The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel

by David Poyer

  Dan cut in: “Have you been listening, Exec? How much degradation is losing one of our predriver groups going to inflict on us? How much capability can we lose before we’re out of the missile defense business? And what kind of maintenance lets a coolant hose, a coolant hose, get so loose a fifty-degree angle makes it let go? Those are the first questions I’d like to have answered. If you have the time, that is.”

  “I … believe I’ll have to get back to you on that, Captain.”

  “Good, do that. Within an hour.” Dan nodded once, to them all. He didn’t need to make his expression any harder than it probably already was. And he was already sorry he’d unloaded on Almarshadi. He almost added a word of apology, then thought savagely: Let him take it. He’d certainly had to, when he’d been Jimmy Packer’s second in command. “Where’s Lieutenant Mills?”

  “CIC, Captain.”

  “I want him in my inport cabin too. No later than 1400.”

  * * *

  AS he was powering up his computer in the large bare captain’s suite down on the main deck level, someone knocked. “Come in,” Dan yelled.

  “Lieutenant Mills, sir.”

  “Come on in, Matt. Get a look at the equipment room?”

  “Yessir. CASREP’s on the LAN. You should have it.”

  “Is Hermelinda coming?” The supply officer. Mills nodded. Dan said to the screen, “We need to make some decisions. Higher needs to know our capability’s degraded.” He glanced at Mills, unsure if the newly arrived officer would be able to help with what really concerned him. Namely, how could they go to war with a system that wasn’t just experimental, but now significantly degraded vis-à-vis their primary mission. “My question is: How badly? I’m getting conflicting opinions.”

  Another knock, and they filed in: Almarshadi, looking even more apprehensive than usual; Donnie Wenck; the supply officer, Garfinkle-Henriques; and the chubby-cheeked petty officer from New Jersey, Terranova. Wenck was still in a first class’s dress blues. Dan was pointing to chairs when his Hydra clicked. “CO, Bridge.”

  He unclipped it. “CO.”

  “Sir, Lieutenant Staurulakis.”

  “What’cha got, Cheryl?”

  “The chief engineer reports full power and rudder trials completed satisfactorily.”

  The 1MC said, “All masters-at-arms muster in the mess decks with the executive officer.” That would be the shipwide search beginning for the missing pistol. His Hydra said, “We need to know where to head from here, Captain.”

  “You have the course plotted.”

  “The course for the eastern Med, yes sir. We’re still executing that—?”

  “Until further notice,” Dan said. “I’m going to report the radar casualty and see what kind of parts support we can finagle.”

  The Ops officer said she understood and signed off. He clicked off too and looked around the table. “Okay, we’re down one DPD. That leaves one spare, aft. What’s next? Repair? Replace? Terranova?”

  The pudgy-cheeked little FC twisted her braid, not meeting his eyes. He still couldn’t believe she was his senior tech for the most advanced radar in the Navy. “Sir, we have eight different kinds of microwave power tubes and CFAs and TWTs in the DPD. We have spares for all of them and Petty Officer—I mean, Chief—Wenck brought us some more. But our real problem’s the chassis. It’s burnt, melted, the solder joints are gone, all the cooling channels are distorted. The simplest thing to do would be to strip it down to parade rest, test the TWTs and Mark 99s and SDRs, keep the ones that are in spec and survey the others. Then plug in all the components into a totally new chassis.”

  Dan nodded. “Okay, how fast can we do that?”

  Mills said, “We can start pulling tubes as soon as the space cools down. Though some of them have radioactive components. So we’d need to do a survey before we send people in. Problem is, we don’t carry spare chassis … chassis-es.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows at the supply officer. “Hermelinda?”

  “Matt’s right, sir. Unfortunately, they’re custom-fabricated for each ship set. So they’re not in the supply system.”

  “You checked that?”

  “Wouldn’t say so if I hadn’t, Captain.”

  “Okay, good. That’s what I like to hear.”

  “I have a message out to the original equipment manufacturer, seeing if they have any in inventory. But I wouldn’t expect it.”

  “How about Dahlgren? They’re the Aegis capital, right? Would they have a chassis set, maybe even a complete driver-predriver, that they could let us have?”

  “I’ll get a message out,” Mills said.

