The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (13 page)

“The good doctor’s got some kind of respiratory infection. Corpsman said he needed rest more than work.”

Dan reflected. According to the last report from the Johns Hopkins consultant, both
Savo
’s SPY-1 system and its team’s watchstanding skills were still marginal. “He’s, um, really sick?”

“What I heard.”

“I’ll check on him. Okay, sorry to interrupt your turnover.”

“No problem, sir.”

The F-5s angled west, and the antiair coordinator assigned them to
Arleigh Burke
for the live-fire exercise. One of the Turkish fighters would launch a drone target. But all units were warned to stay alert; a second wave was likely, and would probably strike from a different quarter. As Mills and Staurulakis started the turnover, Dan noticed the rumpled blond back of Donnie Wenck’s head at another console. He strolled over to stand behind him for a while, glancing back from time to time at the large displays. At last, he leaned over his shoulder. “What you running there, Donnie?”

“Diagnostic subroutine.”

“Did you ever check for that virus you mentioned?”

Wenck sighed. “Oh yeah. System’s clean. But it’s really clocking slow. I’m still not sure why. I was on that new high-side chat last night. We were getting deep into Linux. Good stuff. You know, we were always so isolated trying to fix things at sea, but now you can go brain to brain with the other FCs and really get to pick somebody’s neurons who’s maybe way out in PacFleet. I actually got to talk to the system supe aboard
Monocacy,
you know, our follow-on ship? That’s out there testing, out of Kwaj? And he says we’re due an upgrade.”

“Hardware, or—?”

“No sir, software.” Wenck explained that
Savo Island
’s system was baseline 7. NSWC Dahlgren had written a patch for the ballistic missile defense mission, called ALIS, which optimized long-range scan and took out speed and altitude stops that had been built in back when the system had first gone to sea. “That was a real dinosaur. Baseline 2.10. Rugged, but not a lot of computing power—eighty-megabyte ROM-based memory. Reel-to-reel tapes. Those old UH-3 disk packs.”

“I remember them from when I was with Joint Cruise Missiles. We used ’em for Tomahawk targeting.”

“Uh-huh. Well, they had to build in those stops back then, or the radar would be tracking the moon. But your Scuds and M-11s and such are operating in those regimes. Also, we got another slight problem. Or maybe not so slight. In fact, it could fuck us royal.”

Dan glanced at the vertical screen. Where the hell were the Turkish subs? “Okay, hit me. But, you know, Donnie, try to keep it…”

“Officer-comprehensible?”

“You got it.”

Wenck smoothed his cowlick, but it sprang up as soon as his palm left it. “It’s like, interoperability? You know we got Patriots in Israel. I was going over the defended-asset list. You know, what we’re assigned to cover?”

Dan lowered his voice. “Tel Aviv, primarily.”

“Right, but it gets more specific than that.” Wenck rattled the keyboard and a simplified map of Israel came up. He rattled again and a carpet of symbology overlaid the topography. “See this? Patriot battery at Ben Gurion Airport. Here’s their coverage arc. See how it underlies ours? Shorter range, but—”

“Patriot’s terminal defense. They don’t fire until the last minute or so before impact.”

“Right, but it starts earlier than that. We’re gonna get our—”

The air was growing very cold. Dan shivered and drifted a few steps away to rest a hand on Mills’s shoulder. “Check with Sonar, see if they have anything from TACTAS.”

“Just heard from them, sir. Still no joy,” the TAO murmured into his boom mike.

“Sorry, Donnie, go on. I’m listening.”

“I was saying, three ways to receive cuing. Either our own SPY-1, download from AWACs, or else from the satellite—infrared detection of the booster plume.”

“That’s the Obsidian Glint?”

“Right. Problem is, Patriot’s a semiactive tracker—the missile, like, navigates to impact listening to the radar emissions reflected off the incoming projectile.”

“So’re our Standards.”

“Right. Exactly! Their signals are from a phased-array radar not too different from ours. So, let’s say we pick up a cuing, and fire. And at the same time that radar at Ben Gurion’s out there scanning. Now suddenly there’s two missiles out there for them to home in on: the real target, and our Block 4. That’s what I’m leery of.”

“That it’ll shoot down our missile, you mean?”

