The Command

She picked up the phone and dialed the ID section of base security. The woman who answered had a singsong Puerto Rican accent. She checked the files again, for Achmed Khamis and also for the passport name, Al Shatar. Aisha heard a keyboard clicking. “Ma’am? Like I told the officer who called this morning, Mr. Khamis was discharged from base employ in June of last year. Mr. Al Shatar, we don’t got nothing under that name.”

She said thank you and hung up. Looked at the computer, as it chugged away revising its memory. Sometimes she wished she could do that. Erase images she didn’t care to keep.

Like blood and feces. The slippery feel of cerebrospinal fluid. She’d never seen violent death that close. Maybe that was why she couldn’t concentrate this morning.

The screen flickered, came back up with her familiar desktop. She wished there was some way she could put names into it, have it go away and search some worldwide database. But there wasn’t. Maybe in twenty years. Not now.

She sighed, pulled out the first background investigation, and went to work.

6

Cherry Point Operating Areas

Well before dawn but still unseasonably warm. Like every day so far this time out, three hundred miles off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Dan carried his coffee onto the wing as radios hissed and voices discorded, turning over the watch. Around him the night glittered with far-flung lights, the pulsing beacons of aircraft like itinerant stars. A new moon like a paring of machined titanium silvered the black and restless sea.

The Joint Task Force Exercise capped the outgoing Med and Mideast Forces’ predeployment training. The Blue Force was the Theodore Roosevelt battle group. The Red, or Opposing, Force, simulating a fictional opponent named Kartuna, consisted of the Mideast deployers, eked out with players out of the East Coast ports, and Canadian and German units as well. Their last exercise before leaving the States, and Dan hoped Horn showed up well before the lieutenant commander and two chiefs who’d boarded the day before to be their exercise observers — read, evaluators and graders, in the final report that would go up the chain of command.

The last two weeks had been a crescendo of eighteen-hour days. Revising the battle bills, conducting the underway engineering demo, cruise missile tactical qualification, last-minute school billets for the aircraft controllers, picking up the data transfer disks with the canned Tomahawk missions, and the thousand other tickets and wickets as their deployment date bore down.

A week ago, one of his officers had broken. The auxiliaries officer, a jaygee whose previous experience had been in fleet support ships. She not only didn’t know the plant, she had a bad habit of turning valves without following the Engineering Operating Sequencing System procedure. After the second sewage spill Dan had gotten her, Hotchkiss, and Porter together in his stateroom. Halfway through the counseling session she’d jumped up, crying, and run out. Dan had yelled out of his door, “Auxo, I’m not finished with you yet.” But the only answer had been a sob.

When he turned back, Porter had gone white. “Maybe I’d better go see what I can do.”

“There’s nothing you can do, Lin. If she can’t take a reaming, what’s going to happen when we have a main space fire, or major flooding? I want this lady off my ship by close of business.”

“That’ll end her career,” Hotchkiss said. Not disagreeing, just pointing it out.

“Then she’ll have to find another one,” Dan told her. “She may be a nice person. That’s not the point. If she clutches under pressure, she’ll kill her shipmates. I’d do exactly the same for a guy who reacted like that.” He waited. “Am I wrong? This is the time to tell me.”

And, at last, they’d both shaken their heads. And the next morning there’d been an empty bunk in Officer’s Country and a chief in charge of A division.

Yeah, he’d pushed everybody, and he wasn’t too popular just now. According to his grapevine, some of the wives were having dark thoughts about what their husbands were doing with female sailors aboard. As long as they didn’t write their congressmen … As for readiness, they’d flubbed several exercises in the workup phase, but had come back the next day after reorganizing and retraining deep into the night. But there were still too many glitches, errors, misheard communications, overlooked safety procedures.

The sun was heating the horizon from beneath like a torch under slowly reddening iron. He caught one of the phone talkers eyeing him through the window. The boy instantly looked away, but he straightened in the leather chair, trying not to look as wrung out as he felt.

“Ready for this, Captain?”

He and the observer/liaison shared sticky buns as the horizon brightened, as the sun suddenly squeezed up, like one of Niles’s Atomic Fireballs spit out by the puckered sea.

He hadn’t heard another word from Niles. Only silence from on high.