The Command

by David Poyer

  Over the past weeks Dan and Horn had come to know the upper portion of the Red Sea well. It was shallow, except in the shipping channels, which ran from the scatter of islands at the foot of the Gulf of Suez south more or less down the center of the Red Sea itself. And narrow: at its widest it was only a hundred miles across, and up in the tributary gulfs the coasts closed in alarmingly. It felt strange being under way on patrol where one could see land on either hand.

  This early July morning he stood sweating in the pilothouse, alternately looking down at the chart and out at the mountains as the quartermasters laid out a revised oparea grid that had just come down from the commander, Task Group Red Sea. From Commodore Cavender Strong, Royal Australian Navy, embarked aboard HMAS Torrens, a River-class frigate of British lineage. His force consisted of Torrens, Horn, Laboon and a French destroyer, Georges Leygues.

  Dan had not yet met Strong personally, but he’d gone on the scrambler phone with him the day Horn reported in.

  Strong had laid out their assignment in spare sentences. The coalition group had been here for a year. Their operating area was bounded by the Sinai to the north, the Hejaz to the east, and the coast of Egypt to the west. The entrances to both the Gulf of Suez and of Aqaba were choked with small jazirats, islands, and coral reefs and sand shoals. The islands were low and rocky, with few lights or other navigational aids. The commodore emphasized Dan should take the utmost care when transiting and not to depend on any one navigational method. The year before, a British warship had grounded on the Sha’b Ali on the way from Suez, not even reaching her patrol area before she had to turn back on a long voyage homeward.

  Essentially, Strong said, they were conducting a modified blockade, although the word “blockade” could not be used publicly. “Interdiction operations” or, better yet, “enforcing UN sanctions” was the preferred phraseology. They were here to prevent embargoed goods from reaching Iraq and illegally exported oil or oil products from leaving it.

  It was a delicate assignment. They’d be inspecting not just Iraqi flag vessels, but ships from every nation bordering the Indian Ocean and many from farther away. Few of these countries liked Westerners and many considered their presence a violation of Islam, or, at the least, an insult to local sovereignty. They could expect diplomatic protests, legal threats, and occasional danger, especially for the boarding parties. The best approach was to go in with overwhelming force behind you; but to act with as much courtesy as the master concerned seemed responsive to. Allegations of excessive use of force or other illegal or dangerous acts would be subject to judicial review.

  Strong had positioned his force in three sectors, two blocking positions south of Sinai and one in the Gulf of Aqaba. Each unit spent three weeks on station and then a week transiting to her liberty port and back, usually Hurghada, but to Jiddah about every third trip off the line, for the English-speakers, or Djibouti, for the French. An oiler came up from Jiddah once a week with free Saudi fuel. Limited amounts of fresh food were available, but the choice was small and the cost high. The U.S. units would most likely prefer to rely on the joint defense logistics system now operating in Saudi. Strong had then sketched out his operating procedures in sentences dry as the air, emphasizing again the danger of reefs, tidal currents, and squalls, especially in the Gulf of Aqaba itself.

  Here at the intersection of the great Y formed by the intersecting gulfs, sea traffic divided. As it came up through the central passage from the Indian Ocean, by far the greatest part turned west for As-Suways and the Canal—and the Med and Europe and America. Those ships, gigantic oil tankers plowing along so low in the water their freeboard was barely visible, and huge liquid natural gas tankers with their white bulbous tanks of refrigerated gas, were not the concern of the multinational force. Their lookout was for those that turned east, bound for Jordan and Israel, Al-Aqaba and Eilat. For as remote and deserted as the land around them was, an astonishingly numerous cavalcade of coasters and merchants marched steadily as foraging ants through these narrow passages.

  In her first week on station Horn had boarded and searched twenty-two ships. So far they’d found no oil, no weapons, no contraband, and had nearly come to grief one hazy night on a course laid too close to the westward reefs off the Jazirat Shakir.

