The Command

As sailing time approached, Dan saw the official visitors off, then the families. Hotchkiss stationed the sea and anchor detail. The tug showed up, not the Clelia Gracie, he was glad to see. The band played “Anchors Aweigh” and “Proud to Be an American” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Dan wondered at this last but figured it was the standard repertoire. Blair gave him a chaste peck beneath the quarterdeck awning and left. She wasn’t big on long farewells, and neither was he. The longer they took, the worse he felt. Then the admiral left, and last, Aronie.

The commodore shook Dan’s hand firmly. “We’re getting under way shortly, too. See you on the other side of the pond.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“You’ll do fine. You’ve got a great bunch of people here.”

At least in the military, the junior guy always got the last word, Dan thought. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’ll do our best.”

Too late, when Aronie was on the pier, he remembered he’d wanted to straighten out that matter of the observer’s comments. Around him families were weeping openly. Children clung to their mother’s legs, waving to Daddy. He wished his own daughter was here, or that she’d called. Well, she was almost grown. She didn’t have time for a dad half a continent away.

The tug hooted. He rattled up ladders. Hotchkiss saluted. “All stations manned, ready to get under way.”

He looked to where Blair’s car was already pulling out, to where families waved flags, to the homeland they’d not see again for half a year. Then turned to the waiting faces on the bridge. Smiled, more confidently than he felt.

“Okay, XO, let’s get this show on the road.”

II RED SEA

9

Cobie was down in Main One, washing down the GTG. Main One was main engine room number one. The GTG was the gas turbine generator. She was getting used to talking in acronyms, even when she didn’t know what they meant. Like the little platform everybody called the IR flat, but when she asked what IR stood for, nobody knew. She was getting used to a lot of things. Or trying to, anyway.

After three weeks of standing three-section watches across the Atlantic and past Gibraltar in it, she was real used to Main One. Nickels and dimes, like the guys told her most gas turbine ships stood: five hours on, ten hours off. She worked here and spent most of her off time here, too, unless she wanted to lie in her bunk or go to the ship’s store, if it was open.

The first impression you got coming through the access at the top of the compartment was gratings. Level on level of boot-polished shiny steel, going down and down. Going out on them took an effort of will, like believing you could walk on air. The gratings were set in terra-cotta-colored I-beams with thin pipe handrails painted glossy black. Through them, way down below your boots as the whole space tilted, you could see the shaft going around steadily, usually not all that fast, but giving the impression of tremendous power. The IR flat — a flat was like a deck, in the engineering spaces — was just inside the access, with parts lockers and a couple of mats and the guys’ weights and not much else. You went down the ladder past the huge white insulation-wrapped intake and exhaust ducts for the engines and generators, and you were on what they called the boiler flat. Above the gray padlocked steel cases of the reduction gears.

Here you had to choose between another ladder down or to turn right past the silver-gray, heat-radiating drum of the waste heat boiler, with the steam traps hissing behind curtains of white vapor too loud to speak over. Past that was the 1S switchboards. The next level down was the PLCC flat. PLCC meant propulsion local control console. Threading between racks of firefighting hose and control panels and red Halon tanks, you worked your way around the tractor-trailer-sized boxes of the engines themselves to the console the on-watch used to control everything.

You could peer through a thick window into the soundproofed interior of the isolation module. A jet engine, same as in an airliner, a DC-10 or a C-5. Looking in you couldn’t see much happening, even when they were running, just stainless tubing and hoses and suspended like in midair the long dully gleaming barrel of the turbine itself. It was screaming in there, the temperature was over fourteen hundred degrees in the combustor at full power, but all you saw was the light glowing on it and the safety chains swaying like some unseen hand was shaking them.

Then past that and down yet another half level you came to GTG number one. Another gas turbine, but smaller than the main engines, it ran at a constant speed to drive the generator. Its exhaust ran the waste heat boiler that provided steam for the ship, hot water for the showers, and steam for the mess deck’s kettles and all that.