The Command полностью

“Yes, sir,” Dan said, although being told again annoyed him. What did they expect him to do? Shell the Saudi coast? Launch a Tomahawk zeroed on the Kaaba?

He was interrupted by Porter with a message responding to Naval Sea Systems Command’s request for a shipboard evaluation of the condition of the BLISS. BLISS — he’d forgotten what the acronym stood for — was the water spray system at the top of the stacks that cooled the exhaust plume to where an infrared seeker wouldn’t be able to home in on it. Or that was the theory. The reality was that spraying salt water on steel at eight hundred degrees resulted in such horrendous corrosion no one ever turned it on. He signed it and she went away. He sat alone again.

But not for long, because the radio crackled, putting out the new foxtrot corpen, the carrier’s new flight course. The very first ship he’d ever served in had been run down and sunk by a carrier on a dark night not unlike this one. He didn’t want to repeat that experience. So he kept close tabs on the bigger ship’s relative motion.

He was trudging out to make certain they’d pass clear when the radioman chief intercepted him. Dan read the message, then undogged the wing door. He thought about it when he was out there, watching the carrier’s sidelights and the pretty deck edge lights, which looked festive but actually filled him with dread, move slowly from starboard to port, then wink out as Horn followed her around.

This time around, he’d be in tactical command. That was interesting.

The message said Horn and Moosbrugger were detached effective 0200. Horn would be replaced on plane guard by Underwood. The two destroyers, now constituting a surface action group called Task Element 60.1.1, under command of CO Horn, would detach and proceed to an area bounded by the lines of 32 and 33 degrees north latitude, and the lines of 32 degrees and 32 degrees 30 minutes east longitude.

The latitude figures told him the center of that area would be about a hundred and forty miles south of their current location. He looked out the window to see that the carrier was still where she’d said she’d be, then checked the big chart of the East Med, Gulf of Sollum to Isk-enderun, that was pinned down under a dim red light.

The rectangle started about forty-five nautical miles off the Egyptian coast, roughly off Port Said, and extended sixty nautical miles northward. It was a strange shape for an operating area. Usually they were constrained by geography, or by depth, if the intent was antisubmarine work. But this one was a simple rectangle, and the boundaries were whole and half degrees.

“What’s this about, Chief?” he asked the radioman.

“No idea, sir.”

“Do we have these references?”

“On the clipboard, sir. The ones we got — Ref C’s NOTAL.”

References, A and B were both boilerplate and left him no wiser than before he read them. He looked for Ref C but then remembered, as Gerhardt had just told him, it hadn’t been addressed to him — that was what NOTAL meant. So everything was as clear as shit, but that didn’t matter. His orders were clear: Take charge of Moosbrugger and get both destroyers down there. He signed to acknowledge and asked the chief to tell Lieutenant Camill to give him a call on the bridge after he’d read it. He told the officer of the deck what was going on and told the quartermaster to let the chief QM know.

At 0100 he called the screen commander and requested permission to depart on duty assigned. Horn accelerated smoothly out of station into her southward turn. Dan noted the lights of a Perry-class frigate crossing from port to starboard miles astern. Underwood, taking the plane bitch slot. At the same time Moosbrugger’s CO came up on the horn, reporting in. His name was Bill Brinegar. Dan didn’t know much about him; The Moose was based out of Charleston. He made sure Brinegar was on the same sheet of music and gave him a course of 165 and a speed of twenty-two knots. And gradually the other lights faded into the darkness of the night sea.

She could barely sit still. The briefing was unbelievable … and all too familiar. Rival agencies fighting over credit for frustrating the attack in the harbor. The Americans, so sure they’d performed miracles for the incompetent locals. The Bahraini police, pointing out their helicopter-borne team had been in position for an assault that wouldn’t have put every innocent fisherman in Manama in danger. The SIS, pushing their counterintelligence work as the key to frustrating the plot. Each hungry for credit, and through it, appropriations and promotions and power. It was disgusting.

Still, it was instructive. Maybe she should just look at it that way. As Allah’s will she should be enlightened as to how things actually went behind the scenes of smiling diplomats and smoothly worded joint communiqués.