by David Poyer
The hoary sea, cold and remorseless. The vessel you’d trusted to keep you safe, slipping beneath the waves. Leaving you alone, helpless … Instead of power he felt impotence. Instead of choice he felt locked in. His trachea seemed to be closing again. He kneaded his neck, tried to slow his breathing from a pant.
He could not leave his post to help them. It was as simple as that.
He depressed the metal lever on the bitch box. “Radio, captain here. Tell Zygi: Regret unable to leave station. Urgent operational commitment.”
“Unable to respond, sir?” said the TAO petty officer behind them. “But … that’s a Mayday. And if it’s coming from the coordination center—”
“I agree, it’s probably a valid SOS,” Branscombe said quietly. “But it’s up to the CO to make the call.”
“You all heard the skipper,” Ammermann said. “That’s the right decision, Dan.”
“Adam, I don’t need your backup. I told you, keep quiet or get out.”
The 21MC said, in a different voice, “This is the chief of the watch. Captain, confirm what the petty officer just told me? That we’re not going to respond? I have to log our answer.”
Dan pressed the lever again. Said, as evenly as he could, “That’s correct, Chief. Savo Island heard the request for assistance, but cannot leave station. Log that the commanding officer made that decision personally. I’m sorry … and may God keep them all.”
There. The decision was made. And now that it was, he had to pretend it was right. That was what a leader did. No matter what guilt, or regret, gnawed at his throat.
He frowned, worrying at some tenuous wisp of memory. It struggled to escape even as he seemed to grasp it.…
Then he remembered. His dream. The words he’d said to the ragged men and women as they passed through the gate, never to return.
And may God keep you all.
What he’d just said, leaving four hundred helpless passengers to the mercy of a winter sea.
“CIC, EW: Radar illumination from shore. X-band radar. Consistent with illumination from missile-tracking radar.”
His gaze went to the clock above the vertical displays. 0211 local. He bent forward, clutching his stomach, gagging on coffee-flavored acid as he tried again and again to pull air through a narrowing windpipe.
The battle had begun. And already, the casualties were starting to mount.
15
THREE Musics, jamming from Syrian soil. Lagging Savo’s frequency-hopping but still, inevitably, degrading the ship’s already constricted coverage. And an X-band illuminator from not far away. Aircraft? Patrol boat? Shore battery of Chinese-made C-802s? Hunched over the command table, Dan wiped his mouth, squinting through aching eyes at the rightmost display. The beam clicked back and forth, sous-chef-dicing mountains and desert into tiny digital wedges. Savo Island groaned as she leaned. In the darkness outside, the sea raged, and in the infrared images transmitted from the gun cameras snow streamed across the screen.
“Sir, I’d like to get Strafer in the air.” Branscombe looked pale, but his voice was firm. “Get Red Hawk out there. I know he’s probably in the sack, but if the balloon’s going up, we need his sensor package active.”
“It’s awful rough … but, yeah, you’re right. But have him call me before he launches.” Dan searched the slanting space, for what, he wasn’t sure. “Also, call Lahav. Inform Captain Marom we’re being illuminated and jammed. He probably already knows, but pass the heads-up anyway. He’s next to us on the bull’s-eye.”
“Put Sea Whiz in auto, Captain?” called Slaughenhaupt.
“Not just yet, Chief. Make sure you got a doctrinal cutout in there so we don’t fire at Lahav, or our own fucking helo. Okay?—Petty Officer Terranova. What kind of gates you got set? If they’re going to launch, it’s probably going to be now, while the Syrians are jamming us.”
Her voice rose high, clear, soft as a child’s. “Sir, got a user-defined script running, approved by Chief Wenck. Acoustic alert for anything over a thousand knots between angels five to angels ninety. That automatically trips as a space track and gets designated hostile.”
