by David Poyer
By then, of course, those wounded whom Neilsen couldn’t save had died, and those who were going to recover were on the way. The final count had been eight dead among the ninety-plus who’d taken Gaddis into battle, counting among them Chick Doolan, Johnile Machias, Roy Compline, and Ben Engelhart.
Dan was still angry about the casualties. Intensely angry. But apparently those numbers had been acceptable to whoever had planned their equivocal and obscure mission.
It was perfectly obvious they’d all been expendable.
He suddenly became aware that the official had switched to English.
“… that the government of the United States has seen fit to transfer this notable addition to the Royal Thai Navy, for the purpose of extending our reach offshore and to police the continuing unrest in the Vietnam-Kampuchea area of the Indochinese subcontinent. It is with much gratitude on the part of the Thai people, government, and Crown that we accept the gift in the spirit in which it is offered.
“I will now introduce Daniel Lenson, commanding officer of USS Marcus Goodrich.”
Yes, he thought as he stood, they’d even disguised her name.
An interview with Jack Byrne had set him straight on his own responsibilities in the matter. Gaddis had never been north of the fifteen-degree line. What had happened in the South China Sea had never happened. Both Mellows and Vorenkamp, along with those lost in battle, had died in an action with a heavily armed Filipino extremist group off Mindanao. But Dan had presented a couple of non-negotiable demands of his own. Those surviving crew members who had not participated in the abortive revolt would get a step up in grade and their choice of assignment. The dead got posthumous Bronze Stars for their actions off “Mindanao” and the living wounded Purple Hearts.
Bobbie Wedlake had agreed to confidentiality; she had what she wanted, which she’d explained simply enough as “revenge.” Dan had driven her up to Bangkok, to catch her flight home.
The only other loose end was Juskoviac, who had survived the battle locked in his stateroom. Byrne had “persuaded” the exec to trade his silence for dismissal of any charges relating to inciting to mutiny, and a shore billet at a training command where he could navigate a desk with perfect safety to all concerned till a not-very-far-off mandatory retirement. Any objections the Thai government might have had to being accessories to such smoke and mirrors had been quelled by the gift of a much-needed frigate.
Byrne had seemed taken aback when Dan presented his after-action report but had accepted it, promising to forward it and the recommendations it contained to the appropriate authorities. He handed over in exchange an envelope containing Dan’s own orders, as Tomahawk targeting officer with the staff of the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command, in Mina Salman, Bahrain.
An envelope that remained in Dan’s briefcase now. They were interesting orders, he had to admit. He’d operated in the Gulf before, as exec of Van Zandt during the strike that had destroyed half the Iranian fleet. This assignment might be even more dangerous, if the offensive against Iraq, built up and planned over the last five months in Operation Desert Shield, was finally unleashed. Byrne had intimated that war was imminent and had recommended Dan get himself in top physical shape; despite his being assigned to a staff billet, it was possible he might see action ashore.
But they weren’t command at sea orders, and he doubted they could measure up to where he’d gone and what he’d done with the officers and men of USS Oliver C. Gaddis.
Since then workmen had swarmed over the ship, repairing damage, restoring her to her pre-Pakistani configuration. She was still not fully ready for sea, but there seemed to be considerable impetus to get him and his crew out of the country fast. He’d only had a couple of meetings with his relief, barely enough to brief him on the maneuvering characteristics of his new ship.
And now it was time to lay down the office he’d never really had. His first command, in a way, and he was pretty certain there’d never be another. Officially, he’d never really been her captain. But he knew better, and he felt sure the ship did, too. He could feel her behind him, a conscious presence in the flickering sunlight. As if she were listening, waiting to hear how he would salute her and how he would remember her.
He took the podium, looking down at the men standing at parade rest to his left. At Jim Armey, Chief Tosito, and the other wounded sitting in the front row. They were too shaky yet to stand in ranks, but he’d wanted them at the ceremony. At Usmani, grinning up in his brand-new blues. He was a U.S. Navy sailor now, and proud as hell.