  Which brought them to this summer morning. Fortunately, Dan thought, seeing what was taking shape on the chart, it looked like the day would be clear. Because Strong had ordered them to the inner station. They’d transit the Madiq Tiran, Tiran Strait, and take a blocking position in Oparea Sydney, sixty kilometers inside the Gulf of Aqaba.

  He shook himself awake and went out on the starboard wing.

  Early though it was, the air was so hot it parched throat and nose instantly. The sun glared up from the flat water and down from the sky. The panting heat, the concentrated light, warned that it would really be searing by, say, thirteen hundred. He balanced on his heels, blinking grit from his eyeballs as a tanker transited the horizon with the inevitability of mercury rising in a thermometer. A thin brown haze boiled off its stack into a sky brilliant blue directly overhead, hazy tan with suspended dust lower down.

  He looked down. As Horn’s hull rolled through blue transparence it churned the sea into a roiling, turbulent, somehow colder-looking lamination of translucent jade, a milky greenish film that slid aft slowly and was replaced again and again. Not for the first time, he wished he was swimming in it. To strap on a mask and drop over the side …

  But duty could not be evaded. Not even for a moment.

  The door dogged behind him against the heat and dust, he looked at the chart again, and picked up a pair of dividers. Pricked off distance, and ran numbers through his brain.

  “Bring her around to zero-niner-zero,” he told the officer of the deck. “And bring her up to standard. We’ll set the navigation detail ten nautical miles off the Madiq Tiran.”

  …

  COBIE was in the women’s head, glad to be off watch at last. She was looking forward to breakfast, then maybe half an hour on her back with her eyes closed. But first, something more important.

  She carefully blotted the dregs from a bottle of clarifying lotion across some pimples that had appeared at her hairline. Little, white-hearted buggers. She’d never had an outbreak there before. It was all the sweating they were doing down in the hole. Helm said this was nothing compared to a steam plant, but in the last few days the temperature in Main One had gone over a hundred and ten. Coveralls, forget it. She wore dungaree bottoms and a tee. The guys went around in gym shorts and bare chests. It looked good on some, not so good on others.

  Hair on guys, you could keep it. Looking at them one after another in her mind, like flipping pages in a magazine. Akhmeed, not her type. Ricochet wasn’t that fuzzy, but he wasn’t built either, his chest thin as a little boy’s.

  She cocked her head, looking into her eyes in the mirror and smiling just the littlest bit. If she had to pick, she’d go for Mick Helm. A decent build. Not hairy all over. And he liked her, too. She was picking up something there, not just a work center supervisor trying to get somebody new off on the right foot.

  When she shook the bottle again, it was empty. Fa-a-wk, she thought. She thought of going to shorts and a sports bra. Imagined the Porn King looking up from Hustler to check her out. No way in hell.

  She was wondering where she was possibly going to get more Clin-ique when she heard a whoomp and a scream from back in the compartment. She dropped the bottle and ran to the door, looking the length of women’s berthing.

  Smoke, lots of blue smoke … and yellow light, flames. Coming from the outboard stack of bunks, up against the hull. Coming from …

  “Goddamn it,” she yelled, and grabbed the extinguisher off the bulkhead.

  Her bunk tier was flaming black oily smoke. The heavy extinguisher almost dragged her arms off. But she towed it bumping and scraping across the terrazzo. Some black dude gaped in from the passageway. “Class Bravo fire,” she screamed at him. “Call
DC Central. Call 211.”

  “God, what is going on—”

  “Cobie, what happened—”

  The other girls had leapt from their bunks. Now they were yelling and screaming and rushing around. One was cursing, trying to get her emergency breathing device on over her head, catching it on her braids. Cobie banged the extinguisher down and pulled the pin. “Back off,” she yelled to Myna, who had the bunk below hers. She was trying to claw her bedding off, trying to get to something under it. “Get out of there! That’s a fuel fire. Give me a clear shot.”

  “Fire, fire, fire in the Lezzie Locker! That is … right, sir… fire in compartment 3-382-3-Lima, after women’s berthing. Repair five provide. Fire in compartment 3-382-3-Lima, after women’s berthing. Repair five provide.”

