The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (15 page)

*   *   *

HE
checked with the OOD on the Hydra while climbing the ladder to his at-sea cabin. The contact to port had a left-bearing drift now; it would cross in their wake, three thousand yards astern. Dan told him to maintain thirty knots and keep a close eye on it until it was clear. He switched channels and talked to the navigator as he let himself in, unbuttoned his shirt, and fell into his bunk. They’d reach their patrol area tomorrow at noon. He called Cheryl Staurulakis and got the ops officer started on their reporting-in message.

Then lay staring at the overhead while the decisions he’d just made buzzed around inside his skullcase like trapped wasps.

Any choice a skipper made could lead to disaster under the right circumstances. Screw up the geometry on a closing ship, and it could cut you in two. He’d seen that happen, aboard USS
Reynolds Ryan
. One wrong rudder order, and almost two hundred men had died.

So … Zotcher. Had he come down too hard? Or not hard enough? Knuckled under to the chiefs, or just shown them he was reasonable?

Was Singhe really ambitious, hard-charging, innovative? Or was there something suspicious about the way she was bypassing the chiefs and the senior enlisted adviser? He didn’t think she had anything malevolent in mind. But blocking the ship’s middle management from online discussions didn’t sound like a good way to advance a serious agenda. Of any kind.

He remembered dark eyes studying him, and seemed to smell sandalwood again. Then, somehow, he was asleep.

*   *   *

THE
buzzer jerked him out of a confused pursuit through endless corridors. It had seemed to be the Pentagon, but in some hotter, less affluent country. The windows were boarded up, and through those endless refuse-strewn passageways something stalked him. He had a pistol, but when he tried to use it the trigger malfunctioned, again and again, as he struggled to keep the sights on a shape he couldn’t clearly see, that shifted identity and appearance even as it pursued him.

The buzzer went off again, and he rolled over, flinging an arm out. The back of his hand hit the brass lever and tore skin. “Captain,” he grunted. What time was it anyway? Apparently he’d missed lunch.

“Sir, OOD here.”

“What you got, Bird?”

“Sir, corpsman called a minute ago to report a man dead in forward berthing.”

He rolled out and put bare feet on the chilly deck. “Say that again.”

“It’s Seaman Goodroe. In Weps berthing.”

A heavyset, truculent man in coveralls, hunched over a mess tray. “I … dead, how? I saw him on the mess decks just yesterday. Talking about …
Dead?
From what?”

“Sir, I didn’t get the impression the chief corpsman was real sure.”

“Forward berthing? I’ll be down right away. Does the XO know?”

“I’ll notify him soon as I get off, sir. Figured you ought to hear it first.”

Dan told him he was right and hung up. Dressed as quickly as he could. The blue coveralls were a forgiving uniform, though he didn’t care for the way they showed a corner of your skivvy shirt. He pressed his pins into his chest with the palm of his right hand and let the door lock click behind him.

*   *   *

FIVE
decks down, in the muzzy humidity of the berthing compartment. When he’d first joined the Navy, these had been pipe bunks, metal frames four high, a thin pallet and a worn fartsack sagging on a crisscross of webbing. Now each sailor had his own nook with reading light and curtain. Not exactly roomy, with fifty men in a compartment, but there was some privacy, at least.

The man who lay in bunk 24 was past privacy. The face, immobile as dark wax, and staring eyes told him that. The corpsman, Grissett, looked up from ballpointing notes. An astringent smell edged the air. Grissett wore thin blue latex gloves. A transparent tube lay on the bunk, still sealed in plastic. Behind him stood Chief Toan, the master-at-arms, badge glittering, hands behind his back. They both swung as they caught sight of Dan. A very slight, ugly young man with a dirty tee, scuffed, torn boots, and coveralls peeled down to his waist hovered a few feet away. “What happened?” Dan asked.

“Morning, sir. I mean, afternoon. The Troll here—”

“The Troll?”

“Sorry—the compartment seaman, here. He called the master-at-arms when he couldn’t get Goodroe up.” The corpsman nodded at the body. “Cold. No pulse. He’s been dead awhile.”

Dan looked the corpse over. By no means the first he’d seen, but definitely one of the most peaceful-looking. The heavy-jawed face was expectant, as if at a joke just heard but not yet fully grasped. The nude chest was covered with thick curling black hairs that shriveled to stubs as they approached the beard line. A trace of what might be dried foam at the corner of bluish lips. He bent closer; a hint of brown in it? Started to reach out, then, at a cautionary flinch from the corpsman, retrieved his finger before touching anything. “Is that blood? At the corner of his mouth?”

