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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  I: Line of Departure

  1. The Central Mediterranean

  II: The Liberty

  2. Taormina, Sicily

  3. Palermo, Sicily

  4. Giardini, Sicily

  5. Naples, Italy

  6. Taormina, Sicily

  III: Underway

  7. U.S.S. Guam

  8. U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  9. U.S.S. Guam

  10. U.S.S. Ault

  11. Nicosia, Cyprus

  IV: The Ready

  12. U.S.S. Guam

  13. U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  14. Nicosia, Cyprus

  15. U.S.S. Guam

  16. U.S.S. Ault

  17. U.S.S. Guam

  V: The Storm

  18. U.S.S. Guam

  19. Nicosia, Cyprus

  20. U.S.S. Guam

  21. Ash Shummari, Syria

  22. U.S.S. Guam

  23. U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  24. U.S.S. Ault

  25. U.S.S. Guam

  26. Ash Shummari, Syria

  VI: The Assault

  27. U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  28. U.S.S. Guam

  29. Ash Shummari, Syria

  30. Northern Lebanon

  31. U.S.S. Guam

  32. Ash Shummari, Syria

  33. Ash Shummari, Syria

  VII: The Afterimage

  34. U.S.S. Ault

  Previous Books by David Poyer

  Critical Praise for the works of David Poyer!

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Ex nihilo nihil fit. For this book I owe much to James Allen, James Blandford, A. J. Campbell, Kelly Fisher, Marilyn Goldman, Judith Haynes, Richard R. Hobbs, R. P. Lucas, Robert Kerrigan, Llewellyn Williams, George Witte, Andrew T. Young, George Zabounian, and many others who gave of their time to contribute or criticize. All errors and deficiencies are my own.

  This novel is dedicated to all those who serve in peacetime,

  But especially to those sailors, officers, and marines

  —And their families—

  Who served through the long cruises

  The liberties

  And sometimes, the actions

  Of the Sixth Fleet.

  We sent you to keep the peace for us.

  Some of you never came back.

  Every discussion of duty has two parts. One part deals with the question of the supreme good; the other, with the rules that should guide our ordinary lives.

  —Cicero, “On Moral Duties”

  I

  LINE OF DEPARTURE

  1

  The Central Mediterranean

  Forty miles from land the sea heaves in predawn darkness. No buoy, no man-made mark interrupts the undulant glitter of stars on an easterly swell.

  The destroyer is a sharp-edged shadow against Cassiopeia. Since midnight she has cruised slowly before the prevailing sea. But at 0400, suddenly, she heels as her rudders bite water. The hum of turbines rises to a whine, the sound rolling out into blackness, and a phosphorescent waterfall shoots from the screws. As she gathers speed she begins to pitch, dipping her bow to the swell, then lifting to shake hissing spray into the sea. Above her wake a stain of smoke unrolls against the sky.

  The Line of Departure for an amphibious assault is drawn not through dark waves, over the mirror of stars, but across a Navy chart in number-two lead. On one side, in the minds of men, is peace. And on the other, the irrevocable commitment to battle.

  The destroyer crosses the line still accelerating, sonar pinging into the deep, radar sweeping the sky. Its gray sides fade to black. A single dimmed stern light retreats into the night. The waves of its passing widen and then disappear, merging at last with the unchanging sea.

  Half an hour later six gray ships slowly lift into view to the east. At first only their masts show above an empty horizon, against the faint glow that precedes morning. Then they grow closer. Not speedily, but with a steady and inexorable pace.

  They are not so sleek, nor so fast, nor so heavily armed as the destroyer that escorted them, ten miles in advance. But they are larger, swelling with displacement curves rather than the fine lines of speed. Instead of guns and missile launchers, their decks are cluttered with helicopter pads and replenishment stations, stacks of containers and nested landing craft. In the faint light rises deck on deck of superstructure, topped by the vertical spikes of booms and funnels.

  Flung wide across miles of sea, the task force moves across its face with ponderous eagerness; and from each ship, above the antennas and signal lines, streams the red-and-white-striped ensign of impending battle.

