by David Poyer
“We got to get out of here.”
“Shit, I wish we was in uniform.”
“Not me, man. I just wish we didn’t have—”
A shot boomed out somewhere, and they realized they’d been hearing them since they came out of the basement. In the distance, but growing louder. “Oh, shit,” moaned somebody.
Baby J shoved him and he started to run. They sprinted past the crowd. Then a side street opened up, almost lightless. They panted down it, only to halt at a dead end. The roar and crackle of flames, and an orange glow wavered through the empty windows of an abandoned building.
“Which way to the ship? Shit, we got to get back to the ship,” said Lightbulb.
“Hemmie? You got us into this, you motherfucker. How the fuck do we get out of here?”
“Through here,” yelled Hemmery, pulling at a sheet of rusted corrugated metal.
They squirmed through onto a littered concrete floor that smelled of shit and smoke, then out another hole onto the street beyond. Here, store fronts had been smashed open. People inside were heaving out boxes. Others were carrying out armloads of coats and dresses. The night glistened in pieces on the asphalt. Broken mannequins, black and white and brown, lay in the gutter.
A patrol car turned the corner. The looters waited till it was almost on them, then scattered. The police emerged warily in riot gear.
Suddenly, a shot cracked directly over the sailors’ heads, from a window or a roof, and one of the police spun and collapsed. The others ducked, propping their barrels over the hood and trunk. A ragged volley, flashes, and pellets whacked and whined around them as they ran.
THEY fled through burning streets and back alleys till they found railroad tracks. They picked their way along the sleepers until the weird yellow glow of the interstate expressway rose ahead of them. When they climbed a chain-link fence out of the switchyard, they found themselves on damp grass while traffic went by overhead. They straggled up the embankment, holding their sides.
Behind them, the crescendo of sirens and the popping of shots was building. Something huge was on fire off to the west, immense clouds of inky smoke flickering from beneath, like a smoldering volcano.
They crested the slope and jumped the guardrail, to find themselves on the I-95/A1A interchange. Williams started trying to wave down cars, but they speeded up instead of slowing. Police cars keened by, headed toward the sound of gunfire. Then a truck veered right at them, and they scrambled over the rail as it roared by, spitting gravel, the driver’s fist thrust out the window.
IT took two hours to walk back to Port Boulevard, sticking to cover, running when they had to cross a lighted street. East of Gibson Park, two Hispanic-looking men in a van fired a pistol at them but missed. When they got to the causeway, they found it floodlighted and empty, the gates closed and locked. Port security cars were parked across the road inside. As they trudged up, the guards deployed with drawn revolvers, shouting out at them to leave.
“We’re from the Navy ship. Let us in.”
“Go to hell. Keep your hands in sight! Get out of here or we’ll call the cops.”
Shrobo thought Williams sounded tired as he said, “Okay, Hank. Here’s my ID. Wipe your face off so that it looks nice and white. Then go up there and tell them to let us in.”
41
DAN stood on the wing, clutching at the splinter shield and looking back at a city on fire. A ceiling of smoke masked out the stars, towering above the lights as they slowly dropped astern. Even from out here, he could hear the rattle of gunfire, the seesaw lament of dozens of sirens floating across the smooth reflective water of the last hour before dawn. My God, he thought. What was happening to Miami? To the country?
Then his mind leapt, not to what they were leaving behind but to what lay ahead.
Barrett was on her way to sea again. The orders said “Get under way on receipt of this message,” but Leighty had held on until the last possible minute to get as many men as possible back aboard. Even then, Ensign Steel had come running across the hardstand, weaving between the containers, then hesitated, seeing the lines in and the ship already beginning to move ahead, the black water churning between steel sides and steel bulkheading. Then he’d backed off, getting set for a run and leap. But Leighty had leaned out, motioning him angrily to stay put, not to jump. And luckily, he hadn’t. He just stood watching, a bereft figure growing gradually smaller and more distant under the salmon pink pierhead lights until they lost sight of him as they rounded Lummis Island and steadied up for Government Cut.