  The blaze was fierce, considering it couldn’t be thirty seconds old. It ate into the plastic bunk cover. Cobie couldn’t help getting a lungful, and started to cough.

  By the time she and Ina had it out, spraying purple K powder and beating it out with towels, the compartment was opaque. Girls were staggering around coughing and gagging, arms full of tapes and clothes. Some had the transparent plastic bags of the breathing devices inflated over their heads, as if their brains were being eaten by alien jellyfish. She lowered the nozzle and leaned against a bunk frame, panting.

  The repair party investigator edged through the door. She waved him over and pointed to her bunk. A total mess, burnt and dirty, with smoke marks smeared up the bulkhead. And covered with the gritty purple powder. She looked at her rack of tapes. The plastic cases were melted. Totally ruined.

  All at once she thought, I could have been in there.

  She turned abruptly, dropping the extinguisher, and bolted for the head.

  Chief Forker got hold of her when she came out. Still sweating from throwing up, but she felt better. Now there was lots of khaki, including, standing in the door, the exec.

  “That your bunk?” the paunchy chief master at arms asked. “Kas-son?”

  “Yeah. Myna here’s in the middle, the girl in the lower must be on watch—she’s one of the auxiliarymen.”

  “Were you smoking?”

  “I was in the head when it started, Chief. And no, I wasn’t. I don’t smoke. Nobody smokes in the compartment.”

  “Nobody? Ever?”

  The chief’s bland disbelief enraged her. She grabbed his arm and towed him to her bunk. Pointed to the smoking mattress. “Smell that, Chief. Get your nose right down into it. That’s right.”

  He looked up. “Lighter fluid?”

  “Some kind of fuel. With a pretty high flash point.”

  Forker peered suspiciously into the overhead. She could almost scream… “It wasn’t a leak,” she said tightly. “Somebody poured it here, or threw it, then lit it.”

  A level voice said, “You’re saying, arson.”

  “That’s right, ma’am,” she told the exec. “It’s just lucky there wasn’t anybody in one of these bunks.”

  Hotchkiss looked grim. The other girls murmured uneasily. Forker looked at the door, seemed to be measuring a line between it and the bunks. He cleared his throat, as if they should all stop yakking and listen to him. “They came in, maybe with the stuff in a cup or something. Threw it, lit it, then left. You say you were where?”

  “In the head.”

  “See anybody come in?”

  “I was looking in the mirror.”

  Somehow he managed even to make a nod an insult. “Anybody else get a look at anybody didn’t belong in here? Well, o-kay… I guess we’ll have to investigate. But I wouldn’t count on getting the guy. If it was a guy.”

  “What do you mean by that, Chief?” said the exec. Cobie saw she was getting angry, too. “They live in here. Why would they torch their own compartment?”

  Forker lifted his eyebrows. “I seen bunk fires before, ma’am. Half the goddamn time it’s somebody trying to get back at somebody pissed them off. Just about always, somebody right there in the same space.”

  He turned away to the repair party guys. They were recoiling their hoses, backing out. The 1MC said, “Class Bravo fire is out in compartment 3-382-3-Lima. Reflash watch is set.”

  She looked after his retreating back, shaking. What did that mean? Wasn’t he even going to try to find out? Then a hand tightened on her arm.

  Close up, the exec had little lines around her eyes. Her lips were chapped and grim. “We’ll find out who did this,” the commander told her. “I know what you girls have to put up with in the work spaces. But this is too much.”

  Cobie looked back at her bunk. At the twisted, burnt remnants of all her letters…. “I hope so, ma’am,” she said. “Before somebody gets killed.”

  …

  THROUGH a bright noon Horn hunted with a turbine whine and a creaming hiss of foam. To port the rocky tip of the Sinai and the flat-topped, chalk-colored cliffs of the Ras Muhammad. To starboard, low barren islets, uninhabited and unmarked save for the occasional stranded wreck left from the 1972 war. The navigation team sang a litany of courses and distances.

