by David Poyer
A messman brought in aluminum trays. Italian day: caesar salad, spaghetti and meatballs, cheese, tomatoes, fresh hot bread with crunchy crust, butter in ice. Everything was piping hot, and as soon as it hit the table the chiefs dug in like starving wolves, hardly talking, though perhaps his presence cast a pall.
The U.S. Navy was built on its chief petty officers. The sobering thing was that now, when he looked around, their faces seemed unmarked, young, nearly childlike. Only Tausengelt was Dan’s age, and compared to the E-7s, the master chief looked ancient as lava. Did he look that old too? Was he the Old Man in fact as well as in name?
He asked Grissett, “Chief, how’s our binnacle list?”
“The, uh, crud seems to’ve slacked off, sir. Maybe getting out of that fucking dust helped.”
“It knocks you down for a long time. You feel like lying down every couple of minutes,” Zotcher said. The little sonar chief, who looked like Doenitz, had always struck Dan as less than a hard worker. He’d actually caught the guy asleep on watch, though he’d pleaded illness, and kept finding reasons to mention it. But Zotcher had taken a bullet for the ship when the former exec had cracked, started waving a pistol and threatening people in CIC. “We headed for Hormuz, Captain?”
“Waiting for word. But get your people ready for shallow-water work. And some strange currents.”
“That’s what’s giving us this fog. The Ekman Spiral. A monsoon phenomenon, east of Socotra. The southwest winds push the surface water offshore. The cool water comes up from below. You get boundary layer saturation and fog and low stratus development. Extending the mixed layer, and pushing the thermocline down.”
Dan nodded, registering its impact on possible submarine detection ranges. “Be there in two days, at flank speed,” Van Gogh said. The quartermaster.
The ship’s channel was rebroadcasting a baseball game. “Who’s playing?” Dan asked.
“Orioles and Tigers.”
“Wait a minute. How the heck are we getting that?”
Donnie Wenck said, through a mouthful of meatballs, “Pulled it off a commercial satellite. There’s some DC-2 encryption you got to unscramble, but—”
“Captain don’t need to know that,” Tausengelt put in.
“I didn’t hear a word,” Dan said, helping himself to the pasta.
He was here to smooth whatever feathers were ruffled from his mast case. To eat with them, signal that he stood with them.
A smart CO led less by barking orders than by building a consensus. The wardroom was the most directly responsive to the commander, as might be expected. The crew seldom acted as a unit, or felt as a unit; but when it did, the mood was usually negative, and meant a skipper was in a death spiral unless he could pull out fast. The chiefs were always supportive of the command, unless the CO was seriously off the rails; but their commitment could be grudging, especially if they felt their position was threatened.
Which Amy Singhe had been doing, establishing a no-chiefs policy on her discussion groups. Dan had heard her talking to Matt Mills, Hermione Henriques, and the other midgrade officers. She was brilliant, but she seemed to believe the business-school methods she’d learned at Wharton could be transplanted intact to the Navy. That cooperative work groups outperformed hierarchies. That technology could dispense with middle management.
Her article in Defense Review had been scathing. It had taken courage to publish it. That, he could admire. And the Navy needed shaking up. But when it came to specifics, what a modern naval organization might look like, the piece had been vaguer. He’d come away with a fuzzy picture of strong, wise commanders, and maybe execs, and apparently the rest of the ship at more or less the same level; skilled, certainly, but without much required in the way of leadership.
But what happened when strong-willed sailors didn’t want to cooperate? When “digitally mediated work circles” were disrupted by fatigue, troubled individuals, casualties, battle damage, death? He didn’t believe tradition was sacrosanct. But he was leery of throwing it overboard without a more convincing case than he’d seen so far.
The chiefs exclaimed in disgust at the play on the screen, pulling him back to the messroom. He sighed.
“Ice cream, Captain?”
“No thanks, Red, I’m trying to stay in my size 32s.” He glanced at his watch and rose. “Better get back, I guess … see if we got that message yet.”
He didn’t notice, as he eased the door closed, that he’d left his cap behind.
