The Command

The SEAL said, squinting into the sun, “I say that having been in a few gunfights. Remember, a lot of the guys you’ll go up against, they’ve never had to take on a real opponent. Don’t be afraid of them. Let them be afraid of you.”

“Got it,” Marty said.

“You’re going to make mistakes. You might even get shot. But as long as you’re still shooting back, you’re not dead. And even if you die, if you’ve trained him right, the guy behind you will win.” Devlin looked at him level. “If you can pass that on to your team, you’ll be okay.”

He nodded.

“Ready for the Killing House?”

And Marty Marchetti said yeah, he was ready to strap it on.

4

Off the Virginia Capes

Some weeks later Dan was in his at-sea cabin, just behind the J bridge, talking to Lieutenant Herbert T. Camill.

“The Camel” was the operations officer, one of the department heads. He’d grown up in Muncie and gotten an NROTC commission at Ball State. His shaved head glowed in the overhead light. He spoke ver … y … slow … ly, with pauses not just between words but within them. They’d been out to sea every week since the change of command, and every time Camill went on the net, Dan itched to snatch the handset away from him. But he’d come with a solid recommendation from Tactical Action Officer School. He also had a full multiwarfare drill schedule planned, set to start slow and peak with the joint task force exercise. This morning Camill was briefing him about Evinrude, the electronic surveillance package they’d take to the Mideast with them.

As soon as the Camel left, the phone trilled. Hotchkiss, was he free? Dan said sure, wondering why the exec always called first. He’d told her his door was open twenty-four-seven. As long as he lived aboard, and they had so much ground to make up. “Meet you on the bridge,” he told her. They were making their approach to the Capes, and he liked to be on hand when they were in sight of land.

One of the electronics technicians was coming aft as he went forward. “Petty Officer Leatherbury,” Dan said.

“Morning, sir.”

“Tweaking the TACAN?” A radar beacon that friendly aircraft could use to home in on the ship.

“The new board’s in, she’s doing good now, sir.”

“How about those fifty-cals?”

“Fired them again yesterday, sir. Still rusty on what to do when it jams, though.”

He was working his way through the crew. Five or ten minutes with each man. Something Chief Woltz said Ross had never bothered to do, that he hadn’t even seemed to know some of the chiefs. Dan felt he owed it to the men he served with to at least know their names. To know a little about each one, where he was from, if he had a family, what he hoped for from his time in the navy.

He tried to use those minutes to get his own message across, too. That admin inspections and meticulous cleanliness were less important now than honing combat skills, firefighting, and damage control. That everyone aboard would qualify with the pistol, rifle, shotgun, and fifty-caliber machine gun, no matter what their job on the watch, quarter, and station bill.

In fact, he’d been unpleasantly surprised, looking over the records with Hotchkiss, to see that although their deployment date was rapidly bearing down on them, his crew wasn’t fully trained.

He couldn’t pull Ross’s famous first envelope on this one. It wasn’t his predecessor’s fault. Cut past the bone on personnel and operating funding, the navy had pulled its training cadre out of Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo experience dreaded, suffered, and valued afterward by generations of sailors — isolated weeks of grinding training, varied by nights on the gun line in case the Cubans came through the wire — was no more. These days, the Afloat Training Group did an assessment, identifying areas the command needed to focus on. The ships did tailored training in home port, finishing with a battle problem. The up side was, it cost less. The down side was, the ship ended up training itself. In Horn’s case, with the women joining either from noncombatants or straight from boot camp, the learning curve would be even steeper.

Together with the problems in engineering, he’d even thought of reporting to Aronie that Horn couldn’t meet her sailing date. It might not end his career, considering he’d just taken over. But he’d decided not to — yet.

So when he spoke to each man or woman, he laid the problem in front of them. Along with his solution: to go to full-time training, every possible day under way, and a final battle problem refereed by observers. This would cut down on time with their families. But he owed it to those families to bring them back. And last, he told them that if things really went to hell, the women would be just as much on the line as the men. So instead of bitching about them, they’d all better help train them. He’d backed up the one-on-ones with a shakeup of the watch bills, to make sure everyone knew a new era was here.

There was grumbling about things like actually setting Condition