The Command

by David Poyer

  26

  The Eastern Mediterranean

  THE darkened bridge was quiet, but not relaxed. It was the calm of those who didn’t need to cover uncertainty with talk. Who in months at sea together had worn through idle conversation. So that words were scarce now, consisting of the chanted antiphon of the phone talker, the helm’s terse reports, the murmur of the conning officer keeping them on station a thousand yards astern of the deck-edge lights of USS Theodore Roosevelt, CVN-71.

  Dan sat with legs crossed and shoes kicked off in the dark. He’d started chewing gum. It seemed to help. Working out helped, too. Running was out, at least temporarily; Blade Slinger 191 had operated practically round the clock since they’d rejoined the battle group. Even during down time, hauled inside with the maintenance crews working her over, the deck had to stay clear in case another aircraft needed a dry spot. He tried to get to the weight room every day. Around 0400 seemed to work best. A hard hour on the machines, then a shower before his self-imposed date with the rising sun.

  Around him the Battle Force Sixth Fleet, carrier, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, combat support, drove massively through the night. It had been here since 1949. Nearly every sailor who’d served in the navy since had been part of it at one time or another. Along with its associated amphibious ready group, two hundred miles to the south at the moment, it could react to anything from a humanitarian crisis to all-out war. It could move seven hundred miles in a day, refuel, rearm, and strike without the permission of tacit enemies, doubtful neutrals, or reluctant allies.

  They’d departed the island emirate two weeks ago, three days after the dhow incident. But not for the upper Gulf. Instead, with no explanation, they’d been traded to the Med. Out Hormuz and through the Red Sea again, the passage familiar now. Past the low coast where navy men had died aboard a sinking tanker. They’d never laid hands on the smugglers, never heard another word about them. Like they’d never found out who was behind the dhow attack. Boxing with shadows … Through the Canal again, the usual frenzy when they couldn’t find the certificate. Horn dogged Roosevelt tonight at the triple crossing of lines drawn south from Turkey, west from Cyprus, and north from Egypt. Where the stars arched over the sea like diamonds set in the roof of an immense cave. Waiting for whatever came next. He scratched between his stockinged toes, remembering Riyadh.

  THEY’D crossed the causeway under heightened security in the wake of the attack on Horn. Dan had ridden with a four-striper from CO-MIDEASTFOR in the second unmarked white Suburban. A convoy of SUVs didn’t seem the least conspicuous way to travel, nor was the requirement they wear body armor exactly reassuring. It weighed on him like the lead aprons they give you before the X-ray.

  They sped at seventy miles an hour toward the capital of Saudi Arabia, four hundred kilometers to the west. The highway was perfectly flat, perfectly new. Once they left Al-Khubar behind, a city that looked like it had been built the night before, the broad, exquisitely planed lanes were empty. All there was to look at was rock, sand, and, set well back from the highway, new, huge, seemingly deserted mosques. Or at least the buildings had minarets. The heat penetrated the glass and steel around them despite the roaring air conditioner, made the Americans suck on their plastic bottles of water. It made everything shimmer and run together, as if shape were only a fleeting attribute of reality. He was beginning to suspect that nothing he saw in this quarter of the world was what it seemed. A gaunt hunted-looking dog shied as they sped past.

  Today’s meeting was with Admiral Curtis D. Kornack, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command. Kornack’s flag was in Bahrain, but the admiral himself was in Riyadh. Dan’s disciplinary mast had been postponed. Or maybe OBE—overtaken by events—more accurately described what had happened to the accusation of excessive force while boarding, in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of the Horn. He’d stayed aboard, of course, through the day. No one knew if the dhow was the main event or a diversion. Hotchkiss drafted an OPREP-3, a terrorist incident report. They stood to into the night, with Fear and Faith circling, manned and armed. At any rate, no one had mentioned that investigation since. And he wasn’t about to bring it up.