“Very well.” He rose slightly to squint across at her saffron-lit, almost Madonna-like countenance. She was twenty-three. Not just his fate but that of thousands of others might shortly ride on her competence. But she’d been cool under criticism. Maybe she was just ice under pressure—even if she looked like she belonged in the Toms River High Marching Band. Wenck stood behind her, hair sticking straight up; and at her other shoulder hovered Amy Singhe, like Kali the Dark Mother come to earth for battle. And back in the abyssal shadows of the darkened space, Dr. Noblos. Miniature screens glowed, reflected in his glasses.
They watched, but ALIS would act. Human beings could not react quickly enough. The software would evaluate the threat parameters through to engagement orders. Yet still, with human eyes and brains tracking the process. “I retain release authority,” he told the space at large. “If I’m disabled, authority passes to the TAO.” He nodded at Branscombe.
He checked the boards above the displays once more: in the green, except the aft VLS was still down. Their effective-weapons count was half of what it had been before the fire. He reached for the Hydra, then instead leaned past Branscombe along the command table. “Chief?” Slaughenhaupt lifted shaggy eyebrows. “Can you get on the horn, see if Quincoches is making any progress aft? This’d be a good time to get that ordnance back on the ready board.”
“Will do, Captain.”
Okay, time to shift focus. Dan cleared his throat and picked up the Navy Red phone. In four crisp sentences, he brought the duty officer at CTF 60 up-to-date. The foundering liner. The jamming. And now, radar illumination. He requested air support, if available. Then signed off. Branscombe’s keyboard was machine-gunning; the same update was going out over the high-side chat. Putting it out to the world, or at least, the whole U.S. Navy.
When he resocketed the handset the space was quiet for a second. Then another. The AC hissed on endlessly. A shiver harrowed his spine. Either the temperature in here had dropped ten degrees, or he was getting chills. He scratched a flake of gray paint off the circular worn spot around the black rubber trackball inset in front of him.
A trill: his Hydra. The helo detachment commander, Wilker. “Strafer, can you get the bird in the air in these conditions?” Dan asked.
“The guys are still overhauling from the evening patrol. But I can tell them to button up. That what you want, Skipper?”
“This wind’s not too strong? Snow’s not a problem?”
“We can eat the snow. We launch on instruments anyway, at night. It’s deck motion that defines the launch limits.”
“Eight degrees, right? We gotta be close to that. On this course anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fucking borderline, Skipper. You might have to back down to take us back aboard, if this wind blows any harder. But if you need us, we’ll go.”
Dan updated him on the jamming, the threat emitters. “I don’t think you’ll need weapons, so don’t delay if they’re not on the pylons. But load heavy with IR flares and decoys. I want you out there ASAP. Between us and the Syrian coast.”
Wilker rogered and said he’d launch as soon as possible. Dan rogered back and clicked off. Too late, he wondered if Strafer had been joking about backing down. From the guy’s tone, he couldn’t tell.
What else? He couldn’t think of anything.
He hated to sit and wait. Hardly anything was drilled into a naval officer more thoroughly from day one than a bias toward action, even if it was the wrong action; you never just steamed ahead on the same course, fat, dumb, and happy. That guaranteed the next enemy salvo would land on top of you. Unfortunately, with the SPY-1 in BMD mode, he kept having that tickle at the nape of his neck, the sense that someone was creeping around behind him. As if, sooner or later, some shadowy menace would wind up like a baseball batter and take off the back of his head.
Ammermann said, “
Captain, I don’t understand. What about this cruise missile that’s threatening us? Can you take it out? Or get air from the carrier to do it?”
Dan took a deep breath, not looking at the civilian. “Can I? I could. We’re in Tomahawk range. But Sixth Fleet rules of engagement are clear, Adam. We can’t fire on a nonbelligerent. Not until he fires first. And an air strike on Syria would take presidential approval.”
“I don’t think we need to wait, necessarily.” He lowered his voice. “I can assure you now, preempting the threat will not be looked at askance.”
“Then that direction should have been in an addendum to my ROE,” Dan said. “I don’t have time now to discuss my chain of command. But I’m not going to short-circuit it. There’s a reason it’s there.”
He spared one microsecond to reflect sourly on how Nick Niles would probably fall out of his chair laughing, to hear Dan Lenson say that. But he wasn’t about to accept orders from Ammermann.
