The Command

It was a delicate assignment. They’d be inspecting not just Iraqi flag vessels, but ships from every nation bordering the Indian Ocean and many from farther away. Few of these countries liked Westerners and many considered their presence a violation of Islam, or, at the least, an insult to local sovereignty. They could expect diplomatic protests, legal threats, and occasional danger, especially for the boarding parties. The best approach was to go in with overwhelming force behind you; but to act with as much courtesy as the master concerned seemed responsive to. Allegations of excessive use of force or other illegal or dangerous acts would be subject to judicial review.

Strong had positioned his force in three sectors, two blocking positions south of Sinai and one in the Gulf of Aqaba. Each unit spent three weeks on station and then a week transiting to her liberty port and back, usually Hurghada, but to Jiddah about every third trip off the line, for the English-speakers, or Djibouti, for the French. An oiler came up from Jiddah once a week with free Saudi fuel. Limited amounts of fresh food were available, but the choice was small and the cost high. The U.S. units would most likely prefer to rely on the joint defense logistics system now operating in Saudi. Strong had then sketched out his operating procedures in sentences dry as the air, emphasizing again the danger of reefs, tidal currents, and squalls, especially in the Gulf of Aqaba itself.

Here at the intersection of the great Y formed by the intersecting gulfs, sea traffic divided. As it came up through the central passage from the Indian Ocean, by far the greatest part turned west for As-Suways and the Canal — and the Med and Europe and America. Those ships, gigantic oil tankers plowing along so low in the water their freeboard was barely visible, and huge liquid natural gas tankers with their white bulbous tanks of refrigerated gas, were not the concern of the multinational force. Their lookout was for those that turned east, bound for Jordan and Israel, Al-Aqaba and Eilat. For as remote and deserted as the land around them was, an astonishingly numerous cavalcade of coasters and merchants marched steadily as foraging ants through these narrow passages.

In her first week on station Horn had boarded and searched twenty-two ships. So far they’d found no oil, no weapons, no contraband, and had nearly come to grief one hazy night on a course laid too close to the westward reefs off the Jazirat Shakir.

Which brought them to this summer morning. Fortunately, Dan thought, seeing what was taking shape on the chart, it looked like the day would be clear. Because Strong had ordered them to the inner station. They’d transit the Madiq Tiran, Tiran Strait, and take a blocking position in Oparea Sydney, sixty kilometers inside the Gulf of Aqaba.

He shook himself awake and went out on the starboard wing.

Early though it was, the air was so hot it parched throat and nose instantly. The sun glared up from the flat water and down from the sky. The panting heat, the concentrated light, warned that it would really be searing by, say, thirteen hundred. He balanced on his heels, blinking grit from his eyeballs as a tanker transited the horizon with the inevitability of mercury rising in a thermometer. A thin brown haze boiled off its stack into a sky brilliant blue directly overhead, hazy tan with suspended dust lower down.

He looked down. As Horn’s hull rolled through blue transparence it churned the sea into a roiling, turbulent, somehow colder-looking lamination of translucent jade, a milky greenish film that slid aft slowly and was replaced again and again. Not for the first time, he wished he was swimming in it. To strap on a mask and drop over the side …

But duty could not be evaded. Not even for a moment.

The door dogged behind him against the heat and dust, he looked at the chart again, and picked up a pair of dividers. Pricked off distance, and ran numbers through his brain.

“Bring her around to zero-niner-zero,” he told the officer of the deck. “And bring her up to standard. We’ll set the navigation detail ten nautical miles off the Madiq Tiran.”

* * *

Cobie was in the women’s head, glad to be off watch at last. She was looking forward to breakfast, then maybe half an hour on her back with her eyes closed. But first, something more important.

She carefully blotted the dregs from a bottle of clarifying lotion across some pimples that had appeared at her hairline. Little, white-hearted buggers. She’d never had an outbreak there before. It was all the sweating they were doing down in the hole. Helm said this was nothing compared to a steam plant, but in the last few days the temperature in Main One had gone over a hundred and ten. Coveralls, forget it. She wore dungaree bottoms and a tee. The guys went around in gym shorts and bare chests. It looked good on some, not so good on others.