“I will make my remarks short,” Dan said. “Not because I want to, but because I’ve been asked to.” Slight frowns, uneasy shifts behind him on the dais; yeah, they knew.
“So I will be brief. To the outgoing crew: You overcame a lot of obstacles, but you acquitted yourselves nobly. I’m proud to have served with you, and maybe we’ll run into each other again, down the road.
“To Captain Chandvirach and his men: Treat Bangpakong well, and she’ll come through for you. She’s a solid ship, a dependable ship. I wish you fair winds and following seas.”
There, that ought to be short enough. He turned to his relief, a tall man for a Thai, stiff and resplendent in whites and gold braid. He, too, would know the burden of command and the inestimable reward.
What was command? He knew now he had only glimpsed the edge of it … but he had glimpsed the edge.
If professionalism was responsibility for yourself, and placing duty before self, then command at sea was that, squared. It meant being responsible for others, and for placing their welfare over your own.
And yet more. He knew now that to lead contained a hard contradiction. It was to love those others to a degree surpassing self … and yet to be ready, if necessity so ordered, to place the mission before your career, your life, your men’s lives, and the very existence of your ship.
For that was why the people of the United States sent fleets out to the seas and straits of the planet: to have a sharp tool ready, against the hour of mortal need.
Command was not a reward. It was not a perk. It was not just another step in a career at sea. It was not a lark, though there were times when it held as deep a pleasure as he’d ever felt. For the first time, he’d found a task that demanded everything he had in him, every ounce of professional skill, every gram of courage, every grain of insight and patience, integrity and character, self-control and wisdom. He did not know if he would ever be called to it again. But he was glad to have been there, if only for a little while.
“I relieve you, sir,” said Chandvirach, lifting his hand briefly to his cap. Dan returned the salute, then reached out to shake the other man’s hand.
He said, “I stand relieved.”
BEIJING
THE swarthy, barrel-chested officer in blues sat watching the bare snow-dusted streets pass by. Pleasant as it was in summer, Beijing was a murderous post in January, with the Siberian winds keeping the temperatures somewhere between zero and minus thirty Centigrade. When the embassy Citation turned off Baishiqiao at North Circular Road, Jack Byrne flipped the collar up on his bridge coat. Stood for a moment on the pavement after he got out, looking around. It was a habit he’d picked up from years in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Take your time. Be aware of your environment. Always have an escape route.
When he felt secure, he followed the signs and the straggling crowd toward the exhibition hall.
Tonight’s event had not been scheduled in the reddish-gold blaze of the Forbidden City. The Youyi Binguan lay in the direction of the Summer Palace, but the “Friendship Guest House” had none of the suffocating late Qing ostentation of that resort of the final Manchu empress. It was not a “house,” either. The acres of hotel blocks, apartment blocks, auditoriums, and meeting halls, mostly of reinforced concrete, had been built in the 1950s to house Russian advisers and their families.
But at least, he reflected, it had not been “purified” with hammers during the Great Proletarian Cultural R
evolution.
The main exhibit hall was thronged with smiling Westerners and expressionless Chinese in uniforms and blue business suits. Banners proclaimed corporate allegiances above tables and booths: IDS, IBM, Wang, Hughes, Westinghouse, Lotus, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, GE, Lockheed, Oracle, Acme, Ventura, Compaq, Systems Bull, Osborne. A banner more enormous than all the rest together, hung from one side of the hall to the other, announced in English and French, Welcome to the Annual Beijing Computer-Electronics Exhibition.
Jack Byrne slowly took off his dark glasses, polished them, and slipped them inside his service dress blue blouse. He accepted a brochure from a Japanese woman wearing a Toshiba button, checked the schedule of events, and headed across the exhibition floor—Leading Edge, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe, MicroPro, XyQuest—and down a short hallway.
