The Command

Cobie had said angrily that was an utter lie, where’d she heard that? But too late realized from the glances around her she shouldn’t have reacted at all. Realized from Wilson’s smirk as she went down the passageway — you weren’t supposed to leave the compartment unless you were in full uniform, but Patryce went out in a bathrobe open down to her belly — she’d just been set up. Ina told her Patryce had said worse than that. She was passing all kinds of shit about her. Exactly the things Patryce did herself, she was accusing Cobie of.

It made a sick kind of sense, now she was starting to figure the woman out. It also made her so angry she could hardly talk. All she’d wanted was to do her job and send money home. Learn something she could use. Build up that reenlistment bonus. She didn’t need this crap.

So now she didn’t go back to the compartment, except to shower. She slept on a mat somebody had put in the IR flat to do sit-ups on. Let Patryce play her games. Fuck half the men in the crew and blame it on her. Pretty soon everybody else would see through her the same way she had.

So she hadn’t expected anything different now, had figured they’d have to work all night and all day while everybody else went ashore. So when the chief came by with word the generator was going to be here in a couple of hours, they had to get the old turbine up on deck, it didn’t surprise her.

For a ship that was designed to have the engines replaced instead of repaired, she was beginning to think somebody didn’t do his job when he drew where to put things on the Horn. The generator had to go up the escape scuttle. Five decks, straight up. But before that, they had to get it out of the module, pivoted around, and headed aft. Then chain-fall it from point to point until it got to the scuttle entrance, then pivot it again until it pointed up.

“Ready to do this?” Helm said when she got down to the lower level. She cracked her knuckles and nodded.

* * *

Bahrain International was across a causeway on an island of its own. Dan waited at the lounge area reserved for U.S. military, reading back copies of the Gulf Daily News and trying not to keep looking at the clock.

Finally her plane glittered in the sunlight, a falling flake of silver, then slowly grew, landing lights like Venus in the evening sky. It flared out above the runway before slowly decelerating to pivot and trundle back toward the terminal.

They didn’t kiss. Cold glances from waiting Arabs were no inducement to bill and coo. He just hugged her, wanting so much more but knowing he had to wait; then stood back. Her smile was like the sun on a winter day.

“God, you look tired,” was the first thing she said.

“You look kind of travel-worn yourself.”

She did look beat, as if too much had happened too fast to keep up her usual grooming standards. He touched her hair. “You got it cut.”

“It was time for a change.” She looked around. “Let’s get my luggage before it disappears. Where are we staying? The Regency?”

“How did you know?”

“I know how your mind works. And I like it.”

AT the hotel she insisted on a shower first. Then they made love. He didn’t think about anything while they were doing it. Just surrendered to his body, and to hers. Responding without necessity of thought, with the simple instinctual desire that had come long before thought.

Afterward they lay in the air-conditioning cool, her thigh thrown over his stomach, telling each other about what had happened to them. Except that he left out the part about the charges. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t help, and he didn’t want her to help. She told him about her ongoing feud with the army three-star for personnel and how she was trying to get the military health-care system restructured. Then asked, as she always did, whether he’d heard from his daughter and his ex.

“A letter from Nan. Nothing from Susan.”

“How’s she doing? Nan?”

“Getting ready to start school, at Goucher. Where her mom went.”

“So that’d work out for you, if you got a Washington assignment.”

“Yeah, I’d see her more than I do now.”

“A girl needs her dad.”

“A dad needs his girl. I miss her.”

“Ever think about having another?”

“I always said, that was up to you,” he told her.

“That’s not what I asked. You jumped a step there.”

“Just cutting to the chase.”

“It’s skipping a step,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“So do you miss having a kid?”

“Sometimes.”

He thought she was heading for something, but instead she let her hand rove over his chest. Rubbing it, tweaking a nipple and watching his response. “Enough talking? Is the commander ready for action again?”

“You’re not hungry?”

“I’ll just have a little bite,” she said.