“No sir. That is about it. Oh, and Lieutenant Singhe has requested to see you. When it is convenient.”
“Amy Singhe? What’s it about?”
“She didn’t want to say.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.” He checked the TAG Heuer that Blair had given him as a wedding present. “I’ll be in my at-sea cabin after evening meal if she wants to come by.”
Almarshadi stood, pocketing his BlackBerry, but Dan snagged his sleeve as he turned away. “One second.”
“Sir?” The XO turned back quickly, as if startled.
“I’m not sleeping that well. I thought tonight … we’ll be headed through Messina between 01 and 0300.”
“Yessir?”
“I need to get my head down awhile, so I want you on the bridge. Back up whoever’s OOD.”
Almarshadi seemed to grow an inch taller. His head came up. “Yes sir,” he said. “I will be there.”
He told Staurulakis to drill the other Condition Three sections and continue the tracking exercise until they ran out of aircraft time. And to continue after that with the canned Hormuz scenario. He stopped at the equipment room to find the cleanup progressing, with Dr. Noblos hovering. Dan asked how the reduced redundancy would hurt their tracking abilities. Noblos said it wouldn’t help, but the effect would depend primarily on the geometry between the launch area and their patrol area. The rider seemed less prickly than the first time they’d interacted, so Dan kept it short. Let whatever had irked the man heal. He’d need Noblos when they got on station.
He climbed to the bridge and rode his chair for a while, seemingly intent on his message traffic, but actually observing the bridge team from the corner of his eye. Four contacts were in sight, with five more over the horizon, being plotted on the radar and on the contact board. Nearly all were headed south, probably for the strait, the narrow bottleneck between the Tyrrhenian and the central Med. The wintry light glinted off flinty waves. The sun peered out only now and then through a scrim of high cloud. Other clouds, lower, fluffier, lay far off to the east, marking the mainland of Italy.
The Falcon made another low pass, its roar rising as it neared, dwindling as it parted. Motors whined as the tapered tube of the five-inch swung after it, its slow elevation, quivering indecision, then sudden whiparound as it crossed the zenith somehow comical. The 21MC said, “Bridge, CIC: Event 0265 complete. Falcon 03 requests permission to take it to the barn.”
He nodded. The jet waggled its wings and banked away, shrinking to southward.
Dan swung down. He called the quartermaster over and pulled up their track on the nav screen. Through Messina, then south and east past the cow’s-udder peninsulas and islands of Greece. They’d pick up the task force south of Crete. He sketched an adjustment, and the QM, a reedy deliberate fellow whose accent said Jamaica, said he’d take it from there. “Have the navigator see me when you get it laid out,” Dan told him. “What’s our first course? For the strait?”
The quartermaster set it up on the screen. “One one three, Captain.”
“One one three, and pick it up to twenty knots.” The OOD echoed the command, passing it to the helm, and Savo Island came around to the southeast.
After dusk, after dinner. The porthole in his cabin was moon-dark. He was unbuttoning his shirt, contemplating reading a few more pages of Rome on the Euphrates before some serious bunk time, when someone tapped at the door. “Come in,” he called.
“Lieutenant Singhe, Captain.”
“Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Come in, Amy. Uh — leave that cracked, please.”
Singhe took the chair two feet from him with a fluid motion. Her boots were polished glassy, which was not really required at sea, and her coveralls fitted as if tailored. Only at the knees did they look even slightly worn. She wore a khaki belt with the Savo Island belt buckle: bronze field, the outline of Ironbottom Sound in silver, and the silhouette of USS Quincy superimposed in gold. Below it was the ship’s motto in black enameclass="underline" Hard Blows. Not one he cared for, but not worth the effort of changing. Her coveralls were open at the throat; that glossy hair was pulled back, and she brought some scent with her, sandalwood, at the same time clean and exotic.
He wrenched his mind back from wherever it was headed. “XO said you wanted a word,” he opened.
“Yessir, if you have time.”
Someone tramped past the slightly open door, and footsteps rattled on the ladder. The passageway illumination winked off, then on again, a deep scarlet, for the dark-adapted eye. He reached up and slid the darken-ship curtain across his porthole. “Turn that overhead off? Thanks.”
With just the desk light on, only the blue glow from his desktop screen, and the fainter jade-green illuminations from the gyrocompass and radar repeaters above his bunk, relieved the darkness. That and the ruby glow that seeped past the jamb, limning her silhouette in carmine. She nodded toward his bunk. “Good book?”
“Huh? Oh … just ancient history.”
“You’re interested in history, sir?”
“Just something I picked up.” He cleared his throat. “What’s on your mind, Lieutenant? I mean, Amarpeet?”
“I wanted to talk about something I’ve been trying to initiate aboard, since my piece on leveling military management came out.”
“I read that. Good article,” Dan said. “Thought-provoking. You wanted to apply certain, uh, modern principles to the Navy.”
“It fits in better with how the world does business now, sir. Communication at the speed of light. The drive toward reduced manning. Most of all, the professionalism of today’s enlisted. Our command structure was set up for a small educated class and a large group of unskilled and more or less unwilling draftees. But the old, hierarchical information-flow model … it’s dead. It’s wasteful. And quite frankly, it turns our best enlisted off.”
Dan considered this. She was absolutely right about the way the Navy was designed. How had Herman Wouk described it? “Designed by geniuses, to be run by idiots”? But the idea of cutting midlevel management didn’t thrill him. The one time he’d had to — trying to run a ship without a flag in the China Sea, without chiefs and department heads, basically just himself, a worthless exec, and a ragtag crew no one else wanted — hadn’t worked out well. “Uh — did I see you have an MBA?”
“Yes sir. From Wharton.”
“We don’t see many people with those kinds of degrees in the Navy. At least at the JO level.”
“I’d like to make that count, sir. Is there any possibility we can do an experiment aboard Savo Island?” She reached to the small of her back, bending forward as she did so, and he had to avert his gaze. “Here’s a copy of my proposal for reorganizing the chain of command.”
“Well, hold on a sec, Amy. There’s more to this than management. There’s also leadership.”
A shadowy form paused outside, might have looked in at them, but then continued aft.
“Leadership’s just another word for charismatic management, sir. If we want to get hard-nosed about it.”
“The core tenets: unity of command, chain of command, the ability to verify a command—”
“Again, irrelevant to the way we actually do business. Where do the guidelines for our most important decisions reside today, anyway? In computers. Doctrine’s preset now, in hardware and software, not in top-down relationships. And as computing power proliferates—”