by David Poyer
Dan nodded. The other went on. “Carrier production was accelerated, and the jeep carrier program initiated.”
“I had Gambier Bay under my flag. In the central Pacific action.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“Helpful in antisubmarine actions, but not up to full combat standards. I’d, uh, look into making them more seaworthy, and if we could, more survivable. The container stacking—”
“We’d be interested in a written report. If you can summarize your recommendations.” Though the guy didn’t look that eager. “Just bear in mind, it’s too late to make major changes. Additional conversions are coming out of the yards now. Newport News will deliver two new strike carriers next year too. And two more have been authorized.
“But the admiral wants you to concentrate on the surface combatant program. Forty new Flight V Improved Burke-class destroyers, and twelve of the new cruisers—they don’t have a class name yet, we just call them the CGW class. W for ‘wartime,’ I guess.”
Dan nodded. “I’ve read about them.” The new cruisers were based on Zumwalt destroyers, with an improved hull and the ability—which Savo had never really possessed—to conduct simultaneous antiair and antiballistic missile defense. Half were to be powered by a new type of compact nuclear reactor, the rest by gas turbines. Both were electrically driven, with railguns and advanced beam weapons. Perhaps most important, they were hardened to survive near hits with nuclear weapons.
The J-4 went on. “We weren’t ready for a major war. Had to rebuild the industrial base nearly from scratch. On the West Coast, we had NASSCO, Gunderson and Vigor in Oregon, and the other Vigor yard in Seattle. We pressed the smaller yards into service to repair battle damage, but most new construction’s got to be sourced from the East and Gulf Coasts.
“The exceptions are the BAE yard in San Diego and Long Beach Naval Shipyard. We BRAC’d Long Beach years ago, but reactivated it when the war started. Three of the new cruisers are under construction there. Vigor’s building the escort carriers, and BAE has three shifts cranking out Flight V Arleigh Burkes. The bottleneck’s a lack of skilled workers and a withered supply chain. We’re having labor difficulties, too.
“Admiral Yangerhans wants somebody who can identify choke points, ream them out, and get those ships to sea. I hesitate to say carte blanche, but he’ll back you up.”
Dan pondered it, though the answer didn’t take much thought. “What’s my relationship to SUPSHIPS? They manage new construction, right?”
“Correct, and you’re not to interfere in contract management. If you identify problems at that level, notify us. We’ll work with the appropriate folks at NAVSEA. That’ll play better than trying to push things on your own. If we’re clear on that?”
Dan had smiled and accepted. He’d gotten up, and shaken the captain’s hand. Remembering what Blair had told him, in their all too short tryst in the hospital. The chance to make a difference, when you get orders you don’t much like.
After all, he was still in the war.
Just not in the front line anymore.
* * *
HIS welcome that morning, at an old waterfront building in Long Beach, wasn’t exactly warm. Supervisor of Shipbuilding, West Coast, managed the contractors in California and Washington. Hundreds of engineers and accountants were working 24/7 to build the fleet that would retake the Pacific. Walking the corridors, Dan saw heads bent over screens, sensed near desperation. He was supposed to ream out bottlenecks? More likely, he’d just get in the way. A civilian rep muttered a cursory greeting. A yeoman showed him to a room that looked as if it had been hastily cleared of cleaning supplies.
Two officers looked up from keyboards as he stood at the door. A commander and a lieutenant. Both bolted to their feet.
“Carry on,” he muttered, looking at the door again. A taped-on sheet of pink bond, obviously from a desktop printer, read PACOM REP. “I’m Dan Lenson. Are you working for me?”
They introduced themselves. The commander was Kitty Pickles, a stocky, fortyish brunette with the tightly braided hair that seemed to be fashionable now. The lieutenant was tall, angular, Scandinavian-looking. His name was Brett Harriss. Dan shook their hands, haunted by a feeling he’d heard both names before. Pickles. Harriss. But where? “I don’t think we’ve served together,” he ventured.
“No sir,” said Pickles. Harriss shook his head as well.
