by David Poyer
“What … how did…?”
“He took the pen apart. Put his head on the toilet.” She sounded tired. “Held the pen in position with his left hand, then slammed the lid down with his right. The skull’s thin there, in the temple area. It punched right through the bone.”
“How did he know to do that?”
“I guess he was no dummy,” the medic said. “Or else he got lucky, ’cause he hit the meningeal artery. The question is, why. Say you knew him in boot camp? Was he suicidal there? Moody? Introspective?”
“I don’t think so … the DI rode him hard, but, but … No, Bleckford, he wasn’t the smartest dude in the squad, but … he was a nice guy.”
“Too bad nobody let us know he had problems.”
“I didn’t know he was even on the plane. I haven’t seen him since—”
“Never mind, that wasn’t an accusation.” The door to the head slammed open. Voices swelled and echoed. She blotted her hands with a gauze pad. “If you’re not in his chain of command, better get lost. Don’t worry, they’ll tell his family it was a training accident.”
He wanted to stay, as if that could comfort the big man who’d all but carried him when he’d fallen. But he couldn’t. He slid into one of the other stalls until the officers passed, then slipped out again. He stood in the waiting area, looking out at the darkness, at the stars shining so brightly. Stars Bleckford would never see again.
And good God, under starry skies we are lost.…
Not too much later, the order came to reboard.
16
28° 36.25′ N, 133° 26.1′ E 180 Miles East of the Ryukyus
A week later, leaning back in his leather chair on Savo’s bridge, Dan felt guilty. He should be down in Combat. At his proper battle station, in front of the screens.
But it was hard to leave this. Spread before him, the morning Pacific heaved with the deliberate massive undulations that had greeted Magellan and, long before him, Zheng He. The sky glowed dawning gold, streaked with cirrus stained pink by the incipient sun. The breeze was warm. The old tea clippers had sailed these waters. Russian, Japanese, German, and British fleets; in World War II, the Kido Butai, the Imperial Striking Force, and the great Allied task forces of 1944 and 1945.
He fingered the cover of Neptune’s Inferno. Then laid it aside regretfully.
He had to forget history. And concentrate, now, on making it.
Or at least, on trying to lose as few lives as possible, while accomplishing his near-sacrificial mission.
“Captain? Four hundred miles from Point Epsilon,” Fred Enzweiler said. “We’ll begin the last refueling at zero-six.” Like everyone else on the bridge, the deputy task force commander was in flash gear, gloves, and hood, despite the heat. Goggles were pushed up on his forehead, ready to be pulled down on a second’s notice.
Dan glanced at the clipboard. “Execute as planned. But warn everyone again, we have to be sharp. That means EW, sonar, all sensors passive.” He rubbed his eyes, squinting as the upper limb of sun popped yellow-hot into view, firing a glare like a high-powered laser.
He’d opened up the formation as they steamed west, smearing it across miles of ocean. In the old days, concentration meant power. Now it invited obliteration. To starboard, hull down on the horizon, rode the massive hulk of Gambier Bay. A helicopter was lifting off, on its way to relieve one that, controlling several autonomous vehicles, sanitized their track, sixty miles and more ahead of the speeding prows. Behind the carrier, plodding far back in its smoothed wake, Almirante Montt.
One by one, each ship was falling back to top off one last time. Then the tanker would retreat to the protection of the follow-on force. On the far side of the escort carrier, Hampton Roads, the other ABM-capable cruiser, guarded their right flank. Even farther out, on each flank and bringing up the rear, their escorts, including the Korean frigates, rolled in the deep, slow swells. Less a formation, really, than a procession of ships steaming independently, each in its quarter of untenanted sea. Linked only by the short-range squirts of line-of-sight UHF and the up-and-back, narrowly directional beams of satcomm.
And somewhere behind them, even more lost in the trackless deep, cruised the carriers.
“Bridge, Combat,” the 21MC interrupted his thoughts. The officer of the deck, Chief Van Gogh at the moment, hit the lever twice to say Go ahead.
“This is Combat. EW reports multiple jammers—”
“I’ll be right down.” Dan’s boots hit the deck with a double thud. But at the ladderwell he paused.
He didn’t want to go down there.
