USS Towers Box Set
Author: Jeff Edwards
Date: 2018-07-21 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Braveship Books

PRAISE FOR JEFF EDWARDS BOOKS

“Jeff Edwards has created a superb thriller that grips the reader from beginning to end. Brilliantly executed.”

— CLIVE CUSSLER, International bestselling author of ‘RAISE THE TITANIC’ and ‘THE ROMANOV RANSOM’

“Unfamiliar and exciting territory—a magnificent yarn! Guaranteed to keep you turning pages well into the night.”

— GREG BEAR, New York Times bestselling author of ‘KILLING TITAN’ and ‘DARWIN’S RADIO’

“Jeff Edwards spins a stunning and irresistibly-believable tale of savage modern naval combat.”

— JOE BUFF, Bestselling author of ‘SEAS OF CRISIS’ and ‘CRUSH DEPTH’

“Brilliant and spellbinding… Took me back to sea and into the fury of life-or-death combat. I could not put this book down.”

— REAR ADMIRAL JOHN J. WAICKWICZ, USN (Retired), Former Commander, Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command

“Smart and involving, with an action through-line that shoots ahead … fast and lethal. I read it in one sitting.”

— PAUL L. SANDBERG, Producer of ‘THE BOURNE SUPREMACY’ and ‘THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM’

CONTENTS

Sea of Shadows

The Seventh Angel

Sword of Shiva

SEA OF SHADOWS

Copyright © 2010, 2018 by Jeff Edwards

(Originally Published as TORPEDO)

THE SEVENTH ANGEL

Copyright © 2010, 2018 by Jeff Edwards

SWORD OF SHIVA

Copyright © 2012, 2018 by Jeff Edwards

All rights reserved. No part of these books may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author or publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places or incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Braveship Books
www.braveshipbooks.com

Aura Libertatis Spirat

The tactics described in these books do not represent actual U.S. Navy or NATO tactics past or present. Also, many of the code words and some of the equipment have been altered to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified material.

These novels have been reviewed by the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Navy, and are cleared for publication in accordance with:

Chief of Naval Operations Letter Ser. N09N2/32532242 – Sea of Shadows

Chief of Naval Operations Notice 08-301 – The Seventh Angel

Chief of Naval Operations Notice 12-SR-0115 – Sword of Shiva

U.S. Navy images used in cover art and other illustrations appear by permission of the Navy Office of Information (OI-32), and Navy Visual News. No endorsement is expressed or implied.

Cover Artwork & Designs by Martin Saavedra
www.mtnsvd.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-64062-054-4

Published in the United States of America

SEA OF SHADOWS

Jeff Edwards

San Diego

To Josh

Missiles are fast. They’re dangerous. They’re sexy. So when we think about warfare at sea, it’s natural that missiles are the first things we think about. But we can shoot down missiles. We can decoy them with chaff—jam them—hide from them with infrared suppression systems and minimized radar cross-sections.

Our Kingfisher sonars can detect mines, and we can destroy them or maneuver to avoid them.

Our ships are hardened against chemical and biological weapons.

But how do you stop a torpedo? Thirty years of R-and-D, and we still don’t have a viable system for intercepting torpedoes. We can’t shoot them down; we can’t jam them; we can’t hide from them. And, even third-world torpedoes can do upward of fifty knots, so we sure as hell can’t outrun them.

We do have decoy systems that have shown some effectiveness, and a couple of tricky torpedo evasion maneuvers that work pretty well. But, they depend on split-second timing and perfect execution. Activate your decoys ten seconds too soon (or five seconds too late) and an enemy torpedo will eat your lunch. Hold an evasion turn a little too long, or not long enough, and it’s game over.

We build the toughest warships on the planet, but the best engineers in the business agree that nearly every class of torpedo currently being deployed has the capacity to sink one of our ships with a single shot. To make matters worse, none of our potential adversaries believe in shooting torpedoes one-at-a-time. Typically, they shoot salvos of two or three.

It’s inevitable. One day soon, maybe next year—hell, maybe next week, maybe an hour from now—one of our ships is going to end up on the wrong end of a spread of hostile torpedoes. And, when that happens, we’re going to discover that we are the poor bastards who brought a knife to a gunfight.

Excerpted from the Chief of Naval Operations’ comments to the graduating class at Annapolis

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin-his control

Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,

When for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

— Lord Byron, The Dark Blue Sea

PROLOGUE

In the language of its builders, the weapon’s name was Ozeankriegs- fuhrungtechnologien Deutsches Exportmodell DMA37-R5092—Ocean Warfare Technologies German Export Model DMA37 (Serial Number R5092). On the munitions inventory, its name was shortened to R-92. But the weapon did not know either of these names. It had no name for itself. It was not even aware of its own existence. It waited in its shipping canister, cradled as snugly in the cylindrical steel container as a high-powered bullet in the chamber of a rifle. Cold. Sightless. Unfeeling. Not sleeping, merely unawakened.

R-92 was a state-of-the-art acoustic homing torpedo. It was a cybernetic predator: an electro-mechanical killing machine. Fast. Smart. Unbelievably lethal. Every component, from the shark-like hydrodynamic form of its fuselage—to its multi-spectrum acoustic sensors—to the axial-flow turbine that formed its engine, was optimized for the undersea environment. Its brain was a fifth-generation digital computer, hardwired for destruction with a machine-driven relentlessness that no living predator could match. R-92 and its brethren had been honed for the chase and the kill by two and a half centuries of technological evolution.

But R-92 knew none of these things. It simply waited.

CHAPTER 1

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

SATURDAY, 05 MAY

1114 hours (11:14 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Bowie timed it carefully, lifting each foot at just the right second as he ducked through the hatch coaming of the open blast door and ran out onto the forecastle of his ship. Twenty-one laps around the deck today and his breaths were still coming evenly, but the air was hot and so humid that it felt like breathing soup. Sweat plastered his short black hair to his forehead, and his sleeveless U.S. Naval Academy T-shirt stuck to his skin, the faded goat mascot logo blending into the perspiration-darkened fabric. It wasn’t even noon yet, and the sun was already fierce enough to blur the visual horizon with rapidly evaporating water. At least the seas were calm at the moment—not exactly a given in the Arabian Gulf this time of year.

His crew called him Captain Jim Bowie, which was a technical misnomer on two counts. In fact, his name was Samuel Harlan Bowie, and his actual rank was commander. The title of Captain was honorary; by ancient nautical tradition, the commanding officer of a naval warship is always referred to as “Captain,” no matter what actual rank he carries. The Jim part had been following him around since childhood, a nearly inevitable consequence of having grown up in San Antonio, Texas, with the last name of Bowie. He’d long since given up the battle and accepted his nickname. It beat the hell out of what his buddies had called him at the Academy, anyway.

Bowie curved to his left, cutting between the ankle-high platform of the forward missile launcher and the low wedge of the 5-inch gun mount.

From a visual perspective, the gun was the most arresting feature on the forecastle. Its strange geometric shape and steeply angled sides gave it little resemblance to any of the generations of naval artillery that had preceded it, but the long steel barrel that protruded from the forward slope of the wedge left no doubt as to its purpose.

Situated aft of the gun, the forward missile launcher was not nearly as visually impressive. To the untrained eye, the launcher looked like a grid of square hatches set flush into an ankle-high steel platform. The innocuous-looking hatches were armored with Kevlar-reinforced steel, and every hatch concealed a vertical missile silo, known as a “cell.” Loaded in those cells, and their twins in the aft launcher, were the missiles that comprised the ship’s real destructive force.

When he reached the far side of the launcher, Bowie curved left again, back toward the superstructure. Another of the tricky step-duck maneuvers carried him through the port side blast doors and into the port break. This short stretch of enclosed passageway shielded him from the sun, giving him a few seconds of shade and relatively cool air. Then he dashed out into the sun again, running down the port side main deck toward the stern.

At first glance, Bowie was more likely to be taken for an accountant than a naval officer. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him a clean and efficient look that his neatly trimmed black hair seemed to echo. His lips were thin and slightly turned down at the corners, creating a permanently thoughtful expression that reinforced the image of humorless efficiency. The laugh lines around his mouth were the only giveaways of the imaginative and playful spirit that hid behind his somber brown eyes.

A shade under six feet tall, he had a compact physique that was neither skinny nor overtly muscular. At thirty-eight, he was in the best shape of his life. He was also at the pinnacle of his career, and he knew it. No matter where he went from here, it would be downhill.

Certainly there were more promotions in his future (barring death or major screw-ups), but this was his one shot at his lifelong dream: command of a warship. He was trying very hard not to count the days, but he knew he had less than four months left to enjoy it. Then Bowie would have to turn command of the Towers over to someone else and move on to the next phase of his career. He didn’t like to think about that, but he knew the Navy’s advancement pipeline all too well. After the Towers, he’d be transferred to a shore duty billet, probably a career-enhancing staff position at the headquarters of one of the major commands—part of the Navy’s plan to give him political seasoning that he didn’t want, in preparation for selection to full-bird captain.

His next chance to command at sea would probably be as commodore of a destroyer squadron, overseeing other people’s ships. Command of a squadron was an important job, but it was too much like being an astronaut’s boss, instead of an astronaut. If he was very, very lucky, he might be able to wrangle command of one of the Aegis guided missile cruisers. But there weren’t very many of the old Ticonderoga Class cruisers left to go around, and the Navy wouldn’t be willing to waste a valuable full-bird captain on a destroyer or a frigate.

He reached the amidships break, where the forward deckhouse ended and a narrow section of open deck separated the forward superstructure from the aft superstructure. He edged closer to the lifelines as he ran, giving himself a cushion of space in case someone opened one of the watertight doors without warning. He’d made that mistake years ago, as a boot ensign on the USS Bunker Hill. A second class Signalman had opened a door right in front of him, and Bowie had slammed into the reinforced steel while running at full-tilt. A sprained wrist and two black eyes had given him a personal reminder of one of the most basic principles of physics: Force = Mass × Acceleration.

Bowie passed an exhaust vent and caught a half-second blast of what seemed to be cooler air. The temperature differential was a sensory illusion, caused by the movement of the air over his skin. In reality, the exhaust from every vent on board was precisely monitored and alternately heated or cooled to match the ambient temperature of the air surrounding the ship. The system was expensive, and a pain in the ass to maintain, but it made the ship functionally invisible to infrared sensors or heat-seeking missiles. And in this age of three-dimensional Battle Space Management, stealth was paramount.

His ship, USS Towers, had been built from the keel up with stealth in mind. She was 529 feet long, 66½ feet wide, and (if the media hype was to be believed) virtually invisible. The fourth (and last) ship in the heavily modified third “Flight” of Arleigh Burke Class destroyers, Towers was an example of cutting-edge military stealth technology. She was not, however, the “ghost ship” suggested by news magazines and Internet Web sites. In fact, from his vantage point running circles around her deck, it was difficult for Bowie to imagine how the destroyer even rated her official classification as a “Reduced Observability Vessel.”

The low pyramid shapes of her minimized superstructure and the severely raked angle of her short mast gave her a decidedly strange profile, but she was far from invisible—up close anyway. From a distance of a few thousand yards, however, that began to change. Ninety-plus percent of her exposed surfaces were covered with polymerized carbon-fiber PCMS tiles. Although designed primarily to absorb enemy radar, this newest generation of the Passive Countermeasure System had another handy feature: the rubbery tiles were impregnated with a phototropic pigment that changed color in response to changes in lighting. In bright sunlight, the tiles were a dusty blue-gray that blended into the interface between sea and sky remarkably well. As the light dimmed, the PCMS tiles would darken accordingly, reaching a shade approaching black when the ship was in total darkness.

Although the cumulative effect was a far cry from invisibility, it camouflaged the ship’s outlines enough to make her hard to see at a distance, not only reducing the range at which she could be detected visually, but also making it difficult for any optically based sensor—from the human eyeball to high-resolution video cameras—to determine her size, course, or speed.

A state-of-the-art thermal suppression system performed similar magic for the ship’s infrared signature, while the radar-absorbent PCMS and the carefully calculated geometries of her hull and superstructure gave the long steel warship a radar cross section only a little larger than the average fiberglass motorboat.

Every cleat, chock, and padeye was designed to fold down and lock into its own form-fitting recess in the deck when not in use. Although intended strictly as a means of shaving another fraction off the ship’s radar cross section, the hide-away fittings made for a remarkably uncluttered deck—which in turn made it a pretty good place to run.

The high-tech razzle-dazzle extended to the ship’s acoustic signature as well. Seventh-generation silencing, including an acoustically isolated engineering plant, active noise-control modules, and the venerable (but still effective) Prairie and Masker systems, made Towers a difficult target for passive sonar sensors. Popular rumor held that she, and her sister ships in the Flight Three Arleigh Burke Class, were quieter cruising through the water at twenty knots than most warships were tied to the pier. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

When he came to the aft end of the superstructure, Bowie curved to his left, dodging a pair of Gunner’s Mates engaged in lubricating Mount 503, the aft-starboard .50-caliber machine gun. The arc of his improvised running track took Bowie around the aft missile launcher and back to the starboard side of the ship. The aft missile launcher marked the halfway point for each lap.

Only four more laps to go. Bowie’s daily routine called for twenty-five and a half laps, which he had worked out to be about three miles. Once upon a time he’d done five miles a day, but then he’d discovered that while on board ship he didn’t eat the right kinds of foods to fuel that sort of regimen. The extra mileage had pushed his metabolism into the catabolic zone, burning up muscle tissue as well as fat.

Maybe when he returned to shore duty he’d need to crank back up to five miles a day to keep away the nearly inevitable swivel-chair spread. But that was in the future, a future that he wasn’t quite ready to think about. A future in which he would no longer command what he considered to be the finest warship in the Pacific Fleet.

Bowie increased his stride a little as he turned up the starboard side. The ship’s motion through the water generated relative wind, and running toward the bow, he was headed back into it.

Off to his right, an oil tanker was passing down the starboard side. It was an enormous thing—a supertanker—nearly twice as long as Towers, with an unloaded displacement of about three hundred thousand tons, rising maybe fifty feet above the water and obscuring his vision to starboard. The paint on its orange hull and white superstructure was bright and well maintained. It rode low in the water now, a sure indication that its tanks were full. Based on its size, Bowie estimated that it was carrying somewhere around two million barrels of oil.

The supertanker was about fifteen hundred yards out and nearing its closest point of approach. Bowie already knew that the big ship would pass Towers with a comfortable safety margin, but he couldn’t stop himself from rechecking its position and heading every time he came around the deck for another lap. He knew that the Officer of the Deck had the situation well in hand, but—when it came to collision avoidance—it never hurt to have another pair of eyes open.

In the distance astern of and beyond the tanker, a pair of oil platforms squatted on the horizon, their images wavering like mirages in the desert-heated air. The larger of the platforms belched enormous plumes of fire into the sky as its flare tower burned off the natural gas that accumulated as a natural consequence of the oil-pumping process. It was a routine procedure that the local oil rig crews referred to as “off-gassing.” The Middle Eastern oil fields were so productive that it was marginally cheaper to incinerate natural gas than to containerize and ship it.

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 duty 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.

The car was one of the new Zhonghua M-1s that the Party was so proud of. Five and a half meters of sleek, lacquered black steel, which they were heralding as the first truly all-Chinese limousine. When he’d first seen it, Tian had found himself smiling at the irony posed by the car’s very existence. China’s leading auto manufacturer, the state-owned Brilliance China Automotive, had been forced to partner with BMW (German capitalists) and Italdesign (Italian capitalists) to produce their all-Chinese masterpiece of communist automotive engineering.

The Politburo had chosen to carefully ignore strategic parts of that partnership, the same way that they had chosen to ignore a hundred other changes brought on by globalization and the Information Age. They were so confident in the inherent superiority of the communist social and economic model that they continued to operate as if their actions took place in a vacuum. If Tiananmen Square had taught them nothing else, they should have learned that the world was watching China. To act in ignorance of this fact was to court trouble. Which was, ultimately, why Tian found himself being called across town in the rain and the dark to answer for the actions of his government. He sighed. His country still had much to learn.

Tian fidgeted with his coat buttons and drew the collar more tightly around his neck. He did not yet know why the American president had summoned him at this hour, and that lack of knowledge left him with a cold spot in the pit of his stomach. He did not know what the Americans were going to say, but he knew from the way they had chosen to say it, that it was not going to be good.

At the beginning of his diplomatic career, Tian had viewed the intricacies of state protocol with a critical eye. In the vanity of his youth, he had dismissed the diplomatic ceremonies and rules of political etiquette as nothing more than useless rituals. But thirty years in his country’s diplomatic service had opened his eyes to many things, not the least of which was the foolishness of his own youth. Protocol (and the Americans thought of it that way in their own language—with a capital “P”) went far beyond ritual. As the Americans practiced it, Protocol was more than a system of rules for diplomatic communication; it was a language in and of itself. It was a rich and subtle language, in which every detail had meaning.

Tian checked his watch. Tonight’s meeting was an excellent example. To begin with, the president wanted to meet directly with Tian. That was a most disturbing development. Other than the little ceremony that took place when he accepted the diplomatic credentials of a new ambassador, the president rarely met with ambassadors at all. Meetings with foreign ambassadors were usually entrusted to the secretary of state or an appointed underling. For the president to call for a personal meeting with an ambassador was nearly always a signal of extremely unusual circumstances. The very thought made Tian nervous, and he checked his watch again. No, traffic was light, and he would be on time. He took a breath.

The Americans had given Tian another hint of possible problems when they’d asked him to come alone. Under normal circumstances, he would have been accompanied by his deputy chief of mission. By excluding Tian’s deputy from the invitation, the Americans were forcing the ambassador to face them alone. This was, of course, their prerogative, but it was one that the Americans rarely exercised. It was another bad sign, and Tian was not at all pleased with the prospect of walking alone into a room full of angry Americans.

The designated location for the meeting was yet another clue. There were three traditional choices for diplomatic meetings in the White House. The Roosevelt Room had a neutral connotation, and the majority of diplomatic meetings were conducted there. The West Wing Lobby was Dao shan huo hai—a mountain of swords and sea of flames. The Americans had an equivalent expression. What was it? The doghouse? Yes … the West Wing Lobby was the doghouse. An ambassador called to a meeting there could be certain that he had angered the American government.

But no, tonight’s meeting was scheduled for the Oval Office, the third and by far the least common site for diplomatic conferences. The selection of the Oval Office meant one of two things, each of which were—oddly enough—at opposite ends of the spectrum. If the president wanted to ask a favor of China, or of Shaozu Tian himself, he might call for an Oval Office meeting. The favor would have to be enormous for the Americans to invoke such a rare privilege. And, though Tian had racked his brain to the point of a headache, he could not think of a single favor China could bestow that might warrant such treatment. Which meant that, in all probability, the Oval Office had been selected for the second reason: the president was angry at China. Not just angry either, spectacularly angry. Too angry for the doghouse—a thought that made Tian squirm uncomfortably in the limousine’s leather seat. Maybe even dangerously angry. And he was calling in the ambassador of the People’s Republic so that he could vent his wrath in person, in the Oval Office—the very seat of his country’s power.

Such a meeting could conceivably lead to the disruption of diplomatic ties, or even trade embargoes and the loss of Most Favored Nation status. It was even conceivable that a meeting of that sort might serve as a precursor to war. Tian realized that his armpits were damp. The more he thought about it, the more this promised to be an ugly night.

*  *  *

As the limousine slid to a stop before the black steel bars of the diplomatic security gate that led to the White House grounds, Tian peered out the windshield through the rhythmic sweep of the wipers. The limousine had diplomatic license plates, which made the interior spaces sovereign Chinese territory, and therefore, immune to inspection. But the exterior of the car was—through the vagaries of diplomatic custom—classified as U.S. territory and was subject to inspection.

The steel gate slid open, and Tian’s driver eased the big car forward into a three-sided enclosure built from the same black steel bars that supported the rest of the White House fence. As soon as the limousine braked to a stop, the gate slid shut behind it, leaving the car boxed and helpless in a steel cage. My predicament exactly, Tian thought. Boxed in and helpless.

An expressionless armed Marine guard stepped out of the concrete guardhouse and walked over to stand in the rain near the driver’s window—hands tucked behind his back and feet spread shoulder-width apart in the formal posture known as parade rest. A pair of dark-uniformed Secret Service agents with powerful flashlights and inspection mirrors conducted a thorough search of the car’s wheel wells and the underside of the chassis, working smoothly from the front of the car toward the rear. The men moved with determination and precision, not letting the pouring rain deter them, or hurry their procedures in the slightest.

When their visual inspection was finally complete, the Secret Service personnel backed away from the limousine and took up positions near the inner gate. One of them raised his right wrist to his mouth and spoke quietly into a microphone concealed in his sleeve.

A few seconds later, another pair of Secret Service agents stepped out of the guardhouse. Each of these men carried a device that looked like a cross between a lunch box and a vacuum cleaner. They were smaller than the models in use at the Chinese Embassy, but Tian had no trouble recognizing them through the rain-blurred window. They were ion-spectrometers: machines that sucked in air and sniffed it for the specific trace molecules given off by explosive chemicals. It was the electronic equivalent of a dog’s nose.

Tian hoped that the smaller American spectrometers were smarter than the Chinese models. The ones at the embassy had a tendency to sound their alarms upon detecting the nitroglycerin in Tian’s heart medication.

Despite the downpour, the Secret Service agents went to work at once, letting their machines sniff the exterior of the car, in a pattern that closely duplicated the visual inspection that their fellow agents had just completed. And, like their fellow agents, they gave no hint of even noticing the rain that pounded down on them from the dark Washington sky. Tian could not help but admire their patience and determination.

Satisfied at last, the Secret Service agents retreated into the guardhouse. The Marine guard took a step backward, came to attention, and saluted. As if in response, the inner gate slid open, allowing Tian’s limousine access to the White House grounds. With barely a nod of acknowledgment, Tian’s silent driver steered the car into the White House driveway and turned toward the famed West Wing.

Tian reached across the seat for his diplomatic pouch, pulled it to him, and held it in his lap. The esteemed members of the Politburo could not seem to grasp the fact that the Americans were different now. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had changed them, hardened them—as fire hardens steel. They were less trusting now and a good deal less naive about world affairs. And—after decades spent trying to broker peace at nearly any price—they had become awfully eager to reach for their guns. Surely the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were ample evidence of that.

Tian tightened his grip on the diplomatic pouch, rubbing the largest, most familiar nick in the old leather with the ball of his thumb. He had not been told why he was being called to task, so he was reduced to guessing—a thoroughly uncomfortable situation for an international diplomat to find himself in. If the Americans were truly angry, it might well be over his country’s most recent ballistic missile test. Based on that as yet untested assumption, his staff had drafted extensive notes on potential arguments that he might employ. His diplomatic pouch contained twenty-two pages of Chinese pictographs in the neat calligraphy of his deputy chief of mission. Tian did not anticipate having to refer to those notes. He had read and re-read them until he could nearly recite them from memory. Still, there was a vague comfort in the knowledge that they were available to him if needed—the same sense of sufficiency that came from knowing that your vehicle carried a spare tire, even if you did not expect to need it, or know how to change it.

His staff had done their work well, and Tian intended to score some points—provided that the missile test did, in fact, prove to be the subject of this meeting. Despite his preparations, he had no desire to argue this point. Unfortunately, he had no choice—his orders from the Politburo were unmistakable. If the Americans raised the issue of the missile test, he was to give no ground. The words of Premier Xiao had been quite clear on this: Bu huan er san—to part on hard terms—was acceptable. He was not to bend, or even appear to bend on this matter.

Tian shifted in his seat and hoped fervently that he had guessed wrong. This was an issue on which it was not even remotely wise to anger the Americans. They had become quick to react to anything they perceived as a threat, and these days it was difficult to predict what would fall into that category.

Despite his hopes to the contrary, he had little doubt that the missile test would be the topic of this meeting. He would know in a few seconds. The Laws of Protocol were about to give him a final clue. He would be able to take a reading on the disposition of the Americans according to who was waiting to meet him at the entrance to the West Wing. If tempers were reasonable, he would be greeted by David Spiros, the National Security Council country officer assigned to China. If the Americans were pleased with China, or if they wanted to ask a favor, they would send Gregory Brenthoven, the national security advisor himself. If they were truly angry, they would send a minor functionary from the NSC, probably someone whom Tian would not recognize.

The limousine pulled out of the rain under the curved overhang of the West Wing portico and stopped opposite the marble steps that led into the White House. The rhythmic whunk-whunk of the wipers swept the windshield uselessly a few times before the driver shut them off. Heart in his mouth and lips pressed tightly together, Tian peered through the steamy window toward the door at the top of the steps. It was guarded by a pair of United States Marines in full dress uniforms. As was the custom, one of the Marines came to attention and honored the Chinese Embassy’s vehicle with a crisp salute. Then the guard dropped his salute and marched down the steps to open the rear door of the limousine.

Able to learn nothing further from his vantage point in the back seat, Tian uttered a sigh and, clutching his leather diplomatic pouch, pulled himself from the automobile. Then, as Tian stood and straightened his suit, the Marine came to attention again, and rendered a second salute.

Tian acknowledged the salute with a nod and started walking up the steps. The damp night air enveloped him like an evil spell; he felt flares of arthritic pain in his knees and hips, echoed dully by an ache of anxiety in his chest. He concentrated on keeping his steps even and his face implacable. One did not show weakness in the face of a potential adversary.

The Marine remaining at the top of the steps opened the door, and Tian caught sight of the person assigned to greet him. It was a youngish woman, and Tian did not recognize her at all.

“Bao tian tian wu,” he said under his breath. Literally a reckless waste of grain, but in this context it meant an ill omen. This was not going to go well. He smiled and extended his hand for the woman to shake.

This was not going to go well at all.

CHAPTER 3

DEUTSCHE MARINE NAVAL ARSENAL

KIEL, GERMANY

MONDAY; 07 MAY

0951 hours (9:51 AM)

TIME ZONE +1 ‘ALPHA’

Dirty-looking clouds scudded across an iron-colored sky. In a few hours, the spring sun would burn away the overcast, but for now, the damp remnants of winter hung over the harbor. The water that lapped up against the rusting steel pilings seemed oily and dark, its froth the color of a dead fish’s belly.

Kapitan Stefan Gröeler leaned against the dock railing and watched the huge yellow ammunition crane lift the last of the torpedoes off the ordnance barge. Suspended from the crane’s heavy cable by a four-way sling, the weapon swung slowly out to hover above the aft deck of Gröeler’s submarine, the U-307. Crewmen in gray coveralls grabbed the dangling weapon’s tag-lines and began to guide it into the proper attitude for lowering through the main hatch. The men worked in near silence, as they should have, with the Team Leader watching closely and issuing brief commands. “Hold fast on the forward line,” or “Bring the nose down farther,” or “Check the crane,” or “Watch your deck clearance!”

Gröeler nodded almost imperceptibly. They were good men—a good crew.

His eyes lingered on the weapon suspended above the deck. It hung nose down and tail high, close to the thirty-seven–degree angle needed to lower it through the weapons hatch.

The Team Leader issued another command, and the nose dropped a few more degrees. Satisfied, he turned, made eye contact with the crane operator, and opened and closed the fingers of his right hand several times like the quacking of a duck: the hand signal for lower slowly.

The polymerized coating of the Ozeankriegsführungtechnologien DMA37 torpedo gave the weapon a shiny green look, as though it were a child’s toy made of plastic. In comparison, the rounded profile of the Type 212B submarine seemed especially menacing: a sleek, dark-skinned predator floating low in the water. It was a false impression; both machines were dangerous. The quietest, most capable diesel submarine ever built, paired with one of the most sophisticated and lethal undersea weapons that modern military science could devise.

The morning sun found its way through a hole in the clouds, and Gröeler squinted slightly. The skin around his eyes was crosshatched with heavy crow’s feet. Not laugh lines, but rather a cumulative network of wrinkles caused by thousands of hours spent peering through periscopes and attack-scopes.

He was a short, solidly built man, with ice-blue eyes that moved quickly and missed very little. Behind his back, the men called him das Armkreuz—the spider. Under another circumstance, the nickname might have been disparaging. But Gröeler knew that his crew considered it a compliment. It signified their respect for his skill as a hunter. He moved quietly, worked meticulously, and killed quickly.

He rummaged in the pocket of his gray Deutsche Marine coveralls for a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden at the ammunition piers, but he was in command here. It was his submarine, they were his torpedoes, and the gray-coveralled crewmen working down on the deck were his to command. He lit the cigarette with a slender butane lighter made of good German steel. He drew a lung full of smoke. It was a stupid rule anyway. The plasticized-hexite explosive used in the torpedoes was incredibly stable. Without a precisely measured electrical charge from an arming mechanism, it was just so much harmless chemical modeling clay. With the proper initiating charge … well, that was a different matter. But ten cartons of smoldering cigarettes and a hundred butane lighters couldn’t hope to set one of those weapons off.

He took another hit off the cigarette, exhaling fiercely through his nostrils. Still, it was good to have such rules. They gave the men direction: road signs for separating acceptable behavior from unacceptable behavior. And it was good for the men to see their kapitan breaking such rules. They needed to be reminded that his was the final word on all subjects. As commanding officer of the wolfpack, his orders were not subject to question. He, and he alone, would decide when to follow regulations and when to break them.

He looked at his watch. They would finish with the torpedoes shortly, and then they could begin loading the missiles. It was obvious that his crew would finish ahead of schedule. He stepped away from the railing, executed a precise turn to the right, and began walking with a crisp, deliberate stride.

It was time to inspect the other three submarines under his command and check the status of their weapons on-loads. No doubt they would also be ahead of schedule, but probably not so far as his own crew. He had, after all, personally selected every one of his men. They were, quite literally, the best that the German Navy had to offer. And after six months of intensive pre-mission training, they meshed like the proverbial well-oiled machine.

As he walked, Gröeler pulled off his officer’s cap and rubbed his fingers briskly through his blond crew cut. There was more than a little gray in his hair now. That too was a good thing. The other wolves in the pack should be reminded that the lead wolf was the oldest and wisest, as well as the strongest.

He pulled his cap back on and straightened it with a practiced gesture: no wasted motion. Let his men see the outward evidence of his self-assurance. Let them note the steadiness of his hands and the easy grace of his movements. They would take confidence from these things, and they were going to need that confidence, along with every scrap of advantage they could get.

The mission was achievable; he was certain of that. It would require exceptional skill and more luck than he cared to think about, but it could be done. He knew the tactics of the American Navy and the capabilities of their hardware. He could bluff the Americans. Avoid them. And if he couldn’t …

It wasn’t failure that worried him. He had made every possible preparation. His men were handpicked and expertly trained. His boats were in superb condition. All of the necessary support mechanisms were in place. The plan could work. He would make it work.

But what about afterward? Would the Americans really react as the Bundeswehr’s military Security Council predicted? Did his superiors really understand the Americans at all? Gröeler certainly didn’t, and he’d been studying them and their military tactics for his entire adult life.

The Japanese had critically misjudged the Americans in 1941, hadn’t they? Their attack on Pearl Harbor had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The mission had succeeded. But the Americans had not sued for peace, as the expert strategists and tacticians had assured the Japanese High Command. The carnage inflicted at Pearl Harbor had enraged the normally placid Americans in ways the Japanese psyche could not even comprehend. The Americans had risen from the wreckage of the attack and crushed Japan like an insect. Finally, it had taken the nuclear extermination of over a quarter of a million Japanese citizens and the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to slake the American thirst for revenge.

Japan had nearly been destroyed as a result of wishful thinking on the part of its leaders. And now, the chancellor and his cronies in the Bundeswehr seemed to be poised to make the same mistake. They were gambling the fate of Germany on their projections of how the Americans would react. What if their guesses were wrong? What if the American response was military instead of political?

Gröeler shook his head. He had spent his entire life in submarines. He didn’t know much about international politics, but this whole thing struck him as the worst sort of wishful thinking. The kind by which nations were destroyed.

He had nearly turned the mission down. For the first time in his life, he had come within a centimeter of refusing to obey his orders. Only one thing had stopped him—the knowledge that the Bundeswehr would find someone else to carry out the plan. Someone less capable. Success might bring consequences that the Bundeswehr and the chancellor had not foreseen. But, if the mission was botched, the consequences would be ungodly.

Gröeler shook his head again. Either his superiors had forgotten their history, or they hadn’t noticed the date. The seventh of May. The anniversary of the Nazi High Command’s unconditional surrender to the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Germany had lain in ruins then, Berlin still burning from the American fire bombs, the countryside torn by the boots of soldiers and the treads of tanks. And the Bundeswehr had selected this date to launch their operation. Had they done so out of blind ignorance? Or was their choice of dates intentional? Some delusion that Germany was destined to recapture its former glory? Gröeler couldn’t decide which idea was more frightening.

He sucked a last lung full of smoke from the cigarette and thumped it over the rail into the water. In the split-second before the butt left his fingers, he caught a glimpse of the brand name: Ernte 23.

The name brought a bitter smile to Kapitan Gröeler’s mouth. Ernte meant harvest. And, if the mission didn’t go as planned, there would be a harvest all right. A harvest of blood and fire.

He looked down at the piers where the young Sailors were rushing to carry out his orders and wondered if any of them would survive it.

CHAPTER 4

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 06 MAY

8:45 PM EDT

President Francis “Frank” Chandler swiveled his chair a few degrees to the left and stared out the window across the White House grounds. It was really coming down out there tonight, the rain driving across the manicured lawn in torrents. Occasionally the wind would manage to whip a burst of raindrops far enough under the edge of the colonnade to splatter on the marble flagstones of the covered walkway. But even those violent bursts fell well short of the windows.

Some small part of him wished that the wind would pick up enough to drive the rain against his windows. He loved the sound of rain on glass; it conjured up memories of boyhood summers in Iowa cornfields and of the clatter of a good spring rain on a corrugated tin roof. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyway; the windows were triple-paned bulletproof glass.

He watched for a few seconds in silent fascination. There was something strange about seeing the rain without hearing it; something vaguely disconnected: a little like the feeling that came from watching television with the sound turned down.

He leaned a little farther back, rested his elbows on the padded leather arms of the chair, and wondered for the thousandth time at the strange chain of events that had led him to the Oval Office. The thought, as always, brought an odd half-smile to his lips. There were men—powerful and influential men—who spent their entire lives fighting for a chance to sit in this office. Struggling one rung at a time up the twin ladders of politics and public opinion—waiting for a chance to sit in this chair, behind this desk. But the job had very nearly fallen into Frank’s lap. He sure as hell hadn’t planned his life around it, anyway.

He was a latecomer to politics, and he had entered the political arena by the back door. (Some of his more vocal critics preferred to say he had tunneled under the back fence.)

The son of an Iowa corn farmer, he had inherited three major things from his father: a passion for the land, an iron-hard work ethic, and the shambling big-boned frame of a farmhand. Six foot four and broad shouldered, he had a roughness about him that spoke more of flannel shirts and work-scuffed blue jeans than of suits and neckties.

His love of the land had not led him to the farm, as it had his father and grandfather before him, but to the laboratories of the University of Iowa. Armed with a master’s degree in organic chemistry, he had climbed through the ranks of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, where his fierce determination to improve the lot of the American farmer had eventually earned him an appointment as the state secretary of agriculture.

With the appointment had come the realization that the future of the farmer was being decided not in the fields or in the laboratory, but in the boardrooms and on the floors of the legislature. Frank had decided to throw his hat into the political ring. After an extremely successful term as the state secretary of agriculture, he had made a dark-horse bid for governor of Iowa. He’d never really expected to win. At best, he had hoped to drag the plight of the farmer into the forefront of Iowa’s political system. To raise important issues in the hopes that more viable gubernatorial candidates would have to deal with them.

But his plain-talking grassroots campaign had resonated with the voters of Iowa, and they had surprised him (and everyone else in the state political machine) by electing him governor.

Four years later, he had entered the race for the presidency, running a distant second to Martin Bridgewater: an archly conservative senator and the fair-haired boy of the Republican Party. Bridgewater was a charismatic speaker and a political heavyweight. The cameras loved him, and so did the crowds. He had started with a thirty-point lead over Frank in the CNN, USA Today, and Gallup polls, and had widened it quickly.

Frank had been poised to lose the election by the widest margin in history, when fate dropped another surprise in his lap. Martin Bridgewater’s pregnant nineteen-year-old mistress had decided to take her story to the media. Bridgewater had lost twenty polling points in the first forty-eight hours. Even so, he might well have weathered the storm. After the predictable outcry, his supporters had settled down pretty quickly. They seemed prepared to forgive him for his transgressions. Other powerful men had succumbed to the temptations of the flesh, after all. Some of them had even been presidents.

But Bridgewater’s girlfriend had sold six cassette tapes to one of the more sensational cable news programs. The young woman had recorded many of her private phone conversations with Bridgewater. The news anchors had apparently delighted in playing sound bytes of the more lurid parts, bleeping out questionable choices of language in a manner that made the tapes seem even more sordid than they actually were. At the climax of the exposé had come the most damning revelation of all: Senator Bridgewater—a rabid pro-lifer—had tried to convince his mistress to have an abortion. He had offered the girl a quiet cash settlement to get rid of the baby and disappear into the woodwork.

Bridgewater’s campaign had disintegrated in a matter of days. The resulting backlash of public opinion had hurled Frank Chandler, the hayseed candidate, into the highest office in the land.

*  *  *

President Chandler’s eyes were still locked on the rain falling soundlessly outside the bulletproof windows. His odd little smile faded slowly. He’d been sitting in the big chair for thirty-nine months and sixteen days, and he still couldn’t believe he was here. In the few quiet moments that the job afforded him, the surreal quality of the entire situation filtered back to the surface of his mind, leaving him with a disjointed feeling. Disconnected. Like the strangely silent rain.