  They reached Riyadh as the sun hit zenith. The roundabouts and flyovers were deserted, as if scanned by some futuristic ray that destroyed everything but architecture. The Ministry of Defence was, no surprise, white, modern, and brand-new. They parked in an underground garage, left the armor in the vehicles, and checked in with a sergeant in battle dress. He led them down concrete stairs as the air grew colder and took on a subterranean smell. A large room with acoustic tile ceilings and many Americans at terminals. Past that, more corridors terminated at a windowless briefing room where carafes of coffee and bottles of mineral water and soggy date pastries on plastic plates waited. He saw a face he thought he remembered. As he focused the other, large, rumpled, stepped forward and stuck out a hand. “Been a while, Commander.”

  “The NIS officer. From Gitmo.”

  “That’s right. Bob Diehl. Only it’s NCIS now.” The agent winked and raised his paper cup. “Yeah, awhile since we had our last chat. And this is better coffee than you gave me then.”

  “You on this, too? I thought Ms. Rahim was the agent in charge.” He smiled at her; she nodded back, but without smiling, her dark face giving him nothing but wariness and distance.

  “Ar-Rahim. She works for me. But you know you’ll always get a fair hearing from me.”

  “Like the one I got last time?”

  Years before, a seaman from his department had gone overboard one night off Cuba. Dan had helped inventory the dead man’s personal effects. After reading Sanderling’s diary, he’d wrapped it in copper cable and deep-sixed it over the stern. Which had led to Diehl’s accusing him of being Sanderling’s lover, if not his murderer.

  The agent laughed soundlessly as the admiral came in.

  Karnack had an air force colonel with him, and a civilian in a sport coat and dark slacks whom he introduced as his “political advisor”— which Dan figured was spelled CIA. They sat on one side of the table, leaving the delegation from Bahrain to take the other. Dan added that up: the intelligence-side captain who’d accompanied him from CO-MIDEASTFOR; a Commander Hooker, the base security guy; Diehl, Ar-Rahim, and himself.

  Karnack opened a file folder the colonel gave him. “You’re Lenson?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I respect any man who wears the Congressional, but I’m not happy about what happened in Manama. It took too long to get your security force in the water, and you weren’t ready to repel a waterborne attack. Nor were you maintaining proper lookouts.”

  “I don’t know who gave you that information, sir, but none of those assertions are correct,” Dan told him. “Did you read our OPREP?”

  “And the other reports. You were lucky the Bahrainis took out that dhow before it got close enough to do some serious damage.”

  Dan controlled himself. Karnack was still listening; if Dan got emotional he wouldn’t be. “I’d like to respond to those points, sir?”

  “You’ll have your chance. The CINC told me this incident’s going to be the subject of a congressional investigation.”

  “Congressional,” the captain from COMIDEASTFOR repeated. “I can see a JAG Manual investigation. But bleeding Christ, sir, why congressional? There was no loss of life, no property damage—”

  The civilian said, “Same reason we investigated the Khobar Towers bombing. To find our security holes and fix them.”

  Dan said the major security hole was that he hadn’t been permitted to be ready to defend himself. The colonel started to interrupt, but Karnack gestured for him to speak.

  Dan recounted his initial arming of his patrols and the subsequent orders to pull the weapons off the boats. He’d also requested more security on the pier, but had been told that was a national, meaning local, responsibility. Finally, he recounted how when he got the call warning him a situation was developing, he’d requested permission to
respond preemptively but couldn’t get it through the chain of command. “I called away my security teams, armed the boats, and stationed one off my beam as a sanitizer. I sent the other one into the inner harbor under my inherent right of self-defense. As for the Bahrainis stopping the dhow—it was my men who identified it, neutralized it with fire, boarded, and prevented the last of the terrorists left alive from triggering it in the middle of the fishing fleet. And so far I haven’t heard any objection. If there hadn’t been a bomb aboard, though, I’d be hanging by my thumbs. Right?”

  “We’re guests in Bahrain,” the colonel said. “We’re guests here in Saudi, too. Arabs are very sensitive about their sovereignty. Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Even guests have the right to defend themselves. Especially if we’re here to protect the regimes hosting us.”

