by David Poyer
“I’d say so too,” Singhe called across the compartment. “Just firing over our bow. They’d never dare…?”
Dan was inclined to agree, but couldn’t shake an ominous feeling. Zhang had threatened to take on anyone who intervened. Savo shuddered; she was slewing around, coming to a better launch bearing, a compromise between a course to clear the booster smoke and one that would smooth out her roll in these rougher seas. Theoretically, a Standard could exit its cell at up to a 15-degree angle. But the more nearly vertical, the less chance of a glitch or hang-up.
The salvo alarm began to ring, a steady drone far aft. “Now set material condition Circle William throughout the ship,” the 1MC announced. The vent dampers clunked closed, cutting off the air intakes from the exhaust plume, which seethed with toxic chemicals. The firing litany began.
Dan stood swaying as the deck slanted beneath his feet. He pressed his eyelids together and knuckled his eyeballs. Behind them fireworks bloomed. Coruscating scarlet and viridian shapes pulsated, migrating across the blackness of his visual field. Like the ionization trails that the warhead, traveling five or six miles a second, would shortly grow as it began its plunge, drilling down toward its target.
Time was running out. He tried to go over it again, to make sure he was right. Noblos said it was a waste. And they were his last two rounds. Despite his fatigue, his growing confusion, lack of sleep, he had to do this right.
Meteor Juliet, whatever payload it carried, whatever message it was meant to convey, was nearing midphase. The data callouts registered the unvarying speed consistent with ballistic flight. Coasting in a huge parabola, most of which lay outside Earth’s atmosphere. His Standards would be trying to intercept it there, before reentry. But despite its terrific speed, there was no friction heating in the vacuum of space. The missile was infrared-dim, though seeing it from the side, its radar cross section should make it visible to the seeker head.
Another plus: ALIS indicated a solid lock-on. Since Standards began their flights depending on commands from the launching ship, both rounds should go out boresighted on the target. Or, rather, that patch of imagined space ahead of it, where it should be when their courses met, far above the last wisps of air.
And yet a third reason for optimism: the upper stage would still be in one piece. Once reentry began, temperature would build. The warhead’s ablative sheathing would char off. The ionization plume would blur the radar return. At some point, also, the burnt-out engines would break apart into tumbling, burning debris. Sometimes releasing decoys, too.
If only the Patriot battery south of Taipei had had a couple of rounds left. They’d been in prime geometry for a boost-phase intercept.
On the very thin plus side, he didn’t have to worry about interference from another antimissile radar.
On this hand, on the other hand. But it didn’t really matter, did it? This was what a U.S. Navy cruiser was built for. Protecting the carrier. This time, though, he wasn’t being asked to throw his ship under the bus. Just expend his last rounds. However marginal their chances.
Singhe called, “One-minute warning. Fire gate selection. Launchers in ‘operate.’ Two-round salvo. Warning alarm sounded. Deselect all safeties and interlocks. Stand by to fire. On CO’s command.”
Dan crossed back to his desk. Bending past Fang, who was speaking urgently in Chinese on his net, he flicked up the cover over the Fire Auth switch. Even as it was tracking, ALIS was busily computing the probabilities of kill. He set his finger firmly on the switch, and snapped it to FIRE.
The bellow vibrated the stringers, the deckplates. A brilliant sun ignited on the previously black camera display, lighting the fantail, illuminating Savo’s wake, whipped-cream white against a heaving midnight sea. “Bird one away,” the combat systems coordinator announced. Another roar and rattle succeded it. “Bird two away.”
“That’s it,” Singhe breathed. “We’re shit out of Block 4s.”
Dan bent over the desk, watching the Aegis picture. Two symbols had departed Savo’s blue-circle-and-cross, heading south. He unsocketed the red phone again. “All stations this net, this is Ringmaster. Break. I have taken incoming missile with my last two Block 4 Standards. P-sub-K below ten percent. IPP remains centered over FDR strike group. Impact in six minutes. Over.”
When a hollow voice acknowledged, he signed off. Snapped to Singhe, “Make a separate report. Magazines empty except for antiair rounds and land-attack Tomahawk. No fish left. Full loadout of gun rounds remains. Increasing air activity over the mainland, north of Taiwan. Fuel state nearing critical. Awaiting orders.”
