Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  On Alan’s screen, six new signals appeared at the southern limit of the digital ocean and moved an inch a second, spreading like an opening hand as they advanced.

  Simcoe said, “Holy fuck.”

  Alan found that he couldn’t breathe.

  Soleck rolled the cold top of the plane toward the missiles, hiding his engines under the wings; Alan fired his chaff again, aware that the new threats might be IR missiles. He thumbed his mix to chaff-chaff-flare-flare, keeping his attention on the surface-to-surface missiles that had appeared from the south. They had all been tagged by the computer, which indicated Harp 1c. Six times.

  “Where’re those from?” Simcoe shouted.

  “Canada.”

  A fist punched at their plane. Something rang against the base of Alan’s seat and his head was slammed back. He saw red and breathed copper. The cockpit seemed to pulse; something sounded like breaking glass.

  “Everybody still back there?” Soleck asked from far away. The plane rolled again.

  Alan saw blood on his keyboard.

  Simcoe said, “Commander’s hit.”

  Alan said, “Bullshit.” Then he could see where the ricochet had sliced his arm. On the screen in front of him, the six Harpoons vanished into their targets. Drops of blood had spattered across the shards of his screen. “It’s nothing. Chief, you got a dressing?”

  “On the way.” Simcoe put a hand in his helmet bag. “Hey, look at that!”

  Both of the Nilgiris and the northern Krivak had vanished on ESM.

  Air whistled through a hole in the fuselage where the SAM had hit them.

  Alan ground his back teeth together. In fact, the arm hurt quite a bit now.

  Garcia said something and Alan missed it. He blinked and felt worse, his mouth full of copper and salt, and he threw up into his helmet bag.

  A strange high beeping seemed to fill the after cockpit. Alan didn’t take it in at first; he threw up again.

  Soleck’s voice said, “How bad’s he hurt?”

  Simcoe was out of his harness, a lock-blade knife in his hand, cutting the sleeve of Alan’s flight suit back to the elbow and putting a heavy compress over the wound. It was a long slice with a lot of blood. Alan’s vision tunneled.

  “How bad’s he hurt?” Soleck said again.

  Alan could hear him perfectly. Everything started to make sense again except the high beeping noise. He said, “I’ll be okay. Chief’s putting a—thing—on my arm.”

  “Hold on, skipper.”

  Simcoe cut the tape with his big knife. Alan had never carried first aid gear in his helmet bag and he wondered why. “Master Chief? What’s that noise?” he asked. The plane shuddered and turned suddenly, and Simcoe was lying across him for a moment. Then he struggled back to a crouch. Alan tried to wave an arm. “Chief?”

  Simcoe ignored him. He wasn’t plugged in; couldn’t hear a thing over the rush of air.

  “Stop fussing! Get strapped in before Soleck does another trick!” Alan wanted to shout; it came out as a croak.

  Simcoe folded his knife against his thigh and threw himself back into his seat, hands already pulling at his harness clips. The tone of the air whistling into the airplane’s wound changed and got into a harmonic with the beeping alarm. Simcoe pushed his helmet cord back into the socket.

  Alan looked at his computer screen and found that a fragment had shattered it. He couldn’t do anything.

  Simcoe said, “Uh oh.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Our sub just made contact with buoy four.”

  Soleck was turning so that Alan’s window looked north and west over the burning wrecks of four ships.

  The sub wasn’t under the ships. It was already twenty miles behind them.

  “Fuck,” Alan said. Under his breath he said, “I’m not done yet.”

  36

  Patiala Airport

  Harry ran for the Lear jet, his brain screaming Mecca, Mecca, they’re going to nuke Mecca. He had told Djalik, whose face was grim behind his sunglasses. Now, Moad tried to tell him something about problems with the local airport and fuel, and Harry blew past him, growling, “Later!” and threw himself into the aircraft. Moad was left to hear about it from Djalik.

  Harry tried the satphone, found that the auxiliary power was off, headed for the cockpit. By then, Moad knew about Mecca and was right behind him, shouting, “What can I do, what can I do—?”

  “Get me some power!”

