by Tom Clancy
“Go!”
Chavez went out first, moving perhaps ten feet from the door before he fell flat to the ground. The squad did the same, allowing the Blackhawk to lift off immediately, and rewarding each of its former passengers with a faceful of flying grit as it clawed its way back into the sky. It would reappear around the southern end of a hill as though it had never stopped. Behind it, the squad assembled and moved out into the treeline. Its work had just begun. The sergeant gave his commands with hand motions and led them off at a dead run. It would be his last mission, then he could relax.
At the Navy’s weapons testing and development facility, China Lake, California, a team of civilian technicians and some Navy ordnance experts hovered over a new bomb. Built with roughly the same dimensions as the old two-thousand-pounder, it weighed nearly seven hundred pounds less. This resulted from its construction. Instead of a steel skin, the bombcase was made of Kevlar-reinforced cellulose—an idea borrowed from the French, who made shell casings from the naturally produced fibers—with only enough metal fittings to allow attachment of fins, or the more extensive hardware that would convert it into an “LGB,” able to track in on a specific point target. It was little known that a smart-bomb is generally a mere iron bomb with the guidance equipment bolted on.
“You’re not going to get fragments worth a damn,” a civilian objected.
“What’s the point of having a Stealth bomber,” another technician asked, “if the bad guys get a radar return off the ordnance load?”
“Hmph,” observed the first. “What’s the point of a bomb that just pisses the other guy off?”
“Put it through his front door and he won’t live long enough to get pissed, will he?”
“Hmph.” But at least he knew what the bomb was actually for. It would one day hang on the ATA, the Advanced Tactical Aircraft, a carrier-based attack bomber with stealth technology built in. Finally, he thought, the Navy’s getting on board that program. About time. For the moment, however, the job at hand was to see if this new bomb with a different weight and a different center of gravity would track in on a target with a standard LGB guidance pack. The bomb hoist came over and lifted the streamlined shape off its pallet. Next the operator maneuvered it under the center-line hard-point of an A-6E Intruder attack bomber.
The technicians and officers walked over to the helicopter that would take them to the bombing range. There was no rush. An hour later, safely housed in a bunker that was clearly marked, one of the civilians trained an odd-looking device at a target four miles away. The target was an old five-ton truck that the Marines had given up on, and which would now, if everything went according to plan, die a violent and spectacular death.
“Aircraft is inbound over the range. Start the music.”
“Roger,” the civilian replied, squeezing the trigger on the GLD. “On target.”
“Aircraft reports acquisition—stand by ...” the communicator said.
At the other end of the bunker, an officer was watching a television camera locked onto the inbound Intruder. “Breakaway. We have a nice, clean release off the ejector rack.” He’d check that view later with one off an A-4 Skyhawk fighter-bomber that was flying chase on the A-6. Few people realized that the mere act of dropping a bomb off an airplane was a complex and potentially dangerous exercise. A third camera followed the bomb down.
“Fins are moving just fine. Here we go ...”
The camera on the truck was a high-speed one. It had to be. The bomb was falling too fast for anyone to catch it on the first run-through, but by the time the crushing bass note of the detonation reached the bunker, the operator had already started rewinding the tape. The replay was done one frame at a time.
“Okay, there’s the bomb.” Its nose appeared forty feet over the truck. “How was it fused?”
“VT,” one of the officers answered. VT stood for variable time. The bomb had a miniradar transceiver in its nose, and was programmed to explode within a fixed distance of the ground; in this case, five feet, or almost the instant it hit the truck. “Angle looks just fine.”
“I thought it would work,” an engineer observed quietly. He’d suggested that since the bomb was essentially a thousand pounder, the guidance equipment could be programmed for the lighter weight. Though it was slightly heavier than that, the reduced density of the cellulose bombcase made for a similar ballistic performance. “Detonation.”
