The Command

by David Poyer

  Ninety-five percent of service people were good to go. Unfortunately, she and Bob and the third agent in the Bahrain office, Peter Garfield, got to deal with the other five. Occasionally she found the work interesting, but more and more recently, she felt it didn’t really challenge her. The best she could say about it was, she got to sharpen all her law enforcement skills, including diplomacy and language, when she got the crime and counterintelligence information from her foreign law enforcement counterparts—like Major Yousif.

  There were some people, of course, who didn’t think she ought to be here. Or wondered why she was.

  It had started at the Special Federal Agent course. Fifteen weeks in the Georgia summer. She’d done all right on crime scenes, firearms proficiency, hand-to-hand, arrest procedures. Finished the Criminal Investigator segment number three in the class. But she didn’t seem to have a legal mind, and she’d blown the crim law final.

  The next day the director had called her in. He’d sat tapping his fingers and looking out at the pines. Then swiveled his chair and said, “I had high hopes you were going to be one of our agents, uh, Miz Ar-Rahim. But we can’t compromise the requirements for graduation.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s something I refuse to do. On the other hand, we’re under pressure to increase the number of female and minority graduates we can field. And someone with your—background—”

  “You mean being African American, sir? Or being an American Muslim?”

  “Both. You’re a—pretty special asset, as far as we’re concerned.”

  So maybe she wasn’t DOA yet. She waited.

  “We’ve been trying to think out of the box, some other way we could solve this. And maybe we have one, if it’s something you were willing to sign on to.”

  Since her other scores were so high, he’d offered her a “qualified” graduation, contingent on her passing a retest on the legal section of the final in six months. Her first assignment was the San Diego field office, with the normal caseload for new agents: burglary, larceny of more than fifteen hundred dollars, suicide. The low point was an au-toerotic death at the marine barracks. The lance corporal had gotten his sexual gratification by tying his web belt around his neck and hanging himself from the transom while watching porn videotapes. Unfortunately, the chair slipped. As a new agent, female, and growing up as sheltered as the Muslim community had kept her, it had been a disturbing investigation. But she’d passed both the retest and her ninety-day probationary.

  The NSA at Bahrain was her first overseas assignment. She’d been here just long enough to meet the major players, though she couldn’t say she felt comfortable with them. Especially the locals, like Major Yousif and his boss, the minister. Muslim, like her. But there was a difference. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was. She was still working on that one.

  Sometimes she thought it had taken leaving America, to make her feel, for the first time, American.

  AISHA had grown up in Manhattan. Central Harlem, 135th Street. Her father had converted to Islam in 1964, when he heard Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom. Her mother, a Baptist from Worth, Illinois, had become a Muslim when they married. She’d taught her and her sisters to do tasbih with their fingers, and how to make their wudhu.

  She’d been three years old when she realized not all the thousands of people on the street that never stopped humming and thundering outside the walls of their apartment were like her family or dressed like her family or prayed like her family.

  She knew she lived in the biggest city in the world. Her mother was from Worth, outside another big city called Chicago. She didn’t remember anything about the Carolina place her grandma and her aunts talked about when they sat in the kitchen and drank beer. That was where Grandma was from, back when Grandpa had come north to work in the factory.

  She remembered Worth: the Fourth of July parades, Worth Days in September, with the parade and the flea market. When they went to church with her grandma, no one there mentioned Allah. They stared and whispered when she did, and told her to pray to Jesus instead.

  Every summer her grandma took her to the carnival. Her favorite was the pony carts. The yellow one was hers. She wondered if that ride was still going around. That old metal cart with its layers of buttery enamel so thick it looked melted at the edges, and the chips here and there showing it had always been yellow, coat after coat, all the way down to the silvery core.