“Take a sample in a minute, sir. Downie here”—the compartment cleaner grinned, then sobered—“he says he, I mean Goodroe, felt a little down and had a cough. He was off watch, so he turned into his bunk. That’s all.”

Usually you looked for an off-watch sailor in his work center during the day, but the era when all hands were expected to turn to at daylight was long gone at sea. These days, a sailor off watch, and not feeling well, might well decide to turn in for a Tallerigo. “What’d his work-center supervisor say?” Dan asked the CMAA.

“On his way down, sir. He knew Goody was in his rack, but didn’t know nothing else.”

“Any history? Anything … Any idea what’s going on here?” Dan scratched his head. He’d been talking to the man, what, just yesterday? A young, husky, jock-type guy. Maybe a little … antagonistic, with his remarks about how the crew needed to be in the picture more. But he hadn’t seemed ill. “Is this a natural death? Or what?”

The corpsman frowned. “A lot of possibilities right now, sir. You know most of our guys are strong, healthy specimens of testosterone-filled manhood. So the first thing, you look for signs of strangulation, or beating. But I don’t see any. Could be a drug OD—”

“I’ve seen those,” the CMAA murmured.

“—or poisoning, accidental or deliberate. He could’ve had underlying valve disease. A heart murmur they let go, or didn’t hear, when he enlisted. If he got septic in the night, maybe endocarditis—the infected valve sends emboli to the rest of the body, like fingers. But, bottom line, this is gonna be a coroner’s case, sir. We got to handle it by protocol, and get the body to the medical examiner ASAP.”

“Okay, I get it. Anything in his record?”

The chief corpsman slipped a file folder from beneath a clipboard. “His last entry’s the final installment of the anthrax inoculation. That we got in Naples.”

Dan scratched his head again. He’d had a course of what he assumed was the same vaccine, experimental then, during the Gulf War. “This vaccine. Is it, I don’t know, ever dangerous?”

“It’s a mandatory inoculation.” The chief shrugged. Flipped pages. “A three-shot buildup and booster. No record of any adverse effects to the first two shots. No, wait … he reported fever and swelling after the second. Two days later, follow-up, he’s fine.”

“Good records. When’d he get the booster?”

“Two days ago. I gave him that myself.”

“This is the AVA stuff, right? Is this a documented side effect? Sudden death, I mean?”

“Anthrax vaccine adsorbed, yes sir. No sir, there’s no such warning on side effects.”

“So what killed this apparently healthy guy? Best guess?”

“Captain, I just can’t give you an informed opinion right now. If we had an MD aboard, maybe, but I doubt he’d want to come out and tell you something that might turn out to be a hundred and eighty wrong either.” The chief snapped the latex on one glove, then tore open the plastic wrapping on the flexible tube. He peeled down the corpse’s boxers, dug out the slack flaccid penis, spread its meatus, and began threading the tube into it.

Dan said, “Uh, what exactly are you—”

“Drug screen. Gotta catheterize him. And we’re gonna have to take lots of photos, at the highest resolution we can.”

Dan got Almarshadi on the Hydra and told him to get the ship’s photographer down to forward berthing, and then to meet up with him. “Okay, do the protocol,” he told Grissett. “By the book. Then body-bag him, and back to the reefers until I can get direction on disposition. Can you decontaminate, I mean, disinfect the rack? Would that be something we’d want to do?”

“Yes sir, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Once we get him out of the compartment. I can use an alcohol solution. A spray bottle. And take his linens to the laundry in a separate bag, do ’em in superhot water.”

“Good. Anybody else touch him? Uh—Troll?”

A flinch; a grin. “No sir, I didn’t touch him.” Then a frown. “Well, yeah, I did. To sort of shake him. To, uh, wake him up.”

“I’ll get his hands disinfected too, just in case.” The corpsman studied the body and snapped the glove-rubber again. “You didn’t touch your face afterward, did you?”

Dan left them there, gathered around the drawn-back curtain like a nineteenth-century tableau: grave visages around a sickbed, silent and respectful in the unexpected, yet never faraway, presence of the Dread Leveler.

