The Cruiser (13 page)

The master-at-arms set a glass of bug juice the color of brake fluid beside him. Dan nodded thanks. Benyamin murmured tentatively, “They say, Captain—they say you have the Medal of Honor.”

“That's what's in the official bio,” Dan said, trying to make a joke out of it. “But I still can't walk on water.”

The buzz of talk, the jangle of silverware, gradually welled up again to fill the low compartment. Up in front a row of crewmen watched satellite-televised basketball as they ate, abstracted gazes six thousand miles distant.

A slight pale kid with the beginning of a mustache cleared his throat. “So, Captain, I hear we're gonna pull into Haifa for a week.”

“Really? Guess it's possible, but there's nothing like that in the schedule.”

“Can't you put in for a port visit?”

“It doesn't work that way, exactly. Not with the … op schedule the way it's looking.”

A pixie-faced Hispanic-looking girl said, “Is it true we're attacking Iraq?”

He shrugged. “Above my pay grade, seaman … Colón. Our job's to be ready if we do.”

“But it's a possibility? Sir?”

“Looks more like it every day. But like I said, we're only going to know once we get the tasking.”

“Captain Imerson never told us shit,” the heavyset seaman said. “We're out there on the deck, and we don't know where we're going, or how long we'll be out, or what we'll have to do. Is it gonna be like that the rest of this deployment, sir? Any way we could sorta get, like, more in the picture?”

Dan felt ashamed. Amid all the things he had to catch up on, he'd overlooked including his shipmates. Who did the work. Whose blood would pay the price if he screwed up, made a wrong decision. “That's a great suggestion, Goodroe. Tell you what: I'll get with the XO, see if we can have him do a daily ops brief over the 1MC.” He got out his BlackBerry and made a note, their gazes following his finger.

“Hey, let's let the skipper eat his lunch, dudes,” the master-at-arms suggested. From that point on the talk subsided, though the side glances continued; and all that was heard was the murmur of conversation at the other tables, the rattle of crockery and silverware, and the clatter from back in the scullery when he pushed his tray through the opening and met the startled gaze of the aproned, bespattered mess crank immured back there in heat and steam and stinks. To him too Dan gave a solemn nod of recognition and thanks, and received it back with a graceful inclination of the head.

*   *   *

LONG
after midnight, in CIC, he nursed yet another paper cup of sonar shack joe, fighting a headache and blinking tiredly at the large-screen displays.

COMEX—commence exercise—had been promulgated three hours before. The Orange surface action group had kicked off with a Harpoon attack on the northern screening units, followed by a Tomahawk salvo targeted on
Roosevelt
. They were overwhelmed by a Blue missile and air counterstrike, but Dan figured that if anything, this first attack was a diversion. Trying to anticipate the land-based threat, he'd moved
Savo
up to the outboard edge of her station and concentrated his team's attention on the northeast quadrant, letting his gun-laying radar handle the all-around watch.

For half an hour nothing had developed. He'd begun to wonder if he'd been suckered out of position when the F-5s had suddenly popped up, not out of Izmir, where Terranova had been looking, but low and fast out of the mountains of Caria. “They're trying to hide in among the islands,” the FC had said, hooking three pulsating squares and turning them to carets. “But see how clearly the Doppler lock picks them out?”

“Range?”

“Hundred and ninety miles.”

Dan leaned closer, marveling. The vibrating spokes of the radar clicked around as if escapement-driven. For each of the hurtling contacts a profile read off elevation, speed, course, and electronic identification. “We can do an alert script,” the FC2 murmured. “Write it into the doctrine from the console. Specify elevation, speed, and course, and the system will alert and track automatically. You get the buzzer if it classifies hostile. In self-defense mode, the system takes it from there through firing. Once we tell it what we want to guard against, Aegis doesn't actually need us in the loop anymore.”

For some reason this reminded him of what Amy Singhe had said in his cabin the night before. “Doctrine is preset. It resides in our computers.” He scratched his head, turning this over like some clumsy piece of tool-flint with a brain designed hundreds of thousands of years in the past. He'd watched commanders dither. Try to sort dozens of variables, match them against doctrine, and all too often make bad calls. Or at least suboptimal decisions. Against supersonic threats, a mistake left no second chance. Maybe they had to depend on silicon and code, then. But it still didn't sit well.

