For Honor We Stand (28 page)

Not today.

Max stood facing the painting for several seconds, his back to the other officers.  Then, he turned to face the other men, his back straighter, the set of his jaw more defiant.  Unnoticed by Max, from the perspective of DeCosta, Brown, Kraft, and Sahin, he was framed by the painting--the idealized depiction of the
Cumberland
as a deadly and effective implement of war forming a backdrop for the man whose highest purpose was to make that depiction a reality.  “Skills and training on this vessel have been deficient across the board at almost every level of seniority since the day she was put into service and, as most of this crew was together on the USS
Seine
, for years before that.  You can’t make that up in a week.  Hell, you may not be able to make it all up in a year.  Sure, these men are dedicated and committed and brave and loyal and are willing to give their last gram of strength and their last drop of blood for this ship and for the Union.  But they need the training.  They need the skills.  They need the experience.  We all know that we’ve been training them like mad since I took command and there is some reasonable level of skill in some of the positions, but the layer of proficiency is paper thin.  The skills we have to give this crew now can’t be instilled in a crash program.  There are too many of them and the deficiencies are too comprehensive.  We’re in for the long haul.  It will take a systematic program of hard work,
but at a sustainable level of effort.
  We’ve got to take old Wally Schirra’s advice and pull an even strain because we’ve got a heavy load and we’ve got to pull it a long way.”

The doctor made a mental note to consult the database and find out who this
Wall E. Schirra
was.

“I agree that we have a very great deal of work to do before we will be able to call
Cumberland
a well worked up, or even an average, ship.”  Brown said.  “Returning to the more immediate issue, I do not find it difficult to believe that these men did not come forward.  After all, if the gundecking has been going on for a long time before, can you imagine men actually coming forward of their own accord to say, ‘we have been falsifying data for many months, we repent now--please Court Martial us.’”  He scoffed.  “These people nearly always have to be caught.  In any event, I have a very good idea which men did this.  Although it is almost impossible to believe that every one of the eight of them did not know, I suppose that our mandatory investigation needs to start with the six who were the active participants.”  Brown sounded dejected.

Kraft shook his head.  “Actually, Lieutenant, my experience in investigating crime tells me most emphatically that we are better starting off with the other two.  I want to know how much they know.  And what was done to procure their silence.”

Chapter
7

18:11Z Hours, 20 March 2315

 Max was looking at one of the training schedules prepared by the XO.  The frantic edge needed to go, and there was too much time spent on taking the people who were already competent and getting them up to a high level, and not enough on reaching down to the people who were at the lowest levels of proficiency and bringing them up to competency.  But, where one arm was strong and the other weak, the strong arm does the hard work.  Max needed to find a way to strengthen the weak arm.  Tie the strong arm behind the man’s back?  How do you do that on a Destroyer?

Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats but he couldn’t find a way to make the tide come in.  With this ship, it was always an uphill battle.  Nothing was ever easy.

At least the food was good.

The coffee in his mug had gone cold.  Max didn’t mind cold coffee so much.  He had pulled many hundreds of middle watches in forgotten corners of large warships, where at 02:53 the only coffee that could be had without committing the unpardonable (not to mention Court Martialable) offense of abandoning one’s station was burned, stale, and cold.  Drinking coffee that was merely cold was scarcely an inconvenience, much less a hardship.  He tossed the dregs of the cup down the hatch like a shot of cheap liquor and was reaching for the comm button to call for some more when the panel buzzed making him start and drop the mug.  It shattered into hundreds of pieces on the metal bezel that marked the boundary between the comm panel and the captains’ desk.  “Crap,” he muttered as he punched to answer.  “Skipper.”

“Captain, this is Doctor Sahin.  I was wondering if you might be available to meet with me.  A matter of some importance relative to the welfare of the crew has arisen and I would like to discuss it with you.”

“Absolutely.”  No questions asked.  Well, there was the
one
question.  “Doctor, is there anyone else whose presence might be beneficial?”

“Not initially.  Ordinarily, I would think that having the XO sit in would be advisable.  Given what he is doing at the moment, though, I would be reluctant to interrupt him.”

“Sensible.  I’m available now if you would like to come to my Day Cabin.”

“I’m on my way.  Sahin out.”

Max debated asking his steward or whoever had gash duty to clean up the mess but decided against it.  He was still picking up the pieces of the shattered coffee mug when the doctor buzzed for, and was granted, entrance.  Max waived his visitor to a chair, dropped the mug shards into a waste receptacle, and sat down. 

“I see your exaggerated startle response is still causing you problems,” the Sahin said matter of factly.

Damn.  The man might be a babe in the woods on a starship but his ability to observe trivial details in his environment and fit them together into hypotheses about what other people were doing and thinking bordered on the uncanny.  In this case, however, Max had little difficulty following the chain of deduction; after all, he was pretty good at reading “tells” himself.  He caught it when the doctor glanced at the comm panel.  A few errant drops of coffee were splashed where the mug had shattered and two tiny specks of the mug itself were resting between some of the buttons.  If a person were observant enough to spot the coffee and the mug pieces, and knowing that the panel had buzzed unexpectedly only a few moments before, it would be a simple matter to figure out what happened. 
If
you noticed, that is.

“Yes, I know better than to lie to you.  I hide it pretty well when the men can see me but I still jump pretty bad when I’m alone.” 

“You have come to understand the root of that response, now, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Bram, we have been through this many times.”

“Then, I would be grateful if you would do me the favor of explaining it to me as a demonstration of your understanding.  Just saying it again helps you process it emotionally.”