As with any high-speed photos of such an event, the screen flashed white, then yellow, then red, then black, as the expanding gasses from the high-explosive filler cooled in the air. Just in front of the gas was the blast wave: air compressed to a point at which it was denser than steel, moving faster than any bullet. No machine press could duplicate the effect.
“We just killed another truck.” It was a wholly unnecessary observation. Roughly a quarter of the truck’s mass was pounded straight down into a shallow crater, perhaps a yard deep and twenty across. The remainder was hurled laterally as shrapnel. The gross effect was not terribly different, in fact, from a large car bomb of the sort delivered by terrorists, but a hell of a lot safer for the deliverymen, one of the civilians thought.
“Damn—I didn’t think it’d be that easy. You were right, Ernie, we don’t even have to reprogram the seeker,” a Navy commander observed. They’d just saved the Navy over a million dollars, he thought. He was wrong.
And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning—and, once decided, best unseen.
1.
The King of SAR
YOU COULDN’T LOOK at her and not be proud, Red Wegener told himself. The Coast Guard cutter Panache was one of a kind, a design mistake of sorts, but she was his. Her hull was painted the same gleaming white found on an iceberg—except for the orange stripe on the bow that designated the ship as part of the United States Coast Guard. Two hundred eighty feet in length, Panache was not a large ship, but she was his ship, the largest he’d ever commanded, and certainly the last he would ever have. Wegener was the oldest lieutenant-commander in the Coast Guard, but Wegener was The Man, the King of Search-and-Rescue missions.
His career had begun the same way many Coast Guard careers had. A young man from a Kansas wheat farm who’d never seen the sea, he’d walked into a Coast Guard recruiting station the day after graduating from high school. He hadn’t wanted to face a life driving tractors and combines, and he’d sought out something as different from Kansas as he could find. The Coast Guard petty officer hadn’t made much of a sales pitch, and a week later he’d begun his career with a bus ride that ended at Cape May, New Jersey. He could still remember the chief petty officer that first morning who’d told them of the Coast Guard creed. “You have to go out. You don’t have to come back.”
What Wegener found at Cape May was the last and best true school of seamanship in the Western world. He learned how to handle lines and tie sailor knots, how to extinguish fires, how to go into the water after a disabled or panicked boater, how to do it right the first time, every time—or risk not coming back. On graduation he was assigned to the Pacific Coast. Within a year he had his rate, Boatswain’s Mate Third Class.
Very early on it was recognized that Wegener had that rarest of natural gifts, the seaman’s eye. A catch-all term, it meant that his hands, eyes, and brain could act in unison to make his boat perform. Guided along by a tough old chief quartermaster, he soon had “command” of his “own” thirty-foot harbor patrol boat. For the really tricky jobs, the chief would come along to keep a close eye on the nineteen-year-old petty officer. From the first Wegener had shown the promise of someone who only needed to be shown things once. His first five years in uniform now seemed to have passed in the briefest instant as he learned his craft. Nothing really dr
amatic, just a succession of jobs that he’d done as the book prescribed, quickly and smoothly. By the time he’d considered and opted for re-enlistment, it was evident that when a tough job had to be done, his name was the one that came up first. Before the end of his second hitch, officers routinely asked his opinion of things. By this time he was thirty, one of the youngest chief bosun’s mates in the service, and he was able to pull a few strings, one of which ended with command of Invincible, a forty-eight-footer which had already garnered a reputation for toughness and dependability. The stormy California coast was her home, and it was here that Wegener’s name first became known outside of his service. If a fisherman or a yachtsman got into trouble, Invincible always seemed to be there, often roller-coastering across thirty-foot seas with her crewmen held in place with ropes and safety belts—but there and ready to do the job with a red-haired chief at the wheel, an unlit briar pipe in his teeth. In that first year he saved the lives of at least fifteen people.
