by Jeff Edwards
The wind was hot in Bowie’s face, and he was beginning to look forward to the brief stretch of cool air he would find in the starboard break. He checked an urge to put on a burst of speed. Running in the heat was all about pacing yourself. Patience, he thought. Patience.
He glanced at the supertanker again. Oil. In the end, everything came down to oil. The light-sweet crude that these fields held in such abundance was easily fractionalized into kerosene, diesel fuel, and gasoline—the very lifeblood of the industrialized world.
Bowie had done an experiment with a globe once. He had discovered that he could cover all of the Arabian Gulf and most of the OPEC nations under the tips of two fingers. The idea that such a disproportionately small area had the power to influence events all over the planet was frightening. When you factored in the region’s political instability, the whole situation got scary as hell.
Bowie reached the boat deck and ran past the RHIBs, the ship’s two Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.
Suddenly, an alarm sounded: a jarring electronic klaxon that pounded its discordant rhythm out of every topside speaker. Bowie’s easy jog turned instantly to a sprint. He was already into the starboard break and opening the outer door to the airlock when the alarm was replaced by the amplified voice of the Officer of the Deck.
“General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. Set Material Condition Zebra throughout the ship. Commanding officer, your presence is requested on the bridge.”
Five seconds later, Bowie was climbing the first of the four steeply inclined ladders that would take him to the bridge. He passed a dozen Sailors, all headed in different directions, toward their battle stations. Those who got caught in his path were quick to leap out of the way. One did not delay the captain under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when he was headed toward the bridge for General Quarters.
Bowie’s running shoes pounded up the aluminum steps two at a time. He hadn’t approved any training drills for this morning, so the emergency (whatever it was) had to be real.
He nearly ducked into his at-sea cabin to grab a set of coveralls and a pair of boots, but the OOD’s amplified voice came over the 1-MC speakers again. “Away the Small Craft Action Team. Now set Tac-Sit One. This is not a drill.”
Bowie put on a burst of speed as he hit the last ladder. Screw the coveralls. If the OOD was declaring Tactical Situation One, he was expecting immediate combat. Something was getting ugly fast, but what in the hell could it be?
* * *
The bridge on board Towers was a break with a centuries-old tradition in shipbuilding. In place of a customary “walk-around” style pilothouse that ran from one side of the ship to the other, the Towers’ design offered a small angular module that protruded from the leading edge of the superstructure like a faceted bump.
Seen from the inside, it resembled the cockpit of a jumbo jet. Two contoured chairs, each surrounded by instrument-packed control consoles, dominated the small amount of floor space. The forward-most of these chairs belonged to the Helmsman, a junior petty officer whose primary duty was to steer the ship and issue speed commands to its engines. Behind the Helmsman sat the Officer of the Deck; his chair was mounted on a platform to give him an unrestricted view through the angled bridge windows. In another break with nautical tradition, there were no chairs for the commanding officer, or his second in command, the executive officer.
Bowie stepped through the last watertight door and edged into the cramped control room. The Helmsman’s voice announced his presence before he had closed and dogged the door. “The captain’s on the bridge!”
Bowie squeezed in next to the OOD’s chair and grabbed the overhead handrail that was the only real provision for visitors. He began to shiver almost instantly as cool air from the circulation vents hit his sweat-drenched skin. “What have you got, Brett?”
Lieutenant Brett Parker looked up from his console. His boyishly good-looking features were taut, his normally mischievous green eyes dark and intense. He pointed out the window toward a pair of dark shapes skimming rapidly across the water: small boats, moving fast. The Bridge Heads-Up Display projected targeting symbols on the inside of the windows, superimposing red diamond-shaped brackets around each of the rapidly moving boats. “Sledgehammers, sir. Two of them, off the starboard bow—about a thousand yards out. Looks like they came in on the far side of that tanker and pretty much used it for cover until they got in close.”
Sledgehammer was the current Navy code word for a motorboat armed with an over-the-shoulder missile launcher.
