by David Poyer
“Flight quarters, flight quarters,” the 1MC announced as he was pulling on his jacket. Followed a moment later by the air-side controller calling out, “Helo control reports: Red Wolf 202 inbound, four souls onboard.”
It took a moment before this registered. He swung on his heel and stalked to the far side of the space, where the air picture consoles kept track of, among other things, their own helicopter. “I heard four souls,” he asked the petty officer, who removed one of his headphones politely.
“Yessir, Captain. That’s what the pilot reported.”
“There were three outbound. Pilot, ATO, sensor operator. And … well, three live souls. Why’s it four coming back?”
“I dunno, sir. I asked, but didn’t get an answer.”
“Tell them it’s me asking this time.”
“Helo in final approach,” the 1MC announced.
“Uh, I’d wait a couple minutes, sir, if it’s okay with you,” the controller said. “He’s got a lot on his plate right now. The pilot, I mean.”
“Sure. As soon as he’s got both wheels on deck.”
When Dan got back to his seat he realized he’d left his classified chat screen up. He’d been only a few steps away, but he logged off quickly, before anyone could notice. Then examined the rightmost display again. Damn. That eye could see so far, but only in such a narrow slice; all else was obscurity. Like the Norse god—Heimdall, Hendall, something like that—who could see a hundred leagues and hear the grass growing. Guarding the gates of Asgard, waiting to announce the battle that would end the world with a blast of his horn. Funny, how whenever any religion contemplated the End of Days, there was always a horn involved. Looking back at the Aegis display, he couldn’t shake his apprehension, as if something bad had to be lurking in that huge pie of unsearched space.
“Helo on deck. Secure from flight quarters. Now commence XO’s messing and berthing inspection.”
The helo control petty officer. “Sir, pilot on the horn for you. Click to thirteen.”
Dan fitted the headset on again, adjusted warm plastic, snapped to 13. To hear a voice he didn’t recognize. A young-sounding, eager male voice, with maybe a touch of somewhere in New England. “Captain? Is that you?”
“Yeah, this is Lenson. Who’s this?”
“Adam Ammermann, Captain.”
He blinked and massaged his forehead. Then checked the dial, wondering if he’d wandered in on some other frequency. “I’m sorry. Am I on the line with Red Hawk 202?”
“We’re shutting down, sir. Please secure that,” someone said in the background, maybe the copilot; and the voice said, “I’ve got to get off, I’ll be there shortly.”
Dan stared at the handset, then slowly put it down.
* * *
A tall, round-cheeked man with a slash of dark hair above an oval, open face swung down out of the chopper. He wore a Mae West over a blue blazer with a white button-down oxford shirt and a maroon tie with a repetitive pattern of small red … seals? His smile lit up the flight deck as he bounded toward Dan, palm outstretched, lurching as the deck tilted. “Captain Lennon? Dan Lennon?”
“The name’s Lenson.” Dan freed his hand as soon as he reasonably could and waved toward the hangar. “Let’s get clear of the flight deck, okay?”
“Right, right, Lenson. Adam Ammermann. Just call me Adam, please. Or, my friends call me Jars.”
Inside the hangar the maintenance crew stared. Dan led the guy out of the way as the hangar door clanged and began powering upward. Jars? “Look, Mr.… Ammermann, there’s obviously been some mix-up. This is a U.S. Navy warship. I assume you’re a reporter, or—”
“Oh, no.” Ammermann’s wide innocent face fell. He needed a shave. “They told me they’d notified you—you’d know I was coming. They didn’t? Look, I—”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Dan interrupted. It might not be the guy’s fault, but he didn’t have time for the press. He got the Hydra off his belt. “Bridge, this is the CO, back at the hangar. I need the master-at-arms here, right now. —Sir, I don’t mean to be unwelcoming, but we’re not exactly open to drop-ins. So I’m going to ask you to stand by here until we can get this aircraft refueled, and then—”
But Ammermann had drawn a paper from the blazer and was holding it out. Dan accepted it reluctantly. The letterhead was familiar: dark blue serifed font under the impressed seal. He looked up reluctantly to a forthright grin, teeth so perfect they had to have undergone long-term orthodontia, so white they must be capped. Only the five o’clock shadow marred the impression, and a whiff of sweat mixed with cologne. “The White House.”