* * *
HE reigned on the bridge for an hour, then went down to his sea cabin to try to nap again. His throat was scratchy. He read a few more pages of the book he’d picked up at the Navy Lodge in Norfolk and taken along. He hadn’t made much progress, but it was gradually pulling him in. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. But all too soon his eyelids were sagging, and he switched the light off at last.
* * *
FOR once, no one called him, and when he finally regained consciousness he blinked into the dark, confused. His watch said five but he wasn’t sure if it was morning or evening, local or Zulu. Finally he clicked the reading light on: 1700, by the twenty-four-hour clock on the bulkhead.
Afternoon, then. He pulled on coveralls, went down two decks to CIC, and worked at his command desk for a while. Caught up on his e-mail, though nothing was super hot. Anything flash came up hard copy, hand-carried. Routine material was scanned automatically in Radio for key words and routed on the ship’s network. He also had a secure intership high-level chat function at his battle station.
He was there when an update scrolled up. A Republic of Korea frigate had been hit by a torpedo, or possibly a mine, in the South China Sea. He came to attention in his seat and searched for a name. Hoping it wasn’t Chung Nam, wasn’t Commander Hwang or Captain Hung or Commodore Jung. They’d hunted the tiger together, when SATRYE 17 had turned from an exercise into a live-fire barrier operation. He didn’t get a name for the ship, but the Chinese premier, Zhang Zurong, had issued a statement: China would defend its ally, North Korea, against Western aggression.
* * *
TOPSIDE the rain-laden clouds were darker, the squalls passing north and south of them. The wet decks gleamed like varnished lead. A huge chemical tanker was passing, looming through the patchy mist, then fading back into it. More contacts stretched behind it on the radar, lined up to enter the IRTC like airliners stacked up to land. Van Gogh was the officer of the deck. Dan had only reluctantly approved the quartermaster chief as one of his OODs, but so far, he hadn’t done badly. He and Dan and Matt Mills, the operations officer, discussed the Somali Current, which hit six knots just a few miles east of here.
“If we get orders north, we can ride it up and save fuel,” Mills said. Tall, blond, good-looking enough to star on the cover of a steamy romance, he’d been loaned to Savo from the squadron staff. The loan seemed to have become permanent, and Dan had slotted him in as ops when he’d bumped Staurulakis up to exec.
“So far, they just want us at the eastern entrance to the IRTC.”
“Why, when most of the pirate activity’s farther west? Shouldn’t we be edging that way?”
Dan nodded rather grumpily. “Yeah, but we don’t want to anticipate commands. If there’s a piracy event to the west, it could take us too long to get there.”
Someone cleared his throat behind them. “Captain?”
When he turned, the radioman presented the clipboard with the red-and-white-striped cover sheet. “Flash message, Skipper.”
It was from CTF 150. The news he’d expected. The Iranians had announced the strait was closed. But not to commercial vessels and tanker traffic, their usual assertion.
Their diplomatic note quoted the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and argued the Iranian position with fine logic. It even agreed that Hormuz was open to transit passage, which permitted warships to cruise through territorial waters, as long as they remained within an area used for international navigation. The Iranians, though, stated that the UN
CLOS-protected right of passage could legally apply only to nations that were actually party to UNCLOS.
The United States had never signed. Therefore, though it wasn’t stated explicitly, it was implied that U.S. warships could enter the Gulf only after securing permission from Iran.
There was more to it, Dan was sure. And the diplomats were no doubt arguing the fine print. But as it stood, the declaration was tantamount to closing the Persian Gulf to the United States Navy, unless it stood hat in hand at the door. Since there was no other force capable of countervailing power in the region, that meant Iran would hold 50 percent of the world’s energy traffic hostage.
National Command Authority—meaning, no doubt, Ed Szerenci—had decided to send a high-value unit through to assert the right of passage. Savo would be relieved on station by an Italian frigate, and rendezvous with USS Mitscher off Hormuz. Dan would take command of both ships as commander, Task Group 151.7.
He scribbled his initials, and lifted his gaze to find both Staurulakis and Mills regarding him. “Read this, Cheryl?”
“Yessir. It doesn’t say so, but this will be an opposed transit.”
