The Command

All at once he realized what was going on. She was going down. The fucking crew had tried to scare them off, then tried to kill them. Neither had worked, and that was why they were stampeding aft. That was where the lifeboats were.

He jerked his head and yelled, “Follow me.”

* * *

When he got the word about the Red Ball from the boarding team Dan was still in Combat, explaining to the strike team what he’d just done, how if everything went right and you got lucky, you could shock a recalcitrant bird into realigning itself. He stopped in midsentence and snapped the channel selector on his Saber to the boat frequency. He got Cassidy in midtransmission, saying they were in the lee of the bridge and Marchetti had gone below to get the sweep teams out on deck. “Do you copy that?”

“Runner Gold, copy that.”

“Blade Runner, do you copy?”

“Gold, I copy, d’you copy my copy?”

Dan cut in. “Skipper here, Sean. What’s the situation?”

“Sir, we took fire. This feels like a setup. They were ready for us. My feel is they’ve scuttled. This thing’s starting to go. We need help here.”

“We’ll be right with you.” Dan said to Camill, “Herb, get us back to Gold Team’s position ASAP. Flank three. Secure from strike stations. Set surface action stations. Blue and Green boarding teams muster on the fantail.”

Strong interrupted, wanting to know what was going on. Dan explained rapidly. He asked him to get whichever task group unit was nearest their position to start on its way, they might need help finding men in the water. For once the commodore didn’t have questions, just wheeled away, shouting for his watch officer.

On the bridge the windows were scrubbed with dim ochre, a howling hiss filled his ears. The officer of the deck had pulled the lookouts and gunners inside the skin of the ship. Looking down, Dan couldn’t see the bow. Just brown water scummy with floating sand. The missile hatches were still open. Drill was to leave them cracked for thirty minutes after launch, let the corrosive fumes of the boosters disperse. But sand would be even worse. He snapped at someone to close them, then went to the Furuno.

Sand return made a fuzzy blob at the center of the sweep. The intercepted vessel was ten miles off. The helmsman had the rudder over and the turbines were whining up. He leaned to the windows and saw sandblast already frosting the thick shatterproof glass. It was like peering into boiling tomato soup. He did sums in his head and came up with twenty minutes to intercept. He made sure Faith would be ready to go in the water and the boarders were ready. Unfortunately, he couldn’t launch Blade Slinger in a sandstorm. The danger of pilot disorientation and engine damage was too great.

His mind went to the missiles, probably making landfall by now. They’d wing their way for an hour across the empty northwestern quarter of Saudi Arabia. Then dipping, seeking the shelter of dry wadis to cross the Iraqi border near a place he knew well. A place he’d once taken off from on his own penetration of the dark republic where, like some unkillable mustached specter dogging them through the end of the twentieth century, the tyrant still reigned. From there they’d execute evasive doglegs, till their lethal cargos reconverged again to vanish in balls of explosive gas. If, that is, there were no more of these killer sandstorms along their flight path. Their simple electronic minds took no account of billions of shards of silicon slicing the desert air. They’d drill on till their turbines froze. Till some wandering Bedouin, huddled while the storm raged overhead, heard the deep rock shiver to the boom of half a ton of wayward explosive.

If a Tomahawk exploded and no one heard it, had its message been delivered?

At his waist his radio crackled. He lifted it and listened to gunfire, miles away.

* * *

Marty stood in a deserted passageway, pointing the riot gun down it. Someone was coming up the ladder at the far end. In a moment his head would show. He put the bead on the hatchway and took the slack out of the trigger.

Crack Man stuck his face up. Marchetti jerked down the barrel and stage-whispered, “Get the fuck up here, dipshit. Where’s the rest of the team? What the fuck’s going on down there?”

“These scummers cracked the sea intakes. These fuckers must all be Omanis, there’s so much fucking kif weed down there. She’s going down, man, she’s going down so fucking fast.” He looked past him at the open hatch with the expression of a man inside a sinking ship looking toward an open hatch. “Jesus. Is the boat coming?”

“You see any life preservers down there?” Marty asked him. “You see Turd Chaser? How about Amarillo?”

“They went down the engine room. I ain’t seen them since we split up.”

Lizard came up the ladder. His coverall legs were dripping. He didn’t say anything, just pushed past. Marchetti grabbed him. “Amarillo? Turd Chaser?”

“Headed for the engine room, last I saw.”