He lifted his gaze to meet Noblos’s. The scientist was leaning against the door again, his habitual station, elbows cupped in palms. He gave back a lazy, insolent smirk. Glanced at Terranova. Then back at Dan, still smiling.
Dan straightened, suddenly ignited with rage. Shit! Was this asshole laughing at him? Had he discovered the missing DVDs? The missing blade? Did he know they knew?
No. He couldn’t. Not yet. Noblos thought he was above suspicion. And, thanks to his equivocal status aboard, exempt from the Uniform Code. In international waters. Beyond prosecution.
But … fuck that! Dan gripped the back of his chair. He wouldn’t give up until, somehow, the guy paid for what he’d done. To Terranova. To his other victim, Celestina Colón. For the fear and distrust he’d spread between men and women. And not least, for his violation of Dan’s trust, and the duty and respect every sailor owed his shipmates.
“Stand by for intercept, salvo one,” the Terror muttered. “Stand by … now.”
They stared up at the screen.
The brackets, blue for own-ship missile, red for target warhead, nearly merged.
Nearly. But the blue bracket seemed to lag.
Then fell behind, altitude callouts dropping. Slowly at first, then quickly.
“Maneuvering burnout,” Wenck murmured, just loud enough to carry.
Noblos sniggered. Dan clenched his fists, but said nothing. Not yet.
ALIS’s lock-on faltered. The brackets winked off, then back on. They jittered before locking on again. A nimbus of ionized gas was forming, a ghostly halo circling the now-plunging warhead. “Juliet, starting terminal phase,” Terranova called.
The second set of brackets, where Aegis was tracking Savo’s other round, paced the speeding target for long seconds. The distance between them narrowed. Then held steady.
Then it, too, began to fall behind.
“Told you so,” Noblos said cheerfully. “Another five million down the drain.”
“I heard you, Bill,” Dan said. “I had to try.”
“Hey, it’s only money. And now you all get to go home! I understand. Believe me.” He chuckled. Waved a hand. Turned away, and undogged the forward door, before Dan could respond. The heavy steel protested as it came open, then thunked closed behind him. He didn’t bother to operate the dogging bar. Chief Wenck stepped over and, in one swift, violent chopping shove, sealed it behind the civilian.
“Permission to self-destroy,” Terranova said in a resigned voice.
Dan hesitated, wondering if it was necessary. If they shouldn’t just let the terminal stage drop, vanish, into the wastes of the far Pacific. Then nodded. It was just conceivable it might endanger some lone fishing vessel. “Granted, Terror. Self-destruct.”
“Mark, Meteor Juliet time on top,” Amarpeet Singhe said in a subdued voice.
The Aegis display flickered, then blanked. They blinked up at a Blue Screen of Death. “What just happened?” Dan said.
Wenck muttered, “Not sure … suddenly lost power out. Maybe that hinky driver-predriver blew. Shifting to backup.”
“Let’s get out of BMD mode. Go to normal air,” Dan ordered. He wanted a look around.
The screen came back on, but took several seconds to repopulate. The air activity over the mainland came up again, if possible, denser than before. It was concentrated opposite Okinawa now. Two U.S. F-15s were orbiting out in the str
ait, between Okinawa and Socotra Rock. Which, he recalled, the Chinese had just occupied.
“TAO, Radio.” The 21MC on the command desk.
“Go.”
“This is Radio. Dropped comms with Shangri-La.”
“This is the captain. What did you lose? Data link? Slow Lead?”
“All comms, Cap’n. Tried to reestablish on voice coordination. They’re not answering up.”
Dan told them to keep trying. He was double-clicking off when another station came up. “CIC, Bridge.”
“TAO, go,” Singhe said into the remote in front of her. Glancing at Dan.
“Something funny up here … lookouts report a flash way out on the horizon. Bearing relative zero three zero. Still kind of a fading glow out there.”
Dan glanced at the heading indicator, and converted the bearings in his head. To the southeast. The sun? He checked his Seiko. Too early. Their own self-destructing Standards? Not that small an explosion, that far away. “Bring up the aft camera.”
