The Command (23 page)

H
ORN
had her own little convoy for a few days.
Yazd
and a break-
1
ibulk cargo tramp
Georges Leygues
had caught smuggling nine hundred tons of Iraqi crude out of Jordan under a blanket of olive oil. The crude was heavier than the olive oil, but the French had sampled with a tube rather than a dip bottle and found it. The tanker was old and very slow. They slogged down to Jiddah, the principal Saudi port on the Red Sea, at the blazing pace of six knots when not actually hove to to fix breakdowns.

At Jiddah a patrol boat escorted
Yazd
and the break-bulk into the Royal Saudi Naval Facility. There the mysterious tubes would be pulled out of
Yadz's
hold for examination by UN inspectors. Rashik had been packed off to purgatory with the State Department and Immigration and Naturalization. The Saudis would deliver the captured vessels to the custody area while the mill wheels of international enforcement ground their way to their disposition.

Horn,
drawing too much water for the naval facility, lay that night alongside the mile-long container terminal, surrounded by ro-ro ships discharging hundreds of shiny Japanese SUVs and trucks. She had disgorged, too, four hundred bags of accumulated trash they hadn't been permitted to dump in the Red Sea. Since Jiddah was the pilgrimage port for Mecca, there was no liberty for non-Muslims. American crews were strictly limited to the pier, and the port captain advised Dan to have his women's faces covered even there, or else keep them on board.

He debated staying aboard himself, to show solidarity, but the prospect of a run uninterrupted by knee-knockers and fire hoses seduced him. He told Hotchkiss he was going ashore for an hour. Then suited up in shorts and a T-shirt from his last reunion and jogged down the brow.

The asphalt flatness, long as many football fields end to end, was
dotted by ziggurats of containers, rail lines for the massive traveling cranes, and thousands of plastic-wrapped Hondas like pupating locusts. As he finished stretching and swung into a jog, sodium-vapor lamps detonated salmon-colored light into the Arabian dusk. The wind brought a fine dust that isolated him like fog. The buildings of the forbidden kingdom loomed indistinctly as a realm of ghosts across the moat that separated the pier from the town.

Gradually, as he ran, his mind recurred to where they might be going next. And where they might not.

They were due a week of port visit—actually, more like four days, since they'd used up part of it poking along with the slower vessels. But during the run down, Strong's inquiries on his location and estimated time of arrival had become more pointed. Dan wondered if he should warn the crew their long-anticipated liberty might not work out. The maritime intercept commander seemed to want them back on station as soon as possible. And just that morning a message from MIDEASTFOR had directed them to report the status of their Tomahawk loadout and daily systems checks, and communicate any degradation or casualty.

Isolated as they were, he was hard put to gauge what was going on. But the fleet news summary reported increased tensions with Iraq. The inspectors had probed too deeply, and sabers were rattling again.

If things lit up,
Horn
and
Laboon
might be called into the Gulf. But Strong was pulling them back north, to the head of the Red Sea. Contradictory? Or related to Commander, Mideast Force's sudden interest in their missile loadout?
San Jacinto,
“San Jac,” had fired Tomahawks from the Red Sea during the opening hours of the Gulf War.

After a couple of miles he found himself out of breath. You got out of shape quickly aboard ship. He slowed, then walked, looking at the distant lights of Arabia. Then forced himself back into motion, gasping in the gritty heat.

THEY finished loading food and fuel and cast off at 0800 into the same spectral, powdery-dust haze as the day before. The temperature was already over a hundred. It would rise as relentlessly as the sun. Dan was on the bridge, watching as they navigated the reef-strewn pass of Ras Quahaz, when Hotchkiss came up. He was getting used to her expression when she didn't have good news. Downturned lips, raised
eyebrows, an indefinable way she tilted her head… He sighed and beckoned her in.

“Did you want to keep your head on the maneuvering, sir?”

“I can listen to you and watch the chart.”

“I had an open-door visitor this morning. DK3 Hurst.”

“Charmine Hurst,” Dan said, getting a mental picture of a small, earnest black woman in her late twenties. The disbursing clerks were the navy's paymasters. “Good performer, her chief says. What's her problem?”

