary carried press speculation that operations against Iraq were about to start, but there was no confirmation in the official traffic. A Chinese general had made threats against Taiwan. “Kill one rabbit, to scare the monkeys,” he’d said. A message slotted to both Matt Mills and himself from Naval Weapons Center Dahlgren, Network Systems Directorate, caught his eye. The header: SPY-1 Flight 7 Upgrade. He opened it.

  Referring to the request Donnie Wenck had sent, it turned down Savo Island’s request for new software. The upgrade was in Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE) Category 3 infrastructure, which had not yet been approved for fleet issue due to considerations of operational security.

  Which, he guessed, frowning, meant they were unsure it was hardened against hacking. Everybody wanted open architecture, but the easier programming was to write and change, the more vulnerable it became. He started a reply, then saved it to his draft folder.

  As usual with Jennifer, she called five minutes early. “Commodore,” he said, then released the button on the handset.

  “Dan. I guess you saw the response to your message to Dahlgren.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You made a good case, but you might want to hold off on pressing that issue. You’re handling an emergent tasker. You don’t want to degrade your system right now. Believe me.”

  “I was thinking along those lines. Any, uh, idea when the balloon goes up?”

  “You know as much as we do. I called my relief at the Sit Room and he can’t shed any light.”

  Dan rubbed a bristly chin. Ought to shave soon. “Uh, apropos of that, we may have mutual interference, with the Israeli Patriot battery at Ben Gurion. Our geographic sectors overlap and our freq bands are real close. We’ve asked for a copy of a Patriot/Aegis interoperability test they did at White Sands, but we haven’t been able to break that loose. It’d be good to have some kind of direct channel to the Israelis too. To be able to deconflict in real time.”

  “Sounds reasonable. I’ll take that for action and get back to you. Otherwise, how’s it going? Over.”

  “I had what seems to be a natural-causes death this morning.” He gave her the details, and ended, “I just hit Send on the full report. I’m requesting an autopsy. There’s just not too much my chief corpsman can pull out of his—tail. Other than that it might be a vaccine reaction.”

  Her voice sharpened. “To AVA? The anthrax vaccine?”

  “Correct. Over.”

  “That’ll involve Bethesda. You’ll be getting calls from Clinical Investigation. Has the family been notified? You did what’s right, right? Over.”

  “My XO looked it up in the manual and did the death report and the next-of-kin notification. You and your N4 are info’d on those. Over.”

  “Okay then … keep me in the loop on that. Anything else you need?”

  “Those parts for the chassis rebuild we requested. We got some of them helo lift from the TF, but there’s still outstanding requests.”

  “My loggies are working it. Oh, and by the way—almost forgot—NCIS identified the guy who threw the gasoline at you, at the gate. Over.”

  This was news. He pulled his consciousness out of the phone, checked the display, checked his own personal six. Then wondered what he was looking for, in the chill, darkened, equipment-packed space. The shapeless void-thing that had stalked him in the corridors of dream? “Really? They got him? Over.”

  “Well, identified him. Unfortunately, the Italians had already let him go by then. And don’t seem to be able to find him again—no surprise, I guess. Anyway, want to know who he worked for?”

  “Uh … yeah.”

  “There’s an al-Qaeda link. Maybe not directly, but we’re pretty sure they pulled the string.”

  Dan thought of several things he might say, but the one that
came closest to actually getting voiced was: And I know why.

  After 9/11, at first, no one had known for sure who was responsible. Then they had, but hadn’t been able to locate him.

  But TAG had been able to retask a modeling agent framework, originally intended to data-mine a littoral environment to locate submarines, into a program that integrated communications, intelligence, and social relations to predict the location of a unitary actor. Such as bin Laden. Dan, Henrickson, and Wenck had taken CIRCE active at Bagram Field, Afghanistan, and had nailed Osama’s location closely enough that a SEAL team had come within an ace of taking him out.

  Now, with a titanic conflict impending, maybe OBL was taking the opportunity to settle his books.

  Or was that simply megalomania? To think a randomly thrown bottle had been aimed at him? Surely he wasn’t that important, in the great scheme of things. He grimaced. No, they’d seen an official car, and thrown a firebomb. That was all.

  “Dan? You there?”

  “Yeah. That’s interesting. An asymmetrical response.”

  “Or something like that. Okay, we’re up-to-date, right? Info me on your on-station message. I’ll keep working on this end. Out.”

  He signed off and resocketed the phone. Looked once more at the display, at the symbology and overlay and now, coming into the picture on the right, the east, the curved-bow shape of the most fought-over land on earth. Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in Al-Quds. The Holy Land of the Crusaders and Salah ad-Din. Israel. Palestine.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. Toggled to the next screen, and started his on-arrival message.

  9

  Oparea Adamantine

  “NOW flight quarters, flight quarters. All hands man your flight quarters stations. Stand clear topside aft of frame 315. Flight quarters.”

  The echoes of the 1MC died. Dan sprawled in his bridge chair, boots up, foul weather jacket zipped snug to the throat, gazing out over an uneasy sea. As Savo Island nosed around to face the wind she rose, then plummeted, picking up a deep creaking pitch. The air had turned chill again, and all was gray; charcoal clouds pressing down on a sea like a herd of stampeding elephants, ruffled with streaks of white foam like dust blown off their great heaving backs.