The number grew to fifty before he’d ended his tour of duty at the lonely station. After a couple of years, he was in command of his own station, and the holder of a title craved by all seamen—Captain—though his rate was that of Senior Chief. Located on the banks of a small stream that fed into the world’s largest ocean, he ran his station as tautly as any ship, and inspecting officers had come there not so much to see how Wegener ran things as to see how things should be run.
For good or ill, Wegener’s career plan had changed with one epic winter storm on the Oregon Coast. Commanding a larger rescue station now near the mouth of the Columbia River and its infamous bar, he’d received a frantic radio call from a deep-sea fisherman named Mary-Kat: engines and rudder disabled, being driven toward a lee shore that devoured ships. His personal flagship, the eighty-two-foot Point Gabriel, was away from the dock in ninety seconds, her mixed crew of veterans and apprentices hooking their safety belts into place while Wegener coordinated the rescue efforts on his own radio channels.
It had been an epic battle. After a six-hour ordeal, Wegener had rescued the Mary-Kat’s six fishermen, but just barely, his ship assaulted by wind and furious seas. Just as the last man had been brought in, the Mary-Kat had grounded on a submerged rock and snapped in half.
As luck would have it, Wegener had had a reporter on board that day, a young feature writer for the Portland Oregonian and an experienced yachtsman, who thought he knew what there was to know about the sea. As the cutter had tunneled through the towering breakers at the Columbia bar, the reporter had vomited on his notebook, then wiped it on his Mustang suit and kept writing. The series of articles that had followed was entitled “The Angel of the Bar,” and won the journalist a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
The following month, in Washington, the senior United States Senator from the State of Oregon, whose nephew had been a crewman on the Mary-Kat, wondered aloud why someone as good as Red Wegener was not an officer, and since the commandant of the Coast Guard was in that room to discuss the service’s budget, it was an observation to which a four-star admiral had decided to pay heed. By the end of the week Red Wegener was commissioned as lieutenant—the senator had also observed that he was a little too old to be an ensign. Three years later he was recommended for the next available command.
There was only one problem with that, the commandant considered. He did have an available command—Panache—but it might seem a mixed blessing. The cutter was nearly completed. She was to have been the lead ship for a new class, but funding had been cut, the yard had gone bankrupt, and the commissioning skipper had been relieved for bungling his job. That left the Coast Guard with an unfinished ship whose engines didn’t work, in an out-of-business shipyard. But Wegener was supposed to be a miracle worker, the commandant decided at his desk. To make it a fair chance, he made sure that Wegener got some good chiefs to back up the inexperienced wardroom.
His arrival at the shipyard gate had been delayed by the picket line of disgruntled workers, and by the time he’d gotten through that, he was sure things couldn’t get worse. Then he’d seen what was supposed to have been a ship. It was a steel artifact, pointed at one end and blunt at the other, half painted, draped with cables, piled with crates, and generally looking like a surgical patient who’d died on the table and been left there to rot. If that hadn’t been bad enough, Panache couldn’t even be towed from her berth—the last thing a worker had done was to burn out the motor on a crane, which blocked the way.
The previous captain had already left in disgrace. The commissioning crew, assembled on the helicopter deck to receive him, looked like children forced to attend the funeral of a disliked uncle, and when Wegener tried to address them, the microphone didn’t work. Somehow that broke the evil spell. He waved them toward himself with a smile and a chuckle.
“People,” he’d said, “I’m Red Wegener. In six months this will be the best ship in the United States Coast Guard. In six months you will be the best crew in the United States Coast Guard. I’m not the one who’s going to make that happen. You will—and I’ll help a little. For right now, I’m cutting everybody as much liberty as we can stand while I get a handle on what we have to do. Have yourselves a great time. When you get back, we all go to work. Dismissed.”
There was a collective “oh” from the assembled multitude, which had expected shouts and screams. The newly arrived chiefs regarded one another with raised eyebrows, and the young officers who’d been contemplating the abortion of their service careers retired to the wardroom in a state of bemused shock. Before meeting with them, Wegener took his three leading chiefs aside.
