by David Poyer
“Really? Guess it’s possible, but there’s nothing like that in the schedule.”
“Can’t you put in for a port visit?”
“It doesn’t work that way, exactly. Not with the … op schedule the way it’s looking.”
A pixie-faced Hispanic-looking girl said, “Is it true we’re attacking Iraq?”
He shrugged. “Above my pay grade, seaman … Colón. Our job’s to be ready if we do.”
“But it’s a possibility? Sir?”
“Looks more like it every day. But like I said, we’re only going to know once we get the tasking.”
“Captain Imerson never told us shit,” the heavyset seaman said. “We’re out there on the deck, and we don’t know where we’re going, or how long we’ll be out, or what we’ll have to do. Is it gonna be like that the rest of this deployment, sir? Any way we could sorta get, like, more in the picture?”
Dan felt ashamed. Amid all the things he had to catch up on, he’d overlooked including his shipmates. Who did the work. Whose blood would pay the price if he screwed up, made a wrong decision. “That’s a great suggestion, Goodroe. Tell you what: I’ll get with the XO, see if we can have him do a daily ops brief over the 1MC.” He got out his BlackBerry and made a note, their gazes following his finger.
“Hey, let’s let the skipper eat his lunch, dudes,” the master-at-arms suggested. From that point on the talk subsided, though the side glances continued; and all that was heard was the murmur of conversation at the other tables, the rattle of crockery and silverware, and the clatter from back in the scullery when he pushed his tray through the opening and met the startled gaze of the aproned, bespattered mess crank immured back there in heat and steam and stinks. To him too Dan gave a solemn nod of recognition and thanks, and received it back with a graceful inclination of the head.
* * *
LONG after midnight, in CIC, he nursed yet another paper cup of sonar shack joe, fighting a headache and blinking tiredly at the large-screen displays.
COMEX—commence exercise—had been promulgated three hours before. The Orange surface action group had kicked off with a Harpoon attack on the northern screening units, followed by a Tomahawk salvo targeted on Roosevelt. They were overwhelmed by a Blue missile and air counterstrike, but Dan figured that if anything, this first attack was a diversion. Trying to anticipate the land-based threat, he’d moved Savo up to the outboard edge of her station and concentrated his team’s attention on the northeast quadrant, letting his gun-laying radar handle the all-around watch.
For half an hour nothing had developed. He’d begun to wonder if he’d been suckered out of position when the F-5s had suddenly popped up, not out of Izmir, where Terranova had been looking, but low and fast out of the mountains of Caria. “They’re trying to hide in among the islands,” the FC had said, hooking three pulsating squares and turning them to carets. “But see how clearly the Doppler lock picks them out?”
“Range?”
“Hundred and ninety miles.”
Dan leaned closer, marveling. The vibrating spokes of the radar clicked around as if escapement-driven. For each of the hurtling contacts a profile read off elevation, speed, course, and electronic identification. “We can do an alert script,” the FC2 murmured. “Write it into the doctrine from the console. Specify elevation, speed, and course, and the system will alert and track automatically. You get the buzzer if it classifies hostile. In self-defense mode, the system takes it from there through firing. Once we tell it what we want to guard against, Aegis doesn’t actually need us in the loop anymore.”
For some reason this reminded him of what Amy Singhe had said in his cabin the night before. “Doctrine is preset. It resides in our computers.” He scratched his head, turning this over like some clumsy piece of tool-flint with a brain designed hundreds of thousands of years in the past. He’d watched commanders dither. Try to sort dozens of variables, match them against doctrine, and all too often make bad calls. Or at least suboptimal decisions. Against supersonic threats, a mistake left no second chance. Maybe they had to depend on silicon and code, then. But it still didn’t sit well.
“I think we want to be,” he said. “In the loop, that is.”
“Sir, that’s your decision as CO. But Captain Imerson had no problem running everything in automatic.”
“Let’s not go through that again,” said Matt Mills. The lieutenant had come in and stood by now to take over on the nickel-and-dime, five-on-and-ten-off schedule the TAOs were standing. “Evening, Captain.”
“Matt. Say, you run into Dr. Noblos? Haven’t seen much of him the last couple of days.”
