The Command

Devlin didn’t say anything. Marchetti got the message very loud: the only tough duty was whatever SEALs did. He didn’t buy it. He figured, him and Devlin, even money. But it wasn’t worth starting trouble over.

“It’s just buying votes,” Chesko said. “Fucking liberals, trying to brownnose the lezzbos. Like at the yard. We’re plowing billions into ship mods so they can sit down to pee while we’re scrubbing sonar upgrades because there’s no funding. How about you, Chief? When you gonna get them in the SEALs?”

The waitress came over to check on them. All three men watched her ass as she walked away. “We’ll never see them in special ops,” Devlin said. “I get a few at the range. Some of ’em can shoot. But that’s not all there is to it.”

Chesko said, “Take my advice, don’t let it start. I remember when they first put them on the tugs, my fuckup detector went off. Most of ’em was dykes, but if they got pregnant, they got a admin discharge automatic. That was bad enough, you train them and then they want out, so they forget to take their pill. But now, babysitting’s gonna be part of the defense budget. Like, they’re thinking, now the Russians are gone, we don’t have an enemy anymore, what do we need the military for?”

“We’ve got other enemies,” Devlin said.

“Sure, this is just a breathing space. But Slick Willy’s so hot to load us up with fruits and feminazis, sometimes I wonder if he’s actually trying to fuck us, so when the fucking Chinese land … Hey, I ain’t no dittohead.”

Marchetti said, “I like Rush all right. He’s got the right idea.”

“Well, he’s out there sometimes … but, like, one of my collateral duties, I get to escort people to the decommissionings and shit. Last week I get this female E-8, she’s bulging out to here in her maternity uniform. I still got scars from biting my tongue. I wanted to ask her what the fuck she was gonna contribute if war broke out the next day. And some guy probably’s still walking around a first class because of her.”

“It’s not gonna be good,” Marchetti said. “You can tell that already.”

“Ask any guy on the tenders. They’ll tell you, it’s a circus.” Chesko told a story about a salvage and rescue ship out of Little Creek whose CO got caught porking the ops officer in the backseat of a ship’s van the command chief had fixed up as a love wagon. “And even if they ain’t fucking themselves silly, one thing always made me respect a guy was, he went through the wickets to get what’s on his sleeve. All these split-tails got to do is keep showing up and they make rate. What kind of skipper you got this time?”

“Tough to tell,” Marchetti said, trying to think what kind of CO he had. He’d seen the guy at the change of command, then he came down to the chiefs’ mess, and then around the ship here and there. Actually a lot more often than he’d used to see Ross. “He’s got a shitload of sea time. And a Congressional for something he did in the Gulf. I don’t know what, but—”

“A Congressional?” said Devlin.

Chesko said, “I thought you had to be dead.”

“Well, this dude’s alive,” Marchetti said. “His wife’s some heavy hitter in D.C., too.”

“That why he got the ship?”

“Hey, fuck if I know, man.”

“What’s he think about the girls?”

“He probably don’t like it any better than we do.” Marchetti took his last bite and said through it, “It’s just not ever gonna be possible just to be a team, you know? There’s always gonna be the sex thing. No matter what. So that’s all she wrote for me, you know?”

Chesko said, looking at his plate, “You want those fries?”

Marty pushed back and told him no, go ahead. His old shipmate slopped catsup on them as the others looked on with the unspoken contempt of men who stayed in shape. “I know they can fly and all that shit, but one of these days we’re going to get mixed up with somebody who knows how to fight. They’re gonna get captured and raped and start ratting the other POWs out. Then, you watch, everybody’s gonna say, ‘Why didn’t the military tell us they were gonna get hurt?’ Hell, we already got ships that can’t sail because there’s too many of ’em knocked up to go to sea.”

Marty didn’t say anything, but Chesko was starting to irk him. Probably because he was putting the mouth on his ship.

Devlin glanced at his watch. “Ready?”

Chesko said he had to pony home to mama-san, give him a call before they deployed, they’d get together. Marty said yeah, they’d have to do that.

Walking to Devlin’s truck, Marchetti said, “I don’t know how much these melonheads are going to pick up in an afternoon. Or even if I’m going to keep too many of this bunch.”

“I see a couple you can lose without hurting anything.”

“I figure whatever they learn, it can’t hurt. We’ll just have to work at it.”

“Right,” said Devlin. He buckled the seat belt and adjusted it. Then squinted through the windshield. “But if you can get one thing across … Machete? That what he called you?”

“Yeah.”

“Your team. The mind-set.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’ve got to make a decision. Are you the hunter, or the prey?”

Marchetti said, “Okay.”