Dick Couch - Out of the Ashes

Often accused of being bureaucratic and ponderous, the United States military is anything but that when passing critical information up and across the chain of command. The Global Hawk information captured in Normandy ’s CDC was rapidly passed to Admiral Flynn’s watch staff on Harry S. Truman in Port Jabel Ali; to the 5th Fleet Command Center in Manama, Bahrain; to the CENTCOM Command Center in Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar; to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon; and then quickly to the White House Situation Room.

Without waiting to be called, the president’s chief advisors — the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the secretary of homeland security, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others — began to converge on the White House Situation Room. In the Sit Room harried NSC staffers rushed to pull this alarming Global Hawk video up on monitors.

Roger McCord showed up unannounced at Chase Williams’s office as he was going through his e-mail inbox.

“Roger?”

“Sorry to interrupt, boss. But we’ve gotten the same intel feed from several sources and we’ve got Aaron and his folks going into overdrive. I just wanted to plug you into a developing situation in the Middle East.”

“Sure. What have you got?”

McCord walked Williams through what had transpired since the Global Hawk video first showed up on the monitor aboard Normandy . The admiral asked few questions. Processing what he was hearing was challenging enough.

“Whew, Roger, that’s a lot to absorb.”

“Sure is, boss.”

“Let’s get the planning cell cranked up.”

“Will do, boss. We’ll come brief you as soon as we have more information.”

Even though he was young, inexperienced, and often asked annoying questions, Hibah Nawal continued to use Feroz Kabudi as his driver. There was a reason and it was loyalty. Feroz’s father was the kinsman who had pressed the hardest to have Nawal elected mukhtar of the Rulawa tribe and the man had asked Nawal to mentor his son.

As Feroz drove the Range Rover to the top of a short sand dune, the mukhtar looked down at the building his men had reassembled. As he looked around there was nothing else but trackless desert as far as the eye could see.

“Drive right down there,” Nawal commanded, pointing to the building and to the group of men sitting in the shade of a large, open truck sitting adjacent to it.

“Yes, Mukhtar,” Feroz replied, having finally been schooled by Nawal to do what he was told and stop asking about things that were none of his business.

As the Range Rover stopped in front of the truck the four men got up.

“It is time,” Nawal began. “Pull all that camouflage netting out of the truck and cover the building completely. Use everything in the truck. I want at least three layers of the netting covering the building.”

“Yes, Mukhtar,” the group’s foreman replied. With that, the four men sprang into action, and Nawal commanded Feroz to drive them back to their tents. The young man did as he was ordered to do, kept his mouth shut, but discreetly shook his head in disbelief.

Aboard Normandy, eight tense hours had passed since the ship sent its first streaming video of the Syrian ballistic missile emplacement and sinister-looking material surrounding a nearby blockhouse up the chain of command. Now the ship had settled back into its routine. For Normandy, already at sea, little seemed to change, but new messages continued to come in signaling the Truman strike group was increasing its level of readiness. Other ships were having their port calls abruptly cut short and Harry S. Truman would have only those storm repairs that could be completed in the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours done. The rest would have to wait.

Laurie had remained in CDC for virtually the entire time since the alert regarding the alarming Global Hawk video footage. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to remain in the battle rhythm of the ship so when she assumed her watch she would be as up to speed as possible.

“You ready to relieve me, Ms. Phillips?” the senior chief asked. As one of the A-team watchstanders in CDC, he had been monitoring his Tactical Data Consoles, keeping track of both Aegis radar contacts and the Global Hawk’s video.

“Sure am, Senior Chief,” Laurie replied. He wasn’t typically in the watch rotation right before Laurie’s, but as tensions had risen, Normandy ’s senior watch officer had quietly pulled junior sailors out of the CDC watch rotation and replaced them with more senior people. Laurie was now included as a senior person.

“OK, then. Here’s the tactical situation. We’ve been ordered to steam in this box anchored around this position here,” the senior chief began, showing Laurie the center of the rectangular-shaped area Normandy was assigned to stay in. “ Mustin has gotten under way from Bahrain and will be in our area in about ten hours. Other ships are getting under way just as fast as they can. Truman will probably take a little longer, maybe thirty-six hours or more, as their storm damage was more extensive. For now, our assignment is to just monitor air traffic in the area as well as keep track of what the Global Hawk is seeing.”

“I think I’ve got it, Senior Chief,” Laurie replied with as much confidence as she could muster. She was pleasantly surprised, no, come to think of it, she was stunned, she had been left in the watch rotation. Maybe her attention to detail and the extra effort she had made to learn her watch duties was paying off.

“Roger. You got it. Show’s yours. You’re going to get Global Hawk video pretty much continuously. Remember, there are three people in each watch section monitoring the video from that bird, but don’t assume anyone else sees what you see. Report anything unusual to the TAO.”

“Will do, Senior Chief. Any idea where the ops officer is? He usually spends a lot of time in here. I’m surprised I haven’t seen him, given what’s going on.”

“Oh, word is he’s been in the CO’s cabin with the captain and the exec. Something big must be cooking for them to be behind closed doors for that long.”

“Think it has anything to do with the Global Hawk video we saw earlier?”

“Yep. Things pretty much smoked up the chain of command as soon as the TAO saw that.”

“Yeah, guess you’re right, Senior.”

“Need me for anything else, Ms. Phillips?”

“No, thanks, Senior Chief … and thanks for filling in the white space for me.”

“No worries then. Gonna hit the rack myself.”

As the senior chief left CDC and Laurie settled into her chair for the eight hours of the watch rotation, she could feel the tension aboard the ship. However, she forced herself to put that in the back of her mind so she could focus on the puzzling Global Hawk video she viewed eight hours ago. During those eight hours, while Normandy ’s officers had been involved in a frenzy of activity, Laurie had had time to reflect on what she had seen and she had tried to make some sense of it. She knew something about the optics in the Global Hawk and about the “footprint,” the amount of ground covered by its cameras as it streaked across the sky.

The Global Hawk video they had seen earlier was from the single bird that made its daily flight from Qatar to the Mediterranean and back, Global Hawk Two Bravo. It had to have been a profoundly lucky flight to have stumbled on this missile site all of a sudden, a discovery that had driven the level of activity aboard Normandy , and throughout the Truman strike group, from heightened, right through intense, to frenetic.