by David Poyer
“I read it that way too, but why station a TBMD-capable ship here for that?”
“Our Aegis picture, primarily, I guess. And our nice beefy cryppie assets.” She blinked, looking worried. “I don’t see this as anything … personal, Captain. They’re just tasking us based on our gear.”
Dan said, getting irritated, “I didn’t say it was ‘personal.’ Where’d you get that? I’m just saying, Mitscher could hold down the air picture. Why keep us here? And where are these additional orders they mention in para five?”
“I checked the LAN in case something got by ’em in Radio. Nothing there yet either.”
“TAO, air: fast movers, Indian, lifting off from Sirsa. Looks like Mirages and MiG-29s. Eight radars so far.”
Dan spun around to the air picture as symbols materialized. The TAO said, “Captain, from the CTs: lot of chatter in Hindi. Something big’s going up.”
Dan grabbed the radio handset. “Going out Fifth Fleet Secure. ComFifth Fleet, this is Savo Actual. Flash, flash, flash. Savo holds multiple fast movers, possibly Mirages and/or MiGs departing Sirsa. Evaluate as outbound raid. Composition eight. Also a spike in HF voice traffic. Over.”
The secure satcomm speaker squealed as the scrambler circuits synchronized. “Savo, this is Fifth Fleet Ops-O. Admiral is en route to the watch floor. Do you have any further information?”
Dan started to key the handset to reply, but the electronic warfare watchstander shouted, “TAO, EW: Multiple airborne radars equating to Mirage F-1 and MiG-29 Strikers powering up over Halwara. Looks like six radars at this time.” Before he could key to pass that, another alert came in. Multiple fast movers were taking off from Bhatinda, too.
“Savo, this is Fleet. Did you copy my last? Over.”
Dan shook himself out of information overload, and keyed. “Savo Actual. Update follows. Designate flight from Sirsa, Raid 1. Raid 2 is outbound from Halwara, composition six. ELINT holds airborne Mirage F-1 and MiG radars. Raid 3 outbound from Bhatinda. No further information at this time. Over.” He glanced at Branscombe. “Get me a distance to the closest raid. I doubt they’re headed for us, but set condition one if they are.”
More squealing. Someone was calling them, but the circuit didn’t sync. Dan let it warble away as over the next few minutes heavy strike packages lifted off from two other Indian air bases as well.
Terranova, at the Aegis console, kept the readouts small, so Dan could keep his eye on the big picture as more and more aircraft rose and headed west. Data points winked into existence on the west side of the border as well. The track supervisor reported multiple aircraft taking off from Pakistani airbases. “Shit, looks like the whole damn PAKAF is going airborne,” she said over the net.
“TAO, EW: Multiple airborne search radars going active all over eastern Pakistan.”
CIC simmered at a low buzz. Dan leaned back, unable to come up with anything concrete he should be doing. Savo’s Standards had just enough range to reach the southernmost elements of the warring air forces, but he had no orders to take sides. Pakistan was still officially a U.S. ally, though drifting toward China. India and the U.S. had been edging closer, in the same incremental, continental-drift motion, but weren’t formally allied.
Staurulakis closed her terminal and stood. “On the bridge?”
“For now.” Dan didn’t want to stay down here, but this was where he ought to be.
He and Branscombe discussed splitting the watch, having Savo keep an eye on the Pakistani coast while Mitscher focused on India. They had to watch out for naval sorties, and any increased activity in coastal defense and naval airfields. If anything hostile to the task group were to develop, they’d see the first signs there.
Unless, of course, they’d been assigned to a sub. Either Indian or Pakistani … or worst of all possible cases, designated as a target to both submarine forces. Which might have something to do with the threat emitter. He wished he had Pittsburgh back. But Youngblood was far to the west, off Karachi, eavesdropping, with the tip of his sensor mast just barely exposed—the inshore surveillance the JCS message had mentioned. The carrier, of course, was far offshore, where any threat could be detected from hundreds of miles away.
While he was stuck here, sixty miles from a quickly escalating hot war. “Dave, how about you coordinate with the TAO on Mitscher. See how much overlap we can develop, and give me a recommendation.”