Bowie felt his stomach tighten a fraction. “Damn.” He stared at the target symbols, and then at the small boats behind them. “Are you sure they’re Sledgehammers?”
“Pretty much, sir. They’ve made two high-speed runs on us already, sheering off suddenly both times. It looked like they were practicing missile approaches. And my Helmsman thought he saw a laser flash on the last pass.”
“I did, sir,” the Helmsman said. “A red dot, dancing on the side of the gun mount. I think it was a targeting laser, sir.”
Bowie nodded and looked around. “Did anybody else see it?”
The OOD shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“I saw the tanker when I was out there,” Bowie said. “But I didn’t see anything else.”
The Helmsman piped up immediately. “With all due respect, Captain, I know what I saw.”
The corners of Bowie’s mouth curled up in the faintest hint of a smile. “Relax, son, I believe you. I was just wondering if anyone saw a laser from the second boat.”
A speaker crackled in the overhead. “Captain? This is the TAO. Are you watching these guys on MMS?”
The voice belonged to the ship’s Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Terri Sikes, currently standing duty as the Tactical Action Officer.
Bowie pressed the talk button on the comm box. “Not yet, Terri. Give us half a sec to get it punched up.” He nodded toward his OOD.
Lieutenant Parker tapped out a rapid-fire sequence of keys on his wraparound control console. A burst of video static blossomed on one of the three display screens and then instantly resolved itself into a coherent image: a direct video feed from the mast-mounted sight, a high-definition video camera mounted near the top of the mast.
The video was black-and-white, but the picture was exceptionally crisp. The camera was locked on the nearer of the two speedboats. It was a cigarette boat: long and dagger-shaped, very fast and very low to the water. A continuous rooster tail of spray shot out from under the stern of the narrow fiberglass hull. The image jerked occasionally as the boat took a dip or a roll that the Towers’ optical tracking computer hadn’t anticipated.
Suddenly, the image froze and the Tactical Action Officer’s voice came over the speaker. “There!” she said. “Right there, sir. Do you see that?”
Bowie pressed the talk button on the comm box. “What am I looking for?”
A pixelized oval appeared on the screen, drawn in by the TAO using a light pen. The area inside the oval magnified itself to show a grainy image of the interior of the cigarette boat. Two men were visible, or people, anyway—it was impossible to tell more from the frozen image. One of the figures was hunched over a console, obviously driving. The second figure was half-crouched, hanging on to the windscreen with one hand. His other hand was wrapped around a rectangular object draped over his right shoulder.
Bowie’s stomach tightened another notch. “Got it.”
The oval disappeared, and the image leapt back to life. “Sir,” the TAO’s voice said, “that’s got to be a missile launcher. I think those bastards are going to light us up. Request permission to engage.”
Bowie watched the screen. “Not yet,” he said.
The boats were circling back around for another pass at the ship.
“Two boats,” Bowie said to himself. “No markings. They’re not terrorists, or they would have shot at us on the first pass. There’s no way to tell if they�
��re Siraji or Iranian, but it’s a decent bet that it’s one of the two. I don’t think anybody else around here is mad enough to shoot at us.”
Lieutenant Parker cleared his throat. “Uh, Captain … I have to agree with the TAO. Those boats are showing classic Sledgehammer attack profiles. We need to take them out before they get off a shot at us.”
An enunciator on the Helmsman’s console beeped once, lighting a green tattletale on his display panel. A second later, it beeped again, lighting another tattletale. “Material Condition Zebra is set throughout the ship,” the Helmsman announced. “All gunnery stations are reporting manned and ready for Tac-Sit One.”
Bowie kept his eyes on the black-and-white video. Something was funny here. If the cigarette boats really were Sledgehammers, why hadn’t they attacked yet? “I’m not sure that’s a missile launcher.”
“What else could it be, sir?”
Bowie glanced up for a half-second into the eyes of his Officer of the Deck. “It could be a video camera, Brett.”
