by Gordon Kent
McAllen had the mini-sub on several lines. He suspected that its outer hull was breached, and he was watching a line created by flow noise over the wounded area. Her six-knot surge suggested desperation.
Alan reached the same conclusion. She couldn’t have a lot of power left if, as was almost certain, she was running on batteries. The sprint had to be a targeting run. Otherwise she would either surface and surrender or go deeper, look for the layer and try to limp home—or was it a suicide mission? No, this near-sprint on the surface had to lead to an attack.
“Sub is turning.” McAllen was calm. Alan could feel the fatigue of Africa and the eight-hour flight behind his eyes and in his joints, his ravaged hands. “Rafe, I think he’s going for a shot. We have to use the depth charge.”
“Do it.” Rafe sounded wiped out, too. He had been at minimal altitude for almost an hour, after all the other stunts in this flight. “Whack him, Mac. I don’t have the gas to go back for another bomb.” The plane leaned one wing down like a tired bird and stooped toward the spot in the ocean that McAllen had marked. Cutter craned to look over the windscreen.
“Visual. Dead ahead.”
“Take him.” That was Rafe.
Alan had a few seconds. He wasn’t making the drop. He cycled through the screens and looked at the Libyan Su-22s. They were emitting radar and they were only fifteen miles away. Two were low—two thousand feet, going for the Philly. But no anti-ship missiles. The F-14s had just turned on them, noses hot.
The S-3 was trim and level one hundred feet above the swell. Rafe was no longer watching McAllen’s mark on his console; he was able now to see what Cutter saw, a slender form hardly darker than the water.
McAllen couldn’t see it, but he knew it was nearing the end of its turn, lining up a shot. He opened the Lucite cover and waited, hand on the switch. He counted under his breath. He had hit very small targets in practice. Five, four, three, two, one. He pulled the lever.
The plane rose as the weight of the depth charge fell away; Rafe pulled the nose up hard to gain altitude, counting seconds until the charge went off, putting the tail where he thought the explosion would come from, then leveling off. The blast wave hit them and rocked the wings, but they were five hundred feet off the water and Rafe kept it under control.
“Pitcher? This is Zulu Bravo, over.” The voice sounded jubilant. “You got him. You got him. Wreckage visible.” McAllen whooped and Alan gave him a high five. Rafe rocked the wings.
Rose watched the countdown flickering down an LCD readout. The depth charge’s explosion and the thin cheering on deck told her their story, but it was distant, a different set of problems. She and Valdez were in the last seconds of the count. She knew the Libyan aircraft were close, but without a datalink or direct contact to Alan’s plane, she had no way to measure. 12 … 11 … 10. The deck rumbled as the hydraulic gantries pulled away, backing like praying mantises from the rocket. Valdez was talking into the mission recorder. Rose flipped on the ship’s intercom.
“Secure for launch in ten seconds! Take cover! Take cover! Seven! Six! Five!”
Everybody should have got the message by now.
Three, two …
“Ignition. Starting mission count! Plus one, two, three, four—”
The engines were roaring. The rocket’s effort to lift was actually pushing the ship’s bow down.
“Liftoff—we got liftoff—nine, ten—”
Water was atomized on the deck and blew against the windows like a squall. White smoke and steam obscured the rocket, then opened, and, craning her neck and stooping, she could see the brilliant flash arcing away from the ship, up-range toward Venice. The white-hot light turned gold and seemed to pulse, then fade and tarnish to brass, then something like dull aluminum as the rocket soared into the low cloud cover.
Beside her, Valdez leaned forward and spoke into the mike.
“Launch sequence complete. Peacemaker launched at 0631 local, under goddam difficult conditions, if I do say so myself. This thing gotta be made easier. No way anybody gonna launch this thing with that eight-hour countdown under combat conditions. That’s asinine.”
Two of the tech reps were high-fiving; Maulcker, the bald one with the attitude, was being glum. He had said it wouldn’t work without a full countdown. Now, seeing Rose’s grin, he said, “It could go haywire downrange, you know. Telemetry is unchecked, absolutely unchecked! Computer banks could be damaged—goddamit, if that thing goes into the wrong orbit or crashes, it’s your goddam fault!”
