The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel

by David Poyer

  “Correct. Weapons posture to TBMD—check.” She tapped the keyboard, and dawn came up on the middle screen. Seen through the camera from the port 25mm, the horizon seesawed, rising and falling, since the gun’s gyros were in standby. A gradually brightening patch, far off, a cast-iron sky over a sooty sea.

  Dan squinted. Leaned into it. “What’s that?” Tiny specks dotted on the screen, seemingly on the lens itself.

  Staurulakis murmured, “Snow.”

  “Crap,” he muttered. They really didn’t need the blizzard that Fleet Weather had said for days was coming down from Europe. He didn’t mind degraded visibility. If a small boat or an explosive-laden trawler was out here trying to find them, reduced viz would be a plus. But heavy snow could degrade the tightly focused SPY-1 beam, searching like the flaming Eye of Sauron far out over Palestine and Jordan and the Iraqi desert. Searching for that ascending spark that meant missile.

  From that first instant, assuming they picked it up as it cleared the radar horizon, he’d have roughly fourteen seconds to lock, track, evaluate, and launch. They might get a few seconds more if the Obsidian Glint, far overhead, caught the heat plume from the booster. But he wasn’t confident about the handoff from the Defense Support Program satellites. No one had tested the cuing procedure, and he wasn’t getting actual video, just text from the ground station. The Army had space-based imagery in real time, but the Space and Missile Defense Command Operations Center hadn’t responded to Dan’s request that Savo be placed on distribution too. Not that he had the intel capability to interpret photos, but access would be nice. AWACS, orbiting over Saudi Arabia, might also pick up the ascending weapon.

  But all in all, his response time was disappearingly meager.

  A cough, a sniffle from over by the Aegis area. When he looked that way Noblos was wiping his prominent schnoz, bent over, staring blearily at the screen. “Doctor.” Dan raised his voice. “Bill!”

  Noblos looked his way. “How you feeling?” Dan called.

  “Recovering. I believe.”

  “Good.”

  “I wish I could say the same for your system.”

  Dan motioned to a seat. Noblos pulled it out and settled. He coughed and muttered, “I was out, but not idle. I read up on what type of warheads we might be intercepting.”

  “Scud-type missiles. Right?”

  “Those would be our most likely targets. True. But did you read the DIA report?”

  “Which one? I read one that said they believed Saddam had both bulk chemical and biological weapons.” What he didn’t add was that the report had referenced the report of the Signal Mirror team—which, by the way, he’d written—to indicate the possibility of weaponized biological submunitions. Lower on the list, but not ruled out, was the possibility of what the report called a “baseline fission weapon,” defined as a fifteen-kiloton, single-warhead design.

  Blinking at the GCCS screen, Noblos muttered, “Here’s what I wonder. Why make Tel Aviv the target? They only have a few missiles. We’re scouring the desert, blowing away any we find. But why not use them against the Coalition forces? The amphib landings at Basra? That’d be a more rewarding target set.”

  “The Army will be shielding those,” Dan said. “They’ve got THAAD and Patriot. We’re holding the back door while the Army and Marines are going in the front.”

  “The point I’m making is, we keep assuming they’re using countervalue targeting. What if they start with counterforce?”

  “Countervalue” was strategic shorthand for striking enemy population centers and political targets. “Counterforce” meant targeting the enemy’s armed forces, particularly his strategic missiles, command, control, and air defenses. Dan frowned. “You mean—what? The task force? They’re out of range of a Scud. Even with that uprated booster they’re supposed to have developed. The, uh, the Al-Husayn.”

  “Right.” Noblos coughed, covering his mouth. “But we’re not.”

  Dan leaned back, nodding as he tumbled to where the scientist was going. “You’re saying, the first couple could be aimed at us? Well … maybe. But nothing I’ve seen argues they’ve achieved that level of accuracy. We’re a damn small bull’s-eye. And we’re not moving that fast, but we are moving.”

  “We can be tracked from shore,” Noblos pointed out. “In fact, the EW chief told me we are being tracked—by that coastal radar in Tartus.”

