These were the five key players in the 12-man assault force that would slide into the warm shallows along the coast of Iran fewer than five days from then.
Lieutenant Commander Dan Headley could not make up his mind whether he was being trivial or not. The new orders had arrived that Friday night, while he and the CO had been together in the control room. Dan had read them out to the Commander, whose comment had been, at best, vague.
The orders specified a critical new mission, the insertion of a SEAL team, a precision task that always heightens tension on a submarine. But Commander Reid had merely said, “I really must take my shoes off.” And then had proceeded to do so.
Lieutenant Commander Headley had thus found himself for the first time in his life next to a commanding officer who was standing in the control room in his socks.
It wasn’t much. But it was new. And Dan Headley did not really do new. He was a devotee of the tried-and-tested ways of the United States Navy. He liked and expected his fellow officers to act in a predictable, cautious, but determined way: though sometimes with an added dash of daring, the way most senior warship officers are trained to view an often hostile world.
He particularly liked his commanding officer to react in a calculated manner. I really must take my shoes off.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Dan.
The trouble was, he could not get it out of his mind, though he knew it to be insignificant. The CO had swiftly returned to normal, even suggested they have a private talk about the insertion later in the afternoon. But he had left without really acknowledging the seriousness of the forthcoming Black Op the following Tuesday night.
Dan Headley found it curiously disconcerting. And now, as the submarine cruised slowly at periscope depth, 20 miles off the port bow of the Harry S Truman, he made his way down to the confined privacy of the Commander’s personal cabin and tapped on the door.
“Come in, XO,” called the CO. “I’ve got us some coffee. Let me pour you a cup.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Dan, heading for the second chair at the little desk, and noticing for the first time a small framed print hung on the wall, a portrait really, just a head and shoulders of someone who was obviously an eighteenth-century nobleman.
While the CO splashed the hot, black coffee into their mugs, Dan Headley leaned over and took a closer look at the little portrait. The gentleman wore a tricorne hat, with a sash across his chest. Beneath the picture were the words L’Amiral, le Comte de Villeneuve.
Dan found that unusual, and he said cheerfully, “Nice little picture, sir. But why a French admiral?”
“Oh, you noticed that? It belonged to my grandmother. She was French, you know…my mother’s mother. Lived in a little town called Grasse in the south of France, up in the hills behind Cannes…I went there a coupla times as a kid. Pretty part of the world.”
“Yessir. I was in Nice once, just along the coast. It was crowded, but kinda warm and cheerful…my dad and I went together, trying to buy a racehorse…little provincial meet down there in the spring….”
“I didn’t know that was horse-racing country.”
“It’s not really, sir. But they have a meeting down there before the weather gets warm farther north in Paris. We went especially to buy back a mare we’d sold as a yearling. She’d won about four races, one at Longchamp.”
“Long way to go to buy a horse.”
“Yessir. But she was from a family that’d been real fast back in Kentucky. My daddy’s the senior stud groom on a very big farm out there, and the owner just wanted her back as a broodmare.”
“Did you get her?”
“Yeah, we got her. Probably paid too much, what with the shipping and all. But when Mr. Bart Hunter — that’s my daddy’s boss — wants a mare, he’ll usually pay the price.”
“Was she worth it?”
“Not really. She never bred a stakes horse. But one of her daughters was very good, produced a couple of hotshot milers in New York. Then her next foal, by a top stallion called Storm Cat, fetched $3 million at the Keeneland sales. He couldn’t run worth a damn, but I guess that sale probably quadrupled ole Bart’s money in the end.”
“I find that very interesting, Dan. The way the talent of a fine family just keeps coming back, sometimes skipping a generation, but still hanging in there, ready to surface.”
“That’s the way it’s always been in the horse-breeding business, sir.”
“And it’s not a whole lot different with people, if I’m any judge,” replied Commander Reid.
“I’m not sure that’s altogether politically correct, sir…breeding people’s a tricky subject — aren’t we all supposed to be born equal?”
“Believe that, XO, and you’ll believe anything.”
“You got any hotshot ancestors yourself, sir?”
“Well, we never really delved into it, but I certainly have some deep connections with the French Navy. Very deep.”
“Not Admiral Villeneuve?”
“Non.” Commander Reid paused, almost theatrically raising his head. “We have a connection to the man who effectively won the American Revolution, Comte François-Joseph de Grasse, victor of the Battle of the Chesapeake.”
Commander Reid dipped his head, as if in deference to the memory of the French Admiral who had held off the British fleet at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on September 5, 1781.
“Hey, that’s really something, sir,” said Dan. “Was your grandma named de Grasse?”
“Oh no, the family of François-Joseph merely adopted that title, and named themselves after the town.”
“Good idea, eh, sir? We get those SEALs in, and then out of Iran, I might do the same. How about Lieutenant Commander Dan of Lexington?”
Commander Reid never even cracked a smile. Le Comte de Grasse was plainly a man about whom he did not make jokes.
And this Friday afternoon was plainly a time when he did not make plans. The two men finished their coffee more or less in silence, and the CO suggested a more formal planning meeting at 1100 the next day.
The new XO left with two unimportant, but nagging, questions in his mind. One, what was this “NON” crap all about? And, two, what the hell was the CO of a U.S. attack submarine doing with a picture of the ludicrous Admiral Villeneuve on the wall? This was a man who had narrowly escaped the annihilation of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and then commanded the new fleet at the absolute catastrophe of the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was taken prisoner, escorted to England and six months later committed suicide.
Dan Headley walked back to the control room confirming to himself that he was a loyal XO, resolved to support his immediate boss under any and all circumstances. But in his deepest, most private, thoughts it occurred to him that this Reid weirdo might be a half-dozen cannonballs short of a broadside.
The Galaxy freighter came thundering onto the runway in the small hours of the morning, 34 hours after having left the North Island Air Base in San Diego. Most of the men had slept during the second half of the journey, from Pearl Harbor, but they were all tired, in need of a stretch; and the stifling heat of the island, only 400 miles south of the equator, took them by surprise.
Unlike most arriving passengers after a trans-Pacific journey, the SEALs had to supervise their own cargo. Crates that were accompanying them on the next leg of their journey, up to the flight deck of the Harry S Truman, 2,600 miles to the north, had to be carefully separated for reloading, while the rest of the explosives, which would ultimately be used at the far eastern end of the Indian Ocean, were taken on fork-lift loaders to the main storage area.