  “Make it immediate priority. But a caveat. Everything that goes out of here about this is classified top secret,” Dan said.

  That stopped them. Garfinkle-Henriques especially looked puzzled. “Top secret,” Dan repeated, before they could ask why. “All right, let’s get to it. Matt, you stay. Oh, and Hermelinda, is there a stock number for the chassis?”

  The supply officer said patiently, “If it was in the supply system, it would have a stock number, sir. But since it isn’t—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” He looked at his LAN screen. “I’ve got your CASREP. But before I put it in, I’m going to make a call.”

  He’d thought about doing this via the new high-side chat function. But he distrusted chat. There was no paper trail. There wasn’t even, if he understood it correctly, really an electronic trail, or at least one he trusted to be secure.

  Because he didn’t want this to get out. It was bad enough they were degraded. To let it become public knowledge would mean they didn’t even have a deterrent value. Like letting another boxer, your opponent, know you had a broken right hand. There was no paper trail on the red phone, either, but at least it was a secure circuit.

  He’d have to make three calls, though. To Commodore Roald, first. Then to Sixth Fleet, and to the commander of TF 60, the task force he’d be joining, at least temporarily, on his way to his ultimate station. Or should he depend on the message traffic to keep them in the picture? He’d ask Jen. She’d know.

  A few minutes later he had her on the red phone, and everyone had left except Mills. The STU-3 was warm in his hand. Roald sounded the same as she had when he’d called her once from Korea. Deliberate. Cool. Almost remote. “You’re still operational, though. Correct?” she said.

  “Affirmative … but without the reserve DPD. Over.”

  “How was your effectiveness before that?”

  Dan recalled Dr. Noblos’s sour assessment. Where was Noblos anyway? He hadn’t seen the civvie rider since they’d put to sea. “I’d have to say … the jury’s still out on that. Uh, over.”

  “Can you continue the mission?”

  He started to say “I think so,” but that didn’t sound so good. He cleared his throat and started over. “Yes. But we need help, specifically on repair parts. The message will give you more detail. It’s going out now. Over.”

  “What’s your ETA at Point Hotel? Your rendezvous with the task force?”

  “Just altered course for it. The full-power run went fine, by the way. I’ll get you an ETA by message.”

  “You understand there’s no other unit in the Med, or in the pipeline, with your capability, Dan. And we’re going in. Not for attribution. But there’s no question. So you have to find a way to stay operational. More than that. To be ready for the worst. Over.”

  “I understand. Over.” But he didn’t feel that confident about Terranova’s troubleshooting and maintenance. And he obviously didn’t have enough spares allowance. “Uh, but this current problem … it’s the symptom, not the disease. I get the impression the ship—by that I guess I mainly mean the previous CO—depended too much on tech support, and not enough on growing own-team skills. Over.”

  Roald said he wasn’t the first cruiser skipper she’d heard this from. “But it’s not a problem that developed in a day, and we’re not going to fix it in a day, or a week. Also,” she added,
“I want you to keep all your CASREPs close hold. Please ride herd on that. Over.”

  “Already made that clear on this end. Any reference to our capability, or lack of same, is TS.”

  “Good. That’s maybe even as vital as actually making sure you have the capability.”

  Dan couldn’t help raising his eyebrows. “Even if we’re only a marker on the board?”

  He must have sounded sardonic, because she shot back, “Politics is just as real as operational readiness, Captain. Maybe more so. I should think, with your experience, you’d realize that by now.”

  “Appearance is reality? Over.”

  “Sometimes, Dan. Sometimes it is.” The secure circuit beeped and hissed as she let up on the sync key, then beeped again. “I recommend setting EMCON on all your ship-to-shore comms. And ‘River City’ on your Internet and e-mail. I’ll move heaven and earth to get you that chassis. That will be my staff’s number one priority. In return, keeping a lid on your problems is yours. Over.”

  “I need to notify Sixth Fleet. And TF 60. Over.”

  “No you don’t. I’ll call Admiral Ogawa myself. Tell me what else you need, if your techs find more shortfalls. Stay on it, Dan. And get down to Point Hotel as soon as you can.”

  “Copy all,” Dan said. His gaze met Mills’s. They both looked away. He said, “Over,” and waited.

