2034: A Novel of the Next World War(3)
“I imagine you weren’t thrilled to learn that I’d picked the John Paul Jones for my flagship.” Hunt had lit her cigar as well, and as their ship held its course the smoke was carried off behind them. “I wouldn’t want you to think this choice was a rebuke,” she continued, “particularly as the only other female in command. I wouldn’t want you to think that I was trying to babysit you by situating my flag here.” Hunt instinctively glanced up at the mast, at her commodore’s command pennant.
“Permission to speak freely?”
“C’mon, Jane. Cut the shit. You’re not a plebe. This isn’t Bancroft Hall.”
“Okay, ma’am,” began Morris, “I never thought any of that. Wouldn’t have even occurred to me. You’ve got three good ships with three good crews. You need to put yourself somewhere. Actually, my crew was pretty jazzed to hear that we’d have the Lion Queen herself on board.”
“Could be worse,” said Hunt. “If I were a man, you’d be stuck with the Lion King.”
Morris laughed.
“And if I were the Lion King,” deadpanned Hunt, “that’d make you Zazu.” Then Hunt smiled, that wide-open smile that had always endeared her to her subordinates.
Which led Morris to say a little more, maybe more than she would’ve in the normal course: “If we were two men, and the Levin and Hoon were skippered by two women, do you think we’d be having this conversation?” Morris allowed the beat of silence between them to serve as the answer.
“You’re right,” said Hunt, taking another pull on her Cuban as she leaned on the deck railing and stared out toward the horizon, across the still impossibly calm ocean.
“How’s your leg holding up?” asked Morris.
Hunt reached down to her thigh. “It’s as good as it’ll ever be,” she said. She didn’t touch the break in her femur, the one she’d suffered a decade before during a training jump gone bad. A faulty parachute had ended her tenure as one of the first women in the SEALs and nearly ended her life. Instead, she fingered the letter from the medical board resting in her pocket.
They’d smoked their short cigars nearly down to the nubs when Morris spotted something on the starboard horizon. “You see that smoke?” she said. The two naval officers pitched their cigars over the side for a clearer view. It was a small ship, steaming slowly or perhaps even drifting. Morris ducked into the bridge and returned to the observation deck with two pairs of binoculars, one for each of them.
They could see it clearly now, a trawler about seventy feet long, built low amidships to recover its fishing nets, with a high-built prow designed to crest storm surge. Smoke billowed from the aft part of the ship, where the navigation bridge was set behind the nets and cranes—great dense, dark clouds of it, interspersed with orange flames. There was a commotion on deck as the crew of maybe a dozen struggled to contain the blaze.
The flotilla had rehearsed what to do in the event they came across a ship in duress. First, they would check to see if other vessels were coming to render assistance. If not, they would amplify any distress signals and facilitate finding help. What they wouldn’t do—or would do only as an absolute last resort—was divert from their own freedom of navigation patrol to provide that assistance themselves.
“Did you catch the ship’s nationality?” asked Hunt. Inwardly, she began running through a decision tree of her options.
Morris said no, there wasn’t a flag flying either fore or aft. Then she stepped back into the bridge and asked the officer of the deck, a beef-fed lieutenant junior grade with a sweep of sandy blond hair, whether or not a distress signal had come in over the last hour.
The officer of the deck reviewed the bridge log, checked with the combat information center—the central nervous system of the ship’s sensors and communications complex a couple of decks below—and concluded that no distress signal had been issued. Before Morris could dispatch such a signal on the trawler’s behalf, Hunt stepped onto the bridge and stopped her.
“We’re diverting to render assistance,” ordered Hunt.
“Diverting?” Morris’s question escaped her reflexively, almost accidentally, as every head on the bridge swiveled toward the commodore, who knew as well as the crew that lingering in these waters dramatically increased the odds of a confrontation with a naval vessel from the People’s Liberation Army. The crew was already at a modified general quarters, well trained and ready, the atmosphere one of grim anticipation.
“We’ve got a ship in duress that’s sailing without a flag and that hasn’t sent out a distress signal,” said Hunt. “Let’s take a closer look, Jane. And let’s go to full general quarters. Something doesn’t add up.”
Crisply, Morris issued those orders to the crew, as if they were the chorus to a song she’d rehearsed to herself for years but up to this moment had never had the opportunity to perform. Sailors sprang into motion on every deck of the vessel, quickly donning flash gear, strapping on gas masks and inflatable life jackets, locking down the warship’s many hatches, spinning up the full combat suite, to include energizing the stealth apparatus that would cloak the ship’s radar and infrared signatures. While the John Paul Jones changed course and closed in on the incapacitated trawler, its sister ships, the Levin and Hoon, remained on course and speed for the freedom of navigation mission. The distance between them and the flagship began to open. Hunt then disappeared back to her stateroom, to where she would send out the encrypted dispatch to Seventh Fleet Headquarters in Yokosuka. Their plans had changed.