“The good doctor’s got some kind of respiratory infection. Corpsman said he needed rest more than work.”
Dan reflected. According to the last report from the Johns Hopkins consultant, both Savo’s SPY-1 system and its team’s watchstanding skills were still marginal. “He’s, um, really sick?”
“What I heard.”
“I’ll check on him. Okay, sorry to interrupt your turnover.”
“No problem, sir.”
The F-5s angled west, and the antiair coordinator assigned them to Arleigh Burke for the live-fire exercise. One of the Turkish fighters would launch a drone target. But all units were warned to stay alert; a second wave was likely, and would probably strike from a different quarter. As Mills and Staurulakis started the turnover, Dan noticed the rumpled blond back of Donnie Wenck’s head at another console. He strolled over to stand behind him for a while, glancing back from time to time at the large displays. At last, he leaned over his shoulder. “What you running there, Donnie?”
“Diagnostic subroutine.”
“Did you ever check for that virus you mentioned?”
Wenck sighed. “Oh yeah. System’s clean. But it’s really clocking slow. I’m still not sure why. I was on that new high-side chat last night. We were getting deep into Linux. Good stuff. You know, we were always so isolated trying to fix things at sea, but now you can go brain to brain with the other FCs and really get to pick somebody’s neurons who’s maybe way out in PacFleet. I actually got to talk to the system supe aboard Monocacy, you know, our follow-on ship? That’s out there testing, out of Kwaj? And he says we’re due an upgrade.”
“Hardware, or—?”
“No sir, software.” Wenck explained that Savo Island’s system was baseline 7. NSWC Dahlgren had written a patch for the ballistic missile defense mission, called ALIS, which optimized long-range scan and took out speed and altitude stops that had been built in back when the system had first gone to sea. “That was a real dinosaur. Baseline 2.10. Rugged, but not a lot of computing power—eighty-megabyte ROM-based memory. Reel-to-reel tapes. Those old UH-3 disk packs.”
“I remember them from when I was with Joint Cruise Missiles. We used ’em for Tomahawk targeting.”
“Uh-huh. Well, they had to build in those stops back then, or the radar would be tracking the moon. But your Scuds and M-11s and such are operating in those regimes. Also, we got another slight problem. Or maybe not so slight. In fact, it could fuck us royal.”
Dan glanced at the vertical screen. Where the hell were the Turkish subs? “Okay, hit me. But, you know, Donnie, try to keep it…”
“Officer-comprehensible?”
“You got it.”
Wenck smoothed his cowlick, but it sprang up as soon as his palm left it. “It’s like, interoperability? You know we got Patriots in Israel. I was going over the defended-asset list. You know, what we’re assigned to cover?”
Dan lowered his voice. “Tel Aviv, primarily.”
“Right, but it gets more specific than that.” Wenck rattled the keyboard and a simplified map of Israel came up. He rattled again and a carpet of symbology overlaid the topography. “See this? Patriot battery at Ben Gurion Airport. Here’s their coverage arc. See how it underlies ours? Shorter range, but—”
“Patriot’s terminal defense. They don’t fire until the last minute or so before impact.”
The air was growing very cold. Dan shivered and drifted a few steps away to rest a hand on Mills’s shoulder. “Check with Sonar, see if they have anything from TACTAS.”
“Just heard from them, sir. Still no joy,” the TAO murmured into his boom mike.
“Sorry, Donnie, go on. I’m listening.”
“I was saying, three ways to receive cuing. Either our own SPY-1, download from AWACs, or else from the satellite—infrared detection of the booster plume.”
“That’s the Obsidian Glint?”
“Right. Problem is, Patriot’s a semiactive tracker—the missile, like, navigates to impact listening to the radar emissions reflected off the incoming projectile.”
“So’re our Standards.”
“Right. Exactly! Their signals are from a phased-array radar not too different from ours. So, let’s say we pick up a cuing, and fire. And at the same time that radar at Ben Gurion’s out there scanning. Now suddenly there’s two missiles out there for them to home in on: the real target, and our Block 4. That’s what I’m leery of.”
“That it’ll shoot down our missile, you mean?”
