The Command

When he went back up at 1430, a flattened darkness loomed: the headland of Qatar. He sat musing as it passed and Bahrain pushed over the horizon.

He’d been here before, too, during the Tanker War. He remembered Blair coming across the lobby of the Regency, striding tall and cool and regal. Her hair shining, tumbling to her shoulders. Then corrected himself. It hadn’t been Bahrain. Not the first time. That had been aboard a civilian tanker Van Zandt was escorting. A sand-whipped deck, she in slacks and goggles and cranial; he half asleep with a cold Heineken in his hand. He’d barely noticed her, only recalled the encounter when they met again.

“Make all preparations for entering port. Check the setting of modified condition Zebra. The ship expects to moor starboard side to. Uniform for entering port will be service dress white for officers and chiefs, dress whites for E-6 and below.”

* * *

The Bahraini pilot talked all through sea detail. Dan contented himself with monosyllables as they moved without fuss down the deep-water fairway. The land gradually closing at both hands, low and blasted-looking. They passed the Sitra terminal, a long causeway at the end of which lay two gigantic supertankers. The white domes of liquid natural gas tanks rose above their decks. Dan jiggled his foot as Horn passed a quarter mile away; each dome held the energy equivalent of a small nuclear bomb.

But then they turned and the city grew, the soaring office towers and hotels and futuristic minarets of the most modern and open Arab society in the Gulf and maybe anywhere. Horn glided past a dry dock, a shipyard. Claudia Hotchkiss stood behind the pilot as he slowed, maneuvered, and finally brought them safe alongside a half-mile-long concrete jetty jutting out from Minas Salman, the southern quarter of Manama City itself.

It was already crowded. There were no empty berths once Horn was fitted into hers, farthest from land on the western face. A dry-cargo vessel swung nets of sacked grain or rice down to trucks. A cruise ship flying the Italian flag lay opposite; passengers in suits and abayas regarded their new neighbor with noncommittal stares. Only one old man, in suit and tie despite the heat, raised his hand to Dan, who tipped his hat across a hundred yards of space. Another warship, too, a modern frigate-type that flew the Rising Sun.

“Now secure from sea and anchor except for line handling detail… secure from navigational detail. The officer of the deck has shifted his watch to the port quarterdeck. Set the normal in-port watch. On deck, watch section three.”

* * *

Aisha had found a patch of shade on the west side of the customs office. A lieutenant in khakis nodded to her. She recognized him as the legal officer from DESRON 50. They agreed it was hot, then stood in silence as the destroyer came into sight past Sitra. Men on the Japanese warship stared at her.

When the shore party stood back from the brow, the lieutenant gestured for her to go first. She faced the flag, then the petty officer. He looked her up and down. Maybe it was curious, she thought, seeing herself through his eyes: a black woman in a long pants suit and low heels, a beret on her head and a hijab she was wearing at the moment down around her neck like a scarf, a cell phone clipped to her purse, and in it, although he couldn’t see it, the nine-millimeter. She held out the badge. “Aisha Ar-Rahim, NCIS. I’m here for the threat briefing.”

A woman stepped from beneath a shadowing awning. “Ar-Rahim? Claudia Hotchkiss. The exec.”

She must have looked startled, because Hotchkiss laughed. “They didn’t tell you? We’re mixed gender. An experiment.”

“I wish they had. It will present — differences in how people here are going to react.”

They shook hands, measuring each other. Hotchkiss was attractive, in a hard-nosed way. She gave off an aura of cold efficiency, but past that might be a friendly person. Aisha thought her uniform distinctly unflattering to a woman’s shape, though.

“We’re set up in the wardroom first, officers and chiefs. Then we’d like you to present again on the mess decks, if you’d care to do that. Or we can pass on what you give us.”

“I’d like to talk to the crew, too. Things they need to know before they go ashore. Especially with this — experiment.”

Hotchkiss undogged the door and ushered her through. Aisha braced herself for the chill, but inside it was little cooler than out. “We have a generator problem,” the exec said. “Now we’re on shore power, it should cool off, but we had to secure the air-conditioning load.”

The wardroom was like any other. The captain was tall, with sandy hair. He shook her hand and told her he might have to leave early, he had calls ashore, but the XO would take care of her.

She was on. She shuffled her materials, trying to decide what to change, what to add. Cleared her throat. “Ahlan wa-sahlan,” she said. No one answered.