Iranian shore station
0155 local (GMT +3)
Two hours into his watch, Hamish was already exhausted. The constant stress, the midnight alerts, and the imminent prospects of being attacked, coupled with little food and less water, were enough to do anyone in. The Stinger missile on his shoulder, the business end resting on the sandbag wall behind him, was increasingly heavy. It had not seemed to weigh that much when he’d first hefted it onto his shoulder, but over the hours, its weight had increased geometrically.
He patted the canteen at his side, and thought longingly about taking another sip of the water. But the thirst would be worse later on, and he’d better save it for then. Besides, the temperature of the water was near one hundred degrees now, and it would be better to wait until he went below and it had cooled off a bit. No point in wasting it.
Not that it was that much cooler below. The hasty construction of the series of antiaircraft posts along the coast had left little time or resources for creature comforts such as air-conditioning. The emplacement was little more than an antiaircraft battery position, surrounded by sandbags, with a control station hastily installed in a concrete-walled dugout below. In theory, the control station below was sufficiently fortified and reinforced to withstand most attacks, but nobody really believed it. Placing it all in the dugout did keep the computers somewhat cooler, and provided a little shelter from the sun for the crew.
For not the first time, Hamish wondered exactly why he was standing this watch at all. With the radar in operation, surely the detection would come first from that, not from the naked eye, wouldn’t it? He had started to ask the question, but in his top sergeant’s expression saw his father’s face. Hard, cold, tolerating no disagreement or questions. It was, Hamish thought, what he hoped he would look like to his own sons one day.
Again he patted the canteen, reassured by its weight that it was almost full, and wondered if somewhere down the coast one of his brothers was at that moment doing the same thing. He thought longingly of his younger brother, younger by only fourteen months, who was still at home.
It is an honor. An honor and your duty to serve. Hamish tried to make himself believe that.
Sweat was gathering in his eyebrows, trickling down his forehead, and stopping there, waiting until it gathered sufficient mass to break the surface tension. Every five minutes, he was rewarded with a deluge of hot, salty water in his eyes. He ran a hasty, damp hand across them, feeling absurdly like a windshield wiper. It didn’t seem right that his own sweat would sting him that much.
Suddenly, a horn sounded. He heard an excited jumble of voices rise up from the bunker below him before the trapdoor leading down to it slammed shut. What was it — what had they seen? He scanned the sky frantically, searching for a target, hoping against hope that the antimissile missiles in the battery would do what they were supposed to.
Then he saw it, lower on the horizon that he would have thought. Had his eyes not been staring at exactly the right position, he would have missed it. If it had been anywhere else, it would have taken longer to find. He raised the binoculars to his eyes, searching the sky for it, dropped them long enough to find that it had moved significantly, then refocused.
There was a small puff of smoke and a sliver separated itself from the wing. A contrail tumbled behind it, stark and startling against the clear night sky, illuminated by the full moon.
They’ve launched. They launched a missile at us! His mouth went dry and he felt his fingertips tingle. He raised the Stinger to his shoulder, focusing the eyepiece first on the missile, then on the aircraft.
They had been hastily drilled in the basic operations, but the Stingers were too scarce to be used for practice. Hamish had never actually fired one.
One hundred yards away, the radar dish came to life, rotating back and forth as it searched for its target. From the little he had picked up from listening to the radar technicians, he knew that it was now locked on the other aircraft, working out a targeting solution.
Get it! You have to! And when the aircraft is overhead—
Suddenly it occurred to him that his instructors had been oddly vague on this particular point. The Stinger, he knew, was on its own once it left the launch tube. Nothing he could say or do would influence its track. Even if he were to drop dead the moment after he fired it, it would still continue on.
And so what if they hit the aircraft? The missile is still heading here.
All this sprang through his mind in a matter of seconds, and it went against every bit of training he’d been given. It should have been so obvious — just as the knowledge of how his sister had died should have been, had he bothered to look at the facts and to ask the right questions.
The battery of missiles beside him erupted into flames and fire, and two missiles shoved themselves out of the launch tubes on a piston of compressed air, their tail ends a mass of smoke and fire. They seemed to hang in the air for a microsecond, and then picked up speed so rapidly they almost vanished before his eyes. He held his fire, waiting — was it possible his Stinger could hit one of their own missiles and undo the very thing they were trying to accomplish? Another question that had not occurred to him before this moment.
Unfortunately, Hamish had no more time to worry about unanswered questions. Perhaps it was a blessing that the radar and the missile launch distracted him from what was about to come, sparing him those moments of certain knowledge that he would die.
When he finally turned back to face the missile, it was to find that it was only a few hundred yards away, a distance it covered in less than a second. Its hungry seeker head slammed into the antenna, detonating with a shock that radiated into the ground. The impact was physical as well as aural, shock waves radiating out from it, smashing into his eardrums with a pressure gradient that popped them like a balloon. The pressure slammed Hamish into the sandbag side of his post with sufficient force to dislodge three rows of sandbags. He lay on his back sprawled across the coarsely woven sandbag fabric, and instinctively tried to pull himself into a sitting position. But just as he did, the wave of the blast reached him, carrying with it shards of metal and cinder block, a deadly hail. The shrapnel drove through the sandbags, knocking off more of them, and sending them tumbling down to the desert below and returning the sand to its natural environment. The shrapnel passed even more easily through Hamish’s body, the first fragment slicing the edge of his neck, the next five penetrating his chest and exiting through the back. Hamish sucked in air, his mind still processing the sight of the missile just a few hundred yards away, still wondering whether or not he would live. The answer was, unfortunately for him, no.
