“You made captain. Sure you don’t want to cash in your chips, go make some real money?”
He didn’t answer, and Niles had slammed the desk again. “You might actually be a good fit… But you won’t have long. She’s out there on a national-level mission. If this ship doesn’t turn around, and I mean on a dime, I’ve got another O-6 with his bags packed. And tread light this time, Lenson. No more Gaddises. No more Horns.”
He winced now, inwardly, as he saluted the flag, then turned to face his officer of the deck. Blair stood at attention, hand over her heart. A small woman with a pointed face, chunky hips under dark blue shipboard coveralls, and blond hair smoothed back under her fore-and-aft cap stepped out onto the main deck and saluted. Staurulakis had been fleeted up from operations officer at Dan’s recommendation when the previous exec had self-destructed. “Good evening, Captain. Mrs. Lenson. Hope you had a good trip.”
“You remember Cheryl Staurulakis, Blair. Acting exec.”
The two women shook hands. “Nice to see you again, Cheryl. But it’s Ms. Titus, not Mrs. Lenson.”
“Sorry, ma’am.” Staurulakis said to Dan, “We’re about to begin reloading the after magazine, Captain.”
“What’s going in first?”
“I asked if they could load the 4As first.”
The Standard Block 4As were new, still-experimental antimissile rounds. The autumn before, just before this deployment, Savo Island had gone from a baseline Aegis 7 to a new mission: theater ballistic missile defense. The Navy’s go-to antiaircraft missile had been grown with a higher-energy booster and a lighter proximity-kill warhead to gain the range and altitude needed to intercept a reentry body. This was its first deployment, and most of the experts said it was too early. Not only that, but when she was operating in antimissile mode, the ship was practically blind to other threats. He nodded. “And they said?”
“They wanted to load in a specified order given the cell layout. Said it might not get the 4As in first, but it’d be faster overall. I gave them the okay.”
“All right, we’ll let that stand.” He checked the TAG Heuer Blair had given him as a wedding gift. “We set up for dinner? Got the word, the commodore’ll be here?”
“Yessir, they’re setting up in the unit commander’s cabin.”
“That’s the suite?” Blair asked.
Staurulakis nodded. Dan told her, “Make sure the bed gets made up. The commodore will probably stay over.”
As dusk fell the First Division rigged floodlights and the Tiger Team worked on. After he got Blair settled with a cup of coffee and the CNN feed in his in-port cabin, and scanned his e-mail, he went aft to check on the rearming.
The vertical launch system magazines had no launcher. Or, rather, each cell was its own, with the missile boosting vertically until it cleared the ship, then arching over to its departure azimuth. The upside was that a launcher casualty didn’t put you out of business at a ticklish time. The downside was that rearming was slower than with the older systems, and required a crane, which meant you couldn’t rearm at sea. Each of the square gray stenciled canisters that housed the missiles had to be poised above its cell, cables connected, connections tested, then lowered, very carefully, so as not to bend the loading rails.
He crossed the afterdeck to the open module. The coveralled, hard-hatted civilian technicians nodded. He waved back and looked down as gulls circled, crying out in the failing light. Forty feet, two levels down, nearly to the bilge. A narrow catwalk halfway down gave the gunners’ mates access to the canisters. A stench of burned insulation and propellant welled up. When a missile had shorted out and lit off, he’d had to flood an entire eight-round module, ruining a few million dollars’ worth of weapons. But if the others engines had ignited — or, worse yet, the blazing-hot exhaust flame had set off their high-energy warheads — there wouldn’t have been much left of USS Savo Island.
Chief Angel Quincoches saw him and ambled over. In charge of the VLS, he’d been first to go in after the fire. Dan returned his salute. “Chief.”
“Captain.”
“These guys on the ball?”
“We checked behind them as they got the new cables and control units in. One set of control units had to be replaced again. Defective from the factory, far’s we could tell.” The chief petty officer checked his watch. “Been problems with the crane, too. A bent sheave.”
“Fixed now?”
“That’s what they tell me. Sir.”
“Keep ’em moving. The commodore’s coming aboard tonight. We might get orders. Are we checking the hatches, the hatch components, gaskets?” They were one of the biggest failure items.
The senior enlisted nodded, short, as if Dan shouldn’t have had to ask.
“What are we ending up with, loadout-wise?” He knew the numbers by heart, having thrashed it out in midnight sessions with the exec and the strike and weapons officers, with input from the squadron weapons officer, the type commander, and the COMNAVSURFLANT Ballistic Missile Defense Readiness Office. But it never hurt to make sure you were getting what you expected. Especially the way tensions were running up with Iran and Pakistan, and China now, too. There’d been something on CNN moments ago, about massive capital outflows from that country.
“New totals aft are twenty-four of the new RIM-162s, four Tomahawks, and four regular SM-2 Standards. Twelve new Block 4A rounds totaclass="underline" two in the forward cells, ten aft.”
Dan nodded. They’d left the States with only four of the experimental rounds, which he’d expended in two engagements. The Combat Systems Weapon Inventory screen in CIC loomed in his nightmares, counting down as whatever dream-battle he was fighting progressed. Until he was left with zeros, and cruise missiles incoming, and he’d wake shaking and sweating.
He didn’t need imagination to guess what would happen then. He’d seen it, aboard USS Horn, and Reynolds Ryan, and Turner Van Zandt.
He didn’t want his name associated with another disaster. Not because of his career. That was over, after this tour. Especially after what Blair had said about congressional interest. He just didn’t want more corpses on his conscience.
The chief corpsman, “Doc” Grissett, was leaning against the bulkhead in the passageway outside the unit commander’s cabin. “You asked for a report on our cleanup, Skipper. We replaced all the air filters and disinfected all the ventilation ducts we could reach.”
“Is that going to solve our problem?” Savo had been plagued by a flulike illness among the crew, especially in forward weapons berthing, though there’d been cases throughout the ship. One seaman had died in his bunk. They’d shipped the body back to Bethesda, but the cultures had been inconclusive.
“Hope so, sir. Scrubbed out with bleach.”
The 1MC bonged. One, two; three, four; five, six bells. That would be Jenn Roald. He spun on his heel and headed for the quarterdeck, conscious, too late, that he was still in civvies.
The unit commander’s stateroom was actually a small suite, first a large room with desk, terminal, and table, then a smaller bedroom, with a compact head and shower aft of that. On the rare occasions when an officer senior to the commanding officer was aboard, he operated out of here.
Or she, as was the case tonight. Fine-boned, thin-faced, Jennifer Roald held a cup of punch at the table, which was spread with white linen. To his relief, she was in civilian clothes too, a dark pantsuit that looked both dressy and as if she could inspect an engine room in it. He and Roald dated back to the West Wing, where she’d run the Situation Room. Now she commanded the squadron that Savo was, however loosely, attached to.