“Operations, this is Captain Garrett. I’m in quarters if you need me.”
She dropped the phone back into its cradle. It had been a long… she couldn’t call it a day, because this particular cycle of work and wakefulness had started well before the previous evening’s nightfall. “Long” would just have to do.
Closing the blinds and turning up the air conditioner, she laid out a fresh set of khakis and underwear where they could be grabbed in a hurry. Then she stumbled into the cramped bathroom, peeling off her current stale and sweat-sodden uniform as she went.
The water-conserving showerhead metered out its miserly three-minute dribble of tepid water. As the task group commander, Amanda could disregard water rationing if she so desired. However, she considered that a form of cheating on her crew and she generally resisted the temptation. Instead, she was coming to appreciate one of the odder customs she had observed aboard the Offshore Base.
Many women aboard the platform had taken to carrying a small plastic envelope of shampoo around in their shirt pockets. Whenever a heavy Gold Coast rain squall would roll over Floater 1, “Shampoo Call” would sound and all female hands not on duty would swarm out onto the deck, lathering up their hair to take advantage of the brief unlimited access to fresh water.
Wringing out her own red-brown-blond mop under the last few drops from the showerhead, Amanda decided that, captain’s dignity be damned, she’d best either take up the local custom or get a crew cut.
Without bothering to towel off, she collapsed bare on the bottom sheet of her cot, relishing the few moments of chill as the dampness evaporated from her skin. Burrowing into her pillow, she sought for sleep.
It was not easy to find. Too many lines of thought continued to swirl and tangle in her mind.
The essence of victory in warfare is attack. Putting it bluntly, when one is on the defensive, one is losing. And that was the situation she found herself in now, trapped in a holding pattern with the initiative in Belewa’s hands. It was all well and good to talk about blocking punches, but that in itself was a tacit acknowledgment of having to accept the punch in the first place.
Amanda was far from pleased with the concept. It meant deliberately holding people, her people, at risk. And all for the sake of a set of engagement rules worked up in the rarefied atmosphere of international diplomacy. Something that might look good crossing a State Department desk, but that had no connection with how things actually worked in a real-world combat theater.
She remembered listening to the stories told by some of her father’s old Navy comrades, officers who had served during the Vietnam conflict. They had been men who had lived through the warrior’s hell of being ordered to do it the wrong way, of being commanded to follow a flawed doctrine. Had they ever lain awake like this?
Damn damn damn! Amanda twisted over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. All right, then she snapped at herself, if you’re going to waste your sleep time on thinking, then think about something constructive. You can’t do anything about the R.O.E.s. You can’t do anything to stop Belewa from coming after you in his own good time and on his terms. What you can do is to start planning for what happens afterward.
How do you manipulate the Union attack into a justification for a counterattack? And where do you hit? And most important, how can you hurt Belewa badly enough to alter the basic strategic and tactical situation in your favor?
More than forty-five minutes passed before Amanda Garrett smiled.
Rising from her cot, she padded across to her desk. Dropping into the chair, she lit off her personal computer and accessed the digital communications link, tapping in the sat code that would connect her with the ordnance section at Conakry Base. Ignoring the decided military incongruity of her nude state, she began to type.
FROM: CMDRUSNTACFORCES- MOB 1 AUTHENTICATOR SWEETWATER-TANG0-038
TO: CMDRUSNORDIV–CONAKRY
SUBJECT: ORDNANCE-SPECIAL OPERATIONS
REQUIRE TWO (2) ORDNANCE PACKAGES BE ASSEMBLED WITH ALL POSSIBLE SPEED FOR PG-AC-1. EACH PACKAGE TO CONSIST OF FULL LOADOUT (24 PODS-168 ROUNDS) OF 2.75 HYDRA ROCKET FOR EACH SQUADRON PG. ALL ROCKETS TO BE EQUIPPED WITH 17 POUND HEAVY BOMBARDMENT WARHEADS. ONE (l) ORDNANCE PACKAGE TO BE HELD AT CONAKRY BASE. THE SECOND TO BE HELD ABOARD MOB 1. ROCKETS ARE TO BE PODDED, PALLETIZED AND READY FOR IMMEDIATE, SAY AGAIN, IMMEDIATE FUSING AND LOADING ON CALL FROM CMDRUSNTACFORCES.
Now she could sleep.
As the U.N. military commitment had taken over Conakry’s largest airport, so had the diplomatic mission engulfed the city’s largest and, purely by happenstance, finest hotel. The Hotel Camayenne fronted on the western beach of the narrow urbanized peninsula from which it took its name. Besieged by both a struggling Third World economy and a burgeoning war, it struggled to maintain the pretensions of a top-class international hostelry.
Vice Admiral Elliot Macintyre, in-country once more to touch base with his theater commanders, spent his morning there in conference with UNAFIN’s civilian administrative staffers, a necessary but not necessarily rewarding task.
He found one consolation in the duty, however. Amanda Garrett took part in the same round of briefing sessions, bringing the U.N. personnel up to speed on the abrupt change of affairs along the Guinea coast. And as a final reward for his bureaucratic labors, he asked her to be his guest at lunch. He found himself extraordinarily pleased at the acceptance of his invitation.
Seated in the palm shade of the Camayenne’s outdoor restaurant, with the heat of the day held at bay by the trade winds angling in from the sea, their conversation drifted from professional topics to casual ones and back once more.
To Macintyre, it seemed as if Amanda had adapted well to both her new rank and her new environment. Her skin glowed in a golden contrast to the frost white of her tropic uniform, a restored sea tan replacing the yard-side pallor Macintyre had noted during his videoconference with her. Likewise her thick fall of brown-red hair was sun-streaking toward copper. There was something else different as well, beyond the mere physical. Something Macintyre couldn’t quite put his finger on. A focus, a surety… a contentment?
“So, speaking in generalities, what do you think of your new command so far?” he inquired as the busboy finished clearing away the meal dishes.
“I’m not sure yet,” Amanda replied, frowning lightly in thought.
While it is easy for a woman to be attractive when she smiles, it’s a far rarer thing to find one who can still be so when she frowns. Maclntyre’s late wife had possessed the knack. He found now that Amanda Garrett did as well.
“In many ways,” she continued, “I imagine Vietnam was rather like this in the early days.”
“That’s an ominous pronouncement if I’ve ever heard one.”
Amanda arched an eyebrow and took a sip of her sherry and soda. “I didn’t necessarily mean the strategic situation. I was referring more to the setting and the feel. The beleaguered ex-French colony. The handful of outsiders trying to make sense of things at the last second. The pockets of normalcy with an ugly little war just over the horizon.”
She nodded toward the hotel’s tennis courts, a mixed-doubles match in progress, and the glistening azure pool with its cadre of laughing and splashing swimmers.
The concertina wire of the security fences lay some distance beyond, partially concealed by the hotel landscaping.