The Command

When he’d started out, a captain fought his ship from the bridge. Now destroyer COs fought from Combat. Dan intended to spend the bulk of his time here, at least until he was satisfied Camill could defend the ship in his absence. Directly in front of him the TAO was working the radar repeaters and radios and the blue screens of the

* * *

Jots, the Joint Operational Tactical System, like a croupier on a heavy night. He was drinking coffee with one hand, tapping at a keyboard with the other, and carrying on two different conversations over the air while reporting over his shoulder to Dan about a generator bearing failure light the helo said just came on. Dan told him to bring him back in, get the generator checked out.

“Sir, OPFOR commander wants to know why we’re not moving out there at flank speed.”

“Let me talk to him.” Dan informed Hotel Juliet, the Red Force commander, about the trouble light and promised he’d be proceeding north at flank speed as soon as his aircraft was secure on deck.

Sitting back again, one segment of his consciousness monitoring the sputter of speech and the jerky prance of digital symbology, another reflected on how free-form and inchoate operations at sea seemed now. The navy had once moved across the face of the planet in great ordered formations. At Armageddon battle groups would march in great phalanxes into the northern waters of the USSR, while submarine fleets collided north of the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap. Flag officers had plotted strategy that stretched across time zones, and commanding officers followed written orders and stayed in their sectors.

Now Blue and Red and merchant traffic interpenetrated, zones overlapped, no identity was certain. Chaos had been loosed on the deep.

Camill, interrupting his increasingly gloomy thoughts. “Sir, prefire brief complete, safety walk-through complete, we’re ready to start.”

“Make it so,” Dan said.

* * *

Of four attacking aircraft, Horn splashed one. The designators reacted slowly and had trouble keeping the radars on the targets. The combat direction system dropped track while they were being passed from the consoles. The automatic tracking systems either failed or were applied haphazardly. When the hits started fires, the repair parties reacted hesitantly and probably would have passed out from smoke inhalation because their masks didn’t fit right. The main space fire drill and mass casualty drills dissolved into confusion and recrimination. They were even less ready for chemical attack.

* * *

Nineteen hundred in the wardroom. Officers, chiefs, tactical petty officers held up the bulkheads, nodding with fatigue. They presented weather, equipment status, operations, intelligence, and rules of engagement. They discussed Q-routes and frag orders. The observer-liaison reminded them of the data collection requirements, sheets that had to be filled out hour by hour so that after the exercise ended their tactics could be graded.

* * *

Twenty-three hundred. He tossed in his at-sea cabin, tormented by dreams. They switched between his father and the Mukhabarat torturer named Major al-Qadi. The dream was bad enough. But then he came to the part where they doused Sergeant Zeitner with fuel and set him on fire. It was that, the smell of oil and flame, that jerked him awake.

Only to remember, sweating, staring into the darkness, it hadn’t been a dream. And that he himself had not been as brave as Zeitner. He didn’t deserve the decoration he wore, or the respect.

He lay with palms blanking his eyes, denying, minute by minute, the voice in his heart that told him to take the pistol out of his safe and make the guilt and terror stop. He kept telling himself this voice lied, that it was trauma, stress, the aftermath of torture. But he didn’t believe it.

It came to him with dreadful certainty that he was going to do something irreversible. Shoot himself, or go mad, or pull up the dogging bar on the watertight door next to his bank and step out into the dark sea.

The bridge buzzer went off beside his ear, and his whole body jerked. He grabbed it and half barked, half moaned, “Captain.”

The officer of the deck said they had a contact at eight thousand yards, closing, with a closest point of approach of two hundred yards. He stepped into his pants and got to the bridge barefoot to find it coming in fast on his port bow, a containership or cruise liner, much larger than Horn, a huge and confusing array of white and red lights that made no sense to the eye. The little Furuno radar was obviously not giving correct courses. Combat seemed to be tracking not the ship he was looking at, but another ten degrees off and fifteen thousand yards away. He could not slow his engines, the reflex action in a serious and quickly worsening situation; another contact was following them close astern to starboard, reducing their maneuvering room to zero, unless he cared to cut across the steadily nearing ship’s bow.