  “This is a bigger issue than you and your ship, Commander.”

  “I understand that, sir,” Dan said. “And I agree, I acted wrongly. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to refuse to stay in a port where the authorities knew a possibility of attack existed, without being permitted reasonable means of protecting my men and women.”

  The unspoken point being that Karnack had been responsible for those rules of engagement. From their expressions, he saw they understood, and didn’t like, what he was saying, spoken aloud or not.

  Karnack drew an invisible triangle on the tabletop with his fingernail. “Okay, we’ve cleared the air on that issue. Let’s move on. What I want to know is, is there anything new on the dhow’s crew, the weapons, who built the bomb? Who’s behind it, and who they’re linked to?”

  Hooker started to outline what they had, but Karnack cut him off with a shake of his head. “What I’m really interested in is this doctor figure. He sounds like the traveling mastermind, the outside expertise.”

  “He designs a hell of an interesting bomb,” the civilian said.

  “We’d like to know more about him, too,” Diehl said. He was the only person there who didn’t seem intimidated by three stars. He patted his paunch like an old dog. “Unfortunately, he’s disappeared. None of the captured plotters know who he is or where he went. At least, according to the SIS.”

  The civilian in the sport coat said, “We think he’s Egyptian, but currently based out of Sudan. He may be with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Sadat. So he’s probably been at this a while. He escaped across the causeway to Saudi in a light-colored 1992 Mercedes S-class.”

  “So that’s the Sudanese connection,” the captain said, looking enlightened.

  “How do you know that?” Hooker demanded. “The Bahrainis don’t know any of that, do they? Because they sure as hell didn’t tell us.”

  “He was traveling on a diplomatic passport.”

  “How do we know—”

  The civilian advisor drawled, “Don’t keep asking how we know. Ask what we know, then what it means. One last detail: it was a Saudi diplomatic passport.”

  Diehl whistled.

  The captain said, “If I could forge a diplomatic passport, I’d do it for someplace obscure, where no one could check on whether it was genuine—like, Sierra Leone.”

  “That’s right. Therefore, I don’t think it was forged,” the CIA man said.

  Diehl said, “You mean the Saudis are playing us both ways? Hosting us, but helping these guys attack us? Aisha—what do you think? Does the Moslem mind work that way? Mine sure doesn’t.”

  The black woman said coolly, as if, Dan thought, he hadn’t just insulted her whole religious community, “I would regard it as more likely that it was forged. We know this organization, whatever it is, has sophisticated capabilities.”

  Karnack got up. The military members bolted to their feet; the civilians simply looked up. The admiral said, “I’ve got to move on. But before I do, I’d like to get certain things clear with Captain Lenson here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dan said.

  “People tell me you have a rep for taking independent action. Pending the results of the investigation, you’re forbidden to move Horn inside Saudi territorial waters. Nor will you approach the Saudis or the Bahrainis in any way outside of official channels.”

  “I had no intention of—”

  “Don’t tell me your intentions. Listen to my orders. Any unauthorized action on your part will result in your instant relief. So you won’t take any. Am I crystal clear, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir, Admiral, you are.”

  “That goes for the Bahrainis, too,” Karnack said to Diehl.

  The civilian advisor said, “He’s saying the crime, the attempted crime, took place in their waters. The attack was launched from their streets. None of you—that goes for you NIS clowns, too—are going to try to solve it yourself.”

  With that the meeting seemed to be closed, or at least Karnack, the colonel, and the advisor left. Those who remained looked at each other, then, as one, began stowing away what cold water was left for the trip back.

  ON which, he found himself with Ar-Rahim and the intel captain in the second Suburban. They didn’t start the conversation. So he had to, or sit in silence all the way back to Manama. “You work with the Bahraini cops, don’t you? Ms. Ar-Rahim?”

  “To some extent.”

  “I heard the guys who actually ran the dhows were all Bahrainis.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No outsiders?”

  “All Bahrainis.”

  “So the only outsider was this doctor guy. I’m wondering what if anything’s going to get done about him.”

