Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  The unit's inventors had long watched sharks and dolphins, seeing that their skin moved while they passed through the ocean, flexing and dimpling, making waves on the surface of the skin like those on the surface of the sea. The give in the sharkskin reduced the drag force on the undersea creature, allowing it to swim faster. The manmade object had been given the same low-drag skin.

  The machine had a name—Mark 23, the unimaginative weapon code, and Bloodhound, the more definitive nickname that had stuck since the time of the first unit's testing. It had what could be considered a mother, for streaming from a tailfin was an ultrathin fiber-optic cable, connected miles behind it to the tube of metal that had launched it. The Bloodhound was in the water for one purpose—to sneak up on the battle fleet and listen with the array of hydrophones covering the nose of the machine in a small basketball-size hemisphere. The noise heard would be sent back to the onboard mid-body processor that did the calculations to put out the active-quieting noises.

  The Bloodhound was swimming southeast, making a decreasing-radius spiral inbound to the surface battle fleet, steaming slowly in its diamond formation above the equator. In the space of an hour, the Bloodhound would be five nautical miles away from the surface ships, far to the south of them. From the ring laser compact inertial navigation module it knew its own location, and from its fiber-optic link to the mother ship, it knew the location of the surface ships, which was confirmed by very dim noises coming from the general direction

  it expected. But the loud surface ships were up on the waves while the Bloodhound was circling three hundred feet below the thermal layer. At the five-mile point, the Bloodhound would cautiously fly above the level of the layer, its right side toward the surface ships so that its motion would not cause a sonar pulse to be reflected back as it would be if the Bloodhound approached straight on.

  A few feet above the waves and fifty miles west of the surface ships, the airframe of a jet-engine-powered missile flew over the water at two hundred miles per hour. The airframe was covered with radar-absorptive material, and the missile had a smaller radar reflection than a seagull or a wave tip. The machine flew on small carbon-fiber wing-lets, and the vectored thrust of its small jet, which took in air from an underbelly scoop, passed it through the gas turbine, and ejected it from the aft nozzle. The machine was carrying in its nose a package the size of a steamer trunk, destined for a spot on the ocean fifteen miles south of the surface ships, the Sharkeye acoustic daylight imaging pod. Sometime in the next twenty minutes it would reach the point where it would shut down the engine and angle upward, its velocity dying as it pointed to the heavens, and at zero speed the airframe would eject the Sharkeye package, which would drift down to the water's surface under a haze-gray silk parachute.

  Far to the east of the convoy a similar missile body flew, but this one slower, at about ninety miles per hour, and this unit did not cruise clipping the waves but high above the water at an altitude

  of twenty thousand feet. Its infrared scanners and visual and light-enhanced gyrostabilized cameras looked westward over at the battle fleet. When the Sharkeye hit the water, the Mark 94 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle would be almost four miles above the surface task force.

  Transmitting its information down to the men inside the submarine far beneath the waves was a small antenna inside the mid-body. The antenna was gyrostabilized so that its beam of extremely high frequency transmission did not waver, but was aimed precisely at the receiving antenna. The EHF radio waves were nearly impossible to intercept, but gave out only a meaningless garbled noise if they were.

  Thirty miles beyond, on the surface of the waves, was a small object the size and shape of a football bobbing slowly on the ocean's surface. Inside the object was an antenna locked onto the signal coming down from the Predator. The football buoy was connected to a cable that extended far into the warm ocean layer in an arc, penetrated the layer, and went deeper, ending finally at the top of the sail of the nuclear submarine. Soon, when the Mark 5 Sharkeye package parachuted into the waves, a small buoy much like the towed football on the submarine would surface from a cable going down to the Sharkeye's basketball-size acoustic daylight imaging sensors, which would not concern themselves with the surface ships above the layer, but would sink deep below the layer to search for the image of a submarine approaching the convoy. The information from the Sharkeye would be transmit-

  ted upward along the thin cable to the floating football and uplink to a second antenna on the Predator UAV, which would transfer the information to downlink to the submarine's football along with the data gained by the Predator itself.