“Will do, sir.” Branscombe looked on edge. Dan hoped he could depend on him. Next in line was Amy Singhe, but she wasn’t yet totally qualified. And even if she had been, on paper, he didn’t feel absolutely comfortable giving her weapons-release authority in writing, which was what the CO had to do. Every time something happened, Amarpeet made herself the center of the fray. Good, she was aggressive … but that alone didn’t make a skipper confident about trusting his ship to her. She was smart … but that wasn’t all it took either. Bart Danenhower hadn’t been the sharpest knife in the drawer on Horn, and wasn’t the sharpest aboard Savo, but Dan trusted him. What the chief engineer said, got done. No drama. Just a smooth-running department … except of course for the fucking engine-controls back panel grounding issue.
“Captain?” Chief Toan, blinking at the large-screen displays. “If this is a bad time…”
“Hey, Sheriff. Yeah, things’re a little tense just now. Is it important?”
“Well, about the investigation.”
Dan looked at Branscombe; the TAO was on the line to his opposite number two miles away. “I guess, for a minute … what you got?”
“Well, I told you we had another suspect.”
“I remember. Got a pretty good idea, but want to tell me who?”
“The petty officer you brought aboard. The retired sonarman, I mean. How much you know about him?”
Dan sucked a breath. Not what he’d expected. “Carpenter? Uh, he worked for me at our last duty station. Are you saying you suspect Rit?”
“He’s been showing some pictures around that make us wonder about him.”
“What kind of pictures? Of what?”
Toan said, unwillingly, “Of young girls.”
Dan blinked, but believed it. All too readily. “Hard-core?”
“Well, no … topless … beaver shots … that kind of thing. Apparently he’s got a Polaroid collection. Some of ’em from a while ago, looks like.”
“And he’s showed it to somebody down there in Sonar.” Dan blew out. “Rit’s no angel, Chief. He’s gotten in trouble before, ashore. But I’ve never seen him be violent, or resort to force. Paying a couple hundred for a weekend shack-up, that’s more Rit’s style. Old Polaroids … you really see him as a suspect?”
The Vietnamese-American’s face was carefully neutral. “He owns a knife.”
“I gotta say, Chief, most of the sailors in the Navy own a knife. And all the boatswains have to carry one on the job. That make them suspects too?”
“We’re confining Shah because he had a knife.”
Dan shook his head, noting that fifteen of the Indian strike aircraft were closing on Masroor, a Pakistani strip near the coast. His order-of-battle information showed a suspected strike element of nuclear-capable Chinese-built A-5s based there. The callouts suggested that Masroor had a CAP aloft, identified as F-16s. As Aegis updated, they began clicking east as if to intercept. “Not exactly, Sheriff. I’m confining him because he was sniffing around Colón, by her own testimony, and because he lied to us about the knife. Lied sitting right in front of us, with it in his goddamn pocket.”
Toan lowered his voice still more, until it was all but lost in the background rush of the air-conditioning, the mumble of voices. “So … are you directing that Carpenter not be considered a suspect?”
Dan sucked a breath. “Chief, I gotta cut this short and get back on satcomm. If you say he’s a suspect, he’s a suspect. Don’t rule him out based on my say-so. But you’ve got to bring me more than some old snapshots. Has anyone checked out Peeples? The guy who was flipping off his
female petty officer, before she died?”
“We’ve checked Peeples out. There doesn’t seem any reason to—”
“Captain, sorry to interrupt,” Branscombe put in. “You might want to look at CentCom chat.”
Dan excused himself, and Toan left. He logged in on the command desk terminal and scrolled up and down, gleaning, pausing to speed-read an appreciation by an Army colonel on the CentCom staff.
The ground invasion had started. Exercise Divine Weapon had left Indian armored forces already in forward positions. The orders to advance had come shortly after the first casualties were carried out of the Renaissance Mumbai.
To the colonel, it looked like the deep offensive Indian planners had practiced over and over: a blitzkrieg-type combined-arms assault that counted on surprise, air strikes, and massive conventional firepower to overwhelm the Pakistani army. Two gigantic armored spearheads were racing west, spring-loaded from their exercise positions. He thought the Indians would most likely try to reach the Indus River, at which point they would hook left and right to encircle and destroy the surrounded Pakistanis. The seized territory would be used to bargain for action against the militant groups that had attacked Mumbai. Meanwhile, air strikes would attempt to decapitate Pakistani command, control, and communications, in a replay of U.S. “shock and awe” on Baghdad.