It came up almost at once. The horizon was clearly visible, jagged with the growing seas. But it shouldn’t be visible at all at this time of night. As they watched, the sky faded, very slowly, until all was dark again.
“What the hell,” Wenck muttered, “was that?”
Fang breathed, “It can’t be. Zhang’s mad. Insane.”
Dan gripped the edge of the command desk, breathing hard. Trying to keep it together. He clicked the Send lever again. “Radio, Captain. Any contact with the battle group yet?”
“Nothing heard, Skipper.”
“Keep trying. All circuits. Keep me advised.”
The Aegis screen jumped back, zoomed out. A patch of return shimmered. An elongated blob, where there’d been distinct contacts. Where six ships had steamed … “Ionization effects, bearing and range consistent with strike group,” the Terror pronounced tonelessly.
No one else said anything. Until Dan said, “Make a voice report. Navy red flash. Nuclear detonation report. You know the drill.”
26
Somewhere in China
TEDDY Oberg stared at a steel chain inches from his eyes. It swayed and rattled. The metal floor beneath him, only thinly padded by shit- and piss-smeared straw, flexed and creaked as the bogies jolted slowly over a slanted roadbed.
“We’re sending you for remolding,” his final interrogator had said. “You are a war criminal, member of a criminal organization. Do you understand?”
“You mean … the U.S. Navy?”
“No, Oberg. I mean the SEALs. Do you understand why they are a criminal organization?”
“I understand now. Yes.”
“What are they?”
“Terrorists. Assassins. Murderers of children and women.”
“You deserve to die for your crimes. But perhaps you’re not beyond help.”
“Where?” he’d managed to whisper.
“You will see when you get there.”
When they were done, they had turned him over to the political police. Flown him off the island, to the mainland, he assumed, though there were no windows in the cargo bay of the transport. His sessions with State Security, carried out with more leisure than the military had displayed, had left him with what he judged were torn rotator cuffs in his shoulders. This was from being hoisting into the air and dropped with his arms cuffed behind his back. When they weren’t doing that, he was still pinioned, but in a way he’d never seen before. One arm was pulled up and over his shoulder, cuffed to the other, which was twisted up behind his back. Not only was it agonizing, it made it impossible to take a full breath. Along with no sleep, very little food, and the beatings.
Of course, the beatings. He’d blacked out several times during those weeks. Couldn’t remember much now. A lot seemed to have been erased. Just blank. Where he’d had memories was now just animal terror.
They loved shackles, that was for sure. He hadn’t spent half an hour without cuffs since Yongxing. The good news was that on the last pee-and-mush break, one of their car guards, a teenager with a round, pouch-cheeked face, had unlocked each prisoner, one at a time, as another guard stood aiming an AK. He’d locked the left or right cuff, depending on which side you lay on, to the chain. This left each prisoner with one hand free, so they didn’t have to piss in their pants now; they could piss into the straw. The first time Teddy did, he wasn’t surprised to find his urine was deep red with blood.
He was crammed into a boxcar with a hundred Vietnamese. The Viets, many wounded, had been captured during an action in the Paracels. A helicopter had strafed them after their ship went down, then been shot down in turn. Two crewmen had made it out of the crash. They hadn’t lasted long, when they hit the water in the midst of the surviving Vietnamese.
This was the only news he’d had of the war since he’d been captured.
He lay on his back in the shit- and pus-fouled straw as the train jolted along, creeping uphill. The car was too cold at night to sleep, but too hot during the day to do much more than sweat. Two long chains ran fore and aft, padlocked into welded staples at each end. The prisoners were shackled to the chains. In four days since loading, they’d left the car three times. The guards unlocked the chains at the ends, then shouted the prisoners out to relieve themselves beside the right-of-way. Always in thick forest, or on a deserted, gravelly mountainside looking out over a bleak plain. At the head of the train, a black locomotive panted, venting steam and smoke as it took aboard water and fresh coal. The prisoners had been given bowls of cold cornmeal mush and murky water from pails. Several of the Vietnamese had died, but were still shackled to the snaffle. Obviously, to make the count come out right when they got wherever they were going. Teddy had eyed the mush. Started to scoop out a bowl; then handed it to the guy next to him. Who’d goggled at him, before wolfing it down.