Descending the ladder made him sweat, made his heart pound. He had to get a grip.
But he really, really didn’t want to be belowdecks.
A violet-white flame, burning through the air …
“Y’okay, Admiral?” The boatswain, hand on his arm.
Dan shook it off. “Yeah. Yeah … just dizzy for a second. Must have gotten out of the chair too fast.”
“Want me to call—”
“No. I’m fine,” he snapped. If you gave in to fear once, the next time it would be a hundred times stronger. If you fed it, it grew mighty. If you faced it down, it shriveled.
Sometimes the mind had to dictate to the gut. Especially since right now his gut was telling him that every yard west put them in more danger. He felt like a fly on a tabletop, creeping beneath a poised swatter.
Taking a deep breath, as if to make a long dive, he jerked the door open and slid down the ladder boots first, gripping the smoothworn handrails tightly to brake his headlong descent.
* * *
TWO decks down the consoles were lit like side chapels. The dim light gave CIC an almost holy feel. The murmurs into phones and headsets might be prayers. The flash hoods, monks’ cowls. The flak jackets … okay, you didn’t see those in most cathedrals. He sighed, sagging into his pouched seat beside the TAO. Nodded to Min Su Hwang, who was set up with his own comm channel to the Korean element. The large-screen displays didn’t show much. The whole force was in EMCON, radios and radars off. In listening mode only, as it had been since it headed out of San Diego, picked up the Chilean tanker, and arrowed west.
Into the islandless vacuum of the South Pacific. He forced out a croak. “What have we got, Dave?”
Branscombe muttered, “Maintaining twenty knots. Formation course, 282 degrees. Hampton Roads going in to fuel from Montt. All units within station. The Hunters report all sonar, electro-optical, ESM sensors operational. Engines and responses in the green. Four SuCAP F-35s stacked ahead.
“EW reports increasing activity from the mainland. R-band rackets. Jamming, from Ferrets. Air search radars. Air-to-air narrow-beam lock-ons.”
“Hunters”—also known less gracefully as ASUVs, for anti-submarine unmanned vessels—were autonomous robots. Supposedly the 180-foot, low-observable semisubmersibles had the smarts not just to detect subs, but to maneuver independently to prosecute them. It was good to have something he could push ahead of the formation without putting a crew at risk. A “Ferret” was an electronic warfare aircraft. “Rackets” were jamming.
“The jammers, the rackets. An exercise, Dave?”
“Could be. Unless they know we’re coming.”
The third possibility, of course, was that the second-phase offensive was beginning early. This seemed unlikely. According to intel, the Chinese A-Day was still two weeks away. But it wasn’t good that their target was prepping its defenses. “Log everything. When you have cross bearings, pass locations to Amy Singhe. She’s aggregating the target set for our Tomahawk strike.”
The rattle of a cup and saucer. Coffee. Dan nodded to Longley absently as the mess attendant set a sausage biscuit and a sticky bun at his elbow.
He took one bite of the bun, set it aside, and leaned over to Branscombe’s keyboard, licking the crystalline glaze off his fingers. The earth zoomed back, the sea shrinking, islands and continents crowding in at the corners of the picture. It wasn’t real time. Not wi
thout radar, or AWACS data, or really any significant input to the GCCS feed. Just the geo plots resident in the humming-warm blades of the ship’s computer. Far behind them, Saipan. To the east, the Bonins and Volcano Island. To the south, ocean. To the northwest, the yellow outlines of Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese home islands.
And directly ahead, the gauntlet Force 76 would have to run: what was now an all-but-Chinese-owned sea.
The top secret addendum to the op order had laid out his path. It had to be rigidly followed: U.S. subs had sanitized his transit lanes in, and would barricade his flanks as he closed. He would thread the Okinawa chain via an unnamed channel between two small islands, Akuseki Shima and Kotakara Jima. These were distant enough from the newly Chinese-occupied airfields in Okinawa that fighters from the carriers, two hundred miles astern, could knock down an attack from that quarter. From there, a straight-line course for three hundred miles would take him to Point Epsilon, one hundred miles off the mainland.
If they reached it, he could finally kill people and blow up stuff.