The reception room was considerably more luxurious, and warm enough that he could leave his coat at the check table. Buffet tables held a selection of California delicacies, and older men clustered around them and around a small bar. On second glance, he saw they were staring at a television behind it. The set was connected to an astonishingly small satellite dish, not much bigger than the serving plate he held in his hand. A placard behind it; some vendor had had the bright idea of setting up in here. As he approached, he saw it was tuned to CNN. Wolf Blitzer was holding forth, interspersed with images of a darkened city naked under the night sky. Streams of tracers clawed skyward, the gunners groping desperately for an enemy that eluded their grasp with ease.
He recognized it. Baghdad, reprised images from the opening of the Desert Storm air war, the night before.
He was holding a plastic-stemmed glass of sudashui when he saw the cherub-faced man in gray civilian suit smoking a cigarette near the buffet. He glanced around, then drifted toward him.
“Admiral Mi. Nice to see you, sir.”
The Chinese blinked. “Captain Byrne.”
“Your aide’s not with you?”
“I don’t take him everywhere,” Mi said. His eyes slid past Byrne, toward the buffet table. The attaché turned gracefully, suggesting with his body that they proceed in that direction, but the admiral did not stir.
Instead Mi nodded toward the screen. “Have you been watching CNN?”
“The bombing of Baghdad. Very impressive.”
“Saddam depends too much on Soviet-style weaponry. No one will make that mistake again. The technological supremacy of the West is quite clear now.”
Mi’s face had hardened as he spoke, watching the images of a heavily armed but helpless city. Suddenly he swung away, toward the bar. Byrne glanced round again and followed him. But halfway there the senior officer swung his bulk sideways and stopped. He and a bald husky European in a blazer exchanged several sentences in German. Byrne waited patiently, smiling, till Mi was free again, then said, “I understand the South Sea Fleet was recently engaged off Hainan.”
Mi’s eyes flickered, but only for a microsecond. He said evenly, “Only certain elements of that fleet, deployed on a peaceful mission. They were treacherously attacked, without warning, and the survivors abandoned with great cruelty and loss of life.”
“Tragic. Any idea who was responsible?”
“Pirates.”
“Pirates! How terrible. I have heard they are a serious problem in certain quarters of the China Sea.”
“They have been for many centuries,” said Mi. The Chinese attendant had a drink waiting when he reached the bar. The admiral devoured it in one bite.
“What is the Chinese Navy’s view of that incident?”
“Of the incident off Hainan?”
Byrne nodded. Mi turned his eyes away, then back. “We must suppress these bandits of the sea,” he said at last. “All of them. They threaten us all.”
Byrne looked slowly around at the chattering salespeople, at the banners touting faster RAM chips and Ethernet connectivity. “You know, it’s all too easy to believe commercial interests are all that matters to the West,” he said. “But that’s not the whole story.”
“You first came to China as pirates,” said Mi.
“We came in many roles, as I understand it,” said Byrne. “As pirates and adventurers, certainly, but also as traders, as missionaries, as those genuinely extending the hand of friendship. I can imagine it must have been difficult for the rulers of those days to distinguish among them. To sort out those who merely wanted to profit, with no thought beyond that, from those who had more fundamental interests and would defend them. All the more so since their governments, too, did not always convey a consistent attitude.”
Mi nodded thoughtfully, lighting another cigarette. He said nothing more, simply staring at the screen, so after a moment Byrne excused himself and got a drink, now that the business of the evening was over, now that he’d made the point he wanted to make.
For just a moment, holding a pale golden wine, he allowed himself to wonder if it had been worth it. He knew not only what Mi knew—National Security Agency intercepts of certain transmissions after the sinking of the cruiser had made interesting reading—but he knew also what those higher officers to whom he himself reported thought. He knew their doubts as to whether the mission might succeed and their caution in dissociating themselves from any hint of official sponsorship.