  Then one day Grandma died, and they never went to Worth again. And she and Zara and Layla and Fatima had gone to the Clara Muhammed School, and grown up in Harlem and yet not in Harlem, in New York but not in New York, in America, yet not really. Instead they lived in another nation inside America, surrounded by the close-knit, self-isolated world of the old Nation of Islam that fiercely walled off the idolatrous and licentious and above all white world outside. That bought from its own, learned from its own, stayed with its own. That was only gradually waking to the worldwide Islam Malcolm El-Shabazz had grasped in the last years of his life was out there. The bigger, freer world she’d always wanted to see. Always wanted to be part of.

  And now, she was.

  AS she let herself into the narrow second-floor office, an enlisted man glared up from a vintage olive-drab Selectric. “Hi, Kinky,” she said. “How you doing, ma’am.”

  The office was the size of a Comfort Inn double, with gray metal desks and file cabinets and a refrigerator-sized evidence safe. Racks of three-ring binders and cardboard evidence boxes. Kinky was the investigative assistant, a desiccated little man with black-framed glasses and a change-purse mouth tucked under a prissy mustache. He wore the old-style dungarees and a Belleau Wood ball cap, as if he was still aboard ship. His paychecks said Rossetti, but everybody called him Kinky. She’d never asked why. She didn’t want to know.

  “Get that call about the body in Quraifa?”

  Quraifa was where the Arab had gotten run over. Where the kids had thrown mud and yelled insults. Sitting at her desk and turning on her computer: “Yeah. I checked it out.”

  “One of ours?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She waited for the screen to come up, then typed in her password. It didn’t work again. The computer security people insisted the password be a random string of numbers and letters, even punctuation signs, so it was impossible to guess. Which meant nobody could remember them, so they had to write them down somewhere. She slid her drawer open and looked at where she’d penciled it inside. The machine recognized her then and told her she had mail. She said again, “I don’t think so. We’ll probably leave it for the locals. Anything for me?”

  “The backgrounds are piling up again.”

  She sighed. The Defense Investigative Service did background investigations for military security clearances. But DIS agents didn’t go overseas, so Washington sent the investigations for personnel posted there to the service-specific agents in the field. Who considered them a pain, so the junior agent ended up with them. Other than that, there were reports on pending investigations that had to go out, naval messages to release. She went through them and returned her phone calls. One was from the base exec, who’d heard about the body and wanted to know what was going on.

  When she was done with that, she was face to face with the backgrounds again. She still didn’t want to do them. The computer was running slow, so she put it on cleanup and sat thinking, as it ran a little icon of a disk taking itself apart and putting itself back together over and over again.

  She found herself thinking about the dead man again. Who had he been? Where’d he gotten the base ID? That’d been his picture on it. But the bicycle hadn’t had a base sticker. Which meant he hadn’t kept it on the base, possibly hadn’t been on the base at all—maybe. Unless he parked it outside and walked in. But she couldn’t see him doing that, it wouldn’t stay there long, not in that neighborhood. And … with an Omani passport. That wasn’t out of line. They came to the island for jobs; the Omani economy sucked and Bahrain�
�s was booming. But why was he using two names? And why didn’t the crushed face match the picture on the driving license?

  She picked up the phone and dialed the ID section of base security. The woman who answered had a singsong Puerto Rican accent. She checked the files again, for Achmed Khamis and also for the passport name, Al Shatar. Aisha heard a keyboard clicking. “Ma’am? Like I told the officer who called this morning, Mr. Khamis was discharged from base employ in June of last year. Mr. Al Shatar, we don’t got nothing under that name.”

  She said thank you and hung up. Looked at the computer, as it chugged away revising its memory. Sometimes she wished she could do that. Erase images she didn’t care to keep.

  Like blood and feces. The slippery feel of cerebrospinal fluid. She’d never seen violent death that close. Maybe that was why she couldn’t concentrate this morning.

  The screen flickered, came back up with her familiar desktop. She wished there was some way she could put names into it, have it go away and search some worldwide database. But there wasn’t. Maybe in twenty years. Not now.

  She sighed, pulled out the first background investigation, and went to work.