He sighed and, for a brief second, entertained the notion of opening one of the French doors that led to the columned walkway. That way, at least he’d be able to hear the occasional spatters of rain on the flagstones.

“Mr. President?” The voice belonged to the White House chief of staff, Veronica Doyle.

The president snapped his mind back to attention and swung his chair around. “Yes?”

“They’re ready for you, sir.”

“Good,” the president said. He rubbed his eyes and blinked several times. “Where is the ambassador?”

“In a holding pattern in the West Wing lobby.”

The president nodded. “Show our people in. We’ll give them a minute to get settled before we call for the ambassador.”

Doyle nodded to the Secret Service agent standing by the door to the office of the president’s secretary. The agent opened the door, and the team for the China meeting began to filter into the Oval Office.

The president beckoned them into the room and waved them toward the rectangle of couches and chairs at the end of the room opposite his desk. “Have a seat in the bullpen. Make yourselves comfortable, I’ll be with you in a couple of seconds.”

He turned back to his chief of staff. “What else have we got tonight?”

The chief of staff flipped open the lid of her palm-top computer and scanned the small LCD screen. “At nine-thirty, you’ve got a phone conference with the assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs. The Russians are asking for increased wheat subsidies. Assistant Secretary Chernja thinks it’s a bad idea, but she wants your permission before she shuts the door on this one. You also promised the vice president you would sit down with him and look at his numbers on the handgun bill.”

The president nodded. “Move the vice president up to nine-thirty and bump Assistant Secretary Chernja to tomorrow morning. The Russian thing isn’t going to self-destruct any time soon, and I’d much rather hit it when my brain is fresh.”

Doyle nodded and made rapid notes on the input screen of her palm-top. “Good idea, Mr. President. I’m starting to fade myself, sir.”

Her appearance belied her words. Her short black hair was flawlessly styled, her turquoise silk business suit was immaculate, and if there was any fatigue behind her flint-gray eyes it certainly wasn’t visible to mere mortals.

The president stood up. “All right. Send for the ambassador. Let’s get this over with.”

*  *  *

The bullpen consisted of two couches and four chairs, laid out in a rough rectangle around a low-topped French Empire bureau that served as a coffee table. The table was an authentic piece from the President Monroe collection, burnished ebony with curving saber-style legs that were chased with gold leaf. The source of a minor point of contention, the date of the table’s manufacture could be set at either 1827 or 1830, and a fairly good case could be made for either date. The chairs and couches—which appeared to be matching French Empire pieces—were actually excellent reproductions, crafted by the famed Kittinger Furniture, suppliers of White House furnishings for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

The president had given the bullpen its name during his first week in office. In baseball, the bullpen was a designated area of the ballpark where the pitchers warmed up before they trudged out to the pitcher’s mound, where the real work began. The nickname had not proven to be very accurate, because he generally accomplished more serious work in the bullpen than he did at his desk—which (according to the metaphor) should have been the pitcher’s mound. But, apropos or not, the nickname had stuck.

The president walked over to the bullpen and spent a few minutes greeting the members of his meeting team and shaking hands. Not counting himself and his chief of staff, Veronica Doyle, the team consisted of Secretary of State Elizabeth Whelkin; National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven; Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asian Affairs William Collins; and a designated note taker, Marine Corps Lieutenant Michael Summers, on loan from the National Security Council. There would be no need for an interpreter, as the Chinese ambassador spoke excellent English.

*  *  *

The hallway door opened and the ambassador was ushered in by a deputy assistant to somebody-or-other in the National Security Council. The young woman, who probably didn’t know that she had been selected on the basis of her obscurity, was visibly nervous over what was obviously her first visit to the Oval Office. Despite her nervousness, she made her announcement flawlessly. “Mr. President, may I present Ambassador Shaozu Tian, minister plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China.”

The president smiled and stepped forward to shake the ambassador’s hand. “Good evening, Ambassador Shaozu. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

The ambassador returned his smile. “I am honored to be of service, Mr. President. And I bring you greetings on behalf of the citizens and government of the People’s Republic of China.”

The next few moments were dedicated to handshakes and pleasantries as the ambassador was introduced to the rest of the team.

When the members of the team took their seats, they fell silent. In accordance with the dictates of protocol, the president would speak as the sole representative of the United States—just as the ambassador would speak as the sole representative of his own government. The other members of the team were there to watch, gather information, and formulate ideas for the discussion that would immediately follow the meeting. During the meeting itself, they might pass the president notes or documents, but they would not contribute directly to the conversation.

There was an additional point to having so many non-speaking members in the room. Few people are comfortable under close scrutiny. Having a room full of people watch your every gesture and listen to your every word—all without speaking themselves—can be highly unsettling. It is difficult for even the most accomplished of diplomats to concentrate properly under such circumstances. In Washington circles, the technique has often been likened to a low-intensity version of Psychological Warfare.

*  *  *

When everyone was finally seated, the president said, “I hope you will forgive me if I come directly to matters of business.”

The ambassador smiled slightly. “An excellent idea, Mr. President. I am an old man, and I must confess that the passage of years has somewhat blunted my taste for polite small talk.”

“Good,” the president said. “I would like to discuss the matter of your country’s most recent ballistic missile launch.”

The ambassador’s eyebrows went up slightly. “I see. Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” the president said. “There is a problem, or rather—there are two problems. The first is with the trajectory of the missile, and the second is with the timing of the launch.”

“Oh? And why should either of those pose difficulties? To my understanding, the launch was conducted safely, without incident or threat to life.”

“Without incident—yes,” the president said. “It’s the ‘threat to life’ part that we are not so certain about.”

“How so?”

“The missile in question was a DF-21C, designed to carry the NV-6 nuclear warhead; is that correct?”

“I believe that is so.”

“Does the DF-21C have the capability to carry any non-nuclear payloads?”

The ambassador’s hand stole down to the black leather diplomatic pouch in his lap. He made no move to open it. His fingers began to play over the creased leather, almost as though the pouch were some sort of worry stone, or talisman. “I … cannot speak on this issue,” he said. “That is, I am not an expert on the subject of ballistic missile systems.”

The national security advisor scribbled something on a slip of paper, folded it, and passed it to the president. The president read it and then paused for a second before continuing. “I’m sure that it will come as no surprise to you that I have numerous ballistic missile experts at my disposal, some of whom are quite knowledgeable on the subject of the weapons systems of your People’s Liberation Army. My experts assure me that the DF-21C has no conventional warhead capability.”

The ambassador tilted his head slightly to the side. “If your experts are—as you say, expert—then I am sure that their assessments are correct. May I now ask the point of this question?”

“The point is this,” the president said. “Your military fired a ballistic missile directly over Taiwan, less than a week before the Taiwanese national election—an election in which the front-running candidate just happens to be a strong proponent of Taiwanese independence. The missile in question is designed solely for offensive nuclear strikes. You have to admit, that sounds an awful lot like deliberate intimidation. What my grandfather used to call strong-arm politics.”

The Chinese ambassador’s voice was a near shout. “You accuse my country of playing politics with nuclear weapons?”

President Chandler raised his eyebrows a fraction. “What would you call it?”

The ambassador paused for a few seconds before speaking. His tone was much calmer now. “I would call it … I believe … a routine test-launch of an unarmed missile. A launch, I might add, that traveled entirely through Chinese airspace, passed over only Chinese territory, and landed safely in Chinese national waters. As for the timing? I would call that a coincidence.”

The secretary of state passed a folded slip of paper to the president. He scanned it before continuing. “A coincidence,” he said slowly. “Would that be the same sort of coincidence that led your government to launch three missiles into Taiwanese territorial waters on the eve of their first national election in 1996? Was it also coincidence that your country moved several hundred CSS-6 and CSS-7 missile systems into Fujian province—directly across the straits from Taiwan—in the weeks just prior to their election in 2000?”

Ambassador Shaozu stiffened. “Mr. President, are you now suggesting that the defensive deployment of the People’s Liberation Army within our own borders is somehow the business of the United States?”

“Perhaps not,” the president said. “But firing a ballistic missile directly over Taiwan is an overtly hostile act.”

“Hostile to whom, Mr. President?”

“To Taiwan, the Democratic People’s Republic of China.”

The ambassador smiled. “Mr. President, there is no Democratic People’s Republic of China. It does not exist. It never has existed.”

“I understand that your government holds such an opinion,” the president said. “But you must realize that the United States does not share your view.”

“There is only one China, Mr. President—a simple truth that even the United Nations acknowledges. There are two chairs for Korea in the General Assembly, one for South Korea and another for North Korea. That is because there are two Koreas.

“You will note that there is only one chair in the United Nations General Assembly for China. That is because there is only one China. If there were two Chinas, there would be two chairs, would there not? The citizens of our troublesome island province may style themselves as renegades, but they are Chinese citizens nonetheless.”

“The citizens of Taiwan have a democratically elected government,” the president said. “They have their own laws, their own currency, their own national identity. They do not wish to be part of your country.”

The ambassador sighed. “We cannot let the wishes of a few million miscreants threaten the integrity of our sovereign nation. Their desires are irrelevant.”

“How can the wishes of millions of people be irrelevant?”

“Perhaps my memory for American history is a little fuzzy,” the ambassador said, “but I seem to recall that your country was faced with a similar situation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of your Southern provinces … excuse me … you call them states, do you not? A number of your Southern states decided to secede from your Union. If I am not mistaken, your government used military force to repatriate the renegade states. I believe the casualties from that war totaled something just short of seven hundred thousand people. Yet, your citizens seem to regard the loss of nearly three-quarters of a million lives as a reasonable price to pay for reacquiring the lost territories and reabsorbing the inhabitants.”

“A fair point,” the president said. “But we are in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. The world is a different place. The tools and attitudes that served us well a hundred and fifty years ago have no place in the modern age.”

“Perhaps things have not changed as much as you would like to believe,” Ambassador Shaozu said. “What if the situation arose again tomorrow? Suppose that the citizens of your island state of Hawaii decide next week that they are disillusioned with the direction that your government is taking. Suppose they elect their own president, draft their own constitution, and print their own money. Will your country let them peacefully secede, merely because they wish it?”

The president didn’t say anything.

“It’s not such an easy question when the problem is in your backyard, is it, Mr. President?”

The president leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers. “An interesting argument, Ambassador, but it fails to take into account the two enormously powerful effects in the evolution of nations. Time … and acceptance.”

The ambassador’s eyes narrowed. “I do not understand.”

“Consider your hypothetical example,” the president said. “Suppose the people of Hawaii did declare their independence and form their own government. Then suppose that the United States chose to wait a while before acting to repatriate Hawaii. If Hawaii were self-governing and self-sufficient, at what point would they cease to be a renegade state and actually become an independent country?”

The ambassador frowned. “I am not following your argument.”

“Your People’s Republic of China and our own United States have much in common,” the president said. “Both of our nations were given birth by revolution. Each of our countries managed to fight its way out from under the yoke of a repressive government. Both of our countries began as renegade states. And yet, today, China and America exist as two of the most powerful nations on Earth, due—in large part—to the passage of time and the acceptance of other nations. I’m sure you will agree that far too much time has passed for Great Britain to recoup the United States as lost territory. Similarly, far too many nations have acknowledged the existence of your own People’s Republic of China for the Kuomintang or the descendants of the Empress Dowager to attempt to regain your citizens as outlaw rebels.”

The ambassador did not speak.

“Time has passed for Taiwan, Mr. Ambassador,” the president said. “You haven’t made a serious move to repatriate them in over sixty years. In that time, they have become self-governing, and they have gained the acceptance of many nations. Taiwan now enjoys formal diplomatic ties with over thirty countries and maintains trading partnerships with over a hundred and fifty countries. At last count, they were the fourteenth largest trading nation in the world. It is true that they do not hold a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, but we both know that your country has blocked every attempt to formally admit them to the UN.” He smiled gently. “Rebel republics are transformed into nations by time and acceptance. And the Democratic People’s Republic of China on Taiwan has had both.”

The ambassador did not speak for several seconds. When he did, his voice was tight and low. “You are welcome to accept the make-believe sovereignty of our renegade province, if you so choose. The People’s Republic of China is under no obligation to do so.”

The president nodded. “I understand your position. And I acknowledge that it’s likely that our countries will continue to agree to disagree on matters concerning Taiwan—at least for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the United States is willing to support whatever diplomatic overtures your government wishes to make toward peaceful reunification with Taiwan. I must caution you though; the U.S. cannot and will not sit back and allow military threats to Taiwan to go unchallenged. Our policy on this matter dates back to 1950, when President Truman deployed the entire U.S. Seventh Fleet in defense of Taiwan. Please convey this message directly to your premier: we are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this recent missile launch. You say that it was a routine test, and we will accept your word for that, despite the evidence to the contrary.”

He leaned over the coffee table and flipped open a heavy leather-bound book to a pre-marked page. A glossy color image of mainland China covered two pages. “My world atlas tells me that your country has about eighty-seven hundred miles of coastline.” He flipped to another marked page. The map of Taiwan took up a half-page. “It also tells me that Taiwan is about two hundred and thirty-seven miles in its longest axis.” He closed the book with a thump. “If we add a twelve-mile buffer to the north and south of the island, to account for Taiwanese territorial waters, we discover that your country has over eight thousand four hundred miles of coastline to fire missile tests from—without impinging on the airspace, territory, or seas of Taiwan.” His voice hardened. “I suggest you consider using another piece of ocean for your next missile test.”

“I object to your tone,” the ambassador said. “I have given you my assurances that the launch was a routine test, yet you insinuate that it was a deliberate act of … what did you call it? Strong-arm politics?”

The president beckoned to his secretary of state, Elizabeth Whelkin, who leaned over far enough to hand him a folded newspaper. It was an English-language edition of the Tokyo Times.

“The Japanese press has picked up on a rumor that your missile launch was code-named Tongyi De Zhongguo,” the president said. He unfolded the paper and laid it on the coffee table with slow, deliberate motions. “My Mandarin is a little rusty, Ambassador Shaozu. Could you refresh my memory? How does Tongyi De Zhongguo translate into English?”

The ambassador’s cheeks reddened. His fingers seemed to spasm as they roamed the surface of his old diplomatic pouch. “I give you my assurance, Mr. President; I have no knowledge of any such code name.”

The president nodded. “I’m relieved to hear that. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to translate the phrase anyway, for the benefit of those of us who do not speak the language of the Middle Kingdom.”

“Of course,” the ambassador said in a quiet voice. “It means … United China.”

The words hung in the air for several seconds before the president spoke again. “United China,” he said. “Used in the context of a nuclear missile launch, might that phrase be interpreted to mean that your country is prepared to use any sort of force necessary to achieve a United China? That is to say, the return of Taiwan to Chinese control?”

“That might be one interpretation,” the ambassador said slowly.

“If you have a different interpretation to offer, I would be interested in hearing it,” the president said.

Ambassador Shaozu said nothing.

The president allowed the silence to drag on for nearly a minute. He was tempted to rake the ambassador over the coals again, but there wasn’t anything to be gained by it. He had gotten his message across, and the rules of protocol required diplomatic meetings to end with pleasantries and handshakes.

“Thank you for coming,” he said finally. He climbed to his feet and extended his hand. “Please convey my greeting to Premier Xiao and the esteemed members of the Politburo.”

The ambassador got to his feet and shook the president’s outstretched hand. “I will, Mr. President.”

The ambassador shook hands with the other members of the meeting team before taking his leave. The note taker, Lieutenant Summers, escorted him from the room.

*  *  *

The president waited nearly a minute after the door had closed behind the ambassador before he clapped his hands together. “Talk to me, people.”

The secretary of state spoke first. “Did you notice his eyes, sir? He was blowing smoke the entire time, and I don’t think he was at all happy about it.”

The president waved a hand in a circle. “Continue.”

“The diplomacy game is sticky,” she said. “An ambassador is sometimes forced to present his government’s position, even when he thinks his government is screwing up. This is especially true of diplomats who represent communist governments; they have little or no latitude to deviate from the official party line.”

The president leaned back in his chair. “You think Shaozu disagrees with the Politburo’s position on this missile launch?”

“Maybe, sir,” the secretary of state said.

“Something is definitely bothering him,” added William Collins, the assistant secretary of state for Southeast Asian affairs. “I’ve worked with Tian for years, and I have to agree. Tian put on a good show tonight; he’s too good a diplomat not to put his best into every session, but his heart wasn’t in it tonight.”

“All right,” the president said. “He was distracted, and that threw his game off a little. The next obvious question is: what’s got him rattled? Is it just frustration over having to spout Party rhetoric? Or is he worried about something?”

“If I had to guess,” Assistant Secretary Collins said, “I’d say Tian is worried.”

“About what?” the chief of staff asked.

Gregory Brenthoven, the national security advisor, loosened his tie. “We’ve got two good possibilities. On the one hand, he may be worried about our response to the missile launch—possible military reprisals, diplomatic or economic sanctions—hell, he may even be worried that this will goad us into extending formal diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. On the other hand, it may be his own government he’s worried about. Either something they’ve done, or something they’re about to do.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow the field,” the president said. “Do you have any sense for what it might be? At the moment, I’ll settle for a hunch.”

“I have no idea, sir,” Brenthoven said. “But it’s liable to be something we’re really not going to like.”

Veronica Doyle looked around at the members of the team. “Anybody got any idea how far the Chinese might go?”

“They just launched a ballistic missile over Taiwan,” said Secretary Whelkin. “I’d say they’re feeling pretty bold.”

“And in this case,” the president said, “bold might equate to stupid.” He nodded slowly and then turned to his national security advisor. “Greg, round up the Joint Chiefs; I want an aircraft carrier off the coast of Taiwan by the time the sun comes up tomorrow, and a second carrier on scene as soon as we can manage it.”

The national security advisor frowned. “Two carriers, Mr. President? We’ve only got four deployed. That’s going to spread us pretty thin. If we’re trying to show the Chinese that we’re not happy with them, I should think one carrier would more than do the job.”

The president shook his head. “I don’t want China to think we’re unhappy. I want them to know that we’re mad as hell and not interested in playing games where Taiwan is concerned. Besides, the people of Taiwan have an election coming up in a few days. If we let the Politburo have their way, that election will take place in the shadow of a Chinese sword. Let’s show the Taiwanese people a little of the American shield instead.”

He looked up. “Okay guys, all we’ve got are guesses. If the Chinese are planning some kind of move, we’re going to need a lot more than that. Get out there and beat the bushes. We need numbers on the Chinese economy, readiness assessments on their military, and trend analyses on their logistics. If they’re stockpiling anything—I don’t care if it’s rice, bullets, or canned peaches—I want to know about it.” He stood up. “That’s all.”

The members of the team began filing out the door. In a few seconds, only the president, his chief of staff, and the national security advisor remained.

“Something I can do for you, Greg?”

“Yes, sir. I do have one more item I’d like to run by you, if you have a couple of minutes.”

The president nodded.

Brenthoven reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and retrieved a small leather-bound notebook. He opened it and read for a couple of seconds before looking up at his boss. “February of last year, Niedersachsen Six, the nuclear reactor outside Hanover, Germany, had to be shut down because of a primary coolant leak. There wasn’t a great deal of contamination, but the European media had a field day with it anyway.”

“I remember,” the president said. “They trotted out every China Syndrome reference they could lay their hands on, from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl.”

“Taken by itself, I wouldn’t assign it much importance,” Brenthoven said. “But Niedersachsen Six was the third significant incident in the German nuclear power program in less than two years.”

“I read a white paper on Niedersachsen,” Doyle said. “They shut down the reactor for inspection and repair. They’re going to restart it at the end of this month.”

Brenthoven shook his head. “No, they’re not. The Green Party has cobbled together a sort of ecologist’s coalition to block the restarting of the reactor. In fact, they managed to whip up enough public backlash to force their case all the way up to the Bundestag for a formal vote. It’s official: they’re shutting them all down. Every reactor on German soil.”

Doyle pursed her lips for a half-second. “Germany was moving in that direction anyway. Now they’ll have to do it a little faster.”

“Not a little faster,” Brenthoven said. “A lot faster. In less than a year, the Germans are going to have one hell of an energy crunch. Nearly thirty-five percent of their electricity comes from nuclear power, and their per capita usage is through the roof. Over six thousand kilowatt-hours per person, per year.”

“How bad is it going to get, Greg?” the president asked.

Brenthoven checked his notebook again. “Bad, sir. Catastrophic. We could conceivably be looking at the collapse of the entire German economy.”

Doyle curled a finger under her chin. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the German people vote for a plan that could bankrupt their economy?”

“It’s a classic argument,” the president said. “The pro-Earth lobbies push for environmental safety at any and all cost; they try to frighten people with dire predictions of impending ecological disasters. The pro-industrial lobbies counter with their own brand of scare tactics. Factory shutdowns, loss of jobs, and the crippling economic impact of tighter environmental restrictions. Both sides run around screaming that the sky is falling, and the only way to stop it is to vote the way they tell you to.” He smiled. “And the irony of it is, both sides are probably right. We are poisoning our planet at an alarming rate. And the cost of stopping this catastrophe-in-progress may well be higher than we can afford to pay.”

He sighed. “It comes down to a tug-of-war between the tree huggers and the polluters. Most of the time, industry wins out. People have a hard time picturing ecological catastrophe; but they can picture themselves unemployed. It’s hard to get the man on the street to see past his job. Usually, the only way to do it at all is to scare the hell out of him. I would guess that the Green Party has been capitalizing on the recent spate of accidents in the German nuclear power industry.”

“I would call that an understatement, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “A group called Leben Zuerst, Life First, has blitzed the German media with grisly commercials. One of them, the so-called Dance of the Condemned, uses movie-quality special effects to morph a playground full of laughing children into a pile of smoldering corpses, with a voice-over of German children reading the names of people killed in and around Chernobyl.” He shuddered. “Nasty stuff, sir. The more so because there’s a grain of truth in it.”

“I get the picture,” the president said. “But I have to admit that I’m a little puzzled by your sudden interest in German politics.” He stared at his national security advisor. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”

Brenthoven nodded. “Yesterday morning, British military intelligence intercepted what they believe to be an internal memorandum from German Chancellor Shoernberg to his chief attaché officer. The memo alludes to a letter-of-intent from the German government to Abdul al-Rahiim, the president of Siraj. The CIA and British MI-5 are trying to get their hands on a copy of the letter itself. If the Brits are right, the letter formalizes a secret deal between Germany and Siraj.”

The president leaned forward slowly. “What kind of deal?”

“British intelligence thinks it’s an exchange: military hardware for oil. The boys at Langley think the Brits could be right.”

“Shoernberg will never be able to get the UN Security Council to lift the standing embargo against Siraj,” Doyle said. “Abdul al-Rahiim may call himself president of Siraj, but everyone knows he’s a dictator and a thug. His regime can be linked to half the terrorist organizations in the Middle East. The last thing anybody wants to do is arm the bastard. If Germany brings this up before the UN, there’s going to be a very loud splat when it hits the floor.”

“I agree,” Brenthoven said. “The Office of Naval Intelligence thinks the Germans might just sidestep the embargo.”

“You mean ignore it?” the president asked.

Brenthoven nodded. “Yes, sir. They may just try to deliver the goods in broad daylight and dare anyone to do anything about it.”

“I don’t see that happening,” the president said. “But we’ll worry about that part later. Do you have any details on this supposed deal?”

The national security advisor shook his head. “Not anything concrete, Mr. President. But ONI has thrown together a rough projection, mostly based on production figures from the German military-industrial complex. Recently, quite a bit of hardware has been earmarked for sale to the German military. I asked State to have a look at the German federal budget and any recent appropriations bills. They couldn’t find any sign at all that the German government has plans to allocate money for upcoming major military purchases.”

The president’s eyebrows furrowed. “So the German military never intended to buy all this new hardware they’re building?”

“Not as far as we can tell, Mr. President.”

“What’s ONI’s best guess on this?” the president asked. “How much hardware, and when does it get delivered?”

The national security advisor tugged at his collar. “Uh … again, I remind you that these are rough figures, sir. But right now, we’re looking at something like four Type 212B diesel submarines, to be followed by at least three Type 214s when those start rolling off the block.”

The president frowned. “Obviously we don’t want any new military hardware going into Siraj at all, but why are we getting so bent out of shape over diesel submarines? Nuclear subs I could understand …”

“With all due respect, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said, “your information is about a half a century out of date.”

The president whistled. “I’ve been accused of being behind the times before, but never a half century.”

Brenthoven smiled. “Sir, when I say diesel sub, you’re picturing something out of an old black-and-white war movie—back when diesel subs had no real speed or endurance, and they were easy prey for surface ships. But those days are ancient history.

“Over the past three decades, there have been about a hundred quantum leaps in diesel submarine design and engineering. The new boats are equipped with air-independent propulsion systems and hydrogen fuel-cell technology straight out of the aerospace industry. They can run submerged for weeks without having to snorkel or come up for air. Their hull metallurgy is incredibly advanced, giving them operating depths comparable to our nuclear subs.

And the new Austenitic steels are non-magnetic, making the most advanced diesel subs difficult or impossible to detect with magnetic sensors. To top it all off, nearly all of the new diesel subs are capable of firing Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles, as well as highly advanced acoustic homing torpedoes.”

The national security advisor looked at the president. “Sir, I could go on for an hour.”

“You make them sound better than our nuclear attack subs,” the president said.

Brenthoven shook his head. “Not better, sir. Nuclear subs can still stay down longer. But when you’re chasing a diesel boat that can stay submerged for a month at a time, the difference starts to seem academic. And in a reasonably confined body of water, like the Persian Gulf, an advanced diesel submarine is every bit as deadly as one of our nuclear fast-attack subs.”

“Jesus,” Doyle said softly. “The Germans are actually thinking about selling these things to Siraj? Abdul al-Rahiim has stirred up enough trouble with obsolete Soviet hardware. I don’t even want to think about what a madman like that can do with cutting-edge submarines. What little stability there is in the Middle East will go right down the toilet.”

“I’m afraid that subs aren’t all of it.” The national security advisor swallowed before continuing. “It looks like the deal may include somewhere between thirty and fifty of the new Joint European Strike Fighters.”

The president took a breath and let it out slowly. “Are we certain about this weapons deal?”

“Not yet, Mr. President. The CIA and ONI are both out shaking the trees for independent corroboration.”

“So this whole thing could turn out to be a pig in a poke?”

Brenthoven nodded. “It’s possible, sir. But the intelligence boys don’t think so, and neither do I. Do you want me to bring the Joint Chiefs in on this?”

“Not yet,” the president said. “Let’s push this one onto the back burner until we get some sort of corroboration. Right now, Germany rates about a zero-point-nothing on my threat scale. I’m worried about China. Those boys have stuck their dick out, and I’ve got a bad feeling that they’re not going to be really happy until they’ve stepped on it.”

CHAPTER 5

BRITISH EMBASSY

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 07 MAY

2:14 PM EDT

Sarah Bexley leaned on the sink basin and rested her eyes for a moment. Here, in the quiet coolness of the ladies’ toilet, her throbbing headache seemed to recede to something approaching a bearable level. It had to be the flu—some nasty little American variety of the virus with a particular taste for fair English flesh. At least it seemed that way, since everyone in the office appeared to be catching it. A third of the staff had already gone home ill.

Sarah felt for the handle of the cold-water tap and turned it on, cringing instantly at the sound of the water cascading into the marble basin. Her head was killing her. The two Motrin she had taken had done a bit to ease the body aches, but they weren’t doing much for the pounding symphony of pain behind her temples. Why couldn’t the Yank pharmacies stock a decent painkiller, like Nurosen? Oh they said it was all ibuprofen, didn’t they? But it wasn’t really the same, now was it? A couple of Nurosen would have had this headache on the run by now, whereas the bloody Motrin wasn’t doing a thing.

She opened her eyes and looked at her reflection in the mirror. It took a few seconds to force her eyes to focus. She barely recognized the face staring back out of the glass; it was flushed, puffy looking, and inhumanly tired. Her eyes were the worst: red-rimmed and bloodshot. There were dark circles under them that her makeup couldn’t disguise.

Sarah was twenty-eight, and she prided herself on having inherited something of her mother’s Anglican beauty. Not that you could see it at the moment. The face in the mirror might have belonged to a forty-year-old barfly after a month or two of pub crawling.

She pulled a hand towel from the neat stack next to the wash basin, moistened a corner of it under the running water, and then folded it and dabbed it against the back of her neck. The cool wetness felt good against her overheated skin.

She swallowed with a painful effort. Her throat felt raw and swollen. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t work like this. She needed to go home and curl up on the couch with a blanket and a cup of tea. Maybe she would go home. She sighed, and something rattled deep in her chest, a burbling, phlegmy sort of sound. She really couldn’t go home, could she? Sir Anthony had the economic conference on Wednesday, and his presentation materials weren’t ready yet. Or rather, they were ready, but Mr. Nitpicky-Hammersmith wasn’t through fussing over them yet. She could already hear his voice … “Nothing reaches the ambassador’s desk until it is letter perfect. Let-ter per-fect. England’s hopes ride on Sir Anthony’s shoulders, and his hopes ride on our shoulders.”

Hammersmith was a grumpy old bastard. If she tried to leave before he was happy with her presentation materials, she might as well pack up her desk and move back down to the second floor.

She sighed again. Back to the desk, old girl. Don’t give Hammersmith an excuse to shuttle you back to the administrative pool.

Her bleary eyes came to rest on the delicate curves of the marble sink basin with its sculpted supporting column and the elegant fluting of the water spout and tap handles. It had taken her five years to make it to the fourth floor—up here, where the desks were polished mahogany, the floors were tiled with exquisite mosaics, and the fluffy hand towels were emblazoned with the Royal Crest. Up here, where Sarah’s opinion mattered, where influential people depended upon her work and listened to her words with interest. Up here, where men found her ideas more compelling than her breasts.

She laid the towel on the countertop and turned off the water tap. She stood up straight, doing her best to ignore the surge of pain her movements sent coursing through her aching muscles. She nearly had to lean on the sink again as her knees trembled and threatened to give way. But the weakness passed after a few seconds—most of it anyway. She could tough it out. Another hour or two, at least. Perhaps long enough for Mr. Hammersmith to admit that her economic presentation was ready for the ambassador’s desk. Or at least long enough for Hammersmith to throw in the towel himself and go home sick. He looked even worse than Sarah did. She suspected that he was running more on his stiff upper lip than he was off of any internal reserves of strength.

Well, if he could do it, Sarah could do it. She squared her shoulders and turned away from the sink.

She pulled the door open, stepped into the corridor, and immediately tripped over a heavy bundle of rags lying on the floor. She lost her footing and pitched forward, just managing to turn her face to the side as she half-stumbled, half-fell into the far corridor wall. Her shoulder banged painfully into sculpted plaster and she nearly fell down entirely. Still swaying and half-dazed, she looked over her shoulder at the bundle of rags.

But it wasn’t a bundle at all. It was a person … A young woman, lying on her side with her arms and legs sprawled limply in impossible directions, like a rag doll dropped on the floor and forgotten. She wasn’t moving. Was she breathing?

Sarah tried to bend over the woman, but the pain in her head ramped up so violently that she thought she was going to lose consciousness. Her blood roared in her ears, and her vision seemed to shift and waver. A hot flash swept over her like a gust of air from a blast furnace.

She slumped against the wall, panting and praying for the pain in her head to subside just a little. Through the nauseous fog of her pain, she could see the young woman’s face. The woman’s eyes were open, staring vacantly into the distance. Her lips were parted, and a trickle of blood-tinged saliva dropped from the corner of her slack mouth to a spreading pool on the floor. Another trickle ran from her right nostril and down her cheek.

Oh god! What was wrong with this woman? Was she … dead? Sarah opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. She looked around for help. Someone. Anyone. She was alone in the corridor with the dying woman.

Sarah began staggering toward the door of the closest office. She couldn’t remember whose office it was, but it didn’t really matter. She needed to call someone. Call for help.

The door couldn’t have been more than seven or eight meters away, but the distance appeared to stretch and then contract in a dizzying manner that seemed to be keeping rhythm with the pounding in Sarah’s head. Leaning against the wall, Sarah made for the door, step after trembling step, her knees becoming weaker with every movement. The door … the … door … She stumbled and nearly went down. It was becoming difficult to breathe.

There was something in her throat. Some sort of hard knot. She tried to swallow and tasted something strange but distantly familiar. Her nose was running. She swiped at it blindly with one hand. Her fingers came away red. She was bleeding … Oh God … What was happening to her? What was happening to all of them?

She reached the door, fought with the knob for a desperate second, and then stumbled through. “Help me …” Her voice sounded feeble in her ears, guttural and strangely distant. “Help … me …”

It took a few seconds for her eyes to focus on the contents of the room. It was a charnel house. Bodies lay scattered about like so much wastepaper. Men. Women. In chairs; collapsed on the floor; slumped over desks. Sightless eyes staring into infinity, blood streaming from noses, ears, and mouths.

Sarah stood in the doorway, her lungs laboring for air, her mind refusing to take in the reality of what she was seeing. They couldn’t all be dead. They couldn’t …

Her legs gave way, and she collapsed to her knees. “Somebody … help …”

A man was lying face up on the carpet, his head a few centimeters from her left knee. An older man, his lower face a mask of blood and sputum. In some dark recess of Sarah’s brain, the man’s face connected with a name. Hammer … smith.

And then Sarah did scream, the sound wrenching itself free from somewhere deep in her chest, clawing its way up her tortured and swollen throat like a wild beast rending flesh. She screamed until the last of the air was gone from her lungs.

CHAPTER 6

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 07 MAY

2:46 PM EDT

The president finished the article and dropped the newspaper on his desk with a sigh. What did the Sirajis think they stood to gain by making up stories like this? Did they think there was some political edge to be had? Was it just the need to see their names in the paper? Or were they just full of shit?

The door opened and Agent Allain LaBauve walked in. “Excuse me, Mr. President, we have a Condition Firestorm.” LaBauve’s voice was cool and professional. The two agents who had followed him into the room stood behind him without speaking.

President Chandler glanced up at LaBauve. The Secret Service agent’s poker face was firmly in place. His neutral expression gave no clue that he had just barged into the Oval Office without knocking, dragging a pair of agents in his wake. “Say again, Alan?”

LaBauve was the head of the President’s Personal Security Detail, his so-called body man, because he was never more than an arm’s length away when the president was in a non-secure location. The president called the big Cajun man Alan, LaBauve’s preferred version of his first name.

LaBauve had a talent for languages; he spoke French, German, and Russian—all with near-perfect accents. He had a master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Virginia, and double bachelors in systems theory and political science. His speech was clipped, precise, and bore no trace of his dirt-poor southern Louisiana upbringing. And still he couldn’t escape nicknames like Swamp Thing and Gator. The last came from a persistent rumor that LaBauve—in his young and wild days—had once beaten an alligator to death with a half-empty jug of moonshine.

“Mr. President, we have a confirmed Condition Firestorm,” LaBauve said again. “We need to evacuate you immediately, sir.”

The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Evacuate? What’s going on?”

LaBauve shook his head. “The British Embassy has been attacked, sir.”

A surge of ice water rushed through the president’s veins. His mind immediately started dreaming up worst-case scenarios. His brain was suddenly flooded with images of burned and mutilated bodies. He shook his head and blinked rapidly. “What? A bomb?”

“I don’t know, sir,” LaBauve said. “I don’t have any details.”

The president hesitated for a few seconds and then nodded. “All right. Where are we going? Down to the bunker?”

“Negative, Mr. President. We don’t yet know how the attack was carried out, or whether or not more attacks are imminent. Command Post’s assessment says you’ll be safer outside of the White House until we can be certain that the residence is not a target.” He walked toward the French doors to the West Wing colonnade and opened the nearest one.

The president followed him, with the two other Secret Service agents a half-step behind. His legs seemed heavy, his steps stiff, as if the news had somehow weighed him down. He forced himself to think. “If the White House was a target,” he said, “we would have been hit first.”

“CP concurs with your reasoning, Mr. President,” LaBauve said. “But we can’t rule out the possibility that somebody jumped the gun and attacked the embassy ahead of schedule. It’s still possible that the embassy is just one of a series of coordinated attacks.”

The president walked out onto the colonnade. LaBauve slid smoothly past him into the point position, and the other agents took up positions behind the president’s left and right shoulders, putting the president in the center of a tight triangular formation. LaBauve’s position in front of the president was a clear sign of how seriously the Secret Service was taking the threat. As a rule, the president walked in front, and the agents assigned to his protection walked to the side and slightly behind.

LaBauve raised his right wrist to his mouth and spoke quietly into the microphone concealed in the cuff of his black suit jacket. “Eagle is moving.”

A rhythmic thumping in the sky announced the approach of Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The president stared up into the clouds, trying to spot it. He could hear sirens in the distance now. But that must have been his imagination. Massachusetts Avenue was too far away.

“Where’s my family?” he asked.

“Susan and Nicole are still in school, sir. Their agents have been alerted, and CP is preparing to evacuate them by motorcade. The first lady is at Bradford Hall, speaking to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her agents have also been alerted, and CP has a scramble squad and evacuation team in route to her position. They’ll meet us at the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I.”

The president nodded. “Good.” Marine One appeared as a dark speck against the blue sky and grew rapidly as it dropped toward the White House lawn. He couldn’t help wondering how many people were dead. How many might be dying right now? “What about the vice president?”

“His security detail is evacuating him from OEOB now, sir.”

The vice president’s regular office was in the Old Executive Office Building.