“All right, fine … How long have you been here?”
They’d arrived three days before and, aside from being assigned the space, had heard nothing. Curiouser and curiouser. He took the third desk, then noticed the yeoman still in the doorway. “Yes?”
“I’m assigned to you too, Captain. YN2 Vigliotti.”
“Oh … good. You know your way around, then?”
“Been here a month, sir.”
“Well, give me a day to settle in, then we’ll discuss tasking.”
Vigliotti set him up with passwords and a LAN account, then left for a dental appointment. Dan logged in, checked his email, and found eight hundred messages on his navy.mil account. He read the first twenty, then logged out and searched until he found the personnel records.
He leaned back after reading them, fighting anger.
Starting as an aviation ordnanceman in a patrol squadron, Pickles had been accepted into a commissioning program and graduated from U. Miss. with a BS in electrical engineering. She’d served in frigates and done her department head tour as operations officer on Lewis and Clark. She’d gone to the Naval Postgraduate School for a master’s in information technology, then served in a squadron staff and commanded a minesweeper in the Gulf. After joint professional military education, she’d run enlisted manning at OPNAV before a stand-alone XO tour on a command ship. After a stint at COMNAVSURFOR, she’d been a desk officer at the Joint Staff. She’d then served as exec of an LPD, USS New York, the ship with steel from the World Trade Center welded into her bow, then fleeted up to CO aboard that same ship.
An impressive career, especially considering she’d started at the deckplates. To all appearances, Pickles had been slated for higher things. A hot runner, with solid technical and education credentials and glowing evaluations.
Then, a month into her CO tour aboard New York, she’d asked to be relieved. For personal reasons, the record read. With no further explanation.
Dan scratched his head, glancing over his screen at her. Her braided head was lowered, showing a white line that centerlined her scalp. What the fuck, over? Family issues? But her DEERS statement showed no dependents.
One didn’t just resign from a command tour. Square that, in the middle of a war.
The lieutenant, Harriss, had a shorter career, of course. A Naval Academy grad, he’d done his division officer tour aboard a Cyclone-class PC, USS Zephyr. A junior officer picked up responsibility early aboard a small ship. From there, Harriss had been the navigator aboard USS Ross, then been selected for a Burke Scholarship. He held a master’s in operations research and had done a thesis in applying AI to ship design.
So far, so good. But during duty in the Gulf before his department head tour, just before the start of the present war, Harriss had led a pair of riverine command boats on a patrol off the Iranian base on Farsi Island. One of his boats’ engines had failed, and he was standing by it in the other boat when four much larger Revolutionary Guard Corps patrol craft had surrounded them, trained guns on them, and demanded surrender.
Outgunned and outnumbered, Harriss had ordered the crews not to resist. In custody, separated, and threatened, some of the crew had made statements on Iranian television confessing their mistake. Expressing regret for U.S. violation of territorial waters. Their captors had eventually released them, but kept the boats. The Navy said they’d been in international waters. Tehran disagreed. That was a matter for the international lawyers, but after an investigation, four of Harriss’s superior officers had been relieved. The lieutenant himself had been issued a letter of reprimand.
&n
bsp; Dan massaged his brow, glancing past the screen at Harriss now. He was kicked back, talking on the phone. They were obviously smart. Had once been front-runners. But after missteps, or just plain being in the wrong place at the wrong time, their futures now were bleak. The Navy seldom granted a second chance. His own checkered career was the exception, and only because he’d been either lucky or unlucky enough to have seen serious combat, and made influential friends.
But it wasn’t a good sign, to be assigned two career dead-enders as assistants.
* * *
DAN took Pickles and Harriss to lunch at the mess, and the commander quickly got down to business. “Sir, we’ve been talking to people, trying to get a head start. I don’t want to sound negative, but there’s going to be serious pushback if we try to get between the SUPSHIPS people and the yards.”
“I agree, Kitty. But we don’t sit on our cans just to avoid trouble.”
“Oh, I agree, sir. That’s not what I meant.”
“I didn’t think so. What’s your recommendation?”
