The Command

He opened his mouth to contradict this, but had to close it. As far as he could remember, she was right. The U.S. Navy didn’t change unless the alternative was ruin. On the other hand, once it did, that, too, became Tradition. That massive institution ratcheted forward in microscopic increments, with bursts of sparks and deafening noise and heat, but it never ratcheted back.

“Put that in your safe,” he told her. “Give me one week. Then, if you still want to send it, I’ll sign it without changing a word. That’s a promise.”

She stood still. Then nodded curtly, and was gone.

He breathed out, leaned back. Feeling drained. Was this all going to be a bust? He hated to think so. Everyone had worked so hard.

No, he thought. I have good chiefs. They’ll come through.

At his elbow, the comm petty officer cleared his throat. He remembered the traffic, still on his lap, and went through it quickly, penciling the appropriate department where there was any chance of misunderstanding.

* * *

By 1700 they were on station, under way at bare steerageway between the incoming and outgoing traffic lanes. Dan left the bridge after a renewed warning to Osmani, who’d just qualified as officer of the deck, to maintain a 360-degree awareness. He had no desire to get run down by a sleepy tanker skipper.

He took his place at the wardroom table, freshly showered and feeling more human than he had most of that day. Baked haddock, one of his favorites. The first bite was halfway to his mouth when his radio sounded off. “Captain, bridge.”

“Go.”

“Message from the commodore via voice, Captain, relayed through Georges Leygues. Intercept, board, and search.”

He started to say, “I’ll be right up,” but instead stopped himself and told Osmani to have the TAO plot a course and speed to intercept and get back to him. He got halfway through the fish before the wardroom phone rang.

* * *

“Now away the boarding and search team. Section Gold. That is, away the boarding and search team. Team Gold provide.”

Marchetti came to, pulled from the depths of exhaustion and the strange dreams he got when he had to sleep in a hot compartment. In this one, he’d been a helicopter pilot in Somalia. Wounded and left behind, with thousands of pissed-off skinnies with guns searching for him. A nubile Arab woman had hidden him. He’d undressed her, been on the point of entering a velvety softness. For some reason they’d both been speaking German. He stared at the underside of the bunkabove, hearing the ship creak and sway around him. Then swung out and dropped into his coveralls, stacked around his boots fire-station style. He bloused the cuffs and buckled his belt and was ready to go. Pulled his cap off the bunk light and was out the door, through the mess. The other chiefs were eating. He grabbed a biscuit off Forker’s plate and gnawed at it as he went up two decks.

Goldstine was handing out the weapons and ammo at the ready locker. The guys grabbed their iron without expression, haggard, silent. Too many boardings. Too many condition-three watches. He’d thought they might get a break, running in to Aqaba. Guess not. He slung the shotgun and stuck the .45 he’d started carrying as backup in his belt. “What is it this time,” he asked the boarding officer, Ensign Cas-sidy A porky, scared-looking kid who didn’t seem to have any idea how to lead a boarding team — or anything else. It didn’t seem fair the chiefs had to train the officers. Marty figured they’d given him Cassidy to either harden him up or break him, and so far the odds were not good.

“Motor vessel Yazd. Bound for Aqaba. She hove to on the radio call.”

“Flag?”

“Iranian.”

On the rolling fantail the red plastic-and-nylon jacob’s ladder was laid out ready to drop. He saw the other ship, tilting slowly back and forth ahead. Horn was making up on it, slipping through deep blue four-foot seas. A rust-streaked white deckhouse on a black hull. No net gear. Maybe a thousand tons, the typical small merchant that ran around from the gulf. Heaving to on the call was a good sign. More than once in the last few weeks they’d had to chase them down, threaten them, before they hove to. Horn rolled to a sea, and the choking hot breath of turbine exhaust blew down on them. He didn’t need that, looking at a two-mile ride in a small boat.

“Go ahead and load,” he told them. “Mags only, chambers empty.”

Fear, the port RHIB, came up from astern with a rocking roar, leaping over the wake that dragged behind Horn’s vertical stern. The coxwain raised a glove, then twisted the wheel to come in. “Kick that ladder over,” he told one of the men, then looked back along them, lined up ready to go. Crack Man, Sasquatch, Lizard, Snack Cake, Deuce, Amarillo, Turd Chaser.