  The landing has begun.

  U.S.S. GUAM LPH-9

  High in the island of the helicopter carrier, a stocky man in khakis thrusted his face angrily into binoculars. He raised them with the ship’s roll, leaning into the coaming, examining a shadow that steamed parallel to her, four thousand yards away. The glasses remained level for several minutes; then Captain Isaac I. Sundstrom, Commander, Mediterranean Amphibious Ready Group, jerked them down. He muttered into the fresh wind of a twenty-knot passage, and turned for the interior of the flag bridge.

  “Commodore’s on the bridge!” At the shout officers and enlisted men looked up from dimly lit charts, flickering radars. They glanced at one another, but only one man—a lieutenant, junior grade—moved cautiously toward Sundstrom, his hand rising automatically to his helmet, saluting unseen in the darkness.

  “Good morning, Commodore.”

  “Dan. Morning.” The words were short with anger and fatigue. “What’s going on? Are we ready to hit the beach?”

  The lieutenant’s name was Dan Lenson. Seen by the faint radiance of a vertical plot, he was taller than the commodore and almost unnaturally thin, hair somewhere between sandy and dark. He too looked tired. Rubbing a sun-bleached mustache with the back of his hand, he pitched his voice above the roar of wind, the hiss of radios.

  “Commodore, we’re on two-eight-zero true, speed nineteen. The amphibs are in circular formation for movement to assault. Guam’s the guide, in station zero. Barnstable County is dead ahead; Newport, on the starboard beam; Spiegel Grove, starboard quarter; Charleston, port quarter. Coronado lagged back during the night; I shifted Charleston to her station at 0200. Screen units: Ault is twenty thousand yards ahead of the main body, sanitizing our track in to the beach. The other destroyers are deployed along the air threat axis.” His eyes shifted to a board behind the commodore. “Equipment status: Both of Coronado’s boilers are on line now and she’s catching up, eight miles astern last time I looked. Ault has an anchor casualty that’s being worked on right now. Barnstable reported radar trouble again—”

  “She’ll need that during beach approach. Damn it,” said the commodore, looking out at the darkness.

  “Yes sir.” The lieutenant waited, then went on when his senior did not continue. “Other than that, all units of Task Force 61 and embarked marines report ready for the assault. We’re at H minus one hundred now.”

  “Where are we on track? Are we up with intended movement?”

  “I hold us dead on so far, sir.”

  “I think we’re falling behind. Let’s play it safe. Goddamnit, I don’t want to be late again!”

  “That will make it harder for Co
ronado to catch up, sir. If she isn’t in position for that first wave—”

  “You heard me, Dan. I don’t like to give orders twice.”

  The lieutenant studied him. Dawn was coming. He could make out the sagging, lined face under graying hair. “Aye aye, sir,” he said at last. “I’ll signal another knot speed increase. Mr. Flasher—”

  “Got it,” said a voice from the darkness.

  “Dan, you’ve got to keep me informed. I’m not getting the proper reports.”

  “Sir, the chief staff officer was up here most of the midwatch. I thought he was—”

  “Don’t count on that zero, Dan. He’s disappointed me too often.”

  “Uh … yes, sir. We’re ready to go, then, as far as I can see.”

  “Have you talked to the Guam’s bridge yet this morning?”

  “Just a few words, Commodore. Would you like me to—”

  “Forget it,” said the older man. His face settled, his head lowering itself toward his chest; his eyebrows drew together. “I told you last night to keep close tabs on that brownshoe son of a bitch. Remember how Fourchetti screwed things up in Bizerte, when that helo went into the drink? That’s not how I want things run. When my captains look bad I look bad. And I don’t like to look bad. That’s the name of the game, Dan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll do it. Just like I have to do most of what gets done around here.”

  “Yes sir,” Lenson said again, to the commodore’s back.