*   *   *

ALMARSHADI
caught up as he was letting himself out on the main deck. Dan wanted to get some fresh air; the old-socks-and-deodorant man-reek of the berthing space seemed ominous once associated with death.

They stood by the lifeline, buffeted by a cold wind, as sailors ducked into the breaker—the covered walkway, almost like a highway tunnel, that led from the port side midships up to the forecastle. The sea roared as
Savo
ripped through it, peeling off curving chunks of whitecap that toppled to either side like dump-truck loads of shiny pale green and white marbles, and now and again she rolled and the wind tore a spatter of spray across them, the scent and taste sharp and refreshing. At intervals, when the sun broke through, crystalized salt sparkled on the bulkheads by the refueling station, on the chocks, bitts, life rails, the davit socket, like gypsum deposits in a cave.

Dan allowed himself ten seconds to stand in silence, swaying with the roll, one with the morning and the wind and the endless topple of the bow wave. Communing, for just a moment, with the ancient sea, the mariner’s eternal mother and eternal enemy. Then told Almarshadi to report the death to CTF 60 and request instructions.

“But we outchopped … right?” The smooth dark face was uncertain; the black hair ruffled in the breeze. Dan smelled cigarette smoke. Red coals glowed in the dimness of the breaker. The best execs were shadow selves, masters of detail within the skin of the ship. They freed the commander, instead of continually pulling him in, as this sparrowlike Arab seemed to do all too often. But he’d had worse seconds. Remembering Greg Juskoviac, his totally worthless XO aboard
Gaddis
, he could appreciate Almarshadi a little more. At least the guy was trying.

“We’re not under his tactical command, no, but he’s the closest force commander. So let’s see what he can do for us. Meanwhile, I’ve told Grissett to clear out one of the freezers. And not to let anyone else touch the body.”

The exec inspected his boots. Scuffed the nonskid. “Do we want to slow down? In case they want to offload it?”

Dan frowned. “No. I want to reach station as soon as possible.”

Almarshadi kicked at a scupper. “Okay, sir. Oh. By the way. I think you did the right thing. About Zotcher.”

Dan looked aloft, at the snapping flags atop the signal bridge. A lookout was studying them from the wing, decks above; when he caught his captain’s eye he swung his binoculars out again to sea. The barrel of a machine gun pointed in the same direction. “Glad I have your confidence. What about Amy Singhe? Am I picking up bad blood between her and some of the chiefs?”

“Amarpeet doesn’t get along with them. Considers them beneath her, I guess. You know she’s got an MBA from Wharton?”

“Yeah, I knew that. You call her Amarpeet? Not Amy?”

“That’s her name.”

Dan looked aloft again. “Not a smart attitude. Looking down on the chiefs, I mean.”

“I’ll counsel her.”

“Okay. But first check on how they’re doing with Goodroe. And get that message out.”

*   *   *

HE
walked the deck yearning to try to nap again, but knowing he wouldn’t. The immobile heavy-jawed visage, its last sight on earth probably the stained underside of the next mattress up, haunted him. One day joking on the mess decks. The next, in olive plastic, being slid into cold storage.

You expected death in battle. And going to sea in ships crammed with explosives and fuel and heavy machinery was always dangerous. You lost people overboard, or sucked into turbine engines on carriers, or from smoke inhalation, or asphyxiation in voids. But what killed healthy young men in their bunks? Cocaine? Didn’t that stop the heart? But there’d been no sign of a coke problem in the Command Climate Survey, and it usually showed up either there or in the urinanalysis program. Navy drug use was way down, and Goodroe’d had no record. Heart attack? The man had been in his late twenties; it seemed unlikely.

He dropped down a deck and strolled the length of the ship, stepping over knee-knockers, absentmindedly noting the condition of firefighting stations, dogging mechanisms, repair-party lockers. Putting a hand up now and then to check for dust on the top of the insulated ducts that ran along the overhead, painted cream-white and stenciled every few yards with black arrows denoting direction of flow. A knot of men and a blond woman stood around by the barbershop, nearly all the way aft. Navy didn’t salute inside the skin of the ship, but they came to their feet, nodded, murmuring, “Afternoon, Captain.”

“We doing okay? How’s the service here?”

“Turbo Mouth, he does okay. Talks pretty much nonstop, but he does a good haircut.”

“Price is right,” another sailor said. “Go on ahead if you need a trim, sir. We can wait.”