The Crisis (9 page)

McCall's heels clicked down the asphalted pier as a gaily painted fishing dhow nodded its way out to sea. The glare reflected off the water so brightly Dan had to squint to see her swaying hips, straight back, slender neck. She'd caused him more than a few worries aboard
Horn
, where she'd been the combat systems officer. She was good, but he couldn't always detach her professional performance from the fact that she was a knockout. Tall, professional, smart women were his weakness. McCall wasn't any more attractive than his wife, but she was
here.

Ten thousand miles away from Blair, he promised himself sex would not rear its ugly head.

Henrickson shambled behind, bent under cases, computers, binders, and what little personal gear he carried. Dan had been amused on previous trips to discover that the little analyst washed his underwear and socks in the sink, dried them on shower bars, and in general, lived like a persnickety stoic. His personal comfort came a distant second to the data.

“That's her, I guess,” McCall said as they rounded a shed. Dan pried his gaze off the tight fabric as it stretched and relaxed over her rump, and lifted his eyes to snapping flags.

USS
Shamal
, PC-13, was moored across from several tin-roofed open-sided sheds. A containership with a bright green hull, flying the Saudi flag,
was tied up on the far side. Speedboats and fishing craft motored in and out of the inner port through a half-mile-wide entrance. More dhows and smaller patrol craft lay across the inlet, in a basin from which sailboat masts jutted, though he couldn't see their hulls.

The shed was covered with graffiti and colorful hand-painted signs advertising jitney buses and local restaurants. At least fifty locals, all male, sat or stood pierside. Lanky dark men in thin, worn-out short-sleeve button-up shirts, cut-off slacks, some sandaled, others with bony bare feet. They leaned against pilings or walls. A few smoked, but most were doggedly chewing sticks of something green. Part-time cargo wallopers and line handlers, Dan guessed, waiting for the next opportunity to turn a dollar, franc, euro, or riyal.

Shamal
was smaller than he'd expected. Only her bridge and mast even showed above the pier. Granted, nothing displacing a whisker over three hundred tons was likely to be huge, but even to his eye—accustomed to frigates and destroyers—she seemed barely larger than a toy. But when he stepped to the edge he got a different impression.

Bow on, she seemed to be straining at her lines, a haze gray pit bull eager to fasten her jaws into something. Her superstructure looked as if someone had planed off all the right angles and painted them sky blue, a pattern that looked garish pierside, but that would break up her silhouette at dusk or daybreak. Her upthrust bow had the heavy-weather flare he'd appreciated ever since a winter cruise into the Arctic Sea. A subdued 13 was painted on it in darker gray. An automatic gun was aligned in the “ready air” position on her foredeck. Aft of that a boxlike hump angled up to an enclosed bridge structure, with a windshielded cockpit above.

Dan noted .50-cal mounts on the wings, sheathed in gray covers, and the glint of cartridge belts. A swept-back mast supported levels of radars and sensors, two of which revolved steadily, flashing in the sun. As they paced nearer, deck houses came into view aft, with a raised catwalk that ought to be useful getting around in heavy weather, more antennas—one of the electronic intelligence packages, Bobcat or Privateer—and another gun. She had no stack, but when he peered down he caught mascara smeared back from waterline exhausts. She'd spent a lot of time under way at near idle. You didn't get black soot like that when engines were running all out.

A bo's'n's pipe, a flurry of uniforms as the welcoming party formed up on the quarterdeck. Henrickson and McCall fell back. Dan set down his gear at the brow. Catching a photographer atop the bridge, he straightened his cap and pressed his ribbons into his chest with his palm. The
pipe went low, high, low, high, and held. When it cut off the 1MC announced, “Commander, United States Navy, arriving.”

Dan stepped off the tinny-sounding brow, saluted the national ensign that dangled limply aft, pivoted, faced a chief in khaki. “Permission to come aboard?”

“Permission granted, sir.” The chief's salute could have opened cans.

Dan turned to a squat, desert-booted, BDU-trou-and tan-skivvy-shirt-clad black man with a wrestler's neck and a peanut-shaped head whose shaven scalp glistened even under a boonie hat. “Lieutenant Geller?”