“Engines first,” Wegener said.
“I can give you fifty-percent power all day long, but when you try to use the turbochargers, everything goes to hell in fifteen minutes,” Chief Owens announced. “An’ I don’t know why.” Mark Owens had been working with marine diesels for sixteen years.
“Can you get us to Curtis Bay?”
“As long as you don’t mind taking an extra day, Cap’n.”
Wegener dropped the first bomb. “Good—’cause we’re leaving in two weeks, and we’ll finish the fitting-out up there.”
“It’ll be a month till the new motor’s ready for that crane, sir,” Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bob Riley observed.
“Can the crane turn?”
“Motor’s burned out, Cap’n.”
“When the time comes, we’ll snake a line from the bow to the back end of the crane. We have seventy-five feet of water in front of us. We set the clutch on the crane and pull forward real gentle-like, and turn the crane ourselves, then back out,” the captain announced. Eyes narrowed.
“Might break it,” Riley observed after a moment.
“That’s not my crane, but, by God, this is my ship.”
Riley let out a laugh. “Goddamn, it’s good to see you again, Red—excuse me, Captain Wegener!”
“Mission Number One is to get her to Baltimore for fitting-out. Let’s figure out what we have to do, and take it one job at a time. I’ll see you oh-seven-hundred tomorrow. Still make your own coffee, Portagee?”
“Bet your ass, sir,” Chief Quartermaster Oreza replied. “I’ll bring a pot.”
And Wegener had been right. Twelve days later, Panache had indeed been ready for sea, though not much else, with crates and fittings lashed down all over the ship. Moving the crane out of the way was accomplished before dawn, lest anyone notice, and when the picket line showed up that day, it had taken a few minutes to notice that the ship was gone. Impossible, they’d all thought. She hadn’t even been fully painted yet.
The painting was accomplished in the Florida Strait, as was something even more important. Wegener had been on the bridge, napping in his leather chair during the forenoon watch when the growler phone rang, and Chief Owens invited him to the engine room. Wegener arrived to find the only worktable covered with plans, and an engineman-apprentice hovering over them, with his engineering officer standing behind him.
“You ain’
t gonna believe it,” Owens announced. “Tell him, sonny.”
“Seaman Obrecki, sir. The engine isn’t installed right,” the youngster said.
“What makes you think that?” Wegener asked.
The big marine diesels were of a new sort, perversely designed to be very easy to operate and maintain. To aid in this, small how-to manuals were provided for each engine-room crewman, and in each manual was a plastic-coated diagram that was far easier to use than the builder’s plans. A blow-up of the manual schematic, also plastic-coated, had been provided by the drafting company, and was the laminated top of the worktable.
“Sir, this engine is a lot like the one on my dad’s tractor, bigger, but—”
“I’ll take your word for it, Obrecki.”
“The turbocharger ain’t installed right. It matches with these plans here, but the oil pump pushes the oil through the turbocharger backwards. The plans are wrong, sir. Some draftsman screwed up. See here, sir? The oil line’s supposed to come in here, but the draftsman put it on the wrong side of this fitting, and nobody caught it, and—”
Wegener just laughed. He looked at Chief Owens: “How long to fix?”
“Obrecki says he can have it up and running this time tomorrow, Cap’n.”
“Sir.” It was Lieutenant Michelson, the engineering officer. “This is all my fault. I should have—” The lieutenant was waiting for the sky to fall.
“The lesson from this, Mr. Michelson, is that you can’t even trust the manual. Have you learned that lesson, Mister?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Fair enough. Obrecki, you’re a seaman-first, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wrong. You’re a machinist-mate third.”
“Sir, I have to pass a written exam ...”
“You think Obrecki’s passed that exam, Mr. Michelson?”
“You bet, sir.”
“Well done, people. This time tomorrow I want to do twenty-three knots.”