Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  “Measure twice, cut once, sir. Sorry it’s taking so long.”

  Rafe grabbed his elbow. “Talk to you in the p’way, Alan?” he asked quietly. Alan followed him out of the rigger’s shack to the passageway beyond the ready room. It was empty. The chainsaw was engaging almost every S-3 and its crew. All the gas the air wing had was in the air.

  “Alan, are you okay for this mission? Because if you keep snapping at men and women trying to do their jobs, I’ll leave you behind.”

  His fists clenched and the pain in his hands cleared his head. He counted to five. He knew, knew he was out of line, but the impatience was still there and his words were choked. “I’ll be fine. I’ll apologize.” He stared at Rafe’s too-calm eyes. “You need me.” He meant, You’re hurting, too; I’m trying to help you.

  “Screw that.” Rafe wouldn’t look him in the eye, “That depth charge you asked for? McAllen says that’s a good idea and the ordnance people are digging one out of stores. It’s going to take fifteen minutes. I did your seat and McAllen did your computer. Go into the ready room and put your head down until I come for you. That’s an order.”

  Alan thought of what he had been through with O’Neill and Djalik. Rafe’s “order” existed in a context that made him smile. “Yes, sir.”

  Rafe walked back to the PR shack and poked his head in. “Hey, Waller! Don’t sweat it. His wife is on the Philly and he’s a little tense.”

  Waller didn’t look up. “I know, sir. Just can’t do this any faster.” Waller, like a lot of people on the boat, had some notion of how much Rafe must be worrying about Christy Nixon.

  “You’ve got half an hour till the crew walks.”

  “Cool, sir. Thanks.”

  Rafe ducked out and went to the ready room for coffee. Alan was already asleep in a rear seat. Rafe, Cutter, and McAllen started the brief without him.

  When Rafe woke him, he came awake thinking of Rose. Sick worry hit him; he tried to conquer it. Half an hour of sleep and the imminence of getting there gave him a rush of false energy. His flight gear was ready, and after he put it on he dashed into the rigger shack to thank Waller, who smiled and looked sheepish. Then he slipped into old habit: he flung himself into the ASW module, slugged down a mixture of coffee and chocolate, filled the thermos, and grabbed a plate of cookies from the chart table. He looked at the last locations of the supposed Russian sub and the other players. The Russian surface ships were closing in on the Fort Klock task force. Bad weather still hampered both communications and locations. The chainsaw had tankers extending almost fourteen hundred miles from the carrier. Two KA-6s full of gas were on their way to the last fuel point inside the Med, near Algiers, and a KC-10 was leaving Rota in two hours to meet them off Lampedusa. He studied all this, absorbed it, drank his hot drink, and he thought all the time about Rose and about Rafe: he could do something for Rose; Rafe could do nothing for Christy. How was Rafe going to get through the long hours of this flight? How was he, for that matter?

  Before they walked, a sailor handed him a message board. The top sheet was for him, from Dukas. Zulu dead. “Shot while escaping.” You can’t win ’em all.

  He handed the message board back. Zulu, dead. He smiled, a smile that caused the sailor who had brought the message to flinch. For a moment, Alan’s face was the face of barbarism. He wondered how Dukas had gotten Zulu, but it was remote now. As with a wound, the pressure would come pocket, and scrawled “Pass to Mr Harry O’Neill onboard USS Rangoon.”

  He pointed at the note. “Can you do that?”

  The sailor nodded and took the message board. Alan wondered why the sailor looked so scared and moved down the passageway toward the plane. Toward getting there.

  Alan walked quickly around the plane. A buddy store to top off the two F-14s that would be trailing them one last time as they got close to the action area. A Harpoon missile. A full rack of sonobuoys, both active and passive types. A buddy store and gas. Several hydro-acoustic data buoys. Chaff and flare cartridges to deflect SAMs and air-to-air missiles. In the bomb bay, one Mk 46 torpedo and one conventional depth charge. It was the heaviest load that an S-3 could carry off the deck.