  “We’re continuing the investigation,” Ar-Rahim said.

  The captain said, “That’s the official answer. The unofficial one is: Probably not much, if he’s actually Saudi-sponsored.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  “You heard everything I just heard. As to doing anything about it, that gets decided at a lot higher level. This administration doesn’t like to strike back without a clearly identified guilty party. You were on that last launch from the Red Sea, weren’t you?”

  Dan nodded, remembering the missiles roaring away into the sandstorm. The captain said, “We already proposed a punitive strike against the Sudan. With Horn participating, for the public relations aspect. The ship they tried to blow up, striking back.”

  “My guys’ll be happy to smoke whoever tried to take us out.”

  “No they won’t, because it got turned down. It might lose us basing rights for the Southern Watch overflights.”

  “So we do—what?”

  “At most, they’ll try to get the Saudis, and maybe the Sudanese, though we don’t seem to have much leverage there, to cough this guy up. Which they probably won’t, based on their performance to date.”

  “There’ve been other bombings like this, haven’t there?” Ar-Rahim said.

  “Let’s talk about that in a secure location,” the captain said, and Dan figured what he meant was, not in front of Dan Lenson and the enlisted driver, since he couldn’t think of a more secure location to talk than in a huge SUV tearing across the desert at eighty miles an hour.

  But he was just the dumb ship driver who wanted to shoot first and ask questions later. But from now on, he was going to pay a lot more attention to security. Marchetti had been right. If the Machete hadn’t trained the boarding team and personally led them aboard the dhow, they might all be dust motes floating over the Arabian Peninsula now.

  He looked out the window and there was the dog again, or maybe not the same one, just another gaunt-ribbed starving-eyed pariah mutt. If you had to be a dog, Saudi Arabia was probably the worst place in the world to live.

  When they’d gotten back to Bahrain, and he was getting out, back inside the compound, the captain had leaned out and put his hand on his arm. “Karnack wasn’t joking,” he said.

  “I didn’t think he was.”

  “No independent action. You’ll get sailing orders tomorrow. Out of the Gulf, is my guess. You just go pla
y destroyer captain and let us handle the downstream effects. Copy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dan said, although being told again annoyed him. What did they expect him to do? Shell the Saudi coast? Launch a Tomahawk zeroed on the Kaaba?

  …

  HE was interrupted by Porter with a message responding to Naval Sea Systems Command’s request for a shipboard evaluation of the condition of the BLISS. BLISS—he’d forgotten what the acronym stood for—was the water spray system at the top of the stacks that cooled the exhaust plume to where an infrared seeker wouldn’t be able to home in on it. Or that was the theory. The reality was that spraying salt water on steel at eight hundred degrees resulted in such horrendous corrosion no one ever turned it on. He signed it and she went away. He sat alone again.

  But not for long, because the radio crackled, putting out the new foxtrot corpen, the carrier’s new flight course. The very first ship he’d ever served in had been run down and sunk by a carrier on a dark night not unlike this one. He didn’t want to repeat that experience. So he kept close tabs on the bigger ship’s relative motion.

  He was trudging out to make certain they’d pass clear when the radioman chief intercepted him. Dan read the message, then undogged the wing door. He thought about it when he was out there, watching the carrier’s sidelights and the pretty deck edge lights, which looked festive but actually filled him with dread, move slowly from starboard to port, then wink out as Horn followed her around.

  This time around, he’d be in tactical command. That was interesting.

  The message said Horn and Moosbrugger were detached effective 0200. Horn would be replaced on plane guard by Underwood. The two destroyers, now constituting a surface action group called Task Element 60.1.1, under command of CO Horn, would detach and proceed to an area bounded by the lines of 32 and 33 degrees north latitude, and the lines of 32 degrees and 32 degrees 30 minutes east longitude.

  The latitude figures told him the center of that area would be about a hundred and forty miles south of their current location. He looked out the window to see that the carrier was still where she’d said she’d be, then checked the big chart of the East Med, Gulf of Sollum to Isk-enderun, that was pinned down under a dim red light.