  “Get out of my way—” Moad pushed his boss aside. Harry yielded; the plane was Moad’s specialty.

  Moad gave him a look, flipped switches. “Get on the fucking phone, Harry!”

  Djalik hung back in the hatch, out of it.

  Harry threw himself back into one of the club seats with the satphone in his hand and began to punch in numbers from his laptop—Fifth Fleet Headquarters. He counted nine rings, then ended it and tried it again. Six rings this time, and then a distant voice said, “Fifth Fleet HQ, Petty Officer Nicco speaking, sir.”

  Allahu Akbar. “I have to speak to Admiral Pilchard. Now. This is a vital matter of national security.”

  He was aware how foolish it sounded. The voice, however, remained the same, said simply that it would get the duty officer.

  But the duty officer thought it was foolish—didn’t say so but began to give Harry the runaround: who was this? what was the nature of the information? who was speaking? what was his rank and unit, sir? and would he speak with the flag lieutenant’s assistant, instead?

  Harry shouted an obscenity and ended the call.

  He began to punch in Valdez’s number.

  Over the Indian Ocean

  Alan looked at the wrecked computer screen and tried to think his way through it. The sub had run somewhere, had used its surface ships as a decoy. Ruthless. If he had ever doubted that SOE would use their nukes, his doubts were dispelled. “Soleck?”

  “Skipper?”

  “Get us over our buoys.”

  The sub’s last location on the buoy line was ten minutes old, putting it at least a mile beyond the line.

  And then what?

  Then the hundred-fathom line and so much depth that the Kilo-class could go anywhere.

  And they’d never find it.

  Patiala Airport

  Harry was on the verge of cursing—not taking the name of Allah, no, but calling curses down on cell phones and distance and time—but he held himself together. Valdez hadn’t been home. Mavis was home. But Mavis would get the same runaround at Fifth Fleet that Harry had. He told her, anyway, and shouted into the handset to tell Valdez and pass the message to Pilchard or what the hell was his name, Alan’s assistant, like a city in the Dakotas—what was it? “Pierre—it’s Pierre, or—Lapierre, that’s it—try to get him—Mavis, this is important!”

  Now he was trying to get Dukas. He realized that his hands were shaking and his blood pressure must be up somewhere above two hundred. He heard himself groan. Like an old man in pain.

  “Dukas.” A voice that had been waked from sleep.

  “Oh, Mike, thank God!”

  “Who’s this? Harry? Hey, man—”

  Harry went right through him. And the hell with going secure. “Get to Fifth Fleet and get to Al Craik! He’s after a submarine that has three nukes and he has to be told that the targets are Karachi, Bahrain, and Mecca! Did you get it? Mike? Karachi, Bahrain, a—”

  Dukas didn’t say any of the stupid things people like to say. All he growled was, “Is this solid?”

  “A-1! Urgent, Mike—I mean, urgent!”

  “I’m on it.”

  And he hung up.

  Bahrain

  Captain Lurgwitz fielded Dukas’s call. “This is the real deal?”

  “He says A-1, and he’s the best. Urgent, he says.”

  “I’ll say!” She put him on hold, pulled up comms, and said, “Get me the TAO on the Jefferson. Now!”

  It took less than a minute to pass the names of the three cities to Captain Hawkins.


  USS Thomas Jefferson

  “Chuckwagon, do you read, over? Chuckwagon, this is Wagonmaster, do you read, over?”

  “Go ahead, Chuckwagon.” Soleck frowned at Garcia. The Jefferson was supposed to be in EMCON.

  “Message for your passenger. Tell him the targets are Karachi—”

  Over the Indian Ocean

  Karachi, Bahrain, Mecca!

  Alan tried to blot out what Bahrain meant—his two children, Mike Dukas, friends, the naval base—and to focus on the hope and the problem that the message had brought. Out there somewhere was a datum, selected by Mohenjo Daro or the sub’s captain, from which the three cruise missiles would be fired. Around the datum would be a circle—all the possible points from which a sub with those missiles could hit those three targets. Mecca, Karachi, Bahrain—

  Alan didn’t have a chart of the western Indian Ocean, and the computer didn’t, either. He guessed that there must be a launch point somewhere southwest of Karachi that would let the sub fire missiles at all three of its targets simultaneously. Maybe not. Mecca was a hell of a long way to the west.