From the position of the sun during these breaks, he figured they were headed north. He observed this from habit only. His apathy would have scared him if he’d cared. He could spring that padlock. An old German design they’d covered in lock-picking class. But what would be the point? Plus, every move hurt. His leg and shoulders were minefields of agony. His foot hung twisted, limp. He could barely generate the will to prop himself on an elbow to catch the occasional whiff of fresh air that came in from the barred grating high up on the side of the car.
He closed his eyes in the jolting darkness.
Wouldn’t it be better just to die?
* * *
SOME interminable time later, iron wheels clanked to a halt. The train stood motionless and silent for a long while. Someone wailed, far away, and the muffled coughing from the other prisoners never stopped. The Vietnamese seemed to have a lot of lung trouble. Maybe from inhaling fuel. Plus, each succeeding night seemed to get colder, the air less substantial. They were climbing, gradually, to some high plateau.
Suddenly the doors slid open, clanging and echoing. The guards’ shouts caromed around, along with a racket they liked to make whacking the steel walls with batons. “Du chulai! Du chulai! Pow, pow!” He wasn’t sure what that meant literally, but it seemed to be pretty much like the “raus, raus” you heard the SS shouting in movies. The Viets scrambled up, those who could, and edged toward the bluish evening light at the door. Those who couldn’t were hauled to their feet by their chainmates. Teddy’s two nearest mates got up slowly. Both older, maybe officers, he couldn’t be sure. One, Trinh, spoke some English. But Teddy didn’t want to know them any better. No point to that, either.
Outside, it was evening. A barren waste stretched around them, made more haunting by a stiff wind that kicked up dust and tumbleweeds. The rails stretched into the distance. A water tower, a pile of coal, a ramshackle shed. The perfect setting for a rice Western. An ancient Chinese sat propped against a rusty loader, backdropped by immense heaps of brown dirt. He nodded, smiling and clapping as the guards beat the prisoners out of the cars and unshackled them. “You mi bang,” the troops shouted, then louder, as if yelling harder would
make them comprehend. “You mi bang! Mi bang!” They pushed, shoved, and clubbed them toward the piles.
Teddy figured it out. The stack of shovels. Seizing one, he was rewarded with a curt nod from a guard. Dragging the useless leg, he hobbled to the heap and dug in. Under the brown dust, black coal. A husky Vietnamese with bandaged hands grabbed a wheelbarrow, and Teddy and the other prisoners started filling it, those without shovels using cupped hands.
When he glanced up, Teddy was startled to find himself looking into another European face. The other flinched back too. Stick-thin, almost ghostlike, with a narrow, projecting chin, a brown scraggy beard. Were his own eyes that haunted? “Where the ’ell’d you come from?” the wraith muttered.
“U.S. Navy. What’re you … Australian?”
“Too right.” They couldn’t shake hands under the guards’ gazes, but traded a word each time they passed. The guy’s name was Pitchard, or Pritchard. “Mates call me Magpie.”
“Obie.”
“Guess their loader’s cactus. Truly back o’ Bourke here, eh?”
“Ass end of nowhere. You a pilot?”
“Radar-O. Shot down in the South Sea. You?”
“Diver.”
Pritchard cast an eye around them. “Fella could walk off right here.”
“If he could walk,” Teddy said. Pritchard eyed his foot, then turned away to hammer with the point of his shovel at an immense solid block of coal, breaking it into pieces small enough to haul. A guard screamed and they separated, but kept track of each other as they moved about.
Teddy began to detect an unwelcome sensation, as if his guts were about to drop out. He hadn’t had a bowel movement in a week. Why now? But it was undeniable. Immediate. He nodded to Pritchard and Trinh, and approached one of the guards.
The trooper eyed him as he neared, unslinging his AK. The old model with the wooden stock. Every SEAL trained with Kalashnikovs. If he could get his hands on it … He bowed. “Mister Honorable Guard, or whatever. Permission to take a crap.”
“Manwei bowgow.” The guard made a threatening gesture with his rifle.