“They’re moving him to the emergency response bunker?”

“Yes, sir.”

The president nodded. “Good. Any word on casualties at the British Embassy?”

“CP didn’t brief me on the details of the attack, sir,” LaBauve said.

“Of course,” the president said. His words were lost in the thundering winds churned up by the helicopter’s rotors as the big machine settled gently on the lawn.

LaBauve began shepherding the president toward Marine One the second the helicopter’s wheels touched the grass. A door swung down from the side of the helicopter and then unfolded itself into a set of stairs. A young Marine lieutenant trotted down the stairs, stopped to ensure that they were properly extended and locked, and then snapped to attention and saluted.

As the president and his security detail walked into the downwash of the helicopter’s rotors, LaBauve sidestepped to the left and slowed his own pace for a second or so, putting the president in the lead position for the last few steps to the stairs.

The president returned the Marine’s salute and climbed the short metal stairs into the interior of the helicopter.

He was belting himself into his seat when LaBauve climbed into the cabin, followed by his two flanking agents and then the Marine lieutenant. Thirty seconds later, the pitch of the rotors climbed an octave, and they lifted off the ground.

LaBauve spoke into his sleeve again. “Eagle is airborne.”

*  *  *

The Marine lieutenant’s chair was mounted backward from all the other chairs in the cabin, which left him facing the president. His eyes traveled quickly around the interior of the cabin, making sure that everyone was properly seated and belted in. He turned his eyes to the president. “Sir, Lieutenant Charles Donahue, Marine One in-flight Tactical Officer, standing by to report.”

The president stared out the window as the ground dropped away. “Make your report.”

“Sir, the disposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is as follows: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, J1, J4, and J6 are at the Pentagon. J2 is at Langley. J3 is in the White House Situation Room. J5 is on an inspection tour in San Diego. J7 is aboard USS Mobile Bay in the Sea of Japan, and J8 is currently unlocated. The national security advisor is at Fort Meade.”

“Got it,” the president said, without looking at him. “What else have you got for me?”

Lieutenant Donahue held out a red satellite phone. “I have the secretary of homeland security patched in on this line, sir. He’s in his car. He has a secure-capable phone, but he can’t get his crypto to sync up, so this call is not secure.

The president accepted the phone and held it up to his ear. “Where are you, Clark?”

“On the beltway, Mr. President,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Clark Chapman. “In route to the Pentagon. ETA about fifteen minutes. Maybe ten if this traffic lets up.”

“All right,” the president said. “How much can you tell me over a non-secure line?”

“I can sketch in the basics, sir, and then fill you in on the details when I get to a secure phone that actually works.”

“Fair enough,” the president said. “Give me what you’ve got.”

“Sir, the British Embassy has been hit with some kind of biological warfare agent.”

The ice water was back with a vengeance. “Oh God. Is it anthrax?”

“We don’t know yet, sir. But whatever it is, it’s nasty as hell. We’ll have to get a team in there to look around. But the initial report seemed to indicate that nearly everyone in the embassy is either dead or dying.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

The president sighed. “Nothing, Clark. Please, continue with your report.”

“Well, sir, the initial stages of this thing are all pretty much standard operating procedure.”

The president interrupted him. “We have an SOP for this?”

“Yes, sir,” Chapman said. “At least we have one for a biological or chemical attack on a U.S. government building. We’re following that plan until the British are ready to take over. The British deputy chief of mission has assumed temporary duties as ambassador. He’s given us the green light to drive the containment and response until they can fly their own people in.”

“I take it the British deputy chief of mission wasn’t at the embassy during the attack.”

“No, sir. He’s in Seattle for the latest round of World Trade Organization negotiations. At least, he was in Seattle. He’s probably in the air by now, on his way back here.”

“I’m sure he is,” the president said. “Okay, we’re following our SOP, for the moment at least. Is it any good?”

Chapman sighed. “We don’t really know, sir. It looks great on paper, and it’s played pretty well in training exercises. I guess we’re about to find out how well it works in real life.”

“Looks like it,” the president said. “What have we done so far?”

“Sir, step one is to notify the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s already been done. USAMRIID is working on airlifting in a biohazard response team from Fort Detrick, and CDC is sending us a couple of advisors. No ETA on either team yet, but they’re shaking a leg.”

“Okay,” the president said. “What’s step two?”

“Emergency Services evacuates a three-block radius around the attack site. That’s already in progress. As soon as the initial evacuation is complete, they will extend the evacuation zone to five blocks in the area downwind from the attack site, to create a buffer zone for wind-borne contamination.

“Step three is to get a medical team into the embassy—in biohazard suits, of course—to rescue and treat survivors. The British deputy chief of mission has already given us permission to enter the building.”

“We have a medical facility standing by to receive the victims?”

“Yes, sir. The infectious disease isolation units at Walter Reed are equipped and trained for this sort of scenario. They’ll have to ramp up their staff, but they’re already recalling off-duty personnel. I’ve authorized them to draw from other military medical facilities in the area to augment as needed.”

The president looked out the window. The flight to the Marine barracks at Eighth and I was little more than a hop. They were already descending toward the helicopter pad. “I’ll be on the ground in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m going to have to call the prime minister before too much longer to extend my condolences and to make a formal offer of support. I don’t envy whoever did this.”

“I don’t either, Mr. President,” Chapman said. “Prime Minster Irons isn’t going to rest until she tracks down every last one of them and nails them to a tree.”

The president nodded. That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Emily Irons, better known to political satirists as “Iron-Balls Emily,” was widely regarded as the least tolerant and most volatile prime minister Britain had seen since Margaret Thatcher. Very quick to anger, she was utterly unforgiving of anyone she considered to be an enemy of her country.

Someone had just poked a stick into a hornet’s nest. And if Frank knew anything at all about Emily Irons, there would be hell to pay.

CHAPTER 7

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 84–87] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

It is an axiom in both philosophy and politics that a single determined person can change the world. Anyone who dares to argue the point is likely to face an exhaustive litany of famous names—Louis Pasteur, Robert Goddard, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Ferdinand Magellan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Alexander the Great, Henry Ford, Grace Hopper, Adolf Hitler, Alan Turing—some of whom have changed the world for the better, and some of whom have changed it for the worse, but all of whom have inarguably left an imprint on the pages of history.

As citizens of the human race, we are well prepared to accept the idea that human beings can alter the fate of mankind. But we are far less likely to consider the effect of non-human influences on the course of world events. Perhaps it is a sort of species-centric conceit that blinds us to the effect of the inanimate object—the thing—on history.

And yet, through the sharply focused lens of hindsight, we can see that objects—tools, devices, or weapons—have often become the axis on which history itself has turned. Some of these incidences are easy to spot. On a cold December morning in 1903, a crude biplane clawed its way into the air over Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The homemade aircraft’s maiden flight lasted only three and a half seconds, but it carried the future of aviation on its spruce and cotton muslin wings. And after that nothing would ever be the same.

Forty-two years later, a single bomb (with the innocuous nickname of Little Boy) devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In a single instant of fire and destruction, the world was catapulted into the nuclear age.

At just before 1:00 PM on November 22, 1963, a rifle bullet killed John F. Kennedy. The president was struck by at least one other bullet (conspiracy buffs count a third), but medical opinions are virtually unanimous in saying that Kennedy would have survived his other injuries if not for the head shot. Popular theories argue for a second, or even a third gunman in the shooting, but no one seriously disputes the fact that a single 6.5mm bullet ended John F. Kennedy’s life. It’s impossible to know if the world was changed for the better or the worse in the wake of JFK’s assassination. But there’s no doubt that Lyndon Johnson’s vision for American was different from Kennedy’s. LBJ had different views on Vietnam, human rights, and the future of the space program. And he led the most powerful nation on Earth down different paths than Kennedy might have taken.

Are these examples proof of the concept that inanimate objects can drive the forces of history? To verify the validity of the assertion, we must work the problem in reverse, in the same manner that we can check our answer to a mathematical equation by working backward from the answer. To determine if the bullet that killed Kennedy was truly responsible for altering human events, we can ask two simple questions: If that particular bullet had misfired, or gone astray, would the world be a demonstrably different place than it is today? And, in natural corollary to the first question, would JFK have made different decisions as president than did his successor, Lyndon Johnson? If the answer to either question is yes, we must conclude that a single 6.5mm rifle bullet seized control of the destiny of the most powerful nation on Earth, and therefore the destiny of mankind.

The same sort of reverse check can be run on the atomic bomb question. If the bomb at Hiroshima had failed to detonate (for whatever reason), would the world be a different place? Would the nuclear arms race have ever come to pass? Would mankind have ever been forced to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation?

These examples are relatively easy to recognize: the airplane, the A-bomb, the bullet that killed a president. But there are other instances, other objects or machines that have shaped the fate of our planet.

One particular device has been the engine of history on numerous occasions, and yet its impact is almost entirely overlooked. The torpedo. On at least five verifiable instances in recorded history, the torpedo has become the lever of Archimedes: the machine that moved the world.

To examine the influence of the torpedo, we must examine the history of the torpedo itself. When was the torpedo invented? How did this influential and deadly device come into being?

Some military historians trace the origins of the torpedo back to the Roman Empire, and the fire ships that the ancient Romans would send drifting amongst the fleets of their enemies. Others prefer to attribute the invention of the torpedo to a sixteenth-century Italian inventor named Zambelli, who used a drifting boatload of explosives with a delayed fuse to destroy a bridge in 1585.

But the actual word torpedo was first applied to naval warfare in the late eighteenth century by a young colonial American named David Bushnell. Graduating from Yale University at the dawn of the American Revolution, Bushnell was inspired to use his engineering expertise to support the fight for American Independence. With the help of fellow Yale graduate Phineas Pratt, Bushnell designed an underwater bomb with a clockwork-delayed flintlock detonator. By modern standards, the device would be more properly classified as a limpet mine, but Bushnell chose the name torpedo—in reference to the harmless-looking (but dangerous) torpedo ray. A member of the electric ray family (Torpedinidae), the torpedo ray can deliver a crippling electrical shock to its prey and its enemies alike. Bushnell hoped to emulate the torpedo ray’s nasty underwater surprise by attaching his clockwork bomb to the bottom of one of the British warships that were blockading New York harbor.

The blockade gave the British control of the Hudson River Valley, allowing them to effectively split the colonial forces in two. The situation was becoming increasingly desperate for the Americans. If the blockade remained unbroken, the revolution would likely fail.

Without a navy of their own, the colonials could not challenge the blockade. Although generally unrecognized by scholars and students of history, Bushnell’s torpedo—as crazy and as unproven as it must have seemed—held the only real hope for American independence.

Shortly after midnight on September 7, 1776, a young Army sergeant named Ezra Lee climbed into a tiny one-man submarine, pulled the hatch shut over his head, and submerged beneath the waters of New York harbor. His target was HMS Eagle, a sixty-four–gun man-of-war that served as the flagship of the British fleet. (In a tiny stroke of irony, the British Admiral Lord Howe had anchored Eagle within a few hundred yards of Bedloe’s Island, which would one day be renamed Liberty Island—the site for the Statue of Liberty.)

The submarine used in the attack was another of David Bushnell’s inventions. Constructed from curved oaken planks and strengthened with iron bands, the little one-passenger craft was shaped very much like a peach. Bushnell called his submarine the Turtle, and he equipped it with hand-operated propellers, ballast tanks, and a pair of hand-pumps that enabled the vessel to submerge or surface.

The torpedo was carried near the top of the little submarine, just above the rudder. Built into the top of the submarine was a vertically mounted auger, which the operator could use to screw the torpedo to the bottom planking of the target ship.

Without electricity, the only illumination inside the Turtle came from the glowing foxfire moss that surrounded the compass and depth gauge. Battling unfamiliar tides and physical fatigue from manually powering the submarine through the water, Ezra Lee had only about thirty minutes of air with which to conduct his attack and make his escape. Laboring, sweating, and—perhaps—grunting and swearing in the darkened confines of the tiny vessel, Lee managed to maneuver the Turtle under the hull of HMS Eagle. He set to work with the auger, but several minutes of unproductive drilling convinced him that he could not penetrate the hull planking of the British ship. He rested for a few minutes and then tried again, still without success. With his air supply running low, Lee was forced to abandon the attack.

Nearly exhausted and starving for breathable air, Lee pumped out his ballast tanks shortly after he was clear of Eagle’s hull. He was probably hoping that the darkness would hide the top of his strange little craft as it protruded from the water.

Luck was not with him. The British spotted his craft almost immediately and sent out a boat to capture it.

Lee jettisoned the torpedo in the hopes of lightening his vessel enough to escape the pursuing boat. His tactic worked. Gaining speed, he managed to out-distance the British long enough for them to lose his tiny craft in the darkness. Lee escaped, with the Turtle intact.

To all appearances, the first torpedo attack was a failure. But the night was not yet over. Lying forgotten on the bottom of the river, the torpedo’s clockwork detonator continued its countdown. One hour after Lee jettisoned it, David Bushnell’s weapon went off. The resulting explosion was huge, throwing an enormous plume of spray into the air and illuminating the darkened harbor like a flash of underwater lightning.

Not one British ship was damaged, but Admiral Howe was shaken by it. Strange machines were prowling about beneath the waters of New York harbor—and the next underwater attack might well succeed where this one had failed. Admiral Howe moved his ships. The blockade was broken.

Thanks (in part) to a crude weapon, with an even cruder delivery system, America became a nation. And, from the very moment of its infancy, the torpedo began to shape world events.

CHAPTER 8

MARINE BARRACKS AT EIGHTH AND I

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 07 MAY

7:03 PM EDT

“First off, Mr. President, it looks like the British Embassy was the only target.” The secretary of homeland security’s voice warbled slightly over the secure phone. “The Pentagon, the Capitol Building, and the White House are still under security lockdown, but there don’t seem to be any follow-on attacks. We’ve issued warnings to all of the other embassies, and they’re taking whatever precautions they deem appropriate. We’ll be releasing the lockdowns shortly, but I’ve directed all federal and military facilities to remain at an increased threat condition for the next seventy-two hours, just to be safe.”

“Good call,” the president said. “Continue.”

“Sir, we’ve got four biohazard teams working the embassy: one forensic survey team and three rescue teams. We’re concentrating on survivors first. We can start thinking about moving bodies after we’re sure nobody else is left alive in there. We don’t have a formal casualty report yet, but we’ve got a head count from the initial rapid sweep. Forty-two dead, so far, and about sixty survivors, nearly all unconscious or comatose.”

“I see,” the president said.

The secretary’s voice changed. “I’m afraid that Sir Anthony is among the dead, sir.”

“I see,” the president said again. He stared across the conference room that had become his temporary Situation Room. The wall on the far side of the long oak table was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bas relief of the Marine Corps emblem—the globe, eagle, and anchor, topped by a banner proclaiming Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful)—the words by which the U.S. Marines lived and died. Proud words, symbolizing the honor, courage, and sacrifice of men and women who were both warriors and keepers of the peace.

But where was the honor in killing an embassy full of civilians? He had no doubt that the attackers considered themselves warriors. Whoever they were, whatever their agenda was, they were probably congratulating themselves on their bravery and declaring their attack a victory for their cause. But it wasn’t a victory, and it wasn’t the act of warriors. It was murder.

“Sir?”

The president flinched. It took a second to remember that Chapman was still on the phone. “Huh? What?” The president tightened his grip on the receiver and jerked his mind back to the phone conversation. “I’m sorry, Clark. What were you saying?”

“Sir, we can go over this later.”

“No,” the president said. “Now. Go ahead.”

“We still don’t know very much about the bio-warfare agent, except that it’s a powerful hemorrhagic—the victims all show signs of bleeding from the nose, ears, and mouth. We also know that it works quickly, in hours rather than days. And that eliminates a lot of agents, including Ebola, plague, Q-fever, botulism, Hantavirus, anthrax, smallpox, and most of the other commonly weaponized bugs.”

“Do we know how the attack was carried out?”

“Yes, sir. The attack vector appears to have been the carpet.”

The president’s eyebrows arched. “Say that again?”

“Sir, I know how crazy that sounds,” Secretary Chapman said. “The bio-survey team can’t identify the agent—that’s going to take some lab work—but they can detect it. There are traces of the agent all throughout the building, but the highest concentrations by far are in the carpeting. Apparently, the carpet was pretty much saturated by the agent.”

“How in the hell did that happen?”

“We don’t know, sir. Not yet.”

“All right,” the president said. “What’s our next move?”

“Well, sir, there are going to be victims outside the embassy. Personnel who went home sick at the first sign of symptoms. Visitors, couriers, reporters, people who passed through the embassy but don’t work there. We’ll find some of them in clinics and emergency rooms. Some will be at home in bed. Some of them are probably dead by now.”

The president sucked air through his teeth. “How contagious is this thing?”

“We don’t know, sir,” Chapman said. “We won’t know that until we’ve identified the agent that was used.”

“Or when the hospitals start filling up with sick people,” the president said.

“CDC and USAMRIID don’t think that’s going to happen, sir”

“How can they possibly know that?”

“It’s an educated guess, sir,” Secretary Chapman said. “The agent concentration levels are massive. If this bug was really toxic in low concentrations, the attackers wouldn’t have had to use nearly as much to achieve the desired effect. They could have dropped an aerosol spray can in a bathroom trashcan, instead of saturating the carpets.”

“Sounds like a reasonable assumption,” the president said. “But bear in mind that the people who did this are not reasonable. We don’t know what motivates them, or even what their goal is, short of murdering British diplomats.” He sighed. “Anything else?”

“Not at the moment, Mr. President.”

“Okay,” the president said. “When can I go home?”

“The Secret Service should be giving the all-clear on the White House any time now. If you go ahead and whistle for your helicopter, the residence should be clear by the time you get there.”

“Good,” the president said. “I’ve got work to do.”

CHAPTER 9

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

WEDNESDAY; 09 MAY

1826 hours (6:26 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Standing on the port side main deck of USS Towers, Captain Bowie was just about as hot as he could ever remember being—and for a man born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, that was no small feat. He was facing west, into the setting sun, but the sky was still painfully bright. Behind him, the coast of Iran was only a few miles over the horizon, and the winds blowing in from the Iranian desert showed no signs of cooling down. The back and armpits of his blue coveralls were dark with sweat. The bill of his USS Towers ball cap drooped across his forehead like some dead—but still soggy—sea creature.

He propped a steel-toed boot on a Kevlar life rail and looked out across the five hundred or so yards of water that separated his own ship from the merchant ship that was causing all the trouble.

The motor vessel Lotus Blossom wallowed uneasily on the water, bulling her way through the waves rather than cleaving them cleanly. She was an ancient rust-bucket of a freighter, probably built in the postwar shipbuilding boom of the mid-1950s, and she had not aged gracefully.

Bowie watched the old cargo ship bob and roll. The seas were calm, the waves low and almost lazy under the fierce Arabian sun, but the MV Lotus Blossom heeled alarmingly with each swell that passed under her keel. To Bowie’s trained eye, it was obvious that the old ship’s weight was not properly trimmed; in all probability, her cargo was not distributed evenly. Such an obvious oversight spoke of sloppiness and neglect. Not that Bowie needed any clues to tell him that the aging vessel was poorly maintained (and probably poorly manned). The ship’s appearance told that story all by itself.

The Lotus Blossom was a Type-3 freighter, with her superstructure situated well aft. The forward three-quarters of her deck were dominated by two large cargo hatches and the V-shaped booms of a cargo crane that had once lowered crates and pallets into the twin cargo holds. The crane was gone now, or mostly gone. At some time in the past—possibly in the 1970s, when containerized shipping had become the cargo industry standard—the old ship had been converted from a bulk cargo carrier to a container ship. The conversion had been none too neat. The crane, which had obviously been too light to handle the standard twenty-foot–long steel shipping containers, had been hacked off with welding torches, leaving two truncated stubs sticking out of the winch housing like the stumps of poorly amputated arms.

The ship’s superstructure had been white once, and the hull had been green, but the colors were nearly masked by the scabrous orange and brown of new rust over old. The ship’s name, painted across the stern in two-foot–high capital letters, had faded into near invisibility.

Bowie looked at the ship and exhaled slowly through his teeth. Lotus Blossom. What an utterly inappropriate name. He had trouble associating the battered old tub with any sort of flower. To his mind, it required a liberal stretch of imagination to call the damned thing a ship—never mind a flower.

The Lotus Blossom looked harmless enough, though. Even from five hundred yards away, the old girl looked tired to the bone, as though she might decide to give up the ghost in a minute or two, and slip beneath the waves for some long overdue rest. And, for all Bowie knew, the old freighter might do just that, which certainly didn’t make the ship any less dangerous to his crew. The Lotus Blossom was a suspected smuggler, and Bowie’s Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams were preparing to board the ship to search for contraband cargo. His teams would have their hands full confronting and controlling a potentially hostile crew, and trying to worm their way through every nook and cranny of an unfamiliar vessel while covering each other’s backs. They didn’t need the added angst of worrying about whether or not the ship was going to sink beneath their feet.

From a tactical standpoint, Bowie wasn’t crazy about being this far away from the ship that his crew would be searching. His teams would be armed, but that didn’t make them invulnerable if things turned ugly over there. His gun crews were standing ready to rake the freighter with machine gun fire, or even the 5-inch deck gun, but Bowie couldn’t very well order them to shoot at the ship if his own crew members were aboard.

If he could bring the Towers in closer, his gun crews would be able to see the tactical situation clearly and pick their own targets. For years, that had been the standard operating procedure for Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams. But the terrorist attack on USS Cole had demonstrated the folly of allowing any unknown vessel to get too close to a warship. The Navy had learned the hard way that the most powerful warship afloat is vulnerable to a close-in suicide attack.

Captain Bowie gave the MV Lotus Blossom another careful once-over with his eyes. The crew of the old freighter probably had some small arms aboard, possibly quite a few—if they really were smugglers. But he was ninety-eight percent certain that the old tub was not crammed to the gunwales with explosives and rigged for a suicide attack on a U.S. warship.

Odds were he could order his ship in nice and close to the old girl so that his gun crews could give good cover to his VBSS teams as they boarded. Unfortunately, he was not one hundred percent certain. And, like it or not, it was tactically smarter to risk some of his crew by maintaining a stand-off distance, than to risk all of his crew (and the ship) by getting in closer.

*  *  *

A watertight door opened behind Bowie, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see a small group of junior ensigns file out onto the deck. There were five of them: three men and two women. They stood for a moment, blinking and shielding their eyes against the unexpected brilliance of the setting sun.

Bowie looked them over. They were a good crop of kids. Young, physically fit, and so desperately eager that their enthusiasm nearly shone out of their eyes like the beams of searchlights.

Bowie had been a junior ensign himself once, and he had a pretty fair idea of what was racing around in their minds. Each of them had spent the last four years having his or her head crammed full of information on a dizzying array of subjects: naval history, tactical doctrine, theory of leadership, uniform regulations, military custom and law, formal dining etiquette, shipboard firefighting, and damage control. And now, they were itching to put all that knowledge to good use.

In their own eyes, they were educated and dedicated professionals, ready to seize the reigns of authority and prove themselves as warriors and leaders of men. To the men and women who served under them, they were sea puppies—no experience, no common sense, and prone to sticking their little puppy dog noses where they didn’t belong.

It was Bowie’s job, with the assistance of his officers and chief petty officers, to turn these sea puppies into by-God naval officers. Hands-on training would do some of the work. So would practical experience and the time-honored school of hard knocks. The majority would be well on the way to becoming useful officers by the end of this deployment. The real trick would be making sure they didn’t get anybody killed along the way.

The hardest part for most of them would be the eventual realization that they would never master the technologies under their command. It would be a difficult and painful lesson for them to learn. They were intelligent, educated, highly motivated, and hungry for the respect of their peers and subordinates. It was natural and predictable that they would want to become experts on the equipment and procedures under their control. And many of them would spend their first sea tours trying to do just that. But Bowie knew from experience that it was an impossible task. The equipment and tactics involved were so complex that a person could spend half a career mastering one warfare area, and the other half of that career studying and working to stay on top of the rapid changes brought on by evolving technologies.

An effective naval officer had to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none. He or she needed a strong working knowledge of radar systems, sonar systems, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, communications systems, combat support logistics, torpedoes, turbine engines, firefighting systems, chemical warfare defense systems, navigation technologies, ship-handling techniques, weather patterns, electrical power generation, naval gun systems, infrared sensors, and about a hundred other disciplines, each of which required years to master. It simply wasn’t possible to become an expert in all of them, so a good officer had to be satisfied with becoming a capable leader for his subordinates: the enlisted men and women who were the Navy’s real experts.

Successful officers learned to accept the limitations of the human brain and concentrated on knowing enough about each discipline to command effectively. Naval aviators tended to learn that lesson quickly. You didn’t need to know how to field-strip an F-18 engine in order to fly the aircraft.

But some junior officers never quite got the message. They drove themselves unmercifully, trying to learn everything about everything, piling more and more pressure on themselves to achieve the impossible, until they either burned out or snapped.

Bowie scanned the faces of his latest crop of junior officers. How many of them would not make it over the hump? How many of these bright young men and women would resign their commissions and limp home with their spirits in tatters, never really understanding where they had failed? One of them, probably. Perhaps even two. But wouldn’t it be great if, just once, all of them could make the cut?

“If wishes were fishes,” Bowie said under his breath. He turned his attention back to the motor vessel Lotus Blossom. He would do everything in his power to help these puppies along, but only time would tell.

“Gather round, ladies and gentlemen,” he said over his shoulder. “School is now in session.”

Still blinking as their eyes adjusted to the sunlight, the young officers collected around him in a loose semicircle.

“Let’s start with your assessment of the tactical situation,” he said. “And then we’ll go from there.” He looked at Ensign Patrick Cooper, the ship’s Undersea Warfare Officer. “Why don’t you kick us off, Pat? Take a look at our problem child out there and tell us what you see. Throw in anything you think might be tactically useful.”

Cooper nearly flinched at the sound of his name, and then stood up straighter and squared his shoulders. “Yes, sir.” He looked out at the Lotus Blossom for several seconds. “Aft superstructure,” he said slowly. “So she’s a Type-3 freighter. It looks like she’s a converted bulk carrier. From here it doesn’t look like the ship fitters did a very clean job.”

Captain Bowie smiled. “Is that a tactical observation, or are you just offended by sloppy work?”

Ensign Carol Harvey snickered until Bowie caught her eye, then she chopped it off instantly.

Ensign Cooper reddened. “It’s … uh … a tactical observation, sir.”

Bowie’s eyebrows went up. “Explain your thinking.”

“Well, sir,” Cooper began, “it seems to me that those old cranes make for a lot of deck clutter. They’ll provide good concealment for anyone who wants to hide from our search teams. It probably wouldn’t take much for someone to stage an ambush from one of those old cable housings. On another note, I wouldn’t be surprised if our guys run into that same sort of crappy workmanship in other parts of the ship. Bare electrical wires, rusted ladder rungs, leaky steam pipes, missing deck plates—that sort of thing. A lot of opportunities for our people to get hurt over there, especially with the sun going down.”

The captain nodded again. “All good points, Pat. These are the kinds of things you have to think about before you send your people into a tight spot.” He shifted his eyes to Ensign Harvey. “Let’s talk about the sunset issue for a moment. Carol, why are we sending our teams out to board a potentially hostile vessel while the sun is going down? More specifically, why don’t we order the Lotus Blossom to heave-to and drop anchor? Then we could sit here and keep an eye on her until the sun comes up and send our boarding teams over in daylight.”

Ensign Harvey cleared her throat. “I can see two reasons for boarding tonight, sir. First, if the Lotus Blossom really is a smuggler, any contraband cargo she’s carrying is going to get tossed over the side as soon as the sun goes down. The only way to prevent that is to seize the ship now and post a guard on the crew while we search the cargo.”

“Good,” the captain said. “What’s your second reason?”

Ensign Harvey grinned. “I just came from Combat Information Center, sir. The Lotus Blossom is still ignoring all attempts to establish contact. They won’t respond to our signal flags or our flashing light, and they refuse to answer on bridge-to-bridge radio channel 16, which international law requires all major vessels to monitor at all times. In other words, Captain, they’re ducking our calls. And we can’t very well order them to heave-to and drop anchor if we can’t even establish communication with them.”

“True,” Captain Bowie said. “I’ll bet ten dollars against a month’s pay that—when we do finally establish contact—we’ll discover that their bridge-to-bridge radio is broken, and somehow they just didn’t see our signal flags or our flashing light.”

“By the looks of things,” Ensign Elliot La’Roche said, “they haven’t noticed us at all. Personally, I think if I had a ninety-seven hundred–ton destroyer cruising a few hundred yards off my starboard beam, I’d probably notice.”

“I agree,” the captain said. “And that brings up another point of discussion. Why did we position ourselves on her starboard beam? This puts us close to Iranian territorial waters, and the Iranians do not like foreign warships in their water. If we crowd the line too closely, they’ll send a couple of missile boats out to keep us company. Wouldn’t it have been smarter for us to come in on Lotus Blossom’s port side? That would have kept us farther away from Iranian waters and less likely to provoke a nasty international incident, or—worse—a missile attack.”

Ensign La’Roche rubbed his chin. “It might have been a little safer to do it that way, sir, but it definitely wouldn’t have been smarter.”

The captain nodded once. “Go on.”

“When we first picked the Lotus Blossom up on radar,” La’Roche said, “she was well east of the established shipping lanes and hugging the territorial waters of Iran. According to our TACMEMOs, that’s a tactic favored by smugglers who are trying to penetrate the naval blockade against Siraj. It gives the smugglers a chance to dart into Iranian waters if they think they’re about to be intercepted. As I understand it, Iran has no particular interest in harboring smugglers, especially ones who are bringing aid to Siraj, but the Iranians are fiercely protective of their national waters. If we go in there, even in pursuit of a known smuggler, we’re going to get shot at. By coming in on Lotus Blossom’s starboard side, we cut off her escape route into Iranian waters.”

“Excellent,” the captain said. “You kids have done your homework. One final question before recess …” Something caught his attention: the sound of approaching footsteps. He held up a hand. “Just a second.”

Lieutenant (junior grade) Mitchell Hayes walked up to the little group. He came to an abrupt stop about two paces away from Bowie, drew himself up to attention, and snapped out a salute. “Sir! All equipment checks and communications checks are complete. The boats are ready and at the rail. VBSS teams Blue and Gold are manned and ready to deploy.”

Captain Bowie returned the salute. “At ease, Mitch.”

Lieutenant (jg) Hayes relaxed his posture a notch and held a radio headset out to Bowie. “Your crypto is loaded and keyed, sir.”

The captain nodded and took the headset. “Thanks. Your teams can stand easy for a few minutes. We have to establish comms with our suspect vessel.”

“How are we going to do that, sir?” Ensign Harvey asked.

“We’re going to give them a little technical assistance in repairing their radio,” the captain said. He pulled the radio headset over his ears and positioned the throat mike in front of his mouth. When he was satisfied with the setup, he keyed the mike. “TAO, this is the Captain, over.”

The Tactical Action Officer’s voice came back in his ear a second later. “Captain, this is the TAO. Read you Lima Charlie. Standing by for orders, over.”

Bowie keyed the mike again. “TAO, this is the Captain. Lay a 5-inch round across the bow of motor vessel Lotus Blossom. You have batteries released, over.”

“Captain, this is the TAO. I copy—lay a 5-inch round across the bow of suspect vessel. I understand I have batteries released, over.”

The captain reached into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out a pair of flanged rubber earplugs: a standard part of the at-sea uniform. “Well, kids … I suggest you put your hearing protection in.”

*  *  *

A few seconds later, the 5-inch gun mount spun ninety degrees to the left with a speed that seemed impossible for so large a machine. The rifled barrel of the large-bore cannon locked instantly on the bridge of the Lotus Blossom and tracked it with an eerie electro-mechanical precision, continuously making minute adjustments to compensate for the pitch and roll of the Towers and of her target. It hung there for a few seconds, and then suddenly it swung forty degrees to the right and fired. The ninety-six–pound steel projectile rocketed out of the barrel with a flash and a thunder that would have shamed a Norse god. Bowie knew that it had broken the sound barrier before it was even clear of the gun.

The shell impacted the water less than fifty yards off the Lotus Blossom’s bow, throwing up a surge of spray that looked like a golden fountain in the failing sunlight.

The spray had barely settled back to the wave tops when a voice came over Bowie’s headset radio. “Captain, this is the TAO. Apparently the motor vessel Lotus Blossom has repaired her bridge-to-bridge radio. Her captain is on Channel 16 screaming his head off in Arabic, over.”

Bowie smiled and keyed his mike. “TAO, this is the Captain. Put our interpreter on bridge-to-bridge Channel 16 and ask the motor vessel Lotus Blossom to kindly heave-to and drop anchor, over.”

“TAO, aye.”

Bowie looked at his small group of junior officers. Every one of them was grinning from ear to ear. “I do believe,” he said, “that those boys have managed to repair their radio.”

*  *  *

Forty minutes later, Lieutenant (jg) Hayes stood on the starboard bridge wing of MV Lotus Blossom and looked out across the five hundred yards of water that separated the old freighter from his own ship. The destroyer’s phototropic PCMS tiles were darkening steadily in response to the failing sunlight, making the warship’s squat angular profile increasingly more difficult to see as the sun went down. On the one hand, it was impressive to witness the technology at work. On the other hand, this mission was making Hayes nervous enough, without having to watch the vessel that represented home and safety pull a slow-motion disappearing act. Although the logical side of his mind was well familiar with the limitations of phototropic camouflage, his imagination harbored a tiny (and admittedly irrational) image of the ship continuing to fade until it vanished completely, perhaps with a tiny plop, like a soap bubble bursting.

Hayes turned his eyes back to the ship he was standing on and keyed the mike built into his headset, “Towers, this is VBSS Team Leader, over.”

Captain Bowie’s voice came back in his left earphone. “VBSS Team Leader, this is Towers. Standing by for your report, over.”

Hayes keyed the mike again. “Towers, this is VBSS Team Leader. VBSS Gold Team has secured the bridge and engineering spaces. The vessel’s crew is assembled on the fantail, under guard. The head-count is fourteen, that is one-four. VBSS Blue has completed an initial sweep of all spaces with the exception of the cargo holds, over.”

The captain’s voice came back. “Towers, aye. Say again your head-count for the crew, over.”

“Towers, this is VBSS Team Leader. Head-count is fourteen, that is one-four personnel, over.”

There was a brief pause before the reply came. “VBSS Team Leader, this is Towers. Be advised, the vessel’s paperwork indicates a crew of seventeen, that is one-seven personnel, over.”

“VBSS Team Leader, aye. My interpreter has been questioning Captain Isam on the matter. Supposedly, two of the crew jumped ship in Jakarta, and the third was medically evacuated at sea due to an apparent heart attack. We’ve asked for documentation on the changes to the crew manifest, but Captain Isam is putting a lot of effort into carefully misunderstanding our questions, over.”

“Towers, aye,” Captain Bowie’s voice said in his ear. “I’d say the good captain is giving you the runaround. His vessel is based out of Singapore. Unless he’s fluent in Cantonese, it’s a pretty safe bet that he speaks English, over.”

Hayes wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of a sleeve and grimaced when some of the stinging liquid found its way into his left eye. He squinted and rubbed at the eye. “Towers, this is VBSS Team Leader, copy that and concur. GSM3 Rashid tells me that Captain Isam switches back and forth between Farsi and an Egyptian dialect of Arabic, depending on whichever gives him the best opportunity to be obscure and difficult. The man is definitely taking us for a ride, over.”

“Towers, aye,” the captain said. “That’s why we’re boarding his vessel in the middle of the night, over.”

Lieutenant (jg) Hayes nodded to himself. “Roger that.”

Yusuf Isam, the captain of the Lotus Blossom, had been acting suspiciously almost from the second his ship had appeared on the Towers’ radar scopes. The issue of the three missing crew members was just the latest in a whole string of evasions, accidents, and deliberate misunderstandings on the part of the Arab captain and his crew.

In view of Isam’s evasive behavior, Hayes was in total agreement with Captain Bowie’s decision not to wait until morning to board the Lotus Blossom, despite the fact that he didn’t care for nighttime boardings. He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the last sliver of the sun sink behind the horizon. He did not like this at all. The fact that he agreed with the necessity did not make him any more comfortable about being on an unfamiliar ship in the dark. Factor in the thinly veiled hostility of the crew, three of whom were missing, and the situation became even sketchier.

He keyed his mike again. “Towers, this is VBSS Team Leader. Request permission to set Modified Security Condition Two, over.”

Captain Bowie’s voice came over the headset almost immediately. “VBSS Team Leader, this is Towers. Do you have an emergency or an escalating situation? Over.”

“This is VBSS Team Leader. That’s a negative, sir. But I’m not crazy about the vibes we’re getting from Isam and his crew. Nobody’s done anything snaky yet, but I get the feeling they’ve been waiting for the sun to go down. Don’t ask me what they’re expecting to happen, but they do outnumber my teams by two men, even if we don’t count the three who may or may not be missing. If those guys are hiding on board, we’re outnumbered by five. They might be armed, and they definitely have the home-field advantage, over.”

He didn’t voice the other half of his thought; any or all of the crew under guard could be armed as well. The United Nations guidelines did not permit VBSS teams to conduct body searches of suspect crew members unless they committed acts of physical hostility. Hostile attitudes and general lack of compliance were not considered sufficient grounds for a personal search. VBSS teams were permitted to ask the crew members if they were carrying weapons, which worked about as well as asking politicians if they were crooked.

“VBSS Team Leader, this is Towers. Understood. Stand by on your request, over.”