  West, anyway. Straight toward the hundred-fathom line.

  His mind raced, looking for a solution, grabbed an idea.

  He called the Picton and told Fraser what he knew.

  “I’ll sprint and drift for a while. See if the tail gets a zone.” Fraser sounded worn.

  Simcoe shook his head, then shrugged. When Alan was off the radio, he said, “Won’t get no zone out here. The water’s warm straight to the bottom.”

  Alan didn’t want to hear more bad news. “Whatever. Look, we need all the help we can get.”

  Simcoe said, “That sub’s still running on a snorkel. They need to, to save power, right? Not a nuclear sub. He needs to run his diesel for as long as he can.”

  Alan nodded dully. “Yeah.”

  “So he’ll make noise. Look at these lines, Commander. He’s making boo-coo noise.” Simcoe was pointing at his screen.

  Alan unstrapped his shoulders, tested his back. His left arm was hot and swollen, but there wasn’t any more blood coming out of the bandage, which, by contrast, felt cold and sticky. He was light-headed. He leaned out across the aisle between them and looked at the minutes-old graphs on Simcoe’s screen. The sub was, indeed, making a lot of noise.

  Alan reached over Simcoe and pointed at the track. “Show me his course while he was in our sonobuoy field.”

  Simcoe played with his keyboard. “There.”

  A straight line traveling WNW—perhaps 290 true. Alan leaned back in his own seat. He was breathing hard. “He doesn’t have any reason to turn. He’s heading straight for his launch point.”

  Alan tried to lean forward in his harness and the pain in his left arm stopped him cold. He swore, wriggled, found a position from which he could reach his good arm across his body into his helmet bag and extract a fistful of charts there. He pulled open an ancient TPC of the northern Arabian Sea and spread it across the ruins of his keyboard.

  “How far’s a Tomahawk go?” Alan said, mostly to himself. Time was playing tricks with him. He was fully aware, and then a little out of it, and then back. “Eight hundred miles?”

  “Depends on fuel and payload. Those nukes have to mass a lot more than a ship strike package.” Simcoe had undone the top of his harness and leaned over the chart.

  “Okay. Wild-assed-guess worst case, twelve hundred miles.” Alan tried measuring with his fingers; he was too unsteady. He ripped a piece of paper off his kneeboard and used it to measure distance: Mecca, Bahrain, Karachi.

  “If he’s going to shoot them all at once, he’ll launch here.” Here was a pencil mark on the chart, deep, deep ocean five hundred nautical miles due west of Socotra Island. Alan did a calculation in his head and then dismissed it as absurd, did it again. “He’s at least ninety hours sailing time away.”

  “Deep water, minimal ASW assets. We’ll never find him.” Simcoe was back at his station, looking at the grams. “That’s where he’s going, though. Lines up like that with his course.”

  “He can shoot Karachi anytime. He can shoot Bahrain in a matter of hours.” Alan took a deep breath and found that hurt, too. “We have to get him right now.”

  Simcoe smiled. “That’s what I think. We know where he has to go, we can guess his course; Mister Soleck can take us here—” Simcoe indicated a point just a few miles to the west—“and we drop a new pattern—small, tight—and see if he comes into it.”

  “That’s two miles short of the hundred-fathom line.” Alan tried to sit up straight. “No, never mind. Go for it.”

  Simcoe started telling Soleck where to fly.

  To the east, Donuts had watched Snot’s chute hit the water and had seen a Canadian Sea King hovering over it. He’d finished his long evasion turn and climbed back to find the sky empty. He turned south for the tanker, all too aware that he was leaving Craik alone in the sky.

  The fuel on a second SSM caught fire and burned white-hot on the southern Krivak. The open seam cracked; the ship broke in two and sank in seconds. Most of the crew were already dead; many by their own hands.

  Both of the Nilgiri-class frigates were afire, their remaining ammunition adding to the conflagration started by the Picton‘s Harpoons. Very few crewmen were attempting any damage control. Again, most of them were dead.

