The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel

by David Poyer

  Almarshadi stood without a word, and followed Dan past the silent watchstanders.

  Out into the passageway. Dimly lit. Not with red, because it didn’t open directly to the weather decks, but with half the fluorescents off. The ship creaked around them, and Dan braced an arm to an equipment enclosure as she rolled. When the door thunked shut he said, restraining himself with an effort, “What just happened, Fahad? Because what it looked like to me is, my XO’s a point of failure. And right now, I can’t afford any points of failure.”

  “I guess I … I misread where he was going.” The XO wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “What was initial detection range?”

  “We’ve only got the surface search radar. It came up at fifteen thousand yards.” Almarshadi hesitated. “Actually a little before that … an intermittent contact … but we thought it was sea state. Peaking waves.”

  “Sea state? That thing was enormous. Forty, fifty thousand tons. And you’d pick up its radar on EW—”

  “There was no EW detection,” the XO stated. His voice got a bit stronger. “His radar was off. Or broken. Anyway, he wasn’t radiating. And, Captain—he changed course on us.”

  “Meaning?”

  Still not meeting his eyes, the slight officer explained that although the other ship hadn’t answered their radioed warning, it had come right slightly. “It stayed on that course for about three minutes. That started to open the CPA on the VMS, so we thought it’d pass clear. The CIC officer thought so. And I concurred. But then it—it swung back. By the time we noticed it was closing again, it was inside two miles.”

  Dan rubbed his forehead. The Vessel Management System was the digital replacement for the old grease-pencil-on-the-radar-screen method for figuring out if an approaching ship was dangerous. It computed closest points of approach, course, and speed, and displayed ships’ predicted tracks. It also recorded video, so it would be easy to go back and replay the near collision.

  But he didn’t feel like doing that. He doubted Almarshadi was lying. It was something even more dangerous. “Okay, but when it was inside those two miles, why didn’t you call me? The first I heard was when the OOD buzzed me. By the time I got to the bridge, we were in extremis. We’re talking lives, Fahad. If that thing had hit us, we might well have gone down.”

  “I was about to go up, Captain, and take the conn. I was on the ladder when I saw you bolt out of your stateroom. So I came back down.”

  Dan looked away. He wanted to have confidence in people, but when it came to keeping the ship safe … tolerate substandard performance, and it would become the new standard.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t be awake and alert twenty-four hours a day. And Almarshadi had done fine coming through the crowded, chaotic Strait of Messina, in Dan’s experience one of the tensest passages on the planet.

  He blew out. “I’m honestly not sure what to do about this, Fahad. Is something like this why Captain Imerson didn’t allow you on his bridge?”

  “No sir.”

  He waited, but the guy didn’t elaborate. “Right now, I’m pretty angry. Right this second, I’d rather have Cheryl Staurulakis as my stand-in than you.”

  Almarshadi nodded but, again, said nothing, his gaze aimed somewhere in the area of Dan’s belt buckle. Despite himself, he glanced down to see if his fly was open. It wasn’t.

  Savo rolled and plunged around them. Metal protested, yielding and rebounding against the strain. In the closed space, the dim light, Dan felt nauseated. He took a deep breath. “But I need you. I need every man, and woman, right now. Mission accomplishment, Fahad. ‘Hard blows.’ I’m going to give you one more chance. But also, a warning. If this happens again, you won’t be standing any more watches aboard Savo. And I’ll put you ashore at the first opportunity.”

  “… happen again,” Almarshadi murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “It won’t.”

  “Once again. So I can hear you.”

  “I said, it won’t happen again!” the man blazed out suddenly. His head snapped up, and his cheeks flushed. His fists rose too. Dan would have stepped back, but there wasn’t any room in a passageway so crammed with equipment enclosures that two men going in different directions would’ve had to slide past each other sideways.

  But there it was, a reaction, at last. Did you have to insult him, to rouse his pride? It wasn’t how Dan liked to operate, but if that was the only way to get the son of a bitch on the stick, fine. He’d press any buttons he had to, to get his XO up on step. But it was time to back it off a notch. He gripped the smaller man’s arm, extended a hand. “Fahad … I can’t do this alone. The consequences … I’ve seen what happens at sea when somebody looks the other way. That’s not going to happen on my watch.”