Hayes suppressed the urge to lay a hand on the butt of the Navy-issue 9mm Beretta automatic riding in the speed holster on his web belt. The sky was full dark now, and though a few operational deck lights had come on, they didn’t seem to be making much difference. He keyed his mike. “VBSS Team Leader, aye.”

Hayes had expected a delay. VBSS teams normally operated in Security Condition One, with their Beretta 9mms loaded but holstered. Condition One would cost the team a few seconds if they encountered a threat, but the risk caused by the delay was balanced by the fact that holstered weapons were less threatening and (theoretically) less likely to provoke a hostile response from the crew of the seized ship.

It made sense that the captain would want to think for a few minutes and maybe call in a couple of senior officers for a quick powwow before deciding whether to authorize the change to a more aggressive posture.

Security Condition Two, which called for the teams to operate with their weapons drawn, was inherently more threatening. It also slowed the search process, as it required his team members to work one-handed, the other hand being constantly occupied by a weapon.

Hayes had requested Modified Security Condition Two instead, which would require only the odd-numbered members of his teams to operate with weapons drawn, allowing them to protect their even-numbered buddies. To Hayes’ mind, it was a decent compromise; half of his team would have two hands to work with, and all of them would have some protection.

Isam was a snake. The VBSS teams hadn’t found any contraband yet, but Hayes was certain the man was a smuggler. Everything about the cagey old bastard and his crew pointed in that direction.

Hayes leaned on the railing of the bridge wing and looked down toward the darkened forecastle. The fore deck was cluttered with equipment and deck fittings, visible now only as dark shapes. There were a hundred places to hide down there. A hundred good places for somebody to ambush his teams. “Shit,” he said softly.

*  *  *

Three decks below, Operations Specialist Chief Harry Deacon stood at the entrance to the forward cargo hold. He scanned the darkened compartment and felt his jaws begin to tighten. “This looks like a real good place to get somebody killed,” he said softly.

The cavernous space was crammed with Conex boxes. The huge shipping containers were stacked far closer together than international shipping laws allowed, forming a maze of narrow passageways with walls of corrugated steel.

The lighting system, inadequate when the ship had been designed, had seen fifty-odd years of hard use. Less than half of the fixtures worked, and those had been fitted with energy-saving sodium-vapor lamps. What little light they produced was largely eclipsed by the towering rows of shipping containers.

Deacon counted thirty Conex boxes in this hold. With the twenty-two they had found in the aft cargo hold, his team had fifty-two shipping containers to search. Deacon had six men, including himself, to do the job. There were no ladders or catwalks to the containers on the upper level, so his team would have to haul themselves up with climbing harnesses.

He shook his head in disgust. The United Nations bureaucrats who had drafted the Security Council resolution that mandated these searches had not had a clue of what they were really asking; that much was patently clear. He shook his head again. This was going to take all goddamned night.

“Come on,” he said. “Get that first box open. And don’t forget to write down the number off the box car seal before you cut it off.”

*  *  *

Electronics Warfare Technician Second Class Paul Allen stepped up to the doors of the first Conex box with a pocket-sized notebook and a pair of orange-handled wire cutters. The EW2 was Chief Deacon’s second in command on the Blue Team. “We’ve got it, Chief.”

The chief nodded. “I’m going to head aft and check on Carlin and Finch.” He turned and disappeared into the darkness.

Allen nudged his partner, an eighteen-year-old seaman named Steve Blandy. “Get your flashlight on this box car seal so I can get the number off of it.”

Blandy pointed his flashlight as ordered. “God damn! It smells like a stable in here. What the hell are they shipping? Yaks?”

Allen ignored him. It did stink down here, but that wasn’t exactly a surprise. A lot of these old freighters smelled like shit.

Blandy looked down and prodded the deck with the toe of his left boot. “One of these days, one of these rusty old bitches is going to fucking sink on us.”

“Pay attention to what you’re doing,” Allen said. “Hold the light steady.”

Blandy switched his attention to the flashlight. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I’m not kidding, though. Last week, when we were searching that Omani freighter, Jenkins put his foot right through a deck plate. It was rusted as thin as paper.”

Allen scribbled the last few digits of the serial number from the boxcar seal and slid his pen and notebook into his hip pocket. “Jenkins is always saying crap like that. He’s so full of shit his eyes are brown.”

“Not this time,” Blandy said. “I was there. I saw it happen.”

Allen latched the jaws of the wire cutters onto the thin metal of the seal. “Eye hazard—look away.”

Both men turned their faces away from the door of the shipping container, and Allen squeezed the handles of the wire cutters. The seal parted with a metallic twang and fell to the deck.

Allen turned back toward the container. “Clear.” He retrieved the errant seal and shoved it into a canvas pouch attached to his belt. He grabbed the latching handle of the Conex box and lifted. The handle moved slowly, with a groan of protest. “Give me a hand with this,” he said.

Blandy went rigid. “Shhhh …” He swung the beam of his flashlight around to cover a narrow corridor between two rows of stacked shipping containers. “You hear that?”

Allen gave him a sour look. “Knock it off, goofball.”

Blandy’s hand went to his holster. He unsnapped the strap and wrapped his hand around the butt of his 9mm. “I’m serious,” he said, playing the beam of the flashlight around in the labyrinth of shadows. “Somebody’s down here.”

“We’re still in Security Condition One,” Allen said. “That weapon stays in its holster.”

“Do you see me drawing the damned thing?” Blandy whispered. “Anyway, we can cock and lock if we’re threatened, even in Security Condition One.”

“I don’t see any threat,” Allen said. “And I don’t hear anything.”

“Shut up and listen!” Blandy hissed. “There it is again!”

Something thumped in the darkness, followed by a scraping sound. Then there was silence.

Allen put his hand on the butt of his own 9mm. “I heard it that time.” He keyed his headset mike and spoke in a low voice, “Blue One, this is Blue Two, over.”

Chief Deacon responded immediately. “This is Blue One, go ahead, over.”

“Blue One, this is Blue Two. We have somebody moving around down here, approximately ten yards forward of my position. Do you have any teams working in this part of the hold besides us? Over.”

“Negative, Blue Two. Our personnel are all accounted for. I am in route your position. Take cover and don’t do anything until I get there, over.”

“Blue Two, aye.”

Allen touched Blandy’s shoulder. “Shut off your flashlight and get down.”

The beam of Blandy’s flashlight vanished, plunging them into the yellow-tinged gloom of aging sodium-vapor lamps. The cargo hold was not completely dark, but the shadows were numerous and thick, and the feeble glow of the overhead lamps did little to penetrate them.

Both men crouched against the doors of the steel shipping container. They were still exposed to the sides and the rear, but at least they had cover against attack from the forward end of the compartment—the direction from which the sounds had come.

They heard the noises again. They seemed to be closer this time.

“That’s it,” Blandy said. “I’m drawing down.”

“No you’re not!” Allen whispered fiercely. “Keep your weapon holstered. That’s an order.”

“This is bullshit!” Blandy hissed. “At least three of these fuckers are unaccounted for, and there could be a half dozen more who aren’t even listed on the crew manifest. You can bet your ass they don’t have to get a note from mommy to draw their fucking weapons.”

Allen held up a hand. “Shhhh …”

Something else was moving—something behind them. Allen looked over his shoulder. Damn. They had no cover in that direction. Hopefully it was the chief. But what if it wasn’t?

Allen bit his lower lip. Maybe Blandy was right. Maybe it was time to stop thinking about the rules and start thinking about self-preservation.

In the pre-mission briefings, the Combat Systems Officer was always saying, “No matter how spooked you are, it’s nearly impossible to accidentally shoot a man if your weapon is holstered.” When you were suiting up on the boat deck, that sounded like good common sense. At the moment—crouched in near darkness in this foul-smelling cargo hold with possible hostiles coming from two directions—Allen thought it sounded a little thin.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Calm down,” he said. “And keep your weapon holstered.” He realized that he was talking to himself, more than to Blandy.

The sounds from behind them grew nearer. Someone was moving toward them rapidly. Allen was about a second and a half from throwing his safety training and Security Condition One out the window, when OSC Deacon’s voice crackled in his earphone.

“Blue Two, this is Blue One. I’m coming up behind you, over.”

“Copy, Blue One.” Allen relaxed a fraction. At least one thing moving around out there was friendly.

A shape appeared, moving toward them in the gloom. After a few seconds, it resolved itself into OSC Deacon. He stopped at close whispering distance and crouched down. “Have you seen anything yet?”

“Negative, Chief,” Allen said softly. “But we definitely heard something.”

Chief Deacon nodded. “I’ve notified the lieutenant. He was already in the process of getting clearance to upgrade to Modified Security Condition Two. In the meantime, he’s authorized me to use my judgment in accordance with the tactical situation.” The chief paused for a second and then drew his own 9mm Beretta. “We’re going to go cocked and locked. But, I swear to God, if either one of you shoots at anything, it had better be armed and in the process of cutting your fucking throat. Are we clear on this?”

Allen and Blandy both nodded and drew their weapons.

“All right,” the chief said. “These corridors aren’t wide enough to do right-left properly, so we’re going to have to do high-low. Blandy, you’re the shortest, so you’re low. I’ll take the high position. Make sure you keep your head down after we turn a corner so you don’t foul my field of fire. Allen, you’re jackrabbit.”

Allen frowned. In the jackrabbit position, his job would be to lag behind whenever the others turned a corner and opened themselves up to attack. Allen would only follow when the new stretch of corridor was proven to be empty of attackers, or if Blandy or the chief went down, in which case he would jackrabbit around the corner with his 9mm blazing—providing rapid and (hopefully) unexpected backup. “Chief, I’m taller than you are,” he said. “I should be high and you should be jackrabbit.”

Chief Deacon shook his head. “Negative. You’re the best shooter on the ship. I don’t want you hit by the first bullet that flies. If one of us goes down, you’re our best chance of getting out alive.”

“But …”

The chief grabbed Allen’s shoulder and squeezed it. “You’ve got your orders, Sailor.”

His words were gentle, but Allen knew him well enough to know that they were utterly nonnegotiable.

Allen nodded. “Aye-aye, Chief.”

The chief stood up and shifted his 9mm to a two-handed combat grip. Allen and Blandy did likewise. The chief nodded. “Let’s go.”

Blandy went around the starboard corner of the Conex box, low and moving fast, his weapon swinging from side to side in short, precise arcs as he covered the shadowed corridor ahead. The chief swung around the corner a half-second behind him, his own Beretta carving a similar back-and-forth arc above Blandy’s head. They moved forward at a fast walk, their eyes and weapons ceaselessly scanning the gloom ahead of them.

In accordance with jackrabbit doctrine, Allen counted to three before swinging around the corner and following at the same brisk pace, his own weapon tilted up at a forty-five–degree angle so that an accidental discharge wouldn’t hit one of his teammates.

They covered the distance up the length of the first row of Conex boxes without incident. There was a five- or six-foot gap between the end of the first row of containers and the start of the second row. This space formed another makeshift corridor that intersected their corridor at a right angle, leaving short left- and right-hand passageways to investigate. They halted just short of the intersection.

OSC Deacon tapped Blandy on the shoulder and pointed to the left passageway, then he touched his own chest and pointed to the right passageway. “You check left, I’ll check right.”

Blandy nodded. Still in his low-man crouch, he swung around the corner to the left and screamed.

Allen jumped so hard that he nearly squeezed off a round before he caught himself. He flattened himself against the steel wall of the shipping container to his left, trying to see what was going on.

Blandy threw himself backward, his arms and legs flailing as he struggled to get away. Still scrambling in a sort of crazy crab-walk, he crashed into the back of OSC Deacon’s legs, bringing the chief down on top of him. Blandy screamed again.

What the hell was it? Allen lowered his 9mm to a shooting angle and rushed forward to cover the threat. He had covered about half the distance to the intersection when something rounded the corner in front of him and charged up the corridor in his direction. It was low and moving fast through the darkness, its rapid steps drumming on the deck plates. It was some kind of animal, shaggy and four-legged. A dog? Allen’s 9mm jerked downward to cover the animal as it ran toward him. He sighted in on it, ready to shoot it before it could attack him the way it had attacked Blandy. Would it go for his throat or his groin? His finger began to squeeze the trigger, and then he got a good look at the animal. He broke into laughter.

It wasn’t a dog. It was a goat. Blandy’s terrifying attacker was a goat.

Still laughing, Allen stepped aside and let the frightened animal run past him.

OSC Deacon crawled to his feet and began dusting himself off. “Was that what I think it was?”

“That,” Allen said with a grin that threatened to split his head in half, “was a highly trained attack goat. It’s a miracle Blandy wasn’t killed.”

Blandy got to his feet. “That’s not funny. That’s not funny at all.”

Chief Deacon holstered his 9mm and bent down to retrieve his boonie hat from the deck. “That is where you’re wrong, kid. I can tell you already that this is one of those stories that’s going to get funnier every time I tell it.”

Allen holstered his own 9mm and turned on his flashlight. “You can count on that, Goat Boy.”

Allen turned and walked back down the corridor to the doors of the container they had been set to inspect. Blandy and the chief followed him a few seconds later.

Allen grasped the latching handle of the Conex box and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. He clipped his flashlight to his belt, freeing up his left hand. “Hey, Blandy, come help me with this.”

The chief stepped forward. “I’ll help. Blandy, you keep an eye out for goats, sheep, and other farm animals with terrorist leanings.”

“Cute, Chief,” Blandy said. “Real cute.”

Between them, Allen and the chief were able to wrestle the reluctant latching handle up into the released position.

Allen swung the door open and shone his flashlight inside. “Uh … Chief? I think you need to take a look at this.”

OSC Deacon looked over his shoulder. “What have you got?”

The beam of Allen’s flashlight revealed stacks of gray crates with stenciled lettering in yellow spray paint: FALKE ANTI-AIRCRAFT RAKETENWERFER.

“Holy shit,” Chief Deacon said. “I don’t know what Ratken-worker means, or whatever the hell that is, but the anti-aircraft part I can figure out.”

Allen sounded the syllables out slowly, “Rak-eten-werf-er … I think that’s Arabic for ‘somebody’s in a shitload of trouble.’”

CHAPTER 10

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 10 MAY

7:22 PM EDT

On the state floor of the White House, sandwiched between the enormous East Room and the sumptuously appointed oval Blue Room, was the Green Room. Once the dining room of Thomas Jefferson, the Green Room was now a parlor, usually devoted to small receptions. It was a soothing place; the green watered-silk wall coverings and striped silk damask draperies seemed to invite introspection. President Chandler liked the Green Room a lot. He often went there to relax, and he nearly always left the little parlor with a smile on his face.

He was not smiling this evening, as his chief of staff opened the door for him and stepped back to let him in. Through the open doorway came the background murmur from the East Room: numerous voices mingled with the muted tones of light orchestral music.

Perched delicately on a nineteenth-century Duncan Phyfe settee, Gregory Brenthoven rose quickly to his feet.

The president waved him back. “Sit,” he said. He nodded over his left shoulder toward the East Room. “I’ve got fourteen South American diplomats out there, and at least half of them are trying to pinch Jenny’s bottom. So let’s try to make this quick, before my lovely wife dislocates someone’s jaw and causes an international incident.”

Veronica Doyle followed her boss into the room and closed the door behind her. “The first lady is looking especially attractive tonight.”

The president tugged at his bow tie, loosening it a fraction. “She is, indeed. But I still think it’s rude of our esteemed guests to leave their fingerprints on her anatomy.” He sighed and looked at Gregory Brenthoven. “What have you got, Greg?”

“Germany,” the national security advisor said.

“All right,” the president said. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, what’s going on with the British Embassy?”

“Sir, you’re scheduled for back-to-back Situation Room briefings at nine thirty and nine forty-five,” the chief of staff said. “The topics of interest are developing events in China and the status of the British Embassy investigation.”

“That’s fine,” the president said. “But the embassy attack is on my front burner; Greg can give me the ten-cent version now.”

Brenthoven paused for a second as though mentally shifting gears. “The casualty count has stabilized. Sixty-eight people dead and forty-nine still in treatment. With the possible exception of two who are still on the critical list and could go either way, the doctors are expecting all of the remaining victims to recover.”

“Both of those numbers are higher than the ones I got from homeland security,” the president said.

The national security advisor nodded. “Yes, sir. The FBI has been tracking down people who came in contact with the agent at the embassy, but were somewhere else when they developed symptoms. They’re using the embassy visitors’ logs as a checklist, and they think they’ve found them all now.”

“That’s one piece of good news,” the president said.

“Here’s another one, sir,” Brenthoven said. “So far, everyone who’s come down with symptoms has actually been to the embassy. CDC was right. The bio-warfare agent used isn’t robust enough to spread by human contact. The concentration level has to be pretty high to ensure infection.”

“Have we identified the agent yet?”

Brenthoven nodded. “Yes, sir. CDC ran the micrographs, and USAMRIID cross-checked them. It’s a strain of T2, a trichothecene mycotoxin that comes from corn or wheat mold.”

The president frowned. “Mold? Clark told me that the highest agent concentrations were in the carpet. If we’re talking about mold, that seems like something that could occur naturally. Can we be certain this isn’t some kind of rare natural phenomenon? I remember reading an article on Sick Building Syndrome where the ventilation ducts become infected with mold or a virus and then spread it through the building.”

Brenthoven shook his head. “No, sir. There is no room for doubt. Natural forms of this mold grow on corn or wheat, not carpets. Besides, the agent used was not actually a mold at all; it was a chemically engineered mycotoxin that is manufactured from mold. The T2 mycotoxin doesn’t exist anywhere in a natural form. It’s strictly a man-made agent.”

“So we are one hundred percent certain that this was a biological warfare attack?”

“Yes, Mr. President. We also know how the agent was introduced into the building—in carpet cleaning machines. It went right past the security dogs, because they’re trained to smell explosives, not biological agents. The shampooing process saturates the carpets with liquid soap, but—in this case—the liquid in the machines was about 5 percent soap and about 95 percent mycotoxin. Every carpet in the building received a massive concentration of the T2 mycotoxin.”

The president tugged at his necktie. “How much do we know about the attackers?” he asked.

“There were two men, both American citizens of Middle Eastern descent—Michael Umar and Raphael Ghazi.”

“Deep-cover operatives?” the president asked.

“Possibly, sir,” the national security advisor said. “So far, three terrorist groups have claimed credit for the attack: Assi’rat, the Islamic Revolutionary Congress, and the Hand of Allah. Langley is pretty sure that none of those groups were actually involved in the planning or the attack itself. Most of the major terrorist groups are denying involvement. We haven’t yet turned up any links between the attackers and any known organizations. There was a third man assigned to the carpet cleaning crew as well, a nineteen-year-old American Sailor named Jerome Gilbert. He was dispatched to the embassy with the other two men, but according to the logbook, he never showed up. We’re looking for all three men, but no luck so far.”

The president rubbed his eyes. “One of our Sailors was involved in a biological warfare attack on the British Embassy?”

“We don’t know that, sir,” Brenthoven said. “Seaman Gilbert was moonlighting, and he was brand new to the job. There’s a good chance that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. My guess is he showed up for work and got assigned to a crew with a hidden agenda. It’s even odds that Umar and Ghazi, the other two men on his work crew, murdered him before the attack took place—to keep him from interfering. I wouldn’t be surprised if his body turns up in a ditch somewhere.”

“If that’s true,” the president said, “then the attackers have another murder to answer for.”

“Yes, sir,” Brenthoven said. “It’s a pity we’ll never get a chance to bring them to justice.”

The president’s eyebrows went up. “Why is that?”

“They’re almost certainly dead, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “They couldn’t very well arouse suspicion at the embassy by wearing gas masks or biohazard suits. They would have had to do the job in their regular work uniforms.

No masks, no respirators, no special protective equipment. I don’t see any way they could have avoided absorbing lethal concentrations of the mycotoxin.”

“A suicide mission,” the president said.

“I think so, sir,” Brenthoven said. “Standing right next to the carpet shampooing machines as they were pouring out the mycotoxin, Umar and Ghazi were probably the first people in the embassy to receive a lethal dose. It’s also likely that they were exposed to higher concentrations than everyone else—again because they were right next to the machines. So they got it first and they got it worst. According to CDC, victims of T2 exposure generally begin to show symptoms about five or six hours after contact with the mycotoxin. Death usually follows an hour or two after that. So the attackers were almost certainly dead before any of the embassy staff began to show symptoms.”

“So much for catching the attackers,” the president said.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” Brenthoven said. “We’ll probably find their bodies in a day or two.”

“Do we have any other leads?” Doyle asked. “Can we trace the source of the biological warfare agent?”

“We’re working on that,” Brenthoven said. “USAMRIID thinks the mycotoxin may have been genetically modified for increased lethality and a higher rate of contagion. That should narrow the field for us a bit. Despite the UN’s efforts to stamp them out, there are a number of biological warfare laboratories in the Persian Gulf region. But most of them lack the sophistication for tinkering at the genetic level. The list of countries that could pull it off is relatively short.”

“Don’t tell me,” the president said, “Siraj is at the top of that list.”

“Pretty near the top, sir,” Brenthoven said.

The president held up a hand. “I’ll get the rest of the details at the briefing. Talk to me about Germany.”

Brenthoven fished out his little leather notebook and flipped it open. “CIA has authenticated the memo.”

“The one from Chancellor Shoernberg to his attaché officer?”

“Yes, sir. It looks like Germany is going ahead with the arms-for-oil deal.”

The president’s eyebrows went up a millimeter. “You’re certain about this?”

Brenthoven nodded. “I’m afraid so, sir. Three days ago, one of the Air Force’s Oracle spy satellites imaged four submarines at the naval arsenal in Kiel, Germany. A significant portion of the satellite’s imaging footprint was blocked by cloud cover, but it’s pretty clear that the subs were on-loading missiles and torpedoes.”

Doyle glanced at her watch. “Three days ago? Why are we just finding out about this now?”

Gregory Brenthoven pursed his lips and paused for a second before answering. “Three days ago, our German allies were not considered to be even a remote threat. Air Force intelligence analysts didn’t regard a routine weapons on-load by an allied navy as very noteworthy. It was a reasonable decision, based on the situation as they understood it. It hardly seems fair to second-guess their judgment after the fact.”

“I agree,” the president said. “Is there more?”

Brenthoven looked back at his notes. “Yes, sir. Langley has been chasing down a few leads. It turns out that a lot of the Indian pilots that Germany has been training over the last several months might not actually be Indian.”

“Meaning they’re Siraji?”

“That’s what we’re thinking, sir. We’re running it down, but—at this stage—all we can say for certain is that a number of their immigration papers have strange inconsistencies.”

“It’s starting to sound like this deal has been cooking for a while,” the president said. “So the Germans might be ready to deliver some of the hardware right now?”

“They may have already started, sir,” Brenthoven said. “Yesterday evening, one of our destroyers in the Persian Gulf intercepted and boarded a cargo ship that was attempting to run the blockade of Siraj. The Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams discovered approximately three hundred German-built, over-the-shoulder missile launchers.”

Doyle shook her head. “Greg, how in the hell did we miss something this big?”

Brenthoven closed his notebook. “A lot of our intelligence assets—too many—are electronic. We’re still feeling the bite from the Clinton years; he cut our network of field operatives to ribbons. And the best electronics in the world are no substitute for good agents working on the scene. Our European network is especially thin; we’ve been concentrating most of our efforts on the Middle Eastern countries.”

The president closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He released it slowly and opened his eyes. “Where are the subs now?”

Brenthoven blinked twice and looked at the president. “Ah … we don’t know, sir. Our last satellite imagery of them is three days old. They could be through the English Channel by now.”

“They’ll have to transit the Strait of Gibraltar to get to the Mediterranean,” the president said. “What if we blockade the strait?”

Brenthoven said, “Our nearest significant asset is the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. They’re way down at the east end of the Med. Even at top speed, they’d never make it in time.”

“If we can’t get ships over there,” the president said, “we’ll have to find someone who can. Who are our allies in this?”

Brenthoven said, “The United Kingdom for certain, sir. Greece. Italy, maybe.”

Doyle shook her head. “Not Italy. They’re tied up too closely to France and Germany both. They’ve all got that Joint Theater Defense Missile thing going. Greece is a little shaky too.”

The president ran his right index finger up and down along the bridge of his nose. “We’ll get State to drum us up a list of possibles. In the meantime, we’ll start with the UK.” He glanced at his watch and nodded toward the door to the East Room. “I’d better get back out there before Jenny gets spoiled by so much attention.” He turned his eyes to his chief of staff. “Get me Prime Minister Irons on the phone in an hour. Britain has at least as big a stake in this as we have.” His eyes shifted to his national security advisor. “Wake some people up at Langley. You’d better call ONI as well. If I’m going to yell for help, I want some idea of what we’re up against.” He looked at his watch again. “You’ve got about fifty-seven minutes.”

CHAPTER 11

R-92:

The signal rocketed through the fiber-optic core of the gray Kevlar cable and into the torpedo’s dorsal interface module. A portion of R-92’s digital brain powered itself up and awaited further instructions.

The cable, known as an umbilical in the parlance of technicians and torpedomen, served as a digital communications conduit between the weapon and the submarine’s digital fire control computers.

In the seconds preceding a launch, the umbilical would upload programming commands and updated target information into the weapon’s on-board computer. When the launch order came, the umbilical would relay that command to the torpedo and then automatically detach itself from the weapon at the instant of firing.

But the burst of digital codes coming through the umbilical now was not a launch order or targeting data. It was a routine maintenance signal.

R-92’s on-board computer responded as ordered—transmitting power to each of its major systems in turn, running diagnostic routines to test for faults or errors—and then removing power and letting each subsystem revert to its normal at-rest condition.

The entire sequence of electronic tests took just under three seconds. All subsystems reported themselves as fully operational. R-92’s digital computer relayed the reports back to the fire control computers via the umbilical.

This done, the torpedo waited another three hundred seconds for follow-on orders. When none were detected, R-92’s digital brain powered itself down. Secure in its firing tube, deep in the belly of Gröeler’s U-307, the predator was dormant.

CHAPTER 12

STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

SUNDAY; 13 MAY

0132 hours (1:32 AM)

TIME ZONE 0 ‘ZULU’

The bridge of HMS York was rigged for darken-ship: all unnecessary lights turned off to preserve the night vision of the watchstanders. What little illumination there was came from the soft red glow of instrument lamps, and even those feeble lights were turned down to minimal intensity to preserve the night vision of the bridge crew. As was often the case on evenings when the moon was out, it was actually darker on the bridge of the old British destroyer than it was outside under the night sky.

Second Officer of the Watch, Sub Lieutenant Michael Kensington, felt the front panel of the radar repeater until his fingers located the dimmer knob. He turned the brightness up for a few seconds, just enough to get a good look at the sweep. Still just the one contact, aft and off to port. He turned the dimmer back down. That would be HMS Chatham, the Royal Navy frigate that formed the other half of their little task force.

The young officer raised his binoculars and peered out the window into the night. The seas were calm, and the moonlight coated the gently rolling wave tops with liquid silver. “Good moon tonight,” he said, in what he hoped was an authoritative voice. “Shouldn’t be very hard to spot a periscope.”

Somewhere behind him, Ian Bryce, a seasoned lieutenant and First Officer of the Watch, exhaled sharply through his nose. “I keep telling you, there aren’t going to be any periscopes. Fact of the matter is there aren’t going to be any submarines. No submarines—no periscopes. Can’t very well have one without the other, now, can we?”

Sub Lieutenant Kensington continued his binocular sweep of the waves. “I’d say Her Majesty’s Navy thinks otherwise, or else we wouldn’t be here.”

The other two crew members on the darkened bridge, the Helmsman and the Bo’sun of the Watch, performed their respective jobs in near silence. They were both enlisted men, and—in much the same fashion that butlers and chauffeurs are paid to ignore the dealings of their employers—enlisted men were trained to stay out of the private conversations of commissioned officers.

Lieutenant Bryce sighed, his breath a disembodied sound on the darkened bridge. “The Germans are many things, but they are not stupid. They may posture and rattle their sabers, but when it comes down to it, they aren’t going to challenge the combined might of NATO. They’d have to be pretty well deranged to pull a fool stunt like that, now wouldn’t they? Use your head. If the Admiralty really intended for us to blockade the strait against those German subs, they’d have sent more than two ships.” His words were punctuated by the sound of him patting something in the darkness. “This old girl has got more than twenty-five years on her, and the Chatham’s getting a bit long in the tooth as well. One old destroyer and one old frigate do not a blockade make.”

Sub Lieutenant Kensington lowered his binoculars. “Then why send us out here at all?”

“We … are a symbol,” said his unseen superior. “We are a visual reminder to the Germans, and to the world, that Her Majesty’s government and her NATO allies are firmly opposed to the illegal sale of arms to Siraj. The Germans have rattled their sabers, and now it’s time to rattle ours. Trust me on this, lad; it’s all posturing.”

Kensington shook his head, a pointless gesture in the darkness. “The captain doesn’t seem to think so. You were at the briefing; he made it sound as if we’re going to see some action.”

Lieutenant Bryce laughed softly, that condescending chuckle that adults use when trying to explain difficult concepts to children. “Our fair captain is a wise man. Far too wise to cast doubt, however slight, upon the stated policies of his superiors. If you watch closely, you’ll notice that his orders and opinions are always a close reflection of the current official rhetoric. He’d have to be a fool to do otherwise, and that man is no fool.”

Kensington said, “You make him sound like a mindless puppet.”

“Not at all. He’s a smart naval officer who knows that his career floats as much on politics as it does on the ocean.”

“Ah,” Kensington said. “So a smart naval officer keeps his mouth shut and does his job. How is it, then, that you are able to speak your mind so freely?”

Lieutenant Bryce laughed. “Someone has got to teach the junior officers how the world really works.” He laughed again. “We haven’t fired a shot at one of Jerry’s ships since Churchill was PM. Do you really think we’re going to start another war over a handful of submarines? This is the voice of experience talking; if there’s any fighting to be done, it will all be political.”

“That’s very well,” Kensington said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll be keeping an eye out for German periscopes.”

“And so you should be,” said Bryce. “The Royal Navy needs earnest young men like you, if only to offset the cynicism of broken-down old wretches like me.”

Sub Lieutenant Kensington snorted. “Listen to you, playing the Ancient Mariner. You may be more experienced than I am, but you’re not more than five or six years older.”

“Too true,” said Bryce. “But they’ve been hard years, Young Kensington. Very hard years. You should have a go at my life—never knowing when the Exocet is going to drop in. She did it again last month, the old bitch. Showed up for tea unannounced and didn’t leave for a week.”

Kensington laughed. “Why do you call your mum-in-law the Exocet?”

“That woman is not my mum-in-law,” Bryce said. “She’s my wife’s mum. She’s not anything to me. Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“But the Exocet?”

“Because,” said Bryce with a theatrical sigh, “she’s like a ruddy cruise missile: you can see her coming, but there’s not really much you can do about it.”

Sub Lieutenant Kensington laughed again. “Right.” He raised the binoculars and resumed his search of the waves.

*  *  *

For all his enthusiasm, two hours later, Kensington was beginning to admit to himself that the First Watch Officer might be right. German submarines weren’t exactly leaping out of the water like trained dolphins. And Bryce’s words, as cocky as they’d seemed at the time, did have a certain logic to them. Surely the Germans wouldn’t let things escalate to the point of military conflict. He yawned and raised the binoculars for what seemed like the hundredth time.

He was still searching for periscopes, diligently (if tiredly) when he felt a tap on his shoulder. A voice said softly, “Second Officer of the Watch, I stand ready to relieve you, sir.”

Kensington smiled in the darkness; the arrival of one’s watch relief was always an agreeable thing, but especially so after a long mid-watch. He lowered his binoculars and turned toward the sound of the voice. In the gloom, he could just make out the shape of the man waiting to assume his watch responsibilities. “Sub Lieutenant Lavelle, punctual as always. I am ready to be relieved, sir.”

Kensington turned up the brightness on the radar repeater to show Lavelle that the surface picture was empty of contacts with the exception of their escorting frigate, the HMS Chatham. He was about to crank the knob back down when he caught a tiny flash on the yellow phosphorous screen. “Hello,” he said. “What have we here?”

He spent a few seconds adjusting the controls on the faceplate of the repeater, trying to refine the tiny radar contact.

Sub Lieutenant Lavelle yawned loudly. “Probably a bit of sea return. Just finish your turnover. I’ll have a look at it later.”

“It’s not sea return,” Kensington said softly. “It’s small but consistent, and it’s tracking west-to-east. Right toward us.” He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “Lieutenant Bryce, could you come look at this? I think I’m getting a radar return from a periscope.”

“Get on with your periscopes,” Bryce said. “Turn over the watch and go to bed. Then you can dream of Jerry subs all you want.”

Kensington stared at the radar screen. He made his voice as serious as possible. “First Officer of the Watch, I am officially requesting that you evaluate this radar contact.”

“Listen to you,” said Bryce with a laugh. “Go to bed, you silly bastard! There are no submarines out there. I give you my word as a British officer.”

In a fluke of timing more suited to a situation comedy than to the bridge of a warship at sea, a short burst of static punctuated his last sentence. It was followed immediately by the voice of the ship’s Operations Room Officer, coming from an overhead speaker. “Bridge—Operations Room. The sonar boys are tracking an active contact at bearing two-nine-zero, range of about six thousand meters. They’re requesting a bearing check. My radar shows a flicker of something at that bearing and range. Request you do a visual sweep for surface contacts at that position.”

Kensington swung his binoculars to the appropriate area. “I’ve got nothing,” he said.

Sub Lieutenant Lavelle keyed a comm box near the radar repeater. “Operations Room—Bridge. We have negative surface contacts. Bearing and range are clear.” He released the button. “Think it’s a submarine?” he asked softly.

“Probably a fishing boat,” Lieutenant Bryce said immediately. “Wooden hulls don’t give much of a radar return, especially if they’re small.”

“We should wake up the captain on this,” Kensington said.

“Nobody’s waking the captain over a fishing boat,” Bryce said.

The Operations Room Officer’s voice rumbled the speaker again. “Bridge—Operations Room. We have six inbound Bogies. I repeat, we have six unidentified aircraft inbound! We are initiating Level One challenges at this time. Recommend we take the ship to Action Stations.”

Before his First Watch Officer could object, Kensington shouted, “Bo’sun of the Watch! Sound the general alarm! Take the ship to Action Stations.”

The raucous alarm whooped instantly in response, blaring out of speakers all over the ship, rousting sleeping Sailors from their bunks—as it was designed to do. Then the alarm was replaced by the bo’sun’s voice. “All hands to Action Stations! All hands to Action Stations!”

“Damn it, Kensington,” Lieutenant Bryce half shouted. “That was not your order to give!”

“Sorry, sir,” said Kensington, who was not even a little bit sorry. “I was trying to anticipate your next command. Quick reaction, and all that!”

“Nothing to be done for it now, sir,” Sub Lieutenant Lavelle added helpfully.

“I suppose not,” said Bryce. “Kensington, call down to Main Engineering and tell them we’ll be needing all engines on line. Lavelle, you call up the Chatham. Tell them we’re going to Action Stations and advise them to do the same.” He snapped his fingers three times. “Step lively. The captain is going to be up here in about two shakes, and I want him to see us doing it right.”

“Bridge—Operations Room,” the overhead speaker said. “Sonar is reporting three more active contacts!”

“That would be the rest of those submarines that aren’t going to show up,” Kensington said.

“Shut your mouth,” Bryce hissed.

Kensington started to say something, but the overhead speaker interrupted him. “Bridge—Operations Room,” the Operations Room Officer’s voice said. “Bogies have ignored our Level One challenges. Issuing Level Two challenges now. Gun and missile stations reporting ready for combat.”

“Very well,” Lieutenant Bryce said. “Stand by for orders.”

A watertight door banged open at the back of the bridge, and the bo’sun called out, “Captain is on the bridge!”

The captain crossed the bridge with a few long strides, his movements in the darkness carrying a confidence that only years of familiarity can bring. He climbed into his raised chair at the starboard end of the bridge and said loudly, “First Officer of the Watch, what is the situation?”

“We have six inbound aircraft, sir, as well as three active sonar contacts.”

“Four,” said Sub Lieutenant Kensington.

“Correction, sir,” Lieutenant Bryce said. “We have four sonar contacts. The aircraft have disregarded our Level One challenges. Level Two challenges are in progress. Gun and missile stations are reporting ready for combat.”

Over the speaker, the Operations Room Officer’s voice said, “Bridge—Operations Room. Bogies have gone radar-active. I and J band pulse-Doppler emitters with a cascading pulse repetition rate. Looks like the German Air Force variant of the ECR-90C radar.”

The captain exhaled audibly. “Luftwaffe. That narrows the field a trifle. We’re either dealing with back-fitted Toranados or those damned Eurofighter 2000s.”

“Bridge—Operations Room. Bogies are not responding to Level Two challenges.”

“Is that right?” the captain asked quietly. “Second Officer of the Watch, take missiles to the rails. Shift the gun to anti-air automatic.”

Sub Lieutenant Kensington stood for a few seconds without speaking. He’d done this a thousand times under simulated conditions, but this was no simulation. There were real planes out there, and real submarines.

“Second Officer of the Watch!” the captain said loudly.

Kensington started. “Yes, sir!”

“Take missiles to the rails, and shift the gun to anti-air automatic.”