  As the door to the bridge wing opened a blast of sound hit them. Fifty feet below, on the flight deck, ten helicopters were beginning their flight checks. The roar of their engines warming up made Lenson cover his ears. Several of the near aircraft had engaged transmissions, and their blades began to whip around, slowly at first but then faster until in the dim deckedge lights they blurred into misty disks. The smells of exhaust and kerosene and hot metal mingled with the wind that blew back along the deck from the sea.

  The commodore seemed not to notice it. Below him, around him, something massive was taking form out of the night. Leaning over the coaming, he swept his gaze along the length of his flagship.

  From her blunt, rounded bow, where the flight deck stopped abruptly, aft along a flat sweep of deck to the forest of antennas and nets at the stern, the carrier teemed with men and machines. Men ran in the growing light among the vibrating fuselages. Flight-deck personnel in comm helmets and colored jerseys bent to check chocks and unplug starter cables. Armorers rolled bomb dollies toward four streamlined attack helos that now were adding their scream to the symphonic din that pounded along the deck, spilling out over the sea. Marines in drab utilities clambered in and out of cockpits. Another helicopter came into view, rising from the red-lit hangar below; the elevator locked and a tractor swung in, towing it toward its launch station. Hatches slammed open, and from deep in the ship more men streamed out onto the flight deck. Helmets pulled low, packs jogging on their backs and rifles held nursing-close to their chests, the marines bent low beneath the revolving swords of the rotors.

  Sundstrom raised his glasses, and after a moment, so did Lenson. Ahead of them, beyond four thousand yards of rushing sea, was the same frenzy of activity. Barnstable County was a tank-landing ship, an LST; she was smaller than the Guam, but at seven magnifications her decks, too, were busy with sailors in faded dungarees. Aft of her, on the horizon to their right, was another ship, too far and small to see movement, though it was there; and two more gray specks, far back; destroyers and frigates, escorting and protecting the larger ships that now moved and readied themselves here in the center, the heart, of a vast formation that had flung its moving nets of steel and data, radio waves and sound over three thousand square miles of the central Mediterranean.

  Lenson, looking at the commodore, saw his lips move. He leaned toward him, careful not to brush his arm; Sundstrom disliked being touched. “SIR?” he shouted, into the mounting roar of engines.

  “Sloppy…”

  “Sir? Do you want me to—”

  But he had already turned away, disappearing up a ladder leading to the bridge deck; Guam’s captain held sway there. Lenson straightened, and half-smiled. He went back into the flag bridge, pausing to dog the weather hatch against the steady beat of engines.

  “Dan?” It was a chubby lieutenant with overlong hair. His helmet strap was unbuckled and he had shoved it back. “Where’d he go now?”

  “Hi, Red. Up to see Fourchetti, I guess.”

  “What for?”

  “Probably wants him to go to general quarters. He does it earlier every landing. I think—”

  The ship’s announcing system blared out just then, jerking their heads around. “FLIGHT QUARTERS, FLIGHT QUARTERS. ALL HANDS, MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS! SET MATERIAL CONDITION ZEBRA THROUGHOUT THE SHIP.”

  A gong began to sound, strident, insistent. From below them came the thud of running feet. The red-haired lieutenant, buckling on a lifejacket, shouted, “Want me to take it for you? You haven’t had breakfast, have you?”

  “No, been up here since 0100 … I ought to check on SACC too. Thanks, Red.”

  “I hear ya. Now get outta here.”

  “I stand relieved.”

  * * *

  Three decks down, deep in the steel labyrinth of the ship, Lenson groped through a litter of maps and overlays, messages and green-bound Marine Corps artillery pubs for the cup he had left wedged there at midnight. The coffee was cold, but thick with sugar. As he sipped at it he slumped backward in his chair.

  “Tired, Lieutenant?”

  He bobbed upright; seeing a second-class petty officer old enough to be his father, with the seamed face and graying hair to match, he smiled. “A little. Between here and the flag bridge, I forget what my rack looks like. You getting the circuits up, Mac?”

  “Sure, Mr. Lenson. What’s the skinny?”