He signed in resignation.  It was easier to go through the explanation than to argue.  “All right.  When I was eight years old I saw my mother and my sisters die in a Krag biological warfare attack, after which my father almost immediately shuffled me off to the Navy.  He died in an accident a few months later and I never saw him again.  Only a year and a half after that, the cruiser on which I served as a Midshipman was boarded and taken by the Krag who killed, or tortured and killed, almost the entire crew.  I managed to avoid being killed or captured and hid out for twenty-six days while they relentlessly hunted me through the air ducts, access crawlways, and cable conduits.  You say that these experiences were all traumatic stresses triggering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which, at its root, is an anxiety disorder.  Although I am generally handling it well, part of my mind fears recurrence of these experiences and seeks to protect me from them by being constantly on guard with the fight or flight response set to a hair trigger.  You call this ‘hypervigilance.’”

 “Generally correct.  But you state that I am the one who says that these events were traumatic.  You don’t admit it to yourself.  Your refusal to admit the severity of these traumas is the major impediment to your progress in addressing your anxiety issues.”

“Doctor, while I admit that these things were bad experiences, they were not as bad as you make out.  We’re at war and these things are part of war.  People experience horrible things.  They live through them.  They bear up.  They go on with their lives.”

“And some of them are horribly traumatized and become crippled by fears and neuroses and psychiatric disabilities requiring extensive treatment.  You, my friend, are in denial.  But, we have spent too many hours on this subject for me to believe I am going to make progress on that issue any time soon.  You will move forward when you are ready and not before.  Something will happen, sudden learning will take place, and the door will open.  Until you are ready to open the door, it is useless for me to keep knocking.  So, since I cannot get to the root of the poisonous plant, I am relegated to trimming the leaves.  We have talked about some of the cognitive strategies for combating hypervigilance.  Have you been applying those?”

“Bram, that stuff is a lot more easily said than done.  You told me that, since hypervigilance is the mind’s effort to keep me safe by carefully monitoring my environment, I’m supposed to work to convince myself that, in this particular environment, I am safe and can let down my guard.  I have to tell you, though, that’s a lot easier when you’re sitting in a nice medical office on Earth or Bravo than when you’re in the Captain’s Day Cabin on a
war
ship, in time of
war
, in a
war
zone, in which not only is my ship
theoretically
an object of sneak attack by the enemy, it
actually was
the subject of total surprise attack just a few days ago.”

“I can see how that might be an issue, Max, but there is a critical distinction which you are missing.  While
the ship
is subject to being sprung upon unawares, crept up upon from behind, and fired upon when we are not looking, you—I mean you, personally—are not.  As Captain, you need to be certain that Mr. DeCosta and Mr. Kasparov and Mr. Bartoli and Mr. Levy and Mr. Bhattacharyya and Chief LeBlanc are ready for anything and can spring into action in a moment’s notice.  You, on the other hand, do not have to keep your reflexes spring loaded to deal with an attacker in the same room.  You need not worry about some stealthy assassin tiptoeing up and blindsiding you from your
eighteen hundred hour position
.”  Impressed by his own eloquence in the use of naval argot, the doctor allowed his face to take on a slightly smug expression.

The smugness was short-lived.  “That’s
six o’clock
position.  Six.  O’Clock.”

The doctor was crestfallen.  “But, I thought that ‘eighteen hundred hours’ and ‘six o’clock in the evening’ were equivalent expressions.” 

“They are when you’re telling time.  But ‘six o’clock position’ is a way of giving a rough bearing to a target.  It lets you give the angle of something you see with the Mark One Eyeball without having to calculate degrees.  The numbers are based on the angles of the numbers on an old twelve hour analog clock.  Ever seen one?”

“Oh, yes.  I had never made the connection.  Now it makes sense.  Had that fact been explained to me in the first instance, I am certain that I would have understood it perfectly from the outset.”

“I’m sure.  Bram, as fascinating as this is, you told me that there was a matter affecting the welfare of the crew.”

“Indeed I did.  You are aware of your standing order requiring that any man who falls asleep at his post when we are running on a regular watch schedule be examined by me to determine whether there is a medical cause for his inappropriate choice of naptimes.”

“Sure.  That’s a standard standing order on most warships.  I’ve always thought it should be a regulation.  The watch schedule is set up so that every man gets enough rest.  If a man is falling asleep on duty, chances are he’s got some sort of problem:  medical, psychiatric, personal, whatever.”

“You should be aware that four men have been referred to me pursuant to this regulation.”

“Well, we’re almost three weeks into the month.  I admit that four would be a bit unusual but it’s not cause for alarm.”

“Not four men this month.  Four men in the last two days.”

“Oh.  That’s different.  Ok.  You have my attention.  What’s the reason?”

“The purely medical diagnosis in all four cases is identical.  Exhaustion.  They are not getting enough sleep.  The computer keeps a wake/sleep log on all ship’s personnel based on biometric monitoring.  Don’t worry, it is deeply confidential, CMO Eyes Only.  But it shows them being awakened at all hours, usually for duty-related matters.”

“Duty related?  That’s not supposed to happen.  Regulations prohibit a superior officer from waking a man during his sleep period absent a ship’s emergency or other compelling necessity and, if he does so, he is required to log who he woke, the date and time, and his reason.”

“This was not superiors waking inferiors, but the other way around.”

“Oh.  That’s very different.  Who are these men?”

“If you order me to tell you, I will.  This is not one of those confidences protected under the Navy’s miniscule, anemic, anorexic, atrophied, shrunken, wizened, shriveled, atom-sized notion of physician-patient privilege, but I would prefer not to say.  I believe we can discuss the problem and you can provide a solution without knowing which specific men came to me.”

“All right.  I’ll go along.  For now.  I know you well enough to be able to tell that you think you have put this whole thing together and can explain the whole problem to me.  You have that self-satisfied look on your face.”