  Dan, in his bridge chair with a stack of traffic on his lap, tried to avoid fixating. It was hard, with the jewel-like tones of reef patches and the lighter brown of drying boulders so close in to port. The traffic separation scheme sent northbound vessels east of the reefs, southbound west. The easterly channel was wider, but it was all too damn tight. Fortunately, as Strong had said, there was no air threat. Iraqi aircraft had been grounded since the Gulf War, and Egyptian and Saudi activity was limited to the occasional patrol aircraft that obligingly squawked its identifying IFF. Dan still kept Condition Three watches manned in Combat and on the weapons stations, though.

  Hotchkiss, clipboard under her arm. The worry about close quarters receded, to be replaced with a different apprehension. One could run one’s career aground in other ways than the gnash of steel on coral. He hesitated, then beckoned her. “Exec, what you got?”

  “We need to talk about this situation.”

  “The fire in women’s berthing.”

  “That’s right.” She moved in close and held out a soda can. Dan let her put it under his nose. A petroleum scent.

  “What is it?”

  “Most likely distillate fuel, marine. Could be a couple of other things, including lighter fuel. Which we sell in the ship’s store.”

  “Great, that narrows it down. Dusted?”

  “No prints. Or so Forker says.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I think it’s beyond either his capabilities, or his motivation. To put it bluntly, he doesn’t give a shit who did it or why.”

  “Do I need to recalibrate him?”

  “No. You need to sign this.”

  The clipboard held a message to COMIDEASTFOR, requesting assistance from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service station in Bahrain. COMDESRON 22, COMNAVSURFLANT, COMSECONDFLT, and the JAG office in Washington were info addees. Along with arson in the berthing space, it mentioned the photo incident and other insults to the female crew. A pattern of gender discrimination and harassment had escalated to an attempt on women’s lives. In as many words, it said USS Thomas W. Horn was sick and needed major attention.

  “Well, now,” he said.

  “You send it, we get to the bottom of this,” Hotchkiss told him. “You don’t, I resign and go to the press. Sir.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “It is. I have to protect these kids.”

  “I have to think of all my crew, Claudia. I understand where you’re coming from. Believe me.”

  “Do you?”

  “Give me one more chance to prove it,” he told her. “I need to take this to the senior enlisted. They’re the only ones who can solve this.”

  “They’re the ones who encourage it. Like your command master chief. And Forker. And that testosterone-laced prick Marchetti.”

  “I know how you feel,” Dan told her. “But I don’t think a witch hunt’s the wa
y to handle this. Three months is not a lot of time to change two hundred years of tradition. And regardless of how impatient we get with the pace, blowing it open with higher command, and with the media, isn’t the way to make progress.”

  “Or to advance the CO’s career,” she said. “Is it?”

  He stiffened in his chair. Almost spoke angrily back, but restrained himself. Remembering the times he’d felt exactly the way she did. Not about women, but about the other things that seemed to get overlooked or set aside when the men at the top put their own interests first. She’d carry out her threat. He could see it in the set of her lips.

  “Neither yours nor mine,” he said at last. “And I’m closer to the end of mine than you are to yours, Claudia. The navy needs officers like you. Let me work this a little longer. I promise you, I will work it.”

  “Don’t stonewall this,” she told him. “Sunlight on crap is the only way it ever gets cleaned up. The navy doesn’t change by itself.”

  He opened his mouth to contradict this, but had to close it. As far as he could remember, she was right. The U.S. Navy didn’t change unless the alternative was ruin. On the other hand, once it did, that, too, became Tradition. That massive institution ratcheted forward in microscopic increments, with bursts of sparks and deafening noise and heat, but it never ratcheted back.

  “Put that in your safe,” he told her. “Give me one week. Then, if you still want to send it, I’ll sign it without changing a word. That’s a promise.”

  She stood still. Then nodded curtly, and was gone.

  He breathed out, leaned back. Feeling drained. Was this all going to be a bust? He hated to think so. Everyone had worked so hard.

  No, he thought. I have good chiefs. They’ll come through.

  At his elbow, the comm petty officer cleared his throat. He remembered the traffic, still on his lap, and went through it quickly, penciling the appropriate department where there was any chance of misunderstanding.