The Command

Hanging there, he started to climb. Hand over hand. Fighting his way savagely up against gravity. When he got to the rail he let go with one arm, grunting, and pulled the life jacket off his back and threw it over the barbed wire.

A heave and just about the last of his strength, and he rolled over and his boots slammed down and he came up in a crouch, 45 cocked in front of him. The deck was empty except for a black litter of what looked like burnt wool. He yelled over his shoulder, “Clear on deck. Next man.”

* * *

Dan watched the launch team work, heads down, intent on the screens. The fire controlman was entering the last of the verification codes. The chief was entering the required text data, which allowed him to determine when and how the missile would launch. He yelled to the database manager, asking if the picture was up to date.

Dan remembered when the Tomahawk Engagement Planning Exercise Evaluator had been a wonder of advanced technology. An HP9020 computer, state of the art. Now it was a kludge, and the men cursed it. This part would take awhile, to run the compensation program and get the adjusted launch time.

Strike handed them the go message. They compared the launch sequence plan and the Indigo and both nodded.

McCall turned to him across the space. “Captain? Permission to send TLAM make ready.”

“Make ready” sent engagement plans, mission data, and power to the Tomahawk land-attack missiles. Which would start powering up, performing their built-in tests. Slowly waking to their impending flight. Dan nodded. She bit her lip and turned back to the consoles.

“TLAM make ready, all plans sent.”

“Missiles pair all plans.”

He visualized the antique disk drives down in the control room pulling up the data requests from the Rolm 1666B computers. The size of refrigerators, they boasted a megabyte of random access memory and ran at the blinding speed of eight megahertz.

Strong came into Combat and stood pointedly by Dan’s chair until he slid out of it. The commodore was in crisp white shorts. He wore a light tennis sweater, which he began working up over his head. He said through the weave, face concealed, “What’s going on?”

“We’re steaming Condition I on the way to our launch basket, sir. No contacts near us other than Skunk 16, which is a merchant… still trying to get a name on her, and some small craft that look like fishing boats. No air tracks, no electronic intelligence other than nav radars that equate to merchants.”

“What about our close-in from this morning? The one who was trying to sneak past us?”

Dan explained how he’d sent the boarding team over, then had to leave them behind when the launch time had been moved up. Strong looked grave. “You left them there without backup?”

“I had no choice, Commodore. We can’t put the helo up because of the ambient sand. We should only be gone about two hours.”

“You couldn’t retrieve them first?”

Dan explained he absolutely had to be in the basket on time. If he launched late, the time on target would fall out. Then the whole strike would be vulnerable, birds from Laboon, the others spinning up on the far side of the Sinai, too. “I agree it was a difficult decision, sir. I made it.”

“Without consulting me.”

Dan took a deep breath. “Well, sir — the strike’s not a maritime intercept matter. It’s national. It didn’t seem to me it was within your… purview.”

Strong looked down at him for several seconds. Dan wasn’t sure he was on firm ground, but he stood it. Finally the commodore said, “May I see the engagement order?”

Dan handed it to him. He ran his eyes down it, obviously checking the missions in the engagement order with those ready to fire. This raised Strong a notch in his estimation, at least professionally.

“Any coastal radars from the Sudan? Is your EW team alert?”

“No, sir, nothing but the merchant radars.”

“So we’re prepared to launch?”

“The strike team’s been on station since midnight, sir. The move-up knocked us back a couple squares, but we’ll be ready by the time we get to the launch point.”

“The missiles are up?”

“The missions are updated, checked, and downloaded to the birds. We’re spinning up the gyros now.”

Strong nodded, but his expression didn’t give Dan any idea what he felt.

* * *

Marty took a step, then blinked. The black wooly-looking material was moving. It was crawling. It lifted at one edge as he stepped forward, like the corner of a blanket turning itself upward.

His stomach turned as he realized it was flies. Millions of them. They rose from piles of stinking guts and entrails, milling in the hot dry wind. It carried thousands off, though they buzzed their best, but most settled again to their grisly meal. Gold Team stepped gingerly forward, trying to keep their soles clear of the biggest piles.

“God,” Cassidy said. “What is this stuff?”

“Somebody had a bad day,” Marchetti said. He saw a severed head looking back at him. It was a goat’s head. He couldn’t decide if that was a relief or even more horrible than what he’d thought there for a moment.