  Turning, they both looked straight ahead, to where one end of the compartment was covered with a huge map. Fully nine feet by nine, it writhed in five colors over the bulkhead: sea blue, shading toward green near the shore; yellow of beach, of sandy plains; the crowded green terrain of foothills, black Vs of washed-out gullies, red lines of roads. Glossy plastic protected the dozens of symbols and numbers that had been drawn over its surface in the last forty-eight hours.

  “We still got over an hour to H,” said Lenson. His voice was a murmur over the ceaseless hissing from the speakers; the petty officer had to lean forward to hear him. “Anyway, when the rest of the team gets here, get your comm checks started. You should have the gun ships—Ault, Bowen, the two Turks, and the Italian can—coming up on the Gunnery Coordination Net. The Turks may take a couple of calls to answer. They weren’t very cooperative at the presail conference. So—” He glanced at his watch and got up—“You’ve got her, Mac. Be back as soon as I can.”

  Lenson paused in the passageway to dog the door, then broke into a run. He turned at a stenciled arrow and slid down a metal ladder. A hundred feet on, the corridor narrowed and filled with breakfast smells. By a door marked OFFICERS COUNTRY a row of khaki and green caps stirred like impatient guests as the carrier rolled. In the wardroom he pulled out a chair between two other men, both of whom were eating as fast as they could. “Anything good, Stan?” he asked the one to his left.

  “It’s all good,” muttered the supply officer.

  “It all tastes the same, too.”

  “Lay off, Dan. It gets old after three months out here.”

  “Hey,” said the man on his right, a marine major. “You just come down from the bridge?”

  “Flag bridge. Not ship’s bridge. Why?”

  “What’s going on? How far out are we?”

  Lenson reached eagerly for the cup the steward rattled down at his elbow. “Uh—another hour to H—we’re twenty miles from the coast yet.”

  “Shit,” said the marine.

  “Eager?”

  “Drivin’ those Cobras is better than sex. And they pay you. What
do you do aboard?”

  “I’m with the staff,” said Lenson, not enthusiastically. “You know your supporting fire—ships’ guns, aircraft, artillery?”

  “Sure.”

  “I coordinate that. We keep the opposition’s heads down as you go in, take out positions that threaten the ship-to-shore movement, then cover the marines as they head inland.”

  “Staff, huh? You work for Ike Sundstrom?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I hear he’s kind of hard to get along with.”

  The lieutenant stared at his coffee. “He’s the man in charge,” he said at last, his voice hard. “He wouldn’t have four stripes if he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  The marine stared at him for a moment, and seemed about to speak. Then his look dropped to Lenson’s heavy Academy ring. Then continued on up the left bicep, where it emerged from the short sleeve, showing the puckered flesh of an old third-degree burn. He nodded, looked away, and said nothing more.

  A plate appeared in front of the thin j.g. He began to eat rapidly, greasing the food down with coffee.

  Seven minutes later he was in his stateroom. Throwing himself on the lower of two bunks, he covered his eyes with an arm for a moment, and then removed it.

  Under the upper bunk, wedged into the webbing, a photograph lay fixed six inches above his open eyes. The woman was dark-haired, and she was in bed. Her arms were crossed under her head, and the wary alertness of her eyes contrasted strangely with her teasing smile, with the way her bare nipples poked erectly out toward the camera.

  A few minutes went by, and he lay motionless; once he checked his watch. The ventilators breathed air into the tiny room. His shirt and trousers were soaked with old sweat. I need a shower, he thought. No, I need sleep.

  But he knew there would be no sleep. Not that day. Any minute now, he thought, lying rigidly in his bunk. Any minute—

  “LIEUTENANT LENSON, LAY TO THE FLAG BRIDGE,” said the ship’s announcing system suddenly. It hissed for a moment and then went on: “ATTENTION, ALL HANDS. H-HOUR HAS BEEN DELAYED ONE-HALF-HOUR BY THE COMMANDER, AMPHIBIOUS TASK FORCE. I SAY AGAIN, H-HOUR HAS BEEN DELAYED ONE-HALF-HOUR BY THE CATF. MAKE ALL PREPARATIONS FOR H-HOUR AT 0630.”