The OOD’s voice nearly squeaked. “But they trained a laser on us. They’re targeting us, sir. It’s obvious.”
Bowie shook his head. “What’s obvious is that they’re trying to provoke us.”
The TAO’s voice came over the speaker. “Sledgehammers are inbound. I say again, Sledgehammers are inbound. Request permission to engage, sir!”
Bowie watched the video screen as the cigarette boats raced through the water toward his ship. The conditioned air of the bridge was turning his sweat-dampened skin to ice.
Sledgehammers were every skipper’s nightmare. They were the poor man’s navy: a boat, a shoulder-launched weapon, one idiot to drive, and another to shoot. Presto: instant navy. Not enough firepower to take out a warship, but more than enough to damage it. And even modest damage to a U.S. warship would be an incalculable propaganda coup for a third-rate nation.
Of course, if he blew the boats away and it turned out that they were not armed, then that would be a propaganda coup against the United States as well. The local nutcases weren’t above sending out boats armed only with bulky old-fashioned video cameras and harmless laser pointers, hoping to spook a warship into attacking them.
Bowie’s mouth felt suddenly dry. His intuition told him that the boats would have attacked by now if they were going to. He hoped like hell that his intuition wasn’t about to get somebody killed. “Negative. Do not engage.” Bowie could feel the crew on the bridge stiffen.
A flicker of red light shot through a side window and played around the interior of the bridge for a split-second before vanishing.
The Helmsman shouted, “Targeting laser!”
“Do not engage!” Bowie repeated. He waited about two heartbeats and then added, “I have the Conn. All engines ahead flank! Right full rudder!”
The ship heeled over instantly as the Helmsman executed his orders. “Sir, my rudder is right thirty degrees! No new course given. All engines ahead flank!”
The big destroyer surged forward as all four of her gas turbine engines wound up to top speed, pouring 105,000 horsepower into each of her twin propeller shafts. The acoustic suppression systems muted the rising scream of the turbines to a barely audible wail, like the sound of a jet taking off in the distance.
“Captain,” the OOD said, “that’s going to take us right into them!”
“You’re damned right it is!” Bowie snapped. “If they want to play chicken, then we’ll show them how we do it back home!”
The course change spun the bow of the ship around toward the charging cigarette boats. When they were centered in the front bridge window, Bowie said, “Steady as she goes.”
“Helmsman aye! She goes two-seven-three, sir!”
Bowie nodded. “Very well. Brett, stand by to launch chaff.”
“Sir, we’re too close for chaff. It’ll be on the other side of the boats before it blooms.”
“I know that,” Bowie said. “It’s not worth a damn against laser-guided weapons anyway. I just want to scare the shit out of them.” He pressed the talk button on the comm box. “Terri, I want every gun on this ship pointed at those boats! Now!”
“Yes, sir!”
Bowie watched the boats through the front bridge window. They were getting larger fast, the range closing rapidly as they barreled toward a head-on collision with his ship. There would be no collision; Bowie was sure of that. The boats would sheer off, or the reinforced steel bow of the destroyer would crush their fragile fiberglass hulls like eggshells. They would turn, all right. But would they launch missiles first? And if they did, what would they target? The bridge windows? That’s what he would do in their position.
The TAO’s voice came over the speaker. “All guns are trained on the Sledgehammers, sir.”
Bowie glared at the onrushing boats. “All right, you bastards,” he said quietly. “Let’s see what you’ve got …”
He waited another five seconds while the boats grew ever larger in the window. Then he said, “Launch chaff, port and starboard!”
Lieutenant Parker’s response was nearly instantaneous; he slammed a button on his console. “Chaff away, sir!”
Blunt projectiles rocketed out of the forward RBOC launchers. Super Rapid-Blooming Overboard Chaff rounds hurtled through the air, passing over the charging cigarette boats and exploding on the far side of them, littering the sky with aluminum dust and metallic confetti.
Designed to fool enemy radar with false targets, the chaff had no electronic effect on the small boats, since they had no radar. But the effect Bowie wanted was psychological, not electronic.