  The central node of the three sensors was the Cyclops battlecontrol system, which would collect all of the intelligence and integrate it into a single four-dimensional picture of the battlespace, the fourth dimension being time. The display of this information would come into the control room in the virtual-reality display cubicles or into the command console's interface module, down the interface cable, and into the captain's command helmet.

  At eleven o'clock in the morning, the Sharkeye airframe pulled hard upward while cutting off the fuel valve and shutting down the engine. The missile climbed five hundred feet, stopped in midair, and began to fall slowly downward when the skin of it blew apart. A barrel-shaped electronics package emerged, a streamer popping out to stabilize it. Then a mattress-shaped silk parachute popped out to slow the unit on its two-minute trip to the water's surface. After a small white splash, the unit disconnected from the silk and sank into the ocean. At the thermal layer the barrel shape popped open and scattered the small spheres connected by fiberoptic wires horizontally and vertically. While the spheres sank lower and spread apart, the football buoy rose above the layer, its cable connected to the central sphere, and broached the surface, bobbing gently in the small waves. Its antenna came

  alive and transmitted the "all nominal" signal to the Predator's antenna.

  Captain Kelly McKee's helmet transmitted the data into the twin lenses connected to his eyes by soft black rubber eyepieces. His eyes blinked as the virtual-reality world opened in front of him and around him, transporting him to a three-dimensional space as real as the one the Predator was watching.

  He existed in a crystal-clear ocean of infinite depth. When he looked down, his feet rested on the toy hull of a submarine pointed southwest, the hull about three feet long. High overhead, he could see the wavy surface. It looked like he could swim for it, but in between was another surface—the thermal layer—also wavy. It was as if he were submerged in a bottle of salad dressing that had separated.

  Over his head, to the southwest—the direction the toy sub hull was going—the twenty-five ships of the surface fleet were steaming. They were about forty feet above him and in front of him. He could see each one, spread out, all of them about three or four feet long, clustered into a formation and steaming southeast, at a ninety-degree angle to him, baring their left flanks to him.

  With the Cyclops Mark 83 Mod Echo Battlecon-trol Artificial Intelligence Network Nodal System, a newer version than the Mod Bravo system on the SSNX, McKee would be able to leave his virtual station standing on top of the sub hull and fly up above the surface to see the virtual targets. He had been skeptical that the ability to maneuver would

  even be useful, and he'd heard that the maneuver function could give severe vertigo, but he mentally shrugged. Self-consciously, he lifted the hand up, aware that he probably looked like a child pretending that his hand was a jet fighter, but he immediately forgot what he must have looked like to the control room watchstanders, for as his hand lifted up toward the overhead his virtual body flew away from the submarine hull and up toward the surface. He could feel his head penetrating the warm layer, then he flew farther up out the water and into the sky. Below the thermal layer he could see the hull of the Hammerhead, a gray color, looking like a dolphin with the waves leaving moving highlights on its top flank. McKee raised his head as the surface grew distant, and then over
to the southwest, below him by what looked like a hundred feet, perhaps a virtual half mile toward the horizon. He moved faster and faster, accelerating until the ships were directly beneath him. He began to plummet until the twenty-five ships of the fleet were five feet below him.

  The first ship McKee looked at was the Kuznet-sov-class aircraft carrier. It looked as real and sharply defined as if it were a physical model. The computer stored actual high-optical-magnification visual images of it from each angle of the flying Predator vehicle, then assembled them together to form the three-dimensional display. The ship was a canted flight deck carrier with a ski-jump bow runway. The shape of the ship was wide and flat, the navigation island home to several phrased-array radar panels, a huge central stack, and a tall cylin-

  drical antenna, with the bridge control deck visible below. A dozen aircraft were cabled to the flight deck, including Flankers, Frogfoot and Fulcrum fighters, and two of the recently procured FireStar Japanese export-variety jets.