  But heard only the hiss of a circuit with no one on the other end.

  6

  Strait of Messina

  “UNIDENTIFED sonar contact, bearing one-one-zero, range eighteen thousand yards. Suspected Kilo-class submarine.”

  “Hard right rudder, steady course zero nine zero. Engines ahead one-third. Bo’s’un, set antisubmarine condition two.”

  Dan sat kneading his forehead in CIC, listening to two circuits at once and watching the symbology pulsing across the displays: circles for friendly, squares for unknown, triangles for enemy. He knew this geography, a narrow, island-littered passage, all too fucking well, thank you. So far this afternoon, fighter aircraft had suddenly broken out of a commercial air route, and been queried, warned, then destroyed. He’d also fought off a short-range attack from what had appeared to be a small fishing trawler carrying a battery of Silkworm-type cruise missiles.

  He’d managed to knock the missiles out of the sky and sink the trawler. Now, though, to judge by the submarine contact, plus the pop-up of more small, fast air contacts over the landmass to the east, it looked as if he was going to have to deal with simultaneous air and subsurface threats.

  To his right the tactical action officer, Cheryl Staurulakis, spoke rapidly into her boom mike, the words coming through his headphones too. “TAO, all stations: Commence area defense detect-to-engage. OOD: Bare steerageway. Come to course zero nine zero to maximize non-battleshort-enabled illuminator coverage. Disable all doctrine statements.”

  “CSC: Doctrine disabled.”

  “CIC, Bridge: Steady on zero nine zero. Standing by to comb torpedo track.”

  “TAO, Air: Vampire, vampire, vampire! Fifty nautical miles, altitude sixty feet, speed six hundred knots, inbound to own ship.”

  “Vampire” was the proword and warning an antiship missile was on its way. Staurulakis leaned forward, sneezing suddenly into a fist.

  “TAO, RSC: New track, 0034, bearing one eight five, range forty-eight nautical miles. IFF negative. Unknown, assumed enemy.”

  “Very well. Correlates, sir,” Staurulakis told him, without unlocking her gaze from the displays. “Recommend we ID as hostile.”

  Dan nodded. “Concur.”

  “All stations, TAO: ID’ing track 0034 as hostile.” She hooked the contact, and the symbol on the big screen changed to a vertical red caret.

  Dan rubbed his mouth, evaluating the scramble of tracks and callouts that Beth Terranova, with Donnie Wenck sitting close behind her, was putting online. In the center pulsed the blue cross-in-a-circle that meant Own Ship. Surrounding it, nearly obliterating the landmasses that crowded in, glowed the arcane tracery of dozens of friendlies and passing merchants … and hidden among them, fast-moving enemy boats that could change in seconds from innocent transients to mortal threats. Aegis had been designed for the open ocean. For the U.S. Navy, gutter-fighting in crowded, narrow waters was like forcing a falcon to fight a rat in a cage too small to spread its wings in.

  “Track 0034, range thirty nautical miles, six hundred and fifty knots, inbound.”

  “TAO, MSS: Manually engage when firm track is established.”

  “TAO, ASWO: Subsurface contact classified hostile bears one eight seven, range seventeen thousand yards.”

  “TAO, EW: Track 0034 correlates to emission spectrum of DM-3B mono pulse radar, Iranian Noor antiship sea skimmer.”

  “Permission to engage Goblin track 34 with SM-2, Captain.”

  He recognized a scenario from his nightmares. The numbers on the weapon inventory screen were dropping. They were attriting the enemy, but their own magazines were almost empty. He had one Standard left. Save it, and accept the risk of missing the incomer with his close-in weapons? Or use his last long-range round? The right answer depended on how long the engagement would continue. How much longer the enemy could keep taking losses. Staurulakis broke her fixation on the display and glanced at him, pale eyebrows lifting as she coughed.

  “Kill track 34 with Standard,” Dan said. He closed his eyes and found the red switch marked FIRE AUTH by feel. To his right Staurulakis typed rapidly, echoing the command as computer code, a backup for switch failure or battle damage.

