The downpour eased and he strolled out again. Staurulakis joined him, tucking her hair under her cap. “Take them into custody, sir?”
“Cheryl. Um, no, I don’t see any need to do that.” He ambled to the side of the flying bridge and looked down. Rainwater gleamed, bent streams rainbowing from the scuppers. Pardees looked up from the wing. “Noah, bring us alongside. And ask Hermelinda and Ollie to come up.”
The stench of unwashed men and fish and heaped damp nets rose from the boats. The dark wet faces stared up with hope, fear, awe, resentment. Dan surveyed them as Jacob’s ladders went over. It looked like a hard way to make a living. Watching the huge powerful ships parade past… He could understand why a penniless and desperate fisherman might turn pirate.
The boatswain yelled orders, and blue plastic water containers and bags of rice and beans went down into the boats. Also a compass. Unfortunately, Ticos no longer carried any gasoline, so he couldn’t help them with fuel.
Dan clattered down the ladder and back into the bridge to check the radar picture, keep from being sucked into the micro. The wind was kicking up. As soon as Uskavitch reported water and food offloaded, Dan ordered the RHIB back aboard.
He went out onto the bridge wing and looked down again. A very tall Somali was standing in the prow of the nearest boat as it pitched heavily.
Dan pointed south. “Three hundred kilometers,” he shouted down. The Somali squinted, then grinned unpleasantly. He pointed, as if mimicking Dan, but to the southwest. “Okay, you don’t need a compass,” Dan muttered. He raised his voice into the pilothouse. “Let’s get back on track. Fifteen knots.”
When he looked back, the boats were specks again under a swiftly darkening sky. Then the mist, or fog, moved in again, freight-trained on the endless wind, obliterating them.
The room was small, square, low-overheaded. A green curtain hung across the door to the berthing area. By long and honored tradition, no one entered the Chief’s Mess, also known as the Goat Locker, unless invited. Including the skipper.
Ushered in, Dan shook hands with Tausengelt, Wenck, Van Gogh, Quincoches, Toan, Anschutz, Zotcher, Grissett, McMottie, and others. He knew them all, though some, like the chief corpsman, the sonar chief, the quartermaster, and the assistant navigator, he worked with more closely than others. He slid onto the picnic-style bench, taking in the bug juice machines, the patriotic posters, the swimsuited near-nude that skirted official acceptability. Savo had no female chiefs yet. He needed to look into that.
A messman brought in aluminum trays. Italian day: caesar salad, spaghetti and meatballs, cheese, tomatoes, fresh hot bread with crunchy crust, butter in ice. Everything was piping hot, and as soon as it hit the table the chiefs dug in like starving wolves, hardly talking, though perhaps his presence cast a pall.
The U.S. Navy was built on its chief petty officers. The sobering thing was that now, when he looked around, their faces seemed unmarked, young, nearly childlike. Only Tausengelt was Dan’s age, and compared to the E-7s, the master chief looked ancient as lava. Did he look that old too? Was he the Old Man in fact as well as in name?
He asked Grissett, “Chief, how’s our binnacle list?”
“The, uh, crud seems to’ve slacked off, sir. Maybe getting out of that fucking dust helped.”
“It knocks you down for a long time. You feel like lying down every couple of minutes,” Zotcher said. The little sonar chief, who looked like Doenitz, had always struck Dan as less than a hard worker. He’d actually caught the guy asleep on watch, though he’d pleaded illness, and kept finding reasons to mention it. But Zotcher had taken a bullet for the ship when the former exec had cracked, started waving a pistol and threatening people in CIC. “We headed for Hormuz, Captain?”
“Waiting for word. But get your people ready for shallow-water work. And some strange currents.”
“That’s what’s giving us this fog. The Ekman Spiral. A monsoon phenomenon, east of Socotra. The southwest winds push the surface water offshore. The cool water comes up from below. You get boundary layer saturation and fog and low stratus development. Extending the mixed layer, and pushing the thermocline down.”
Dan nodded, registering its impact on possible submarine detection ranges. “Be there in two days, at flank speed,” Van Gogh said. The quartermaster.
The ship’s channel was rebroadcasting a baseball game. “Who’s playing?” Dan asked.
“Orioles and Tigers.”
“Wait a minute. How the heck are we getting that?”
Donnie Wenck said, through a mouthful of meatballs, “Pulled it off a commercial satellite. There’s some DC-2 encryption you got to unscramble, but—”
“Captain don’t need to know that,” Tausengelt put in.
“I didn’t hear a word,” Dan said, helping himself to the pasta.
He was here to smooth whatever feathers were ruffled from his mast case. To eat with them, signal that he stood with them.
A smart CO led less by barking orders than by building a consensus. The wardroom was the most directly responsive to the commander, as might be expected. The crew seldom acted as a unit, or felt as a unit; but when it did, the mood was usually negative, and meant a skipper was in a death spiral unless he could pull out fast. The chiefs were always supportive of the command, unless the CO was seriously off the rails; but their commitment could be grudging, especially if they felt their position was threatened.
Which Amy Singhe had been doing, establishing a no-chiefs policy on her discussion groups. Dan had heard her talking to Matt Mills, Hermione Henriques, and the other midgrade officers. She was brilliant, but she seemed to believe the business-school methods she’d learned at Wharton could be transplanted intact to the Navy. That cooperative work groups outperformed hierarchies. That technology could dispense with middle management.
Her article in Defense Review had been scathing. It had taken courage to publish it. That, he could admire. And the Navy needed shaking up. But when it came to specifics, what a modern naval organization might look like, the piece had been vaguer. He’d come away with a fuzzy picture of strong, wise commanders, and maybe execs, and apparently the rest of the ship at more or less the same level; skilled, certainly, but without much required in the way of leadership.
But what happened when strong-willed sailors didn’t want to cooperate? When “digitally mediated work circles” were disrupted by fatigue, troubled individuals, casualties, battle damage, death? He didn’t believe tradition was sacrosanct. But he was leery of throwing it overboard without a more convincing case than he’d seen so far.
The chiefs exclaimed in disgust at the play on the screen, pulling him back to the messroom. He sighed.
“Ice cream, Captain?”
“No thanks, Red, I’m trying to stay in my size 32s.” He glanced at his watch and rose. “Better get back, I guess… see if we got that message yet.”
He didn’t notice, as he eased the door closed, that he’d left his cap behind.
He reigned on the bridge for an hour, then went down to his sea cabin to try to nap again. His throat was scratchy. He read a few more pages of the book he’d picked up at the Navy Lodge in Norfolk and taken along. He hadn’t made much progress, but it was gradually pulling him in. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. But all too soon his eyelids were sagging, and he switched the light off at last.