  The thin shoulders straightened; the chin came up. Deep brown eyes met his at last, and Almarshadi returned the handshake. “I understand, Skipper.”

  “Okay then. Review those new ROEs. Let me know how they bounce against the theater Conops in the morning.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Dan eyed him a moment longer, then nodded curtly and turned away toward the ladder.

  Climbing it, he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake. If his exec was a failure node, they were in trouble. But a Zero Defects Navy wasn’t his Navy. Daniel V. Lenson had looked less than stellar now and then himself.

  He did need to control his temper, though. Did he really have what it took to be a good CO? He’d thought so, once. Now he wasn’t sure.

  Not for the first time, he closed his eyes and silently asked for help.

  * * *

  BACK in his cabin, he couldn’t get back to sleep. But he didn’t want to go down to CIC, or up to the bridge. That would signal distrust. Plus, he was probably getting some rest just lying here, even though his brain seemed to be on some kind of naturally secreted speed. He kept replaying those looming lights like a preview of coming attractions.

  If he did fall asleep, he knew exactly what he’d dream, and what he’d hear. The screaming in the dark, from when the first ship he’d ever served on had gone down in the Irish Sea.

  He picked up the Freya Stark book again, found where he’d bent down a page, and read a few more paragraphs. About the Parthian Empire. How Rome had tried again and again to outflank and break it, and finally succeeded. But the ship rolled again, and he clutched the bunk frame until his fingers cramped. This high in the superstructure, you really felt the motion.

  Enough. He got up and shaved, wedged into the narrow space in front of the sink, shoulders braced. Rinsed his mouth, shook out a fresh set of coveralls, and pinned on the eagles and rather tarnished surface line insignia and name tag. And last, the circled dull-gold star of command at sea. He pressed it gently into the blue cloth, feeling like the Cowardly Lion again.

  He peered into the mirror once more. Not looking so alert yourself there, Lenson. Red-rimmed eyes. Those crow’s-feet were getting deeper. And was that more gray on the sides?

  He remembered what he’d called his skippers. Not to their faces, but what everyone else had called them too.

  Now he was the Old Man.

  * * *

  THE mess decks were bustling. He slid his tray along the stainless rails, grabbed French toast with greasy aluminum tongs and added a sloppy spoonful of eggs. When he zigzagged out into the dining area DC3 Benyamin stood. He pointed to his table and Dan wobbled over. “Gonna get rougher, I hear, Skipper,” he said as Dan climbed into the bench seat. The other men and women shoved over, making room.

  “Yeah, we could be in for a blow.” Dan blinked at the damage controlman’s scarred pale arms. Wondering what his tattoos had been, and why he’d had them lasered out.

  “Sir, hear anything back yet about Smack? What happened to him?”

  “I’m sorry—Smack?”

  A silence, broken only by the roar of engines from the big screen up front. Dan glanced that way; Pierce Brosnan was piloting a hovercraft in a chase scene. The men at the
front tables stared at the screen, hardly eating. “That was Seaman Goodroe, sir,” another man supplied. “You know, the guy who—”

  “Right, right. Sorry, the chief corpsman wasn’t able to make a determination. As to cause of death. And we haven’t heard anything back yet from Bethesda.”

  An acned young woman said softly, “Somebody said it might be those anthrax shots they gave us.”

  “I don’t think so, but I haven’t totally ruled it out as a possibility.”

  “You’d let us know if there was … like … a plague aboard,” a palely mustached young sailor said hesitantly.

  “You’ve been watching too many movies,” Dan told him, trying to sound kind but firm. “But for the record, yeah, I would tell you. But there’s no plague. No curse, either.” He grinned, sorry he’d even repeated the words. “Look, we’ve been pushing you guys pretty hard. But you know why now. Right?”

  They nodded, more or less together. “So you realize, we could very well take a hit out here? Our radar’s focused inland. Somebody could kick us in the ass and we wouldn’t see him coming. So we need to be ready to fight fires and flooding. That’s why Mr. Danenhower and the DCA, Mr. Jiminiz, and Chief McMottie are working your tails to the bone right now. Is that the word you’re getting? I want to make sure everybody knows why we’ve got our balls … our hair on fire about this.”