  6

  Cherry Point Operating Areas

  WELL before dawn but still unseasonably warm. Like every day so far this time out, three hundred miles off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

  Dan carried his coffee onto the wing as radios hissed and voices discorded, turning over the watch. Around him the night glittered with far-flung lights, the pulsing beacons of aircraft like itinerant stars. A new moon like a paring of machined titanium silvered the black and restless sea.

  The Joint Task Force Exercise capped the outgoing Med and Mideast Forces’ predeployment training. The Blue Force was the Theodore Roosevelt battle group. The Red, or Opposing, Force, simulating a fictional opponent named Kartuna, consisted of the Mideast deployers, eked out with players out of the East Coast ports, and Canadian and German units as well. Their last exercise before leaving the States, and Dan hoped Horn showed up well before the lieutenant commander and two chiefs who’d boarded the day before to be their exercise observers—read, evaluators and graders, in the final report that would go up the chain of command.

  The last two weeks had been a crescendo of eighteen-hour days. Revising the battle bills, conducting the underway engineering demo, cruise missile tactical qualification, last-minute school billets for the aircraft controllers, picking up the data transfer disks with the canned Tomahawk missions, and the thousand other tickets and wickets as their deployment date bore down.

  A week ago, one of his officers had broken. The auxiliaries officer, a jaygee whose previous experience had been in fleet support ships. She not only didn’t know the plant, she had a bad habit of turning valves without following the Engineering Operating Sequencing System procedure. After the second sewage spill Dan had gotten her, Hotchkiss, and Porter together in his stateroom. Halfway through the counseling session she’d jumped up, crying, and run out. Dan had yelled out of his door, “Auxo, I’m not finished with you yet.” But the only answer had been a sob.

  When he turned back, Porter had gone white. “Maybe I’d better go see what I can do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do, Lin. If she can’t take a reaming, what’s going to happen when we have a main space fire, or major flooding? I want this lady off my ship by close of business.”

  “That’ll end her career,” Hotchkiss said. Not disagreeing, just pointing it out.

  “Then she’ll have to find another one,” Dan told her. “She may be a nice person. That’s not the point. If she clutches under pressure, she’ll kill her shipmates. I’d do exactly the same for a guy who reacted like that.” He waited. “Am I wrong? This is the time to tell me.”

  And, at last, they’d both shaken their heads. And the next morning there’d been an empty bunk in Officer’s Country and a chief in charge of A division.

  Yeah, he’d pushed everybody, and he wasn’t too popular just now. According to his grapevine, some of the wives were having dark thoughts about what their husbands were doing with female sailors aboard. As long as they didn’t write their congressmen … As for readiness, they’d flubbed several exercises in the workup phase, but had come back the next day after reorganizing and retraining deep into the night. But there were still too many glitches, errors, misheard communications, overlooked safety procedures.

  The sun was heating the horizon from beneath like a torch under slowly reddening iron. He caught one of the phone talkers eyeing him through the window. The boy instantly looked away, but he straightened in the leather chair, trying not to look as wrung out as he felt.

  “Ready for this, Captain?”

  He and the observer/liaison shared sticky buns as the horizon brightened, as the sun suddenly squeezed up, like one of Niles’s Atomic Fireballs spit out by the puckered sea.

  He hadn’t heard another word from Niles. Only silence from on high.

  The boatswain’s mate brought out his gas mask and their new anti-flash gear. Not Navy issue, but heavy, clumsy hoods improvised out of fiberglass cloth and gloves that were meant for aircrew. Wearing them in the heat meant pouring sweat and itchy rashes. But Dan had seen too many men die from burns to worry about comfort.

  He rubbed his face. Wondering if he was asking too much, if he was projecting on the outer reality the shadow that lived now within. Was it forehandedness? Or paranoia? The world was at peace. Why should he expect his people to train in the dark, taking mock casualties, taking hits, losing power, drill after drill till they were ready to drop?