“Pick two or three issues we can really impact, especially any having to do with the precom crews, and go to town on those. The nucleus crews always need help. Arranging team training. Preparing for combat systems and propulsion lightoffs. Intermediate post-delivery availability issues. They’re always shorthanded, and a big wall of work is gonna hit these guys when they go aboard for the first time. If we can stem the bleeding, they can make their milestones.”
Dan nodded. A reasonable line of attack. “Anything specific come to mind?”
Harriss perked up. “Data multiplexing, for the cruisers and Flight V Burkes. And high-pressure air for the weapons, torpedoes especially, for ships that don’t have installed HP air systems. But the biggest hard point is going to be propulsion. Half of the new cruisers are nuclear powered. The other half, and all the destroyers, are gas turbines.”
“So what’s the hitch?” Dan said.
Pickles looked around the mess, then lowered her voice. “The reactor packages are new technology. Half were ordered from B&W/Bechtel. The other half are from NuScale. Unfortunately, they’re all behind schedule. Teething problems.”
“Well, we still have the gas turbines.”
Harriss shook his head. “There are issues with them, too.”
Dan shrugged. “We’ve been putting gas turbines in ships since the seventies. Come on, guys.”
“Specifically, sir, the new engines,” Pickles said.
“The turbine blades are defectively machined,” Harriss added.
Dan sucked air between his teeth. “Defective. How?”
The lieutenant reached under the table to a briefcase. He set a chunk of dull-silvery metal between them. Intricately curved, it resembled something organic, rather than a machine part. Perhaps the vertebra of a whale. Dan hefted it; it was as dense as it looked. But the upper part was mangled, obviously torn apart in some violent event. Harriss murmured, “They fail, Captain. Explosively. After about fifty hours.”
The lieutenant flicked the tortured metal. “To be perfectly accurate, they weren’t machined, per se. They’re 3-D printed … built up with additive manufacturing. Out of a high-temperature-resistant, polycrystalline nickel/titanium-based superalloy. The manufacturer went to that to save time, since the government gave them an emergency priority. But somehow the printers left microvoids in the blades. Not cooling channels. Just … vacancies. Invisible, even to X-rays during the QA inspections. Until they were PET-scanned at a hospital, to see why they kept failing. The FBI suspects a polymorphic malware.”
“Clarify,” Dan muttered.
Pickles said, “Cybersabotage. Someone modified the programming for the printers. From outside.”
“Holy shit.” Dan glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Put it … put it away. For the whole class?”
Harriss straightened from his briefcase again. “Both classes, sir. And if the nukes don’t come through either, we’re looking at fifty-two new major combatants with dangerous engines.”
Dan contemplated this disaster, and how completely a few lines of malicious code could cripple an entire war effort. “Uh, tell me more about these reactors. Can they replace the gas turbines in the other ships in the class? Maybe even in the Burkes?”
Pickles shook her head. “These are small modular units. Nominal forty-five megawatts each. Unfortunately, sir, like we said, the reactor packages are behind schedule too.”
“Does SUPSHIPS know?”
“They have the report, but frankly, I get the impression they don’t think this is a big problem yet.”
Dan grimaced. “Good work, Brett. Kitty. So that’s four issues we can address straight out of the blocks. I’d like bulleted lists. Short descriptions of each problem, plus options to address them. In rank order, but it sounds like the engine issue is the most critical.”
“I agree, Captain.” Pickles smiled at him.
Dan said, “That’s great, Commander. But let’s get this straight from the start: I don’t always expect people to agree with me. If you see me headed for the shoals, say so. That goes for both of you, and Vigliotti, too. I don’t think any of us are going to win any more medals in this war, so let’s at least try to do some good for the fleet. Understood?”
* * *
THAT night he got through to his daughter at last, as he lay on the bed in his BOQ room. The twisted turbine blade gleamed on his bedside table beside the phone. Nan answered on the fifth ring. She sounded tired. “Dad! They said you were back. I knew it. I never really believed you were, um, gone.”