  Serious business, he thought. It was serious for him because of Rose, but he wondered about the Russian sub and how much those guys wanted it to be serious business. If he had to use that depth charge on an Akula-class nuclear submarine, what would the next move be?

  He climbed into an aircraft that was already running and warm. He checked his seat anyway, from habit, and strapped in. The moment he was in, Rafe had the plane rolling toward their spot on catapult two. The deck was strangely empty, the entire air wing deployed in order to get three planes across nineteen hundred miles of chainsaw, the F-14s that would fly with them already aloft and on the tanker, heading up the chain.

  At top speed and with favorable winds, the S-3 should hit the KC-10 in eight hours, yet Rafe kept saying six. Alan suddenly got it: Rafe’s not going around; he’s going to fly across Algeria and Tunisia. He smiled. Rafe was the skipper, now, but he still had more balls than anyone Alan had ever known. Six hours to Rose. Bless Rafe Rafehausen and his balls. Six hours to Rose, and whatever had blown a hole in her ship. Alan had a hunch about that, and the hunch had led him to ask for the depth charge.

  He thought about that hunch as they rolled onto the catapult and went into tension. His kneeboard cards were ready to hand, his procedures taped in little notes at three places on the screen. He already had emitter data on the Libyan patrol boat and the Russians. He thought again, fleetingly, of how close all of them might be to a real war: too many hulls in the water, too many planes in the air. Russian and American and Libyan.

  Rafe gave a crisp salute to the cat officer and said, “On to glory!” and the plane tore down the deck. Alan thought of Christy Nixon, in this seat, hurtling off the deck and hearing the engines fail, feeling the loss of power, the water—

  As AH 702 fought for a few meters of altitude with her load of fuel and weapons, Alan tried to picture his hunch as it appeared on a page of Jane’s Fighting Ships. Terrorists had used them more than once. The Libyans might have one. Small, compact. Four-man crew.

  Mini-sub.

  But if he was right, what was a Russian nuke attack boat doing down there, as well?

  Gulf of Sidra.

  USNS Philadelphia was drifting broadside to a thirty-knot wind. The swells now struck her only slightly stern-on, seeming to threaten to broach her as seawater clawed at the upswell side and broke over the deck. Water battered the container that housed the missile; the three men assigned to checking its fittings and its condition wore survival suits, and they had lifelines that they snapped to strategically positioned holds as they tried to move around the wave-washed deck.

  On the bridge, Rose and the captain tried to understand their situation. The ship was in contact with Captain Cobb on the cruiser, a hundred and thirty miles to the north. Rose had been in contact with the IVI watch officer and had been told that the In-Flight Command Executive—Ray Suter—was being called at home. Rose had also spoken to the Whiskey Bravo on the Andrew Jackson, who said they would launch aircraft within the hour. There didn’t seem to be any more communication to be done.

  The captain was in a yellow foul-weather jacket, with Merchant Marine pants showing beneath it. He looked haggard, more like a street-person than a ship’s captain. Rose, dried blood from a broken nose still crusted on her upper lip, was scowling down at the black deck, where flashlights pierced the dark as the crewmen worked.

  “What’s the situation now?” she demanded. She had been below, trying to assess damage, and she had come up to the bridge because she had understood she was in the way down there.

  “Steering gone, main propulsion gone. I’ve got lateral screws, and I’m trying to with those, but if I do, we’re going to be carried toward the coast.”

  “How far before we’re in Libyan waters?”

  “If you accept their definition, we’re in Libyan waters now.
International law, we’re about twenty miles off.” He cleared his throat. “Either way, we’re inside their goddam Line of Death.”

  “How long?”

  He shook his head. A crewman appeared and passed the captain a report from the ship’s engineer: he was reversing one lateral screw to bring the ship around.

  “How long?” she said again.

  “Maybe three hours. I thought you were gonna have that nose looked at.”

  “How long if you use the lateral screws to fight the wind and the wave action?”

  “We couldn’t stay bow-on if we did that. See, we’d be broadside like now, and—”

  “How long?”

  He compressed his lips. “I guess I could keep us in international waters a day, maybe a day and a night. If those engines last—they’re not made to run constantly.” He turned on her. “You know what it’d be like to stay broadside to this shit for twenty-four hours?”

