The Cruiser (26 page)

He wasn't attracted. Quite the opposite. But some instinct warned him not to reveal that. So he smiled back, held the little plastic device out farther, and let it drop. The wind caught the drive as it fell, curving its path. Then it vanished into the heaving sea, leaving a widening ripple that only slowly moved aft, visible for a long time, before
Savo
finally left it behind.

12

War Day

DAN
was napping in his chair in Combat when the message came in. He woke to Cher Staurulakis shaking his arm. “Captain. Captain!”

“Yeah!”

“The Air Force is hitting downtown Baghdad.”

His first instinct was to check his watch. 0440 local, Bravo time, one hour earlier than it was over what was now, officially, an enemy capital.

The warning order had come down several hours before. They'd gone to darken ship and full battle readiness. Everyone on the bridge was in flash gear, with goggles handy. Here in CIC, gas masks, life preservers, and helmets were stacked in neat piles or slung from consoles. He ran his eye over displays and status readouts. The starboard bow array wasn't operating as well as it should. The chill-water flow was still a problem.

Other than that, and the slow engine response due to their artificially low patrolling speed,
Savo
was as ready as he could make her. Right now they were on a southeasterly course, which pointed the port quarter array out along the main threat bearing, but they were nearing the southern limits of their area. He'd have to turn north again in another hour or so, or lose geometry on the acquisition basket.

He'd come to visualize this as a circle hovering sixty miles above and slightly north of Amman.
Ezekiel saw that wheel, way up in the middle of the air.…
Donnie and Mills were down trying to improve the numbers on the other array. If they couldn't get it above 80 percent, he'd have to head west rather than north. Which would gradually open the range, and thus reduce their probability of kill.

Stuck to them like a tick, the bright pip of
Lahav
rode five miles off. During the night the Israeli corvette had repositioned to the north. Staurulakis had interpreted that positively. “He's clearing our downrange bearing. Letting us do what we're here for,” she'd murmured, typing rapidly. She was monitoring the chat from the U.S. and British ships that had slammed open the doors of Iraq's defenses with salvos of Tomahawks from the Gulf and the Red Sea. “There won't be a long air campaign before the land assault this time. The Army and Marines are already crossing the Kuwaiti border.”

“They'll burn the oil fields again,” Dan said. Remembering the stench of burning hydrocarbons that had hung over that land, like smoke over Mordor, during the last war.

“Maybe not, if we can take them down fast enough. SpecOps are mounting an amphibious assault on Basra. It's going to hang on what happens when the Army hits the Republican Guard.”

“Good luck to 'em,” Dan said. When it came to war, the football-field enmity, always half a joke anyway, vanished, and the services rolled as one.

Terranova came out of the darkness holding a thermos and a plate. “Coffee, Captain? And they sent us up some cinnamon buns. Special, for the tracking team.”

“Nice. Thanks, Beth.” He took two; his mirror had been telling him he could afford some empty calories. He winced as the fresh charge of java burned his tongue. The buns were drizzled with crystallizing frosting; he wolfed one and half the second. Sucking the sticky sweetness off his fingers, he repositioned his keyboard and switched from one camera to the next. Damn, it was dark out there. Even in the infrared. He cranked up the magnification and searched the horizon, then guiltily switched it off. The gunners on the ROC consoles on the bridge were scanning, backed up by the CIWS watch team. He needed to stay up at angels one hundred. Keep his mind clear, his head on the main mission.

ALIS—the acronym dated from the LEAP Intercept program, but specifically, now, meant only the software patch in Aegis that drove the TBMD programming—was up. On the right-hand display, the spokes clicked back and forth with metronomic regularity. They'd turned off everything from 0 to 0.5 degrees elevation and put all the system resources into above-horizon search. He stretched his arms until tendons cracked. “Okay, where are we, Cher?”

“A reminder on the high side to watch for indications of missiles being fueled. Any intel will be forwarded to us Flash precedence, but we'll probably hear it over chat first. Increased threats from enemy leadership—”

“Double-check on that.” So if the satellite chat went down, they'd lose time on getting the warning order. He had to talk to Branscombe, make sure their cybersecurity was up and they had backup receivers standing by on the satellite downlink. If they couldn't get alerts fast,
Savo
was nothing but a fat target out here.

“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 for 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.