by David Poyer
He’d steamed these tropic seas before. In the old Oliver Gaddis, when an order that hadn’t really been an order had sent him to find, and destroy, a ship most said didn’t exist—
“Captain?” The exec was rubbing her eyes and studying her ever-present BlackBerry.
“Cheryl. What’ve we got?”
“I’d like to put Amy on the watch bill. I know she’s not school-qualified, but she’s studied hard. And served six tricks under instruction, during the transit. She’s ready.”
Dan cleared his throat, searching for a reason why not, but couldn’t come up with one. At last he said that was all right. Staurulakis made a note. “Next, our urinanalysis quota—”
“Drop it,” Dan told her. “No more pee tests. Administrative requirements, reports, inspections—draw a line through them. Fully manned watches, essential maintenance, last-minute training. That’s all I want on tomorrow’s plan of the day.”
“Yessir. We got a response on those extra eductor fittings you wanted. None in the system.”
He grimaced. “Just great. Okay, a complete check of the firemain system. Isolation valves, auto and manual, and drill each of the repair parties on bridging them in case of rupture. Check all the jumpers—”
“Banca boat to port, Captain.” The JOOD, binoculars to his eyes.
One of the small craft native to these seas. Dan twisted, to make sure the remote operating console on the 25mms had it hooked up. The operator met his eye and winked. “Keep him outside a mile,” Dan told the OOD. “Warn him off with the loud hailer if he looks to be headed this way.” Then went back to discussing the schedule. “That’s what we want to drill. Damage control, dewatering, restoring power. And medical—get Dr. Schell to help Doc Grissett update our first aid and battle dressing training. With particular attention to burns. Everything else, we drop. From here on in, it’s real world.” The exec jotted again, then shifted to her Hydra.
“Bridge, CIC—Radio. Skipper there?”
He leaned to depress the 21MC lever. “Lenson.”
“Captain, flash message. Warning order from PaCom. Message board to the bridge, or will you take it on the LAN?”
“I’ll take it in CIC.” He sucked air and swung his legs down. What now? Staurulakis stepped aside, still on the Motorola, but shot him a worried frown as he brushed past.
* * *
IN Combat again, in the same worn chair. The same displays, the same flicker from the rightmost status board, which seemed to be slowly dying. Dan told Mills to have it checked out, and logged into the CO’s terminal.
The news wasn’t good. USS George Washington had hit not one but two mines coming out of Yokosuka, warping her shafts and shutting down one of her reactors. The carrier was experiencing power loss and was limited to five knots. No one had claimed responsibility, though it was easy to assume the mines had been submarine-laid. The Japanese were resweeping the channel.
The second flash described a civilian airliner crash on the main runway at Osan Air Base, effectively shutting down Seventh Air Force operations in South Korea.
The third raised U.S. readiness condition to DEFCON 3, with PaCom and CentCom at DEFCON 2, immediate readiness for nuclear war. He read this three times, incredulity deepening with each perusal. U.S. forces hadn’t gone to condition two since the Cuban missile crisis, when SAC had been placed on fifteen-minute standby.
The final flash was to Savo Island. Halfway through, he twisted in his chair. “Donnie. Chief Wenck!”
“Present!”
“You read this, Donnie?”
“The SAR? Just got through it, boss. Writing up the ack message. The Terror’s setting up the laptop.”
It was a satellite acquisition request, directing the SPY-1 to steer its beam to a given volume of space, setting up its sensor parameters … in essence, telling it where to look and what to look for. In this case, according to the tasking order, that “something” was nearly a hundred miles up and moving at an ungodly speed. He scanned down the rest of the message. “What’s the nomenclature on this? Let’s get Bill Noblos down here. We may need him on this one.”
“It’s in a low polar orbit. Period about ninety minutes.” Mills flipped pages in a red-covered pub titled Draft Tactics for Engaging Ballistic and Orbital Targets, then riffed on his keyboard. “NORAD catalog number 20404, for what it’s worth. And ephemeris data. But that doesn’t tell us what it is.”
Dan reread the order. Acquire, track, and prepare to engage. A polar-orbiting body, or technically speaking, a ninety-degree inclination orbit, moved north to south, or south to north, while the earth rotated beneath it. The item they were directed to look for circled the globe every hour and a half. So that over twenty-four hours, it crossed over, or at least within reasonable slant range of, every point on the planet.