“Yessir, Connor Geller. Welcome aboard, Commander.” The skipper's grip was hard and his palm wet. So was Dan's, making for a squishy, gritty handshake.

Dan waved his people forward. “Dr. Monty Henrickson, Lieutenant Commander McCall.”

Geller shook hands with both, pointedly not looking at McCall's chest. “Welcome to Africa, welcome aboard
Shamal
, welcome to the patrol coastal navy. Want to see where we're bunking you? Or do the tour first? Petty Officer Dugan'll get your gear.”

“We could all use showers,” Dan said. “Then let's meet someplace cool and get our heads together.”

“Excuse me, Cap'n,” a radioman said. “Complan for the transit.”

Geller scribbled a signature. “Works for me. Except for the part about cool. Dugie, put the commander's bags in my cabin, okay?—Got a shower there, care to use it before you change?”

“Works for me,” Dan said.

 

GELLER'S stateroom was no larger than those aboard a submarine, porthole-less, and extremely hot despite two bulkhead fans shuddering at max rpm. Dan saw why T-shirts were the uniform of choice. “Not much AC aboard these things,” Geller said. “Up forward, where the electronics live, that's about all. Shower help?”

Dan tousled his head with the towel, feeling first gratefully cool, as the moisture on his skin evaporated, then stifling again. “Much.”

“Sweet or unsweet?”

“Sorry?”

“Tea. Sweetened or not?”

He said unsweetened. Sucking half the icy glass down at once helped. He sat back and plucked his skivvy shirt off his chest.

“So, understand you're gonna be riding us on patrol. First time you've been aboard one of these?” Geller asked.

“First time. I mean, I've seen them going in and out, but as I said, never been aboard.”

“They designed these to deploy special forces teams in near-shore operations. But the spec ops guys didn't like 'em as much as they thought they would. We draw nine feet; that puts our operational envelope too far offshore. So then the Navy said, who wants these? And started getting rid of 'em.”

“Like what happened to the hydrofoils.”

“Yeah, and the PTs before that. Some went to the Coast Guard. The Philippines took one. Then we started getting serious about the Gulf.”

“They're smaller than I thought,” Dan said.

“Yeah, your blue-water Navy isn't impressed. We don't carry the big gun, the sonar, can't land a helo. So what good are we? Well, we've operated off Bahrain, guarding oil terminals. Did antidrug ops in the Ca rib be an. Did a forward deploy to the Gulf, five PCs and six Coast Guard WPBs. And that worked.” Geller nodded toward the porthole, out which the upper-works on the far side of the basin were visible. “And we're training the locals.”

Dan pulled khakis out of the hanging bag. “That's them? Across the basin?”

“Well, they aren't seaworthy enough to trust out of the harbor. But we're working on it. The MST's got an engineman warrant over there. Maintenance support team. You'll hear more about 'em on the Mountain.”

Dan groped before he realized Geller meant
Mount Whitney
. “What's the outback like? Have you been incountry?”

“Flew over it, sir. It's grim. Sand and scorpions. The Afars and the Issas with their goats and their guns, fucking the goats and shooting the guns, and you really don't want to get in between them. Oh, and there's the refugee camps, full of poor bastards nobody wants. It's like, on the eighth day God said, Crap, I forgot . . . and he made East Africa. I know I shouldn't say this, but whoever got my ancestors out of here, God bless 'em.” Geller checked his watch. “Seen the commodore yet?”

“Thought I'd wait till it got cooler. After dark?”

“It's pretty much set on broil all the time. Hit a hundred and forty in the engine room last week. And we're sked to get under way at eighteen hundred. So you better go pretty soon. I'll walk you over. He wanted to see you as soon as you got here.”

Dan wasn't looking forward to meeting the squadron commander. All too often, the Visiting Expert was nothing more than a PITA. But you couldn't ride one of his ships without shaking the guy's hand. The Navy didn't pay calls as formally as in 1900, with white gloves and engraved cards, but they were still a reality. “Anybody else I need to punch in with? Base commander? This isn't a U.S. base, is it?”

“Oh, hell no. If anything, it's French. They've got their own flag now, but
it's still almost a colony. There's a huge Foreign Legion camp. Usually a frigate or a sweeper at that pier over there. But we have an arrangement.”