“I guess it could, but we’d be at the ragged edge of its intercept envelope, and heading away by that time—it’d be trying to catch up on a tail chase—I ain’t no Patriot expert, you know? I’m more worried, there’s two birds active out there, we’ll decoy the Israelis off the real one. Then if we miss, everybody’s fucked. That Scud, or whatever it is, is gonna get through.”
Dan wondered how exactly to put this without sounding like, well, like an officer. “Uh, Donnie, I think that’s something to look into. But there’s three pieces to having us out here. A warfighting piece, a deterrence piece, and then there’s a political angle, too. Ideally we’d have all three in place—we can shoot the missile down, the other side knows we can, and the Israelis see we can.”
Wenck frowned. Just as Dan had figured he would. “You’re saying, we don’t actually have to have a P-sub-K of—”
“Yeah, yeah, we want to two-block that figure, but the point I’m making, if the guy who’s thinking about firing that missile figures we’ll just shoot it down, he might not hit the button. And even if he does, and we miss, and it hits an orphanage, at least we tried. We stood by our ally.”
The chief’s shoulders lifted, then sagged. Signifying either total lack of interest, or incomprehension. Dan waited, then went on. “Anyway, how do we fix it? This interoperability thing?”
“Like I said, I’m working it, and one of the guys thinks he can get a Patriot dude up on chat. There was an op-test called Coral Talon, but I haven’t been able to get an e-copy yet. What would really help is if we had, like, freqs from the Israelis. Or better yet, some way to talk to them direct, instead of going up through all the political bullshit architecture and then down again.” He pointed to a tall console farther down the aisle. “The EWs are picking up what they think’s the Ben Gurion battery, but it’s gonna freq-hop like crazy when it goes into battle mode.”
Dan glanced plotward again. Where the fuck were the Orange subs? Arleigh Burke had two lines of helo-laid sonobuoys out, but no contact. Could the “enemy” 209s already be inside the barrier? It seemed unlikely. But it was unsettling that they’d disappeared. Which of course was exactly what subs trained to do, but still … “Look, I’m gonna have to get back to this exercise, but keep working this, okay? Anything you need to get my signature on, or approve a message asking for that study or whatever, let me know. Okay?”
Wenck’s head was going up and down, but his attention was already a million miles away, back in the lines of code scrolling across the screen.
Dan was turning back for Sonar when the overhead speaker crackled to life. “Vampire, vampire, vampire! Bearing zero-eight-eight, range twenty, tracking left.”
Vampires were submarine-launched missiles. From the east. And close. He hurled himself toward his seat. On the display, the just-emerged missile was already hooked and blinking. It was crossing Savo’s beam, five miles off, at an extremely high angular velocity. Not an easy target, and headed directly for the carrier.
A second pip bloomed behind it. Then a third, from a different azimuth.
A coordinated attack. How had both subs evaded the screen? He grabbed for a handhold on the datalink console as the cruiser heeled, coming around to unmask batteries. He jammed on the headphones and his hand found the Fire button by feel as the engagement litany picked up velocity.
“Lock on.”
“Ready to fire. Select—”
“Holy shit, they’re really firing!” Mills yelled. Dan tensed, before the lieutenant continued, “Uh, sorry, belay that … my mistake. Exercise-generated imagery. Sorry. Won’t happen again. Sorry, Captain, sorry.”
Dan eased out a breath. “Eye on the ball, Matt. It’s only an exercise. Knock them down. They’re homing on the carrier. EW?”
“Jamming,” came over the phone circuit from the SLQ-32 console. “No visible effect.”
Before they could fire, the dry voice of the anti-air warfare controller crackled over the net, assigning the inbound vampires to a destroyer in the inner screen. Dan cursed; Savo had missed her chance. She heeled again, this time reorienting to take on the subs. Voices rose from Sonar and the tracking table as they lined up for a shot. Dan toggled the ASW display on the leftmost screen, squinting. The screen flickered. Then he saw.
“Range, thirty-eight thousand, bearing zero eight zero. Stand by to fire Asroc.”
“Negative!” Dan shouted. “Check fire, check fire! He’s too close to the fucking dog box.”