“Can we go outside for this?”

“We'll go back to my cabin,” Dan told her. “It's too damned hot to be out there when we don't have to.”

In the little stateroom behind the bridge he closed the door and motioned her to the settee. He took the chair and tented his fingers.

“She saw the corpsman. She's pregnant.”

Dan grunted, his morning just ruined. The whole pregnancy issue was getting to him. He'd lost two sailors already this cruise. All young sailors weren't knuckleheads. But some were, and when you put nineteen-year-old male knuckleheads together with nineteen-year-old female knuckleheads … “And?”

“She says it's the DK1.”

“Oh, swell.”

“Uh-huh. They're in there in that little disbursing office all day. And of course with the cash, it's locked. Nobody can come in and surprise them. Apparently she didn't bother with birth control. Simple as it is. We give the pills out in sick bay.”

Dan wondered why her gaze moved around his office. It struck him that it was a small, private compartment, too. She was leaning back, one coveralled arm thrown over the back of the settee. He could envision her nude … a small, slightly protruding belly, freckles down her thighs … he liked slim, fit women, and Hotchkiss spent as much time on the machines as he did.

The physical attraction was there. But even more alluring would be having someone he could just fucking
hold. A
skipper was alone as no one ever was ashore. Add the stark functional bareness of passageways, the comfortless machinery-humming desolation of air-conditioned spaces, and the thought of something warm and for yourself alone became worth risking very much for, indeed. He rubbed his lips, trying to concentrate on what she was saying, not the sway of breasts beneath blue cloth. And what did she mean by that reference to how easy birth control was?

“I told her policy doesn't require her to identify the father, but she wanted to. She's sorry she let the ship down.”

“I guess we all wish being sorry made things better. Hurst's married, isn't she?”

“Unfortunately, they both are. Also unfortunately, DK1 Konow's wife is also the mother of his three children. And also the vice president—”

Dan closed his eyes. “Ouch. Vice president of the Military Wives' Association of Tidewater, Virginia.”

“You see our problem.”

“So what do we do? Take them to mast is my first thought.”

“She came to me in confidence,” Hotchkiss said. “I write her up, that finishes my open-door policy for the other girls.”

“I see that, but it takes two to tango. Unless she's going to say it's rape, which is a whole different ball game. So to speak.” He stopped, realizing by her incredulous stare he'd just made the kind of half-unconscious pun a guy might make to another guy, but that was most definitely non grata with Claudia H. Hotchkiss.

“You'd better get serious about this. It's flagrant fraternization. Not only that, it's adultery.”

“You're right, sorry … but if it
was
consensual, the only way I see to play it fair is to take them both to mast. How far along is she? Is she planning to keep the baby? Did she share that with you?”

Hotchkiss told him, tone icier than it had been before his joke, “She's three months gone. But there isn't any choice. Navy medical care is prohibited by federal policy from terminating pregnancies. And she can't depend on a civilian facility out here.”

“So we'll lose her regardless of what I decide.”

“Lose her?” Hotchkiss seemed surprised. “Not necessarily. Not for several months yet, anyway.”

“If she's pregnant, she can't do her job,” Dan told her. “So I want her off the ship. Same as the first girl.”

“Why? All she has to do is sit at a desk and work the pay program.”

“We made this decision already, Claudia. We're running a warship, not a maternity ward. If a woman gets pregnant, we scrub her off the manning document pending a permanent relief. That's what we promised would happen, on the page thirteen entry and the fraternization briefings.”

Hotchkiss said with ominous silkiness, “So let me get this straight: We fire the woman, and keep the guy who knocked her up.”

“No—or at least not for the reason you're getting at. One, a pregnant woman waddling around can't do the shipboard damage control
and firefighting job, whatever her day-to-day rate is. She can push a desk shoreside, but sea duty's tough even for a man in good shape. Two, she's not being ‘fired,' we're sending her to a safer environment for an expectant mother. We may punish her for fraternization and adultery, but the pregnancy's a separate issue. We have a responsibility to both of them, mother and baby. And she's going to need family support intervention when she goes home, to explain this to her husband.”