“White House staff. Right.”
“You’re what … military?”
“Oh, no. You were military staff, right? Dr. Szerenci said you were.”
“You know Edward Szerenci? The national security adviser?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve met him several times. At least.”
The master-at-arms, out of breath. “You wanted me, Skipper?”
“Yeah. Just stand by a minute, Chief. —This letter doesn’t say anything about Savo Island, uh, Adam.”
“That was in the message. You didn’t get a message?”
Dan blew out. “Let me check. Meanwhile just stand by, all right? Go back aft, back there, out of the way.”
The crew chief. “We refueling, sir? Or putting her in the barn?”
“Just stand by. —Chief, escort Mr. Ammermann to the ready room.” He turned away, tried to shield his ears from the noise, and failed. He slammed the starboard door behind him and stalked forward along the main deck, until the engine whine receded enough so that he could get through on the Motorola. He asked Radio if there were any messages about an incoming political visitor, an Adam Ammermann.
“When would it have come in, Captain?”
“I don’t know. Can’t you do a global search or something?”
The radioman came back within sixty seconds. “Nothing under that name, sir.”
Dan pivoted on his heel.
Back in the hangar he nodded to the civilian, but spoke to the chief. “Chief, there’s obviously been some mix-up. Mr. Ammermann here must have been slated to go somewhere else. Somehow, the carrier put him on our helo. We’ve got a maintenance hold on the bird, so I’m going to place him in your custody until we figure out where he’s supposed to go and how we can help him on his way. That okay, sir? Sorry about this, but this kind of stuff does occasionally happen. In the Navy, like everywhere else.”
But Ammermann said earnestly, “Sure, but this is Savo Island, right? And you’re Lennon—I mean, Lenson? This is where I’m supposed to be.”
Dan studied him again. He didn’t look like anyone who ought to be drifting around the fleet. Or maybe, just like one of the young profs you occasionally saw in the College Afloat program. “What exactly are you supposed to be doing here, Adam?”
“Jars. Please. The message explains it. But since you don’t have that yet, well—I’m your liaison.”
The MAA looked from one of them to the other. “Liaison with who?” Dan asked.
“With you. Office of Public Liaison. I’ve got an ID.”
Dan scratched his chest as he examined it. He vaguely remembered Public Liaison from when he’d worked in the West Wing. They were fervent and ambitious but inexperienced and sometimes too full of themselves, and the military staffers had tried to avoid them whenever possible, especially since they tended to look down on anyone in uniform. Or at least they had during the previous administration.
“You’re absolutely sure it was Savo Island? Well, if you knew my name … Look, I’ll stash you in a stateroom until we figure this out. Okay? But until we do, I’m going to ask you to stay there. Don’t leave that cabin. We have a lot of high-voltage equipment and this is an industrial environment. We’re busy and we’re on a … Anyway, I just want you to stay put for the time being, okay?”
Ammermann said sure, absolutely, whatever Dan said. A crewman hustled over carrying an expensi
ve-looking leather suitcase and a hanging bag. Dan drew Chief Toan aside. “Take him to the unit commander’s suite, and put somebody you trust on the door. I don’t want this dude wandering around. We still don’t really know who he is.”
“Gotcha, sir.”
“Be courteous. Get him coffee, put a movie on for him, but don’t let him roam unescorted. In fact, don’t let him out of the stateroom.” The chief nodded, and Dan forced an Official Smile at Ammermann, who was standing by his luggage. The staffer kept glancing from the suitcase to the chief. Only when it was perfectly obvious that no one else was going to pick it up did he make a little quirk of the mouth and bend for it. As he did so pens and a smart phone fell out of his jacket, bouncing away over the nonskid. The crew chief was on it in an instant, yelling, “FOD alert! Get this shit off the deck, ASAP!” and slamming a boot down on the phone as Ammermann winced and plastic cracked.
Dan almost smiled. But not quite. Then he was out of there, mind snapping to the next item on the day’s agenda.
