The Cruiser (35 page)

“Roger, sir.”

A touch at his elbow. Ammermann, the broad earnest face sallow now. “Captain. Do I understand one of those missiles is aimed at us?”

“The first one. The intent being to take us out first. Then the Patriot battery, is my guess. The third, and the ones after that, can strike undefended targets.”

“Can you take that missile out?”

Dan said, “The question is, do we want to.”

“What do you mean? You have to!”

Terranova said, loudly but without any stress in that Joisey accent, “Meteor Alfa, apogee. Hundred and forty kilometers up. Fifteen thousand miles an hour. About to commence terminal phase. Lock-on is firm.”

Wenck added, “Request permission to engage Track Alfa with SM-2.”

Dan waved the staffer away. Said to the TAO, “Where are we in the launch basket, Cheryl?”

“Damn near at the hairy edge, Captain. But I don't think we want to initiate a turn right now. Two-round engagement?” She hesitated, carefully dressed nails poised over the keyboard. No color, as per regs, but they were neatly manicured and shiny with clear polish.

“Permission to engage?” Wenck asked again.

“Not yet,” Dan said.

She turned, and those wide blue eyes searched his. “Two-round engagement,” she repeated, this time without the question mark. “At least, can we roll the FIS to green?”

The firing integrity switch wasn't really used as a safety, but it ended up being used that way by default. He said slowly, “FIS to green. But negative on permission to engage.”

Another tug on his arm. “That's against the
first
missile, right?”

“Mr. Ammermann, I've asked you before. Now I'm telling you.
Keep out of my way!
 —Stand by, Cheryl. Donnie.” He tore his gaze from her and nailed it onto the rightmost screen, where the quivering brackets held the center of the picture as the mountains and wadis across which the armies of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria, Rome and Britain, had marched, clicked past with each sweep-and-refresh of the beam.

The Eye of Sauron. If only he could reach out with that demonic entity's power to destroy. It seemed counterintuitive, that the assemblages of metal and solid fuel, electronics and explosives, sleeping umbilicaled in
Savo
's deep-racked womb could in mere minutes be hurtling through space. To hit a bullet with a bullet … it seemed impossible.

And judging by the tests to date, the probabilities weren't all that high.

He rubbed his face, creepy with déjà vu, recognizing the nightmare scenario he'd dreaded. His magazines were almost empty. Should he take the most imminent incoming threat? Increase his probability of kill? And leave the pair following in its comet trail down through the troposphere to impact in their defended area?

Or: Fire one on the first incomer, and the second on the first Israel-targeted warhead?

If only he knew their payloads. Explosives? Nuclear? Chemical? Poisonous isotopes, with half-lives in the centuries?

Or worst of all, the secret horror he and the Signal Mirror team had discovered years before, in those silent tunnels beneath Baghdad. He shuddered, remembering blanket-wrapped bundles, infected technicians hidden away to die … shivering, feverish, unconscious, faces and hands scabbed with horrendous lesions.…

Dr. Fayzah al-Syori—“Doctor Death”—had started with the most deadly disease in history. Then engineered it to increase its virulence, enhance its lethality, and enable it to jump from host to host on the wings of touch, breath, even the wind.

Classic smallpox killed 40 percent of an unvaccinated population. The death rate from the hemorrhagic variant was double that. And, an Army doctor had told him then, it wouldn't stop at national boundaries.

He shook his head, finding it hard even to breathe. If what he feared was true, only his last and final alternative made sense. He should use both his weapons on the delivery vehicles targeted on the city.

But that would leave
Savo
naked to what had to be some kind of homing weapon, even now screaming down, less than a hundred miles away, closing at twenty thousand miles an hour. When his gaze sought the IPP oval again, it had shrunk to a pinpoint.

Meteor Alfa was still aimed right at them.

“Sir. You still haven't given permission to fire,” said Staurulakis. Her lips stayed parted. Her pale thin face hung abeyant, staring at him. The CIC itself seemed to have grown larger, the steel around them thin as the shell of a blown egg. Dan was sweating. His mind was cold, the way it always, or almost always, got when things became really tense. But his body didn't agree. He pressed his palms down on the desk, so no one could see the CO's hands shaking.