“I guess it
could,
but we’d be at the ragged edge of its intercept envelope, and heading away by that time—it’d be trying to catch up on a tail chase—I ain’t no Patriot expert, you know? I’m more worried, there’s two birds active out there, we’ll decoy the Israelis off the real one. Then if we miss, everybody’s fucked. That Scud, or whatever it is, is gonna get through.”

Dan wondered how exactly to put this without sounding like, well, like an
officer.
“Uh, Donnie, I think that’s something to look into. But there’s three pieces to having us out here. A warfighting piece, a deterrence piece, and then there’s a political angle, too. Ideally we’d have all three in place—we can shoot the missile down, the other side knows we can, and the Israelis see we can.”

Wenck frowned. Just as Dan had figured he would. “You’re saying, we don’t actually have to have a P-sub-K of—”

“Yeah, yeah, we want to two-block that figure, but the point I’m making, if the guy who’s thinking about firing that missile figures we’ll just shoot it down, he might not hit the button. And even if he does, and we miss, and it hits an orphanage, at least we tried. We stood by our ally.”

The chief’s shoulders lifted, then sagged. Signifying either total lack of interest, or incomprehension. Dan waited, then went on. “Anyway, how do we fix it? This interoperability thing?”

“Like I said, I’m working it, and one of the guys thinks he can get a Patriot dude up on chat. There was an op-test called Coral Talon, but I haven’t been able to get an e-copy yet. What would really help is if we had, like, freqs from the Israelis. Or better yet, some way to talk to them direct, instead of going up through all the political bullshit architecture and then down again.” He pointed to a tall console farther down the aisle. “The EWs are picking up what they think’s the Ben Gurion battery, but it’s gonna freq-hop like crazy when it goes into battle mode.”

Dan glanced plotward again. Where the
fuck
were the Orange subs?
Arleigh Burke
had two lines of helo-laid sonobuoys out, but no contact. Could the “enemy” 209s already be
inside
the barrier? It seemed unlikely. But it was unsettling that they’d disappeared. Which of course was exactly what subs trained to do, but still … “Look, I’m gonna have to get back to this exercise, but keep working this, okay? Anything you need to get my signature on, or approve a message asking for that study or whatever, let me know. Okay?”

Wenck’s head was going up and down, but his attention was already a million miles away, back in the lines of code scrolling across the screen.

Dan was turning back for Sonar when the overhead speaker crackled to life.
“Vampire, vampire, vampire! Bearing zero-eight-eight, range twenty, tracking left.”

Vampires were submarine-launched missiles. From the
east
. And
close
. He hurled himself toward his seat. On the display, the just-emerged missile was already hooked and blinking. It was crossing
Savo
’s beam, five miles off, at an extremely high angular velocity. Not an easy target, and headed directly for the carrier.

A second pip bloomed behind it. Then a third, from a different azimuth.

A coordinated attack. How had
both
subs evaded the screen? He grabbed for a handhold on the datalink console as the cruiser heeled, coming around to unmask batteries. He jammed on the headphones and his hand found the Fire button by feel as the engagement litany picked up velocity.

“Lock on.”

“Ready to fire. Select—”

“Holy shit, they’re
really
firing!” Mills yelled. Dan tensed, before the lieutenant continued, “Uh, sorry, belay that … my mistake. Exercise-generated imagery. Sorry. Won’t happen again. Sorry, Captain, sorry.”

Dan eased out a breath. “Eye on the ball, Matt. It’s only an exercise. Knock them down. They’re homing on the carrier. EW?”

“Jamming,”
came over the phone circuit from the SLQ-32 console.
“No visible effect.”

Before they could fire, the dry voice of the anti-air warfare controller crackled over the net, assigning the inbound vampires to a destroyer in the inner screen. Dan cursed;
Savo
had missed her chance. She heeled again, this time reorienting to take on the subs. Voices rose from Sonar and the tracking table as they lined up for a shot. Dan toggled the ASW display on the leftmost screen, squinting. The screen flickered. Then he saw.

“Range, thirty-eight thousand, bearing zero eight zero. Stand by to fire Asroc.”

“Negative!” Dan shouted. “Check fire, check fire! He’s too close to the fucking dog box.”

Putting a torpedo in the water there would endanger one of the Blue subs, the friendlies, scouting out ahead of the force. Apparently, due to layer depth, or whatever low cunning the Turkish sub commander had employed, the Blue sub hadn’t detected him.