“I think we want to be,” he said. “In the loop, that is.”

“Sir, that's your decision as CO. But Captain Imerson had no problem running everything in automatic.”

“Let's not go through that again,” said Matt Mills. The lieutenant had come in and stood by now to take over on the nickel-and-dime, five-on-and-ten-off schedule the TAOs were standing. “Evening, Captain.”

“Matt. Say, you run into Dr. Noblos? Haven't seen much of him the last couple of days.”

“The good doctor's got some kind of respiratory infection. Corpsman said he needed rest more than work.”

Dan reflected. According to the last report from the Johns Hopkins consultant, both
Savo
's SPY-1 system and its team's watchstanding skills were still marginal. “He's, um, really sick?”

“What I heard.”

“I'll check on him. Okay, sorry to interrupt your turnover.”

“No problem, sir.”

The F-5s angled west, and the antiair coordinator assigned them to
Arleigh Burke
for the live-fire exercise. One of the Turkish fighters would launch a drone target. But all units were warned to stay alert; a second wave was likely, and would probably strike from a different quarter. As Mills and Staurulakis started the turnover, Dan noticed the rumpled blond back of Donnie Wenck's head at another console. He strolled over to stand behind him for a while, glancing back from time to time at the large displays. At last, he leaned over his shoulder. “What you running there, Donnie?”

“Diagnostic subroutine.”

“Did you ever check for that virus you mentioned?”

Wenck sighed. “Oh yeah. System's clean. But it's really clocking slow. I'm still not sure why. I was on that new high-side chat last night. We were getting deep into Linux. Good stuff. You know, we were always so isolated trying to fix things at sea, but now you can go brain to brain with the other FCs and really get to pick somebody's neurons who's maybe way out in PacFleet. I actually got to talk to the system supe aboard
Monocacy,
you know, our follow-on ship? That's out there testing, out of Kwaj? And he says we're due an upgrade.”

“Hardware, or—?”

“No sir, software.” Wenck explained that
Savo Island
's system was baseline 7. NSWC Dahlgren had written a patch for the ballistic missile defense mission, called ALIS, which optimized long-range scan and took out speed and altitude stops that had been built in back when the system had first gone to sea. “That was a real dinosaur. Baseline 2.10. Rugged, but not a lot of computing power—eighty-megabyte ROM-based memory. Reel-to-reel tapes. Those old UH-3 disk packs.”

“I remember them from when I was with Joint Cruise Missiles. We used 'em for Tomahawk targeting.”

“Uh-huh. Well, they had to build in those stops back then, or the radar would be tracking the moon. But your Scuds and M-11s and such are operating in those regimes. Also, we got another slight problem. Or maybe not so slight. In fact, it could fuck us royal.”

Dan glanced at the vertical screen. Where the hell were the Turkish subs? “Okay, hit me. But, you know, Donnie, try to keep it…”

“Officer-comprehensible?”

“You got it.”

Wenck smoothed his cowlick, but it sprang up as soon as his palm left it. “It's like, interoperability? You know we got Patriots in Israel. I was going over the defended-asset list. You know, what we're assigned to cover?”

Dan lowered his voice. “Tel Aviv, primarily.”

“Right, but it gets more specific than that.” Wenck rattled the keyboard and a simplified map of Israel came up. He rattled again and a carpet of symbology overlaid the topography. “See this? Patriot battery at Ben Gurion Airport. Here's their coverage arc. See how it underlies ours? Shorter range, but—”

“Patriot's terminal defense. They don't fire until the last minute or so before impact.”

“Right, but it starts earlier than that. We're gonna get our—”

The air was growing very cold. Dan shivered and drifted a few steps away to rest a hand on Mills's shoulder. “Check with Sonar, see if they have anything from TACTAS.”

“Just heard from them, sir. Still no joy,” the TAO murmured into his boom mike.