  On the screen Halle Berry undulated out of the ocean in an orange-and-white bikini. The sailors hooted and hammered the deck with their boots.

  “I think we get the picture, sir,” Benyamin said. “You’re takin’ us into harm’s way, like they say in The Bluejacket’s Manual. And we gotta be ready to take a licking and keep on ticking.”

  Dan looked at the sobered young faces, most sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed. Some still acned with youth. Some with hair too long, or buzz-cut violently short. Black and white and brown and Asian. “I know it’s a lot of work, a lot of stress, but this is what we’re out here for,” he told them. “What the country expects of us. And any problems your chief or div-O can’t help you with, my door’s open. I mean … right now, I couldn’t give you an uninterrupted hour, but I’m there if you need me. Okay?”

  “Hoo-ah, Skipper.”

  “Yes sir.”

  When he turned his tray in the same kid took it who’d been there the first time. “What, you got permanent crank duty?” Dan asked him. But the kid just squinted at him, scraping the remains off into a garbage pail, as if he had no idea who Dan was.

  * * *

  THEY patrolled through seven- to eight-foot seas black as gangrened flesh. Long, deep seas, along the troughs of which he could look for hundreds of yards. Squalls spattered on the windscreen. The wipers whipped the raindrops away. Everyone on the bridge was in heavy sweaters or bulky green foul-weather jackets. Around noon the lead helo pilot, “Strafer” Wilker, came up to give him his cap, which Dan had apparently left on the mess decks, and to brief him on whether they were going to be able to operate. Dan watched him sway to the roll in his flight suit, palms clamped over elbows, and wondered why pilots were so different from surface officers. Perhaps their DNA was the same, but that was about all. “So, why ‘Strafer’?” Dan couldn’t help asking.

  “Oh, I happened to come in a little too low once, on a pass over a reviewing stand.”

  Dan raised an eyebrow. “I see. Well, we might need you in an antiship role.”

  Wilker looked out toward the corvette. Savo was plodding south, so the distant dot winked on and off out on their port beam. “We got Hellfires. Like, you mean, this guy? Or is he a friendly?”

  “Him? I think he’s more of a … well, I don’t really know yet.” Dan explained his argument with the Israeli. “My impression is, he’s waiting for orders. The main threat I’m looking at is antiship missiles from shore. But we might see small boats, a leaker.” He massaged his eyes. “Even a Syrian patrol boat.”

  “Coffee, Captain?” The boatswain, Nuckols, stone-faced, with the stainless-steel ovoid of the bridge pot.

  “Yeah, top me up. —Main thing that worries me is a trawler. Like what happened to Horn.”

  “Not sure I recall that, sir. Heard something about it, but—”

  “A dirty bomb in a trawler. It looked like a plain old fishing boat. But it wasn’t.” He blinked and swallowed, looking out to sea. Hell, was that a swirl of snow? No, just spray. The bridge heaters clanked and popped, but he still shivered. Having a helo patrolling out there with infrared vision, a laser designator, .50 cals and five-mile-standoff missiles, even if the warheads weren’t quite big enough to take out a ship, would definitely make him sleep better. “How close are we getting to your wind limits?”

  Strafer broke out a blue plastic-backed NATOPs manual from a cargo pocket and went over the diagrams. The limiting factor was pitch and roll. Savo had the RAST sled, a car that ran on rails on the flight deck. It was designed to winch the helo down out of the sky if they had to land in heavy seas. Dan had seen it get very white-knuckled at times. “I know this isn’t the best weather we could have. But I’ve got to launch you,” he told the pilot.

  Strafer shrugged. “I’ll tell you if I think it’s not safe. But you’re the guy who bottom line says go or no go. If it’s an operational necessity.”

  “Well, I definitely want your input on that. Ideally, I’d like two missions per twenty-four-hour cycle. One starting an hour before dawn. The other, at dusk. That’s when we’ll be most vulnerable. Fly a circle, but with the wider radius to shoreward. The rest of the time, maintain as close to a five-minute standby as you can get.”