Putting a torpedo in the water there would endanger one of the Blue subs, the friendlies, scouting out ahead of the force. Apparently, due to layer depth, or whatever low cunning the Turkish sub commander had employed, the Blue sub hadn’t detected him.
However he’d done it, the Orange sub was using the Blue one like a hostage shield, leaving Dan unable to attack. He keyed the 21MC, then let up on the lever as Mills passed the command he’d been about to give. “Bridge, TAO; come left—”
“Remember you have the tail streamed,” Dan put in.
“Yes sir. —Come left, no greater rudder than fifteen degrees; steady three two zero; go to flank.” He was repositioning Savo, placing the cruiser, as a shield between the enemy and the carrier. Blocking the next missile salvo. The hum of the turbines rose to a whooshing scream. The superstructure began to vibrate. A deckplate buzzed like a cicada.
Dan pressed his mike switch. “Sonar, CO: Do you have a solid contact?”
“Bridge, Sonar: Contact tracking one eight five, speed nineteen. CO, Sonar, did you copy?”
“Copy,” Dan snapped. Nineteen knots: top speed for a submerged 209, and not one its batteries could maintain long. One boat was sprinting south. Attempting an end run? Or trying to seduce them off its partner? “Source of that datum?”
“TACTAS, sir. Mainly flow noise, sounds like.”
“Keep an eye on that bearing,” Dan told Mills. “As soon as they clear the dog box, I want an Asroc in the air.”
“TAO aye.” Mills switched to the ASW circuit, and Dan half overheard his side of the conversation as they made ready to fire. He switched back and forth on his headset, watching chat click up his desktop screen, seeing Arleigh Burke’s Standard splash the drone fifteen miles from Theodore Roosevelt, the exercise opening like a flower on the big flat-panel displays. He switched and keyed. “Aegis, CO: Keep an eye peeled up toward Antalya. They could launch a second strike out of there.”
Terranova’s Jersey-accented soprano: “Aegis aye.”
He switched back just in time to catch “TAO, Sonar: Lost contact.”
“What the fuck is going on back there?” Mills muttered. “Sonar, TAO: What do you need to regain?… Okay … okay, but we’re right at the edge.… Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. Bridge, TAO: Left turn, steady up on one eight zero and drop to ten—�
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Longley, at his elbow. “Coffee, Captain? And we got, hey, we got oatmeal cookies tonight. Really good.”
Dan blew out, trying to keep his temper. He didn’t want more coffee … but he needed more … so fucking tired … but his stomach churned. He grabbed a cookie and wolfed it. Typical big, chewy U.S. Navy mess deck cookie. Not much you could find fault with, actually. He chased it with a slug of coffee that turned out to be so scalding he would have spat it back into the cup if both Mills and the steward hadn’t been watching him. “Holy smoke, Longley, did you brew this with a blowtorch?”
“Ran that straight up from the galley, Captain. Know you like it hot.”
His tongue felt flayed. Dan clicked back to the antisubmarine circuit, wondering why he wasn’t hearing anything from Zotcher. But then snapped the dial back to antiair when another voice said, “TAO, Sonar: Regained contact. Range twenty thousand. Bearing one zero five.”
“Christ, at last,” the CIC officer muttered, on Mills’s other hand.
The exercise lulled. Dan stretched, tried to fight his eyelids up again. Shivered, and resolved to bring a sweater the next time he came up here. Checked his watch: 0413. Considered calling Almarshadi to take it, but didn’t. The XO needed sleep too.
Finally he stood, and stretched again, touching the overhead with the tips of his fingers. He bent and snagged his toes a couple of times, just to get the blood moving again. Something popped in his back. He glanced over at the Aegis display. Past Wenck and Terranova, their heads together, the electronic warfare consoles flickered a weird graveyard green. It might not just be that the Patriot battery could mistake Savo’s SM-2 for the incoming Scud. Could there also be mutual interference, from the Patriot’s and Aegis’s own radar guidance? Had anyone ever thought to deconflict the spectra between the Army’s antimissile system and the Navy’s? They freq-shifted, sure. But would the bands they swept overlap? It sounded all too much like the kind of thing no one in either service had bothered to check out, and that you’d find out too late. He’d have to ask Noblos. Investigate—
“Datum: Bearing two seven three, nine thousand yards.”