The ideal orbit for a reconnaissance satellite, whether its sensors be cameras, radars, or something more sophisticated, like the far-infrared detectors of the Obsidian Glint early-launch warning satellites. “It’s a recon bird?” he asked anyone who cared to answer.
“That’d be my guess.” Noblos settled into a seat on the far side of the CIC officer. He wore civilian slacks, a Savo Island light blue nylon running jacket, and a soft wool cap. “In a low polar orbit? Probably synthetic aperture radars, for ocean recon. Like our Lacrosse series.”
Mills added, “But all we actually have is object number and orbital parameters.”
“Could be some kind of comm relay,” Wenck put in.
“Doubtful,” said Noblos. “They put those in a synchronous orbit, so they’re always over the same spot.”
Dan lifted his eyebrows. Was it really possible they were being asked to acquire a satellite? “Uh, how long to acquisition? Until it’s overhead?”
Wenck said patiently, “By then it’s too late to do anything about it. We gotta hop on it the second it pops over the horizon, clears atmospheric lensing effects.”
“All right, and how long is that?”
“That’s gonna be”—Wenck peered past Terranova—“two minutes, fifteen seconds.”
Dan sat back, reviewing the order. It was to acquire and, yes, “prepare to engage.” The SPY-1 output was focused into a narrow, coherent beam by the phased arrays. The octagonal antenna faces were made up of dozens of radiating elements. Since waves from nearby sources interfered with each other, shifting the phase of the signals pointed the beams left, right, up, and down, within certain stops imposed by the physics of interference phenomena. To detect something as small, as fast, and as far away as their target, the beam had to be both extremely narrow and aimed exacty where it would appear. Like trying to track a fastball with a laser pointer … you had to start with the laser on the ball the moment it left the pitcher’s hand.
He twisted in his seat, fighting the urge to go over and kibitz. “Donnie, Terror, we set to acquire?”
“Not yet, Captain.” Wenck was busy on the Dell laptop that connected to the Aegis console by a cable, an arrangement that had always struck Dan as absurdly ad hoc. But, hey, off the shelf was popular … regardless of whether it was milspec, shock-hardened, or EMP-protected. The chief frowned at his screen. “Getting an error message. Fuck.”
“What kind of error message?” Dan asked him.
“Delta AM on the array face. Hot weather like this, you get thermal distortion on the edges of the array faces.”
“You can tune for that,” Noblos observed. “Apply a bias correction factor. Haven’t you been doing that?” He dragged his stool noisily to the console, where he was soon deep in the weeds with Wenck, Terranova, and the assistant SPY-1 petty officer.
Dan knitted his fingers, getting apprehensive. At the tremendous speed this thing was moving, much faster than the suborbital projectiles they’d engaged to date, they had to take it head-on. Otherwise the Block 4 just wasn’t fast enough; its target would zip past unharmed as the seeker fell back into the thermosphere, ablated, and burned.
But he couldn’t, not with
two minutes to set up. They might acquire, but they couldn’t fire on this first pass. Ninety minutes from now was the soonest they’d be set, when it came around again.
“And … there it is,” Noblos announced drily. “Be sure to log that correction. That’s the tweak you need when the array gets unevenly heated. We saw a lot of that at the test site in Kwaj.”
“Target acquired. Designate…” The petty officer’s voice trailed off. There was no proword for “satellite.” “Uh, Satellite Alfa.”
Wenck muttered, “Man, this thing is struttin’. Look at that range gate. Five miles a second. That’s … eighteen thousand miles an hour. And the cross section fluctuates, fuck’s with that?”
“Maybe rotating,” Terranova suggested.
“A recon bird, rotating? Probably just the antennas changing their angle to us.”
No one said anything for several seconds, as Wenck or maybe Terranova turned up the audio on the signal going out. For some reason the unsteady, low-frequency rattle sounded eerie today. “Okay,” Wenck muttered. “Noodge the range gate a little more … got it. No, wait, lost it … lock on. Intermittent. This thing’s really fucking small. And it’s way out there, slant range four hundred miles … out of engagement range on this pass, anyway.”