  But he couldn’t help the suspicion, intuition, that somewhere under that eastern sky they’d come face to face with something they’d best be ready for. Not a test, or a drill, or an exercise. Something real. Something menacing. Something powerful.

  He didn’t even know what it might be.

  Only that it was there.

  ZERO-NINE-THIRTY. He picked up the rolling shape in his binoculars. A government-leased survey ship, flying for the purposes of the exercise the flag of a “hostile neutral,” the People’s Republic of Micara. It was idling three miles ahead, in what his scripted geography chart showed as the Strait of Benaventa. Horn’s embarked helicopter had completed the threat assessment and was drawing a smoke line back in their direction, coming up on bingo fuel state, when low fuel compelled her return. Yerega watched him. When Dan nodded, the boatswain’s hand was already on the 1MC switch.

  “Now flight quarters, flight quarters, all hands man your flight quarters stations. Stand by to receive Blade Slinger 191. No hats are to be worn on the weatherdecks. No eating, drinking, or smoking aft of frame 292. All unauthorized personnel stand clear aft of frame 292. Now flight quarters.” He released the switch, then depressed it again. “Away the visit, boarding, and search team. Deck division stand by the port RHIB.”

  Horn heeled beneath them, turning into the wind, and he watched the incoming machine grow and grow and at last pass behind the hangar, too close to see.

  The boarding and search went well at first. One of the RHIBs, the twenty-foot rigid-hull inflatables that had replaced the old motor whaleboats, cast off and half-planed, half-wallowed across the green swells. It circled the other vessel for a visual check, then closed to board over the stern. They found the stowaways. But one crewman had a rifle concealed under a windbreaker on his lap, and none of the boarding crew bothered to search him. The chief observer said he could have mowed down every man on deck before they could get their pistols out of their holsters. Also the boarding team had no climbing gear, no keys to their handcuffs, and so on down a long list of shortcomings and miscommunications.

  …

  TWELVE hundred, noon, after a wolfed lunch of grilled cheese and fries that felt like it had wedged six inches down his gullet. “Range to the carrier?”

  “Forty-one miles, sir.”

  “Captain, we have a low-flying contact just popped up 031 nine miles, outbound.”

  “
Bridge, TAO, hold air contact bearing 005, range 32 nautical miles… Come to 160 for two minutes, then come back to base course.”

  The Combat Information Center. “Combat.” Sitting in the blue leather elevated chair while around him in a space no bigger than a good-sized living room eighteen people worked in dim blue light. Five different conversations were going on over sound-powered phones and radio headsets. Helo land/launch, battle group common, fleet anti-air warfare control net, the surface control circuits, and screen commander circuits.

  Combat was laid out concentrically, though it took familiarity to distill that arrangement from the dozens of screens, circuits, tote boards, and comm gear that festooned every flat inch above the green rubber decking. His chair overlooked the tactical action officer’s station, the surface weapons controller, and the Harpoon and Tomahawk engagement planners. To his left, tote boards listed the ships involved in the exercise, the day’s call signs, and Horn’s comms status. Behind him was the dead-reckoning tracer—dark at the moment, since no antisubmarine play was scheduled. Those could be considered the inner ring. Farther out, along the bulkheads, were the underwater fire control panel and the helo controller’s station, with a grainy black-and-white TV that showed the flight deck, empty, at the moment, as just now a refueled 191 was twenty-five miles distant, checking out a contact suspected to be USS Briscoe. To the left were the fire control radar consoles, gun control consoles, and, along the forward bulkhead, the electronics warfare stack, nav table, and the Tomahawk launch console. On the far side of the bridge ladderway was the curtained-off alcove of sonar.

  When he’d started out, a captain fought his ship from the bridge. Now destroyer COs fought from Combat. Dan intended to spend the bulk of his time here, at least until he was satisfied Camill could defend the ship in his absence. Directly in front of him the TAO was working the radar repeaters and radios and the blue screens of the