Chapter 1
My name is Rebecca Kane, and the morning Vice Admiral Richard Hayes struck me in front of two thousand sailors, I had been awake for thirty-one hours.
I want to start there because the exhaustion matters. Not as an excuse, not as a detail that makes what happened more dramatic, but because it tells you something accurate about the conditions under which I had arrived at Naval Station Pacific Command. I had flown from Kabul to Ramstein to Andrews to San Diego in a sequence of aircraft that included a C-17 cargo transport where I slept for ninety minutes on a nylon strap seat with my jacket over my face, and I had landed at the base gate at six forty-seven in the morning with my credentials and my authorization and the slim black folder in my cargo pocket, and I had walked onto the parade ground in the same clothes I had been wearing for the better part of two days because the thing I had been sent here to do did not require a dress uniform.
What it required was a parade ground, a full formation, and a vice admiral who did not yet know why I was standing on his deck.
I had been a Master Chief Petty Officer in the United States Navy for four years. Before that I had been a Senior Chief for six, and before that a Chief for seven, and before all of it I had been a young enlisted sailor from Barstow, California who had joined at seventeen with the specific motivation of getting somewhere far from Barstow, California, and had ended up somewhere considerably farther than she had imagined. My career had taken a turn eleven years ago that I am not at liberty to describe in detail, which is the accurate way of saying that the last eleven years of my service record were classified at a level that most senior officers never access, and that the folder in my pocket contained a summary of a portion of that record along with a set of authorizations that had been signed by two people whose names I will not put in writing but whose signatures the MP would recognize immediately when he opened the first page.
Naval Station Pacific Command was the posting I had been watching for fourteen months.
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Vice Admiral Richard Hayes had commanded it for three years. He was sixty-three years old, fourth-generation Navy, the specific kind of officer whose career had been built in the era when a certain type of command authority was exercised in a certain way, and who had arrived at senior rank having never been seriously corrected. His record contained eleven formal complaints filed by junior officers and enlisted personnel over a period of twenty years, none of which had resulted in disciplinary action, all of which had been processed through the same command chain he controlled and resolved in the manner that complaints tend to resolve when the person reviewing them and the person being complained about are the same category of person.
The twelfth complaint had not been filed through his command chain.