“I notice you're at Condition Yellow. Live ammo, armed pier sentries.”

“There's a civil war going on. Low level, mainly out in the hinterland, but it's there. The whole Horn's boiling. Somalia's been in the toilet for a long time. Looks to me like Ashaara's going the same way. We had an amphibious ready group here for two months.
Inchon
,
Trenton
,
Portland, Spartanburg County.
All prepped to run up and evacuate Ashaara City. But things cooled off and they went back to Bahrain.”

“Port looks busy.”

“Oh yeah. They closed Eritrea to Ethiopian trade. With the drought, that means all the aid shipments for Ethiopia have to come through here. We may have to vacate this pier space. I can anchor out if I have to. Might even enhance security.”

“It'll cut down on liberty.”

“The guys get as much liberty as they can stand here the first night.” Geller grinned. “Okay, pull your shirt on and grab your pisscutter.”

 

THE command ship loomed over the quay like a star cruiser. Dan had been aboard
Mount Whitney
before. He was used to its spacious spotless passageways, the icy air-conditioning, the quick, pleasant young crew. It was always a marvel to him, eighteen thousand tons of ship armed with nothing more lethal than a twenty-millimeter self-defense system. Her main battery was her forest of antennas. Her brain was the command quarters, where he sat now, doughnuts and coffee on the leather-covered table, with Geller and Commodore Carlos Goya.
Shamal
's CO had sweated through his uniform blouse just in the couple hundred yards down the pier.

Goya looked more German than Hispanic, with gangly arms he didn't seem to be able to find a comfortable place for and a small black mustache. Which right now he was plucking at, frowning. He and Dan had gotten past whom they both knew and where they'd both served.

“What I don't understand is why Vince Contardi's interested in the patrol coastal community. I'd think this'd be about the least transformation-izational, if that's a word, community around. Given our lack of advanced sensors and computers.”

“Well, yes and no, Commodore.” Dan had thought this over in light of Contardi's speeches and papers, most of which he suspected Fauss had ghostwritten. “As best I can tell, you could test-bed two aspects of transformation. The first is the idea we can use, uh, ‘sensor nodes,' to target ordnance from larger units via something like a cooperative engagement
capability. Those could be small, lightly manned surface craft, operating in littoral environments—like what you do. Eventually some nodes could be robotic, autonomous small craft and subs and UAVs. The second aspect would be crew swapping. Instead of rotating the ship back to home port every deployment, you leave the hull in place and change the crews out.”

Goya's quirk of the lips might have been skepticism. If so, it was quickly masked. “I've read a couple of pieces in
Proceedings
and
Surface Warfare
. Sounds like upsides and downsides. But you're here. Tell me what you need.”

Dan thought about confessing his own doubts, but undercutting his orders wouldn't be a good way to kick off his stay. He front and centered his notebook. “First, I guess, is the command structure.”

“Right now I'm CTG 156.4. Report to COMNAVCENT in Bahrain.”

“You have three PCs out of Djibouti?”

“Only temporarily. We had a larger squadron with some amphibs when it seemed like we might have to implement Hasty Exit—that was a NEO from Ashaara City.”

NEO was navalese for noncombatant evacuation operation, what the Navy and Marine Corps executed when a country went to shit and the State Department people, residents, and dependents had to be whisked out before being used for target practice. As Dan nodded Goya went on, “I'm running four hulls out of here on the maritime security mission, with an MST of twenty-two guys living in tents north of town. EMs, ETs, electricians, a welder, and a crusty old chief warrant named Wronowicz.”

“Fuel? Food?”

“We refuel from
Whitney
and get food through the Foreign Legion out at Camp Limonier. We're actually growing a working relationship with the small navies around the area. The platform's not as threatening as it is when we come in with a Burke-class. It's working peer to peer rather than gawping up at this huge thing you can't even grasp what weapons systems it
has
, much less operate it. We work with them on interdiction ops, antipirate missions, maritime security.” Goya cocked his head. “Understand you've had experience along those lines.”

“Now and then. Like most surface line officers,” Dan said, disguising the particular in the general. “So the infrastructure, if we were to maintain ships on station two, three years at a time—rotating crews—it's adequate?”