Sea of Shadows

Standing on the port side main deck of USS Towers, Captain Bowie was just about as hot as he could ever remember being — and for a man born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, that was no small feat. He was facing west, into the setting sun, but the sky was still painfully bright.

Behind him, the coast of Iran was only a few miles over the horizon, and the winds blowing in from the Iranian desert showed no signs of cooling down. The back and armpits of his blue coveralls were dark with sweat.

The bill of his USS Towers ball cap drooped across his forehead like some dead — but still soggy — sea creature.

He propped a steel-toed boot on a Kevlar life rail and looked out across the five hundred or so yards of water that separated his own ship from the merchant ship that was causing all the trouble.

The motor vessel Lotus Blossom wallowed uneasily on the water, bulling her way through the waves rather than cleaving them cleanly. She was an ancient rust-bucket of a freighter, probably built in the postwar shipbuilding boom of the mid-1950s, and she had not aged gracefully.

Bowie watched the old cargo ship bob and roll. The seas were calm, the waves low and almost lazy under the fierce Arabian sun, but the MV Lotus Blossom heeled alarmingly with each swell that passed under her keel. To Bowie’s trained eye, it was obvious that the old ship’s weight was not properly trimmed; in all probability, her cargo was not distributed evenly. Such an obvious oversight spoke of sloppiness and neglect. Not that Bowie needed any clues to tell him that the aging vessel was poorly maintained (and probably poorly manned). The ship’s appearance told that story all by itself.

The Lotus Blossom was a Type-3 freighter, with her superstructure situated well aft. The forward three-quarters of her deck were dominated by two large cargo hatches and the V-shaped booms of a cargo crane that had once lowered crates and pallets into the twin cargo holds. The crane was gone now, or mostly gone. At some time in the past — possibly in the 1970s, when containerized shipping had become the cargo industry standard — the old ship had been converted from a bulk cargo carrier to a container ship. The conversion had been none too neat. The crane, which had obviously been too light to handle the standard twenty-foot — long steel shipping containers, had been hacked off with welding torches, leaving two truncated stubs sticking out of the winch housing like the stumps of poorly amputated arms.

The ship’s superstructure had been white once, and the hull had been green, but the colors were nearly masked by the scabrous orange and brown of new rust over old. The ship’s name, painted across the stern in two- foot — high capital letters, had faded into near invisibility.

Bowie looked at the ship and exhaled slowly through his teeth. Lotus Blossom. What an utterly inappropriate name. He had trouble associating the battered old tub with any sort of flower. To his mind, it required a liberal stretch of imagination to call the damned thing a ship — never mind a flower.

The Lotus Blossom looked harmless enough, though. Even from five hundred yards away, the old girl looked tired to the bone, as though she might decide to give up the ghost in a minute or two, and slip beneath the waves for some long overdue rest. And, for all Bowie knew, the old freighter might do just that, which certainly didn’t make the ship any less dangerous to his crew. The Lotus Blossom was a suspected smuggler, and Bowie’s Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams were preparing to board the ship to search for contraband cargo. His teams would have their hands full confronting and controlling a potentially hostile crew, and trying to worm their way through every nook and cranny of an unfamiliar vessel while covering each other’s backs. They didn’t need the added angst of worrying about whether or not the ship was going to sink beneath their feet.

From a tactical standpoint, Bowie wasn’t crazy about being this far away from the ship that his crew would be searching. His teams would be armed, but that didn’t make them invulnerable if things turned ugly over there. His gun crews were standing ready to rake the freighter with machine gun fire, or even the 5-inch deck gun, but Bowie couldn’t very well order them to shoot at the ship if his own crew members were aboard.

If he could bring the Towers in closer, his gun crews would be able to see the tactical situation clearly and pick their own targets. For years, that had been the standard operating procedure for Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams. But the terrorist attack on USS Cole had demonstrated the folly of allowing any unknown vessel to get too close to a warship. The Navy had learned the hard way that the most powerful warship afloat is vulnerable to a close-in suicide attack.

Captain Bowie gave the MV Lotus Blossom another careful once-over with his eyes. The crew of the old freighter probably had some small arms aboard, possibly quite a few — if they really were smugglers. But he was ninety-eight percent certain that the old tub was not crammed to the gunwales with explosives and rigged for a suicide attack on a U.S. warship.

Odds were he could order his ship in nice and close to the old girl so that his gun crews could give good cover to his VBSS teams as they boarded. Unfortunately, he was not one hundred percent certain. And, like it or not, it was tactically smarter to risk some of his crew by maintaining a stand-off distance, than to risk all of his crew (and the ship) by getting in closer.

* * *

A watertight door opened behind Bowie, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see a small group of junior ensigns file out onto the deck. There were five of them: three men and two women. They stood for a moment, blinking and shielding their eyes against the unexpected brilliance of the setting sun.

Bowie looked them over. They were a good crop of kids. Young, physically fit, and so desperately eager that their enthusiasm nearly shone out of their eyes like the beams of searchlights.

Bowie had been a junior ensign himself once, and he had a pretty fair idea of what was racing around in their minds. Each of them had spent the last four years having his or her head crammed full of information on a dizzying array of subjects: naval history, tactical doctrine, theory of leadership, uniform regulations, military custom and law, formal dining etiquette, shipboard firefighting, and damage control. And now, they were itching to put all that knowledge to good use.

In their own eyes, they were educated and dedicated professionals, ready to seize the reigns of authority and prove themselves as warriors and leaders of men. To the men and women who served under them, they were sea puppies—no experience, no common sense, and prone to sticking their little puppy dog noses where they didn’t belong.

It was Bowie’s job, with the assistance of his officers and chief petty officers, to turn these sea puppies into by-God naval officers. Hands-on training would do some of the work. So would practical experience and the time- honored school of hard knocks. The majority would be well on the way to becoming useful officers by the end of this deployment. The real trick would be making sure they didn’t get anybody killed along the way.

The hardest part for most of them would be the eventual realization that they would never master the technologies under their command. It would be a difficult and painful lesson for them to learn. They were intelligent, educated, highly motivated, and hungry for the respect of their peers and subordinates. It was natural and predictable that they would want to become experts on the equipment and procedures under their control. And many of them would spend their first sea tours trying to do just that. But Bowie knew from experience that it was an impossible task. The equipment and tactics involved were so complex that a person could spend half a career mastering one warfare area, and the other half of that career studying and working to stay on top of the rapid changes brought on by evolving technologies.

An effective naval officer had to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none. He or she needed a strong working knowledge of radar systems, sonar systems, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, communications systems, combat support logistics, torpedoes, turbine engines, firefighting systems, chemical warfare defense systems, navigation technologies, ship-handling techniques, weather patterns, electrical power generation, naval gun systems, infrared sensors, and about a hundred other disciplines, each of which required years to master. It simply wasn’t possible to become an expert in all of them, so a good officer had to be satisfied with becoming a capable leader for his subordinates: the enlisted men and women who were the Navy’s real experts.

Successful officers learned to accept the limitations of the human brain and concentrated on knowing enough about each discipline to command effectively. Naval aviators tended to learn that lesson quickly. You didn’t need to know how to field-strip an F-18 engine in order to fly the aircraft.

But some junior officers never quite got the message. They drove themselves unmercifully, trying to learn