“Put it on the screen,” Mills said.
It came up, not video but the range gate brackets, vibrating as usual, clamped around the contact, and the data readouts flickering, and at the bottom of the display a blank black area that Dan guessed was the sea horizon. He leaned back again.
Object 02-4064 was a recon bird. Most likely Chinese. It made sense to take it out, if a war was starting. But no one had ever shot down another country’s satellite. Only their own, falling out of orbit, or in tests of the few antisatellite interceptors that had ever existed. Reaching out to this one was going to be at the very outside envelope of Block 4’s and Aegis’s capabilities. In a sense, it was astonishing he could even consider trying.
He remembered how impressed he’d been, back at the start of his career, at how far out the old Reynolds Ryan’s dual-purpose five-inch 38s could reach. Now their eighteen-thousand-yard range seemed laughable, primeval …
… No, goddamn it. He pinched his cheek painfully, catching a doubtful glance from the CIC officer. He’d gotten maybe four hours a night, going through the Singapore Strait, alert for air strikes or the lurking submarine, maybe a sub-laid mine. What had he been thinking about … oh yeah. That no one had ever shot down another country’s satellite. Would it be an act of war? Did anyone even bother to declare war anymore? Maybe the whole idea was passé, like dueling.
Okay, time to let everybody know what was going on. He picked up the red phone and waited for the sync. The comm problem, whatever it had been, had gone away, or been fixed; anyway, the circuit didn’t squeal, just synced smoothly. The tasking message had come from Pacific Command, but Strike One and Fleet would be monitoring too, and logging the conversation for history. Alert for any more Dan Lenson screwups … He said slowly and clearly, “PaCom, this is Savo Island, over.” On covered nets, there was usually no need to use call signs, though sometimes you did, depending on what the SOP directed.
A hiss, a crackle. “Savo, this is PaCom. Over.”
“Savo Island Actual. In respect of your order to track and prep to engage NORAD catalog 20404, low polar orbital object 02-4064. Over.”
“This is PaCom. Go ahead. Over.”
“This is Savo. We have lock-on at this time. Over.”
“This is PaCom. Cleared for autonomous engagement. Intercept and terminate. Over.”
Dan swallowed. “Um … This is Savo Island. Unable to comply at this time. We have radar track and lock-on, but due to range and speed limitations, the target is too far east and too far above the horizon to engage. The next opportunity will be on its next orbit, ninety minutes from now.”
“This is PaCom. Copy all. Interrogative: Can you intercept and terminate at that time?”
Dan cupped the handset, keeping his finger off the Sync button. “Donnie, before I answer him, homer on the Block 4’s infrared, right? Is it even gonna home on an ice-cold satellite?”
“It’s not purely infrared, Captain. That’s just part of the decoy-penetration algorithm.”
“So that’s a yes, it’ll radar-home?”
“Hey, I ain’t guaranteeing it’s gonna do shit,” Wenck muttered.
“What’s that, Chief?”
“Nothing, sir. But you also gotta … gotta remember, this thing’s moving in longitude, too. Like, the earth turns under it. So it’s not gonna pop above the horizon at the same place as before.”
“Wenck, I’m on the phone to PaCom. Are we gonna be able to knock this thing down or not?”
Wenck turned those blue blue eyes to Dan without seeming to see him. As if a million calculations were streaming past behind them. He didn’t answer for a second. Then said, “Sir, I don’t know. Gonna be damn close, all I can say. A diagonal speed vector along with the crossing geometry. And if there’s any maneuvering juice at all on that thing, any smarts built in so it can dodge once it knows somebody’s trying to hit it, the answer’s definitely gonna be no.”
Dan blinked, still holding the phone. Met Noblos’s lifted eyebrows, folded arms, his half smirk. As if their failure would prove, in some way, his own superiority. But he had to put that aside. For now. “Bill, what’s your call? Can we knock this thing down?”
“Savo, this is PaCom. Over.”
He didn’t answer, waiting for the civilian physicist. Who at last drawled, “Well, now that I’ve got it tuned for your technicians, Captain … it might be within the outer edge of the engagement envelope. Theoretically. If everything worked perfectly. But I’d have to say … the odds are against you.”