“Sorry, Donnie, go on. I'm listening.”

“I was saying, three ways to receive cuing. Either our own SPY-1, download from AWACs, or else from the satellite—infrared detection of the booster plume.”

“That's the Obsidian Glint?”

“Right. Problem is, Patriot's a semiactive tracker—the missile, like, navigates to impact listening to the radar emissions reflected off the incoming projectile.”

“So're our Standards.”

“Right. Exactly! Their signals are from a phased-array radar not too different from ours. So, let's say we pick up a cuing, and fire. And at the same time that radar at Ben Gurion's out there scanning. Now suddenly there's two missiles out there for them to home in on: the real target, and our Block 4. That's what I'm leery of.”

“That it'll shoot down our missile, you mean?”

“I guess it
could,
but we'd be at the ragged edge of its intercept envelope, and heading away by that time—it'd be trying to catch up on a tail chase—I ain't no Patriot expert, you know? I'm more worried, there's two birds active out there, we'll decoy the Israelis off the real one. Then if we miss, everybody's fucked. That Scud, or whatever it is, is gonna get through.”

Dan wondered how exactly to put this without sounding like, well, like an
officer.
“Uh, Donnie, I think that's something to look into. But there's three pieces to having us out here. A warfighting piece, a deterrence piece, and then there's a political angle, too. Ideally we'd have all three in place—we can shoot the missile down, the other side knows we can, and the Israelis see we can.”

Wenck frowned. Just as Dan had figured he would. “You're saying, we don't actually have to have a P-sub-K of—”

“Yeah, yeah, we want to two-block that figure, but the point I'm making, if the guy who's thinking about firing that missile figures we'll just shoot it down, he might not hit the button. And even if he does, and we miss, and it hits an orphanage, at least we tried. We stood by our ally.”

The chief's shoulders lifted, then sagged. Signifying either total lack of interest, or incomprehension. Dan waited, then went on. “Anyway, how do we fix it? This interoperability thing?”

“Like I said, I'm working it, and one of the guys thinks he can get a Patriot dude up on chat. There was an op-test called Coral Talon, but I haven't been able to get an e-copy yet. What would really help is if we had, like, freqs from the Israelis. Or better yet, some way to talk to them direct, instead of going up through all the political bullshit architecture and then down again.” He pointed to a tall console farther down the aisle. “The EWs are picking up what they think's the Ben Gurion battery, but it's gonna freq-hop like crazy when it goes into battle mode.”

Dan glanced plotward again. Where the
fuck
were the Orange subs?
Arleigh Burke
had two lines of helo-laid sonobuoys out, but no contact. Could the “enemy” 209s already be
inside
the barrier? It seemed unlikely. But it was unsettling that they'd disappeared. Which of course was exactly what subs trained to do, but still … “Look, I'm gonna have to get back to this exercise, but keep working this, okay? Anything you need to get my signature on, or approve a message asking for that study or whatever, let me know. Okay?”

Wenck's head was going up and down, but his attention was already a million miles away, back in the lines of code scrolling across the screen.

Dan was turning back for Sonar when the overhead speaker crackled to life.
“Vampire, vampire, vampire! Bearing zero-eight-eight, range twenty, tracking left.”

Vampires were submarine-launched missiles. From the
east
. And
close
. He hurled himself toward his seat. On the display, the just-emerged missile was already hooked and blinking. It was crossing
Savo
's beam, five miles off, at an extremely high angular velocity. Not an easy target, and headed directly for the carrier.

A second pip bloomed behind it. Then a third, from a different azimuth.

A coordinated attack. How had
both
subs evaded the screen? He grabbed for a handhold on the datalink console as the cruiser heeled, coming around to unmask batteries. He jammed on the headphones and his hand found the Fire button by feel as the engagement litany picked up velocity.

“Lock on.”

“Ready to fire. Select—”

“Holy shit, they're
really
firing!” Mills yelled. Dan tensed, before the lieutenant continued, “Uh, sorry, belay that … my mistake. Exercise-generated imagery. Sorry. Won't happen again. Sorry, Captain, sorry.”