“I know. Whites of their eyes, Cher,” he said again, as calmly as he could manage.

“It's inside our outer engagement envelope.”

“Captain, what's going on here? Aren't you going to fire?”

“Mr. Ammermann, one more word and I'll have you removed. —I know, Cher. But like Donnie says, the later we shoot, the more maneuverability the homer has. We've got another, what, fifty seconds? Just stand by. Just stand by.”

“Very well, sir.” She closed her mouth and turned back to the screen.

Suddenly, he made his decision. Though it really hadn't been a choice. Just remorseless logic. He reached for the 21MC. “Bridge, CO: Come left, steady on zero seven zero, bring her up to flank. Pass Circle William throughout the ship. Launch-warning bell forward.” He clicked to Helo Control. “Pass to Red Hawk: Remain to our east and stand by to dispense flares.” As
Savo
began to lean, he told Slaughenhaupt, “Deploy the rubber duckies. Stand by to launch chaff.”

The orders clamored away, repeated down the line. Circle William shut down ventilation, sealing them off from outside air. Ticonderogas weren't designed to endure chemical- or biological-warfare conditions. They didn't have filtered air supplies or positive ventilation. But securing blowers and dogging every access topside would at least give them a few minutes' grace, during which, perhaps, they could steam out of a wind-carried contaminant plume. The “rubber duckies” were decoys. An array inside the inflatable tetrahedron simulated the cross section of a ship, presenting a radar-guided missile with a simulacrum of
Savo.
With any luck it would select the wrong one … that is, if the incoming homer
was
radar-guided.

“You're going to take it head-on?” Staurulakis murmured. “We sure about this, Captain?”

He wanted to say,
Duh … Hell no,
but muttered, “That's what we're here for, Cheryl. What do cruisers do? When they're in the screen, protecting the high-value unit.”

“Exhaust our magazines. Then absorb the last salvo ourselves.”

“Exactly. If we can sacrifice ourselves to shield the carrier, we damn sure can go down protecting a city.”

“Wait a minute—Captain—”

Dan nodded to the chief master-at-arms, who with a grim-visaged Master Chief Tausengelt had been standing behind the White House staffer for the past few minutes. He didn't know who'd called them, but it was time. “Mr. Ammermann, I'll ask you to leave now. But stay inside the skin of the ship. And don't try to interfere again.”

“You can't—you can't just … just
sacrifice
us. This is insane. You have to—”

“Take him out, Sid,” Dan told Tausengelt. The old machinist's oversized hands closed on the staffer's shoulders. Ammermann's face went white, and he gave a grunting squeak.

The chiefs hauled him to his feet and led him away. Dan squinted after them, then back at Staurulakis. “Cher? I gave an order.”

Her face seemed to waver, and finally, set. “Got it. —Shift fire gate selection. Launchers into operate mode. Set up to take Meteor Bravo, one-round salvo. Next salvo, Meteor Charlie, also one-round salvo. Salvo warning alarm forward. Deselect all safeties and interlocks. Stand by to fire. On CO's command.”

Her fingers raced; he leaned in his seat, body-Englishing
Savo
into the turn as she heeled harder, bringing her bow on to the incoming payload. Making herself as small as possible, like a dueler turning sideways to his opponent's pistol.

Time slowed. He lifted his head, attention flicking from screen to screen, which seemed to strobe more and more slowly. A camera picture shutter-flicked past; the black sea, gleaming as it heaved; the drive of snow sideways like a white wall. Cold outside. Air-conditioned cold within.

And bearing down on them, burning down through the thickening air at a heat far beyond what even steel could stand, a weapon that would in seconds begin searching for its prey. If it got through, they could all die. If it hit the VLS. Or the gun magazines. They had a little steel and Kevlar around them, here in the command spaces. The magazines, a few inches of hardened armor plate. But neither would stop a projectile arriving at three miles a second. The thing wouldn't even need an explosive charge. Like an antitank round, its velocity alone would be enough to drill through whatever it hit. If it was a heavy pyrophoric, like depleted uranium, it would spread flame and toxic smoke wherever it penetrated.

