Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  “Sir?” Rafe said. “Sir? Harpoon impact in five, sir? Sir?”

  They waited. There was only silence, and then the sound of automatic-weapons fire. Then static.

  By the magic of encrypted datalink, Alan’s screen showed the same picture that the captain could see on the bridge of the Philadelphia, that Cobb could see on the Fort Klock, and that the captain could see on the bridge of the Isaac Hull. Far to the west, near Tenerife, Admiral Pilchard could sit on the flag bridge of the Andrew Jackson and see the same picture. The President could watch the same picture in the White House. Dozens of sources of information converged on the screens to plot the locations of friendly, neutral, and hostile ships all over the world. Radar and sonar, active and passive reception, signals intelligence and direct visual observation could be fed in to clarify and resolve the locations of every unit. Circles meant friendlies, squares neutrals, diamonds hostiles. Different codings indicated whether the contact was a ship, an airplane, or a submarine. A mouse click would bring up information on the contact’s method of identification and classification. Another click would identify its circle of weapon coverage.

  It was these circles that dominated Admiral Pilchard’s screen. At the moment, he had the Nanuchka’s surface-to-air missile circle showing; it differed sharply from her radar horizon. The half-circle representing AH 702, Rafe’s S-3, moved jerkily toward the diamond representing the Nanuchka, which was so close to the circle representing the Philadelphia that, at this resolution, they overlapped. Fort Klock’s bold blue circle was almost fifty miles north of Philadelphia’s and showed her air-defense missile ranges and her radar horizon; near the Fort Klock’s circle and inside her protective ring was the half-circle of the KC-10.

  Thirty miles north and west, three red squares marked the last known location of the Russian surface-action group. They were not emitting with radar, however, so they might be closer. Their circles represented their radar horizon against a tall-masted surface target like the Fort Klock. They had missiles capable of hitting at very long ranges, but, as always, the problem was targeting.

  Suddenly one of the three Russian ships jumped several inches on the screen, moving it almost ten miles to the east. AH 702 had just been lighted by a radar emission and had identified the location of the source, a Sovremenny-class destroyer. Computers had examined the information and massaged it. They had decided. The symbol had jumped.

  On board the Russian destroyer Poltava were several similar systems, but they lacked input from aircraft, and the Russians were moving almost in the dark, limited to their radars, which the long, heavy seas and sand-filled wind were degrading. The Americans were out there, to the south near Libya, they knew. One of the American ships—almost certainly the noncombatant Philadelphia—was damaged, given the frequencies they were broadcasting. The Russians knew, too, that the Americans had an S-3 Viking in the area, because it was using its targeting radar at intervals, illuminating the Poltava itself a minute earlier. There was also a large aircraft overhead the Fort Klock, which might be a tanker or a command and control plane.

  Second Captain Lutovinov tried to remain calm. His orders were to remain close to the American group but to avoid direct contact. He was trying to shadow, but the only American unit he was sure of was the S-3 aircraft; he had elected to run east when it targeted him, to put his missile batteries broadside to the threat of the S-3, which was capable of carrying a Harpoon.

  The other two Russian ships were in line behind him. Lutovinov had two very good helicopters with radar units that could illuminate the area, but using the helicopters would give his position away and escalate the electronic jab-and-parry another notch. Still, better to reveal himself than blunder into the Americans in this foul weather. He had to be able to see.

  “Launch the helicopter.”

  Lutovinov had that feeling in the pit of his stomach. If it was fear, then he was a coward. He had the feeling all too often. He had been a junior officer in the heady days of the eighties, when this kind of game was played every day, all over the world. He knew how the game was played, but he had never been the man responsible before. Each action caused the consequent reaction. He also knew that his job did not include starting any form of conflict. His presence was a protest. Suvarov had been firm on that score.

  On the other hand, Captain First Rank Suvarov was what the Americans called a “cowboy.” And someone had hurt the American launch ship, not by protest but with a real weapon. Was Suvarov mad enough to do it? Lutovinov did not think so. He wanted more information. He also wanted guidance. That S-3 was primarily a subhunter. Was it looking for Shark?