Kensington managed to catch himself before he saluted out of reflex. “Aye-aye, sir!” He keyed a comm box and repeated the captain’s orders to the Operations Room Officer. Were they actually going to shoot? Surely it wouldn’t go that far … or would it? The captain seemed to think so …

*  *  *

Out on the darkened forecastle, the twin arms of the British Aerospace missile launcher rotated up to the zero position. Two small hatches powered smoothly aside, and slender rails extended through the openings to mate with the arms of the launcher. A fraction of a second later, a pair of Sea Dart missiles rode up the vertically aligned rails to lock into place on the arms of the launcher. The rails retracted themselves, and the small hatches closed as soon as they were clear. The entire operation took less than three seconds.

The 114mm Vickers gun was loaded and ready a split-second later. Its barrel instantly slewed to a new position as it locked on the inbound aircraft and tracked their radar returns through the night sky.

*  *  *

“Missiles at the rail, sir,” the Operations Room Officer reported. “The gun is in anti-air automatic.”

“Good,” the captain said. “Ready all torpedo tubes for firing.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Kensington said. He keyed his comm box and repeated the order to the Operations Room Officer.

“Bring us around to two-six-zero,” the captain said. “Don’t let those subs get past us.”

Lieutenant Bryce’s voice was loud, “Helmsman, right standard rudder. Steady on course two-six-zero.”

“Helm, aye! Sir, my rudder is right fifteen degrees, coming to new course two-six-zero!”

The Operations Room Officer’s voice came over the speaker. “Bridge—Operations Room. Bogies will penetrate our inner defense perimeter in five seconds! Request guns and missiles free!”

“Negative!” the captain said. “They’re just trying to scare us into breaking formation so those submarines can get past us. We are not at war, gentlemen. We’ll not fire the first shot!” His next words were drowned out by an earsplitting roar that vibrated the thick bridge windows like tuning forks.

The jets rocketed overhead, not more than ten meters above the foremast. The shriek of their engines was deafening, literally rattling Kensington’s teeth. The glass faceplate of a gyrocompass repeater exploded into fragments under the sudden pressure.

A sliver of flying glass stung Kensington high on the right cheek, burying itself deep under the skin. His involuntary yelp was lost in the cacophonous scream of six pairs of jet engines running at open throttle.

And then the jets were gone, climbing away into the darkness, their afterburners carving blue arcs of flame into the night sky.

Kensington touched his cheek and felt the moistness of his own blood. His ears were still ringing from the fly-by.

“Steady, lads,” the captain shouted, obviously nearly deafened himself. “We’ll not fire the first shot,” he repeated. “But if they do, I give you my word that we will fire the last one!”

The Operations Room Officer’s voice came over the speaker again. It was difficult to hear him because he wasn’t yelling like everyone else. Working farther down in the superstructure, he hadn’t been half-deafened by the jets. “Bridge—Operations Room. Bogies are coming back around for another pass.”

“Keep on those subs!” the captain yelled.

“Bridge—Operations Room. Bogies have locked on us with fire control radar!”

“Damn it!” the captain shouted. “Lock on the lead aircraft!”

Staring out the window, Sub Lieutenant Kensington spotted it first: an orange-white flare in the darkness, followed instantly by five more. Just as his brain was coming to grips with what he was seeing, he heard the Operations Room Officer’s voice.

“Inbound! We have six inbound missiles!”

“Flank speed!” the captain shouted. “Hard left rudder! Guns and missiles free! Engage all targets!”

The deck pitched sharply to the right. Kensington grabbed the crossbar mount of the radar repeater to keep his footing as the ship heeled over into the turn.

Two brilliant flashes of light from the forecastle and twin rumbles, like freight trains passing a half-meter away, announced the launch of HMS York’s first pair of missiles. The British Aerospace Sea Darts hurtled into the sky on fiery white columns of smoke. Perhaps three-quarters of a second later, two Sea Wolf missiles leapt off the deck of HMS Chatham.

The forward chaff launchers fired six times in rapid succession. Six egg-shaped chaff projectiles arced away from the ship, four of them exploding at predetermined distances, spewing clouds of aluminum dust and metallic confetti into the sky to confuse the enemy missiles with false radar targets. The remaining two chaff rounds ignited like roman candles. They were torch rounds: magnesium flares designed to seduce heat-seeking infrared guided missiles.

The York’s 114mm Vickers deck gun opened fire, and suddenly the night sky seemed to be filled with man-made lightning and thunder.

The starboard Phalanx fired a short burst of 20mm rounds, and was rewarded a second later by a distant explosion as the hardened tungsten bullets shredded an incoming missile. The high-tech Gatling gun swung around toward another incoming missile and fired again.

The port Phalanx mount remained silent, waiting for suitable targets to enter its arc of fire.

Out on the forecastle, a second pair of Sea Dart missiles slid up the loading rails to the launcher.

“Bogies are firing again!” the Operations Room Officer shouted over the speaker. And another half-dozen missiles leapt into the fray.

The Sea Darts blasted the forecastle with fiery exhaust as they shot away into the night.

*  *  *

Kormoran 2 (mid-flight):

The German missiles were AS-34B Kormoran 2s. Sea-skimmers that dropped like stones, not leveling out until they were less than two meters above the wave tops.

Following its mid-course inertial guidance program, the first missile waited twelve seconds before activating its nose-mounted targeting radar. When it did, it immediately located two radar contacts: one large and close, and a second, smaller contact fifty meters beyond. The target selection algorithm running through the missile’s Thompson-CSF digital seeker instantly rejected the nearer/larger target. Large/near targets tended to be chaff decoys. The missile locked on the smaller target, and executed a short S-turn to the left to avoid the chaff cloud.

Locked firmly on the second contact, it closed in for the kill. At an optimum range of one-point-three meters from its target, the missile detonated its warhead. Fifty-five kilograms of hexagon/RDT/aluminum erupted into a mushrooming shock wave of fire and shrapnel.

*  *  *

HMS York:

The concussion shook the bridge, throwing Sub Lieutenant Kensington up against the radar repeater hard enough to knock the wind out of him.”Holy Mother of God!” he gasped. “That was close!” His ears were still ringing, and the brilliant after-image of the close-aboard explosion still danced in front of his night-accustomed retinas. He pulled himself back to his feet. “Why are we seeding chaff so close to the ship?”

No one bothered to answer, but a second after he asked the question, he dredged up the answer from some half-forgotten training lecture. Missile manufacturers knew about chaff, and they were programming their weapons with little tricks to avoid it. Many missiles were now smart enough not to turn on their radar seekers immediately. If a chaff cloud was far enough away from the real target, a missile with an inactive seeker could fly through it without being distracted. The closer the chaff was to the ship, the better the odds that a missile’s radar would be active and subject to seduction. By seeding an inner pattern of small chaff clouds and an outer pattern of larger chaff clouds, the ship could even sucker missiles that were programmed to ignore the first targets they spotted.

A fireball blossomed in the distance, as one of the Sea Darts intercepted and destroyed a German sea-skimmer. A few seconds later, a Sea Wolf from the Chatham vaporized another of the German missiles.

The Phalanx Gatling guns continued to spray short bursts of 20mm bullets into the night.

*  *  *

Flight Lead:

Two hundred meters above the water, Fliegen Oberleutnant Pieter Hulbert torqued his pistol-grip control stick to the left and nudged the rudder pedal, twisting his EF-2000S EuroStrike-Fighter into a tight turn. Mounting G-forces mashed him back into his seat as the agile jet fighter practically stood on its port wing. Stubby canard-style foreplanes gave the delta-winged aircraft a vicious midair turning radius. Hulbert grunted several times as his plane ripped through the turn, an old fighter pilot’s trick for keeping blood pressure in the upper body when the Gs were stacking up.

He bumped the dorsal airbrake, and a streamlined section of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit folded open, creating a drag-stream that caused his plane to shed speed and altitude rapidly. The maneuver saved his life, as a Sea Wolf missile punched through the section of sky that his aircraft had occupied a millisecond earlier. The G-forces eased off as he rolled out of the turn into level flight less than a hundred meters above the water.

Hulbert scanned his Head Up Display for the targeting reticule. There! A wire-frame rectangle popped into existence on the HUD, outlining a fat radar blip. With the touch of a button, Hulbert called up an infrared display, superimposing the target’s IR signature over its radar image. The IR signature was black: no significant heat sources. Not enough for a warship, anyway. It was a false target, a chaff cloud.

He sequenced to the next radar target and immediately called up its IR signature. An irregular oblong appeared on the HUD—gray, shot with dapplings of white. Heat sources. Heat from engine exhaust. Heat from ventilation systems. It was a warship. A target.

Hulbert shifted his right thumb up to the top of the control stick and flipped up the hinged plastic cover that protected the arming selector and fire button. He held down the arming selector, giving the missile under his starboard wing its first look at the target. A bright circle appeared on the HUD, signaling the missile’s acknowledgment. He released the arming selector and gave the control stick a tiny jog to the right, improving his alignment on the target, to give the missile the best possible odds of success. His thumb shifted to the fire button.

The Kormoran missile dropped away from the wing, falling for nearly a second before its engine fired in midair. Then it dropped even closer to the water to begin the inertial-guidance portion of its attack on HMS York.

Oberleutnant Hulbert twisted his pistol-grip control stick to the right, peeling his aircraft away from the firing bearing as quickly as possible. It was a good tactic: what any smart fighter pilot would have done in the same situation. But in this case, it was fatal.

The 114mm cannon shell that tore through his port wing wasn’t even aimed at him; he just happened to fly between it and its intended target.

Red tattletales began flashing all over his instrument panel, accompanied by a small choir of alarm bells and warning buzzers. Fly-by-wire was out and shifting to backup. Fuel pressure was dropping rapidly. The HUD lost power and went dark, and half of his instruments started fluctuating wildly.

The plane began to vibrate, and the control stick bucked crazily in his hand. A quick glance over his left shoulder told him that the carbon-fiber wing was starting to delaminate. He had perhaps ten seconds before the entire aircraft came apart on him.

He reached behind his head and groped for the looped shape of the eject handle. His fingers locked on it.

The second 114mm shell wasn’t aimed at his aircraft either. It punched through the thin skin of the EF-2000S’s fuselage just aft of his seat, about sixteen centimeters left of centerline. The explosion rolled through the tight little cockpit, simultaneously shredding Hulbert’s body and flash-cooking it to cinders. Unable to contain the expanding pressure wave, the aircraft ruptured like an overripe fruit, spilling fire and twisted metal into the night sky.

*  *  *

Kormoran 2 (mid-flight):

Oberleutnant Hulbert’s AS-34B flew two meters above the wave tops. In route to its target, it encountered two fat radar contacts, both of which it discarded as too large. The missile’s target selection algorithm evaluated the third radar contact it detected and decided that the new candidate was of a size and shape appropriate for a valid target. Twice, the missile made mid-course corrections to improve its angle of attack, unaware that the second of these course changes snatched it out of the way of a burst of 20mm rounds from the destroyer’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System. The missile kicked into terminal homing mode and accelerated to mach 0.9 for the attack.

*  *  *

HMS York:

The starboard Phalanx mount had expended the last of its ammunition. It continued to track the incoming missile with unerring accuracy, its six Gatling gun–style barrels spinning impotently.

The missile struck the destroyer starboard side midships, just above the waterline, blowing a huge hole through the old ship’s steel hull. The fireball and shock wave ripped through Engine Room Number One, buckling decks, collapsing bulkheads, shattering pipes, and severing electrical cables. Anything that was even remotely flammable was instantly incinerated—from the insulated lagging that lined the bulkheads, to the six crew members closest to the blast.

The sound wave that accompanied the explosion ruptured the eardrums of the three engineering personnel who survived the initial detonation.

Though the point of impact had been a half-meter or so above the waterline, the hole created by the explosion extended well below the waterline. The sea poured through the ragged hole in a sledgehammer torrent that drove an apprentice engineer to the deck.

Unable to fight the relentless deluge, the young man was swept across the space by the wave front. Deafened by the explosion and half-blinded by the seawater, he flailed about helplessly under the driving cascade as water forced its way up his nose and past his shattered eardrums. He opened his mouth to scream, but the water forced itself down his throat, pumping his lungs full of liquid fire. Still tumbling, his head slammed into a pump housing hard enough to crack his skull. The in-rushing sea tossed him about like a rag doll until it had driven the final spark of life from his limp body.

Electrical power to the compartment failed immediately, plunging the huge space into darkness. Battery-powered emergency lanterns kicked on, casting spheres of light into the roiling black floodwaters. Scalding tendrils of steam drifted through the semidarkness, the inevitable result of contact between cold seawater and super-heated metal.

A ruptured pipe spewed fuel onto the rising water. The volatile liquid floated on the surface, forming a slick that widened steadily.

Bleeding from their shattered ears and dazed by the concussive force of the explosion, the two remaining engineers managed to scramble up the steep ladder to the engine room’s upper level. By the time they were through the watertight door at the top of the ladder and had dogged it behind themselves, the water level was halfway up the sides of the acoustic isolation modules for the gas turbine engines.

The larger of the turbines, a 50,000 horsepower Olympus TM3B, ran on—oblivious to the water swirling around its airtight isolation module. Its air supply and exhaust were routed through ventilation ducts that were still well above the water level. Closer to the blast, the isolation module for the smaller boost-turbine had been penetrated by shrapnel. Seawater poured in through several holes, quickly drowning the engine.

The ship began to slow.

Rising water reached an electrical junction box and shorted it out in a shower of sparks, igniting the fuel slick, and instantly converting the huge compartment into an inferno.

The ship’s firefighting systems were more than adequate to handle the blaze. Fifteen cylinders of compressed halon gas stood ready to suppress the flames with a combustion-inhibiting chemical reaction. An extensive network of piping and sprinkler nozzles stood ready to spray hundreds of liters of firefighting foam throughout the massive engineering compartment, blanketing the fuel slick with a layer of chemical bubbles that would smother the flames and form a vapor barrier against reflash.

Neither system was activated, because neither system was automatic. Both systems required manual activation, either from control panels located inside the engine room or from duplicate control panels in the passageway outside the main entrance. Bloodied and dazed by the explosion, neither of the escaping engineers had thought to activate the fire suppression systems.

Fed by the still-gushing fuel pipe, the fire grew larger, stronger, and hotter.

*  *  *

On the bridge, the captain shouted, “Hard right rudder! Get us around so the port Phalanx can cover us!”

“Helm, aye! Sir, my rudder is right thirty degrees, no new course given!”

A dazzling ball of flame lit up the sky as a Sea Dart missile swatted a German fighter jet out of the air. Kensington’s heart jumped in his chest. His pulse was racing, and every explosion brought another involuntary flinch. Some primal part of his brain was screaming at him to run, to get away from this place. To escape this worthless stretch of water that the God of death had staked out as a playground. But there wasn’t anywhere to run to …

“Kensington!” the captain said. “Find out where we were hit!”

The young sub lieutenant stared out the window. In the distance, he could see that the aft superstructure of their escort, HMS Chatham, was burning. They’d been hit too, then. Maybe they were all going to die.

“Goddamn it, Kensington!” the captain yelled. “Don’t make me repeat every order!”

Kensington flinched again. “Yes, sir!” He leaned over the comm box and punched up the damage control circuit. “Damage Control—Bridge. I need a damage report.”

There was no answer. Kensington tried again. He paused to wait for a reply, and that’s when he saw them: two streaks of fire boring through the night. Coming right toward him. He had just enough time to scream before the first one slammed into the ship one level below the bridge. A millisecond later, the deck under his feet erupted into a volcano of fire and molten steel.

*  *  *

U-307:

Through the lens of the Zeiss-Eltro Optronic 19 attack scope, Kapitan Gröeler watched the British destroyer surrender to the sea. Clouds of steam rolled skyward as fire and melted steel drowned themselves in the dark waves. Oily smoke mingled with the steam, creating billowing black columns against the white vapor. After a few moments, the waves closed over the old ship, leaving only a burning oil slick and a handful of floating debris to mark the destroyer’s grave.

Gröeler’s hands tightened on the grips of the attack scope. What were the fools doing? The fighters were supposed to keep the British ships occupied, not attack them! Some idiot of a pilot had pissed his pants and squeezed off a missile. And now look at this …

The plan called for keeping the British out of the conflict. Gröeler felt his jaw tighten. That wasn’t going to happen now, was it?

He swung the scope ten degrees to the right and centered the other ship in his crosshairs. The frigate had a heavy list to starboard, and her guns and missile launchers were motionless. Her active sonar had fallen silent as well. Probably she was without power.

For the briefest of seconds, he considered throwing the mission out the window and ordering his boats to the surface to mount a rescue operation. His country would try him for treason, of course, but that wasn’t such a high price to pay for averting a war.

But his men would pay the price with him, wouldn’t they? The economy of his country would still collapse into ruins. And, even then, it might not be possible to prevent war.

Gröeler flipped up the handles of the attack scope and stood back as the burnished metal cylinder lowered itself into its recess beneath the deck. He kept his face carefully neutral. It would not pay to allow his crew to see the doubt that he was feeling.

He turned to his Officer of the Deck. “Make your depth one hundred meters.”

“Sir, make my depth one hundred meters, aye!” the Officer of the Deck said. He pivoted on his heal. “Diving Officer, make your depth one hundred meters.”

The Diving Officer acknowledged the order and repeated it back. Almost without pause, he issued his own order to the Planesman. “Ten degree down bubble. Make your new depth one hundred meters.”

Gröeler watched his men only long enough to verify that they were carrying out his order with their usual efficiency; then he turned his mind back to the British ships. He almost couldn’t believe it. With the flick of a switch, some fool had dragged the British into this—a development Gröeler was certain the all-seeing strategists of the Bundeswehr had not foreseen. One stupid, reflexive squeeze of a trigger and the plan had gone to hell. And, who knew? Maybe the world would go to hell with it …

Like nearly all senior naval officers, Gröeler was a student of history. Twice in the last century, his country had traded fire with the British. And both times, the entire world had stumbled blindly after them into war. He suppressed a shudder. Please, God, do not let history repeat itself.

CHAPTER 13

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

SUNDAY; 13 MAY

1601 hours (4:01 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

It appeared on the video screen without warning: a brilliant wedge of jittering green static that dominated the lower left quadrant of the SPY radar display. Operations Specialist Third Class Angela Hartford stared at the flickering green triangle with disbelief. She had been tracking three air contacts in that sector, and now she couldn’t see any of them. They were totally eclipsed by the pulsing wedge of static. It was an equipment malfunction or maybe a software error. It had to be. Because the only other possible explanation was impossible. At least it was supposed to be impossible.

Hartford glanced across Combat Information Center to the Radar Control Officer’s console, to the left of the Tactical Action Officer’s station. She punched the channel selector on her communications panel, patching her headset into the Radar Control Officer’s circuit. “RCO—Air. I’m getting some kind of weird system artifact on my air tracking display. It’s gobbling up about a sixty-degree sector of my radar coverage. Can you run a quick diagnostic on SPY and check it out?”

The AN/SPY-1D(V)2 phased-array radar formed the heart of the ship’s Aegis integrated sensor and weapons suite. With a power output of over four million watts and a high–data-rate multi-function computer control system, the most recent generation of SPY radar was capable of detecting and tracking nearly two hundred simultaneous air and surface contacts. In Aegis ready-auto mode, SPY could detect a contact, classify it as friendly or hostile (based on its radar signature, movement characteristics, and approach profile), prioritize it in relation to other threat ships or aircraft, and—if necessary—assign and launch missiles to attack it. Following a missile launch, SPY could even assess the target for damage and decide whether to launch additional missiles to finish it off.

But with such technological power came complexity, and the need for continuous human attention and frequent adjustment. That was the job of the Radar Control Officer: monitoring the condition of the SPY radar and keeping it tuned for optimum performance based upon atmospheric conditions and the types of ships and aircraft operating in and around its detection envelope.

The Radar Control Officer answered Hartford’s call almost immediately. “Air—RCO. Copy your suspected system artifact. Running SPY diagnostics now. Stand by for updated system status.”

Hartford was about to key her mike to acknowledge when another voice broke in on the circuit. “RCO—Surface. I’m getting it too. A big section of my scope is getting creamed. I can’t see squat off the port side of the stern. Somebody’s jamming us.”

The RCO’s reply was sharp. “Surface—RCO. Watch your professionalism on the comm net! Didn’t they teach you anything in school? SPY frequency-hops about a hundred times a second. You can’t jam SPY without jamming the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Now stand by while I run SPY diagnostics.”

Hartford nodded. The RCO was right. Everybody knew it was impossible to jam SPY, and not just because of the frequency-hopping. At four megawatts, SPY was powerful enough to burn through any jamming signal known to man.

Hartford watched the brilliant triangle of static on her screen. It couldn’t be a jammer, but it sure looked like one.

She punched her channel selector, patching her headset into the Electronics Warfare circuit. “EW—Air. Are you showing any sort of electromagnetic interference off the port quarter?” She shied away from the word jammer. Better not to get people spun up over nothing.

The Electronics Warfare Technician was obviously trying to stifle a yawn as his voice came over the comm circuit. “Air—EW. That’s a negative. I’m tracking a couple of APG-79s and a WXR-2100 down in that sector. Slick-32 shows no interference in any sector. The EM spectrum looks nice and clean.”

“EW—Air. I copy no interference and a clean electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks.” Hartford released her mike button. The APG-79s would belong to the two F-18s she’d been tracking prior to the appearance of the artifact, and the WXR-2100 must be weather radar for the Saudi airliner she’d been tracking. Whatever the strange interference was, it was not a jammer. If it had been, the Electronics Warfare Technicians would have picked it up on their SLQ-32, or as they called it, the Slick-32.

Hartford frowned. If it wasn’t a jammer, then it had to be a SPY malfunction. Either hardware or software. Hartford shrugged and turned her attention to the three hundred degrees of her scope that were not being blown away by the video artifact. Whatever it was, the RCO would find it.

CHAPTER 14

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 13 MAY

9:16 PM EDT

President Chandler laid both palms flat on the polished mahogany tabletop and let his eyes travel down one side of the long conference table and back up the other. The seven men and five women gathered around the table ranged in age from thirty-four to sixty-eight. Some were in military uniform, and some were not. A few wore suits, but most were dressed casually, in whatever they’d been wearing when the call had gone out for an emergency meeting. The single visible characteristic common to all of them was the grim expression they shared.

Seated directly across the table, Vice President Dalton Wainright nodded once when the president’s eye caught his.

Veronica Doyle sat to the president’s immediate left, in the spot traditionally reserved for the White House chief of staff. She leaned over next to him and whispered. “SecState is still shuttling back and forth between Beijing and Taipei, trying to nip the China situation in the bud. She’s got Undersecretary Mitchell covering for her.”

The president nodded and said quietly, “I don’t see SecNav either.”

“Secretary Larribee called from his car,” Doyle said. “He’s stuck in traffic on the beltway. I’ve got police escorts in route, trying to make a big enough hole to get him out of there, but it’ll probably be at least an hour.” She nodded toward the Chief of Naval Operations. “In the meantime, the CNO is ready to cover the Navy angle.”

“Good enough,” the president said. He looked at the CNO and said in a louder voice, “Bob, I understand that your boss probably isn’t going to make it. Are you ready to proceed?”

Admiral Robert Casey stood up and nodded toward his commander in chief. “Yes, Mr. President.” He picked up a small remote control and ran his thumb across a dial. The room lights dimmed and, at the far end of the conference table, a large projection screen scrolled down from a recess in the ceiling.

The admiral’s summer-white uniform fairly glowed in the semi-darkened room. The contrast between the immaculate twill fabric and his tanned, weather-beaten face made his skin seem the color of old leather.

He pressed another button and an image filled the screen. It appeared to be an aerial view of a large industrial seaport. A good deal of the picture was obscured by cloud cover, but—judging from the clarity of the image—the shot appeared to have been taken from low altitude with a very good camera.

“This photograph was taken on the seventh of this month by a U.S. Air Force Oracle III series surveillance satellite, during a covert medium-altitude orbital pass over Western Europe. The area under surveillance, in this case, was the Deutsche Marine Naval Arsenal in Kiel, Germany.”

The admiral pressed a button on the remote, and the image was replaced by an enlargement of a section of the photo. The picture was somewhat grainier than the first image had been, but the clarity was still very good. Several dark cylindrical shapes could be seen in the waters adjacent to a series of parallel docks, each attended by a large yellow crane. Workmen were clearly visible on the docks and on and around the dark cylinders.

“These are satellite photos?” asked Undersecretary of State Mitchell. “From the quality, I would’ve thought they were shot from an airplane.”

Admiral Casey smiled briefly. “Yes, sir, they’re satellite shots. I have to give those Zoomies credit; their equipment is top-notch.”

“It certainly is,” Mitchell said in a nearly reverent tone.

The admiral pressed a button. Four bright red ovals appeared on the screen, each of them enclosing one of the dark cylindrical shapes. “These are German Type 212B diesel submarines. The Office of Naval Intelligence believes that they are hull numbers U-304 through U-307. Barring the new German Type 214s, which are not operational yet, these are the most sophisticated and deadly diesel submarines on planet Earth. Intelligence analysts at ONI and the Central Intelligence Agency have examined these photographs in detail and are confident that we are witnessing a complete missile and torpedo load-out for all four submarines.”

The admiral looked around the room. “Under ordinary circumstances, we wouldn’t be even slightly concerned by this. Our allied nations are entitled to arm their submarines, and we wouldn’t expect them to do otherwise. But we believe that these particular submarines have been earmarked for delivery to the government of Siraj.”

Eyebrows went up around the table, and a few people sat up straighter in their seats.

Undersecretary of State Mitchell said, “Obviously, any such delivery is in clear violation of standing United Nations resolutions.”

“Obviously,” Admiral Casey said.

“The repercussions would be staggering,” the vice president said. “The government of Germany wouldn’t dare …”

The admiral keyed the remote. “I’m afraid they already have dared, sir.” The image changed to a split-screen picture of two warships. “The ship on the left is—or rather was—HMS York, a destroyer belonging to the British Royal Navy. The ship on the right is her escort, HMS Chatham, a Royal Navy frigate. Approximately twenty-two hours ago, while attempting to blockade the Strait of Gibraltar, these ships gained sonar contact on what they believed to be the four German submarines. While HMS York and HMS Chatham were attempting to divert the submarines, a flight of approximately six German warplanes appeared. Based upon their performance characteristics, we believe they were the German Air Force variant of the EF-2000S EuroStrike-Fighter. We don’t know who pulled the trigger first, but the encounter escalated into a missile shoot. HMS York went down with a loss of nearly all hands. HMS Chatham was severely damaged and is currently being rigged for tow back into port. According to their reports, the British shot down four of the jets and may have damaged a fifth.”

The admiral looked directly at Vice President Wainright. “The Royal Navy has search and rescue helicopters out combing the water for survivors, but as of their last situation report, two hundred ninety-four British Sailors are either dead or missing.” He paused for a second. “Sir, I humbly submit that our German allies have already dared one hell of a lot.”

“Where does that put us now, Bob?” the president asked.

The admiral looked at the screen and pressed the button again. The ships were replaced by a color map of the Mediterranean Sea. “The German subs are somewhere in the Med by now. Assuming that they are moving at their maximum possible speed, they should still be west of this line.” He pressed another button, and a curved red line appeared on the map. “In all probability, they are somewhere between the Spanish island of Balearic and Sardinia—off the Italian coast.” He turned to look at the president. “It’s a big stretch of water, Mr. President. But not so big as to be unmanageable. I’ve got the Abraham Lincoln strike group steaming west at top speed, and a half-dozen P-3s in the air as we speak.” He keyed the remote again, and a series of small black silhouettes appeared on the map: six ships at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and six airplanes at the western end.

“Excuse me,” Undersecretary Mitchell said. “P-3s? Those would be some sort of aircraft?”

“Yes, sir,” the admiral said. “Lockheed Martin P-3 Orions. Long-range, prop-driven planes. Specially designed for Undersea Warfare, or what we call USW.”

Mitchell nodded.

The admiral continued. “The plan is to blanket the western end of the Med with sonobuoys. By the time the P-3s have the subs localized, the carrier and her escorts should be on station.”

Army General Horace Gilmore, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cleared his throat. He was a mild-looking man, with a rounded face and black-rimmed glasses that would have been at home on the nose of a librarian. The rack of ribbons on the left breast of his uniform jacket hadn’t come from shelving books, though. He leaned his head forward and stared over the tops of his glasses with eyes that were nearly predatory in their intensity. “And then what, Admiral Casey?”

The admiral sat down and pulled his seat up next to the table. “I believe that’s what we’re here to discuss, General.”

Secretary of Defense Rebecca Kilpatrick leaned back in her chair. “I get the feeling that you already have a plan of action.”

“I do, Madam Secretary. I think we should hunt those bastards down and sink every one of them.”

Secretary Kilpatrick smiled. “It has the virtue of being simple. And a simple plan is often the best plan.” She looked around the table. “But I think we need to consider this situation carefully before we start shooting at people. Things may not be as cut-and-dried as we think.”

“With all due respect, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said, “it looks pretty simple from my side of the table. One of our allies has been attacked. If we don’t cover their backs, how can we expect them to cover ours?”

“I don’t dispute the fact that one of our allies has been attacked,” Secretary Kilpatrick said. “The question is which of our allies?”

“That’s pretty obvious,” the admiral said.

SecDef’s eyebrows went up. “Are you certain? Right now, we can’t even be sure who fired the first shot. What if we investigate and discover that one of the British ships launched first, and the Germans only returned fire in self-defense?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Admiral Casey said. “But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“You’ve been in combat before,” the secretary of defense said. “And so have I.” As a retired Army colonel, she was one of only three people in the room who had earned the right to wear the coveted Combat Infantry Badge.

“We both know how the game is played,” she said. “Some yahoo crowds your airspace, so you lock on them with fire control radar. They return the favor and paint you with their fire control radar. Before you know it, you’re both pumping enough electromagnetic energy into the air to microwave a hotdog. Alarms are going off; adrenaline levels are sky high; people are shouting. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, somebody eventually gets tired of the game and backs down. Everybody gets to go home claiming victory. But about one percent of the time, somebody gets spooked and does something stupid. Sometimes it’s one of our guys, and sometimes it’s one of their guys.”

“The Brits are claiming that the Germans shot first.”

“Of course they are,” the secretary of defense said. “In their shoes, I’d probably say the same thing, whether I’d shot first or not.”

General Gilmore nodded. “I agree. We have to table the matter of the shooting, at least until we know who initiated the attack. That still leaves us with four German submarines hauling ass through the Med. What do we do about them?”

“We can’t afford to attack them out of hand,” Undersecretary of State Mitchell said.

“We’re not going to,” the president said. “I want the Abraham Lincoln strike group to intercept them and turn them around.”

Admiral Casey tilted his head to the side. “That tactic didn’t seem to work too well for the British, sir.”

The president brought his palms together and interlaced his fingers. “A fully escorted aircraft carrier should fare slightly better than two aging British warships. I would hope so, anyway.”

General Gilmore nodded. “No doubt you are right, Mr. President. But Admiral Casey does have a point. While there’s no conclusive evidence yet, my instincts tell me that the Germans probably pulled the trigger first. What if they start shooting at us?”

“They won’t,” the president said. “Somebody just got an itchy finger. It’s not going to happen again.” He looked at the Chief of Naval Operations. “Bob, it’s your job to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We don’t want to provoke the Germans; we just want to turn them around.”

“Understood, sir,” the CNO said. “We’ll play it low-key. But what happens if the Germans open up on us anyway?”

“Jesus Christ, Bob!” the president snapped. “Get over it, and get over it now. You’ve got your orders. We’re not going to get in a shooting war with the god-damned Republic of Germany. That is simply not an option. It’s … it’s unthinkable.”

CHAPTER 15

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 91–95] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

Following the American Revolution, naval tacticians in many countries began to see the torpedo’s promise as a weapon. The torpedo still lacked a viable delivery system, but its destructive potential was nothing short of astounding.

Over the course of the next several decades, two basic design philosophies emerged. Floating torpedoes (by far the most common) were designed to drift on, or slightly below, the surface of the water until they came into contact with the hull of an enemy ship. Today, these so-called floating torpedoes would be classified as mines, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word torpedo was understood to include nearly any form of waterborne explosive device. During the American Civil War, when Union Admiral David Farragut shouted his famous line, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” he was referring to mines.

Spar torpedoes were second in popularity and effectiveness to floating torpedoes. A spar torpedo consisted of an explosive charge mounted on a wooden pole (or spar) and lashed to the bow of a small boat. Rigged to project several yards out in front of the bow, the spar torpedo was designed to be rammed directly against the hull of the target vessel. The resulting explosion, only a few yards from the attacking boat, would almost certainly result in damage to the torpedo boat or its crew. Understandably, spar torpedoes were unpopular weapons, and they saw very little application in combat before they fell out of use altogether.

Destructive capacity notwithstanding, the lack of a reliable delivery system severely limited the effectiveness of both spar and floating torpedo designs. It would take a major technological breakthrough to change that.

The breakthrough finally came in 1866, when a British-born naval engineer named Robert Whitehead built the first self-propelled torpedo. Whitehead called his invention the automotive torpedo (or sometimes, the locomotive torpedo), but critics and supporters alike insisted on calling it the Whitehead torpedo. By any title, the self-propelled torpedo represented more than a technological breakthrough; it was a quantum leap in naval weaponry.

In appearance, Whitehead’s torpedo was a cigar-shaped steel cylinder with severely tapered ends. Mounted at the rear (or afterbody) of the weapon was a propeller, which was coupled by a drive shaft to a pneumatic motor inside the cylinder. Also mounted on the afterbody were a pair of horizontal fins and a pair of vertical fins, to guide the torpedo through the water in a straight line. The pneumatic motor was powered by compressed air from a tank built into the middle section of the weapon. The nose of the weapon was dedicated to an explosive charge, the warhead. Whitehead used explosive gun cotton in most of his early warhead designs, but eventually he switched to dynamite, which was more stable and packed significantly more destructive power.

The ironclad warships of Whitehead’s day were defenseless against torpedo attacks. Designed to repel explosive shells from naval cannons, ironclads were heavily armored all the way down to the waterline. Since cannon shells could not effectively penetrate below the water, naval architects the world over agreed that it was not necessary to armor the underwater portion of a warship’s hull. (In fact, an armored hull was considered undesirable; the increased weight would make a ship ride lower in the water, reducing its speed and its fuel efficiency.) As a consequence, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, every warship in the world was vulnerable to torpedo attack.

Nineteenth-century Sailors found the very idea of the torpedo both insulting and terrifying. They began to refer to Whitehead’s invention as the Devil’s Device. Many prominent naval officers condemned the machine as a barbarous method of warfare. After all, war at sea was a gentleman’s game, and a device that slipped in under a ship’s armor wasn’t a very far cry from a punch below the belt. It could hardly be considered the weapon of an honorable man.

Luckily (for its detractors), Whitehead’s torpedo had a lot of problems. Early models had difficulty maintaining their depth in the water. A torpedo that rose too high in the water would impact on a ship’s armor, which might well absorb the explosion without serious damage. A torpedo that ran too deep would pass under the target ship’s hull and miss it completely. To make matters worse, since Whitehead’s first models did not have steering mechanisms, they were easily pushed off course by tides or ocean currents, frequently causing them to miss their targets.

Whitehead applied his engineering skills to the first problem: depth control. It took him two years to solve it, but by 1868, he had the solution: a device that he referred to as the secret. Many European countries were becoming interested in the automotive torpedo, and Whitehead was intensely aware that he had a growing list of competitors. To throw them off the scent, Whitehead hinted strongly that his secret depth control device was highly complex and would be difficult or impossible to duplicate. In fact—despite its dramatic title—the secret was little more than a piston, a cylinder, and a spring attached to the horizontal fins by a mechanical linkage. Seawater flowed into the cylinder by means of a small vent just behind the warhead. As the water pressure increased with depth, the seawater in the chamber would exert force on the piston, compressing it against the spring. The motion of the piston would in turn move the mechanical linkage, which would change the angle of the horizontal fins, making the torpedo climb or dive. When the force exerted on the piston by the seawater became equal to the opposing force of the spring, the fins would return to a level position, causing the torpedo to level off. By adjusting the tension on the spring, Whitehead was able to pre-select the depth to which a torpedo would dive. To make depth changes even smoother, Whitehead attached a pendulum to the linkage to dampen minor oscillations as the piston shifted positions.

The basic design of Whitehead’s secret depth control device was so successful that it remained in use—with very few changes—for nearly a hundred years.

With the depth control issue finally solved, Whitehead turned his attention to the problem of steering. Unlike the depth control issue, which had yielded to Whitehead’s engineering expertise in only two years, the steering problem seemed to defy solution. Whitehead (and his competitors) spent the next several decades trying to solve it.

In the meantime, the unsolved steering problem did not prevent the torpedo from gaining popularity. Over the social and moral objections of many naval officers, nearly every navy in Europe began buying or building automotive torpedoes. Small, steam-powered torpedo boats began appearing in increasing numbers, and many larger warships were back-fitted to carry torpedoes. The situation escalated into an arms race, and conventional wisdom held that any navy that did not arm itself with torpedoes was likely to fall prey to one that had embraced torpedo warfare.

On January 25, 1878, the automotive torpedo found its first real use in combat. Russia, under the rule of Tsar Alexander II, had been at war with Turkey since April of the previous year. On the night of January twenty-fifth, two Russian torpedo boats, Tchesma and Sinope, conducted attacks on the armed Turkish steamer Intibah. Both shots were direct hits, and the resulting explosions devastated the Turkish ship. The wreckage of the Intibah slipped beneath the waves in less than two minutes.