Not looking at what his hand was doing, Dan flicked up the red metal cover over the Fire Auth switch. Deep in its silicon blades of reason and memory, ALIS was computing the parameters that ensured the highest probability of kill. When he clicked the switch to Fire, the computers would fire at the instant P-sub-K peaked. At his elbow Staurulakis typed away, entering her own command in case the switch failed. A microsecond's hesitation; then she clicked again, and the rightmost screen switched.

“Duckies deployed,” someone called behind him. “Standing by on chaff.”

The launchers would mortar out a dozen rounds at once, spaced to burst to both sides of, ahead of, and behind the ship, littering the sky with millions of tiny radar dipoles. They also carried pyrotechnics that burned fiercely in the same infrared spectra as the ship's exhausts. But they didn't burn long, and the dipoles needed time to bloom. They'd have to fire the chaff no more than twenty seconds before the enemy homer arrived.

Which meant …
now.
“Stand by on chaff. Pass that to Red Hawk, too, on chaff and flares. Stand by—”

“Terminal body separation,” Terranova called.

Dan jerked his gaze up. Blinked at the screen, unable to make sense of the blurring, vibrating images. Instead of a single radar return, grotesquely swollen with the ionization plume, the screen now showed two. As he blinked again the larger one subdivided. Now
three
blips pulsed, two brightening and dimming like pulsars, but unsynchronized; one strobed twice as fast as the other.

“Meteor Alfa's breaking up,” Wenck called.

Dan pitched his voice across CIC. “Noblos! Is that a breakup, or just the warhead detaching from a second stage?”

The PhD's voice came hesitantly, then gathered force. “I don't read that as a warhead or a—or a decoy. See that brightening and dimming? That's something tumbling over and over. Varying the cross section from our viewing angle. There—see—it's disintegrating.”

“Ionization bloom,” called Terranova.

The rightmost screen jerked and zoomed back as more and more numerous fragments, each surrounded by a comet-halo and streaking trail of radar-reflecting gas, drew apart from one another. Now five or six, seven, were pulsing, each at its own rate, tumbling over and over as they fragmented under the g-forces of hypersonic reentry.

Meteor Alfa was burning up. “Whatever they cobbled together, it didn't hold,” Cheryl murmured beside him. “Came apart in reentry.”

“Okay. A lucky break. Ready to kill Bravo now?”

The keyboard clicked; the brackets snapped into place around the second incomer. “Ready to fire on Meteor Bravo. One-round engagement. Followed by Meteor Charlie, also a one-round engagement.”

“Kill them both,” Dan said. He waited until he was sure the brackets changed color—he absolutely didn't want to fire on any of the still-incoming debris—and flicked up the switch cover.

A long, heart-stopping pause, during which the toxic vent dampers clunked shut. The recirc ventilation wound down, and the steady rush of cold air ceased.

He was just starting to think
Is it going to—
when the roar came through the deckplates, the stringers, the hull, and the falling snow glared bright white in the camera display.

“Bird one away … Bird two away.”

On the center screen two small bright symbols left the own-ship circle-and-cross. They blinked into blue semicircles rapidly moving east. Dan eased a breath out, then pulled his mind back from the departing missiles and swept it out and around. “Cher, inform Higher we fired on two TBMs, launched from western Iraq with predicted points of impact within our defended area. That exhausts currently available inventory of Block 4s, but we're working to bring the second pair back online.”

“The missile targeted on us? Mention that, too?”

“Sure. It's a new capability, but obviously not quite operational yet. Too bad we didn't get to see if the decoys worked on it.” He caught her wide-eyed glance and grinned. Keeping his palms flat, so she couldn't see how shaky he was himself. “Just joking. Okay, let's get around headed north, get back into our area. Fuel state on Red Hawk?”

“Half hour to bingo fuel, Captain.”

“EW: Any change on those threat emitters?”

“No change, Captain.… Stand by one.… Ku-band from Patriot. Patriot going active?… Lost track, freq shifting too fast to follow.”

He keyed combat systems maintenance central, but got no joy from the report on the after VLS.
Savo
rolled through the night, powerless against another attack. Surely these weren't the only missiles the enemy had. But he too might be keeping something in reserve. A bargaining chip.