  Dan massaged his throat. He’d expected radar surveillance from Syria. After all, they were only about thirty miles off the coast at the north end of their patrol area. But what Noblos was suggesting was more ominous. “You’re saying they might pass cuing to Iraq.”

  “Exactly. We share data with our Coalition allies. Why can’t Syria share with Iraq? They have landline connections. They’re both Ba’athist regimes. All they’d need is GPS coordinates and some kind of terminal homing on the missile. If they can take us out, along with Israel’s own BMD capability, Tel Aviv’s defenseless. At that point Saddam says, Yeah, I’m dirty, I do have WMDs—and I’ve got seven million Israelis as hostages.”

  Dan slumped in his seat as he thought it through. The Syrians were supposed to hate Saddam. But did they hate him more than they loathed Americans and Israelis? Probably not. The modified Scud-Bs the Iraqis had employed in the Gulf War had been notoriously inaccurate. But since then, according to the informed speculation he was reading, both range and throw weight had been upgraded. Why not accuracy?

  He shivered in his chair, but it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. Actually, they didn’t even need terrific accuracy, in the old sense that the ballistic missileers had inherited from the artillery community. All they’d have to do was bolt on a radar-homing antiaircraft missile—like the ones the French and Soviets had sold them—as the upper stage. Dial in Savo’s track, relayed from the Syrian coastal radar—and fire. Savo Island would light up the path for her own attacker; Aegis was putting out so much energy, a homing warhead could fly right down the beam.

  Unfortunately, there was no way to tell, until it was well into endoatmospheric phase, where a ballistic missile was aimed. And with the malfunctioning of her space tracking system, to calibrate against satellites of known altitude and speed, Savo’s track precision was itself in question.

  “Doc, what about SCUS? It’s still degraded. The Block 4 warhead guides itself in terminal phase. But to predict point of impact, we’ve got to have track precision.”

  “Correct. You can’t predict POI without SCUS.”

  Noblos sounded so unconcerned, so lofty, Dan had to turn away and run his hands through his hair. He made himself turn back. “Well, maybe it’s better if we are the target. At least we’ll be decoying the missile away from population centers.”

  Noblos shrugged. Looked over Dan’s head. Sniffled, and wiped his nose again. “Was there anything else?”

  Dan sighed. “Guess not.” He shook his head at the scientist’s ramrod posture as he stalked away. Fucking … great. He just hoped they had some warning before the first missile lifted off its portable erector-launcher. And that their hastily upgraded Standards worked. A warhead coming in at them, at the velocities they were talking about, would be well beyond the intercept capabilities of anything else the Navy carried.

  Someone cleared his throat behind him. The corpsman, Grissett, was holding a clipboard. “Yeah, Chief?”

  “Sir, you asked me to let you know if we saw any more respiratory illness. I’ve got a sick-call case with mild fever and a good deal of congestion. One of the helo crew.”

  Not without an effort, Dan extracted his head from ballistics and radar. “Uh, right. We’re seeing a lot of that, seems like. Flu? Like what Doc Noblos had?”

  “No sir. This looks like just a bad cold. He says he probably picked it up on the carrier. That makes sense. On a long deployment, whenever you have liberty the troops tend to bring back these minor upper-respiratory infections. On a small ship, they burn out quick. On something the size of a carrier, they can pass it around f
or quite a while. I’m keeping an eye on him.”

  “Actually … is there any way we can isolate him until he’s not infectious? We’re so shorthanded up here, even passing a cold around could degrade readiness.”

  The corpsman shrugged and said he could check him into sick bay, but it was probably already too late; the mechanic had been walking the passageways for two days now. “But you asked me to report.”

  “Right, I did. Thanks, Doc.” Dan checked his watch, suddenly conscious the cinnamon buns had worn off. 0700. “Cher, I’m going down to breakfast. I’ll leave my Hydra on.”