* * *
THEY assembled in his in-port stateroom. Longley had coffee and doughnuts ready and Dan gestured everyone—Noblos and Wenck and Mills, Singhe and Terranova and Staurulakis, the major players in his Aegis team—to seats. Dr. Noblos looked worn and held a handkerchief to his nose; he sniffled. Terranova smiled down at the table with that inwardness, that passivity, he’d noted before, and grabbed for a doughnut. Wenck was humming to himself, some inaudible ditty that bounced his head back and forth as he plugged in a power supply and set up a notebook. Not for the first time, Dan wondered if there might be a touch of autism, Asperger’s or something like that, there. Mills blinked into space. He’d just come off watch and looked as if his head were still in Combat. Staurulakis sat pale, calm, composed, compact, ready for anything. While Singhe, perfectly pressed, perfectly coiffed, smiled at him, deep brown eyes seeming to convey more than any whisper could. Sandalwood perfume drifted across the table. The strike officer wasn’t really part of the TBMD team. But maybe the more brainpower they poured on this, the better.
He cleared his throat. “All right, I asked everyone here to iron out any hard spots now that the watch is set in ABM mode. I guess I’ll ask Chief Wenck … or, maybe better, Dr. Noblos to start the recap.”
The physicist coughed. He said in a hoarse voice, “I assume you’re calling this to check our timelines and geometry?”
“Maybe start with an overview, Doctor.”
Noblos smiled tightly. “I’ll make it as … simple as I can, then.
“Savo Island’s mission is to maintain station once hostilities begin, in surveillance and track mode, ready to intercept any ballistic missile fired within a radius of three hundred miles. The obvious enemy is Iraq, the extended-range Scud they call the Al-Husayn, though Iran’s also on the threat axis and within range. If the firing point is from western Iraq, we’ll have a near zero angle of attack on the incoming missile from here.
“We’ll probably acquire either via handoff from AWACS or cuing from Obsidian Glint. Aegis will develop a track, compute intercept trajectory, and initialize. We have a limited inventory. Four Block 4A Theater Defense rounds. The missile will perform a built-in system test, match parameters, and fire itself. This must occur no later than eight minutes after the target launch.”
The scientist coughed. “After firing and in flight, the SM-2 establishes communication with the ship. The booster will burn out, and separate. The solid-fuel dual-thrust motor will ignite. Aegis keeps transmitting midcourse guidance through the third-stage motor burn, taking the warhead above the atmosphere. The kill vehicle will apogee three hundred twenty-five kilometers up at approximately fifteen thousand miles an hour. Terminal long-wave infrared guidance will take it to final impact.
“If, that is, all goes as planned.” Noblos blinked bloodshot orbs at the overhead. “Limiting factors are the low round loadout, marginal crew training, marginal software function, and limited backup amplifier and power-out equipment. I have to be honest. The best possible outcome would be if we never have to fire. Because I don’t think you’re ready to detect, track, and discriminate well enough to achieve mission success.”
Dan said as evenly as he could, “Thanks for the recap, Doctor, and for keeping it … comprehensible. Matt, what can you add?”
Mills spoke through his hands, which were clamped over his face. “Well, Dr. Noblos has pointed out most of the hard spots. But the cooling system and the calibration are question marks too. I have more confidence in Donnie and the Terror’s tracking team than the Doc seems to. But the geometry’s going to govern everything, and it’s the one variable we can maybe get some more traction on. So I printed this out.”
He passed out pages, and Dan studied his copy. A map of the Levantine, with a blurry infinity or sideways figure-eight pattern overlaid between the east Med and western Iraq. The left lobe of the lazy eight was much smaller than the right.
Mills said, “Over here to the left is our assigned box. You can see we have a pretty small footprint to jockey around in. We’re going to have to watch the intel very closely. If we get launch indications farther south in Iraq”—he rocked his fingers in a seesaw—“we’ll want to move north. And vice versa. The more we can minimize the sideways velocity vectors, the bigger the error basket we give ourselves.”
“Bigger, or smaller?” Dan asked. “I’m not sure I—”
Staurulakis said, “Think of it as a funnel, Skipper. The narrow end’s what we have to get the missile into. That’s the error basket. The kill vehicle has its own little steering thrusters, once the infrared seeker locks on. That’s the open end of the funnel. But there’s only a limited amount of maneuverability after burnout.”