He tried to imagine what his ship looked like to the men aboard the cigarette boats: 9,794 tons of steel rushing down on them like a freight train; chaff exploding overhead; and every gun on board pointed down their throats.
His grip tightened on the handrail above his head. “Come on, you bastards, turn …”
There wasn’t a sound on the ship except the muted wail of the turbine engines. Everyone on the bridge seemed to be holding their breath.
The boats grew larger in the window. They couldn’t be more than fifty yards away now. This was not going to work. The boats weren’t going to sheer away. They were waiting to get close enough to make their missiles count.
Bowie glanced up at his Officer of the Deck. The young lieutenant’s eyes were locked on him.
Bowie pressed the talk button on the comm box. “Stand by your guns.”
The boats weren’t going to turn. The bastards were calling his bluff.
A chill washed down his spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning or his damp running clothes. It had come on him suddenly, the moment that every military commander secretly dreads. The crux of a decision in which there was no good choice, where both action and inaction were equally likely to lead to disaster.
If he sank the boats and they turned out to be unarmed, the United States would find itself neck-deep in an international incident, and Bowie’s career would be over. A lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, gone in a matter of seconds. It would play out in the U.S. media as monumental incompetence at best, and criminal disregard for human life at worst. In the current political climate, the Arab press wouldn’t bother with half-measures; they’d cut straight to the chase and call it murder. And, under all the flack and the political posturing, four men would be dead. Four men who might not be guilty of any crime more serious than harassing an American warship.
On the other hand, if he didn’t shoot the boats and they did turn out to be armed, the safety of his ship and crew were at risk. This could end with some of his men going home in body bags. And, of considerably lesser importance, his career would still be at an end.
How ironic was that? Ten minutes earlier, he’d been feeling sorry for himself, decrying the lack of excitement in his future career prospects. Now, he was about to watch his career self-destruct, and it was the very least of his worries.
He watched the boats continue to close. His first du
ty was to protect his crew. He couldn’t wait for the Sledgehammers to take the first shot. It wasn’t really a very hard decision to make, but it hurt like hell to have to throw away everything he had ever worked for.
He opened his mouth to give the order to fire, but he was interrupted by a shout from the Helmsman. “They’re turning, sir! They’re running away!”
Bowie looked at the boats. Sure enough, they had peeled off and appeared to be running. He let out a breath that he didn’t even realize he’d been holding.
The TAO keyed her mike for a few seconds to let him hear the cheers coming from the crew in Combat Information Center. In the background, a male voice cut loose with a rebel yell.
The boats grew smaller in the window. Bowie watched them until he was certain that they weren’t coming back. Then he turned to his Officer of the Deck. “Stand us down from General Quarters.”
The young lieutenant was still a little pale. “Yes, sir!”
Bowie looked down at the cold, sweat-drenched T-shirt sticking to his skin. “Take the Conn, Brett. I need a shower.”
CHAPTER 2
WASHINGTON, DC
SUNDAY; 06 MAY
8:27 PM EDT
The Americans had an idiom: “It’s not so much what you say; it’s how you say it.” Although the phrase had no direct corollary in Mandarin, Ambassador Shaozu Tian of the People’s Republic of China had long since puzzled out the meaning behind the words. There was a certain sort of wisdom in them. Not exactly Lao Tzu, or even Confucius, but an identifiable kernel of truth nonetheless.
His hand slid across the seat to touch the folded black-leather shape of his diplomatic pouch. In the darkness he could feel the reassuring creases and nicks left by years of faithful service. His hand trembled slightly, and he stilled it with an act of will. It was unfortunate, he thought wryly, that one could not become a wise old master of statecraft without first becoming old.
The lights of the American capital city slid by the rain-streaked windows of his embassy limousine. Discrete shapes smeared into prismatic blurs of light and color as rivulets of water snaked down the glass beside him. Beautiful images, but confusing. An apt metaphor for his years in America.