Chapter 4 - The Black Sedan
The staff car was a black Cadillac with government plates and two four-star flags mounted on the front fenders, their blue fields tucked into small leather sheaths to keep the highway soot off the silk. It was idling by the freight doors on the commercial side of the hotel, where the linen trucks delivered the towels and the grease bins from the kitchen were rolled out to the dumpster.
It was not where the admirals usually got into their cars.
Commander Vance held the rear door open. She had Marin’s name tag in her left hand—the laminated plastic square with the blue Navy League logo that had been ripped off the clip—and she dropped it into her pocket without looking at it, the way a boatswain drops a piece of used marline into the scupper.
“The hospital in Portsmouth has a burn specialist on call at the naval medical center,” Vance said to the Admiral as we reached the curb. “I called the officer of the deck five minutes ago.”
“We’re not going to Portsmouth,” I said.
The wind coming off the river was twenty knots from the northeast, smelling of salt water, coal dust from the piers at Lambert’s Point, and the cold, flat smell of winter diesel. It cut through the front of my torn blouse where the Admiral’s coat didn't meet, but the wool was so thick that the heat stayed trapped against my ribs like a blanket pulled from the drier.
Admiral Carrow looked at me over the roof of the car. Her gray hair had moved half an inch in the wind, but her cover was set precisely three fingers above the bridge of her nose, the gold oak leaves on the visor catching the orange glare of the sodium lights from the shipping channel.
“Get in, Valerie,” she said.
The leather inside the Cadillac was cold, dark, and smelled of cedar shavings and the grease pencils they use on tactical plotters. On the floor between the jump seats was a green canvas navigation kit bag with CNO-01 stenciled in faded yellow block letters across the flap.
She got in beside me, pulled the door shut herself with a heavy, pressurized thunk that cut the sound of the hotel’s exhaust fans to a faint, distant hum, and reached for the armrest console.
She didn't pour the scotch. She reached into the document pocket on the back of the driver’s seat, pulled out a brown manila envelope with a red classification border, and dropped it into my lap.
The paper was cold through the wool of the trousers.
“That’s the report from the Naval Inspector General’s office,” she said. Her driver, a master-at-arms first class with a neck like a fire hydrant, didn't look in the rearview mirror; he put the car into gear and eased it into the lane that led past the drydock gates toward the interstate. “It was filed on Tuesday by an anonymous source in the regional maintenance center. It alleges that the former Chief Engineer of the Truxtun, currently employed as an inspector for the Maritime Administration in Baltimore, has been accepting outside consultation fees from defense subcontractors to expedite safety certifications on auxiliary machinery.”
I looked at the envelope. My thumb was resting on the brass prong that held the string.
“Greg Bates,” I said.
“Greg Bates,” she agreed. “With three supporting affidavits signed by retired naval personnel who claim they were present when you offered to clear his non-compliant polymer packing for twenty thousand dollars in cashier’s checks.”
“My sister told him I would do it,” I said. The words came out without any heat, just the dry, mechanical reporting of an engine-room log entry. “When I told her the material would fail under five hundred pounds of steam, she said she would make sure I never worked another contract on the Chesapeake.”
“She tried,” Carrow said. “Your father called the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy on Wednesday morning. From his club in Norfolk. He told him that his younger daughter was ‘unstable,’ that the medical discharge had left her with cognitive difficulties, and that any communications from you regarding local contractor specifications should be referred to his personal office for review.”
The Cadillac climbed the ramp onto I-264, the concrete expansion joints thumping beneath the tires with the steady, dull rhythm of a heartbeat: one-two, one-two, one-two.
Through the tinted glass, the shipyard was visible across the river: the massive red-and-white gantry crane of Newport News Shipbuilding, the yellow sodium towers around the drydock where an aircraft carrier lay gutted to her frames, her flight deck covered in temporary plastic sheds that looked like caterpillar cocoons in the dark.
“He thought he was protecting the name,” I said.
Judith Carrow turned her head. Her face was in the shadow between the reading lamps, but her eyes were very bright, reflecting the red tail lights of the semi-trucks rolling toward the tunnel.
“The Alden name has three destroyers named after it, Valerie,” she said, and her voice had the cold, clean precision of an autopsy report. “Your great-grandfather was at Leyte Gulf. Your grandfather was on the Hornet when the planes didn't come back from Midway. Your father was a brilliant aviator who didn't understand that a carrier has four thousand men below the waterline who don't care how many night traps you have if the fresh water runs out.”
She reached over and tapped the manila folder on my knee with her middle finger.
“He wanted an Alden on the flag list,” she said. “He spent twenty years cultivating the selection board members. He had you mapped out: Annapolis, division officer on a cruiser, department head on a destroyer, executive officer on an amphibious ship, then command of an Arleigh Burke by thirty-eight. When you went down that ladder into the steam, you didn't just burn your back, Valerie. You burned his plan.”
“Ruiz was nineteen,” I said.
“Ruiz was a sailor,” she replied. “And you were the Chief Engineer. That’s what the four-hundred-series manual is for. You don't leave your people in the hole to save your service record.”
The car entered the Downtown Tunnel, the yellow ceiling tiles flickering past the glass in a hypnotic, golden strobe. The air inside the car grew warm as the auxiliary heater clicked on, the vents smelling faintly of the paper that had been sitting in the Pentagon basement since the fiscal year rolled over.
“What happens to the report?” I asked.
“The report is dead,” Carrow said. “The Inspector General’s office closed the file at fourteen-hundred today after I provided the board with the metallurgical test results on Bates’s polymer from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Carderock. The material failed at two hundred and twelve degrees. The test coupon disintegrated into carbon soot in eighty seconds. If we had put that packing into the Wasp’s boilers, the ship would have lost propulsion during her transit through the Bab-el-Mandeb.”
She leaned back into the leather, her right hand resting on the silver stars on her shoulder.
“Bates is being referred to the Department of Justice for procurement fraud on Monday morning,” she added. “And the Navy League has already rescinded his corporate membership.”
I looked down at my hands. The skin on the back of my left hand was smooth, brown from the sun on the Baltimore piers, but the right wrist was still white and thick where the scar tissue met the thumb.
“Marin will tell everyone I did it to spite her,” I said.
“Marin can tell the seagulls at the ferry landing whatever she likes,” Admiral Carrow said. “She doesn't have a badge, she doesn't have a contractor, and after tonight, she doesn't have an address in the naval district that will answer her phone calls.”
The car emerged from the tunnel into the gray, flat marshland of Portsmouth.
“Where are we going, Admiral?” I asked.
May you like
She pointed toward the north, where the high chain-link fence of the naval hospital rose out of the cedar scrub beside the river.
“You’re going to let Commander Vance take you into the clinic by the side gate,” she said. “You’re going to let the plastic surgeon on duty clean the silk out of that graft. And then you’re going to put on a set of khakis that fit you, because tomorrow morning at ten-hundred, we have a commissioning ceremony for the new guided-missile destroyer Daniel Ruiz at the naval station, and the family needs someone on the platform who knows how to wear the uniform.”