In many ways, the attack was less impressive than Whitehead might have hoped for. The Intibah—although armed—was not an ironclad, so the torpedo’s effectiveness still had not been demonstrated against a fully armored warship. (In fact, the Tchesma and Sinope had conducted earlier attacks on the Turkish ironclad Mahmoudieh, but both of their torpedoes had missed the target.) Still, details notwithstanding, history had been made: automotive torpedoes had struck and destroyed an armed vessel under conditions of actual combat. The torpedo was no longer a curiosity, or even a theoretical weapon. It was an engine of war. The race to acquire and perfect torpedo technology rose to a level approaching frenzy.

The torpedo, in various designs, saw use in several sea battles over the next few decades, with wildly varying degrees of success. The mixed results were the product of two factors: one positive and one negative. On the positive side, the destructive energy that a torpedo could deliver was astounding; it was not at all unusual for a single torpedo hit to cripple or sink a fully armored warship. On the negative side, the lack of a self-correcting steering mechanism made it difficult to actually hit a target with any real degree of reliability.

In the early 1890s, Whitehead became convinced that the torpedo steering problem could be solved by installing a gyroscope. (Invented in 1852 by French physicist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, the gyroscope was known to have interesting properties but was generally thought to have no practical application.) Whitehead embarked on a series of experiments using a Russian-made gyro called a Petrovich. Despite its promise, the Russian gyro was too crudely made to suit Whitehead’s purpose. In 1895, Whitehead turned his attention to a precision-built gyroscope designed by an Austrian naval engineer named Ludwig Obry. Unlike the Russian model, Obry’s gyroscope could achieve and maintain a high enough rotation speed (about 2,400 rpm) to give a torpedo both duration and accuracy.

Whitehead attached the gyro to a two-way air valve, which directed measured quantities of compressed air to a steering engine whenever a torpedo began to deviate from its directed path through the water. The steering engine was connected in turn to the torpedo’s vertical fins, which Whitehead re-engineered into turnable rudders. It was an ingenious solution to a problem that had plagued the automotive torpedo ever since its birth in 1866. Gyroscopic steering increased the accuracy of the torpedo’s course to a mere half degree over a distance of seven thousand yards, or three and a half nautical miles.

Suddenly, the torpedo had striking range, accuracy, and the incredible destructive potential for which it had become famous. With the major engineering problems finally solved, it was nearly inevitable that the torpedo would begin to exert a significant influence on world events.

CHAPTER 16

SOUTHERN MEDITERRANEAN SEA

MONDAY; 14 MAY

1609 hours (4:09 PM)

TIME ZONE +2 ‘BRAVO’

Lieutenant Shari Scarlotti leaned her head against the side window and felt the bass drone of her plane’s engines resonate through her skull. Dark-haired and small-boned, her slight frame looked out of scale in the pilot’s seat, like a child swallowed up in her father’s easy chair. The relentless sound of the turbines never ceased and rarely wavered while the big four-engined aircraft was airborne.

Her air crew had nicknamed it the hypno-tone, and they frequently joked that it lulled them into a post-hypnotic state and then forced them to perform acts that they would never have even considered without its mesmeric (and undoubtedly evil) influence. Any trouble they got into when they were off-duty was invariably blamed on fourteen-hour missions spent listening to the hypno-tone.

Her Flight Engineer, Chief Benjamin Lanier, took the opposite side of the argument, asserting that the steady thrum of the huge Allison turboprops was the most beautiful music audible to the human ear. With a couple of beers in him, he’d even been known to claim that he couldn’t make love to his wife without a recording of turboprops droning in the background.

Shari wouldn’t go quite that far, but she liked the sound; she liked it a lot. The Lockheed Martin P-3C Orion was a big plane and over thirty years old. But as long as the 4,600 horsepower engines kept pumping out that deep monotonous tone, she knew that her aircraft had a guaranteed place in the sky.

Shari’s copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Andy Cole, squeezed past her right shoulder and slid into the right-hand seat. He held out a tall, spill-proof plastic cup. “Coffee, boss? Just the way you like it: fourteen sugars, nine creams, and then I waved the cup over the pot to give it that good coffee flavor.”

Shari reached for the cup and took a sip. It was just the way she liked it, hot and black. She swallowed. “Thanks, wise-ass.” She took another sip and swallowed again. “What’s the word from Nav?”

Andy set his own coffee cup in a car-type cup holder that he had Velcroed to his side of the cockpit and went about the business of belting himself into the copilot’s chair. “Our fearless Navigator assures me that we are right on track, and nine minutes ahead of profile. We should be on station in about fifteen minutes.” He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder.

Shari nodded. “Good. It’s just about time to start this party.”

Andy furrowed his eyebrows in mock concentration. “I think Nav had his fingers crossed,” he said. “So he could have been blowing smoke up my butt.”

Shari looked out her side window at the brilliant blue waters of the southern Med scrolling by fifteen thousand feet below. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times,” she said. “If you don’t put your butt where Nav can get to it, he can’t blow smoke where you don’t want it.”

Andy grinned. “Roger that, boss.”

Shari rotated her neck to relieve a crick. “How are we looking for Electronic Support?”

“The ALR-66 is still out of commission,” Andy said. “Chief Lanier is back there breathing down the tech’s neck, trying to get it fixed. Apparently, we need a break-while-stepping relay, whatever the hell that is. It’s probably going to stay broke till we get back to the barn.”

Shari sighed. “Have we ever flown a mission where everything on board actually worked for the entire flight?”

“Not that I know of, boss. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of such a thing.”

“So we’re hitting the Op-Area blind?”

“Not exactly. We just got an ES cross-fix from Abraham Lincoln’s Airborne Early Warning plane.”

“Better than nothing,” Shari said. “Is it good news or bad?”

“Good news. There are at least two Kelvin Hughes Type 1007 I-band radars transmitting right-smack-dab in the middle of our Op-Area. Definitely consistent with German Type 212 subs.”

Shari’s eyebrows went up. “Two? What about the other two? Did they split off from the rest of the pack?”

Andy shook his head. “George doesn’t think so.”

George was Ensign George Freely, the plane’s Tactical Coordinator, or TACO (pronounced to rhyme with “whacko”).

“He says it’s not unusual for subs in a rotating diesel barrier to alternate their depths according to a predetermined schedule. That way, not all the subs are at periscope depth at the same time.”

“This isn’t exactly a rotating diesel barrier,” Shari said.

“True,” said Andy. “But that’s the closest tactical example that anyone can think of. Nobody’s had to deal with a roving diesel wolfpack since the Second World War.”

“I understand that,” Shari said. “But we still don’t know for a fact that the subs are sticking together. What if we get all our eggs in one basket, and some of those subs slip by us to the north?”

“They’re going to have to refuel somewhere,” Andy said. “The intel weenies think they’ll head for Tobruk, Libya. That’s the nearest port that’s seriously hostile to the good old U.S. of A.”

Shari glanced at her own fuel gauges. “Sounds like a pretty big gamble to me,” she said. “How much time will we have on station before the carrier gets there and steals our thunder?”

Andy took a swallow of coffee. “Those guys are making tracks. We’ll probably have the Op-Area to ourselves for an hour before AEW gets there.” He shrugged. “The carrier will be, what? An hour behind that? An hour and a half, maybe?”

Shari pursed her lips and nodded once. “Let’s make the most of it. I want to have those subs filleted and on a plate before the big boys even stick their toes in our Op-Area.” She pulled her headphones from around her neck and positioned the left earpiece over her ear. The other earpiece she put over her right temple, leaving her ear uncovered so that she could hear her copilot. She keyed her mike. “George, let’s get FLIR warmed up and ready to play.”

The TACO’s voice cracked in her left ear. “You got it, Lieutenant.”

Down in the belly of the plane, the Forward-Looking Infrared cameras came to life and began scanning the water below and in front of the aircraft for thermal signatures. The temperature contrast between a periscope and the surrounding water was sometimes drastic enough to make it detectable to IR. But FLIR really worked best against snorkeling submarines. A snorkel was a specially designed ventilation pipe that a submerged submarine could extend above the surface of the water to allow its diesel engines to suck in fresh air and expel exhaust gasses. In the infrared spectrum, the heat plume from a snorkeling engine was like a giant arrow pointing directly back to the submarine.

*  *  *

A few minutes out from the Op-Area, Shari began a slow descent that would take them down to their patrol altitude of 1,500 feet. Based on the recommendations of the TACO, they didn’t drop any sonobuoys on the first pass, giving the FLIR cameras and the APS-137 radar a chance to sweep the area for periscopes or snorkels.

When she reached the far edge of the search grid, Shari eased the yoke over into a slow turn that would bring them back around for another pass. She keyed her mike. “Did we get anything, George?”

“No joy. Just a merchant ship and a couple of yachts.”

“So much for beginner’s luck,” Shari said. “Let’s start planting the Briar Patch on this next pass.”

“Roger that,” her TACO said. “Stand by for waypoints.”

A series of coordinates popped up on Shari’s Tactical Data Display. She punched the acknowledge key on the TDD. “Got ‘em.” She brought the nose around two degrees to starboard to line up on the first waypoint. The TDD beeped to tell her that her approach vector was within acceptable limits. She keyed her mike. “I’ll do the flying, Andy. You cover the numbers.”

Andy said, “Roger that, boss.” He paused, watching the numbers on the TDD for a moment, and then he keyed his mike. “All stations—waypoint Alpha coming up in five seconds … four … three … two … mark!”

On cue, one of the two Acoustic Sensor Operators sitting at display consoles near the center of the plane pushed a button.

An electrical signal triggered a small explosive charge, not much more powerful than a shotgun shell, propelling the first sonobuoy out of its launch tube. As soon as the metal and plastic cylinder was clear of the aircraft, a propeller-like set of spring-loaded fins popped open on the rear end of the buoy. Known in Undersea Warfare circles as a roto-chute, the fins caused the sonobuoy to spin like a helicopter, slowing the buoy’s rate of fall and keeping its nose pointed down toward the water.

On splashdown, the sonobuoy performed a series of automatic operations in rapid sequence. First a flotation collar inflated, keeping the buoy floating upright with four-fifths of its length extending down into the water. Next a latch snapped open in the lower end of the device, releasing a small array of sensitive underwater microphones to dangle at the end of a cable beneath the buoy. Relays clicked; a lithium battery powered up an acoustic processor and a radio transmitter, transforming the buoy into a small disposable sonar system. Almost simultaneously, an antenna popped out of the top of the buoy and began transmitting coded signals back to the aircraft.

The P-3 continued launching sonobuoys at precisely measured intervals, turning occasionally to begin another row. Buoy after buoy shot from the launch tubes, each spinning down toward a pre-selected spot in the ocean, until they formed an integrated field of sonar sensors: a Briar Patch.

In Shari’s left ear, the TACO’s voice said. “Buoy 12 won’t tune up. All other buoys are up and operational.”

“Copy,” said Shari. “How big a hole does that make in our coverage?”

“Negligible,” George said in her ear.

Andy keyed his mike. “Do you want to swing back around and re-seed buoy 12?”

“It’s a tight pattern with a lot of coverage overlap,” George said. “We can reseed, if it’ll give you a warm-fuzzy, but it’s not really necessary.”

“You’re the USW guru,” Shari said. “I’m just the bus driver.”

“Copilot concurs,” Andy said. “If you’re happy, we’re happy.”

“Roger,” said George. “Looks like we’re getting some LOFAR data now.”

LOFAR is an acronym for Low Frequency Analysis and Recording. It’s a method of acoustic processing that takes the noise detected by a sonar sensor and strips it apart into individual component frequencies. By comparing those frequencies against a catalogue of known acoustic sources, it is often possible to classify the source of a particular noise.

A skilled acoustic analyst can read a LOFAR gram the way an average person reads a newspaper. The process is largely one of elimination. Three-bladed propellers have different characteristics than four-bladed propellers. Engines with in-line cylinders generate different frequencies than V-configured engines. Four-pole electric motors make different tonals than two-pole motors. Chinese-built ventilation fans are different from French-built fans, which are different from Russian-built fans. Different hull designs have different hydrodynamic characteristics, which create identifiable sounds.

Sometimes, the majority of the contact’s frequencies are common to several possible sources and the resulting classification may be ambiguous: This is a non–Russian-built Type I diesel submarine—probably Chinese but possibly Korean. Other times, the classification can be startlingly exact: This is a Russian-built Akula submarine hull Number 8.

From their display consoles, the two Acoustic Sensor Operators began the process of classifying the frequencies coming in from the sonobuoys.

After several minutes, George’s voice came over Shari’s headset. “All buoys are cold.”

Shari and Andy stared at each other in disbelief. “Say again,” Shari said.

“I repeat,” the TACO said, “all buoys are cold.”

“All of them?” Andy asked softly.

“Every one of them,” George said. “The only tonals we’ve got are coming from those two yachts, and that merchant ship. We have zero possible submarine contacts.”

“Have your guys go over the grams again,” Shari said. “Maybe they’re missing something.”

“They’ve been over them twice,” George said. “Then I went over them myself. Those grams are ice cold.”

Shari’s eyes went to the Tactical Data Display. “Check the numbers, Andy. First you do them, and then give them back to Nav for a cross-check. While you’re at it, get Nav to run a diagnostic on GPS. Maybe we planted the Briar Patch in the wrong spot.”

“I’ll check, boss,” Andy said. “But I’ve never seen a GPS plot that was off by more than a few inches.” He flipped a selector switch and began talking to the Navigator on another circuit.

Shari keyed her mike. “George, have your ASOs run diagnostics on their gear.”

“Already in progress,” the TACO said, “but I can tell you up front that the equipment is running sweet. Whatever’s wrong ain’t in the ARR-78s.”

“Let’s swing back and re-seed that bad buoy,” Shari said.

“That’s not it,” George said. “There isn’t enough room in the blind zone for one sub to hide, much less four.”

“Maybe all four of them aren’t down here,” Shari said.

Andy kept his eyes on the TDD and punched buttons, watching the changing numbers like a hawk. He keyed back into Shari’s intercom circuit. “That’s certainly a possibility. But AEW got solid ES cuts on at least two of their radars. Even if there are only two of them down here, there’s no way they both just happened to be sitting under the only bad buoy in this whole piece of water.”

“If anyone’s got a better explanation,” Shari said, “I’d love to hear it right now.”

“These new 212Bs are supposed to be bad-ass,” Andy said. “Maybe they’re just so quiet that we can’t detect them.”

“I can’t rule that out,” George said. “But I’ll believe it when I’ve seen the proof.”

“Could be we’re seeing it now,” Shari said. “Or not seeing it, as the case may be.”

“The Brits detected them by going active,” Andy said. “Maybe we need to drop some active buoys.”

“Not my first choice,” George said. “As soon as we start pinging, those subs are going to run like scalded dogs. If they split up, we’ll never catch them all.”

Shari stared out the window at the Mediterranean. The water was still just as blue as it had been before, but now her eyes accused the waves of concealing the location of her enemies. “It’s not like we’re having a hell of a lot of luck catching them now,” she said.

Andy looked up from the TDD. “The numbers are clean. We dropped those buoys right on top of the ES cross-fix.”

George said, “Maybe the cross-fix was wrong. Who says the AEW guys can’t screw the pooch once in a while?”

“Maybe,” Shari said, “but they’re never going to admit it. Let’s set up a rack of active buoys and try this again.”

“Yes ma’am,” George said, but his voice didn’t sound very confident.

Shari pretended not to notice. “Shoot me some waypoints.”

*  *  *

Active buoy number 9 was going into the water when George said, “Abraham Lincoln’s AEW is about thirty miles out. They’re still picking up Kelvin Hughes I-band radars in our Op-Area.”

“Where the hell are they?” Shari asked.

“Just a second,” George said. “I’m getting the cross-fix now.”

Shari waited without speaking; the only sound in the cockpit was the drone of the engines.

After what seemed like an hour, but was—in reality—probably more like five minutes, the accordion door at the rear of the cockpit slid open. George stepped into the cockpit and stood in the narrow strip of floor space between the pilot and copilot chairs. His disconnected comm-set was down around his neck, the cord draped around his shoulders. “Ah, boss?”

Shari looked up. George never came up to the flight deck to deliver good news. “I’m not going to like this, am I?” she asked.

“Afraid not, boss. We plotted the cross-fixes on those I-band radars we’ve been chasing. They fall right on top of those two yachts in the middle of our Briar Patch.”

“That’s nuts,” Shari said. “Go out to AEW and get them to check their ES gear.”

“I’ve already done that,” George said. “Their gear is clean. Those boats are emitting I-band radar signatures consistent with German Type 212B diesel submarines.”

“Leave it to the AEW weenies to screw up something simple like an ES cut.”

The idea dawned on Shari slowly, like some sort of vile egg hatching deep in her intestines. “AEW didn’t screw up,” she said. “They got suckered. We all got suckered.”

“Those boats are carrying decoy radar emitters,” George said softly.

Shari’s eyes shot over to Andy. “Get on the horn to the Abraham Lincoln! Tell them the subs are not in this Op-Area, and they never have been. We’ve got to get that carrier turned around and headed back toward the eastern end of the Med.”

Andy picked up the radio microphone, his face gone suddenly the color of ash. “It’s already too late, isn’t it? The subs have already gotten past us.”

“Forget about us,” Shari said. “The carrier is out of position, way out of position. Those subs have a straight shot into the Suez now.” She whistled softly through her teeth. “I doubt anybody can stop them.”

CHAPTER 17

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

MONDAY; 14 MAY

1840 hours (6:40 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Fire Controlman Chief Robert Lowery tapped the video screen with the tip of his index finger. A bright green wedge of static interference eclipsed an arc of the SPY radar display. “This is a playback of recorded video from the Aegis display system,” he said. He looked up at the faces of the three technicians gathered on the far side of the console. “The interference lasted about two and a half minutes, which is pretty consistent with the other two times this malfunction has shown its ugly head.” He tapped the screen again. That’s pretty much all we know, except that it always appears in the same sector of the aft port-side SPY array, and that it tends to show up in the early to mid-afternoon.”

Fire Controlman Second Class Todd Burgess rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s array number four, Chief. Fish and I have run every test in the book on that damned thing. Every single module in the array is operating within design tolerances. Now we’re thinking about a couple of tricks that aren’t in the book.”

Chief Lowery glanced back down at the partially garbled radar screen. “Like what?”

Burgess nodded toward Fire Controlman Third Class Daryl Fisher. “The problem always seems to show up during the hottest part of the day. Fish thought that some of the emitter-receiver modules might be breaking down under the heat. If he’s right, we should be able to duplicate the problem by heating up the array a little bit. We have some ideas on how to do that.”

FCC Lowery cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “Why am I suddenly certain that I don’t want to hear the rest of your idea?”

Fisher grinned. “Relax, Chief. We’re not going to burn it up. We’re just looking to crank the heat up a notch.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Burgess said. “We just want to half close a couple of valves in the cooling loop that feeds the array. That will slow down the movement of chilled water through the modules and reduce the effectiveness of the cooling loop. Then, when the array starts to warm up a bit, we run over-voltage tests on the emitter-receivers and heat things up a little more. If this malfunction is being triggered by some sort of thermal component failure, we should be able to force the array to reproduce the interference pattern.”

The chief nodded. “I see … If you can make the problem appear by turning up the heat, then it just becomes a matter of finding out which components are breaking down under high temperature.”

“Right,” Fisher said. “We’ll have the problem localized to the array, and we can chase it down a module at a time. Plus, we can get the engineers to rig us a couple of fan units inside the array housing to blow extra air across the back sides of the modules. That might help us hold the heat down enough to keep the array from shitting all over itself while we look for the bad modules.”

“Sounds good,” FCC Lowery said. He looked at the third technician, who hadn’t said a word yet. “Gordo, these clowns may be onto something, but we can’t afford to get tunnel vision here. This could still be a processor error, or a software glitch, or God knows what. I want you to reload the entire Aegis software package from your archive disk packs.”

Fire Controlman Second Class Bruce Gordon nodded. “Will do, Chief. And the next time we get a satellite window for Internet access, I’ll log onto Navy Knowledge Online and post a note on the troubleshooting forum for SPY. It’s possible that somebody has seen this particular casualty before, and there might already be a fix for it.”

“Good idea,” the chief said. “All right guys, you’ve got your marching orders. I don’t need to tell you how serious this is. If we were joyriding off the coast of Southern California, this kind of casualty wouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience. Unfortunately, this is the Arabian Gulf, and the natives out here don’t run around in rollerblades and thong bikinis. There are an awful lot of people out here who would love to stick a cruise missile up our ass while we’re not looking. We can’t afford to have our primary sensor go blind at a critical moment.”

The three technicians all nodded.

“Right,” the chief said. “Now, let’s go find this bug and kill it, before it kills us.”

CHAPTER 18

ALASKAN AIR CORRIDOR

MONDAY; 14 MAY

2319 hours (11:19 PM)

TIME ZONE-9 ‘VICTOR’

The flight from Narita, Japan, to Alaska was nearly sixteen hours long, and there was still an hour of it left to endure. Then, after a quick refueling, it would be back into the air for another six hours on the final leg to DC. The very thought of it made Secretary of State Elizabeth Whelkin want to bang her head against the window.

The Air Force 747 was a nice enough plane, and she and her staff had the VIP section all to themselves, but she was tired. She was sick of flying, and she was feeling cranky as hell—far too cranky to handle the kind of delicate phone call that she was about to make.

Roger Couric, her chief aide, was on the phone now, wading through the intricate barrier of political flunkies that shielded the president of Egypt from the outside world. Elizabeth had been watching Roger work the phone for nearly forty minutes. He was good at it, shifting smoothly from English to Arabic, and back again as he climbed steadily up the chain of command of the Egyptian government. Even so, from the look on his face, things were not going well.

After a while, Roger appeared to hit an impasse. Chances were, President Bin-Saud’ knew why Elizabeth was calling and had instructed his staff to deflect the call.

Elizabeth yawned and stretched, the seat belt pulling tight across her well-padded stomach. Plump rather than fat, she looked like Hollywood’s idea of the perfect maiden auntie. Her tightly curled hair was an aggregation of silver gray and Clairol’s Born Blonde, but her bright blue eyes were pure steel.

Eventually, Roger covered the mouthpiece of the satellite phone and whispered, “Prime Minister. That’s the best I can do. The big man is absolutely not talking today.”

Elizabeth sighed and held her hand out for the phone. She had to endure two minutes of hold-music before it was picked up again on the other end.

“Prime Minister Amman.”

“Good evening, Prime Minister,” she said. “This is Elizabeth Whelkin.”

“Ah, Madam Secretary,” the Egyptian prime minister replied. “It is an honor to hear your voice again. Peace be unto you.” His voice carried a note of well-disguised condescension.

Egyptian men were inimical toward women on the best of days, and—polite conversation aside—their distaste for having to treat female political leaders as equals was never very far beneath the surface.

“And unto you,” Elizabeth said, trying very hard to keep the weariness out of her own voice. Exhaustion was a form of weakness, and weakness could be exploited.

“May the blessings of the one true God be upon your home, and upon your children, and upon your children’s children,” the prime minister said.

“And unto you and your family, blessings,” said Elizabeth Whelkin. “May the Lord God protect you and keep you safe from harm.”

“Are you enjoying your stay in Beijing?” the prime minister asked.

“So kind of you to ask,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t get a chance to spend much time in Beijing. But I did enjoy what little I saw of it. I have concluded my visit, and now I’m flying back to Washington.”

“I trust that your business in China was brought to a satisfactory conclusion?”

“I believe that we made some progress. It is, of course, a bit too early to tell how much.”

“A pity that you could not have stayed a few extra days to enjoy the local culture. I’m told that the water-silks produced in the Xi’an province are particularly fine this year.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes and massaged her right temple. The Arabic system of conversation was built around elaborate layers of small talk. Face-to-face meetings were practically rituals, nurtured carefully—never rushed—and fueled by a seemingly endless stream of thimble-sized cups of hot Arabic coffee. Luckily, the telephone version was much abbreviated. Even so, it was considered rude to attempt to arrive at the point of the conversation without first exchanging an extensive series of irrelevant pleasantries.

“I hadn’t heard,” she said. “But now that I know, I will certainly look for silk the next time I’m in China. Xi’an province, did you say? Please excuse me for a second, while I write that down.” She closed her eyes for a moment and made no move to write anything at all. “There,” she said after a short pause. “Now I’ll be certain to remember. Thank you for the suggestion, Prime Minister.”

“Think nothing of it,” he said. “It is always my pleasure to be of assistance to a lady.”

Thank God, an opening at last …

“So kind of you,” she said. “In fact, that’s the very reason I called: to ask for your assistance.”

“Ah,” said the prime minister. “And how may I help you?”

Elizabeth paused for a second. How should she phrase it? “We have reason to believe that four German submarines will attempt to transit the Suez Canal within the next day or so.”

“How unusual,” the prime minister said. “Ships of that country frequently travel our canal, but I cannot recall the last time that we were visited by German submarines. And now, four at once you say?”

Elizabeth massaged her temple again. “We believe so, yes.”

“Am I to assume that your reason for calling has to do with these four submarines? Or, more specifically, with their transit through our national waterway?”

“Yes, Prime Minister, it does. My government has reason to believe that the submarines are in route to the Arabian Gulf for delivery to the Siraji Navy.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. When Amman finally spoke, he did so slowly, as though choosing his words carefully. “You are prepared to accuse the Federal Republic of Germany of violating international law?”

“I understand that this is a serious allegation,” Elizabeth said. “But our intelligence sources are virtually certain that Germany intends to sell military hardware to Siraj.”

“I see,” Amman said. “You are asking me to close the canal to these submarines, are you not?”

“Yes, Prime Minister, that is exactly what I’m asking. My president requests formal assurances from your government that the submarines will not be allowed to travel through the Suez Canal.”

Amman paused for an even longer time before speaking again. “Madam Secretary, perhaps you are aware of my country’s previous attempts to close the canal? On several occasions in the last century, we undertook to deny use of the canal to ships of Israel, who was—at that time—considered an enemy of Egypt. If I recall correctly, the United States government led an international movement to force us to open the canal, even to nations that had proven hostile to our country.”

“Yes, Prime Minister. I am quite familiar with my country’s dealings in your region during the latter half of the twentieth century. But these are extraordinary circumstances; we believe they justify an exception to ordinary policy.”

“I do not believe that I can agree,” Amman said. “Not unless you can provide me with some compelling evidence of hostility on the part of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Elizabeth grimaced; she had hoped to avoid the path this conversation was taking. “There have been hostilities,” she said. “The day before yesterday, two British warships were attacked by a squadron of German fighter jets in the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the ships, HMS York, went down with a loss of nearly all hands. The other ship, HMS Chatham, was severely damaged. At least four of the fighters were shot down.”

“Why would the Germans do such a thing?” Amman asked. “Are they not allied with the United Kingdom? Or, at the very least, peaceful neighbors?”

“The British ships were attempting to blockade the strait, to prevent the submarines from entering the Mediterranean Sea.”

“Ah,” said the prime minister. “Then it would be safe to assume that the German government did not consider the blockade a friendly act.”

“Apparently not.”

Amman said, “I am not certain that I can blame them. I would not take well to having the Strait of Gibraltar blocked to the military vessels of Egypt’s navy either. I do not believe that it would be proper for my government to impose restrictions on other nations that we would not like to have imposed upon ourselves.”

“I understand your reasoning,” Elizabeth said. “But, if those submarines do reach Siraj, the repercussions could destabilize the Gulf region for years to come.”

“If that is so,” Amman said, “then this matter would best be decided by the United Nations. If there is an international ruling on the matter, my country will certainly abide by it.”

Elizabeth fought to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Those submarines are moving now. By the time we petition the UN for a ruling, the subs will be through the canal and gone.”

“Inshallah, Madam Secretary,” said the prime minister, and he hung up the phone.

Elizabeth hung up the phone and looked at Roger. Inshallah … Roughly translated, it meant: If such is the will of Allah.

CHAPTER 19

//SSSSSSSSSS//

//SECRET//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//161228Z MAY//

FM      CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS//

TO      COMPACFLEET//

COMFIFTHFLEET//

USS KITTY HAWK//

USS CHANCELLORSVILLE//

USS FORT PULASKI//

USS BOLLINGER//

USS TRIPPLER//

USS WALLINGFORD//

INFO      CTF FIVE ZERO//

SUBJ/USW TASKING/IMMEDIATE EXECUTE//

REF/A/RMG/CNO/150744Z MAY//

NARR/REF A IS MY TACTICAL SUMMARY OF LIVE-FIRE HOSTILITIES BETWEEN UNITED KINGDOM ROYAL NAVY WARSHIPS AND FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY (LUFTWAFFE) AIRCRAFT APPROX 13MAY//

1. (UNCL) AS OUTLINED IN REF A, TWO RN WARSHIPS, HMS YORK AND HMS CHATHAM, ENGAGED IN AN EXTENDED MISSILE/GUN BATTLE WITH APPROX SIX LUFTWAFFE AIRCRAFT. HMS YORK WAS SUNK WITH A LOSS OF NEARLY ALL HANDS. HMS CHATHAM WAS HEAVILY DAMAGED AND SUFFERED HIGH PERSONNEL CASUALTIES. AT LEAST FOUR (4) LUFTWAFFE AIRCRAFT KNOWN DESTROYED WITH PROBABLE DAMAGE TO A FIFTH. REF A REFERS.

2. (CONF) EARLY REVIEW OF LUFTWAFFE AIRCRAFT PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS INDICATE THEY WERE PROBABLY EF-2000S EUROSTRIKE-FIGHTERS. REF A REFERS.

3. (CONF) AT U.S. REQUEST, RN SHIPS WERE ATTEMPTING TO BLOCKADE PASSAGE OF FOUR (4) DEUTSCHE MARINE TYPE 212B DIESEL SUBMARINES THROUGH GIBRALTAR STRAIT. INTELLIGENCE SOURCES BELIEVE DM IS ATTEMPTING TO DELIVER SUBS TO SIRAJ IN VIOLATION OF STANDING UN RESOLUTIONS.

4. (CONF) INITIAL REPORTS INDICATE THAT AIRCRAFT INITIATED HOSTILITIES, POSSIBLY TO FORCE AN OPENING THROUGH BLOCKADE FOR DM SUBMARINES.

5. (CONF) DIPLOMATIC ATTEMPTS TO CLOSE SUEZ CANAL TO SUBMARINES UNSUCCESSFUL. BELIEVE SUBS STILL IN ROUTE ARABIAN GULF FOR DELIVERY TO SIRAJ.

6. (SECR) USS KITTY HAWK AND ESCORTS DIRECTED TO DEPART SOUTHERN ARABIAN GULF IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE. PROCEED AT MAXIMUM AVAILABLE SPEED TO ENTRANCE TO RED SEA (LATITUDE 1322N LONGITUDE 04406E) TO INTERCEPT DEUTSCHE MARINE SUBMARINES.

7. (SECR) U.S. IS NOT, REPEAT NOT IN A STATE OF WAR WITH FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY. WEAPONS CONDITION FREEZE IS IN EFFECT. NO U.S. SHIP OR AIRCRAFT IS TO FIRE ON ANY VESSEL OR AIRCRAFT OF THE REPUBLIC OF GERMANY WITHOUT SPECIFIC ORDERS, OR EXCEPT IN THE LAST POSSIBLE EXTREMIS OF SELF DEFENSE.

8. (SECR) KITTY HAWK CARRIER STRIKE GROUP IS TO BLOCKADE RED SEA AGAINST PASSAGE OF SUBMARINES WITHOUT INITIATING HOSTILITIES. RECOMMEND YOU UTILIZE ACTIVE SURFACE SHIP SONAR, ACTIVE SONOBUOYS, RADAR FLOODING, AND HELO HOLD-DOWN TACTICS TO HERD SUBS AWAY FROM CHOKE POINT.

9. (UNCL) I KNOW THIS IS A DIFFICULT ASSIGNMENT, AND THAT IT REQUIRES SUBTLETY AND RESTRAINT ON THE PART OF THE MEN AND WOMEN UNDER YOUR COMMAND. I AM CONFIDENT THAT YOU CAN HANDLE IT; THAT S WHY I CALLED IN THE BEST. GOOD LUCK. ADMIRAL CASEY SENDS.

//161228Z MAY//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//SECRET//

//SSSSSSSSSS//

ARABIAN SEA (SOUTH OF OMAN)

WEDNESDAY; 16 MAY

1604 hours (4:04 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Had it been a little larger, Flag Plot aboard USS Kitty Hawk could have easily doubled as a movie set for the infamous War Room. The dimly lit compartment was crammed floor to ceiling with electronic equipment. Four large-screen tactical displays dominated the forward and starboard bulkheads. Each of the six-foot–square screens was speckled with cryptic-looking tactical symbols representing ships, submarines, aircraft, and shore installations within the carrier’s area of responsibility. The symbols were color-coded: blue for friendly, red for hostile, and white for neutral.

The remaining two bulkheads were lined with computer terminals, automated status boards, radio comm panels, and radar repeaters, all designed to provide the admiral and his staff with the information required to effectively manage the aircraft carrier and her attendant strike group.

Despite the nearly continuous flurry of activity, the room was quiet. The equipment operators spoke to each other in low tones, using hands-free communications headsets very much like those used by astronauts.

Slouched in his raised chair at the center of the room, Admiral Curtiss Joiner read the closing lines of the CNO’s message for about the seventh time. “What a crock of shit,” he said under his breath.

The admiral’s chief of staff, Commander Ernesto Ortiz, was standing next to his chair. “Pardon me, sir?”

Admiral Joiner looked up. “What? Oh, sorry, Ernie. It’s just this message. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve been asked … no—we’ve been ordered … to haul ass to the Gulf of Aden and bottle up a pack of German subs before they can sneak out of the Red Sea.”

Ortiz nodded slowly. “Is this the same four diesel boats that gave Abraham Lincoln the slip over in the Med, sir?”

“It’s the same guys all right,” the admiral said.

“They made LANTFLEET look like idiots,” Commander Ortiz said. “Now I guess it’s PACFLEET’s turn in the barrel.”

The admiral shook his head. “I’m an old man, Ernie, too old to worry about looking like a fool. But if I’m going to pull my pants down in public, I’d like to have some degree of confidence that nobody’s going to shoot me in the ass.”

Ortiz frowned. “You think that’s a real danger here, sir?”

“They sure as hell didn’t have any compunctions about shooting the Brits,” Admiral Joiner said. He waved the message printout like a fan. “It says right here that the Germans are almost certainly trying to sell those subs to Siraj. As far as I’m concerned, that makes them proven hostiles. But we’re being ordered to turn their submarines around with a kind word and a smile.”

“They wouldn’t be stupid enough to take on a carrier strike group, would they, sir?”

“Probably not,” the admiral said, looking up at the tactical display screens again. “But I’d sure hate to guess wrong.” He stopped himself before he spoke the next words on his mind: History was written in the blood of thousands of poor bastards who had underestimated their opponents. Instead, he said, “Turn the formation around, Ernie, and crank it up to flank speed. We’ve got a date with some submarines.”

*  *  *

The carrier strike group tore across the water, heedless of the noise it was making. Six ships, all racing through the morning sun at thirty knots, their propellers churning up frothy wakes that stood out against the dark blue waves like vibrant stripes.

Stealth would come later, when they arrived on station. Until then, speed was more vital than silence. If the submarines made it through the choke point and out of the Red Sea before the admiral’s blockading force arrived, the mission would be a failure before it had even begun.

At the center of the formation was the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. Stationed around her in a protective screen were two frigates, two destroyers, and a cruiser. The positioning of each ship was carefully calculated to provide the maximum possible amount of sensor and weapons coverage overlap.

Even the order of the ships was important. For the moment, submarines were rated as the highest potential threat, so the frigates, USS Wallingford and USS Trippler, which had been built primarily for Undersea Warfare, composed the leading edge of the formation. On the carrier’s flanks ran the destroyers, USS Fort Pulaski and USS Bollinger, multi-mission ships that were also highly effective USW platforms. The cruiser USS Chancellorsville comprised the trailing edge of the formation, protecting the carrier from air attack along the axis that led back toward the Arabian Gulf—where the majority of potentially hostile aircraft in the region were based.

The layered screen defense concept had been around since the Cold War. Its longevity could be attributed to two simple words: it worked. Or at least it had worked against every naval threat encountered in nearly fifty years. But, despite its impressive track record, the screen concept was not flawless. To provide effective protection, a screen formation required seven or eight escort ships per carrier. Anything less left gaps in the screen, exposing the carrier to attack. But the U.S. Navy no longer had enough ships to provide that kind of coverage.

Kitty Hawk was making do with five escorts, and at that was better off than half the carriers in the Navy. Admiral Joiner’s tactical staff used aircraft to plug the holes in the screen, a common tactic in an era of few ships and numerous taskings.

MH-60R Seahawk helicopters played leapfrog with the screening ships, hovering low over the wave tops at strategic moments to lower sonar transducers into the water and ping for enemy submarines. For now, the dipping sonars were especially important because the ships’ sonars were virtually deaf when they were moving at high speed.

Thousands of feet above, maintaining careful vertical separation from the helos, the carrier’s F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter/attack jets patrolled the sky. The twin-tailed Super Hornets were multi-role aircraft, and their flexibility saddled them with two missions: CAP (Combat Air Patrol) and SUCAP (Surface Combat Air Patrol). Any ship or aircraft close enough to threaten the carrier strike group had to get past the missiles and guns of the Hornets first.

Flying well in front of the formation, E-2C Hawkeyes scanned the sea and sky for potentially hostile radar contacts. The disk-shaped radome mounted on the back of each Hawkeye was so hugely out of proportion to the rest of the aircraft that a running Navy joke accused its designers of trying to mate a twin-engine commuter plane with a flying saucer. The sensitivity and power of the strange-looking radar dish were no joke, though. The Hawkeyes really were the eyes of the fleet.