  “Prepare a message for North Fleet headquarters as follows …”

  Rose was running up the port side toward the ladder to the bridge, gasping for air, trying to keep up with LaFond. Behind her, Valdez was pressing like a runner trying to surge, and he swung right and went around her. His chunky frame contained great speed, she found; he went by her like a sprinter, the AUG held vertically in front of him, his hands ready to fire.

  The marines had dealt with one of the Libyan inflatables before it had ever reached the ship, holing it as it came in close so the air cells began to deflate. The fragmentation grenades went on through without exploding, but when the boat was only ten meters away, its blunt V-nose up, a bow wave surging below it, the M19 round went through the rubber walls and hit something beyond—a weapon, the motor, a helmet—and the inflatable seemed to push bottom-first toward the ship, then rip apart. Within seconds, the defenders on the Philadelphia were astonished to see the Libyan patrol boat also go up in a flash of light and smoke, the incoming Harpoon all but meaningless to them in the fog and gritty light of dawn.

  Rose had been at the stern then with the civilian crewmembers and Valdez. They were aware only of the explosion of the inflatable, then of the distant fire on the patrol boat. Rose had shouted into her handheld, bellowing LaFond’s name over and over, and then the second inflatable had appeared under the stern and it was too late to find out what had happened.

  Three of the civilians tried to shelter behind the steel rail and yet lean far enough over to fire down Philadelphia’s sloping stern to stop the second load of boarders. From her post by the superstructure, Rose had watched one of the men explode into flying blood as the Libyans sprayed the rail with automatic fire. The other two men fell into the scuppers. She was about to rush the rail when Valdez grabbed her arm and flung her against a steel bulkhead, pulling her back and away from the rail as two stun grenades were lobbed over from below, one bouncing wide and disappearing back into the water, the other concussing in the area where the defenders had tried to stand.

  Deafened, Rose had leaned back against the bulkhead. Valdez’s face was close to hers; he was shouting and she couldn’t hear him. Then, as if he were shouting from a great distance over the noise of surf, she heard him say, “Okay? You okay—?” and she nodded, shaking her head to try to clear it.

  “Commander!” somebody was whining at her. Some child—a child’s voice. Tinny. Then Valdez was pushing the little radio against her ear and she heard LaFond, clearer now. “Commander! This is Gunny! What’s going on aft? Commander?”

  It had been a great effort to concentrate and to make her lips and tongue work. “Gunny—They’re boarding at the stern. There’s only two of us—”

  Then she had been aware of a man pulling himself over the rail twenty feet away, and later she would realize that he had been coming up a line that he had grappled to the ship; but then, he seemed to be materializing from the sea, head, hands, shoulders, hips, a man in camo and a khaki watch cap and body armor; and Valdez had turned and shot him with bursts of full automatic, knocking him right off the rail as he started to swing his leg over. He went back and down, the force of the weapon enough to push him into the sea, armor or no armor.

  Two more of them came on, and Valdez was firing, and then she had the stubby submachine gun up and felt it buck in her hands. She and Valdez had spent a day s
hooting the Steyrs at the Navy SEALS school at Little Creek, but that had been play and now her life was on the line, and when one of the boarders started to throw something, she cried aloud and turned the weapon on him and sprayed, ripping his vest armor apart, then his neck and chin.

  Then LaFond and one other marine had come from the starboard side. They had shielded her, firing three-round bursts and throwing grenades over the stern at the unseen inflatable. It had already moved forward, however, because a voice started shouting over her handheld that they were headed for the bridge, that they were on the main deck and heading toward the ladder to the bridge.

  LaFond had jumped toward the port walkway, plastered himself against the bulkhead and waved the other marine to the limit of protection, then shot a look up the walkway and immediately drew back as firing started. He tossed two grenades and ran, firing in burst mode, pulling the second marine with him. Rose followed; Valdez dropped in behind her as they heard one of the M19s chatter amidships, and that’s where they were now, running up the deck like sprinters in a race.