He snapped his attention back to the screens, tuning everything and everyone else out. From now on, each passing second would call for a decision, while he kept a hundred variables in mind. They were like a basketball team, following the ball around the court. Right now that basketball, called the initiative, was in the enemy’s hands. But at some point he’d fumble, and whoever recovered it would win the battle that was nearly upon them.
At the same time, he, at the little end of the funnel for all this information, had to rise above it, stay both focused and open, both engaged and aloft at ten thousand feet, seeing the big picture.
His legs ached, as they usually did when he went without sleep too long. He wished he could unlace his boots and prop stockinged feet on the command table. In front of them all. He’d known captains who wouldn’t have hesitated. Instead, he felt in his coverall pocket and located a lint-coated Aleve. Swallowed it with a gulp of tepid coffee.
Then leaned back, the chair creaking, and closed his eyes.
* * *
HE opened them some time later to the TAO tapping his arm. “Sir, we’re getting intel feed,” Branscombe said. “Coming in Zircon chat. Lat-long of a suspected launch site.”
“Uh … put it on the screen.” Dan shook his head and scooted himself up in the chair. He looked around for the coffee cup. Where the hell had it gone? “Amy, you getting this?”
“On it, sir. Coming up now.”
On the center screen, the geo plot of Iraq and Jordan, two trapezoids of the same shape, but different sizes—of course, the displays were at different scales—winked on. Their borders flashed alternately orange and bright blue, cycling five times a second. The effect was nauseating, but it popped. The boxes were ninety miles due east of the Jordanian border, deep in Al-Anbar Province. What intel had called the Western Missile Sites.
Dan massaged the orbits of his eyes with the heels of his palms, pressing so hard that black-and-white digital-looking patterns rastered his retinas. Then he went to his keyboard. He located the chat but couldn’t make sense of the source code. A low-flying A-10, scouting for TELs. Or a Special Ops team, buried under some dune with infrared scopes, freq-hopping satellite uplinks. Brave men, deep in a hostile land. He flashed back on his own mission into Iraq. Stumbling across the desert. Discovered, once, by a shepherd. A dirty-faced kid with a harelip, and something brown stuck between his teeth, and long dark lashes like a girl’s. Dan could still recall his frightened, hopeless eyes.
“They’ve identified a mobile erector,” Branscombe said, obviously ahead of him reading the brief, cryptic tweets that floated upward, one after the other, as new transmissions joined the queue. How strange war felt when you could follow it moment by moment, like a video game, as tankers, airmen, staffers, each added his or her own glimpse of unfolding reality. Of course this specific chat was the highest of high-side discussions, limited to the ballistic-missile hunt west of Baghdad. But he could skip from one room to the next and sample war as it fractaled like a nuclear reaction going supercritical.
“All right.” Dan sensed a strange, mystical coldness descending like a liquid nitrogen–chilled Pyrex cylinder coming down between him and everything else. If it was time, it was time.
At that moment a digitally generated double chime sounded, one he’d never heard before, from the Aegis area. “Launch cuing incoming, Link 16,” Wenck yelled.
Link 16 was the primary path for long-range cuing information, a digital 25-kilohertz military satellite channel. There were a number of possible inputs for detection information, but the most likely would be either AWACS, orbiting far to the east over the Gulf, or the down-looking sensors of the geostationary Obsidian Glint, twenty-five thousand miles up.
He pulled over his notebook and called up a little program he’d written. It modeled the engagement geometry in the form of an oblate spherical triangle, with the apexes at the LPE, the launch point, the DOA, the defended area, and their own ship position. It was a simplistic algorithm, but he felt better having an independent check on what ALIS was putting out. The firing point was from western Iraq. That was good; their angle on the incoming missile might be okay.
“We need LPE, IPP, AOU!” he yelled. “Call ’em out and put ’em on the screen.”
“Coming through now.”
“Put it up! Put it up!” Amy Singhe was yelling. The leftmost panel flickered, then came back. “It’s up,” she said, voice pitching high.