However he’d done it, the Orange sub was using the Blue one like a hostage shield, leaving Dan unable to attack. He keyed the 21MC, then let up on the lever as Mills passed the command he’d been about to give. “Bridge, TAO; come left—”

“Remember you have the tail streamed,” Dan put in.

“Yes sir. —Come left, no greater rudder than fifteen degrees; steady three two zero; go to flank.” He was repositioning
Savo,
placing the cruiser, as a shield between the enemy and the carrier. Blocking the next missile salvo. The hum of the turbines rose to a whooshing scream. The superstructure began to vibrate. A deckplate buzzed like a cicada.

Dan pressed his mike switch. “Sonar, CO: Do you have a solid contact?”

“Bridge, Sonar: Contact tracking one eight five, speed nineteen. CO, Sonar, did you copy?”

“Copy,” Dan snapped. Nineteen knots: top speed for a submerged 209, and not one its batteries could maintain long. One boat was sprinting south. Attempting an end run? Or trying to seduce them off its partner? “Source of that datum?”

“TACTAS, sir. Mainly flow noise, sounds like.”

“Keep an eye on that bearing,” Dan told Mills. “As soon as they clear the dog box, I want an Asroc in the air.”

“TAO aye.” Mills switched to the ASW circuit, and Dan half overheard his side of the conversation as they made ready to fire. He switched back and forth on his headset, watching chat click up his desktop screen, seeing
Arleigh Burke
’s Standard splash the drone fifteen miles from
Theodore Roosevelt,
the exercise opening like a flower on the big flat-panel displays. He switched and keyed. “Aegis, CO: Keep an eye peeled up toward Antalya. They could launch a second strike out of there.”

Terranova’s Jersey-accented soprano:
“Aegis aye.”

He switched back just in time to catch “TAO, Sonar: Lost contact.”

“What the
fuck
is going on back there?” Mills muttered. “Sonar, TAO: What do you need to regain?… Okay … okay, but we’re right at the edge.… Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. Bridge, TAO: Left turn, steady up on one eight zero and drop to ten—”

Longley, at his elbow. “Coffee, Captain? And we got, hey, we got oatmeal cookies tonight. Really good.”

Dan blew out, trying to keep his temper. He didn’t want more coffee … but he needed more …
so
fucking tired … but his stomach churned. He grabbed a cookie and wolfed it. Typical big, chewy U.S. Navy mess deck cookie. Not much you could find fault with, actually. He chased it with a slug of coffee that turned out to be so scalding he would have spat it back into the cup if both Mills and the steward hadn’t been watching him. “Holy
smoke,
Longley, did you brew this with a blowtorch?”

“Ran that straight up from the galley, Captain. Know you like it hot.”

His tongue felt flayed. Dan clicked back to the antisubmarine circuit, wondering why he wasn’t hearing anything from Zotcher. But then snapped the dial back to antiair when another voice said,
“TAO, Sonar: Regained contact. Range twenty thousand. Bearing one zero five.”

“Christ, at last,” the CIC officer muttered, on Mills’s other hand.

The exercise lulled. Dan stretched, tried to fight his eyelids up again. Shivered, and resolved to bring a sweater the next time he came up here. Checked his watch: 0413. Considered calling Almarshadi to take it, but didn’t. The XO needed sleep too.

Finally he stood, and stretched again, touching the overhead with the tips of his fingers. He bent and snagged his toes a couple of times, just to get the blood moving again. Something popped in his back. He glanced over at the Aegis display. Past Wenck and Terranova, their heads together, the electronic warfare consoles flickered a weird graveyard green. It might not just be that the Patriot battery could mistake
Savo
’s SM-2 for the incoming Scud. Could there also be mutual interference, from the Patriot’s and Aegis’s own radar guidance? Had anyone ever thought to deconflict the spectra between the Army’s antimissile system and the Navy’s? They freq-shifted, sure. But would the
bands
they swept overlap? It sounded all too much like the kind of thing no one in either service had bothered to check out, and that you’d find out too late. He’d have to ask Noblos. Investigate—

“Datum: Bearing two seven three, nine thousand yards.”

The red diamond of a hostile sub ignited on the screen. At the same instant, the cool tones of the exercise coordinator murmured in Dan’s headphones, “
Simulated Orange Vampire launch, two seven zero, nine thousand.
”

“Vampire, Vampire, Vampire!”