  The Picton pulled in her tail and began a long dash for the last datum on the sub. She could make thirty knots—six times the speed of the Kilo submerged. She would be their last hope, and a slim one. Once the sub made it over the shelf and into the deep water, only luck would get her.

  They flew due west, almost over the sub’s projected course, until Alan’s best guess and Simcoe’s experience said they were ahead of her. They laid five buoys in a straight line across a mile of sea, a very tight pattern that gave them a sensory net almost three miles across. By the time the last buoy was in the water, the sub was almost due to arrive.

  Alan sat with his head all the way back in the seat, trying to follow it all from radio calls and what he could see of Simcoe’s screen. He thought about the sub and about Stevens: the sub had a SAM. Maybe a rack of them, maybe just a guy who ran to the flying bridge and shot a MANPAD.

  “Soleck?”

  “Skipper!”

  “Soleck, if that sub comes up, you put your rockets on him. Got me? Pri-one.”

  “I hear you, skipper.”

  “Master Chief? Tell me your thoughts about prosecution.”

  Simcoe didn’t take his eyes off his screen. The sub was now officially late. “If I get a fix, I’d put an active buoy down. We only have one torp and we have to be sure, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Active buoy. On the first ping, Mister Soleck starts us on lineup and we drop the torp.”

  “Roger that,” Alan said. He was not thinking his best, but he knew he had wanted to say something—Ah! “Torp may have gotten fragged.”

  Simcoe sat back, his head snapping around. “Jesus fuck,” he said. “I forgot.”

  “Yeah.” Alan nodded blearily. “But we go with it. Go active. Stevens must’ve gone active, right?”

  Simcoe probably had no idea what Craik was talking about. He was suddenly busy on his screen.

  He’d just got a passive sonar hit from buoy 14.

  “North end of the pattern. He’s changed course slightly, going about 300 true.” Simcoe’s voice went up an octave. He had his fingers on the toggle to drop an active buoy.

  They only had four buoys left.

  The plane waggled back and forth and suddenly the wings came level and Simcoe grunted and pulled his toggle.

  “Away,” he said and they were turning hard, like a shit-hot break over the carrier, the turbofans screaming along with Alan’s back and arm. His heart was pounding. It was all on them now, and he was out of it—his screen busted, his station unimportant. All down to Simcoe. Simcoe looked like a batter waiting for a pitch. His mouth was open.

 
; Back into a second turn. Water just out Alan’s window. Alan was puzzled to find that there was a crack in it. They were below a hundred feet. Air rushing through the hole in the fuselage.

  “Going active,” Simcoe said.

  Alan pushed himself against the turn and the g-force and the pain to look over at Simcoe’s screen.

  Garcia said, “Bingo!” and Simcoe grunted.

  “Mister Soleck? Torp run. Get me a broadside shot, sir.”

  “Roger, Simcoe. 120 true.” Again, the hard turn. Water out the cracked window again. Alan watched Simcoe’s screen as another pulse went out from the active buoy; Simcoe’s head came up like a pointer’s. “He’s going for the surface. Fast.”

  Soleck pulled the nose up, nearly stalling; pulled power off the plane and pushed the nose over and down until he was just barely airworthy and moving at less than sixty knots. All that in a few seconds, because he was ready to pull that very maneuver, because Skipper Craik had said the sub would surface.

  Less than a mile in front of him, the bow shot into the air and crashed back, throwing spray into the oily swell. The tower was already clear. Soleck figured ten seconds until they had a man on the bridge. In ten seconds, his plane crossed three hundred meters, and the bridge of the sub seemed to fill the windscreen. By then, two men were shouldering launchers. That’s how they got Stevens.

  Soleck fired his entire rocket pod, the firing a continuous push that tried to turn his plane to starboard with every launch. The S-3 had no sights, no computer, no nothing to guide his rockets. Just pilot skill. Soleck walked the rockets across the water by eye, from the first impact until he saw hits. Then he banked away to port, his right hand flying from the firing toggle to the throttle and pushing it all the way forward.