Which they were sliding through now, the Art Deco buildings on South Beach a wall of pastel light drifting noiselessly and smoothly down the port side. Beyond their distinct geometries, the huge hotels of the Strip glittered like a column of great liners. Dan took off his cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. He was glad he wasn’t driving. The fresh sea air was clearing his head, but he still felt drunk.
“This is getting to be a habit,” Cannon joked when he went back into the pilothouse.
“What is?”
“Getting under way on short notice.”
“Oh, yeah. Seems like it.” He looked around the darkened, silent bridge, at the shadows of officers and men at their places; the softly glowing indicators at the helm console; the compass card trembling in its alcohol bath, steady, steady, quiet, quiet, as the lights moved past; the captain’s motionless silhouette forward of the chart table. Whatever was happening astern, whatever might happen ahead, here at least was an island of order, sanity, dedication. He lowered his voice a little more. “Where we headed, Dave?”
“Back to Gitmo.”
“What? You’re shitting me. They did an emergency recall just so we could—”
“Cool it, cool it. I was joking.” The navigator broke off as Morris fed him a round of bearings on Fisher Island, the North Jetty, and the Miami Beach Light. Dan waited as he passed the fix to Kessler. “We’re going to Cay Sal,” Cannon muttered, pricking off the distance to the next turn.
“I heard something on the news about that. That’s down where we just were.”
“Right. West of Area B, where we were stationed.” Cannon jerked his head aft. “Pub one forty-seven, page nineteen. I just looked it up.”
Dan went back into the chart room. He pulled the curtain shut and clicked on the light, waited for the red flicker to steady, then searched the shelves for the Coastal Pilot.
2.11 Cay Sal Bank and environs—Cay Sal Bank (23° 50’N., 80° 05’W.) is an isolated and comparatively extensive shoal water area in a somewhat central position with Santaren Channel separating it from Great Bahamas Bank W side, with Nicholas Channel setting it apart from the NE coast of Cuba and with the Straits of Florida dividing it from the U.S. mainland and the Florida Keys. It is roughly in the form of a triangle and has a number of above-water landforms scattered everywhere along its edges save along its S or Nicholas Channel side, where, however, a cursory examination has reported the existence of numerous rocky heads.
… Cay Sal (23° 42’N., 80° 25′W.), in the SW part of Cay Sal Bank and the only inhabited landform is about one mile long. It consists of an approximately circular, low-lying islet which, rising to a narrow range of sand hills on its NE side, has in its interior portions a large salt pond commonly replenished by heavy wind-driven seas that broach the islet along its SW side. It is covered with stunted palm trees and marked by several buildings standing on its W side. Indifferent to poor anchorage is available in 12.8m (7 fm), sand, in a position charted close W of the islet where the play of tidal and ocean currents can be considerable … .
Interesting, he thought. But it sounded totally godforsaken—no port facilities, an undependable-sounding anchorage. There wasn’t even any mention of fresh water.
When he looked out again, the glow and blaze of Miami Beach was slipping astern and the great dark sea was opening its jaws ahead. He staggered as the deck began to roll, denting his shoulder on the corner of the plot board. It occurred to him that i
t wasn’t doing his professional image any good hanging around breathing margarita fumes, so he felt his way gingerly to the ladder down.
Halfway to his stateroom, he changed his mind.
Somehow he wasn’t surprised to find all the lights on in the computer room. He stood among the humming gray slabs of the mainframes, looking at Doc DOS’s back as he hunched over the monitor console. The air was icy, electric. For a moment, he thought Shrobo was alone. Then Matt Williams’s voice echoed from the equipment room. “Which listing did you say?”
“Module thirty-five.”
“Hi,” said Dan when Williams came out. “Did the other CE division guys get back in time, do you know?”
“Far’s I know, sir,” said the petty officer. Dan noticed he was still in civvies. The cuffs of his trousers were ragged and his sneakers were caked with ash and mud.
“We’re back at sea. Time to shift back into uniform, Petty Officer Williams.”