  LaFond turned and pushed her to her left, where she came up hard behind a steel stanchion, hyperventilating. Valdez hit the deck behind her, weapon extended. LaFond was tight up against the bulkhead across and a dozen feet ahead of them, with the other marine on the deck and bleeding. Thirty feet ahead of them, five men were clustered on the steel ladder to the bridge. It went up seven steps, turned across an eight-foot square landing, and then went up the other way. The stairs were open, so that the protection from the steel treads increased as the men went up but was minimal at deck level.

  Valdez was craning his neck up from the prone firing position, then rolling on his side to aim the Steyr. Three men were already on the upper half of the ladder; at the top was a steel walkway with a waist-high bulkhead, and then a door to the bridge. “They’re gonna get the bridge!” Valdez was shouting over and over as he fired. Mostly, the steel treads were protecting the men as they ran up the stairs; then one stumbled and seemed to fall and then caught himself. The other two were almost at the top when the door to the bridge opened and a man pushed himself out into the open space there. Rose had trouble recognizing him as the captain of the Philadelphia. He looked wild, even crazed. He was shouting.

  The captain had one of the streetsweepers. He began firing as he got free of the doorway. He was going on adrenaline and rage, but he was a middle-aged man and he wasn’t quick. He blew away the first man to reach the top, but the second put him down with one shot from a 9mm Helwan. He was a skilled commando, the leader of the assault, for whom the snap shot that killed the captain was pure reflex. It turned him away from Rose and Valdez and LaFond, however, and LaFond, who wasn’t a SEAL or a commando but who also had honed reflexes and was an instinct shooter, put a three-shot burst into his head.

  That left the man Valdez had hit on the upper half of the ladder, and two who were sheltering in the lower half, already separated from the leader and already hanging back in the protection of the steel bulkhead.

  Behind them and far over the starboard side of the ship, the remains of the patrol boat were burning on the sea. Rose saw it all in one flash: the patrol boat was on fire; they had the boarders cornered; the boarders were done.

  “Take them alive!” she shouted at LaFond.

  He had a grenade. He hesitated.

  Valdez rolled back behind her.

  “Throw down your weapons!” she screamed. Nothing happened—but nobody fired. She shouted it again, cursed herself for knowing no Arabic (Alan would have, she knew) and remembered that Libya had close ties with Italy. “Finito!” she bellowed. She didn’t have much Italian, but both her parents had spoken it as children, and she hadn’t been able, in the Italian neighborhoods of Utica, New York, to grow up without knowing some words. “Finito! Tutto morte! A terra i fusili!” Terra didn’t make a lot of sense there on the water, but she didn’t know the word for deck. And was fusili right for guns? Fusili was a kind of pasta, for God’s sake. “No piu! No piu! Fasciate la pace!” She tried to put it together in her head—Your boat is sinking, what the fuck—La vostra—oh shit, boat—marina—no—goddamit—!

  LaFond’s hand came back a fraction of an inch, ready to throw, and then an AK fell to the deck from the second level and bounced and lay there. After a moment’s silence, a voice shouted, “Promesso dei lege della guerra? Promesso d’essere prigioneri della guerra?”

  Yes, she shouted at them, I, a senior ufficiale of the Navy of the Stati Uniti, I promise you that you will be prisoners of war under the rules of war. “Geneva Convention!” she shouted. She didn’t know any Italian for that, either. “Mani alla testa! Fasciate scendere coi mani alla testa!” Surely testa meant head. Christ, if it meant testicles they were all going to look pretty stupid, guys surrendering with their hands on their crotches.

  But they came down with their hands on their heads, frightened, probably thinking of Lockerbie—except for the guy on the second level, who had one of Valdez’s bullets in his left knee and who was moaning. They were not young, these two, and they looked to her very much like Italians. She felt no hatred and no disgust: these were not intelligence agents who planted bombs on civilians, but soldiers who had tried to carry out a tough mission and had failed.

  LaFond had them against the bulkhead with their heads on the painted steel before he would let her move, and then he ran up the ladder, weapon at the ready, and screamed for the wounded man. He was gone. There was a blood trail to a hatchway, but the hatchway was closed. “The fucker’s gone down a ladder and screwed the hatch down, Commander! He’s fucking bleeding! He’s fucking crazy!”