He pulled down a long swallow of hot coffee. Of course, it would also place him within range of every long- to medium-range defensive system the enemy possessed, from strike aircraft, to cruises, to ship-killer ballistic missiles.
He twisted in his chair to find Wenck a few feet away, looking over the EW operator’s shoulder. “Donnie? Chief?”
“Admiral.”
“Our super spoofers on Gambier Bay. What’re you hearing from them?”
A classified module had been loaded aboard before the escort carrier left Seattle. Even Dan wasn’t fully privy to what they were capable of. He did know they were searching for the comm links from the Albatross gliders, and beam-jamming them. Which might help slip them past enemy recon … “Not a lot.” Wenck passed a hand over his hair, which sprang up like wire grass as soon as his palm left it. “Want me to get on UHF, see what’s shakin’?”
“Can they intercept you?”
“If some sub has his mast up, he might hear something.” The chief looked wary. “They keep telling us not to depend on comms. Sounds to me like they still suspect a penetration.”
Dan told him to never mind, then. He sat back, wondering if he’d made the right decision shifting his flag to Savo. NAVSHIPS had offered to put a command module aboard the escort carrier. But in the end, he knew the cruiser. Had commanded her in combat. Knew her capabilities, her limitations, her skipper, and her crew.
It was the same decision Admiral Dan Callaghan had made in 1942: to command from his old ship, San Francisco, instead of a newer cruiser with radar. He’d paid for that choice with his life, dying in the night action for which Savo Island was named.
A mistake, in retrospect … but Dan understood. If he had to go into danger again, he wanted to wield a familiar weapon, feel dependable steel under him.
“Admiral? Hampton Roads reports fueling complete. Next up, Sejong the Great.”
He murmured the standard Navy acknowledgment of any piece of information that didn’t require further action on his part. “Very well.”
* * *
HE was awakened in his chair by a sound from his dreams. Or rather, nightmares.
It was the cuing buzzer from the Aegis console.
A glance at his watch told him four hours had passed. An hour to noon, and eighty miles closer to the enemy.
Staurulakis slid into the CO’s seat. Slight and wan-visaged, she had the olive-and-black Savo shemagh tucked around her neck, the flash hood pulled off pale hair. Settling her headset, she signed in on the weapons control net as she pattered the keyboard. The central screen, the GCCS geo, blanked. A different display came up.
Dan frowned. What the…? Then he realized the callouts were in kanji. The right screen came up from the forward camera almost like a windshield view. The port display looked aft to a slowly rocking line of far-off blue.
The alert buzzer ceased abruptly. “Profile plot, new Meteor,” Terranova announced, and Dan tensed. “Meteor” was the proword for a ballistic missile. “Elevation angels fifty … angels sixty. Climbing fast! ID as hostile. A big one, too. Huge radar return.” She called out lat and long on the launch point. Originating from far inland, nowhere near the coast.
“We need an IPP,” Staurulakis said tensely. “ASAP.”
“Stand by … ALIS is generating.”
“Where’s this data from?” Dan called to CIC in general. He twisted, searching for the rider from the Missile Defense Agency. “Dr. Soongapurn. Where are we getting this?”
Her fine-boned face looked spectral, orclike, lit blue from below by a tablet computer. “Download from Japanese air defense.”
“Japanese? I won’t ask how.”
“Good, because it’s unofficial. There may be interruptions, and it’s going to lag real time by about twelve seconds. It’s coming via nano downlink, handed off to each bird as it orbits from thirty degrees above the horizon to thirty degrees from its local sunset.”
Dan nodded; the Japanese, though publicly cooperating with Zhang, were passing him information under the table. The air picture extended from South Korea, to the Asian mainland, to Miyako Jima in the south. It showed a boil of high-altitude contacts off the Shanghai coast. Planes and RPVs were leaving the Okinawa airfields, but they seemed to be heading south and north, not toward him. More activity showed over Taiwan, in the mountains: attack helicopters. Everything looked quiet in Korea, where the Chinese were digesting one of the world’s most vibrant economies … but highlighted in red, and jerking toward him in one-second increments, was a tented symbol. The missile they’d just detected, no doubt.
“Can we get an IPP?” Staurlakis asked again, voice sharp.