He hadn’t seen much of her after the divorce, which had not been amicable. His ex hadn’t exactly encouraged their daughter to feel well disposed toward him. Add to that being deployed, and they hadn’t developed much of a relationship. Still, the few times they’d met since the split, they’d gotten along. He was proud of her, that was for sure. She’d completed a tough undergraduate degree, then postgraduate work in biochemistry. “So where are you now? Out at sea?”
“No, ashore, San Diego. Sort of … on the shelf now.”
“They’re giving you a vacation?” She laughed. “About time.”
“Something like that. Anyway, I have evenings free. Maybe even a day off. Any chance we could—”
“From Seattle?” She sighed. “I couldn’t get away, Dad. We’re on a high-priority project. And even if I could, the airlines are all shut down. Government flights only.”
“You’re still in research? Still with Lukajs?”
“Yes, Dad. Still in research. And still with Dr. Lukajs.” The same tone he’d gotten in college, when he tried to ask about her classes. Which had sounded incredibly difficult: “Membrane and Biomolecular Chemistry,” “Bioinformatics,” “Biotechnology of Microorganisms,” “Biochemistry of Stem Cells.” He’d opened one of her textbooks once, and quickly closed it, bewildered, realizing how far her world was from his.
“So tell me about it. What’re you working on? Anything I could understand?”
Her voice went guarded. He recognized the tone. Christ, was everyone in America on a government payroll now? “I wouldn’t want it to be general knowledge. That I told you this, I mean.”
“I understand. Lips zipped.”
“Have you ever heard of H7N9?”
“No. What is it?”
“A virus. Subtype of a pretty common avian influenza, but it never infected humans or mammals before. It drifted and shifted and reemerged in Asia last year. Flu viruses reassort their segments from different strains. Once or twice a century, you get something new. This one’s bad. Forty percent mortality rate. We’re at a Phase Six alert. That’s the highest, if you’re not familiar with the alert system.”
“Christ,” he muttered. “And you’re working with this stuff?”
“We have containment protocols. But it might actually be good, that we’re at war. The lack of air travel may slow down its spread. It hasn’t gotten to the U.S. yet. But if it does,
we could see another pandemic. Like the Spanish flu in 1918.”
She sounded breathless. He didn’t know a lot about the pandemic she’d mentioned, but had read it had been bad. “Any chance of a vaccine? Isn’t that what you’d need, a vaccine?”
“We have a monovalent live attenuated vaccine. It’s not great, but we’re working to improve it. But Dr. L thinks antivirals will be our best weapon if this breaks out, though. Inhibiting the neuraminidase protein. That’s the N in the H7N9.… Sure you want to hear all this?”
“If you can keep it Dad simple.”
“Viruses produce surface proteins that let them infect your cells. Okay? Then they reprogram the cells, to produce more viruses. Usually your immune system protects you. But this new strain produces a protein that shuts down the normal immune response. That’s what makes it so virulent.
“We used reverse genetics to investigate the exact interactions that make this so dangerous. When we characterized the RNA segments we found a unique carboxyl terminus. We’ve elucidated the structure. Dr. Lukajs and our team are trying to map it out on the molecular level, how it evades immunity and takes over cell biochemistry. Then we might be able to find or create a drug to roadblock it. Either throw a monkey wrench into how it reproduces, inside the cell, or make it visible again to the immune response, so it doesn’t get inside at all.
“But we might not have to invent something new. What if we have something that’s already passed toxicity tests, that we can pitch in there? I’m looking at some of the new cancer drugs. What we call the EPOCH drugs—etoposide, prednisone, vincristine, cyclophosphamide, and doxorubicin.”
Dan cleared his throat. “Uh, okay! Think I got most of that.”
“I tried to keep it simple, Dad.”
“I’m super proud of you, kid.”
“Thanks. But if we can’t come up with something effective … over a hundred and fifty million died in 1918. From a much smaller global population. It would stop trade, cause famine, more wars—you can’t imagine how bad it would be. Like a nuclear war. Only worldwide.”