Mills added, “Don’t forget, it’s going two miles a second by then. We have to get our bird into that funnel, as Cheryl calls it, so the seeker can track and discriminate for a hit-to-kill. The closer to a nose-on meeting we can manage, the bigger that basket will be, and the better chance we’ll hit it.”
Dan said, “Okay, let’s assume we hit the, uh, the error basket. What’s P-sub-K after that? Probability of kill?”
Noblos took that one. “For the warhead itself, if it gets out there and is positioned right, and the target’s within its maneuverability envelope, P-sub-K will be around .8. Or so. But that’s to impact. Actual PK on an incoming warhead also depends on what kind of target we get, unitary or separating. If the airframe detaches from the warhead, for example, as reentry starts, you get two targets and possibly other debris as well. There’s some discrimination built into the seeker, but it’s not foolproof.”
“Overall?” Dan asked quietly.
“Probably about .5.”
He sucked air. Even odds were not so good when you had only four missiles. They could look, shoot, look, shoot, but at a closing rate of fifteen thousand miles an hour they’d have no time for a second try. “Can we fire two-round salvos?”
“Depends on the geometry.” Noblos’s grin was diabolical, until he grabbed a napkin and sneezed.
Nobody else said anything, and after a moment Dan nodded to Wenck. “Okay, Donnie, you’re coming in at this pretty much from the outside. What’re you seeing that we’ve all missed?”
The newly minted chief had been riffing on his keyboard all through the discussion. Now he rotated it to display a chart of the eastern Med. A sea-tinted teardrop faced its blunt end toward Damascus. The tapered tail extended far to the west, almost to Greece. He drawled, “A little different take on what Mr. Mills just presented. This blue patch is our defended area, against a missile from western Iraq.” He pivoted the screen so all could see in turn.
“According to that, most of the area we can defend is behind us,” Dan said.
“Right, but there’s nothing we can do about that. It’s just the way the intercept geometry works. Actually our optimal location would be about a hundred miles inland. But it means two things. First, we have a real narrow footprint we can launch from, to have much
chance of making an intercept. Second, we’ve got to push that footprint in as close to shore as possible. The closer in, the better we can cover our defended area. However, we have to stay fairly far north, too. Unfortunately—”
“That puts us very close to Syrian waters,” Staurulakis finished.
Wenck nodded. “Yes ma’am. The closer inshore we get, the bigger the hoop on that basket we’re trying to hit. But you’re right.”
The operations officer murmured, “The Syrians are trying to figure out which way to jump in this war anyway. We probably don’t want to be their excuse to jump the wrong way.”
“Hey, if they do, we’ll just lick their shit too,” Wenck put in.
Dan winced—it was an unfortunate choice of words—and glanced at him. “Donnie, that’s good. Clarifies the problem. Anything else? Any way we can make things easier for our tracking team? Give them some kind of advantage?” He made sure not to look at Terranova as he said this.
Wenck blinked and pushed his cowlick back. “Hey, everybody seems to think there’s a bunch of dummies on that console. It’s not Beth’s fault. This is a new system. New software. But the training package is all old shit; all she got was the beta development notes. Wanna know why? Some dickhead in the missile-development agency cut their funds off. They need billions for some supersmart kinetic-energy warhead, so they cut all the funding for training. The Terror here, she had to make half of it up herself.”
Noblos started to object, spluttering; Dan held up a palm. “Okay, okay! Maybe a little less finger-pointing and more listening here? We have a lot of constraints and not much wiggle room. Two things worry me, and they’re related. What Cheryl pointed out—Syria considers the area where we’d most like to be, to successfully intercept, as its territorial waters. Allied to that is ship self-defense. Petty Officer Terranova told me, but it didn’t really hit home until today, how vulnerable we are in BMD mode.”
Mills said, “We’re really almost blind against other threats.”
Dan nodded. “Right; such as antiship missiles fired from Syria. Or by Hamas or Hezbollah, from Lebanon. Intel says they might have some Iranian C-802s.”