“I agree. Essentially, a combat operation,” Dan said. “I know we’ve been training hard, but if there’s anything remaining to spin up or tune, we’ve got forty-eight hours. Chief Van Gogh! As soon as we’re clear of this next guy, come to a course for the rendezvous and kick us up to full. Cheryl, set a meeting, mess decks, twenty hundred. Brief the weather, course in, choke points, enemy order of battle, the whole schmear. I want everybody to know exactly what kind of hornet’s nest we’re sticking our head into.”
“I’d like to convene a combat systems working group before that,” the exec murmured as the bridge started to bustle. “Maybe have Amy chair it, as strike officer—”
”Make it so,” Dan said. “Weps, Strike, Wenck, Terranova, whoever else Singhe needs. Schedule a damage-control locker inventory too. Have the chief engineer see me as soon as possible. The last fuel state I heard was 82 percent. Cheryl, draft a reply, asking for an unrep before we go in. I want to be above 90 percent when we hit Hormuz.”
The duty quartermaster said from the nav console, “Course to rendezvous, zero-two-eight true.”
“Where will you be, sir?” said the exec, head down over her BlackBerry. “CIC?”
Dan nodded as the 21MC said, “Bridge, Combat: Skunk Oscar bears zero-five-five, range seven thousand yards. Closest point of approach, close aboard to port. Recommend come right to zero-nine-zero.”
“Shit,” Van Gogh muttered. Dan stood back as he dipped his face into the hood. When the chief lifted it he said, “That’s gonna take us way to the south, when we need to come northeast. Okay if I cut left in front of him, Cap’n?”
Dan glanced out the window. Nothing but fog, sewn by dancing silver needles of rain. “As long as you put on enough speed.” Crossing in front of an oncoming contact was frowned on, but warships had enough reserve power and maneuverability that some risk could be accepted. “But keep a close eye on him.”
Mills hit the 21MC. “Bridge, Combat, coming left to cross Oscar’s bow. Putting on power to get across expeditiously. CO concurs.”
“Combat, aye,” said the watch team supervisor, sounding doubtful.
He’d intended to go below and start getting read in for the linkup, but lingered. Both Mills and Van Gogh had their binoculars leveled out the window as the wipers flailed like dying cicadas. The light was dimming as the monsoon sealed off the sky like wax on a jar of preserves. The whole Indian Ocean would be this way for months: high winds, mist, heavy seas, rain.
What would it be like at Hormuz? If it was this socked in, he’d have trouble detecting, much less engaging, the small craft the Iranians stationed there. The Navy had war-gamed their tactics. In some games, the Red side had won. In others, American firepower had mowed them down like infantry advancing against Maxims in the Somme. Success or failure mainly depended on how closely the attacks could be sortied from different ports and concentrated on a single, though in this case moving, schwerpunkt: the U.S. penetration.
The rain increased still more, drumming on the overhead, sheeting the windows. The wipers labored, but didn’t help much. The junior officer of the deck was off to starboard, binoculars aimed into the fog. Dan glanced that way. “See him yet?”
“No sir.”
“Radar range?”
“Four thousand,” Van Gogh said from the repeater. “Good strong return. Big guy, but we’ll pass at least a thousand yards in front of him.”
“Confirm that, Combat?”
The CIC phone talker spoke into his chest-mounted set as Dan paced the length of the bridge. Not a distance he was comfortable with, but acceptable in the interests of getting up north without delay. If for some reason they had an engine glitch, and Savo had experienced occasional shorting in the engine controls, he could still angle left and open the range.
The Iranians had learned from their last clash with the Navy, when their major units had been wiped out. The Pasdaran had married suicidal commitment, light missiles, and mass wave tactics to reach for an asymmetrical advantage over the numerically inferior Americans. Dan could appreciate why Savo had been chosen to lead the transit. Aegis was designed to track hundreds of small, fast-moving targets. She could reach out hundreds of miles, but her close-in defenses were dense and prickly as well: the automatic five-inches, Harpoon, and last, Phalanx, for any leakers. His EW team could decoy and jam most missiles.