His phone went off. The comm messenger was trying to locate him. Dan told him he was in the sea cabin.

The message was from Strong.
Horn's
liberty port was canceled, due to emergent operational commitments. They were to proceed north at best speed to a point off Duba. Due to a comms breakdown on the flagship,
Horn
was to stand by to receive the task group flag.

“What is it?”

“Port visit canceled. The commodore's coming aboard.” He passed it to her.

“We aren't staff configured,” Hotchkiss said, fingering the message doubtfully. “We don't have the space, and we sure don't have the comm suite.”

Dan wasn't enthusiastic either, but he didn't see a way out. “Strong can go in my in-port cabin. Move the junior officers to overflow berthing.”

“It's going to be crowded.”

“Then maybe they won't stay long,” Dan said. He caught her look. Yeah, in some ways having a female exec was a lot like being married. “I meant, this is probably just temporary, till another flag-configured ship comes available. Are we all clear now about this other thing?”

“I'm still not convinced Charmine deserves to get hammered. The man's a first class, she's a third. There's got to be an element of intimidation.”

“She should have brought it up when he hit on her, then. I don't buy that, that the woman's always the victim.”

“If one partner's twenty-four, the other's thirty-two?”

“Old enough to blow the whistle if her supervisor's coming on to her.”

“If you're going to throw her off the ship anyway, why take her to mast?”

“We went through that,” he told her. “Plus, so far all we've got is her word he's the father. There'll be enough complications downstream. I don't want to pin this on Konow if it actually was somebody else. So
he's got to have his say, too. Put together your evidence and start the process.” He hesitated. “Actually we'll probably end up losing them both. There's that issue of trust when you're in there with the cash and the checks. And he's abused it. So let's get a message out to get some kind of quick fill body on their way so we can keep the people paid.”

She tossed her foot nervously. Her coverall had ridden up and he saw fine blond hairs on her calf. “I don't agree. I don't think she should go to mast.”

“Get them both ready,” Dan told her. “And you're dismissed.”

He sat listening to the echo of the slammed door, unable to shrug off that he'd just fantasized doing what he was bound to punish others for.

Ah, but he hadn't done it. Only thought about it.

Thought about it night after night, alone on that same settee. What she'd say. What they'd do. Just to have her hand gently fingering up and down his prick … and what that first long, irretrievable orgasm would feel like. Guilt and pleasure. The most explosive mix of all.

And if Lieutenant Commander Claudia Hotchkiss, USN, his executive officer, had gone to the door, and pushed in the button? Locking them in?

Fortunately, it couldn't happen. She was happily married. To a marine aviator she talked about with a lilt in her voice, her professional demeanor suddenly transforming with a sparkle, a smile.

Did Blair smile like that when she talked about him?

He drummed his fingers on his knee, head lowered in contemplation.

“NEW foxtrot corpen, relative wind will be three-two-zero, ten knots,” said the speaker, the words echoing from the cavernous aluminum bulkheads and lofty overhead of the helo hangar.

Twenty-four hours later and two hundred and sixty miles to the north, on a hot morning backed by desert-blasted mountains.
Horn
was coming to a course to put the wind on her bow. Dan waited inside, watching the helo approach, then undogged the flight deck door as the rotors disengaged.

As tradition dictated, the senior disembarked first. Dan saluted a lean officer in a green flight suit. Strong handed him his cranial, fitting a pisscutter to a close-cropped head that was turning silver. The 1MC stated, “Red Sea Task group, arriving.” Six bells, and the commodore's pennant broke at the masthead, rippling in the hot wind.

Horn
was now the flagship, and Dan no longer senior aboard.

“This way, sir,” he shouted over the engine howl. Strong eyed him, holding his salute. But Dan was uncovered. U.S. ships didn't permit headgear on the flight deck. Too much danger of them getting sucked into an engine and ruining a perfectly good aircraft. At last he returned a bareheaded salute. The blades were still turning, Strong's staff jumping out while a crewman tossed out luggage and tape-strapped cardboard boxes. They seemed to have a lot of gear.