“Bridge.”
“Bridge, aye.” The voice of her exec, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Hiro, came back crisply over the circuit.
“This is the Captain, Ken. It’s all over. Secure the conflagration drill. Well done to all hands.”
The 1-MC speakers took up the call a few moments later.
“Secure the conflagration drill. I repeat, all decks, secure the conflagration drill. Main Engine Control, energize all circuits. Damage-control teams, shut down all smoke generators and commence stand-down. Set condition X-Ray in all spaces and ventilate the ship. All hands, the Lady says well done.”
The overhead lighting blazed on with a glare that momentarily made the eyes ache. The ventilator blowers came on stream as well, producing the soft roar of moving air that was the underdeck sound signature of a healthy man-of-war.
The smoke haze began to flow toward the intake grilles.
“I hope I wasn’t being premature in issuing that ‘done’ comment, Captain Johannson,” Amanda continued, recradling the phone.
“Not in the least,” the Fleet readiness officer replied. “Of course, I’ll have to run a formal evaluation with the rest of my inspection team, but since your crew performed today the way they’ve been doing all week, I don’t foresee any problems.”
He extended his hand to Amanda. “Captain.You’ve got yourself a four-oh ship. I’d say that you’re cleared for deployment.”
From down the corridor, some covert listener produced a muffled whoop. In seconds, the word that the Duke had made it would be spreading along the scuttlebutt line from bow to stern.
Amanda made her way topside again, past the damage control hands, who were starting to clean and rerack their gear. This time when she emerged onto the well deck, she could take the time to savor the clean Pacific trade winds.
The USS Cunningham lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor’s East Loch. There, for the past week, she had been deeply involved in the process of winning back her spurs.
The big guided-missile destroyer was just out of the repair yards following a long and difficult combat deployment in the South Atlantic, having been the sole American naval vessel to see action during the recent military confrontation with Argentina.
Despite this, and despite the fact that the Cunningham had emerged from the Antarctic campaign with numerous battle honors, including the Presidential Unit Citation, the Duke had to re-prove her readiness to return to sea.
For the past month, she and her crew had been involved in a grinding ritual of tests and drills: gunnery requalification, engineering requalification, aviation and ASW requalification.
The climax had been the weeklong mass-conflagration and damage-control exercise. With this last hurdle cleared, the ship and crew were rated as ready to depart on their scheduled duty deployment to the western Pacific.
Looking forward, Amanda could see that the helipad elevator was down as per her orders and that a few last wisps of the odorless, nontoxic smoke from the exercise generators were issuing from the open well, like steam from the crater of an inactive volcano.
Just forward of that, fared into the trailing end of the streamlined superstructure, the towering fin of the Cunningham’s freestanding mast array stabbed upward. It was shaped like the raked back blade of some gigantic tanto fighting dagger, and the slight roll of the ship made its tip carve a delicate invisible pattern in the vivid blue of the Hawaiian sky.
Here and there, small clusters of sweat-soaked but jubilant crew personnel were emerging topside through the destroyer’s weather-deck hatches, including some of Doc Golden’s erstwhile “patients.” They still had a good job’s worth of cleanup and reordering to deal with, but for the moment the men and women of the Duke could take a breather and feel proud.
Up on the rim of the helipad, Vince Arkady appeared. She caught the flash of his grin as he spotted her on the well deck. Moving deliberately, he lifted his arms and clasped his hands overhead in a boxer’s declaration of victory.
Amanda smiled as well, and replied in kind. Reaching back, she snapped the rubber band that confined her ponytail. Shaking her hair down around her shoulders, she leaned against the deck railing and took a deep breath.
4
It was the most pleasant part of the day in Washington. Evening was just taking the edge off the sauna bath heat, leaving a mellow glow that would hold well into the night. Secretary of State Harrison Van Lynden didn’t have the time to enjoy it, however. His town car swept through the security checkpoint at the gate and wheeled up the curving drive to the south portico of the White House.
Ahead, brake lights flared, marking the arrival of another member of the crisis team. As his own vehicle drew up and came to a halt, Van Lynden recognized Lane Ashley, director of the National Security Agency, disembarking from the limousine ahead. Briefcase in hand, she paused for a moment, waiting for him.
“Good luck, sir,” his Secret Service driver said. “On whatever it is this time.”
“Watch CNN, Frank. They probably know more about it than we do.”
“Where did they catch you this morning?” Ashley inquired as they hurried down the quiet, carpeted corridors of the presidential residence.
“Preparing for a very long day with the Belgian Prime Minister. Possibly one of the ten most boring men in Western Europe.”
“You were lucky,” the tall, graying blonde sighed. “Brian and I were about to fly out to the West Coast for our son’s wedding.”
“None of us are lucky today, Lane. God, what a can of worms!”
They broke off their brief conversation as they approached the security team that flanked the access elevator to the White House briefing room. Even though he had made this passage scores of times during this administration, the Secret Service men carefully compared Van Lynden’s spare, Yankee features with the photograph on his identity badge. Then, with suitably respectful suspicion, they touched an ID wand to the badge’s magnetic tab. The resulting electronic chirp verified that the secretary of state was indeed who he said he was. The process was repeated with the NSA director, then they were cleared through into the elevator and down into the White House’s secured underground level.
“Were you able to get something put together?” Ashley inquired as they began to descend.
“Something. But the Boss still isn’t going to be happy.”
Benton Childress was a middle-aged black man, solidly built and tending toward portliness. His predilection for rather hairy tweed suits and gold-framed glasses gave the classic impression of a college history teacher. Not surprisingly so, for he had once been one. He had also been a Rhodes scholar, the mayor of a major midwestern city, and a lieutenant colonel in the Missouri Air National Guard. Currently, he was the forty-fourth president of the United States.
He was looking over the golden frames of those glasses now, regarding the three members of his assembled crisis team much as he must have a group of recalcitrant students.
“Miss. Lane, gentlemen,” he said. “How in the hell was this allowed to get past us?”
Like another ex-Missouri National Guardsman who had sat in the Oval Office, President Childress had a decided propensity for plain speaking.
“Too many tasking assignments and not enough assets,” Lane Ashley replied, levelly meeting the president’s gaze. Having battered her way up through the old boys’ network within the CIA, she was well capable of doing some plain speaking of her own. “Most of the resources we’ve had deployed on the western Pacific Rim have been focused on what’s been happening inside mainland China. We simply weren’t looking back over our shoulder at Taiwan.”