“Yes, sir,” said Williams absently, staring at the screen. Dan didn’t insist. If anything big was building, this was where he wanted them, and what they wore was distinctly secondary. “Is the system coming up?” he asked them.
“We’re cracking it,” said Shrobo. The civilian pushed his stool back from the console, but the legs caught on the rubber matting. Dan caught him before he went over backward. Then he sniffed. “Do I smell alcohol?” he said to Williams.
“We was cleaning the tape heads, sir; that must be what you smell.”
“Uh-huh. You said you were cracking it?”
“That’s right.” Shrobo pointed to the screen. “We finally figured out how. A powerful as hell decryption algorithm.”
Dan couldn’t see anything but flickering numbers, so fast that they were only a blur. Only once every minute or so did they freeze, suddenly, and the printer in the corner whirred to life and tapped out a single digit.
“How does it work?”
“Well, Lieutenant, let’s just say it’s an overlap strategy, executed with a random system of replacement. We can’t unzip the Crud without destroying it, so we decode it by an empirical, bruteforce method.” Shrobo examined him through his glasses. “I can go into more detail, if you like.”
“No, that’s good. Does this mean we’ll have Elmo back in operation pretty soon?”
“What?” Shrobo blinked.
“The combat system. Will it—”
“Oh. Yeah. Yes, we should have it all broken in a couple of days. Then we build a search string, a search-and-destroy program. It will automatically delete and overwrite the Crud where it finds it. Q.E.D., your virus is history.”
“Good,” said Dan, but he didn’t make it too enthusiastic. So far, they’d “fixed” the thing three times. No point in celebrating till it actually ran clean for a while. “But for the time being … if we’re required to go operational, we’ll just run with the reducedcapability program. Okay? Till you tell me you actually have Version Three sanitized.”
Neither of them answered. The screen froze, the printer whirred up, and one letter tapped out. He went over and looked at the output, but it was in hex—just a string of ones and zeros, in groups of four: 1011 0100 1111 1110. “What is this, again?” he asked them.
“That’s the … zipped code, sir—the part we couldn’t get into before. It’ll … take a while, but we’ll have a printout of the whole thing.”
“Okay, great,” Dan repeated. He looked up, but they were huddled around the monitor like obstetricians at a difficult birth. He gave up and went below.
“OFFICERS’ call.”
The 1MC woke him three hours later. He blinked, still lying in his bunk, then jumped out, cursing, and threw his uniform on. As he pounded up the ladder, he thought, I’m getting sick of this. Always late, feeling like shit. He only vaguely remembered the night before, dinner, the reggae bar, drinking, the long conversation with Harper, more drinks. What had they been talking about? He forgot it as he slid into the front rank. Vysotsky gave him a disapproving look. “Mr. Lenson,” he noted hoarsely.
“Morning, sir.”
The ship plowed through a green and blue morning, pitching to southeastern seas. The wind was warm and brisk. Far to the west, Florida was a green smear. The intakes were whining and Vysotsky had to shout. “Now that everyone’s here … Listen up, you’ll want to put this out to your troops. Why we had to cut short our liberty.
“We are now en route to the Florida Straits area, west of the Cay Sal Bank, in order to join a task force being formed there.
“Background is as follows. Due to the current, many of the refugees leaving the north coast of Cuba were set in large numbers onto the Cay Sal Bank. That’s a group of low cays, rocks, and reefs midway between Cuba and Florida. Uninhabited, except for a few fishermen. They’re part of the Bahamas, but Cuba has tried to dispute ownership based on historic claims.
“Late yesterday, Cuban forces landed on Cay Sal and Elbow Cay. Havana has announced that they landed to ‘restore order.’ Elbow Cay is only fifty miles from U.S. territory. It’s ideally situated for a number of things, including radar stations and drug running.
“I understand there are diplomatic protests and so forth being made, but that’s it in a nutshell.
“The reason for the formation of the task force is that, as you know, the Kirov and her associated escorts have been in port in Cienfuegos for the past few weeks. That force has now sortied. It’s reported heading west, presumably for the Yucatán Channel. We suspect its ultimate destination is … the Cay Sal Bank.”