  “We’d be real sick. What else?”

  They stared at each other. He shook his head. “Maybe I could rig some kind of sea anchor,” he said. “Slow down the drift. Then maybe use the laterals at an angle—”

  There was an old sound-powered phone system on the ship, kept as a backup. Rose got on it now to Valdez, who had been snapped out of his sickness by the explosion and was now down with the damage-control crew. One of the civilian reps was down there, too; he was a former senior chief who had worked damage control on an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. “What’s going down?” she shouted into the antique headset.

  “We got timbers up, pumps are working!” Valdez’s voice seemed to come from another ship.

  “What’s Anson say about it?”

  “He says not a torpedo. Something like a mine. He says, fucking lucky hit or somebody knew just where to put it!” Then Valdez shouted something she didn’t get, and she had to ask him to repeat, and they talked over each other until she heard the words “limpet mine.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she murmured.

  “What now?” the captain groaned.

  “Anson thinks maybe it was a limpet mine. That means—”

  “I know what it means, Commander!” The captain’s face was a mask of outrage. “It means somebody sabotaged my ship! It means the goddam Libyans or Russians planted a bomb on us so we’ll drift into their waters and they can grab us. Well, I’m goddamned if they’re going to do that to my ship!”

  That made a kind of sense, she thought. Yes, the Libyans would like to grab this American ship that was in waters they claimed but didn’t dare to defend against the Sixth Fleet; yes, it made sense that they would try to disable the ship and let it drift into water that even the US would acknowledge was theirs; yes, it made sense that they had that patrol boat just over the horizon, maybe waiting now for the moment to move in.

  Rose went to the comm center and messaged the battle group that the explosion had come from outside the hull. She reported what Valdez had passed on to her from Anson: suspected sabotage, probably planted underwater by a diver. She asked that intel check Libyan order of battle to see what submersibles they had that would carry swimmers to this distance from their coast. In her mind—and now, she knew, in the minds of the battle group—was one question: had it been done from a submarine, and, if so, was that submarine the Russian Akula? And if that question went unanswered, what would the cruiser and its destroyers, shorn of air cover, do?

  Over Gibraltar.

  Alan slept between refueling points on the chainsaw. They passed up the coast of Africa with a tailwind and passed Gibraltar without a hitch. The weather was getting worse, and Alan knew from meteorological reports how bad it was near the surface in the Gulf of Sidra. They got gas just east of Gibraltar as the moon rose over the dense cloud below them. The F-14s were ahead of them and had drained the other tanker. They had two more of Rafe’s squadron’s S-3s waiting north of Algiers, and then they would be on their own—the point and purpose of the chainsaw, one S-3 and its covering F-14s, which would take the combined aerial power of a super-carrier to get two thousand miles from her deck.

  Rafe had redirected the KC-10 enough to reveal his plan to overfly North Africa to anybody who thought about it, but nobody challenged them. Alan took the opportunity between fuelings to share out coffee and cookies. Nobody talked much. Rafe said that Klock reported that Spain and Italy had forbidden armed US aircraft to take off from their territory or to overfly them. There goes Air Force support for the BG. A cynic would say that both countries had major trade with Libya to protect, but the outrage they had expressed at the Peacemaker launch seemed real. In fact, Peacemaker seemed to have stirred up an international movement against the US; Rafe told him that press traffic the night before had the Chinese ambassador to the UN making a speech about Peacemaker’s being a terror weapon. That tickled something in Alan’s memory, something way back when Abe Peretz had done his Reserve duty at IVI. Peretz had hinted something about Peacemaker’s being a weapon—was that it?

  He’d been out of it a long time—what had the world learned while he was thrashing around in Africa—?

  His head fell forward and almost hit his keyboard, but his parachute harness caught him and he didn’t wake. He dreamed about crows.

  Gulf of Sidra.

  Back on the bridge again, Rose could see a work light shining on the deck and more figures darting in and out of its yellow glow.

  “We’re bringing up material to rig a sea anchor,” the captain said. “Take an hour, anyway.” He stared into the black sky.