  "Identify," McKee muttered to his boom microphone, addressing the Cyclops system. A tag appeared in front of him, listing the ship's vital statistics:

  NAME: ADMIRAL FLOTA SOJUZZA KUZNETSOV HULL NUMBER: 113

  DISPLACEMENT, TONS: 67,500 FULL LOAD DIMENSIONS, FEET: 999 X 229.7 MAIN MACHINERY: 8 BOILERS, 4 TURBINES, 200,000 HORSEPOWER / 147 MEGAWATTS MAX SPEED: 30 KNOTS COMPLEMENT: 1,700 (200 OFFICERS)

  "Registration," McKee said. The tag added the words:

  NAVY OF THE UKRAINE. BLACK SEA FLEET.

  "Attention in the fire-control team," McKee said into his boom microphone inside his helmet. "This task force is definitely the Black Sea Fleet battle flotilla. I'm searching to see if there is a flagship or command-and-control vessel, but other than troop carriers and cargo ships, there are only the aircraft carrier, two cruisers, two ASW destroyers, two anti-air destroyers, and three fast frigates. We will therefore target all ten warships with a time-on-

  target Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedo attack. Any questions?"

  Judison spoke up. "But, Captain, what about having the fleet admiral turn the ships back to the Black Sea? If we take out his aircraft carrier flagship, he won't be around to give the order. Your previous policy, sir?"

  "The executive officer has raised a good point," McKee said to the room. "My logic is that I can't leave the aircraft carrier to proceed on with the task force. It is too lethal, and the aircraft embarked aboard could include ASW jets, which could come get us. As far as making the remaining troopships and cargo vessels turn back, we'll have to count on whoever is the surviving senior officer present afloat to make that call. If he makes the wrong call, we'll motivate him by conking a ship every twenty minutes. A final word. Despite the business of shooting these weapons and watching them detonate, all hands are to remain on max alert for the arrival of the Ukrainian submarine. Any other confusion? Very well, carry on."

  McKee flew circling the surface force for the next few minutes while the attack was prepared.

  "Captain," Kiethan Judison said in McKee's ear as he zoomed in between the two cruisers, then flew back high above the force, high enough to see the dolphinlike shape of the Hammerhead below. "Ship is ready for the salvo. Alert/Acute weapons are warm in tubes one, two, and four with the tube muzzle doors open. Tube three remains loaded with the Mark 17 Doberman. Do you want to download that for an Alert/Acute?"

  "No," McKee said. "Even if it means we keep the Mark 58s orbiting a little longer before they run to the Black Sea flotilla, I want that tube for the Doberman. You remember our little chat, XO?"

  "State champs on the flea-flicker, sir."

  McKee smiled, his white teeth shining inside the helmet where no one could see him.

  "Cyclops, Captain," McKee said.

  "Yes, Captain," the deep-voiced computer said in his headset.

  "Designate the ten combatants of the Black Sea Fleet as follows: aircraft carrier, target one. Cruiser at this position"—McKee flew to the southernmost of the two cruisers—"as target two, the other cruiser target three." He identified the four destroyers and three fast frigates, then confirmed Cyclops had the data.

  "Target designation entered, Captain," the system said.

  "Very well. Cyclops, insert calculations for a time-on-target torpedo attack using tubes one, two, and four with Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedoes with wire guidance cut off, full programmed attack."

  "Please specify detonation interval, sir."

  The computer wanted to know whether the ten torpedoes were required to hit within a half second of each other, or sixty seconds, or three minutes.

  "Plus/minus ten seconds," McKee said. Not enough time for the ships to take evasive action, and loose enough that the computer wouldn't waste torpedo fuel orchestrating an attack more precise than it needed to be.

