Free The Command by David Poyer

messages to release. She went through them and returned her phone calls. One was from the base exec, who’d heard about the body and wanted to know what was going on.
    When she was done with that, she was face to face with the backgrounds again. She still didn’t want to do them. The computer was running slow, so she put it on cleanup and sat thinking, as it ran a little icon of a disk taking itself apart and putting itself back together over and over again.
    She found herself thinking about the dead man again. Who had he been? Where’d he gotten the base ID? That’d been his picture on it. But the bicycle hadn’t had a base sticker. Which meant he hadn’t kept it on the base, possibly hadn’t been on the base at all—maybe. Unless heparked it outside and walked in. But she couldn’t see him doing that, it wouldn’t stay there long, not in that neighborhood. And … with an Omani passport. That wasn’t out of line. They came to the island for jobs; the Omani economy sucked and Bahrain’s was booming. But why was he using two names? And why didn’t the crushed face match the picture on the driving license?
    She picked up the phone and dialed the ID section of base security. The woman who answered had a singsong Puerto Rican accent. She checked the files again, for Achmed Khamis and also for the passport name, Al Shatar. Aisha heard a keyboard clicking. “Ma’am? Like I told the officer who called this morning, Mr. Khamis was discharged from base employ in June of last year. Mr. Al Shatar, we don’t got nothing under that name.”
    She said thank you and hung up. Looked at the computer, as it chugged away revising its memory. Sometimes she wished she could do that. Erase images she didn’t care to keep.
    Like blood and feces. The slippery feel of cerebrospinal fluid. She’d never seen violent death that close. Maybe that was why she couldn’t concentrate this morning.
    The screen flickered, came back up with her familiar desktop. She wished there was some way she could put names into it, have it go away and search some worldwide database. But there wasn’t. Maybe in twenty years. Not now.
    She sighed, pulled out the first background investigation, and went to work.

6

Cherry Point Operating Areas
    W ELL before dawn but still unseasonably warm. Like every day so far this time out, three hundred miles off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
    Dan carried his coffee onto the wing as radios hissed and voices discorded, turning over the watch. Around him the night glittered with far-flung lights, the pulsing beacons of aircraft like itinerant stars. A new moon like a paring of machined titanium silvered the black and restless sea.
    The Joint Task Force Exercise capped the outgoing Med and Mideast Forces’ predeployment training. The Blue Force was the
Theodore Roosevelt
battle group. The Red, or Opposing, Force, simulating a fictional opponent named Kartuna, consisted of the Mideast deployers, eked out with players out of the East Coast ports, and Canadian and German units as well. Their last exercise before leaving the States, and Dan hoped
Horn
showed up well before the lieutenant commander and two chiefs who’d boarded the day before to be their exercise observers—read, evaluators and graders, in the final report that would go up the chain of command.
    The last two weeks had been a crescendo of eighteen-hour days. Revising the battle bills, conducting the underway engineering demo, cruise missile tactical qualification, last-minute school billets for the aircraft controllers, picking up the data transfer disks with the canned Tomahawk missions, and the thousand other tickets and wickets as their deployment date bore down.
    A week ago, one of his officers had broken. The auxiliaries officer, a jaygee whose previous experience had been in fleet support ships. She not only didn’t know the plant, she had a bad habit of turning valves