Choosers of the Slain

by James H. Cobb

  It was a vain hope. Her pet formula for getting to sleep failed her. Exhausted or not, her mind refused to shut down. Random fragments of thought ricocheted through her mind, prodding her back into wakefulness.

  Both Ken Hiro and Dix Beltrain had come up with good concepts. The problem was that somewhere, buried under her blanket of weariness, something kept whispering that they weren't quite good enough.

  After half an hour's futile pursuit of sleep, Amanda gave up. Rolling over onto her stomach, she tucked her pillow under her chin and stared into the darkness. Damn, damn, damn, just what was the best way to go about killing a convoy? Maybe she should consult with some experts on the subject.

  Those experts would be men like "Red" Ramage, Otto Kretschmer, and Gunther Prien, the great submarine aces of both sides of the Second World War. In her search for doctrine that could be applied to stealth-ship operations, Amanda had studied them extensively. She knew what they would say.

  "You have to get inside! Maneuver directly into the convoy's line of advance, then dive. Go deep and rig for silent running. Lie doggo and let the convoy run over the top of you. Then surface right in the middle of them and open up with everything you've got, torpedoes and deck guns both. Fire on anything and everything that moves! Flow with the developing tactical situation. Take advantage of the confusion. Blow them to hell!"

  "A proven and valid way to do the job, gentlemen," Amanda replied to the shades of the men who shared the darkness with her. "The only problem is that I can't dive this damn barge."

  Get in close without being spotted, yes. Fifteen, maybe even ten miles, on full stealth and with a good sea running. Just close enough to get caught cleanly between the convoy and the distant covering force.

  Figure eight Exocet cells on each of the five big Argentine warships and four on the two smaller ones. Forty-eight heavy antiship missiles, not counting gun mounts and torpedo tubes--too many. Amanda might have been willing to match her countermeasures and point defenses against one group of escorts or the other, but not both simultaneously.

  Well, what about trying to lure some of the escorts off somehow?

  Not likely. Amanda had already played the decoy gambit once before with the Aeronaval patrol planes. The Argentines were angry and aggressive, but not stupid. They must know that the Duke had to come to them sooner or later. They wouldn't readily abandon a sure thing to go off chasing will-o'-the-wisps.

  Okay, then what about a diversion? Something that would scramble the Argentine defenses just long enough for the Cunningham to get across that last ten miles and inside the convoy perimeter. Maybe the helos? Configure them for surface attack with Hellfire and Penguin missiles and send them around to hit the far flank of that covering force ...

  No. Drop it. Too risky.

  Wait a minute. Was it really all that risky, or was it so just because a certain Lieutenant Vincent Arkady would be flying one of those helicopters?

  Examine that thought, Mandy. Turn it over in your mind and look at it carefully from all angles.

  Somewhere over the past few hectic days, Arkady had become a larger presence in her mind. More so than any man had in a long time. Twice she had sent him out, and twice he had nearly died carrying out her orders. Was the thought of doing it a third time making her freeze?

  This is why you aren't supposed to cross the line, the risk to your objectivity and professionalism.

  With great deliberation, she closed her eyes and played it out like a hand of cards. The hard outline of the mission parameters against his knowing touch. The grim risk probabilities versus his relaxed, lazy-panther slouch against a convenient bulkhead. The cold consideration of the gains and losses against his comfortable and comforting presence when the load was on.

  When she opened her eyes again, she was pleased to find that her soul was still her own. The simple truth was that it was irrelevant who might be flying the mission. No helicopter, not even a Sea Comanche, could hope to survive inside the area defenses of a modern surface warship, and Amanda Garrett did not believe in suicide missions, not for anyone.

  She rolled back onto her side. For the first time she wished that the old Boone had been invited along on this cruise. What she really needed was another ship to provide a diversion while the Duke made her run in on the convoy. Either that, or a way for the Duke to be in two places at the same time.

  Well, why couldn't she be?

  Amanda abruptly sat upright. For almost five full minutes she stared into the darkness, her mind functioning with sudden crystal clarity. Then she reached for the interphone at the head of her bunk.

  "Ken, this is the Captain. Cancel the schedule I gave you. I want all operations officers in the wardroom immediately. We're going to do this thing right now!"

  DRAKE PASSAGE

  0031 HOURS: MARCH 30, 2006

  "Fire twelve!"

  The warning horn blared and the last Stealth Cruise Missile punched out of its launch cell. Holding the peculiar tail-down attitude of its breed, it arced away from the Cunningham, booster pack streaming a curtain of golden flame. Its razor-blade wings snapped open and the small turbojet power-plant spooled up to power. Completing conversion to flight mode, it kicked free of its exhausted booster, leveled out, and raced for the horizon.

  Onboard the SCM, an almost miraculously precise guidance system began tracking on the distant impulses of a NAVSTAR satellite. The cruise missile had been carefully programmed to swing wide along a circular course and to deliver itself to an exact point in space at an exact moment in time. Nothing short of a massive systems failure or total destruction could stop it.