  The Cyclops system spent the next second thinking, knowing the rate at which it could launch each torpedo, shut its muzzle door, drain the tube, open the breech door, ram in a new weapon, plug it in, start the gyro, shut the breech door, flood the tube, equalize it to sea pressure, open the muzzle door, pressurize its water-round-torpedo tank, confirm that the weapon was warm, complete the onboard processor's self-checks, perform the warhead self-checks, insert the trajectory to the target to the onboard processor and launch the weapon, then start the entire cycle over again. The cycle time even with the fast warmup of the Mark 58 torpedo put the detonation time far after the launch of the first torpedo, especially given that they were still thirty-five miles away and that torpedo approach velocity would be set at a stealthy thirty knots.

  "Captain, from first launch to the time-on-target interval, we are showing one hour and seventeen minutes."

  "Attention in the fire-control team. Firing-point procedures, targets one through ten for time-on-target assault, Cyclops data to be inserted."

  "Ship ready, sir," Dietz said.

  "Weapon ready," Van Dyne reported.

  "Solution ready," Judison said.

  "Cyclops ready," the computer said.

  "Shoot on generated bearings," McKee ordered.

  "Set," Judison said.

  "Standby," the Cyclops computer said.

  "Shoot," McKee ordered, his final chance to abort the attack or pursue it.

  "Fire," Van Dyne called, the report that the Cyclops system had control.

  "Cyclops has the torpedo room," Judison said.

  "Tube three launch in three, two, one, mark," Cyclops said, the word "mark" punctuated with the barking roar of a torpedo launch from the lower level.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Cyclops fired torpedoes. The first-fired unit flew out of the dolphin shape below the layer, an orange trail marking its passage. McKee watched it from high above as it drove two miles from the Hammerhead and began a slow circle a thousand yards in diameter. The other torpedoes began to emerge from the ship below him, their hold circles spaced out so that they were a half mile apart, until there were ten torpedoes in the water. The last-fired weapon in the salvo didn't circle but proceeded on toward the surface force; then the other nine torpedoes broke off from their orbits to sail on toward the fleet.

  "Forty minutes until plasma detonation, Captain," the computer said.

  "Very well," McKee said. Shutting his eyes, he pulled off his helmet and put it on the console. Reality returned to him in a rush, the sky and the sea beneath him vanishing, the control room back. And vertigo came to him, not from the motion of flying in the three-dimensional virtual battlespace but from the sudden stopping of the motion. The room spun around him, and his stomach lurched. He clamped his eyes shut and held on to the console handhold. The nausea didn't seem to wear off. He considered putting the helmet back on, but

  didn't want to stand there with the stupid visorless box on his head for the better part of an hour.

  "There's a bottle of water in your console, Skipper," Judison said, not looking at him. "And a couple of vertigo pills."

  McKee took the water but ignored the pills. At last he forced himself to open his e
yes.

  "How was it, sir?"

  "A trip to the amusement park," McKee said.

  He glanced up at the tilted widescreens in the overhead. The forward port display showed the surface force as so many diamond symbols with the approaching torpedoes ellipses. The central forward display showed the camera view from the Predator circling overhead discreetly to the south.

  "Cyclops, how long to impact?" he asked the overhead.

  "Eight minutes, Captain."

  "All right, everyone, tighten it up in here. Torpedo detonation is imminent, and we have to expect that in the next few minutes our weapons may be counterdetected. We also may need to be ready for a visit from our submarine friend. Carry on."

  Where the hell was the Ukrainian submarine? McKee wondered in frustration.

  the room. Around him purred the bass note from the air-handling ducts, the whine from the inertial navigation cabinet and the thrum of the processor modules of the Second Captain.

  He stood behind his command console, his hands in his pockets, nodding at the deck officer. He tapped through his console's software display. The navigation display came up, and it showed them 122 kilometers north of the equator, due north of longitude twenty-five. Grachev had turned the ship from its great circle route from the U.S. East Coast farther east to approach the rendezvous point from due north. This approach was apparently a submarine safety lane, so that the convoy—were they to detect a submerged contact from due north—would know that a sub coming from that direction would be a friendly vessel.