The Command by David Poyer Page A

stay in with a relief for cause in your jacket.”
    Dan was still standing, at an almost reflexive brace. Niles stared at him for some seconds more, then picked up a red-striped message folder. Leaving Dan unsure whether the interview was over. “Are you done with me, Admiral?” he said at last.
    And Niles said, just as he had years before, “Oh,
I’ve
had enough. Get the fuck out of here.”
    HIS hands shook, his fists were balled. Mathias’s glance was pitying. Dan stood in the passageway, trying to regain control. Fighting the murderous gloom that shadowed everything he saw.
    Then, from nowhere, he wondered: What am I so upset about? Niles didn’t like him. So what? He’d never expected to make 0–5, and here he was. Never expected to get a command, and he had.
    Maybe he was just numb, but suddenly it just didn’t seem to matter that much. He’d been shipwrecked, torpedoed, and tortured. Led men in combat. Where did Niles get off telling him he wasn’t a good officer? To hell with Niles’s opinion of him. And everybody else’s, too.
    McCall came striding down the passageway, cool gaze seeking his. He watched with only the most perfunctory attempt to hide his admiration. Damn! She
was
good-looking after all.

5

Manama, Bahrain
    T HREE blocks outside the main gate, in the rundown, predominantly Shi’a neighborhood west of the U.S. Naval Support Activity, a dark-eyed woman with a surgical mask over her face peered down at the body sprawled on the pavement. Blood and fluids stained the road. The driver stood beside the truck, smoking; the bicycle, crushed flat, was still pinned under the big double rear tires.
    â€œHe must have died instantly,” the traffic sergeant said in Arabic. “The wheel passed over his head.”
    Aisha Ar-Rahim said a short
du’a
asking for help. Then she knelt and pulled the bloody sheet back, careful to touch it only with rubber-gloved fingertips, releasing the olfactory bouquet of the violently and recently dead.
    The pathologist at Glynco, where she’d gone through federal law enforcement training, had warned the students before their introductory forensic autopsy. Blood, he’d said, was only part of that mingled smell. Its metallic tang could be flavored due to recent ingestion of foods, drugs, or alcohol. The lungs, liver, and kidneys all had peculiar odors. Bone had little smell, unless it was heated, as in amputations. Of course, any tissue that had been burned—in this case, from contact with the truck’s exhaust pipes, muffler—would have its own aroma. And finally, organ contents—bowel and bladder—would be part of the collection. Their odors were dependent on many things, including metabolites of vitamins, asparagus, alcohol, coffee, drugs, diseases, and, of course, the bacterial mixture in the feces.
    Breathing through her mouth, after that first necessary whiff, she studied what lay beneath.
    The skull had been crushed. But the face had not been destroyed. The right cheek hung down, exposing teeth carameled with tartar. She pressed the flap of flesh back into place, restoring the face to whereshe could visualize it in life. Black hair, brown eyes, weathered skin. Mustache, but no beard. About thirty, at a guess.
    Aisha was from Harlem, New York. This was her second month in Bahrain as a special agent, specializing in foreign counterintelligence—although so far she hadn’t done any of it in her two years with the agency.
    Which up to now, she thought, had been nowhere near this exciting. Though it was hard to see this as a high point.
    Typically, a duty call would be answered by an admin person. The “investigative assistant,” a fancy name for the secretary, would notify the duty agent. After hours, after 5:00 P.M. or on the weekend, like now—it was Saturday—base security would contact the duty agent directly, who would then respond.
    Which she was doing