*  *  *

In Flag Plot, aboard the carrier, Admiral Joiner stared up at the large-screen tactical displays, evaluating the positioning of the colored symbols that marked the ships and aircraft under his command. Between them, the aircraft he had deployed extended the carrier strike group’s sensor and weapons ranges well beyond the coverage envelopes of the ships. But he would have gladly traded one of the stars on his collar for another pair of frigates or destroyers.

CHAPTER 20

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

THURSDAY; 17 MAY

2239 hours (10:39 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Chief Lowery pushed a technical manual to the side, sat on the workbench, and waited for the rest of his technicians to straggle into Combat Systems Equipment Room #2. The three men came in slowly, one at a time, exhaustion weighing them down like lead.

The chief yawned. The compartment was nearly the temperature of a meat locker; it had to be to keep the rows of electronic equipment cool. Like all high-powered radars, SPY generated a tremendous amount of heat. It took the majority of the output of an industrial air conditioning skid to cool it off.

The shelves above the workbench were lined with technical manuals, and the stretch of bulkhead immediately adjacent was given over to large-scale color schematics of the air, water, and power systems that fed the radar. They had been through every one of the manuals at least once, and some of them two or three times. So far, to no avail.

His techs were wiped out. One glance at their faces was enough to tell Chief Lowery that Fisher was the worst, or at least he looked it. Fish, whose clean-cut Boy Scout handsomeness could have ordinarily been used to sell Mother’s Farm Fresh Bread, looked like a crack addict on a three-day comedown. His eyes were nearly slits, half-closed with fatigue, bloodshot and underscored with dark circles. Burgess and Gordon weren’t going to win any beauty contests either. The chief yawned so hard that his ears rang. How long had they been going now? Four days?

Fish flipped absently through one of the tech manuals without bothering to look at the pages. “We need some fucking chicken bones, Chief. We need to go down to Supply Berthing, wake up one of the cooks, and make them get us some chicken bones from the galley.”

The chief yawned again. “Chicken bones?”

Fisher nodded. “Chicken bones. We need to do the secret voodoo ritual.”

“I see,” the chief said. “And what, pray tell, is the secret voodoo ritual?”

“We had some on the Paul Foster,” Fish said. “Dried up chicken bones. We kept them in one of those purple velvet bags like Crown Royal bottles come in. Whenever we came across a radar problem that was kicking our asses, we’d get out the chicken bones. We’d turn on one battle lantern and shut off all the lights, so things would get real dark and spooky looking. Then, we’d shake up the bag really good and dump the chicken bones on the deck.”

Chief Lowery grinned. “This helped somehow?”

“Hell yeah,” Fish said. “One of the bones was bigger than all of the others, and one end of that bone was bigger than the other end. See?”

“Like a leg bone?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah,” Fish said. “Like a drumstick. Anyway, whichever way the big end of the big bone was pointing, that’s where the problem was. We would go to the nearest piece of equipment to where it was pointing and start troubleshooting.”

“Bullshit,” Gordon said.

Burgess grabbed the crotch of his own coveralls and squeezed theatrically. “Yeah, Fish. I’ve got your big bone right here!”

Fish grinned and gave Burgess a wink. “No thanks, Cowboy. I’ve seen your bone, and it didn’t look very big to me.”

Chief Lowery tried not to grin. “Knock it off, you knuckleheads. We’ve still got a radar to troubleshoot.”

Fish held his hands palm up and let them drop. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Chief. There’s nothing left to troubleshoot. There is nothing wrong with this fucking radar. We’ve run every on-line test, every off-line test, and every dynamic and static load test ever invented. We’ve swapped every circuit card in Array #4 with every circuit card in Array #3. If the problem was in one of those cards, or even several cards, the interference should have moved to Array #3 with the cards.”

Burgess nodded. “We’ve checked video processing, wave guides, primary and alternate power, and all of the digital multiplexers. We’ve checked for thermal problems, phase angle calibration errors, electromagnetic cross-talk between cable runs, signal shedding, and digital sync pulse errors. We’ve also tested the sweep raster initiators, and every clock pulse and digital incrementer that’s even remotely related to SPY.”

“Fish and Shit-for-Brains are right,” Gordon said. “We’ve swapped every disk pack, and reloaded the software from scratch three times. I’ve used the secure sat-phones to make four tech-assist calls to the engineers at Lockheed Martin who built the system, and the software bubbas who wrote the program code. None of them have ever heard of anything like this problem. They’re going to fly a tech rep out to help us troubleshoot it, but they’ve already pretty much said they don’t have a clue of how to tackle this. In fact, one of the engineers as much as told me that we’re full of shit. He said we can’t have this problem, because the system isn’t capable of generating this type of sector-specific interference.”

The chief snorted. “What? Does he think we’re making this shit up?”

“I don’t know what he thinks,” Gordon said. “But I’ll tell you what I think. There is nothing wrong with this radar, Chief. Not a fucking thing. It’s clean as a whistle.”

“So where is the interference coming from?” It was the captain’s voice.

Chief Lowery leapt off the workbench. “Attention on deck!”

They all scrambled to attention.

“Sorry, Sir,” Chief Lowery said. “We didn’t see you come in.”

Captain Bowie motioned for them to relax. “Don’t worry about it, Chief. Carry on. Please.”

All four men relaxed their postures, but no one made any move to sit down.

“Let’s get back to my question,” the captain said. “If there’s nothing wrong with the radar equipment and nothing wrong with the software, where is this interference coming from?”

“We don’t know, sir,” Chief Lowery said.

“But you agree with your techs that there’s nothing wrong with SPY?” the captain asked.

Chief Lowery shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t. SPY is not designed to lose sixty degrees of coverage every day or two. And, if SPY is operating outside of its design parameters, by definition something is wrong. I don’t know if it’s hardware or software, sir. But something is sure as hell wrong somewhere.”

The captain nodded. “Well said, Chief.” He reached out and patted the side of one of the gray radar equipment cabinets. “Our primary anti-air and anti-surface sensor seems to be in the habit of losing its mind every day or two. There are no two ways about it, gentlemen. That’s unsatisfactory.”

Fisher squinted his eyes and opened his mouth. Then he appeared to think better of it, and he closed his mouth.

“Go ahead, son,” the captain said. “Whatever it is, you can say it.”

Fisher looked at his chief and then back to the captain. “Sir, it’s only for a couple of minutes …” He waited, and when it became apparent that no one was going to say anything, he cleared his throat and continued. “The … um … the interference only appears for two or three minutes every other day or so. And it’s only a sixty-degree arc. It’s not like we lose the entire quadrant. Just sixty degrees or so, for a couple of minutes.” He cleared his throat again. “I mean, I understand that there’s something wrong with SPY, even if we don’t have any idea what it is. But we’ve been killing ourselves for four days now, over a two-minute glitch that only eats up sixty degrees of our coverage.”

The captain nodded. “I know you’ve been knocking yourselves out, son. I’ve talked to a couple of the engineers at Lockheed Martin, and they say your troubleshooting efforts so far have been excellent. First rate. But we can’t afford to minimize the impact of this casualty. We’re in some of the most hotly contested waters in the world, and every day or two, a significant sector of our radar loses its ability to scan for ships, aircraft, and missiles.”

No one said anything.

“Suppose it happened to you while you were on the freeway,” the captain said. “You’re driving along, doing seventy-five or eighty, and a slice of your vision goes pitch black. Not all of it. Say it’s just twenty degrees. The rest of your field of vision is fine, but your eyes are totally blind within that twenty-degree arc.” He looked around. “Are you with me?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good,” the captain said. “So, every couple of days—while you’re cruising down the freeway—a twenty-degree sector of your vision goes on the fritz. It’s just twenty degrees. And it’s just a couple of minutes.” His eyebrows went up. “How safe are you?”

“Not very, sir,” Fisher said. “Point taken.”

“Good,” Captain Bowie said. He looked at Lowery. “Chief, you guys have been at this long enough.” He looked at his watch. “I want you and your men to hit your racks for at least the next three hours.”

The chief looked surprised. “But sir …”

“No buts, Chief. That’s an order. Come to think of it, make it four hours. I don’t want anybody getting electrocuted because his brain is too tired to think properly. And, I want you to set up a sleep rotation. One man in his rack at all times, and you can swap out every couple of hours. That way no one has to work for more than a few hours before he gets a chance to recharge his batteries.”

The chief nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.”

The captain looked at each of the men in turn. “You’re all doing excellent work,” he said. “Keep looking. You’ll find it.” He cocked one eyebrow. “And, if you don’t, there’s always the chicken bones.”

CHAPTER 21

GULF OF ADEN (SOUTH OF YEMEN)

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

0647 hours (06:47 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Wolfhound Eight-Seven was the call sign for an MH-60R helicopter working the outer edge of USS Kitty Hawk’s formation. The gull-gray helo hovered fifty feet above the water, close enough for the edge vortexes down-drafting from its rotors to whip a swirling mist of salt spray off the wave tops.

The pilot, Lieutenant Ray Forester, checked his instruments and, when he was satisfied with the positioning of his aircraft, he turned to his copilot. “Your show, Ted.”

Ensign Theodore Dillon nodded. Out of habit he scanned the instrument panel himself, and then said, “Down dome.”

From his console at the rear of the cabin, the Sensor Operator responded, “Down dome, aye.” He pressed a fingertip to a highlighted rectangle on the touch-sensitive control screen. The floor of the cabin vibrated slightly as the high-speed winch built into the underside of the fuselage began reeling out cable at a rate of sixteen feet per second.

At the end of the cable, the cylindrical sonar transducer slid out of a formfitting cavity in the bottom of the aircraft and began its rapid descent toward the ocean. A little over three seconds later, the rubber-coated sensor plunged into the water, disappearing quickly beneath the waves.

“The dome is wet,” the Sensor Operator said. “How deep do you want it?”

The copilot looked over his shoulder. “How deep is the sonic layer?”

The Sensor Operator studied his screen. “Just a second, sir. We haven’t hit it yet.”

His eyes stayed locked on the digital temperature readout relayed back from the descending sonar transducer. For several seconds, the numbers on the green phosphorous screen showed only tiny fluctuations, never varying by more than a tenth of a degree. When the depth readout passed 130 feet, the temperature began dropping rapidly. The transducer had passed from the surface duct, a zone of nearly constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, into the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. Below that, the temperature would become nearly constant again at just above the freezing temperature of water.

The drastic temperature differential between the surface duct and the thermocline formed a barrier to sound energy. Submarine hunters called it the sonic layer, or sometimes just the layer. A well-trained submarine captain would know the depth of the layer at any given time—as well as his boat’s position in relation to it. Properly exploited, the layer could make submarines—which were difficult to detect under the best of circumstances—even harder to locate.

The Sensor Operator looked at the readout. “Layer depth looks like about a hundred and thirty feet, sir.”

“Let’s start below the layer this time,” the copilot said. “Take her down to about four hundred.”

“Four hundred aye, sir.” The Sensor Operator watched the descent of the transducer on his screen for another minute and then pressed a highlighted soft-key. The depth readout froze at four hundred. “Dome is at four hundred feet. Request permission to go active.”

The copilot nodded. “Go active.”

The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key on his screen and was rewarded with a high-pitched ping in his headphones as the sonar transducer fired a pulse of sound energy into the water four hundred feet below the surface. He began scanning his screen for the telltale echo that a submarine would produce. “We are active, sir.”

The copilot keyed his radio circuit and waited a half-second for the crypto burst, a short string of garbled tones that the UHF transmitter used to synchronize its encrypted signal with the secure communications satellite. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. My dome is wet. I am active at this time, over.”

The voice that answered a few seconds later had a strange warble to it. “Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Roger. Good hunting, out.”

The cartoonish voice modulation and the short delay caused by the crypto burst were unavoidable by-products of the encryption-decryption algorithm that scrambled the signal at the transmitting end and decoded it on the receiving end. Ensign Dillon liked to pretend that his voice came out of the speakers on the other end as a masculine baritone, but deep down he knew that he probably sounded just as silly over the secure satellite circuits as everyone else did. It was a small price to pay for secure voice communication.

At the rear of the aircraft, the Sensor Operator watched his screen carefully. Every time the sonar transmitted, a bright green line appeared at the bottom of the search display and began tracking upward. In its wake, the search raster left random scatterings of green dots in varying shades and intensities: ambient noise in the ocean caused by everything from fish, to wave action, to distant shipping. A contact would appear as a bright cluster of dots, generally accompanied by an audible echo in the operator’s headphones.

After about fifteen sweeps, the Sensor Operator said, “No joy, sir. Want to pull her up some and see what’s above the layer?”

The copilot paused for a second. As a general rule, submarines liked to approach surface ships from below the layer, where they would be shielded from the powerful hull-mounted sonars carried by most warships. Still, it didn’t hurt to check both sides of the fence. He shrugged. “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “Bring her up to about a hundred feet.”

The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key and the floor rumbled again as the winch began retrieving cable. “One hundred feet, coming up, sir.”

Less than two minutes later, the Sensor Operator sang out, “Active sonar contact! Bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards.” He watched the screen for another sweep. “No supporting data yet, but it’s a clear bearing. Could be a sub, sir!”

The copilot grinned. “Good job! Now stay on it!”

He keyed his radio circuit and waited for the crypto-burst. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. I have active sonar contact, bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards. Initial classification—POSS-SUB low, over.”

The reply came a few seconds later. “Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Copy your active contact. We are vectoring Wolfhound Nine-Three in to assist. Get ready to play leapfrog, out!”

The pilot and copilot both grinned. Helicopters were a lot faster than submarines. With two dipping sonars working together, a submarine’s chance of escape was virtually zero. One of the dippers could maintain the track, while the other one repositioned closer to the submarine. By alternating their dip cycles, they could maintain contact indefinitely. Dipping helicopters were every submariner’s worst nightmare, because—apart from their speed and tracking abilities—they could carry torpedoes. A skillful air crew could put a torpedo within yards of a submarine’s bow—much too close to evade.

Suddenly, the Sensor Operator shouted. “Launch transient! I’m getting some kind of launch transient! Same bearing as the POSS-SUB!”

“It’s probably a hydraulic transient,” the pilot said. “Our active pinging scared them, and they’re diving for the layer.”

“No, sir,” the Sensor Operator said. “This is definitely not hydraulic. This is … oh shit!” He began pointing emphatically toward the window. “It’s coming out of the water! We have missile emergence, bearing zero-five-five!”

All three men watched in disbelief as the missile erupted from the ocean in a fountain of salt water and fire.

“Cruise missile!” the copilot shouted. “It’s gotta be aimed for the carrier!”

The pilot shook his head. “That’s a SAM, and it’s coming after us!” He pulled back on the control stick, breaking the helo out of its hover. The helicopter climbed steeply, snatching the sonar transducer out of the water where it swung crazily at the end of its cable.

Lieutenant Forester threw his aircraft into a violent series of banks and turns that were the closest thing to evasive maneuvering that a 22,000-pound helicopter could manage. “Launch chaff!”

Ensign Dillon flipped up a row of red protective covers and stabbed at two of the buttons underneath. The helo shuddered slightly as two chaff projectiles blasted clear of the airframe.

Before the chaff pods had even blossomed, Dillon was on the radio. “Sub-SAM! We’ve got a sub-SAM! This is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. I say again: we have a submarine-launched surface-to-air missile inbound, over!”

The Sensor Operator watched the missile blow through the expanding cloud of aluminum dust without slowing. “It’s not going for the chaff, sir!” he yelled.

“Heat-seeker!” the pilot said. “Launch a flare!”

The radio warbled with the crypto burst of an incoming message; no one had time to pay attention to it.

Ensign Dillon reached above his head and flipped up the covers for another row of protected switches. His finger jabbed toward a button, but he never made it.

The missile’s infrared seeker rode the heat plumes off the helicopter’s engines like a railroad track. A fraction of a second before Dillon’s finger touched the button, the sub-SAM slipped into the exhaust chamber for the starboard engine as neatly as a key sliding into a lock.

The warhead detonated, blowing the General Electric T700 turbine into a thousand fragments, each one blasting through the helicopter like a machine gun bullet. The flight crew was cut to shreds even before the secondary explosion hit the fuel tanks.

Bits of flaming wreckage fell out of the sky like meteors, and Wolfhound Eight-Seven ceased to exist.

*  *  *

USS Kitty Hawk:

Commander Ortiz stared at the tactical display. Wolfhound Eight-Seven’s tracking symbol flashed several times and then converted itself to a last-known-position symbol. They were gone. They were really gone. How in the hell could this happen?

He shook his head once and then blinked several times. “Get the admiral up here! And get on the radio to Wolfhound Nine-Three. Tell them to get a torpedo in the water now! I don’t give a damn if it hits anything. We’ve got to put that sub on the defensive before it gets a bead on them.”

Even as he spoke, he saw that his order had come too late. A hostile-missile symbol popped up on the tactical display and began homing in on Wolfhound Nine-Three’s position.

“Goddamn it!” Ortiz shouted. He grabbed a red radio-telephone handset. “USS Wallingford, this is Strike Group Command. Lock on to hostile missile track zero-zero-two and kill that son of a bitch!” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Break—Wolfhound Nine-Three, this is Strike Group Command. Forget the torpedo! Get the hell out of there, over!”

A friendly-missile symbol appeared on the tactical display next to USS Wallingford. It began to close rapidly on the hostile-missile symbol. The hostile-missile symbol continued to race toward the helicopter.

“It’s too far away,” somebody behind Commander Ortiz said. “Wallingford’s missile is never going to get there in time.”

Ortiz knew instantly that the speaker, whoever he was, was right.

Ten seconds later, the hostile-missile symbol merged with the helicopter symbol, and Wolfhound Nine-Three was gone.

Ortiz was amazed at how clean it looked from the tactical display. No blood. No fire. No screams of terror as burnt bodies fell from the sky. Not even the imaginary canned violence of a video-game explosion. Just two cryptic symbols touching on a video display, joining to create a new symbol: a last-known-position marker for Wolfhound Nine-Three. An electronic headstone to mark the death place of three men.

It took a second to hit him—the tactical display had more to show him than the last positions of two downed helicopters. Something else was staring him in the face. With the two helos gone, there was a hole in the formation. A big one. A gap in the protective screen surrounding the carrier. There was another pair of helicopters at Ready-Five on Kitty Hawk’s flight deck, but it would take five minutes to get them airborne and another few minutes to position them to plug the hole. And they didn’t have five minutes. Kitty Hawk was wide open to attack.

*  *  *

U-307:

Leaning over the shoulder of the Sonar Operator, Kapitan Gröeler watched the acoustic display. The sounds kept playing themselves back in his mind. The distant rumbles of the exploding helicopters. The serpentine hiss of burned metal quenching itself in the ocean.

They were well and truly committed now. After this, there could be no turning back.

He almost wished that he could have fired the missiles himself, pushed the buttons with his own hands. He had no desire to kill those men. But the act of killing them was far too much like murder, and ordering someone else to do it for him felt like the worst sort of cowardice.

Gröeler’s jaws tightened. This was murder. The men whose deaths he had ordered were allies of his country, both by law and by intent. Moreover, their attempt to halt the passage of Gröeler’s wolfpack was in the spirit of international law and consistent with the stated intentions of the United Nations.

These killings could not even be justified under the auspices of war. The fact that they were a necessary step toward the success of the mission did not make them seem any less repugnant.

At least if he had fired the missiles himself, he could have carried the physical responsibility for the act. The moral responsibility was already his. The orders to carry out this mission had come from the Bundeswehr, far above Gröeler’s rank. But he had made the decision to carry out those orders. And the fact that he had only done so to prevent someone less capable from carrying them out in his place was little or no comfort.

But the missiles had to come from north of the American carrier formation, and Gröeler’s own battle plan demanded that he position his submarine to the south—in preparation for the next phase of the operation. So the onus of murdering the helicopter crews had fallen on Jurgen Hostettler, the young fraggetenkapitan in command of the U-304.

The Americans placed far too much faith in the invulnerability of their aircraft. It was an easy logical trap to fall into: no submarine ever had shot down an aircraft—therefore no submarine ever would shoot down an aircraft. Everyone knew that sub-SAMs were only a rumor: a spook story with which to tease helicopter pilots. No one had ever seen one—therefore they must not exist.

But the Americans had just learned the hard way that sub-SAMs were not the stuff of rumor. Like the dagger they were named for, the Dolch missiles had cut the American defenses to the bone.

With two quick squeezes of his thumb on the firing button, young Hostettler had changed the face of naval warfare. He had also, perhaps, branded himself a war criminal. Only time and the judgment of history could tell.

Gröeler forced his attention back to the sonar display. The hole in the American’s defense perimeter was massive, a veritable autobahn into the heart of their carrier strike group.

He stepped through the door of the Sonar Room into the submarine’s Control Room. “Take us below the sonic layer and then increase speed to all-ahead full. If we are to penetrate the formation, we must be in exactly the right position when their defenses begin to come apart.”

*  *  *

USS Kitty Hawk:

The deck tilted to the left as the huge ship heeled into a tight starboard turn. To an untrained observer, it might have seemed incredible that 82,000 tons of steel could move so quickly. In fact, the carrier was by far the fastest ship in the strike group, with a top speed of over forty knots. Kitty Hawk was making use of that speed now, building momentum rapidly as she turned to leave her slower escorts behind. That too might have surprised an observer, but strategically the carrier was far more valuable than all of her escort ships combined. And right now, Kitty Hawk was running for her life.

The watertight door at the rear of Flag Plot slammed open, and Admiral Joiner made his way across the slanting deck to his chair. “Ernie, what the hell is going on? Why are we turning?”

Commander Ortiz looked up from the tactical display. “The formation has been penetrated, Admiral. We’ve got two helos down and a hole in our defensive screen the size of Texas.”

The admiral scowled. “How did we lose two helos?”

“Looks like sub-launched surface-to-air missiles, sir.”

“Sub-SAMs? Jesus Christ, I thought those rumors were bullshit.”

Commander Ortiz nodded. “Frankly, sir, so did I. But the Germans have apparently taken the technology past the rumor stage.”

Admiral Joiner looked up at the tactical display. “You did good, Ernie. Priority One is to protect the carrier first. That buys us time to think about Priority Two: how to turn this situation around and kick some ass!” He rubbed his chin. “Let’s establish datum halfway between the last-known positions for the helos. Designate the frigates as a Search Attack Unit and get them down there to run an active sonar search. Then I want you to issue full weapons release authority to all ships for torpedoes and ASROC. There aren’t any friendly subs in the area, so the order is shoot first.”

Commander Ortiz reached for a radio handset. “Aye-aye, sir.”

The admiral’s eyes were still locked on the tactical display. “How much longer before our Ready-Five helos are ready to launch?”

“About three minutes, sir.”

“Get on the horn and tell the flight deck to shake a leg,” the admiral said. “And tell the frigates to keep their eyes peeled for dye markers and flares. Maybe somebody made it out of one of those helicopters.”

*  *  *

U-307:

The voice of the Sonar Operator came over the Control Room speaker. “Active sonar transmissions, bearing three-zero-five and two-eight-zero. Frequencies consistent with SQS-56 surface sonars.”

“That will be the frigates, searching for U-304,” Kapitan Gröeler said. He nodded. The Americans were performing just as he’d expected. Their tactics were rapid, efficient, and (no doubt) lethal—at least against an adversary who was unfamiliar with them. Gröeler knew their tactics well though, and that made them predictable. And in combat, predictable was synonymous with dead.

He leaned over the plotting table and reviewed the tactical situation. The plot showed his submarine, U-307, at the southern edge of the strike group’s defense perimeter. U-305 would be in position to the west of the carrier formation, and U-306 would be to the east.

He checked his watch. In exactly fifteen seconds, U-305 and U-306 would each fire a spread of torpedoes toward the heart of the formation. Perhaps one of them would get lucky and nail an escort ship, but it didn’t matter if every torpedo missed its mark. They would almost certainly miss the aircraft carrier, but that didn’t matter either.

The carrier couldn’t possibly know how close the torpedoes were, so it would have to turn to evade them. It couldn’t turn west, toward the torpedoes of U-305, and it couldn’t continue east, toward the torpedoes of U-306. It certainly wouldn’t turn north, back toward datum—the last known position of the submarine threat. The carrier would turn south, toward the only safe sector that it could identify. And that would be the aircraft carrier’s final mistake.

*  *  *

USS Kitty Hawk:

“Holy mother of God,” said Commander Ortiz in a quiet voice. Flashing red hostile-torpedo symbols were popping up all over the tactical display—five of them so far. While he watched, a sixth enemy torpedo appeared.

Blue friendly-torpedo symbols began springing up as the ships conducted counterattacks against the submarines. At the moment, no one held sonar contact on any of the subs, so the ships were reduced to firing down the bearings of the incoming torpedoes.

The sub-surface part of the tactical plot was a few seconds behind real time. The carrier was too noisy to carry its own sonar, so it had to rely on the sonar systems of its escorts. It took a few seconds for symbols and updates to percolate through the Tactical Data Link, which meant that every torpedo that appeared on the screen had been in the water for at least two or three seconds by the time the computer assigned it a symbol.

“This is going to hell in a hand basket,” Admiral Joiner said. “Tell the bridge to take us up to flank speed and get us the hell out of here.”

Commander Ortiz looked up at the tactical display. “We’re at flank speed now, sir. Which way do we run?”

“South!” the admiral said. “It’s the only clear vector. Turn us south, now!”

Ortiz relayed the admiral’s orders to the bridge and then returned his eyes to the tactical display as the big ship began to come about. “We’re being herded,” he said. “We’re being systematically isolated from our screening units.”

The admiral nodded. “Just what I was thinking,” he said. “But I don’t see where we have a lot of options at the moment. We sure as hell can’t turn back toward those torpedoes!”

*  *  *

U-307:

Gröeler watched the situation unfold on his tactical plot. The Americans were reacting as he had expected, which was to say in accordance with their tactical doctrine. It was good doctrine, as far as it went, but it did have a few weaknesses. He was about to show the Americans what those weaknesses were.

The carrier was running toward him now. It was close; too close to dodge his torpedoes.

According to standing tactical doctrine, it was time to come to periscope depth and take a final peek at his target through the attack scope before shooting. It wasn’t just doctrine, either. The idea was so deeply ingrained into the minds of the submarine force that it had taken on nearly religious significance; you never launch torpedoes without making a last-second visual confirmation. Not ever.

Gröeler knew without looking that his Control Room crew were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They had practiced this shot in the simulators a hundred times, but it was such a fundamental violation of basic tactical principles that none of them could really believe that he would actually try it under combat conditions. Behind his back, they called it Schießen in dem dunklen: shooting in the dark. The bolder of them compared their kapitan to the knife thrower in a circus—letting fly with deadly blades while a blindfold covered his eyes. They assumed he didn’t know about their little jests, but they were wrong. Where his boat and crew were concerned, very little escaped his attention.

“Stand by to fire salvo one,” he snapped. “Three torpedoes, shallow run, fifteen degree spread.” He checked the current sonar bearing to his target. “Centered on zero-two-zero.”

He took a breath and held it for several seconds. “Fire!”

Three quick tremors ran through the deck as a trio of Ozeankriegsführungtechnologien DMA37 torpedoes were rammed out of their launch tubes by columns of high-pressure water.

An instant later, the Sonar Operator called out, “I have start-up on all three weapons.”

“Estimate fourteen seconds to impact,” the Fire Control Officer said.

“Right full rudder,” Gröeler said. “Ten degrees down-angle on the forward planes.” This was one part of the tactical doctrine that he could not ignore. He had to separate himself from his firing bearing and depth as quickly as possible; without an actual contact to shoot at, the Americans would fire their own torpedoes down the bearing from which his torpedoes had come. Doctrine again.

“Sir, my rudder is right full,” the helmsman said. “My dive bubble is down ten degrees.”

“Torpedoes two and three have acquired,” the Sonar Operator said.

Gröeler frowned. “What about torpedo one?”

“It’s gone astray, Kapitan. Sounds like it’s a bad fish.”

“Ten seconds to impact,” the Fire Control Officer said.

The Sonar Operator’s voice came over the speaker again. “They’ve detected our weapons, sir. Target is altering course to starboard.”

“Too late,” Gröeler said. “Much too late.”

“Target is launching acoustic decoys,” the Sonar Operator said.

“Too late,” Gröeler said again—a whisper this time.

“Impact in five seconds,” the Fire Control Officer said. “Four … three … two … one … Weapons on top!”

*  *  *

USS Kitty Hawk:

Ortiz grabbed the edge of a radar console with both hands. “Brace for shock!”

His words were drowned out by the first explosion. The deck of the huge ship lurched violently as the shock wave surged down the length of the keel. The point of impact was on the starboard side, several hundred feet forward of Flag Plot, and at least nine decks down, but the intensity of the concussion was still unbelievably fierce.

A pipe ruptured in the overhead, spewing water in every direction. A third class Operations Specialist screamed as the shower of water shorted out the electronics in his console, making his body the path of lowest electrical resistance. For an instant, his muscles went rigid as four hundred forty volts of alternating current surged through his flesh and internal organs, finding its path to ground through the soles of his feet. Then, a circuit breaker tripped, cutting the power to the console, and he sank lifelessly back into his chair, the air around him permeated with the smells of ozone and singed meat.

The ship rolled heavily to port. Something hit Commander Ortiz from behind, throwing him against his console and then knocking him to the deck. The lights flickered, and it took him a second to realize that the hurtling object that had laid him out was another person—someone who hadn’t been properly braced for the explosion. The lights flickered again and then came back on. The ship had begun settling back toward starboard when the second torpedo found its mark and exploded.

*  *  *

The Ozeankriegsführungtechnologien DMA37 torpedo had been designed as a ship killer. Programmed to dive under the target’s hull before detonating, it carried a 250-kilogram high-explosive warhead powerful enough to shatter the keel of any ship the size of a cruiser or smaller. To make matters worse, as the explosion ripped through the steel hull plates, a white-hot bubble of expanding gases would flash-vaporize the water directly below the ship’s keel. Combined with the devastating effects of the explosion, the nearly incalculable stress created by the sudden loss of all support beneath the hull was frequently enough to break a ship in half.

But at 82,000 tons, Kitty Hawk was nearly ten times as large as any cruiser or destroyer on the planet. She could be damaged by torpedoes, but it would take more than one or two to sink her.

The wounded aircraft carrier slowed a few knots and began to list to starboard as water poured in through the two enormous holes in her hull.

CHAPTER 22

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 102–104] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The gunman was a young Serbian nationalist and a member of the Black Hand terrorist organization. Archduke Ferdinand had been heir to the throne of Austria. A month after his murder, Austria declared war on Serbia and, over the next several months, the conflict spread to every major country in Europe. World War I had begun.

Germany, a relative latecomer to submarine technology, put its unterseeboots (undersea boats) to excellent use. In short order, German U-boats dominated the seas surrounding Europe, stalking Allied supply ships and sinking them at will. The torpedo, which had been a relatively obscure weapon at the outset of the war, became an object of terror. The German U-boat captains wielded their torpedoes with skill and cruelty—painting the seas with fire and blood, and littering the bottom of the ocean with the broken ships of their enemies.

Situated safely on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, the United States adopted a policy of strict isolationism. America turned a blind eye as the death toll in Europe skyrocketed. It was a European war, after all, and Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of letting the Europeans handle it themselves.

On May 7, 1915, a single event shifted public opinion in America: a German submarine, U-20, torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania. Two perfectly aimed torpedoes blasted through the hull of the ocean liner, sending the ship to the bottom of the ocean, along with 1,195 civilian passengers. Unfortunately for the Germans, 123 of those passengers were American citizens.

Horrified by what they saw as a barbaric attack on an unarmed ship, the American people began to scream for revenge. The United States was drawn into the war that it had struggled to avoid, shifting the balance of power to the Allies.

It is, perhaps, a supreme stroke of irony that the torpedo—the very weapon that had almost brought victory—would sow the seeds of Germany’s defeat.

CHAPTER 23

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

0732 hours (7:32 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Someone was shaking him …

Some distantly conscious fragment of Chief Lowery’s brain detected the pressure of someone’s hand on his shoulder. A million miles away, someone with a tin bucket over his head was speaking gibberish in slow motion. The voice was tinny, echoey, and totally incomprehensible. The lump of unconscious meat that sometimes called itself Chief Lowery grunted and rolled over, burrowing farther under the blankets, away from the intruder, whoever—or whatever—it was.

The hand grabbed his shoulder again, tighter this time, and shook harder. “Heep! May-buff!”

Chief Lowery flailed one arm in a half-hearted attempt to drive the intruder away. The sudden motion ratcheted his brain a couple of notches closer to consciousness. “Keef! Hay-gupp!” It was the voice again. Closer this time, and more word-like. The shaking continued.

A switch in the deep recesses of his brain clicked reluctantly to the “on” position. Lowery felt the rumble of his own groan as it escaped his throat. He clenched his eyes shut even tighter, preparing the muscles for the unthinkable task of opening his eyelids.

The hand on his shoulder continued to shake him toward awareness. “Chief! Way-gupp!” The voice was an urgent whisper, close to his ear.

A whiff of his dream still floated at the edge of his memory, an indistinct sweetness, like the subtlest perfume smelled at a distance. It was a wonderful dream, part of him knew. A glorious re-imagining of life, in which Charlotte was still in love with him, and he could somehow dance and sing like Fred Astaire.

He groaned again and felt his hand come up of its own accord to scratch an itch near his right ear. The movement drove the last of the dream from his mind. “What?”

The hand stopped shaking his shoulder. “Chief, wake up!”

Chief Lowery grunted and opened one eye. He didn’t bother to point it toward his tormenter. “What time is it?”

“What?” The voice sounded confused. “It’s, um … just a second … it’s, uh … oh-seven-thirty-three, Chief.”

Lowery opened the other eye and began blinking heavily to get things moving. “It’s seven thirty in the morning?”

“Uh … yes, Chief. Seven thirty-three.”

“Oh God …” Chief Lowery said. “Forty minutes … I got a whole forty minutes of sleep this time.” He yawned. “Go away right now, and I may let you live.”

“I need to talk to you about the radar, Chief. SPY radar.”

The words brought Lowery to full consciousness. No, not the words. The voice. His uninvited guest was not one of his techs. It sounded like … Lowery grabbed his privacy curtains and slid them back, opening his coffin-sized bunk area up to the rest of the berthing compartment. He recognized his mistake immediately. It was after reveille, so the lights in Aft Chief Petty Officer’s Berthing were on. He flinched away from the unexpected brightness and tried to squint out of the corners of his eyes.

Into the bleary circle of his vision swam the face of CS3 Charles Zeigler, better known to the enlisted crew as Z-Man, or Zebra. Zeigler was a Culinary Specialist—a cook.

Chief Lowery blinked. “Zeigler? Do you have any idea how much sleep I’ve had? Or, I should say, how little sleep I’ve had?”

Zeigler shook his head. “No, Chief, I don’t. But this is real important. I know who’s been … I mean I know what’s wrong with your SPY radar.”

Chief Lowery sighed. “Petty Officer Zeigler, you are a CS. A cook.”

“Yeah, Chief. I’m the night baker this month. I’ve got sweet rolls in the oven right now. As soon as they’re done, I’m going off shift.”

“Sweet rolls in the oven,” Chief Lowery said. “That makes you an expert on the most sophisticated combat radar system in the world?”

Zeigler grinned. “I’m not an expert on radar. I’m a cook. Which means I’m an expert on potatoes. That’s what’s wrong with your radar, Chief. It’s the potatoes.”

Chief Lowery grimaced. The potatoes? The potatoes? He slid one leg out of his bunk and dangled it toward the floor. “Excuse me, Zeigler. Could you back up a little? I’m getting up. This is either going to be the coolest story I’ve ever heard, or I’m going to strangle you right where you fucking stand.” He reached for his pants. “Chicken bones … potatoes … thank God there’s not a problem with the linguini. That would probably sink the whole goddamned ship.”

*  *  *

Forty minutes later, Lowery and his three technicians stood gathered around a SPY console in Combat Information Center.

Gordon yawned. “What are we looking for, Chief? I’m setting up to do some signal injection tests on Array #4. I’d like to get back to it.”

“Hold your horses,” the chief said. “Just watch the screen. If this works, you can forget about troubleshooting the array.”

“If what works?” Burgess asked. “What are we waiting for?”

Chief Lowery held up his hand. “Just give it a minute. We should start seeing … There!” He pointed to the screen. “Read ‘em and weep, boys!”

A jittering wedge of video static glowed bright green on the radar screen. The interference was back.

FC2 Burgess stared at it. “There it is! But it’s only eight in the morning! We’ve never seen it before mid-afternoon …”

The interference vanished after less than a minute.

“Hey! It’s gone!” Fisher said. “That was fast.”

Chief Lowery grinned. “Keep watching, Fish. In about two minutes, you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before.”

They stared at the screen together. Considerably less than two minutes later, the interference appeared again, in a different part of the screen.

Fish nearly jumped. “Holy shit! It’s on the starboard side now! That’s Array #3. We’ve never seen it in Array #3!”

The chief crossed his arms and looked smug. “It all depends on where you put the potato.”

All three technicians glared at him. Gordon spoke first. “What the hell are you talking about, Chief?”

The chief grinned again. “Fish had it right all along. If you can’t fix your radar, go see the cooks.” He uncrossed his arms and patted Burgess on the shoulder. “Come on, boys. Let’s go track down the Division Officer. He’s gonna love this!”

