Standing at the helicopter’s tail ramp, Captain Stone Quillain didn’t avail himself of the opportunity until his last man had cleared the aircraft.
Standing two inches over six feet in height, the Marine company commander was a composite of rough-hewn angles and wedges. A halfback’s shoulders tapered down to a quarterback’s waist and his wind-weathered face had high cheek bones, a forthright nose, and dark, rather narrow eyes that could shift from amiable to agate cold.
Stone Quillain was not a handsome man by any conventional Hollywood reckoning. However, he would have been a little surprised at the number of women who had studied him thoughtfully after noting his strong, open features and tall, rangy frame.
With the last member of the platoon on his way, Quillain took his look around at the platform and the sea and the heat hazy horizon beyond. He gave a noncommittal grunt and slung his rucksack and flak vest over one shoulder. With his free hand, he scooped up the carrying straps of both his fully loaded seabag and the Mossburg Model 590 combat shotgun he preferred as a personal weapon. Lifting them without effort, he started for the ladderway.
A chief petty officer waited for him down on the barge’s main deck. “The compliments of Commander Gueletti and the Provisional Seabee Base Support Force, sir,” he said, saluting. “Welcome to Floater 1. We have your quarters ready.”
“Thank you, Chief,” Quillain replied, setting down his gear and returning the salute. “You can show Lieutenant DeVega here and his men where they’re to be quartered. Also, I’d ’preciate it if you could have someone take care of my gear and that of my top sergeant. Yo! Tallman! Over here!”
Calvin Tallman, the Fox Company top, was a solid and stocky brick of a black man. Hailing from the hard side of Detroit, he stemmed from a background and culture decisively divergent from the rural Georgia upbringing of his company commander. However, like Quillain he acknowledged the existence of only one color: Marine Corps green.
“Tallman, you’re with me while we report to the TACBOSS. Afterward, we can check out the rest of the company spaces and see what we have to work with.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.”
“Want a guide to Captain Garrett’s quarters, sir?” the Seabee CPO inquired. The layout of the platform can be a little confusing until you get the hang of it.”
“No, thanks, Chief. We’ll manage.”
The truth be told, Quillain wanted the opportunity to have a look around on his own, as well as the luxury of speaking bluntly with his own people.
“Well, Skipper, what do you think?” Tallman asked as they strode aft through the compact village of deck modules, availing himself of the traditional openness that existed between a Marine unit commander and his top shirt.
Quillain prefaced his response with a disparaging snort. “What I think is that we’re pretty much stuck up shit creek without a paddle. You heard the word back on the beach, same as I did. The Navy’s tech weenies aren’t having any luck getting the bells and whistles on these damn glorified landing craft of theirs to work. We’re falling over patch-together ‘provisional units’ and ‘task groups’ left and right and down the middle, and the goddamn United Nations is in charge, no doubt with the entire goddamn General Assembly voting on how to make it totally goddamn impossible for us to do whatever the hell it is we’re supposed to be doing!”
“And let’s not forget that we got us a lady C.O. on top of it,” Tallman added. “We may all be goin’ to hell in a handcart, but at least we’re doing it politically correct.”
Quillain aimed a baleful glance at the grinning noncom. In any number of vociferous bull sessions, Quillain had argued that women had their place in the military, just not in any command position over a Marine ground combat unit.
The mere fact that his new commanding officer was the highly decorated and, in some circles, near-legendary Amanda Garrett didn’t cut a great deal of slack with Quillain either. In his mind there was a vast difference between pushing buttons in the CIC of a warship and lying in the mud of an infantry battlefield.
They reached the deck space of the seafighter group and a seaman pointed the way to the officers’ quarters. Shortly thereafter, the two Marines stood beside the housing module door bearing a nameplate that read, “Commander Tactical Action Force.” The murmur of a feminine voice could be heard inside.
Quillain exchanged his Kevlar battle helmet for the Marine utility cover he’d carried in one of his cargo pockets. “Wait here, Top,” he said lowly, slapping the cover into shape and tugging it down over his coarse, dark hair, “while I go and see just what kind of a goddamn candy-assed female we’re lashed up with.”
Climbing the single step to the module’s doorway, he knocked.
“Come in,” the muffled alto replied over the hum of the air conditioner.
Quillain flipped the door handle and entered, coming to attention in front of the desk that dominated the small living space. The precise, razor’s-edge salute he aimed toward the individual seated behind that desk almost made the air crack, and he fired his words like a burst from a machine gun.
“Captain Stone Quillain, Fox Company, Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, reporting as ordered, ma’am!”
The responding salute was more casual, the responder’s free hand being used to hold a telephone to her left ear. “At ease, Captain. Welcome aboard. Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right with you.”
Quillain went to a parade rest that was only a nominal step down from his previous stiff-spined brace. Keeping his eyes level, he used his peripheral vision to evaluate his surroundings.
Above and beyond being an office and living quarters, the little room was also obviously being used as a planning center. An intricately Scotch-taped mosaic of maps, charts, and aerial photography covered almost every inch of wall space. Interspersed were sheets of computer printout, some of them flowing down almost to deck level, the hard copy extensively annotated and underlined with multicolored marker pen. Only the top of the neatly made bunk was completely clear, and even it had a small pile of reference books stacked near its head.
Orderly stacks of file binders sat on the desk, and a mil spec Panasonic laptop computer sat open and ready for use beside the large and sophisticated interphone deck.
He recognized her, of course. Almost any individual who even casually followed recent world affairs would recognize America’s heroine of both Drake’s Passage and the China Coast: the thick, blended auburn and amber hair, the large and alert golden hazel eyes, and the striking, fine-lined features that didn’t need the accent of makeup to highlight their attractiveness.
What the news bites hadn’t brought out was the natural dynamic vibrancy that seemed to radiate from the woman. Quillain couldn’t help but note the phenomenon, even though he’d come into the room grimly intent on not finding anything to like about his new commander. Likewise, he found himself unable to resist noting the unemphasized but definite swell of firm breasts beneath her soft uniform shirt.
Quillain savagely yanked his mental focus away from that particular image, turning it instead to the half of the telephone conversation he could overhear.
“Frankly, Lieutenant,” Garrett was saying, “I don’t care what our replenishment schedule is. We need an additional allocation of small-arms ammunition right now and we’re going to require a lot more in the future. We’ve got a major live-fire training program going out here.… We’re cross training our service personnel to serve as auxiliary gunners aboard the PGs.… That’s correct. We’re going to be running at least three new light-weapons mounts per hull, so you can junk all of your prior expenditure projections.… I know I have a quarterly training allotment, Lieutenant. We’ve already expended it and we’re burning into our operational reserves.… We need everything: 5.56 NATO, forty-millimeter grenade, all types, fifty-caliber, lots of fifty-caliber. And a couple of dozen more M2 barrels. We need our ammo allocations doubled all across the board.”