  “How much time have we got?”

  “Well—if you’re an optimist, you’ll say that Sixth Fleet will have something down here to tow us out in six hours. That depends on what’s available and how they’re doing with the Russians up there. Y’know, I been thinking—this could of been the Russians and not the Libyans, or the two together, maybe to draw a couple ships down here and then—shit, I don’t know. Maybe they’re after your Peacemaker.” The captain was both smarter and better informed than she had thought. His fears were in fact hers.

  “And if I’m a pessimist?” she said.

  “Worst case, we duke it out here by ourselves because Fleet has its plate full. I’ll keep us out of Libyan waters for twelve hours, by God, if I have to tow the Philadelphia by swimming with a rope in my teeth, but after that, oh, shit—They’ll get us. No way they won’t get us if we just drift.” Agonized, he glanced at her. “How soon can you launch that goddam thing off my deck?”

  “Countdown is supposed to start in—one hour twenty.”

  “Any chance you can move it up?”

  “Captain, we got two minds with but a single thought.” She pressed the button on the sound-powered phone and ordered Valdez to the launch command module. “Spread the word down there, launch countdown has been moved up, it is now L minus eight-thirteen and counting. I want you in the module, in your seat, ready to go in thirteen minutes! Bring a bucket, because you’re not going back to your rack!”

  Before she could leave the bridge, the duty mate stuck his head in and shouted, “Captain!” and disappeared, and the captain shot after him. She hesitated, and after twenty seconds the captain put his head back around the doorframe and looked at her. “Libyan patrol boat is moving! We got confirmed radar they’re heading this way—about fifteen miles out!”

  Rose bit her lip. She tasted the blood that had dried there. She went back to communications and put her hand on the operator’s shoulder. “Pass the word for Gunnery Sergeant LaFond. Marines to assemble in battle gear just aft of the launch module ASAP. All weapons on the deck and loaded. LaFond to report to me in the module.” She patted the shoulder. “I’m moving there now.”

  On her way off the bridge, she passed the captain again. “You keep us in international waters. I’ll take care of the Libyans.”

  “This is my ship, Commander!”

  Her voice was soft. “Yeah, but it’s my mission. You know how my orders read. You sail it, I use it—and defend it. Captain, if they
take the Philadelphia we’ll be in Benghazi for breakfast, and we could be stuck there for years. I don’t mean to be the first naval officer since Decatur to rot on the Barbary Coast.”

  She went out into the dying storm.

  24 NM north of Algiers.

  Alan unstrapped before they reached the tanker, pissed into a bag, and lay down in the tunnel by the computer to stretch his legs, his hands burning by his sides. He smiled wryly. Djalik had lost a hand, Harry an eye, and he had blistered hands. When he was done, McAllen and Cutter followed suit. Then they hit the last two tankers just on schedule.

  The F-14s were flying at max conserve, already gassed up. Rafe hit the funnel on his first try and took all the gas the other S-3 had left to give. Then he hit the second tanker and drank it dry, too. Both were supposed to land in Rota—would the Spanish let them in now? The whole maneuver was done without radio contact. They flashed flashlights on and off to make signals. It wasn’t as well done as in Alan’s first squadron, but it was a miracle to Rafe after the debacle of Fleetex. These guys were eager, and they were getting good.

  Rafe got alongside the refueled F-14s and flashed his flashlight. When he had their attention, he held up his tiny rescue radio, supposed to have a range of less than two miles. He turned it on the guard frequency and pointed the antenna at the other plane.

  “Pitcher calling Shortstop,” he said slowly into the handheld.

  “Roger, Pitcher. I copy. What’s up?”

  “Change of plans, Shortstop. Just follow me.”

  “Roger, copy.”

  “Roger, out.”

  Rafe dove for the deck and turned toward the Algerian coast, because he was about to start an illegal over-flight from about Constantine, Algeria, to near Ben Gardane in Tunisia—almost the point where the Tunisian-Libyan border met the Mediterranean. Alan handed forward a computerized map printout showing Algerian and Tunisian radar coverage.

  “Thanks, Al.”