The Command

A tap at the door, and the mess specialists began bringing in the commodore’s gear. A much-abused duffel bag, boxes of records, a Toshiba notebook in a black case. Strong asked several questions about his Tomahawk loadout. As he talked, he opened the boxes with a pocketknife, one slice each, like a surgeon doing assembly line hernias. He cut open the bottom, not the top, so he could flip it over and all the files dropped into the open drawer at once. Dan gave him the password to the computer on his desk, and waited for him to write it down. Strong just nodded.

The commodore looked up, seemed to realize his discomfiture. “That’ll be all. I’ll come up to the bridge later,” he said. He gave Dan a quick handshake and opened the door with the other.

In the passageway he watched the commodore’s staff bustle past. They gave him quick neutral glances, as if he were a bollard or a piece of gear they might or might not use.

* * *

Strong had a U.S. officer attached. “A. J.” Lambert was a commander, as was Dan. He wore the gold dolphins of a submariner. Lambert told him Laboon and Horn were headed back to Oparea Adelaide, while Georges Leygues took Laboon’s place inside the Gulf of Aqaba. The U.S. ships would be doing two missions now. One was the usual, maritime interdiction. The second was setting up for strike ops against Iraq.

“Saddam’s resisting the inspection regime. The White House wants what they call an ‘appropriate response.’ Something that makes headlines but doesn’t kill civilians. You know, like always, they want to have it both ways. What it bottlenecks down to is either an air force strike with smart bombs, or Tomahawk. They shoot a plane down, they’ve got a hostage. So we’ll probably get the job.”

Dan contemplated the flat area on his foredeck, the armored hatches. It was easy to overlook them at a glance, and they were so low maintenance he could all but forget about them day to day. But the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System was Horn’s main battery. His current loadout was sixty-one land-attack Tomahawks, with either conventional warheads or a thousand pounds of bomblets. They made Horn a strike destroyer, able to download data via satellite and destroy targets up to twelve hundred miles away.

A dependable weapon, but not a perfect one. As he knew from helping develop it. Sometimes you launched them and the engine didn’t start and they went on over, falling out of the sky. Sometimes they missed. At best, they were only as good as the intelligence that selected their targets.

Which he had no input into. The team in Combat downloaded the strike package, programmed the missiles, and fired them as directed. Not only did they never see their target, there was no requirement they even know what it was.

Lambert lit a cigar. “Penny.”

“We used to shell their forts when things didn’t go like we wanted. Now we clobber them with missiles.”

“Whatever. Get your guys ready to receive an updated package. When we’re in position, the commodore’ll want a rehearsal. He’s interested in the strike concept, wants to bring it back to the Aussie navy.”

Dan had never seem a non-U.S. officer in the chain of a strike command. “I thought Tomahawk was still NOFORN.” No foreign nationals, U.S. personnel only.

“I’ll show you the message appointing him launch area coordinator. So he’ll need a red phone and a table, and connectivity to the strike commander and to Laboon.”

“All right,” Dan told him, though he was still uncomfortable with his own limited input. He’d always felt real weapons, meant to kill real people, needed human control all the way down. “We have all the taped missions loaded. The ones the theater commander thought we better have ready to fire. He can come down anytime we’re at General Quarters Strike and we can walk him through a launch in training mode.”

They discussed the patrol area and whether there was any air or missile threat. Lambert thought not, but had to admit there was be mines. “There’s no reason one of these smugglers can’t push a few over the fantail. It’d really screw up traffic coming down out of Suez.”

“What do the Iranians think?” Dan asked him.

“Making hostile noises, as usual. But they lost half their navy the last time they tangled with us.” He hesitated. “You were there, weren’t you? Praying Mantis?”

“I was on Van Zandt,” Dan told him, and watched the name trigger its usual effect. Like Samuel B. Roberts and Stark. Navy people had long memories for lost ships.

“But I don’t think they’re going to stick their hand in the meat grinder again. I don’t think there’s going to be much chance of anything on this side of the Sinai. But stay alert, that’s all I can say.”

“Commodore’s on the bridge,” Yerega sang out, and Dan turned.

Strong had shucked the flight suit for khaki shorts. He climbed up into what had been Dan’s chair. Held out his hand, and a staff officer put a folder into it. He didn’t say word one to anyone, and the other