The Cruiser by David Poyer Page A

What’s it about?”
    â€œShe didn’t want to say.”
    â€œUh-huh. Okay.” He checked the TAG Heuer that Blair had given him as a wedding present. “I’ll be in my at-sea cabin after evening meal if she wants to come by.”
    Almarshadi stood, pocketing his BlackBerry, but Dan snagged his sleeve as he turned away. “One second.”
    â€œSir?” The XO turned back quickly, as if startled.
    â€œI’m not sleeping that well. I thought tonight … we’ll be headed through Messina between 01 and 0300.”
    â€œYessir?”
    â€œI need to get my head down awhile, so I want you on the bridge. Back up whoever’s OOD.”
    Almarshadi seemed to grow an inch taller. His head came up. “Yes sir,” he said. “I will be there.”
    *   *   *
    HE told Staurulakis to drill the other Condition Three sections and continue the tracking exercise until they ran out of aircraft time. And to continue after that with the canned Hormuz scenario. He stopped at the equipment room to find the cleanup progressing, with Dr. Noblos hovering. Dan asked how the reduced redundancy would hurt their tracking abilities. Noblos said it wouldn’t help, but the effect would depend primarily on the geometry between the launch area and their patrol area. The rider seemed less prickly than the first time they’d interacted, so Dan kept it short. Let whatever had irked the man heal. He’d need Noblos when they got on station.
    He climbed to the bridge and rode his chair for a while, seemingly intent on his message traffic, but actually observing the bridge team from the corner of his eye. Four contacts were in sight, with five more over the horizon, being plotted on the radar and on the contact board. Nearly all were headed south, probably for the strait, the narrow bottleneck between the Tyrrhenian and the central Med. The wintry light glinted off flinty waves. The sun peered out only now and then through a scrim of high cloud. Other clouds, lower, fluffier, lay far off to the east, marking the mainland of Italy.
    The Falcon made another low pass, its roar rising as it neared, dwindling as it parted. Motors whined as the tapered tube of the five-inch swung after it, its slow elevation, quivering indecision, then sudden whiparound as it crossed the zenith somehow comical. The 21MC said, “Bridge, CIC: Event 0265 complete. Falcon 03 requests permission to take it to the barn.”
    He nodded. The jet waggled its wings and banked away, shrinking to southward.
    Dan swung down. He called the quartermaster over and pulled up their track on the nav screen. Through Messina, then south and east past the cow’s-udder peninsulas and islands of Greece. They’d pick up the task force south of Crete. He sketched an adjustment, and the QM, a reedy deliberate fellow whose accent said Jamaica, said he’d take it from there. “Have the navigator see me when you get it laid out,” Dan told him. “What’s our first course? For the strait?”
    The quartermaster set it up on the screen. “One one three, Captain.”
    â€œOne one three, and pick it up to twenty knots.” The OOD echoed the command, passing it to the helm, and Savo Island came around to the southeast.
    *   *   *
    AFTER dusk, after dinner. The porthole in his cabin was moon-dark. He was unbuttoning his shirt, contemplating reading a few more pages of Rome on the Euphrates before some serious bunk time, when someone tapped at the door. “Come in,” he called.
    â€œLieutenant Singhe, Captain.”
    â€œOh yeah. Almost forgot. Come in, Amy. Uh—leave that cracked, please.”
    Singhe took the chair two feet from him with a fluid motion. Her boots were polished glassy, which was not really required at sea, and her coveralls fitted as if tailored. Only at the knees did they look even slightly worn. She wore a khaki belt with the Savo