The Command

And to his horror, faced with the necessity for immediate action, his mind did not respond. He seemed to be back in the dream, suspended, yet at the same instantly conscious of others around him waiting for orders.

Inside his skull seethed dazzling white pain and the smell of burning fuel.

He put his hands out in the darkness, groping, and felt cloth. His shaking fingers dropped to the knobbed controls of a radar repeater. He leaned forward, hammering his knuckles into them over and over. Till the pain penetrated the milling turmoil of what passed for his mind. He took a deep breath. Then another.

At last, though he could not have said from where, an order occurred to him. He gave it. Then another.

He escaped by putting all engines on the line and accelerating out of the closing jaws. But as he walked aft on trembling legs, seeing blood drip black from his hands in the red passageway light to explode inky ellipses on the buffed and slanting tile, Dan Lenson reflected with utter cold lucidity that the greatest danger to USS Horn might be the tormented brain of her commander.

* * *

The exercise peaked the next day in an intense swirling battle that had no clear front and no clear development and no clear outcome, except that everyone seemed to be getting clobbered. Hostiles, neutrals, unknowns popped up, seethed, and vanished between the imaginary landmasses. Cruise missiles from nowhere blitzed Theodore Roosevelt. Two Red Force units were sunk by air strikes, one by surface-to-surface missiles, two more by Blue submarines, while Blue suffered from mines in the approaches to Kartuna City and from land-based missiles while transiting the straits. As far as he could judge, if the referees hadn’t kept “reconstituting” sunken ships and shot-down aircraft, the exercise would have ended after the first hour with the destruction of every unit from both sides. Horn was hit over and over, and the observers imposed casualty after casualty as the day went on: missile strikes forward, midships, and aft, class A fire in supply berthing, class A fire in the admin office, flooding in Aux One, flooding in the Mount 51 passageway, class B oil fire in main engine room number two, flooding in shaft alley, electrical power failure forward, ruptured firemain piping. On and on till the crew slumped glassy-eyed to the decks.

It was a sobering foretaste of an all-out littoral action fought with computer-aided data availability and long-range, high-speed weapons. He hoped the U.S. Navy never faced an opponent of even roughly equal numbers and weaponry. The carnage would be immense and the victor anybody’s guess. Like the confused and bloody nights off

Guadalcanal, where shadows loomed suddenly from the dark and the first who drew would either win the gunfight or bear the crushing responsibility of blotting out the lives of fellow Americans.

This was the kind of war Horn might be headed for.

This was the kind of war they had to be ready to win.

* * *

Dusk, and they were steaming north along the coast. Lights twinkled on the horizon. He looked toward them, wishing he could get ashore. Just for an evening. Just to be no longer the captain. He’d never understood before, watching those he’d served under, second-guessed, criticized, how crushing heavy it all could weigh.

Instead he nodded to Yerega, who flicked switches and handed him the mike.

“This is the skipper speaking.”

He paused, hearing his voice echoing, then went on. “The JTFEX is over. The observer-liaison team has just given me our raw scores. In some respects we’ve done well. In others, not so well.”

He went over the shortcomings: failure to set Zebra, absences from watch stations, inadequate training of firefighting and damage control teams, improper readiness of casualty power cables, inadequate marking of casualty power terminals, unfamiliarity of personnel with dewa-tering procedures. Then he paused.

“To sum up: I’m not happy. My choice is whether to accept our performance, go to the Gulf the way we are, or to go back and do it over.

“I don’t like that first choice. We’re going in harm’s way. It would not be fair to you, nor to your families, if I took you there less than fully prepared.

“Horn will no longer accept mediocre performance. Our new motto says it: ‘Aggressive and proud.’ I believe we can be the best ship in the United States Navy. But to get there, we’ll have to do better.

“We have clearance to enter port, but I’ve advised the squadron we won’t be alongside tonight. I’ve asked our observers to help us conduct additional training tomorrow. And the day after, if necessary. Until we’re ready to fight our ship, and save her when she’s hurt.”

He lowered the mike, then set it back in its receptacle. Catching the bridge team’s looks of resentment and disappointment. That was okay. Nothing in a skipper’s billet description said he had to be liked.

The faces of the dead haunted him. He wasn’t going to add to their number.