  "All SCMs launched, Captain. All missiles running hot and straight on designated headings," Beltrain reported from the tactical console.

  "Very well, Dix. Give us a time to target."

  In the bottom right corner of the Alpha Screen, a second digital readout flashed into existence over the standard time hack and began counting down.

  "There you go, ma'am. First missile estimated in over point item in T minus fifty-one minutes and thirty seconds."

  "Okay. Helmsman, are we ready to initiate the speed run?"

  "Yes, ma'am," the seaman called back over his shoulder from the battle helm station. "Course to point item is up and in the system. Navicom and autopilot read green and ready to engage. Projected time to point item, fifty minutes."

  "Very well. Helm, you will engage on my mark."

  Amanda leaned forward in the captain's chair, regarding the time hack through narrowed eyes.

  "Stand by to take departure. Coming up on T minus fifty ... three ... two ... one ... mark! Engage!"

  The helmsman keyed in the autopilot and the light patterns on his console shifted. Without human influence, the helm controller spun to a new heading, and smoothly the Cunningham's bow began to come around in response. On the lee helm pedestal, the power levers and throttles flipped forward against their stops with an audible click. On the propulsion system's repeaters, the glowing green bars of the engine-output gauges crawled up their scales until they reached their limits and flared bloodred.

  A soft rushing roar with shrill metallic overtones began to fill the background. The Duke's huge gas turbines were spinning up to their peak RPM, sucking a tornado of cold air down the intake ducts and into their shimmering blades. Like the cruise missiles she had just unleashed, the destroyer herself was now a computer-guided projectile aimed and launched at a specific target.

  Amanda pushed herself up and out of the captain's chair and joined her tactical officers at the chart table. A moment later, Arkady ducked through the aft hatchway and joined the group. He'd watched the SCM launch from the weather decks and he wore a heavy navy parka over his flight suit. As he brushed past her, she could feel a clean trace of the topside cold caught in its fabric. He moved into his slot around the table and gave her a nod and a sober smile.

  "All right. Let's go over this one last time, just to be sure." Amanda called up the latest satellite photo image of the
Argentine convoy onto the chart-table flatscreen. "The enemy task force is continuing to hold a course of one nine zero degrees true and a speed of eighteen knots. The distant covering force has executed its latest cross over the line of advance, and is currently holding on stations some ten miles off the starboard bow of the main formation. Given our current course and speed, and granted they don't make any changes, we will be making intercept on the convoy in about... forty-seven minutes."

  Amanda picked up a data wand and drew a glowing line across the screen, converging on the convoy's heading. "We're steering zero degrees true, due north. That will bring us in on the bow of the formation at a shallow angle. Adding their eighteen-knot rate of advance to our own forty-knot speed will give us a cumulative rate of closure of about fifty-eight knots. That should get us across the ten-mile gap between stealth integrity failure and the convoy perimeter in about eight minutes."

  "That'll also put us damn near alongside the distant covering force when our stealth crashes," McKelsie interrupted.

  "So it will," Amanda agreed. "That's what that cruise-missile stream we just launched is all about. The roundabout course they're flying will bring them in over point item at approximately the same time as we and the convoy arrive there. We'll be coming in from the south. The SCMs will be coming in from the west at thirty-second intervals. Not only will we be catching the Argys in a cross fire, but hopefully we'll also be confusing them as to where the attack is actually coming in from and how many of us there are out here. With a little luck, by the time they sort things out, we'll have gotten at the transports."

  "I still don't know about setting the cruisers to come in at two hundred feet, though," Bertram commented, leaning forward against the chart table. "That high, they're going to be a whole lot easier to spot and hit with point defense."

  "I know," Amanda replied, "but the whole idea is for them to provide a distraction while we make our run in. If they actually happen to hit anything, it'll be chocolate frosting on sugar pie. Oh, and by the way, Dix, the discriminator circuits on those SCMs should reject lock on anything with a radar cross-section as small as we have. Just in case, make sure our IFF beacons are set to go in case we have to wave one of them off."

  "Will do, ma'am."

  "To continue, the intent is to get within the convoy perimeter. To do so, we'll kill this nearside forward escort the second we lose stealth. That'll blow us our hole. Once we're inside, between all the grass and garbage being put out by our counter-measures and those of the transports, the Argentines won't be able to be sure of their target designation. They won't be able to fire inward without running the risk of hitting their own ships. We, on the other hand, will be able to blaze away at anything that moves. We'll take down the transports, blow ourselves another hole out the back of the escort perimeter, then beat it out of there. Any comments?"

  "It still strikes me," Ken Hiro said slowly, "we're counting an awful lot on the Argys doing exactly what we want them to do. What if they've thrown a course change in on us?"

  "That's a point. In fact, if you or I had been running the show, I'd have bet we'd have been throwing in random variances in course and speed all along, especially after each satellite pass. They haven't, though. They've held this heading and speed steadily for the past sixteen hours, and there is no visible reason for them to change for at least another eight or ten. I think those are solid enough odds to bet on.