She went right on grinning. She had got Peacemaker off the deck before the Libyan aircraft got there, and that was all she wanted for now.
In suburban Washington, Ray Suter sat, telephone at his ear, watching the telemetry data. “Ignition—counting—Jesus, they’ve got lift—it’s lifting—! She did it. Goddamit, she did it!” He had thought it was all over. He had thought it was hopeless. “She did it!” he cried again. For that moment, he had forgotten that he hated her now. All he could think was, We’re good to go, we’re good to go—!
Alan watched the missile climb away from the Philadelphia. At a range of one kilometer, it was rising with deceptive slowness through the thick air and already disappearing into cloud, its blast light glowing like a silver sun. It seemed to be accelerating as it disappeared. When he looked down at his screen, its form was burned into his retinas and tracked around the screen with his eyes, and he had to look at the displays with peripheral vision.
He studied the datalink from the Fort Klock, which now, astonishingly, wonderfully, showed the Libyan aircraft turning away, barely five miles from the ship, eighteen miles from the avenging F-14s. Perhaps they had thought that the Peacemaker was a giant surface-to-air missile. Perhaps they had just thought better of facing the Tomcats. Or perhaps the Libyans had been told to stand down, too.
Rafe kept the S-3 a few feet above the surface.
“Checking gas,” Cutter said. “How long we gonna hang around out here?”
Alan smiled. “The Klock’s forty miles away and steaming. Philly’s help is on the way.”
Rafe was already on Strike Common, nagging the F-14s to suck gas and get back on station. “Roger, roger,” he said finally in a tired voice, switched to intercom. “Twenty minutes. We’ll hang around until they get back.” He sighed. “Sorry, guys. I’m going to have to go into the Coast Guard field at Lampedusa. The K-10 hasn’t got enough for us to make it to the boat and fuel the F-14s coming off the chainsaw.” A chorus of groans sounded, Alan’s included, but he had been thinking of the same thing himself and hadn’t yet dared to ask—that if they diverted to tiny Lampedusa Island, where the US Coast Guard kept a station on an Italian island that was really closer to Africa than to Europe, they could stay out and guard his wife for an extra half-hour. He groaned, but he was happy.
“We’ll gas at Lampedusa, get a nap, and head for the boat.” Rafe sounded numb.
Alan looked out his window at the sea. There was no sign of the mini-sub, and her identity and her story had probably vanished with her. Rose had two prisoners on the Philadelphia who could be interrogated, she said, plus a wounded guy who was holed up somewhere on the ship. That would be fun, flushing him out. Fun for him, too—maybe dead already in the chain locker or the double bottom. The other two might tell who planted the limpet mine.
Feeling another wave of exhaustion hit him like a blast of heat, Alan said, “How you doing, Rafe? I’m about wasted.”
There was a grunt. A wave of a hand. Rafe was a little like Rose, he thought, holding himself together by keeping himself apart. Never calling in to the Jackson to check on Christy. Locking it all up.
Then the Philadelphia came into view out his window. She looked like a fairly normal ship, not one from which marines had been repelling boarders less than an hour before, or one that had survived a mine. The missile gantries might have been cranes for cargo, and the scorched launch pad could have been a chopper pad or just some weird part of the deck. Yet she had survived a
lot—captain dead, several crewmen dead, hull holed. Damn good ship, even if she was a noncombatant.
Then the F-14s swung into place a couple of thousand feet above them, and Rafe gave them some parting words, and they twisted in tandem and were gone, up and west to begin a CAP above the Philadelphia. Well, he had wanted to wrap her in safety. Could he do better than this?