“Not yet. It’s still climbing, Skipper.” The Terror sounded calm. “Can’t predict impact until it enters ballistic phase.”
Dan caught his breath, suddenly fearing the worst. “Run its bearing out,” he told Staurulakis.
The screen zoomed back. A green line pulsed. It was curved, but that was an artifact of the geo plot. There was Guam … Hawaii. “Keep zooming out,” he muttered, and the California coast came into view. Only from memory, of course—their feed didn’t reach nearly that far.
The extended track passed south of Hawaii. South of San Diego, of any continental U.S. city. Halfway around the world, the pulsing line met the coast of South America in the middle of Argentina.
Which of course it couldn’t be aimed at, but it relieved his worst worry: that it was targeted at Seattle or LA.
“First-stage burnout. Separation,” Donnie Wenck said from the console.
“I concur,” murmured Soongapurn.
Dan said sharply, “We’re not radiating?”
“Hell no, Skipper. I mean, Admiral. Just reading two tracks now, one descending, the other still showing an acceleration vector.”
A cool hand on his. Staurulakis’s. “Admiral? It might be better if you let me handle this.”
He ground his teeth. Whatever this was, it wasn’t aimed at the task group. Might pass more or less over them as they steamed west, but it was going too fast, and far too high, to have anything to do with them.
So what was it?
He shook it off, and clicked to the task group voice command net. Though it was short-range and scrambled, he used it as little as possible, but with his ships as far flung as they were, he had no choice now. “Monitor, this is Barbarian. Over.” “Monitor” was Hampton Roads, his other ABM cruiser, on the far flank of the formation.
The squeal of a synced transmission. “Monitor, over.”
“We’re picking up a launch from the mainland, extended track south of Hawaii. Weapons tight. I say again, weapons tight.”
“Monitor. Roger, out.”
“Pass to Fleet?” Staurulakis murmured.
Dan twisted, searching for dark eyes, short black hair. “Dr. Soongapurn?”
“They may not have it,” the scientist called from the EW console.
“To Flee
t, absolutely, Cheryl. Flash. Voice HF—no—sorry. Satcomm Navy Red. But describe the track, so they don’t think this is a strike on Pearl or CONUS.”
“Initial IPP,” Terranova called. “Impact point is south of Hawaii and north of Kiribati.”
“Put it on the screen.” But even as he said it a shimmering oval appeared, generated from the data downloaded from the hurtling nanosatellites, relayed from the distant radars on Kyushu. Wenck called, “Total flight distance: four thousand five hundred nautical miles.”
Dan wondered why he was being told this, then realized: With that range, if its launch bearing had been pivoted counterclockwise, it could hit Honolulu. Farther to the left, and that quivering IPP would have lain over downtown Los Angeles.
He beckoned Soongapurn to him, then led her to the dark blue curtain to Sonar. Lowered his voice. “All right, Doctor. What’s this mean?”
Her brows puckered. “Not sure. It’s a heavy ICBM. Most likely, one of the DF-41s Zhang sprang on us last year.”
“Multiple guided reentry vehicles. Miniaturized thermonuclears. Like our Peacekeeper, or the Russian SS-20. So, what? He’s showing us the goods?”
“Either a demonstration of capability, or an overt threat.”
“Or both,” Dan said.
“Or both.” She nodded. “Correct.”
He paced back and forth, scratching his nose, then digging fingers into the ache in his neck. Zhang Zurong had already crossed the nuclear threshold with a ten-megaton detonation that had wiped out the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt battle group. Six ships, and almost ten thousand sailors and air personnel. So far, the U.S. hadn’t returned the favor. But the longer Washington waited, the more Zhang might assume there wouldn’t be a riposte.
It was more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. He just hoped that, as in that long-ago face-off, back-channel contacts were ongoing. If either side made a misstep, they could be over the brink into a massive exchange on each other’s homelands.
He shivered, and not from the chill of CIC.
* * *
AT the command desk, Cheryl was studying the same screen. Thinking not about the missile, which she’d dismissed once its IPP was clarified, but about the shrinking distance to the Ryukyus and the contacts that had left the airfields there a few minutes earlier. The string of islands led from Kyushu south to Okinawa. The airfields there had hosted American air power for the better part of a century.