He lay sprawled on the pale sand, the blood from his wounds no longer flowing vigorously since his heart stopped. Although the first piece of shrapnel had not entirely severed his head, his subsequent trip through the air had enlarged the jagged gash, virtually decapitating him. Had Hamish been in a position to observe himself, he would have noticed that he looked peculiarly like his sister the night his father had brought her home for the last time.
TWENTY-FOUR
USS Jefferson
0155 local (GMT +3)
“Evasive maneuvers! Countermeasures!” Coyote banged on the plotting table with his fist, glaring at Bethlehem. “Damn it, woman, don’t you know what you’re supposed to do?”
A shocked, horrified silence filled the bridge for just a moment, and then the watch team resumed the terse patter that always characterizes dire emergencies. Captain Bethlehem, for her part, stared at Coyote, her face impassive. Time seemed to stop, although in reality it could have been no more than a few seconds. Finally, she spoke. “Officer of the deck — hard right rudder. Starboard engines back, port engines ahead full.”
She listened as the officer of the deck repeated back her orders, her gaze never leaving Coyote’s face. He stared back in stone silence, then howled, “No! You’re taking her right back toward the torpedo!”
“On the bridge wing, Admi
ral. Now.” Without waiting to see if he followed, Captain Bethlehem stepped away from the table and walked the long distance to the port bridge wing, her footsteps soft but steady on the linoleum. “Officer of the deck — you have your orders.” She swung the catch open and stepped out, finally turning to see if Coyote was following.
Swearing softly, Coyote ran across the bridge and stepped out. “Do you realize what you’re doing? How in God’s name you ever managed to get command of the ship I’ll never know, but you’re the one who’s going to have to live with what you’ve done.”
“I’ll say this once, Admiral. Right now, I don’t have time to pamper your ego.” Bethlehem’s face was molten steel. “This is my ship — it has been since the moment I read my orders to these people. It’s not yours anymore. I will explain myself this once — no questions, no explanations. The turning radius of the ship is such that if I followed your suggestion, the torpedo would hit the ship in the port quarter. It would no doubt do serious damage to engineering. We would lose at least the port shafts, maybe one of the starboard. There is no way — no way — that we would avoid the torpedo. None. And you know it. What I have done is to turn the ship so that the torpedo will hit in the fourth section. If you were paying attention, I ordered that section of the ship evacuated. There may be casualties — yes. But the ship will be able to continue fighting and to launch aircraft. Now, by your leave, I’m a little busy right now.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned abruptly and went back into the ship.
Coyote was enraged. He started after her, intending to throttle her with his bare hands. Then, as he looked at the pale, horrified faces of the men and women on the bridge, he stopped. Captain Bethlehem stood among them, and it was clear from the way they closed ranks around her that they were prepared to protect her. That they were her crew, not his.
She’s right. You know she is. You just don’t want to admit that there’s no way out of this.
“All hands brace for shock,” Bethlehem said, her voice calm and collected. The boatswains echoed her orders over the 1MC.
Coyote grabbed the left side of the plotting table and braced himself against it, leaning toward the port side.
Viking 701
0156 local (GMT +3)
Rabies put the S-3 into a hard dive, then pulled her up abruptly into level flight. “Where is she?”
“Headed for the oil rig,” his TECO said.
“Viking 701, you are weapons-free on hostile submarine contact,” a voice said over tactical.
“Too late,” Rabies shouted, frustrated beyond reason. “Damn it, Jefferson, we could have had her!”
“701, be advised that you are weapons-free on this contact regardless of location,” the voice said firmly. “We see where she is — the admiral says go ahead anyway.”
“Our probability of kill isn’t good,” his TECO said.
“It’s zero if we don’t take a shot,” Rabies answered. “If nothing else, maybe that damned oil rig will fall on her and crush her. Fire one.”
There was a click as the torpedo was released from the wing, and a slight jolt as the S-3 was suddenly light on that side. Rabies corrected automatically for the shift in the center of gravity.
“Splash,” his enlisted technician said. “Torpedo is hot and sweet — gaining contact — he has her.” The crew compartment echoed with the sounds of the torpedo seeker head, the sonar pings coming closer together, the torpedo hungry for its contact. “Ten seconds,” his technician said. “Nine, eight, seven…”
If it hits the oil rig, there’s going to be hell to pay. It will rupture fuel lines and spew all that crap into the sea. Worst of all, the submarine may get away anyway.
“Six, five, four…”
She won’t, though. She thinks she’s safe under there. She’ll sneak in behind one of the supports, thinking we won’t dare take a shot at her there. There were times when we wouldn’t. But that was then and this is now.