  * * *

  SAVO plowed on through the morning, bucking seven-foot seas and the occasional snow flurry. Dan told Almarshadi to scrub all training and relax berthing restrictions. If people weren’t on watch, he wanted them to catch up on sleep or maintenance. He’d love to get his own head down, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. High-side chat said both Lebanon and Syria had filed protests about Savo Island’s presence so close to their coasts. Dan filed that for reference, but not without wondering why Lebanon was even bothering to get its stick in.

  At 1000 Branscombe called to ask if he wanted a CNN feed to the mess decks. After a few seconds’ consideration, Dan said no, at least not for the moment. He wanted everyone’s head on his or her own job, not on what was going on to the east. There, the Army was punching hard into southern Iraq. The Air Force was laying down ordnance across the country, hitting command and control, trying to decapitate the regime.

  How would “decapitation,” if they could pull it off, affect his mission? If the Iraqi command structure got turned into shredded meat in a bunker, what were the enemy’s rocket forces’ standing orders? Stand down? Acquiesce in occupation? Or unleash a last spasm of destruction? The last sounded a lot more likely.

  He’d just socketed the J-phone when Almarshadi undogged the bridge door, shaking snow off his foul-weather jacket. A few flakes blew in with him. Dan returned his salute gravely. The XO sighed, glanced at the OOD, and sidled close. At some unseen signal the rest of the bridge team drifted to the starboard side, giving them privacy, as long as they kept their voices low.

  Which his second in command did. “Sir, we’ve scrubbed down the LAN. That … program … is no longer available on it. And we made sure there’s no backup. At least on the ship’s network.”

  “There’s no backup on the LAN? What if the downlink goes … wait a minute. You’re talking about that fucking rape game.”

  “Yessir. Sorry, I wasn’t clear.”

  “My bad, my head was on something else I have to talk to Dave B. about. If you see him, send him up. So, you don’t think I was overreacting? There seemed to be a lot of resentment among the female crew.”

  “No sir, that was probably the right call. Considering … I guess, considering how ready everybody seems to be to jump on anything like that these days.” He pulled paper from inside his jacket. “Here’s the list you wanted. Everyone who accessed or downloaded it. The game kept a players list, so you could see how your, um … scores … compared with the others. That’s the number to the right of the name. Where it says ‘player,’ ‘thug,’ ‘hustla,’ ‘gangsta,’ ‘baller,’ that’s your ranking.”

  Dan didn’t want to know how you got points in a game called Gang Bang Molly. He almost said just shred it, but at last accepted it. The list wasn’t as long as he’d feared. Maybe a dozen names, and all junior enlisted. No chiefs. One first-class petty officer. Carpenter, of course, was the high scorer. Benyamin was number two. He grunted. “Okay. What do we do with this?”

  “Do you want to take disciplinary action, sir?”

  “Of course we do, XO. I don’t give a shit about swimsuit posters in the work spaces, the women can put up beefcake too. But a rape game’s over the line. Tell me if you disagree.”

  “No sir, I think you’re right.”

  “At the same time, I don’t want it to be a career breaker. I know things have changed since I had Horn—”

  “Yes sir. They have. The guys call a captain’s mast a ‘delayed admin discharge.’ One conviction at mast, they can deny your reenlistment.”

  “Well, I don’t want that. Can you do XO’s mast? What exactly are the regs now?”

  “I can do XOI, yessir. The maximum award is twenty hours of extra military instruction.”

  The newest euphemism for punishment detail. “What kind of EMI?”

  “Typically mess duty, or extra cleaning.”

  Dan said, “I don’t want to be too much of a stickler here, Fahad, but I’m recalling extra military instruction can’t be punitive, it has to be actual training.”

  “Yessir. That’s OPNAV Instruction 3120. It has to be bona fide training to improve unit efficiency, not a substitute for punitive action under the UCMJ.”

  No question, the days when a captain could lash a recalcitrant to a grating and let the cat out of the bag were long gone. “So we can’t punish them without mast, but if we do take them to mast, they won’t be able to reenlist?”

  “About the size of it, Captain.”

