The Command

Forker lifted his eyebrows. “I seen bunk fires before, ma’am. Half the goddamn time it’s somebody trying to get back at somebody pissed them off. Just about always, somebody right there in the same space.”

He turned away to the repair party guys. They were recoiling their hoses, backing out. The 1MC said, “Class Bravo fire is out in compartment 3-382-3-Lima. Reflash watch is set.”

She looked after his retreating back, shaking. What did that mean? Wasn’t he even going to try to find out? Then a hand tightened on her arm.

Close up, the exec had little lines around her eyes. Her lips were chapped and grim. “We’ll find out who did this,” the commander told her. “I know what you girls have to put up with in the work spaces. But this is too much.”

Cobie looked back at her bunk. At the twisted, burnt remnants of all her letters…. “I hope so, ma’am,” she said. “Before somebody gets killed.”

* * *

Through a bright noon Horn hunted with a turbine whine and a creaming hiss of foam. To port the rocky tip of the Sinai and the flat-topped, chalk-colored cliffs of the Ras Muhammad. To starboard, low barren islets, uninhabited and unmarked save for the occasional stranded wreck left from the 1972 war. The navigation team sang a litany of courses and distances.

Dan, in his bridge chair with a stack of traffic on his lap, tried to avoid fixating. It was hard, with the jewel-like tones of reef patches and the lighter brown of drying boulders so close in to port. The traffic separation scheme sent northbound vessels east of the reefs, southbound west. The easterly channel was wider, but it was all too damn tight. Fortunately, as Strong had said, there was no air threat. Iraqi aircraft had been grounded since the Gulf War, and Egyptian and Saudi activity was limited to the occasional patrol aircraft that obligingly squawked its identifying IFF. Dan still kept Condition Three watches manned in Combat and on the weapons stations, though.

Hotchkiss, clipboard under her arm. The worry about close quarters receded, to be replaced with a different apprehension. One could run one’s career aground in other ways than the gnash of steel on coral. He hesitated, then beckoned her. “Exec, what you got?”

“We need to talk about this situation.”

“The fire in women’s berthing.”

“That’s right.” She moved in close and held out a soda can. Dan let her put it under his nose. A petroleum scent.

“What is it?”

“Most likely distillate fuel, marine. Could be a couple of other things, including lighter fuel. Which we sell in the ship’s store.”

“Great, that narrows it down. Dusted?”

“No prints. Or so Forker says.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I think it’s beyond either his capabilities, or his motivation. To put it bluntly, he doesn’t give a shit who did it or why.”

“Do I need to recalibrate him?”

“No. You need to sign this.”

The clipboard held a message to COMIDEASTFOR, requesting assistance from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service station in Bahrain. COMDESRON 22, COMNAVSURFLANT, COMSECONDFLT, and the JAG office in Washington were info addees. Along with arson in the berthing space, it mentioned the photo incident and other insults to the female crew. A pattern of gender discrimination and harassment had escalated to an attempt on women’s lives. In as many words, it said USS Thomas W. Horn was sick and needed major attention.

“Well, now,” he said.

“You send it, we get to the bottom of this,” Hotchkiss told him. “You don’t, I resign and go to the press. Sir.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is. I have to protect these kids.”

“I have to think of all my crew, Claudia. I understand where you’re coming from. Believe me.”

“Do you?”

“Give me one more chance to prove it,” he told her. “I need to take this to the senior enlisted. They’re the only ones who can solve this.”

“They’re the ones who encourage it. Like your command master chief. And Forker. And that testosterone-laced prick Marchetti.”

“I know how you feel,” Dan told her. “But I don’t think a witch hunt’s the way to handle this. Three months is not a lot of time to change two hundred years of tradition. And regardless of how impatient we get with the pace, blowing it open with higher command, and with the media, isn’t the way to make progress.”

“Or to advance the CO’s career,” she said. “Is it?”

He stiffened in his chair. Almost spoke angrily back, but restrained himself. Remembering the times he’d felt exactly the way she did. Not about women, but about the other things that seemed to get overlooked or set aside when the men at the top put their own interests first. She’d carry out her threat. He could see it in the set of her lips.

“Neither yours nor mine,” he said at last. “And I’m closer to the end of mine than you are to yours, Claudia. The navy needs officers like you. Let me work this a little longer. I promise you, I will work it.”

“Don’t stonewall this,” she told him. “Sunlight on crap is the only way it ever gets cleaned up. The navy doesn’t change by itself.”