“Three, two, one…”
The survivors. How big is the crew on the oil rig? We didn’t even have a chance to warn them. There will have to be a search-and-rescue mission and, oh, God, there better not be any kids involved.
“Got her! Sir, I hear underwater explosions — secondaries now,” the technician added, as the explosions from cold seawater hitting hot metal and machinery aboard the submarine followed the initial explosions.
“That’s it, then!” his TACCO crowed. “We did it!”
“Not exactly,” Rabies said. “There’s still a torpedo in the water. And it’s still headed straight for Jefferson.”
USS Jefferson
0157 local (GMT +3)
The carrier was turning, but slowly, oh, so slowly. As he watched the overhead radar repeater, it seemed to Coyote that there was no way they would ever get the stern out of the way of the torpedo. And just how maneuverable was this one, anyway? Was it a wake-homer?
As Jefferson’s massive rudders bit hard into the water, she started to increase her rate of turn. He could feel the vibrations under his feet changing as the two steam turbines that supplied the starboard shafts picked up speed, adding their counter-rotation force to the action of the rudders and steepening the turn. The deck took on a slight angle. Pencils rolled across the plotting table, and more than one face turned pale at the unexpectedly severe motion of the carrier.
“Four seconds,” a voice announced over the 1MC. “Three, two, one.”
The impact, when it came, was felt more than heard. There was a sharp change in the vibrations under his feet, echoing up through the steel plates and strakes. A microsecond later, Jefferson lurched hard to the left, then equally violently back to the right. The smoothly increasing angle on her deck changed abruptly, and the vibrations through the deck felt horribly, horribly wrong. It was the same massive jolt and sound you heard from immediately below the flight deck when recovering a heavy aircraft such as a Tomcat, but coming from an entirely wrong direction.
The chaos started immediately. Controlled chaos, but chaos nonetheless, as damage-control teams raced forward to assess the extent of the damage, to check watertight doors and compartments, and guide corpsmen to anyone injured in the impact. Damage-control actions were coordinated by Damage Control Central, or DCC, but Bethlehem was monitoring every step. She slipped on a set of sound-powered bones and put the jack into the damage-control circuit. For the moment, Coyote was tempted to tell her not to micro-manage it, to let the men and women below do their jobs.
It wasn’t necessary — Bethlehem was simply listening, nodding her head in approval or frowning and snapping out a short order, her expression clearing as the DCC team revised its plans.
The angle on the deck grew steeper as seawater poured into shattered compartments. They were nowhere near a dangerous angle, but it was still distinctly ominous to feel the carrier that barely ever moved heel to the right.
An hour later, the verdict was in. The torpedo had smashed into the hull two decks below the waterline, destroying an auxiliary machinery compartment and flooding part of the anchor deck. The watertight doors had held, preventing the flooding from spreading, and the electrical connections and waterlines affected had already been rerouted. One sailor had been killed, smashed by a watertight door that had not been properly secured, and fourteen others were injured in the impact. After a final refueling, the strike aircraft were quickly recovered.
“Captain,” Coyote said when Bethlehem finally had a lull in the constant stream of reports and assessments flooding in. “A moment.”
Bethlehem put down her clipboard and followed him out onto the bridge wing, casting a glance back at the bridge as though seeing it for the last time. “Yes, Admiral?”
“Good job,” he said abruptly. “I won’t apologize — admirals never do. You’ll need to know that soon enough, I suspect.”
The faintest trace of relief spread across her face, and it wasn’t until that moment that Coyote realized just how much of her ass she’d put on the line standing up to him.
His admiration for her grew. “Thank you, sir.”
“But if I were going to apologize, I’d probably start by telling you that when I was Jeff’s CO, the admiral I worked for had also been her skipper. I swore then I would not repeat his mistakes, that I’d let my captains run their ships their way. And, still without admitting that I was out of line, I’d ask you to remember that when you get back here as battle group commander. You’ll make enough of your own mistakes — trust me on that — but see if you can avoid repeating mine.”
“Captain, Fifth Fleet wants you,” the officer of the deck said as he stuck his head out and interrupted them with an apologetic look.
“I’ll be right there,” Bethlehem said without looking at him.
“Go,” Coyote ordered.
“Yes, Admiral.” She turned and walked back to the hatch. She paused for a moment, then turned back to him. “Next time we’re in port, have dinner with me.” It wasn’t exactly a request.
Coyote pulled back, startled. He started to voice a number of objections, then said, “Okay. I’d like that.”
“Good.” Bethlehem gazed at him for a moment longer, then said, “You’re a good man, Coyote. And a good officer. Never forget that.” She pulled the hatch open and stepped out of view.
Now what in the holy hells brought that on? he wondered. And more importantly — just what am I going to do about it?
EPILOGUE
Charleston, South Carolina
Old Dixie HQ
Wednesday, September 19
1000 local (GMT -5)
Herbert Hoover leaned back in the deeply padded leather chair and blandly surveyed the three men sitting in front of his desk. There was no doubting their eagerness, their commitment to the cause. Passion burned in their eyes, spoke in every line of their bodies as they leaned forward on their chairs, eagerly awaiting his decision. Yes, they were truly committed patriots. There was no doubt about that.
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