The Command

Horn, drawing too much water for the naval facility, lay that night alongside the mile-long container terminal, surrounded by ro-ro ships discharging hundreds of shiny Japanese SUVs and trucks. She had disgorged, too, four hundred bags of accumulated trash they hadn’t been permitted to dump in the Red Sea. Since Jiddah was the pilgrimage port for Mecca, there was no liberty for non-Muslims. American crews were strictly limited to the pier, and the port captain advised Dan to have his women’s faces covered even there, or else keep them on board.

He debated staying aboard himself, to show solidarity, but the prospect of a run uninterrupted by knee-knockers and fire hoses seduced him. He told Hotchkiss he was going ashore for an hour. Then suited up in shorts and a T-shirt from his last reunion and jogged down the brow.

The asphalt flatness, long as many football fields end to end, was dotted by ziggurats of containers, rail lines for the massive traveling cranes, and thousands of plastic-wrapped Hondas like pupating locusts. As he finished stretching and swung into a jog, sodium-vapor lamps detonated salmon-colored light into the Arabian dusk. The wind brought a fine dust that isolated him like fog. The buildings of the forbidden kingdom loomed indistinctly as a realm of ghosts across the moat that separated the pier from the town.

Gradually, as he ran, his mind recurred to where they might be going next. And where they might not.

They were due a week of port visit — actually, more like four days, since they’d used up part of it poking along with the slower vessels. But during the run down, Strong’s inquiries on his location and estimated time of arrival had become more pointed. Dan wondered if he should warn the crew their long-anticipated liberty might not work out. The maritime intercept commander seemed to want them back on station as soon as possible. And just that morning a message from MIDEASTFOR had directed them to report the status of their Tomahawk loadout and daily systems checks, and communicate any degradation or casualty.

Isolated as they were, he was hard put to gauge what was going on. But the fleet news summary reported increased tensions with Iraq. The inspectors had probed too deeply, and sabers were rattling again.

If things lit up, Horn and Laboon might be called into the Gulf. But Strong was pulling them back north, to the head of the Red Sea. Contradictory? Or related to Commander, Mideast Force’s sudden interest in their missile loadout? San Jacinto, “San Jac,” had fired Tomahawks from the Red Sea during the opening hours of the Gulf War.

After a couple of miles he found himself out of breath. You got out of shape quickly aboard ship. He slowed, then walked, looking at the distant lights of Arabia. Then forced himself back into motion, gasping in the gritty heat.

* * *

They finished loading food and fuel and cast off at 0800 into the same spectral, powdery-dust haze as the day before. The temperature was already over a hundred. It would rise as relentlessly as the sun. Dan was on the bridge, watching as they navigated the reef-strewn pass of Ras Quahaz, when Hotchkiss came up. He was getting used to her expression when she didn’t have good news. Downturned lips, raised eyebrows, an indefinable way she tilted her head… He sighed and beckoned her in.

“Did you want to keep your head on the maneuvering, sir?”

“I can listen to you and watch the chart.”

“I had an open-door visitor this morning. DK3 Hurst.”

“Charmine Hurst,” Dan said, getting a mental picture of a small, earnest black woman in her late twenties. The disbursing clerks were the navy’s paymasters. “Good performer, her chief says. What’s her problem?”

“Can we go outside for this?”

“We’ll go back to my cabin,” Dan told her. “It’s too damned hot to be out there when we don’t have to.”

In the little stateroom behind the bridge he closed the door and motioned her to the settee. He took the chair and tented his fingers.

“She saw the corpsman. She’s pregnant.”

Dan grunted, his morning just ruined. The whole pregnancy issue was getting to him. He’d lost two sailors already this cruise. All young sailors weren’t knuckleheads. But some were, and when you put nineteen-year-old male knuckleheads together with nineteen-year-old female knuckleheads … “And?”

“She says it’s the DK1.”

“Oh, swell.”

“Uh-huh. They’re in there in that little disbursing office all day. And of course with the cash, it’s locked. Nobody can come in and surprise them. Apparently she didn’t bother with birth control. Simple as it is. We give the pills out in sick bay.”

Dan wondered why her gaze moved around his office. It struck him that it was a small, private compartment, too. She was leaning back, one coveralled arm thrown over the back of the settee. He could envision her nude … a small, slightly protruding belly, freckles down her thighs … he liked slim, fit women, and Hotchkiss spent as much time on the machines as he did.