The Indians envision it as a limited incursion for limited goals, the colonel concluded. But Islamabad may not see it that way.
Dan rubbed his face, and surfed. A SEAL team had recovered a Special Forces soldier held hostage in Afghanistan, but aside from that, the news from home was all bad. Wall Street trading was still closed. The crash had expanded to the banks. The president had closed them, a step not taken since 1933, and called an emergency meeting of the Federal Reserve.
Another cyberattack had corrupted the four central servers that processed transactions for the self-service automatic pumps at gas stations, halting truck and delivery service across the country. And a major fire had shut down a smokeless propellant plant in St. Marks, Florida, one of only two in the country and the one that supplied over 90 percent of the Army’s needs. St. Marks made not just powder for small-arms ammunition, but propellants for mortars, artillery, naval guns, and gas generators—like the ones in automobile air bags or, as it happened, in Savo’s missiles.
He sat motionless in the whirring, humming chill air as the hinges of the doors of Mars creaked and began to swing open. It wasn’t clear yet, with whom. But the United States, no less than India and Pakistan, was at war. It would be waged in the shadows, before flaring into open conflict.
His mess attendant, at his elbow. “Cap’n. Gonna want evening meal up here?”
Dan tried to work the tension out of his shoulders. Remembering how Singhe had massaged them. Wishing those soft yet strong hands could dig into his muscles once more. “Yeah, I guess. From now on until further notice, Longley.”
* * *
OVER the next twelve hours, he slumped in the chair, or alternately paced the aisles as Savo pitched and rolled. The Indian spearheads advanced and the Pakistani defenses began to dent in, visible on the large-screen displays as a froth of low-level air contacts over the forward edge of the battle area. The high-side chat posted near-real-time inputs from DIA and play-by-play commentary by the Army. The Indians had also embedded TV crews in their forward elements, and now and then Donnie called to say he’d Tivo’d a clip from the front lines, rebroadcast over commercial TV. General Zhang had left Mumbai, flown out in a PLAF transport with escorts from both the Indian air force and the Chinese. Still alive, the bastard … the spy who’d orchestrated, years before, the systematic theft of U.S. military secrets, and ordered the murder of an innocent young woman.
Scattered cyberattacks and sabotage were crippling aircraft production facilities at General Dynamics and the two submarine shipyards left in production, Electric Boat and Newport News. Too late now to regret the paring away of the defense industrial base. If open war came, would he even be able to get ammunition?
0510, and a message from Fifth Fleet. The replenishment ship Stuttgart, en route to OpArea Endive, had been instructed by her national authorities to turn back toward the Arabian Sea. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Problem?” Mills said, beside him now in the TAO chair.
Dan blinked; when had Matt taken over from Dave? He was getting fuzzy. Weak, forgetful—the aftereffects of the crud. He tried to squeeze his tired brain back into something resembling alertness. “Uh, it’s Stuttgart. Our oiler’s been called off.”
“Fuck.” Mills rattled his keyboard, stared at the message. “Fuck.”
“Let CHENG know. See if there’s anything he can do to cut consumption even more. And query Mitscher, see what their fuel percentages are. They’ve got to be just as hard up.”
He got up and paced again, hands locked in the small of his back. Stopped behind Terranova, who was worshiping at the Aegis console. Dr. Noblos snored a few feet away, the Johns Hopkins rider sleeping in a chair. Savo rolled, and Dan staggered before catching himself on a console.
Without Stuttgart, his situation was critical. Savo had an intel mission? Fine; the cryppies and the EWs were sending steady reports. But so far, neither the Pakistanis nor the Indians seemed to be taking the war to sea.
So where were his orders, and what was he still doing in a war zone so dangerous that the Germans refused to send a ship into it?
A hell of a lot of questions. But damn few answers. Or maybe one: with everything going down back in the States, they’d forgotten he was out here.
In which case, he’d better start thinking about when to pull up stakes and head for calmer waters. In both the literal and the figurative senses.