“—message to the battle group,” a strange voice broke in on the comm. Rafe was waggling his fingers at them. Everybody listened up. “The White House has just released this message from the government of Libya as passed to them by the government of the Russian Republic, quote: The State of Libya regrets the misunderstanding that led to the sinking without warning of one of its patrol boats. The government of Libya regrets that its attempts to help a stricken ship in international waters near its coast were misinterpreted, and it insists with all its moral force that it had no part in whatever events led to the crippling of the stricken ship, despite the fact that that ship engaged in serious provocation of all nations of the Mediterranean rim by launching a space vehicle in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and of the clearly stated wishes of all peace-loving nations. As proof of its peaceful intentions, the government of the State of Libya has withdrawn all military units from the ship’s immediate area. As further proof of its commitment to human rights and international peace, Libya has also ejected from its territory the international war criminal Zoltan Panic, also known as Colonel Zulu. The government of the state of Libya is joining with other nations of the Mediterranean rim to try to apprehend this great criminal before he escapes into sympathetic surroundings in Yugoslavia. Unquote.” The voice stopped and another voice came on. “This is Admiral Pilchard speaking. Well done, guys.”
Zulu. That snapped Alan’s attention back from the Philadelphia. It was disorienting, as if the month he had spent in Africa and had been jerked so abruptly from had just as abruptly jerked him back. Dukas had messaged that Zulu was dead. Then he got it: the Libyans had let him go well before that message went out; they didn’t know he was already dead. They simply wanted credit for turning him loose, now that it was all over.
39
December 9
In the IVI headquarters in suburban Maryland, Ray Suter was sweating. He had discarded his suit-jacket, which hung from his chair like part of a corpse. Despite the air-conditioning, Suter was soaked. He had thought it wouldn’t work, and it had worked.
It was not quite three in the morning. IVI was all but deserted, only watch officers and security people and some night-staff security jocks. And Suter.
He was watching the telemetry data from Peacemaker. Despite the truncated countdown, despite whatever had happened to the Philadelphia, Peacemaker was in orbit, sailing over Franz-Josef Land, a moving spark in the night sky if you had the instruments with which to see it. Not quite in a polar orbit, it would cross over Alaska and start down the far side of the world, heading south over the Pacific, across a sliver of Antarctica. Then, Suter would command the computer to initiate an orbital-adjustment sequence that would move it east over the South Atlantic just far enough to bring it across the eastern tip of South Georgia Island. There, twenty-one miles east of the main island, an uninhabited pile of rock would receive Peacemaker’s rain of depleted uranium rods, observed only by instruments set up weeks before, and by the feral goats that lived there, descendants of animals left by whalers a century and a half ago.
Suter was smoking. He hadn’t smoked in three years. Now he was chewing his lip and smoking and tapping the end of the cigarette pack on his mousepad, looking at his watch every half-minute, then at the big wall clock. Thirty-one minutes.
The telephone rang.
“Suter.”
“Sir, this is the Duty Officer. We have a priority message from the White House, Code Red. Message reads, ‘Stand down.’ I repeat, the message is, ‘Stand down.’ Sir, you are to record data but put your console in Passive Mode. I refer you to page 1.12.47 of the operations manual, ‘Levels of Command.’ An officer will join you to—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Suddenly, Suter was screaming. Then he threw the telephone. The White House! Who cared a shit about the White House?
The green phone rang and he grabbed it, and before he could speak, a voice said, “A phone message from General Touhey in Houston, sir—please call him on the secure line at once.”
“‘Stand down?’ That was the White House message? Confirm that, goddamit—get—!”
“It’s been confirmed, sir.”
Suter looked at the clock. Thirty minutes. Stand down. What the hell! The White House had blinked! But why? There had been intense pressure for the last three days; they hadn’t budged. The Chinese ambassador to the UN had made a scorching speech last night—so what? Stand down? Now?
Touhey was waiting in Houston. He was terse, a sign that he was deeply angry. All he said was, “I’ve heard. Stand by.” Then there was a lot of electronic garble, and suddenly a new voice was there, cold and ironic. It was Shreed. The three of them were on a conference call. “I hear the master said, ‘Down, boy,’” Shreed said.
“That sonofabitch don’t know strategy from ape-shit!” Touhey cried.
Shreed laughed. “My, my.” He didn’t really sound amused. “You there, Suter?”
“Yes, sir. I’m outraged! Devastated! They can’t do this!”
“Of course they can.”
“We can say we didn’t receive the message,” Touhey growled. He knew better. The message had already been logged.