  “Birds away.” A bright symbol detached from the circle-and-cross and winked into a blue semicircle rapidly tracking outbound. It curved, then steadied on a collision course with the red caret. No one around him spoke, though back in the curtained alcoves of Sonar murmurs testified to the slow deadly wrestling match of the antisubmarine battle going on at the same time deep beneath the sea.

  The two symbols neared, then flashed. When the flashing stopped one had vanished. Dan shook his head; it had been their missile, not the incomer.

  “No kill, no kill.”

  “Three-four is leaker, leaker!”

  “TAO, Sonar: We have tube opening sounds from Kilo. Torpedo firing imminent.”

  “Fuck,” Staurulakis murmured. “Mount 51, engage.”

  “Tell the bridge to come right, unmask mount 52 as well,” Dan told her. “But remember to minimize your radar cross section.” He told her to prosecute the submarine contact with torpedoes, and to stand by to fire their two antisubmarine-rocket-launched torpedoes out of the vertical launchers if the fish failed to connect. They had no more missiles; the next layer of defense was guns, and last, the rapid-fire automatic 20mm of the Phalanx. If the enemy sub put a torpedo in the water, the situation would become desperate. She nodded tersely and snapped into her boom mike, “Batteries released, mount 51 and 52, mount 21 and 22, arm CIWS and deselect hold fire.”

  “System in high power.”

  “Range, fifteen miles and closing. Speed seven hundred.”

  “Watch for a pop-up maneuver at five miles. Reduce your radar cross section. Stand by for jamming. And don’t forget chaff,” Dan told her. She nodded without replying.

  “PASS loaded … RCS control … AAW autoselected.”

  He leaned back and combed fingers through hair soaked with sweat despite the blast of icy air. Behind him and stretching back into CIC the tactical team squinted into screens, each intent on his own lines in the drama. An occasional cough was the only sound, and now and then a murmur into a voice circuit, though most of their interaction was via the keyboard.

  There was, of course, no submarine, and no supersonic missile turbojet-howling toward them yards above the waves, its silicon brain fighting off Savo Island’s jamming. The missile firing keys didn’t hang around his neck on their beaded steel chain, but were in the weapons safe in his at-sea cabin. There was an aircraft, a Falcon configured to emulate various enemy missiles. Out of NAS Sigonella, for two hours of
area/own-ship exercise. The contacts and landforms on the right three displays were a virtual-training scenario, carefully firewalled from the actual surface and air picture on the leftmost screen: the slowly passing coast of Sicily and the crooked, horned toe of the Italian boot at Capo Vaticano.

  The scream of a jet engine outside. “Playmate, mark on top,” someone said in his headphones. He took them off and massaged his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. Someone had said you could reset eyestrain by doing that.

  “Dinner, Captain.” His steward slid a napkin-covered tray in front of him and snatched away the napkin like a conjurer. “Wednesday’s slider day.”

  “Sliders. Great.” For some reason this had become the Navy word for burgers, conjuring an image of pink patties skidding in hot grease when a ship rolled. The fries were still warm, and there was even a shaker of salt on the tray. “Thanks, Longley.”

  “What I’m here for, sir.”

  He ate slowly, one eye on the screens. The ship’s tactical action officer sat atop a reporting pyramid. Below him or her was the antisubmarine-warfare coordinator, the antiair coordinator, the antisurface coordinator, and the bridge team, all feeding information and recommendations. The TAO controlled the ship’s weapons and radars, fighting in concert with friendly, “blue,” forces in his or her area. The TAO actually fought the ship; if he or she was skilled, the CO’s can in the next seat was nice, but not essential.

  Dan was using this exercise to evaluate his three school-qualified TAOs, Mills, Staurulakis, and Almarshadi. So far the operations officer would be his first choice in actual combat. Petite, pale-haired, sharp-faced, unflappable, Staurulakis tended to be faster on the trigger than he liked, but she read a scenario quickly and her solutions were as good as his own. A few more hours together and they’d be one dangerous beast with two brains.

  Savo Island was still headed east, but he hadn’t wanted to arrive at Point Hotel without a firm idea of just how sharp was the blade that had been thrust into his hands. So far, Engineering had reported no problems, and his bridge team seemed to be on top of things. Their test would come late that night, as they transited the Strait of Messina, a choke point dreaded by everyone since the Greeks had ventured to challenge Scylla and Charybdis.