The real question wasn’t capability. It was magazine capacity. Reduced, in his case, by the fact that so many of his cells were filled with BMD-optimized Block 4s. Given enough numbers, any defense could be overwhelmed. He couldn’t help thinking of Thermopylae. Isandlwana. The Little Big Horn. And Savo Island’s namesake battle, where the Navy had been surprised, outnumbered, and outfought.
He didn’t want to add the Battle of the Strait of Hormuz to that list.
“Forward lookout reports: large ship, bow on, one-three-zero relative,” the talker said.
Dan and Van Gogh went out on the starboard wing and huddled for shelter in the pilothouse corner, lifting their binoculars like a synchronized team. The rain-fog seethed past like fine grist from some gigantic mill. “There it is,” the OOD said.
Dan steadied the glasses as a gray form took shape. The bow loomed high over Savo’s pilothouse. A bulbous bow pushed up a taut green bulge of sea, which broke as it washed aft into a seethe of vanilla-ice-cream foam. An ultralarge tanker—no, ore carrier—bound, probably, for the furnaces of Germany. Christ, it looked close … though that might just be the fog. He slid the ring of the pelorus to bisect the bow. Watched tensely for a second, then blew out. The angle was drawing right. Savo would clear the oncoming behemoth by a comfortable margin, just as the management console’s plot had predicted.
“One blast?” Van Gogh asked.
This signaled that Savo intended a starboard-to-starboard passage. Dan nodded and the horn droned out its incredibly long, incredibly loud note. Seconds later, an even deeper, more prolonged monotone answered.
“Combat’s getting a second return,” the CIC talker said, out of nowhere.
“Say again?” Van Gogh snapped, wheeling around.
Fighting a sudden shortness of breath, Dan snapped his binoculars to his face again but saw only seething silver mist, and the fog moisture had built on his objectives. He dried them hastily on the sleeve of his coveralls. When he got them back up, the tanker’s bow was centered, aimed directly at them. But even as he watched, it continued to drift aft, seeming to rotate slowly as Savo emerged on its starboard side.
The junior officer’s near shriek from inside the pilothouse broke the stillness. “Another contact! Behind it!”
The rain fell harder, solid roaring sheets, soaking them, obliterating even the sea. But just for a second, Dan had made out a dim spark through the falling dusk. And the faintest shadow. Close behind the ore carrier, but smaller, another ship had pull
ed out to the right of the inbound channel, as if intending to pass the bigger vessel ahead, and was coming up on its quarter. But the huge mass of steel and ore between it and Savo had masked its radar return.
“All ahead flank!” he shouted. Van Gogh shouted it at exactly the same moment, as if they’d rehearsed. But Dan barely noticed. His brain raced. Rain blasted his face. The spark winked out, and the silhouette faded. But, to judge by its relative motion, it and Savo would arrive at the same point on the surging sea at the exact same moment.
He shuddered, suddenly gripped by a perverse apathy. For a second he seemed to hear voices, lifted on the wind. Screams. Dear God, no. It could not happen again.
“Hard right rudder!” Van Gogh shouted, and Dan, at the same instant, yelled, “Belay that. Belay that! Hard left rudder. Emergency ahead flank! Belay your reports! Hard left rudder.”
The bridge babbled with a cacophony of shouts, through which the helmsman’s clear tenor penetrated, calm as an accountant. “My rudder is left hard, sir. Passing zero-one-zero. Engines ahead emergency flank.”
Dan breathed out. Van Gogh’s instinctive response had been to keep to his original course. Try to fit the cruiser between the two oncoming ships. It might have worked, but he suspected not. His way was more prudent, but they still weren’t out of the woods. “Very well. Combat, are we clear out at two-seven-zero? JOOD, port side, binoculars.”
”Passing zero-zero-zero … rudder hard left. No course given.”
The squall slacked. He raised his glasses again, focusing on the emerging slate-gray bow of a smaller ship, ro-ro or containership. Yes, there were the boxes piled high, the colors washed pastel pale by the fog that writhed around them. He bent to the bearing ring. Zero-five-four. Savo heeled into her turn, ten thousand tons of aluminum and steel leaning and straining as the plowing rudders levered it around, as centrifugal force tilted the deck and things started to slide.