Vysotsky gave it a few seconds, letting it sink in. And the warm wind, the speed of the ship as it crashed southward seemed suddenly ominous.
“There’ll be a meeting of all tactical action officers in CIC right after quarters. We’ll be going over the operation plan and rules of engagement that came in this morning. As far as the troops go, we need to tell them it’s time to put the things they tried to teach us at Gitmo into effect. We’ll go to Condition Three around noon and expect to reach the rendezvous point around fifteen hundred. Postpone as much routine work as you can, and make sure we’re battleready, including prefiring checks.
“Now, I know there’ll be loads of questions, but I’d rather have you hold them till the department heads get their brief and get the guys turned to.”
DAN shaved quickly, put a fresh shirt on, and took his foul-weather jacket along when he went back up to Combat. When he got there, Cannon and Giordano were already waiting. Herb Lauderdale was going over the radio-remote setup with Chief Kennedy. Quintanilla came out of Sonar carrying a message board. Norm Cash and Burdette Shuffert showed up a few seconds later. CIC had no real briefing area, so they gathered around the darkened glass tabletop of the dead-reckoning console.
“Attention on—”
“Carry on,” said Leighty, coming in behind Vysotsky. He was still in trop whites, but they were rumpled. Dan realized he’d been up all night long, presumably studying the execute order and the other messages that had started to follow it. One thing the U.S. Navy did was communicate, he thought. Usually to excess. The sheaf on Quintanilla’s clipboard was already an inch thick. The operations officer looked tired, too.
“All right, Mr. Quintanilla, why don’t you kick off,” Leighty said.
“Yes, sir.” Quintanilla put his clipboard carefully on the glass.
“Okay … The situation is basically what the exec put out a few minutes ago at officers’ call. The Kirov battle group has left Cienfuegos, presumably intending to round the western tip of Cuba, then turn north. We’re joining an ad hoc task force gearing up to block them if they try to intervene in whatever develops at Cay Sal.
“The, uh, opposing forces are as follows. The Kirov, a nuclearpowered battle cruiser; Tallin, a guided-missile cruiser; two Krivak -class frigates; and accompanying them, one Boris Chilikin-class replenishment ship. There may be a Victor-class nuclear attack submarine in company. This group’s most effective weapons are the SS-N-nineteens on Kirov. Range,
two hundred and forty nautical miles; guidance, inertial navigation with active radar homing. Closer in, both Tallin and the two Krivaks carry SS-N-fourteens. We estimate their range at around forty miles, so they’re basically the equivalent of our Harpoon. Again, the greatest threat is the SS-N-nineteens. Kirov can launch a wave of twenty, programmed to arrive simultaneously from different directions. They come in at Mach one point six and carry a fifteen-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead.”
He cleared his throat and flipped to the first tab in the clipboard as Dan thought about what nearly a ton of high explosive would do to a thin-skinned ship like Barrett. “This is the execute order from Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet to Commander, Carrier Group Two, directing him to activate Task Force One forty-two. Effective at oh-one hundred this morning, we are working for Rear Admiral Keith Larson. His flagship will be USS Lexington.”
“Not Lexington!”
“The training carrier?”
Vysotsky grated, “The ops officer is trying to brief. Do you mind, Mr. Giordano?”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Lexington’s the only carrier available on short notice. The others are all either deployed or in the yards for overhaul. At least she’s close, Pensacola. She’s embarking aircraft now.
“My impression, sir, is that this is a hastily scraped-up force. So far, it consists of Lex, us, and Dahlgren, two reserve frigates, Voge and Bronstein, and a tanker, Canisteo. Also one of the action addressees on this message is the Munro, although it’s not really clear how the Coast Guard’s going to fit into the command organization.”
They discussed the cutter for a few seconds. Quintanilla pointed out that Coast Guard ships, though they had guns, were limited in communications capacity, could not come up on NTDS, and had no real antiaircraft capability. “She might end up being more a liability than an asset, sir.”
“There’s our missile sponge,” Lauderdale joked.