He nodded slowly, realizing Mi had said the right things. Very cautiously, he allowed himself to hope that the message had been received. But he also knew what all diplomats learned sooner or later: that no message ever meant to the hearer exactly what the sender intended. What the oligarchs of the New China made of this one remained to be seen. But it had been transmitted. Until matters developed further, his responsibility, and that of the U.S. Navy, could be considered at an end.
Only time would tell if the game had been worth the candle, or if history and politics and the ineradicable streak of something not quite sane in the human heart meant a titanic struggle still lay ahead. He himself did not believe in inevitable conflicts. He hoped what they’d done had pushed the possibility of this one a little further away.
Drinking off the rather-too-sweet wine, he grimaced and set the glass down. And a moment later, lost himself in the crowd.
Read on for a sneak preview of David Poyer’s next exciting book
BLACK STORM
Now available from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
1
0100 18 FEBRUARY 1991: THE SAUDI DESERT
No one spoke after the helicopter lifted off. There wouldn’t have been any point, even if they’d wanted to; the engine noise was deafening. The deck shuddered, tilting as the pilot pulled into a hard bank. Beyond the windshield, beyond the open doors where crewmen sat hunched over the pintle mounts for the M60s, impenetrable night hurtled by as they gathered speed.
The winter of the war was cold and rainy, the worst in thirty years. The desert stars had been sealed off for days by an overcast that opened now and again to loose spatters of sooty, oil-smelling, dust-gritty rain over the half million men who waited, scattered far and wide across the western desert, for the word to go.
The helo steadied, dropping till it hurtled onward barely a hundred feet above the desert.
Seven dark figures lay tumbled together in the crew compartment, where they’d hauled themselves in during the thirty seconds the Navy Combat Search and Rescue HH-60 had touched down at the pickup point. The compartment was too low to stand up. There weren’t any seats, just bare aluminum-walled space lit by faint green lights to port and starboard. Their camouflage uniforms had no rank insignia and no unit patches. They lay on top of their gear and rucks and weapons and each other, mingled like a composite organism that had only just begun to gain consciousness of itself.
The pilot tilted his head back, peering beneath his night vision goggles when a brilliant line of evenly spaced blue-white lights lifted over the horizon. The pipeline road stretched parallel to the border twenty-five miles north. It was lit all night long. Both lanes were filled with double columns of tanker trucks and
tank transporters heading slowly west. The lights passed beneath them, and fell quickly aft. As darkness retook the world he looked through the goggles again. And suddenly the scene shifted from inchoate and unrevealing darkness to a strange green-on-black world of barren sand-ridges and blasted wadis, a dry undulating sea of sand and sand and sand, and close above it the haloed green flare, pulled from the deep infrared by the circuitry of the heavy goggles, of the hot exhaust of another larger aircraft.
The black helicopter ahead was an Air Force Pave Hawk bird. It had better avionics and weapons, including a sophisticated terrain-avoidance radar, but the Navy helo had better navigation. The pilot tracked it through the NVGs, rising when it rose, dropping when it dropped. When he had the rhythm he said softly into the intercom, “Team leader, you on the line yet? Slap a cranial on him, Minky.”
“Six team leader on the line,” said a voice. “This the pilot?”
“Welcome aboard, I’m your taxi driver tonight. Crawl up here and tell my copilot where you want to go.”
A faint green light clicked on, focused on an air chart. Across the lower quarter a dotted stripe zagged from left to right, gradually angling down. North of it was a series of carefully hand-drawn threat circles. They grew denser and more closely spaced toward the top of the chart, and many of them overlapped.
A gloved finger reached out and pressed a point west of a blue-tinted scatter of lakes and marshland. It was covered by two of the circles, which marked the location and effective radius of Iraqi antiair missile batteries.
After a moment the copilot said, “I was afraid that’s where you wanted to go.”
“What is this, sir? You were at the briefing, weren’t you?”
“I’m just pulling your chain. Just making sure we’re on the same sheet of music.”
“Just get us there,” said the team leader.