  “When we launch. Armed? Hellfire?”

  “Absolutely. Hellfire, EW, and FLIR. But stay data-linked. And I retain positive control. Weapons are tight unless specifically released. Unless you’re attacked, of course—that’s in your rules of engagement.”

  “How long? Our endurance is four hours.”

  “If you can do two four-hour patrols a day, that’d be great. But I won’t hold you to that. Two hours at dawn, two at dusk would make me happy. Don’t push so hard you degrade. Clear?”

  Wilker nodded and left. Dan mused for a while, then crooked a finger at the OOD. “Hermelinda?”

  “Yes sir.” She came over, still clutching her binoculars to her chest.

  “I was down on the mess decks this morning, and I saw the same kid scraping trays in the scullery as last time I was there. That duty gets rotated, right?”

  “I’m not sure who you mean, sir.”

  “I mean, make sure your crank duty gets rotated, okay? Don’t let the divisions send you the same bodies over and over. Some of ’em’ll do that if you don’t stir the pot.”

  He settled back into the padded seat, and the next thing he knew, he didn’t know anything at all.

  * * *

  HE woke with a snort and a flinch, realizing he’d been snoring. He cleared his throat and swung down, catching sidelong glances from the bridge team. Not sharp, Dan. A skipper was human, he needed to sleep, but it didn’t help to do it in front of the crew. “Captain’s off the bridge,” he heard as the door closed, and waited, listening for chuckles, or any comment loud enough to hear.

  But neither came, and he stopped at his cabin and shaved, then nosed himself and decided he could use a quick washup, too. A Navy shower: a quart to wet down, the shower turned off; lather up thoroughly; one last quart to rinse off. He threw his coveralls back on and rattled down the ladder to Combat. He was pulling up the SH-60B Tactical Manual on the LAN for a quick review when his Hydra beeped. He snatched it, heart instantly accelerating. “Skipper.” Beside him Mills glanced over from the TAO position.

  “Sir, this is Sid Tausengelt. Where are you right now?”

  “In CIC.”

  “Be there in five.”

  “What’ve you got, Master Chief?”

  “Better in person, Captain.”

  What fresh hell? He checked the vertical displays. Air and surface traffic had vanished east of Cyprus. Even the regula
rly scheduled commercial airlines had cancelled or diverted. The shadow of war lay across the Mideast. He checked the stats on Aegis. The system was at 87 percent. Not great, but not quite mission-compromising, either.

  Tausengelt’s seamed visage appeared, lit from below, back by Sonar. He peered around the darkened space uncertainly, then felt his way forward. Dan wondered if the older man was losing dark adaptation. Then he oriented, homed in, lifted his chin, and Dan saw that Chief Van Gogh was behind him. Zotcher as well. The sonar chief was in an ivory plastic neck brace. He glowered at Dan.

  “Captain,” the command master chief muttered, “you real busy?”

  Dan wanted nothing less than to go into this, but nodded and got up. But Tausengelt motioned him back down and sidled past. He said a few words to Amy Singhe, who was perched on a stool in the Aegis area. Dark eyebrows knitted; she looked past him at Dan; her face darkened. She nodded abruptly, and stood.

  “What is all this, Master Chief?”

  The ship’s senior enlisted said, “Can we talk out in the passageway, sir? And I wanted the lieutenant there too. ’Cause, basically, it’s mostly about her.”

  “Have you taken this up with Commander Staurulakis, Master Chief? She’s the department head. And the XO?”

  “Sir, with all due respect, I think this is becoming a CO-level matter,” Tausengelt said with great dignity. The others, behind him, nodded.

  * * *

  DAN told Mills where he’d be, and followed the command master chief and the others to an equipment room. A petty officer was hunched over a pulled-out rack with a tester. Tausengelt asked him gravely if he’d give them a few minutes. Wide-eyed, he slotted the computer blade back into place and left. Singhe stood with arms folded, glaring with such dark intensity that she seemed to be radiating in the far infrared. The three chiefs ranged themselves opposite her. “What’s this little kangaroo court?” she said harshly, before anyone else could speak. “Should I have representation?”

  “I’m not sure, Lieutenant. Master Chief, what’s this about?”