  “Valdez!”

  “I’m with you, ma’am.”

  “Damage assessment. Get on to Aston, then check with Nguyen and the science team to see if anybody’s hurt. I want status on that countdown, number-one priority. LaFond! Get help for this marine! And find the guy who crawled away!” She was running up the ladder. “Bridge! Hello, on the bridge!”

  She tried not to look at the captain’s body, then looked, saw that he had a hole just above the eye in the left eye socket. He still looked crazy. She stepped over his legs, noticing that he had changed into chinos and wondering when, an absurd thing to be thinking about, and she opened the door and she saw the first mate standing there with a shotgun pointed at her.

  “Put that goddam thing down!” They stared at each other. “It’s over! It’s over!” He didn’t recognize her, she realized. Her fingers tightened on the AUG and she was thinking that the buckshot from the sweeper might not do much of a job on her body armor before she killed him, when he slowly lowered the gun, swayed, and fainted.

  “Oh, shit!” she said. “Bridge watch! Who’s got the goddam bridge watch?”

  The engineer emerged from behind a console, holding a Ruger highway patrolman in her left hand, a comm mike in her right. Rose had barely seen her the whole mission, but she seemed pretty cool.

  “Commander Craik? There’s an aircraft asking for you. They say they need to get some mini-sub now, and have you got any explosives you can put over as depth charges?”

  “What mini-sub?” It didn’t make sense. Depth charges? What the hell—!

  “Commander?” The engineering officer was coming toward her with a funny look on her face, holding out the hand that didn’t have the gun in it as if she thought she was going to have to hold something up. Then Rose realized she was shaking, that she was the thing that might have to be held up, and she pushed herself back against the bulkhead and slid down it until her butt whacked on the deck.

  Her hands were shaking so bad she could hardly hold the radio. “LaFond—LaFond—Hello? LaFond—?”

  On his screen, Alan saw the Russian helicopter launch from the destroyer, although he was really looking for any signs of emission from the Nanuchka. He was running the ESM program again, looking for data from other ships or other planes. Another Sovremenny-class destroyer rotated its air-search radar once, and he caught it and passed
it on. Rafe was turning the plane and running in on the Philadelphia’s location. For an S-3, this was moving fast. Alan toggled the screen to look for signs of hostile radars, but the Nanuchka, which had had radars emitting on three frequencies a moment before, was silent. Unless he missed his guess, they had hit her hard.

  He toggled the ISAR radar and placed the beam squarely on the Nanuchka. A huge radar return blossomed amidships, where a few seconds earlier she had shown only the normal returns of her canted bridge.

  “Direct hit amidships. No signal, no radar.”

  Rafe said nothing. Alan watched the heading change on his screen and toggled back to his datalink display, which showed the relative position of the plane, the Nanuchka, and the Philadelphia. He didn’t have to care, yet, about what lower resolution showed—other Libyan ships beyond the horizon, or the Russians, or Libyan aircraft. Not yet. And if the weather got any worse, he wouldn’t see them coming, anyway.

  Alan was too busy to think of how many men had died when the Harpoon hit. He was too busy to be glad it had hit at all. Somewhere, sometime, he would remember how close he might have come to putting the Harpoon into Rose’s ship. He pressed his mike button.

  “Okay, let’s see who’s under the Philadelphia. McAllen, ready with the sonobuoys? Everybody ready?”

  “Alan, you sure that fucking SAM on the patrol boat is fried?”

  “A-ffirmative!” Alan looked back at his ESM screen. Nothing. The Nanuchka was silent.

  Petty Officer McAllen was laying out his sonobuoy pattern on his screen. Alan could only watch. He understood the basics and the theory of acoustics, but McAllen was an artist and Alan left him to his work.

  McAllen spoke for the first time in what seemed hours.

  “Sir, I need you to fly the course I’ve laid on. The 180 is the inbound radial. I’ll drop sonobuoys along the whole path from the first mark. Then you turn west and follow the circle I’ve laid on and turn onto the 090 radial. When we’re done, I’ll have a cross-shaped pattern of buoys in the water covering two miles around the Philadelphia.”