Suter looked at the clock. Twenty-seven minutes. “If we don’t do the test-drop, we’ve got no data and no video coverage.” The video was what Shreed had been waiting to get, he knew. That was going to be the proof, which could be leaked to nations that wouldn’t get into line. Suter didn’t know that Shreed was going to turn the results directly over to the Chinese, but he knew that frightening China was part of the goal.
“I’ll be at the Senate’s front door when it opens tomorrow!” Touhey railed. “I’ll get on the White House’s ass about this, you can bet—!”
“It won’t bring the test back.” Shreed sounded cool. Distant. As if he didn’t have a stake here. “The Brits have denied us use of South Georgia—three minutes ago. Just to make sure, they’re jamming the island and cutting off the emitter. It’s over.”
“We can change targets!” Touhey shouted. “Goddamit, we’ll go public with it now! We can adjust orbit another hundred klicks, do a minor re-adjust a little later, what the hell’d it be? Three minutes, four—Christ, we got all that goddam targeting data, it’s in the goddam computer, all we got to do is apply it—and we drop the rods and the President can go suck his dick about it!”
“And how would you and I explain that?” Shreed said. Then he sounded wistful. “It’s going to be hard to get them to back another test any time soon, though. Maybe never.” His voice took on a nasty quality. “‘Touhey’s Folly.’”
“We could drop on the goddam Libyan desert! Nobody’d object! People hate Libya—shit, they tried to sink our ship! They were out there, it was their mini-sub, the way I hear it!”
“You’re not thinking. I am. It’s over.”
Touhey began to babble. He dropped a lot of names, used a lot of swear words, but it was all reaction, no action. It was Touhey’s way of admitting it was over. That, maybe, his career was over. That he was mad as hell and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
Suter was thinking. Touhey railed, and Suter thought. The clock ticked. Suter was thinking first of himself, of what it meant to be connected to failure. Maybe to a program that would be shut down, now. Touhey had lots of enemies; IVI had lots of competitors for money, for power. Next year, this building could have a different sign outside, different people in here.
Suter was thinking of Rose. All those questions, right at the end. Not believing me. She turned against us. She turned against me.
Suter was thinking about Peacemaker. No target, no data, n
o videos. No threat to the world. But if Peacemaker went ahead and dropped its rods, and the world knew it had done so, knew somehow that Peacemaker had hit a target—
Twenty minutes.
“I have an idea,” Suter said. His throat was so tight he could hardly speak. When he lifted a cigarette from the cup he’d been using as an ashtray, his hand was shaking.
“An idea!” Shreed crowed. “Well, well, an idea! I love ideas. What’s your idea, Suter—we regroup and come back as the Three Stooges?”
“I’m serious.” Suter realized how much he disliked Shreed. The dislike would make no difference to his working for the man, might even make things better by giving it edge, but he felt the stab of hatred, regardless. “I’m serious, even if you’re not,” he said.
A little silence. “Ah,” Shreed said. “The worm turns. Well, well. Okay, give us an idea.”
“You have to give me cover.” Suter eyed the clock. Nineteen minutes.
“For what?”
“You have to promise cover, both of you! Confidentiality. Absolute confidentiality. If it doesn’t work, nothing shows anywhere.”
Touhey started to mutter, but Shreed cut him off. “You are serious,” he said, and it was clear he was talking to Suter, not Touhey.
“I’m damned serious.”
“Then I’ll take you seriously. If you can pull a diamond out of this shit-pile, you’ve got cover. Absolute. From both of us.” Now Shreed was serious, too.
Suter swallowed and plunged ahead. “We change the target to the Philadelphia,” he said.
Something muffled came over the telephone, probably Touhey. Suter ignored him.
“It’s the perfect target: everybody’s watching it. It’s emitting, so Peacemaker has something to lock on to. It’s isolated. It’s not in a foreign country, so nobody will object.”
Shreed waited a second or two, but he would be figuring it out, probably had already figured it out. Still, he went a step at a time. “Why would anybody believe that Peacemaker targeted the Philadelphia?” he said.