That seemed to be all they were was going to get. He pressed Transmit. “PaCom, Savo. Our intercept capabilities against satellites are … marginal. How badly do you want this guy taken out? That will impact salvo size and any refires needed. Over.”
“This is PaCom. We need it taken down. ASAP. On its next orbit, if at all possible. Expend what ordnance is necessary. Over.”
Dan exchanged glances with Mills. The TAO was frowning, pointing up at the weapons inventory board. “This is Savo. Two issues. First: This is a Chinese satellite, correct? We had not understood here that hostilities had gone hot. Interrogative tasking. Over.”
The distant voice turned hard. “Far above your pay grade, Captain. But for your information, an Air Force Rivet Joint recon plane is missing east of Hainan Island. We suspect shootdown. Execute your orders. Over.”
Okay, that was clear enough. “This is Savo. Roger on execution. However, important to make clear we have only eight, I say again, numeral eight, TBMD birds remaining. Interrogative: Will there be resupply? Interrogative: How many should I commit to this mission? Over.”
“This is PaCom. I say for the last time: expend what is necessary. Report results ASAP. PaCom out.”
He blew out, resocketed the handset, and exchanged astonished looks with Mills. “Okay, that clarifies things.”
“They really want this thing off the board.”
“If it’s synthetic aperture radar, it can track forces anywhere in the Pacific, and pass targeting on our battle groups.”
“But if we do, it legitimizes their shooting down our satellites too,” Noblos put in. “Which they definitely can. A multistage solid-fuel kinetic-kill vehicle from Xichang Satellite Launch Center—”
Wenck said, “But they already shot down our recon plane, right? I’d say, it’s game on, and we’re ten points behind.”
Dan glanced at his watch. “Like the man says: above our pay grades. All right, eighty-two minutes until it comes around again. We’ve got an orbital plotting function in GCCS, right? Get that up where we can see it. Also, dig out what exactly this thing is, and get the EWs tuned in if it’s radiating. Donnie, if we shoot a two-round salvo, will we have time to refire? Or have to wait until
the orbit after that? Sounds like this is getting urgent.”
But Wenck was shaking his head. “We can’t refire on the next orbit, Dan—I mean, Captain. Each pass, the track moves west, remember? Or the earth rotates out from under it … whichever way you want to put it. If we miss on this go-round, we’re not gonna see this thing again until tomorrow.”
Dan blew out again. Right; with a period of ninety minutes, that would be about … twenty-two degrees of longitude with each pass, or, here near the equator—
“Fifteen hundred miles,” Wenck supplied, apparently doing the same calculation, but faster. “Way out of range. So this coming up is gonna be our one whack at this piñata.”
Which also explained why PaCom had been so insistent that they fire now. They were isolating the battlefield; taking down the sensors the other side needed to fight an over-the-horizon battle. Just as Simko had predicted.
But he was the guy with his butt in the crack, squeezed between astrophysics, operational necessity, and emptying magazines. He felt for the Fire key, on its steel chain around his neck with his Academy-issue dog tags. “TAO, set up for three-round engagement. Pass what’s going on to the battle group commander. Give somebody else the air defense mission. Do we need to steam west, Donnie? Will that improve our geometry?”
He glanced at the geo plot, overlaid now with the green curved lines of the satellite track function. They didn’t have a hell of a lot of sea room before slamming into the Malay Peninsula, but he could run in that direction for eighty-two minutes.
“Thirty or forty miles is not going to make a difference,” Noblos sniffed.
“But it can’t hurt. Let’s come to two-seven-zero and kick her up to flank. Prepare for three-round engagement.” He stood, stretching the pain out of his back and neck, staring at the GCCS. Taking in the whole vast bowl of the China Sea, and the increasing number of air and sea contacts up to the north, off the coast.
So both sides trudged toward war. Like sleepwalkers …
* * *
AN hour later, they were fully manned. Two watch sections, including Cheryl and Amarpeet, crowded CIC. Dan wanted them all in on this. Not just for training, but so they could say they’d been here when it started—the first offensive step of the war that now seemed unavoidable, though chat kept reporting UN efforts to avert it. No further news on George Washington, but another civilian airliner had attempted an approach, to Yokota Air Base. A Japanese F-16 had brought it down short of the runway, unfortunately into a heavily populated part of Tokyo.
