“Steady on three-zero-zero,” the helmsman stated.
“Very well,” Dan called. “Let’s get well clear, make sure this is all sorted out. Then come back to — Quartermaster: new course.”
“Coming up with a new course, sir… zero-three-four looks good.”
Dan cocked his head into the corner of the pilothouse, gesturing the OOD aside. Their heads together, he murmured, “Don’t fucking apologize. Just tell me you understand what just happened.”
“I gave the wrong order. Sorry, Captain. I mean—”
Dan wondered how best to tell him. “It’s a little more than the wrong order. Ever heard of Reynolds Ryan?”
“The destroyer? That got cut in two by the carrier?”
“That’s the one. I was on the bridge. JOOD. Know how it happened? At a critical point, like today, the CO gave ‘left rudder’ instead of ‘right rudder.’ I don’t think he even realized, until it was too late.”
The little chief’s head was down. “I–I didn’t know.”
“Look, Teddy, you’re a decent officer of the deck. Conscientious. Alert. All I’m saying is, when you’re at an inflection point, that’s when you need to take that couple of extra seconds and make absolutely certain of the order you’re giving. That your brain, or your tongue, isn’t on automatic, or you’re replaying some old tape. So next time you’re faced with a big decision, one that can kill people… slow down. Make what you decide as right as you can make it. Understood?” The chief nodded. “Now take the conn and get us back on course.”
Dan clapped his shoulder and turned back to the pilothouse. The helmsman, quartermaster, phone talkers, instantly looked away. “This is the captain. Chief Van Gogh has the deck and the conn.”
He waited as each watchstander reported his status to the conning officer. Until the bridge, overhead lights snapping off, going to darkened status now, settled back into the somnolent routine of night watch. Until they were on course for the rendezvous, and he’d double-checked it, made triply sure it passed near no reefs or headlands or other hazards to navigation.
Then he strolled out onto the wing.
Alone at last, both hands claw-gripping the dew-coated, varnished teak of the bulwark, he let himself freak out.
The mist cooled his cheek like an open freezer after the heat of the day. No stars gleamed through the overcast. Even the channel behind them, stacked with the lights of incoming and outgoing ships, was only a glowing band, fuzzy as the Milky Way. And all around, above, ahead, lay darkness, into which Savo’s cutwater drove with a continuous roar, her bow wave waxing and waning as the cruiser rolled, creaming out coruscating and flashing into the dead and returnless velvet black.
The shaking eased off, leaving nausea, and a stabbing agony in his knotted neck. By any standard, that’d been too fucking close. Five seconds’ hesitation, a few screw-turns slower, or if he’d let Van Gogh’s erroneous rudder order take effect… they’d have collided. Sailors dead, maybe. For certain, Savo damaged, her mission unfulfilled. The billions of dollars and millions of man-hours invested in her lost, squandered, wasted.
The chief was doing the best he knew how. So were Cheryl, Ollie, Hermelinda, Max, even Amy Singhe, who after all was just trying to fix something that all too often seemed deeply broken. But no one could do his or her job alone. They needed each other, and Savo needed them all.
And at the top, solitary… Really, who was he to lead them? Most Navy careers, successful ones, ascended as gracefully and predictably as a curve of ballroom stairs. Winding upward to greater responsibility, greater honor, greater rank.
While his own had been tossed by downsucks and updrafts like a glider in the mountains, heading for the ground one minute, the sky the next. Questionable decisions. Courts of inquiry. Awards. Letters of reprimand. Dangerous assignments. Unexpected promotions. The one sure thing he could say was, he’d had an eventful career. Yeah, if experience came through bad judgment, he had it, all right. In spades.
But by all rights, he should be on the beach, living the dreary aftermath of an active career. An engineer at a shipyard, a consultant, real estate, insurance, dabbling in local politics or charity boards or docenting at museums. Knowing, all the while, that the apex of their lives lay behind them.
A tentative cough behind him. “Captain? Meeting on the mess decks. They’re standing by for you.”
A sardonic smile curved his lips. He nodded into the dark, thanking it, at least, for staying with him. Before turning away, back to his duty.
7
“Emergency breakaway,” Dan told Amy Singhe, and the pilothouse filled with shouting and the drone of the ship’s whistle. Five short blasts. The distance line was hustled in hand over hand. Aft and below, the refueling gang danced their intricate pavane. The boatswain tripped the pelican hook with a clank audible even high on the bridge wing. The heavy black hose through which Savo had sucked as at some massive teat withdrew up its supporting cable in spasms and starts. As the ships began to pull apart, the linehandlers paid out the inhaul line, faster and faster, as it snaked back to the departing oiler.
Two days after the near collision, late in the afternoon, he reclined in the leather chair on the port wing under a cloudy low sky. Ceiling two hundred feet, winds southwest, seas four to six feet. Engines 1A and 2B on the line, generators one and two, steering unit B. Singhe had taken the conn for the replenishment. She’d arrowed in too fast, making them all hinky as the massive swollen stern of USNS Kanawha had loomed too suddenly. At his cautionary murmur, though, she’d slowed, and dropped them into the refueling slot fifty yards off the oiler’s starboard side with seasoned aplomb.
He stole a glance at the strike lieutenant as she crouched, peeping through the bearing circle. “Watch your stern,” he cautioned. “She’s gonna swing fast if you put a hard rudder to her.” Every word sounded like a double entendre.
She spared him one cool glance, eyebrow lifted, full lips curved in an equivocal half smile, then bent to the pelorus again. “Come to course two-seven-zero. Engines ahead standard, indicate pitch and turns for fifteen knots.”
“My rudder is right, coming to course two-seven-zero.” Dan’s gaze locked with the helmsman’s. Was that half a wink, as the seaman suppressed his own chuckle? “Engines ahead standard, fifteen knots.”
He leaned back, opening the focus of his attention as Savo’s fantail, with the outboard-slanted canisters of Harpoon launchers, cleared Kanawha’s bow. The whipped-cream white of her wake frothed a curving path on pristine sea.
A mile away, another leaden shadow lurked in the haze: nearly as large as Savo, but her profile less lofty, more rakish, radar panels set lower on her superstructure. USS Mitscher was an Arleigh Burke — class destroyer. Nine thousand tons full load, five hundred — plus feet long, with much the same sensors and weapons, but without Savo’s antiballistic capability. Slightly faster and more heavily armored, with a stealthier radar profile, Mitscher would be riding shotgun for him as CTG 151.7 penetrated the most heavily traveled, fiercely disputed strait in the world. Dan didn’t know her skipper, Frank “Stony” Stonecipher, but had downloaded his bio and discussed him with Jenn Roald on the “red phone,” point-to-point secure satcomm. Roald said he was a good guy, one Dan could depend on. “My N4 says HM&E and CS are both readiness status one. She has a full ordnance loadout and her Aegis is at 98 percent. If you have to fight your way in, you’re both as ready as we can make you. If, that is, nobody’s been gundecking his reports. Over.”