Pushing through the curtain into Sonar, he stood behind Carpenter and Zotcher as they scanned the amber pulsing patterns. Mitscher, streaming her low-frequency tail, would probably get the first indication of anyone bird-dogging them, a Pakistani Agosta or Daphne, or an Indian Kilo-class or Type 1500. But if one succeeded in getting in close, his own team, pinging active, could determine whether they lived or died.
He looked down at Carpenter’s skull, the pale scalp visible between gray thinning hairs. He couldn’t envision the old sailor dragging the wiry, athletic Colón into a fan room.
He closed his eyes and stood swaying to the roll. Remembering what Szerenci had said, and how the nations of Europe had been sucked, one after the other, into the maelstrom. Then took a deep breath, propelled himself back out into CIC, and seized Noblos’s shoulder. “Bill. Bill?”
The physicist jerked awake. “Christ! I was napping.”
“Sorry. A question. You said we’d up our P-sub-K the closer inshore we got.”
“Correct. Essentially.” Noblos rubbed his eyes.
“It’s a straight-line relationship? Or geometrical?”
“Uh … neither, but your first miles closer are going to up your probability of kill more than your last.” He coughed, and Dan remembered he too had had the crud. Earlier than the rest, though. “But that wasn’t my recommendation. The actual recommendation—”
“Was to leave station. I remember.”
“And we should, Captain. We really should. This isn’t our war. And your chances, if you attempt to intervene, are not good.”
Dan started to reply, something about not always being so negative, but bit it back. He needed Noblos. Didn’t have to like him, but needed him. “Well, goddamn it, I’m going to close the range. Just in case.”
“You’re accepting additional risk.”
“I understand that,” Dan said. Keeping the lid on his temper. He strolled back to the command desk. “Matt! Tell the OOD, come to zero-four-zero. Let’s get in a little closer.”
“Um … yessir … how much closer?”
“Not you too, Matt. Just get us in there. Thirty miles?”
The tall lieutenant’s voice was reluctant. But he said, “Thirty miles from shore. Aye aye, sir. I’ll pass that to the br
idge.”
* * *
0530. The ship leaned and creaked, differently now, with the seas nearly dead astern. In the aft camera, up on the leftmost screen, waves towered black in the foreglow of dawn. He stood watching for minutes, mind blank, leaning over the shoulder of the surface warfare coordinator at his console back near Sonar.
At last, reluctantly, he disengaged his attention from the endless parade of swells. Went back to his command chair, but hesitated before sitting again. His butt ached like a dying tooth. His brain felt as if it had been removed, frozen for ten thousand years, then reinstalled. Half an hour until the mess line opened. He muttered, “Matt, I’m fading. You got it. I’m gonna lie down for twenty, in my sea cabin. Then—”
A digitally generated double chime bonged from the Aegis area. “Launch cuing,” Terranova announced, almost primly.
Dan wheeled. “From where?”
“Link 16, from Rainbow.” The Saudi-based AWACS.
“We need LPE, impact point, area of uncertainty,” Dan rapped out. “Get the geo plot up.”
The middle panel blanked, then relit. Eastern Pakistan. Western India. Launch point, impact-point prediction, area of uncertainty. The last two he could ignore for a few more minutes. They were only guesses, until first-stage burnout and weapon pitchover. ALIS didn’t have a detect yet. Just the heads-up from the Air Force bird, orbiting hundreds of miles to the west.
Suddenly he didn’t feel sleepy. But everything inside his head still seemed to be running more slowly, like a computer with too many programs open. He breathed deep, pinched his cheek. Didn’t seem to help.
The alert-script buzzer went off. “Profile plot, designate Meteor Alfa,” Terranova murmured. “Meteor” was shorthand for a ballistic missile in the air. “Rapid climb rate, but not as fast as a solid-fueled rocket. Size and acceleration profile consistent with Ghauri type. Passing angels fifty. Identify as TBM. ID as hostile. Stand by … ALIS has track … computing trajectory and IPP.”
Beside him Mills murmured, “Ghauri’s a liquid-fueled single-stage. Derived from a North Korean design. Transporter-erector launched. Nuke capable, but no one knows if it actually has a nuclear warhead. Spins early in the transonic regime, to increase accuracy.”