Dan sat hunched, staring up, fingers poised over the notebook’s keyboard as the preformatted TADIL message displayed on the leftmost screen. Of course ALIS had already ingested this data. It was developing a track, computing the intercept trajectory, and initializing the Standards. The human eyes and brains reading the formatted message were already seconds behind.
But there it was. Launch point, impact-point prediction, area of uncertainty. The second two numbers he could ignore for now. Even the satellite was only guessing until booster burnout and pitchover. He typed in bearing and launch point. They wouldn’t get an intercept angle until they had the impact-point prediction, but he was hoping for no more than five to seven degrees. That would make the basket, that imaginary, suspended circle their interceptor had to go through, as wide as possible.
Above all, he had to keep his limited inventory in mind. Four rounds total, and at the moment, only two available Standard Block 4A theater missile defense missiles. Once he flipped that red Launch Enable switch inches from his right hand, the weapon would run through a built-in system test, match parameters, and fire itself.
To intercept, it had to clear the tube no later than eight minutes after its target had launched. Thirty seconds had already ticked away.…
The Aegis display jerked, then jumped forward, as if they were falling toward the desert at some unimaginable velocity straight down from space. The effect was sickening, but he kept his gaze nailed to it, gripping his armrests, as they hurtled down, down.…
Toward an infinitesimal white dot. The “gate,” a rapidly throbbing bright green bracket, the automatic hook of the radar’s acquisition function, curved in from the right. It overshot, corrected, locked on. It vibrated, but the white dot, growing inside the bracket, remained centered, as in a fighter plane’s reflex gunsight, or as in some arcade game, where the meteor threatening your spaceship has to be blasted to bits with the photon torpedoes.
No photon torpedoes here. For all her technology, Savo Island wasn’t the starship Enterprise. They might be at the cutting edge of technology, but it was a brittle, fragile blade.
Meanwhile the litany had gone on. When it paused he said more or less by rote, “Concur. Manually engage when track’s established.”
A stir beside him. Staurulakis slid into Branscombe’s seat. She tilted her head, fitting the headset to her ears, and began speaking urgently, cluing the bridge into what was going on. At the same time her fingers blurred on the keys. The leftmost screen, the TADIL feed, toggled off. In place of western Iraq she brought up the GCCS plot, zoomed down to central Israel. The right screen was
still raw video from ALIS. “We actually need four screens for the TBM mission,” she murmured.
“Save that for the lessons learned,” Dan told her. Adding, but not aloud: If we’re around to file one.
Yeah, that was all they needed to hear from the CO.
The alert-script buzzer went off, a little bit behind the action. “Profile plot, Meteor Alfa,” Terranova’s soft voice announced. “Meteor” was the new proword for an incoming ballistic missile. “Elevation thirty thousand … forty thousand … fifty thousand. Very fast climb. Identified as hostile TBM. ID as hostile.” She called out lat and long on the launch point. Dan jotted it into his notebook as it came in, and checked it against the LPE from the TADIL.
And … they didn’t match. “What the fuck,” he muttered.
He was about to ask for confirmation when the double note chimed again, and a foresense of doom oppressed him. “Second launch cuing,” Wenck said, and the same dire note was in his voice too.
Two launches, within seconds. One detected by whoever was out in the desert and relayed through the alert network; the second observed by the infrared plume generated by its booster, noted by the camera twenty-five thousand miles up.
Then the buzzer again, from the Terror’s console. “Profile alert, Meteor Bravo…”
The soft chime again … then the buzzer. Yet a third. He didn’t catch the source this time. Could the three reports be of the same launch, recorded by different sensors? No, then they’d have the same launch-point estimate. And the LPE was different for each. Only by a few miles—they were all coming from Al-Ansar—but with enough geoseparation, and different time markers, too. Clearly not the same event.
Three hostile missiles on the way. And just two antimissile rounds to take them on with.
“Meteor Charlie. System lock-on.”
“Coordinated launches,” Branscombe breathed. Dan didn’t answer, or move; eyes narrowed, laptop forgotten, he was riveted on the rightmost screen.