  "If they do throw a major course change in on us... well, we'll sheer off and think of something new. We won't be any worse off then than we are now. One way or another, we'll know pretty soon. Anything else?"

  Amanda scanned around the table, meeting the eyes of her people. She was satisfied with what she saw.

  "Okay, Ken, I'll be keeping the con down here. You've got the bridge. It's safe to assume that if the CIC goes down, the ship will have received heavy damage and I will be dead or otherwise out of it. If that's the case, your primary concern will be the survival of the ship and the crew. Break off the mission and get the Duke out of there."

  "Aye, aye, ma'am. You've got it."

  "Very well, then, let's go to stations."

  Her people dispersed out from the chart table, all except Arkady. He moved closer in the blue-lit dimness, and Amanda smiled to herself. He had good shoulders, she noted, and just now it would have been rather nice to be able to bury her face against one of them for a few minutes.

  "You didn't have too much to say, Arkady."

  "Not too much to say. It's a good plan. It's comparatively simple. It makes the best possible use of our available resources. It matches our strengths against the enemies' weaknesses, and like every other military plan of operations since year one, it'll dissolve into elephant snot the second we make contact with the enemy."

  "That's a stark assessment."

  The corner of his mouth quirked up. "I'm the guy who does honest, remember? In the end, it's all going to boil down to whoever is riding the captain's chair, and how good they are at gluing things back together again after they start falling apart."

  "I know," Amanda replied quietly. She crossed her arms across her stomach and hugged herself lightly to suppress a shudder. "God, please don't let me screw up!"

  "If I were him, I think my reply would be, 'Don't sweat it. This is what I made you for.'"

  Arkady took a step back and saluted crisply. "Captain, request permission to observe the engagement from CIC."

  Amanda straightened and answered the salute. "Permission granted, Lieutenant."

  From up forward, the Aegis systems operator called out, "Multiple surface-radar sources coming up over the horizon. Position bearing and number consistent with enemy force projection."

  Someone else, possibly Christine over in Raven's Roost, whispered, "Show time!"

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  0110 HOURS: MARCH 30, 2006

  "Yo?"

  "Admiral Garrett? This is Captain Callendar, Admiral MacIntyre's Chief of Staff. Sorry to disturb you at this hour, sir, but the Admiral thought that you would like to know that they are going in now. We will keep you advised as the situation develops."

  "Thank you, Captain. I appreciate it. My compliments to Admiral MacIntyre."

  Wilson Garrett replaced the phone in its wall cradle and returned to the living room. Impatiently, he scooped the television remote control up off the low, golden-pine coffee table and killed the cable news broadcast issuing from the entertainment center across the room. Dropping back onto the couch, he picked up his sketch pad and tried to return his attention to the concept drawings he had been working on. He found, however, that the images of Empress Augusta Bay that he had been seeking had become entwined with the visualization of a much more current and personally meaningful battle.

  Sliding his pencil into the wire coil atop the pad, he angrily swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. And when he resumed his drawing, it was not of a naval engagement. It was a sketch of a young woman, an idealization of a girl as remembered by a father.

  DRAKE PASSAGE

  0120 HOURS: MARCH 30, 2006

  A number of the secondary monitors in the Combat Information Center had been switched over to the exterior low-light television system. Through them, it appeared as if the ship were a projectile fired through the narrow slot between the wind-whipped sea and the low overcast. Her prow tore through intermittent veils of mist and rain, and once, off to port, an ominously large pan of drift ice flashed past.

  Jane's All the World's Warships for 2006 listed the Cunningham-class destroyer as having a top speed of "thirty knots plus," the "plus" being a modestly well-guarded secret. This night, bucking Force Five seas, the Duke's iron log registered a clean forty-two.

  The twin prop wakes streaming aft from the propulsor pods met right astern and kicked up a thundering rooster tail that rose above the level of the well deck. The normal pitch and roll of her cruising state was gone, replaced by an unsteady floating sensation as the huge, 80,000-ton hull tried to lift and plane.
She was no longer riding up and over the waves; rather, she was driving through them, her sharp-edged clipper bow smashing into each oncoming roller like an ax into soft wood, the jolting impacts radiating back along her frames.

  "How are we doing, McKelsie?" All hands in the CIC wanted to ask that question, because over in the counter-measures bay, the battle had already been joined.

  With all stealth protocols closed up, the Duke had the radar cross-section of a small cabin cruiser. However, even a small cabin cruiser could be tracked at ranges of up to twenty-five miles by a good surface-search system, and the Argentines had good surface-search systems.

  Working in close would require that the enemy's own technology be turned back against him. In high sea states, search radar would frequently pick up "wave clutter," annoying random contacts and ghost targets brought about when the radar sweep reflected off the moving surface of the sea. Modern radars had electronic filters built into them to eliminate most of the phenomenon.

  McKelsie and his spook team were counting on that. They were using a vast block of processing capacity to produce a continuously updating computer model of the surface wave patterns that surrounded the Cunningham. Then, employing that model, they manipulated the "mutability envelope" of the ship's Wetball stealth skin, phasing its radar return into the surface clutter being produced around it.