  They went back and forth about this for a while, Dan actually enjoying the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate on Navy regs and how to best skate around or in between them. It was more pleasant than thinking about what occupied most of his plate. Finally they got it boiled down to an agreement. Almarshadi made a note, then glanced around, as if making sure the others on the bridge were still out of earshot. “However, this brings up another issue. A personal one, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I would like to be relieved.”

  Dan tried to mask his surprise with a squint out the window. Through a gauze of snow the Israeli corvette seemed, through some queer fluke of the waning light, closer than ever. In the U.S. Navy, officers didn’t ask to be relieved. It was theoretically possible, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing of such a thing. “Uh, Fahad, what exactly are you telling me here? Relieved as what?”

  “As exec. I do not feel, any longer, I am performing to your satisfaction.” When the Arab inclined his head with a dignified courtesy Dan caught the beginnings of a bald patch under a careful comb-over. “You said I am the … point of failure in our system. I don’t want that responsibility. Therefore, I would like to be released … I mean, relieved.”

  “This is a surprise. I don’t really know how to respond.”

  “I am being accurate? That I am not fulfilling your expectations?”

  “Hey now. I admit I was ticked off the other night. About the near miss. And I chewed your butt. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to fire you. Believe me, if I did, you’d have been on that helo to the task force, the one we sent back with Goodroe.” He glanced away, then back, trying to read the closed stubborn face. Remembering the anger and pride he’d seen a flash of, there in the passageway, when he’d used that phrase. Point of failure. Obviously it had sunk deep into this man’s soul.

  He had to try harder to remember how powerful a CO’s words could be. But couldn’t the guy take a reaming and keep on steaming? Any XO, by design, had a stressful job: to demand more than anyone could offer, and keep the standards of performance, cleanliness, and professionalism in the stratosphere.

  In other words, he was almost guaranteed to be unanimously hated by everyone beneath him. Dan smiled as he recalled the joke about it, about why the insignia for lieutenant commanders and commanders was an oak leaf. The punch line was “So the pope gave the order to cover all the pricks with leaves.” Dan had been there, executive officer aboard USS Turner Van Zandt, in the Gulf, under Benjamin Shaker, for Operation Earnest Will. It was a hard role. Was Fahad Almarshadi just not going to fill the bill?

  “Fahad—surely you’ve gotten chewed out before. The idea’s to take direction, reorient, and keep charging.” The head remained stubbornly lowered; the dark gaze didn’t rise. Past him the helmsman and JOOD were watching curiously. They looked away quickly.

  Or was something else going on here? “Wait a m
inute. This wouldn’t be about Iraq, would it?”

  That called forth a furrow down Almarshadi’s brow. “Iraq?”

  “It’s not that, then. For a minute, I wondered—never mind.”

  “You wondered that since I was Arab, I would be on their side?”

  “I didn’t say that, Fahad.”

  “Now you insult me. First I am a point of failure. You would rather have Cheryl as your XO. Now I am disloyal, not to be trusted.”

  Jesus. The guy had remembered every word he’d said, then made up some he hadn’t. “Cool the fuck down, XO. And lower your voice.” Dan swung out of his chair. “We’d better take this to my cabin.”

  “No sir. I think we have said what we both needed to say.”

  Almarshadi started to turn away, but Dan caught his shoulder and none too gently jibed him back around. “I’m not done talking, XO. You’ll stand there and listen. And look me in the eye when I’m speaking to you.”

  “Yes sir.” The murmur was submissive, but the dark eyes were blazing now, as they had been once before.

  “You need to start paying less attention to what I say to you, especially when I’m not getting enough sleep, and more attention to your job. The only thing I see wrong here is that you lack self-confidence. But do you think you’re the only one who feels that way?” No answer. “Do you?”

  “I do not know.”

  His gaze had dropped again, but Dan saw he’d hit some kind of nucleus. Maybe not hard enough for fission, but the angry flame seemed to be turning down to simmer. He started to lower his voice, then looked past the small man and instead raised it, so the others in the pilothouse could hear. “XO, sorry for losing my temper last night. Hear me?”

  “I hear you, sir.”

  “I have every confidence in you. Do you hear me?”