*  *  *

An hour later, they were all gathered around the SPY console for another demonstration. This time, the onlookers included Ensign Christopher Lance (CF Division Officer), Lieutenant Terri Sikes (the ship’s Combat Systems Officer), Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler (the executive officer), and Captain Bowie.

On cue, the sizzling wedge of static interference appeared on the lower left side of the screen. Like the previous time, it disappeared after a minute or so, only to reappear a short time later on the starboard side of the scope.

The XO cocked his head to the side and looked at Chief Lowery. “It’s not a SPY casualty, is it?”

Chief Lowery shook his head. “No, sir. It’s not a hardware problem or a software problem. It’s a potato.”

“A potato?”

“Yes, sir. That’s why we couldn’t find the source of the interference. It wasn’t in the radar at all. It was completely external.”

“A potato,” the captain said.

Chief Lowery grinned. “I didn’t believe it myself, sir. But it’s true.”

The Combat Systems Officer gave the chief a hard look. “Would you mind telling us how a potato made its way into our SPY radar system?”

“It didn’t, ma’am,” the chief said. “The potato is entirely external. Or I should say potatoes, because there have been several of them. We’ve just been seeing them one at a time.”

“You’ve dragged this out long enough, Chief,” Ensign Lance said. “You’d better tell them the rest of it before they beat you to death.”

“Yes, sir!” Chief Lowery tried to bring his grin under control. “The potato business has been going on for a long time. It’s sort of a secret thing that the mess attendants keep to themselves. They’ve got these two long bamboo poles. I don’t know where they got them from, but they keep them stashed in one of the dry provision storerooms. Anyway, when one of the mess attendants wants a snack, he drags out these two bamboo poles. They can plug the narrow end of one pole into the wide end of the other pole and make a single pole that’s even longer.”

“Where does the potato come in?” the CSO asked.

“They jam the potato onto the top of the bamboo pole, and then use the pole to hold it up a few inches from the front of the SPY radar array. SPY is pumping out more than four million watts of microwave energy. The intensity that close to the array face is really high. It’s like the giant microwave oven from hell. It’ll cook a potato in about a minute. If the mess attendant brings along a pat of butter and a little salt, presto! Instant snack.”

Captain Bowie half-smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know whether to laugh or hang somebody from the yardarm.”

“Wait a second,” the XO said. “If this potato thing has been going on for so long, why haven’t we seen this interference problem before this past week?”

“Well, sir, the bamboo stick and the potato are transparent to radar. The microwaves go right through them, so they don’t show up on the screen. That’s how the mess attendants have been able to do this for so long without getting caught. Then, last week, Seaman Apprentice Murphy was assigned to mess attendant duties. One of the other mess attendants shared the secret potato trick with Murphy, and that was when the problem started.”

The captain’s eyebrows went up. “Seaman Apprentice Murphy brought some new twist to the potato-and-stick routine?”

“Yes, sir,” Chief Lowery said. “I guess Murphy’s mother taught him to wrap his potatoes in aluminum foil before he cooked them. And aluminum is not radar transparent. A potato-sized piece of foil hanging three or four inches in front of the array face throws a whole lot of electromagnetic backscatter. Enough to jam the hell out of a big sector of SPY’s coverage.”

Lieutenant Sikes looked at the deck and shook her head. “Two hundred million dollars worth of state-of-the-art electronics, and we were being jammed by a potato?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am,” Chief Lowery said. “We only saw the interference on the port side, because there’s a small landing at the top of the 01 level ladder, just below the Super-RBOC launchers. It makes a great place to stand when you’re holding the bamboo pole up in front of the array. It can be done from the starboard side too, but there’s nowhere to stand. You have to hang off the side of a vertical ladder and hold the bamboo pole with one hand. The port side is much easier.”

The XO said, “Don’t tell me. I’ll bet I know why the jamming only happened in the mid-afternoon. That’s when Seaman Apprentice Murphy gets his break, isn’t it?”

“You hit the nail on the head, sir. But Murphy got rotated to the night shift. That’s the only reason we found out about it at all. Murphy told the night baker about his improved method of cooking potatoes, and the night baker was smart enough to put two and two together. He came and woke me up.” Chief Lowery looked at the captain. “If you ask me, sir, I think CS3 Zeigler deserves a Letter of Appreciation for this. He single-handedly solved the mystery of the ghost potato.”

The captain snorted, tried to hold it in, and then began to laugh quietly. The Combat Systems Officer burst out with a laugh of her own, more like the bray of a donkey than anything human. The entire group dissolved into hysterics. It was one of those wild group laugh sessions, where every time it starts to die down, somebody snorts again, and it cranks up for another go-around.

It took five minutes to die down to chuckles. The XO stood, half hunched over, wiping tears from his eyes. “You want to know what’s really funny?” He gasped a few times before gathering enough wind to continue. “Murphy’s potatoes probably took three times as long to cook as everyone else’s because he wrapped them in foil. If SPY wasn’t so damned powerful, they probably wouldn’t have cooked at all.”

The captain shook his head. “No, Pete. I’ll tell you what’s really funny. You get to write the message explaining how the most advanced warship in the world got jammed by a vegetable.” He snorted again. “Because I wouldn’t touch that report with a ten-foot bamboo pole!”

CHAPTER 24

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

12:13 AM EDT

The double doors swung open, and two Secret Service agents entered the room and took up positions at either side of the doorway. The president strode into the room a few seconds later, holding up his hand as he walked. “Please, don’t get up.”

He slid into his chair at the head of the table and looked at each of his three advisors in turn. “We all know why we’re here,” he said. “Fifteen U.S. Sailors dead, nearly thirty more wounded, two helicopters destroyed, and a half-billion dollars worth of damage to an aircraft carrier.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “The question is, what do we do now?”

Admiral Casey, the Chief of Naval Operations, cleared his throat. “My position remains unchanged, Mr. President. Our best recourse is to sink those submarines and do it now.”

The president forced a half-smile. “I understand how you feel, Bob. But I’m not going to start a war here.”

“Looks to me like the Germans have already started it, sir,” Admiral Casey said. “God knows why, but they want to duke it out with us.”

Secretary of State Whelkin shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

The CNO’s eyebrows shot up. “They took the first shots,” he said. “At the Brits and then at us. And you don’t think they’re spoiling for a fight?”

SecState raised her index finger. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Admiral. I’m certain that you’re right; the Germans are looking for a fight. I just don’t think they want a war.”

The room was silent as everyone tried to digest that puzzling remark.

After a few seconds, the president said, “Talk to me, Liz. What’s going on in that head of yours?”

Elizabeth Whelkin folded her hands on the table in front of her. “We’re trying like hell to avoid a war here, right?”

Nearly every head in the room nodded.

She tilted her head. “Don’t you think the Germans know that?” Her gaze traveled around the room, touching on every set of eyes around the table. “Not only do they know it, but they’re depending on it.”

“Wait a minute,” the CNO said. “You’re saying they want to mix it up with us, but they’re counting on us to keep it from blowing up into a full-scale war?”

The secretary of state nodded. “That’s how I read it.”

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven put both hands on the tabletop. “I can think of at least two possibilities that make more sense than that. How about this? Maybe those submarine commanders have gone rogue. They might be operating without authority from their government. Or maybe those Siraji crews that they’ve been training have seized control and hijacked the damned things!”

The president shook his head. “I don’t think so, Greg. If those subs are operating without orders from the German government, where are the apologies? Why isn’t Friedrik Shoernberg falling all over himself to kiss up to me? Where are the frantic phone calls denying involvement?”

Brenthoven looked surprised. “He hasn’t called you, sir?”

The president shook his head again. “Hell no. I had to call him.”

“What did he say?”

“He expressed sympathy for the families of our dead and wounded Sailors,” the president said.

“No apologies?”

“No apologies. In fact, the bastard half-implied that it was our fault.”

The CNO sat up. “Our fault? How in the hell does he figure that?”

“It’s a free ocean,” the president said. “From their angle, their subs were exercising their legal right to transit. Friedrik gave me a whole song and dance about it. By interfering with their passage and shoving a carrier up their noses, we provoked them into defending themselves.”

“That’s absolute bullshit,” the CNO snapped. “Our ships have United Nations authorization to board and search any vessel suspected of violating the arms embargo against Siraj. Those subs are prohibited military hardware. We were totally within our rights to try to stop their delivery.”

“That’s not how Chancellor Shoernberg sees it,” the president said. “It’s the position of the German government that our mandate to conduct maritime interception operations is only valid within the boundaries of the Arabian Gulf. Shoernberg claims we overstepped our authority when we went after his subs in the Arabian Sea.”

The national security advisor stared at the secretary of state. “Is that right?”

Whelkin scribbled a rapid note on her legal pad. “That’s a tuffy. I’ll have to go back and look at the wording of the resolution. It’s possible that Chancellor Shoernberg is right. Technically, anyway.”

“Technically, my ass,” the CNO snapped. “You don’t shoot at your allies—your supposed allies—over a technicality. The whole self-defense argument is a crock anyway. The Kitty Hawk strike group was hit by a coordinated multi-axis attack. From what I’ve seen of the initial post-mission analysis, the whole thing was a carefully orchestrated attempt to disrupt the defensive formation around a United States aircraft carrier long enough to attack the carrier itself. A damned successful attempt at that.”

“Maybe the self-defense claim is Chancellor Shoernberg’s way of covering his ass,” Brenthoven said. “A whole pack of rogue submarines is pretty damned embarrassing. Could it be that the German government is stalling until they can think of the least damaging angle on this thing?”

The secretary of state shook her head. “Those submarines are not rogue. They are operating under orders.”

Brenthoven stared at her. “How can you possibly know that?”

“It’s not all that difficult to figure out,” Whelkin said. “An entire squadron of German Air Force jets showed up to escort them through the Straits of Gibraltar. Unless you’re suggesting that the Luftwaffe has gone rogue as well, I’d say that’s a pretty good indication that the German government is calling the plays.”

“Don’t forget those radar-decoy yachts in the southern Med,” the CNO said. “That was a calculated deception, carried out using boats that were leased by the German Navy.”

The president’s eyebrows went up. “Right. So, we scratch the rogue commander theory. What does that leave us? Can the Germans really be that determined to push us into a war?”

“Not a war, Mr. President,” Whelkin said. “A fight.”

Brenthoven rolled his eyes. “Are we back to playing semantics again? Planes, ships, torpedoes, missiles. Burnt bodies floating in the ocean. What difference does it make what you call it? Do you think the families of those dead Sailors care what word we use for it? Are they any less dead if we call it a fight instead of a war?”

“You misunderstand me,” the secretary of state said. “I’m not talking about the choice of words. I’m talking about the scope of the conflict.”

Brenthoven snorted. “What in the hell does that mean?”

The president raised a hand. “Keep your shirt on, Greg. I want to see where Liz is going.”

Whelkin turned her eyes to the president. “I think the German government is challenging us to single combat.”

The president frowned. “You mean like they did in the Middle Ages? Like jousting?”

“Pretty much, sir,” Whelkin said. “But in the Middle Ages, it was primarily used as a display of battle skills, or to decide points of honor.” She took a swallow of coffee and carefully wiped the lipstick off the rim of the cup before continuing. “In biblical times, the concept had much greater significance. When the leaders of opposing nations had disagreements, sometimes they would settle them by single combat. The toughest warrior from one country would do battle with the other country’s toughest warrior, often while the opposing armies looked on. The warrior who came out on top won the day for his side. It was a pretty good system. Disputes over land and resources could be resolved without the danger and expense of all-out war. Remember the Bible story about David and Goliath? That’s a classic example of single combat in its original form.”

The president’s eyebrows furrowed. “You think that’s what the Germans are trying to do here?”

“It fits, sir. They shot up a carrier strike group. That’s not the kind of thing we can let slide, right? We’ve got to take some sort of retaliatory action. We can’t risk letting the pocket Napoleons of the world think that they can attack our ships with impunity.”

“You’ve got that right,” the CNO said. “That’s why we’ve got to chase those bastards down and sink every goddamned one of them. If we don’t, it’s even money that somebody else will take a poke at one of our carriers next month, or next week.”

Secretary Whelkin looked around the room. “The Germans are not stupid. They know that we’re going to nail those subs. They knew it before they launched them.”

“It’s a hell of a risk on their part,” Brenthoven said.”How can they be certain that we wouldn’t go to war over this?”

“It’s not as much of a risk at it seems to be,” the secretary of state said. “The Germans know that we’ll avoid going to war if we possibly can. They also know that we can’t afford to let an attack on one of our carrier strike groups go unpunished. If you put the two ideas together, it’s predictable that we will try to destroy those submarines without much further military escalation.”

“Single combat,” the president said slowly. “The modern version—a handful of their subs against a handful of our ships and aircraft.”

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Brenthoven said. “Selling weapons to Siraj I can understand, even if I don’t agree with it. Germany needs a lot of oil fast, and—in exchange for breaking the weapons embargo—Siraj is giving it to them at a fraction of fair market value. That part I can see. But I cannot for the life of me see what the Germans stand to gain from attacking the Kitty Hawk.”

“That is the question,” the president said. “What do the Germans get out of this?”

“Turn the question around, Mr. President,” the secretary of state said. “What do we stand to lose from this?”

“We live and die by our image over there,” the CNO said. “What success we’ve had in keeping a lid on the Middle East is largely due to our military strength. As long as we appear to be invincible, no Middle Eastern leader will seriously attempt to challenge us. Oh, they’ll rant and rave on the six o’clock news and call us dirty names on the floor of the UN General Assembly, but they’ll avoid direct conflict. It’s not a perfect peace, God knows—some of those guys just can’t pass up the chance to shoot at their neighbors—but it allows commerce rather than chaos to be the dominant mode of operation in the Gulf States.”

“There’s your answer,” Secretary Whelkin said. “The Germans have already demonstrated that they can penetrate our carrier strike groups. Right now, their reputation is gaining ground and ours is losing. If we can’t prevent them from delivering those subs, they’re going to look even stronger, and we’re going to look weaker still.”

“A new Germany for the new century,” the president said. “Re-forged as a world power. Focused, independent, and not afraid to play rough with the big boys.”

“This whole thing has been a great showcase for their military hardware,” Whelkin said. “Four little submarines have managed to elude one carrier strike group and blow the hell out of a second one.”

“I can’t argue on that point,” Brenthoven said. “So far, they’ve succeeded in making us look like idiots. And we can’t afford to lose credibility in the region.”

“I agree,” the CNO said. “We can’t let even one of those subs get through to Siraj. A big chunk of our deterrence comes from our carriers. Not just the carriers themselves, but the perceptions associated with them. The American aircraft carrier is the embodiment of force projection. We’ve all seen it work when some pissant third-world dictator gets too big for his britches. A carrier shows up a few miles off his coastline, and suddenly he’s jumping through hoops to show how enlightened and cooperative he can be. Most of the time, we don’t have to fire a single shot. The aura of power reaches out from the carrier like an umbrella and practically blocks out the sun.

“We’ve got two carriers off the Chinese coast right now. Do you think the Chinese would be minding their P’s and Q’s if they thought they could hit our carriers with impunity?”

“An excellent point,” the president said. “And a vital point. I think Admiral Casey is correct. The credibility of our conventional deterrence is on the line here. If we screw this up, it could affect the balance of power in countries all over the planet.”

“Okay,” said Brenthoven, “we throw everything we’ve got at those subs.” He snapped his fingers three or four times. “I remember reading a proposal for eradicating the Iranian Kilo Class submarines. Something about catching them in the Straits of Hormuz and carpet-bombing the hell out of them with thousand-pound bombs. We could do that. The German subs will have to transit the straits to get into the Arabian Gulf. We can wait and nail them then.”

“I’m not sure how Iran would take that,” said the secretary of state. “The Straits of Hormuz are right off the Iranian coastline. If we were already at war with Iran, a scenario that your carpet-bombing proposal was apparently designed for—since it calls for attacking Iranian submarines—it wouldn’t be an issue. But we’re not at war with Iran, and we aren’t looking to start one. It might be a good idea to think twice before bombing the hell out of their coastal waters.”

“It’s the wrong kind of response, anyway,” the president said. “We’ve thrown two carrier strike groups at those subs already, and we’ve gotten our asses kicked. If we’re going to salvage our credibility, we need to beat them in a fair fight. They’ve got four submarines—we send four surface combatants to take them on. No carriers, no bombers, no land-based aircraft. Just our destroyers and frigates against their submarines.”

“Mr. President, you can’t be serious,” the CNO said. “The credibility of our national deterrence is at stake, and you’re asking me to fight with one hand tied behind my back?”

The president said, “I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that our Navy is good enough to go one-on-one with the Germans and come out on top. If you can’t say that with a straight face, we’ve got bigger problems than credibility.”

“We snatched the Kitty Hawk out of there pretty quickly, sir,” the CNO said. “I’m not sure if I can get four ships into a position to intercept. I know I’ve got three Middle East Force deployers on station—two destroyers and a frigate—but I may have to scrounge around to come up with a fourth unit on short notice. Unless you’ll let me substitute a submarine. I should be able to get the Topeka in position without too much trouble.”

The president shook his head. “No submarines. Those bastards have been lucky so far. If they managed to get a shot in on one of our subs, we could end up with nuclear contamination from one end of the Gulf to the other. Besides, the credibility of our sub force isn’t in question right now. We need to do this with surface combatants.” He looked at Whelkin. “Single combat.”

The national security advisor cleared his throat. “Isn’t that giving the Germans what they want?”

“We’ll give them what they want,” the president said. “We’ll stick it up their ass and break it off.”

“We might end up with only three ships,” the CNO said. “Against four submarines.”

“Then we do it with three ships,” the president said, “but we do it. And keep this in mind: if any of those submarines make it to Siraj, the Germans win this thing.”

Admiral Casey nodded slowly. “Understood, sir.”

The president stood up. “I have to go figure out what to tell the American people about this mess.”

The door opened and a young Navy lieutenant (junior grade) walked in, carrying a red and white striped folder. He scanned the room quickly and made his way toward the Chief of Naval Operations.

Every eye in the room followed the young officer as he walked. Under the color-coding system of the White House Signals Office, red and white stripes indicated highly classified material of utmost urgency.

The lieutenant (jg) stopped near the CNO, whispered briefly into his ear, and handed him the folder.

No one spoke. Admiral Casey opened the folder and read the single-page document inside. The CNO looked up. “Mr. President, our little mess just got a hell of a lot messier.”

The president lifted his papers from the table and straightened them. “Bad news never improves with age, Bob. What have you got?”

The CNO looked down at the folder again. “Sir, about twenty minutes ago, two squadrons of British Sea Harriers exchanged missile fire with a German frigate in the North Sea. The ship was the FGS Sachsen, the lead unit of the new Sachsen Class guided missile frigates, and pretty much the pride of the German fleet. As of this report, the Sachsen was burning but still afloat.”

The president rubbed the back of his neck. “Any word on who fired first?”

“The preliminary satellite data suggests it was the Brits, sir. And they don’t seem to be going out of their way to deny it.”

“They’re getting even for what happened to the York and the Chatham.”

“It certainly looks that way, Mr. President,” the CNO said. “Apparently we’re not the only ones worried about the credibility of their deterrence.”

CHAPTER 25

//SSSSSSSSSS//

//SECRET//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//180504Z MAY//

FM      COMUSNAVCENT//

TO      USS TOWERS//

USS BENFOLD//

USS INGRAHAM//

INFO      CTF FIVE ZERO//

SUBJ/USW TASKING/IMMEDIATE EXECUTE//

REF/A/RMG/CNO/150744Z MAY//

REF/B/RMG/CNO/180449Z MAY//

NARR/REF A IS CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS TACTICAL SUMMARY OF LIVE-FIRE HOSTILITIES BETWEEN UNITED KINGDOM ROYAL NAVY WARSHIPS AND FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY (LUFTWAFFE) AIRCRAFT APPROX 13MAY//

NARR/REF B IS CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS TACTICAL SUMMARY OF LIVE-FIRE HOSTILITIES BETWEEN USS KITTY HAWK BATTLE GROUP AND FOUR DEUTSCHE MARINE TYPE 212B DIESEL SUBMARINES EARLIER THIS MORNING.//

1. (CONF) AS OUTLINED IN REFS A AND B, GERMAN NAVAL UNITS HAVE ATTACKED BRITISH ROYAL NAVY AND U.S. NAVY ASSETS TWICE IN THE PAST FIVE DAYS. IN MOST RECENT ENGAGEMENT, TWO U.S. NAVY HELICOPTERS DESTROYED, USS KITTY HAWK SERIOUSLY DAMAGED. PERSONNEL CASUALTIES HIGH.

2. (CONF) CURRENT THREAT EVALUATION HOLDS ALL FOUR DEUTSCHE MARINE SUBS AS UNDAMAGED AND UNRESTRICTED IN ABILITY TO FIGHT OR EVADE.

3. (CONF) INTELLIGENCE SOURCES BELIEVE DM IS ATTEMPTING TO DELIVER SUBS TO SIRAJ IN VIOLATION OF STANDING UN RESOLUTIONS.

4. (SECR) USS TOWERS, USS BENFOLD, AND USS INGRAHAM ARE DIRECTED TO FORM A THREE-SHIP SEARCH ATTACK UNIT (SAU) AND PROCEED SOUTH AT MAXIMUM AVAILABLE SPEED. SUBJECT SUBMARINES ARE DECLARED HOSTILE. TOWERS, BENFOLD, AND INGRAHAM ARE DIRECTED TO ENGAGE AND DESTROY ALL DM SUBMARINES WITHIN COMMANDER U.S. NAVAL CENTRAL COMMAND S AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY.

5. (SECR) COMUSNAVCENT WILL MAKE ALL EFFORTS TO LOCATE AN ADDITIONAL SURFACE ASSET TO REINFORCE SAU. IN THE INTERIM, USS TOWERS IS DESIGNATED AS SAU COMMANDER.

6. (SECR) AT LEAST ONE DM SUBMARINE HAS SUCCESSFULLY ENGAGED AND DESTROYED CARRIER-BASED USW AIRCRAFT USING SUB-LAUNCHED SURFACE TO AIR MISSILES. TAKE ALL POSSIBLE PRECAUTIONS WHEN DEPLOYING AIRCRAFT IN THE VICINITY OF TARGET SUBS.

7. (SECR) ALL UNITS ARE ADVISED THAT DM SUBMARINES HAVE SHOWN EXCEPTIONAL TACTICAL SKILL AND CREATIVITY, HIGHLY PROFICIENT EXPLOITATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS, AND A PREDILECTION FOR DEPLOYING ELECTRONIC DECOYS. EXPECT COORDINATED, ZERO-NOTICE, MULTI-AXIS ATTACKS AND BE PREPARED TO DELIVER SAME TO DM SUBMARINES.

8. (UNCL) GOOD LUCK AND GOOD HUNTING! ADMIRAL ROGERS SENDS.

//180504Z JUN//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//SECRET//

//SSSSSSSSSS//

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

CENTRAL ARABIAN GULF

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

0911 hours (9:11 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

There was a full-length mirror bolted to the bulkhead outside the wardroom. Across the top of the glass was a blue decal depicting the eagle-and anchor emblem of the U.S. Navy, followed by a short paragraph in white block lettering:

CHECK YOUR MILITARY APPEARANCE. ARE YOU SETTING A PROPER EXAMPLE FOR YOUR SUBORDINATE PERSONNEL? LOOK LIKE A LEADER. THINK LIKE A LEADER. BE A LEADER.

Sonar Technician Chief Theresa McPherson paused to examine her reflection in the mirror. She was a bantam hen of a woman: short, redheaded, and inclined toward plumpness. Thirty-five minutes a day on the treadmill kept her within Navy body-fat standards, but her round face and full cheeks made her seem chubby no matter how trim she kept her body.

She suppressed a sigh. Her face was a preview of the years ahead. The women of her family all put on weight in their late thirties, and some day—when she no longer had the energy to struggle against her genes and the general entropy of middle age—she would become just as round as the others. That day might not be too far in coming. She didn’t need the streaks of gray in her hair to know that her fortieth birthday was careening toward her like a juggernaut.

She turned her attention to her uniform. Her short-sleeved khakis were crisply starched, the creases sharp and precisely aligned. Despite her chipmunk cheeks, there were no bulges at the hips of her khaki trousers, and the buttons of her shirt lay flat against her belly. She was winning the battle, for now at least. And maybe that was all she could expect: to win one battle at a time. She straightened her belt buckle a fraction and stepped away from the mirror.

Two quick steps brought her to the wardroom. She rapped on the door-frame and then opened the door far enough to stick her head in.

Captain Bowie was sitting in his customary spot, the middle seat on the far side of the table that ran down the center of the room. He looked up and motioned to a chair. “Come on in, Chief. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and have a seat.”

Chief McPherson skipped the coffee and took a chair near the middle of the table.

The captain turned back to a stack of papers laid out on the table in front of him. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “I want to make sure that my homework is finished before the thundering hoard arrives.”

The chief nodded automatically, despite the obvious fact that the captain wasn’t looking at her. “Of course, sir.” She checked her watch. “I’m early anyway.”

She resisted the temptation to give the room the once-over. She’d been to meetings here at least two dozen times, but the wardroom was so unlike the rest of the ship that just walking through the door was always a bit of a shock. Towers was a warship, and that meant she was built for utility rather than aesthetics. Outside of the wardroom, the bulkheads and overheads were crowded with pipes, valves, ventilation ducts, cable runs, electrical junction boxes, and damage control equipment—so much so that it would have been difficult to locate two square feet of exposed wall space. If such an empty spot had existed, some naval engineer would undoubtedly have found a way to shoehorn in a fiber optic relay terminal or a casualty power transformer.

Inside the door of the wardroom was a different matter. The walls were paneled in richly grained walnut. (Yes, wall was the right word; bulkhead was a shipboard term, and the dark wooden paneling bore no resemblance to the utilitarian white-painted steel bulkheads found elsewhere on the ship.) In place of the cable runs and pipes that lined the overheads on the rest of the ship, the wardroom boasted an acoustic tile ceiling that would have looked at home in a restaurant or business office.

Equal parts conference room, classroom, dining room, and social parlor, the wardroom on Towers (as on every warship) was the nexus of all officer activity. Here, the commissioned officers held training sessions, conducted high-level briefings, and entertained the occasional civilian dignitary or head of state.

A score of other details made the wardroom—and to a lesser degree the officers’ staterooms—markedly different from the rest of the ship. Up here, the officers dined on real china—inlaid with the ship’s crest. Down on the Mess Decks and in the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess, the enlisted crew members ate their meals off fiberglass trays. The officers’ eating utensils were of finely patterned silver—also engraved with the ship’s crest. The enlisted crew used unpatterned stainless steel flatware. The wardroom napkins were starched linen, in place of the paper napkins used by the rest of the crew.

Chief McPherson didn’t begrudge the officers the few perks they received, and she didn’t think that most of the crew did either. General consensus treated the wardroom as an upscale version of the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess, but Chief McPherson knew that it was more than that. It was, among other things, a symbol: a line drawn in the dirt that clearly delineated the distinction between the enlisted crew and the officers who commanded them.

In ages past, the line between commissioned officers and their enlisted subordinates had been so obvious that it had needed no elaboration. Officers had been the military’s version of the aristocracy: educated, frequently wealthy, and well mannered to the point of gentility. By contrast, enlisted men had often been illiterate, ill mannered, and so nearly destitute that the majority had lived from payday to meager payday.

Over the years, such distinctions had faded far enough to blur the line between officers and their subordinates. The typical twenty-first–century petty officer was college-educated, technically skilled, well mannered, and financially solvent. In point of fact, the wealthiest man currently stationed aboard Towers was a second class Electronics Warfare Technician with a bachelor’s degree in economics and an uncanny flair for predicting the ups and downs of the securities market.

The extravagant (by comparison) trappings of the wardroom served as a subtle reminder to the crew, and to the officers themselves, that the line between officer and enlisted was still in place—and that it was there for a reason.

*  *  *

Chief McPherson focused her attention on the trio of oil paintings that hung in a neat row on the wall behind the captain’s chair. The center, and largest of the three, was a portrait of the ship’s namesake, Vice Admiral John Henry Towers. Obviously based on a photograph taken early in the man’s career, the face staring out of the portrait had the sort of square-jawed, wavy-haired good looks that were more readily associated with motion picture heroes than with actual warriors. But the man had been an actual warrior; only the third airplane pilot in the history of the U.S. Navy, Towers had been designated Naval Aviator Number 3 in 1911. Present at the very birth of military aviation, he had guided the development and growth of the Navy’s fledgling air wing through two world wars.

To the left of the admiral’s portrait was a painting of the first ship to carry the name of Towers. Shown plowing through heavy seas under a storm-darkened sky, the old Adams Class guided missile destroyer looked resolute and powerful, and yet—at the same time—tiny and frail against the thrashing might of the waves. Fluttering from the old ship’s starboard yardarm were the signal flags November and Yankee: the tactical signal for “I Stand Relieved.”

On the opposite side of the admiral’s portrait hung a painting of the current USS Towers. Also shown slicing through a stormy sea, the new ship flew the signal flags Charlie and Lima from the short yardarm on the port side of her shark-fin mast, and the flags Bravo and Zulu from the starboard yardarm. The four flags formed two tactical signals: “I Assume the Watch,” and “Job Well Done!”—the new ship’s answer to the message sent by her older sister.

The low, angular profile of the stealth destroyer looked more like something out of a science fiction movie than the sister of the older ship. But, appearances aside, sisters they were. Despite the fifty-odd years of technological development that separated them, both ships shared the same DNA. As guided missile destroyers in the United States Navy, both ships had been designed with the tin can Sailor’s credo in mind: Go anywhere, do anything, battle any foe.

With thirty years of service spanning the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the old Adams Class DDG had more than met the challenge raised by those words. With fewer than eighteen months of duty under her belt, the new Towers had a long way to go before she could begin to live up to her name.

*  *  *

The wardroom door opened, and the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Pete Tyler, filed in, followed in short order by the ship’s Operations Officer, Lieutenant Brian Nylander; the Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Terri Sikes; and the Navigator/Administrative Officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Karen Augustine. Each of the officers greeted the captain and found a seat at the wardroom table.

The XO leaned over in Chief McPherson’s direction and whispered, “Where is your boss?”

The chief glanced at the door. “On the way, sir. He won’t be late. He never is.”

“He’d better not be,” the XO said out of the side of his mouth. “He’s your ensign; it’s your job to train him.”

There was a hint of amusement in the XO’s eyes, but Chief McPherson knew that the man was only half-joking. As the captain’s second-in-command, the XO was charged with making sure that the ship operated in accordance with the captain’s orders and policies. One of those policies involved ensuring that junior officers were never—never late for meetings. Especially not meetings that had been called by the captain.

Due to the oddities of the Navy command structure, that put Chief McPherson in a bit of a predicament. Her Division Officer, Mr. Cooper, was a brand-spanking-new ensign (as were most other Divo’s). He was a commissioned officer, albeit a very junior one, and that made him Chief McPherson’s boss. She was required to follow his orders, despite the fact that she had nearly twenty years of experience, and he had virtually zero. Ensign Cooper was a hard-charger and a quick learner, but he was also young and very wet behind the ears. By naval tradition, the chief was expected to train her own boss and mold him into a good officer, which made her responsible for his actions, even though she was his subordinate. A good chief petty officer, it was reasoned, could use knowledge and experience to guide a young officer into correct action—Which ultimately meant that the XO would kick Chief McPherson’s ass up around her shoulder blades if her boss didn’t show up for the captain’s meeting on time.

She stifled the urge to look at her watch or the door again. “My Fearless Leader will be here, sir. Count on it.”

The door opened again, but it wasn’t Ensign Cooper. Lieutenant Alan West, the Supply Officer, walked in and took the chair closest to the coffeepot.

Now Chief McPherson did look at her watch. Her boss had about three minutes. She was just about to get up and use the phone to try to track him down when the door opened and Ensign Cooper walked in.

As soon as the ensign found a chair and pulled it up to the table, the XO cleared his throat. “Ah, Captain. We’re ready to begin.”

Captain Bowie looked up from his paperwork and scanned the group of men and women seated around the table. “Where’s the Chief Engineer?”

“The CHENG is down in Main Engine Room number one,” the XO said. “The engineers are finishing up the installation on the new fuel oil purifier, and he’s overseeing the work. I told him he could take a pass on the meeting, and I’d catch him up later.”

The captain digested this bit of information for a few seconds. Then he shook his head. “Sorry to second-guess you, Pete, but I need him up here for this.”

The XO nodded. “Yes, sir.” He stood up and walked to the phone.

*  *  *

A couple of minutes later, the Chief Engineer showed up, his coveralls streaked with grease. He nodded toward the captain. “Sorry I’m late, sir. I thought I had a get-out-of-jail-free card, but I guess I misplaced it.”

The captain waved him to a chair. “I’ll let you slide this time, but next time you’ll have to bring a note from your mom.”

Everyone chuckled politely.

The captain held up a hand for silence. “How many of you have been staying on top of the secret message traffic?”

Every hand in the room went up.

“Good,” the captain said. “Then you all know what’s been going on with that wolfpack of German submarines.”

Everyone nodded, and there were gentle murmurs of assent.

“Excellent,” the captain said. He picked up a stack of papers and began passing copies around the table. “Because we’ve just received orders to form a Search Attack Unit with USS Benfold and USS Ingraham. We’ve been designated as commander for the SAU. You can read these at your leisure, but I’ll give you the short version for now. Our orders are to proceed south at all speed, intercept the German submarines, and destroy every one of them.”

The Supply Officer accepted his copy of the orders and stared blankly at it. “Sir? Are we at war with Germany?”

“Not yet, SUPPO,” the captain said. “And maybe not at all. This may be an isolated reprisal for the attack on the Kitty Hawk strike group.

“What I want right now is an up-to-the-minute status report. Are we ready for this? What equipment is broken? Which systems are degraded?” He turned to the Chief Engineer. “You first, CHENG. If we can’t drive, we can’t fight. What’s the latest on the engineering plant?”

“The engines are in top shape,” the CHENG said. “So are the generators. Prairie Masker is looking good. The installation on One Alpha Fuel Oil Purifier is about ninety percent complete. With a little luck we’ll have it back on line in a couple of hours.” His eyebrows narrowed slightly. “I’m not crazy about the compressor on air conditioning plant number three. I haven’t ordered a sound survey yet, but the A-Gang Chief says he thinks it’s running a little loud. I’ve listened to it, and I think he’s right. If we can’t get it back within specs, we may have to shut it down entirely before we can set Silent Ship.”

The captain scribbled a note. “Number three AC feeds enlisted berthing aft, doesn’t it?”

The Chief Engineer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“The ambient air temperature is over a hundred degrees,” the captain said. “If we have to shut three AC down for long, aft enlisted berthing will become an oven. I don’t want the crew sleeping down there when it gets like that.”

“It will be uncomfortable, sir. But the crew can learn to live with it.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” the executive officer said. “But it’s hard to sleep when it gets that hot. And when the crew loses sleep, they make mistakes. We’re about to take on a pack of hostile submarines that have stomped the shit out of every surface ship that has crossed their path. Mistakes are something we cannot afford.”

“I agree,” the captain said. He looked at the Supply Officer. “SUPPO, make sure the engineers get whatever parts they need to fix that compressor. And if they need something we don’t carry on board, send out a logistics request, and we’ll have it sent out by helo. We just jumped to the top of the Navy’s logistics priority list.” He looked around the table. “All of you, get your wish lists to the SUPPO before evening chow. It just became Christmas on Happy Warship Towers, and the Navy supply system has been designated as your official Santa Claus.”

The captain looked at the XO. “Pete, assign one of our bright junior officers to come up with a plan for moving the enlisted personnel out of aft berthing, just in case we can’t get three AC to play right.”

The XO nodded. “Sounds like a good job for the Admin Officer.”

Lieutenant (jg) Augustine made a thumbs-up gesture. “Piece of cake, sir. We can spread the personnel out to other berthing spaces with empty racks. Move a few into officer and chief petty officer overflow berthing. If worse comes to worst, we can drag mattresses and sheets down to some of the electronics spaces. Those spaces are nice and chilly.”

“Good,” the captain said. “Now, OPS, what have you got for me?”

The Operations Officer looked up from his copy of the new orders. “Operations department is clean and green, Captain. The biggest problem I have to report is a sticky cipher lock on the starboard door to CIC. Other than that, we’re just ducky.”

“Just ducky,” the Combat Systems Officer said under her breath in a mocking tone. “We’re just ducky here. Ducky, I tell you.”

“You’re next, CSO,” the captain said. “You’re the one with all the cool bullets and bombs. What’s broke and what ain’t?”

The Combat Systems Officer sighed and consulted her palm-top computer. “We’ve got that bad Tomahawk in VLS cell twenty-two. Should be zero tactical impact, at least while we’re hunting submarines. The Aegis backup computer has a bad high-volt power supply. Tactical impact is just loss of a redundant system. Supply department has a replacement on board, but we’ve been holding off, because we don’t have sixty thousand dollars left in this quarter’s repair budget. But if we really do have a blank check for parts, we can draw the new power supply from stores and have the backup computer on line in less than an hour.” She used a plastic stylus to scroll down the screen on the tiny computer. “As far as Undersea Warfare goes … all the sonars are up; we’ve got a full bag of sonobuoys; all the ASROCs and torpedoes look good. I’d say we’re ready to go hunt some submarines.”

Chief McPherson nodded imperceptibly. Her equipment was in good shape, and her people were trained.

“That’s just what I wanted to hear,” the captain said. “And now we can move on to our next order of business: tactical planning. How are we going to go about this business of hunting down these submarines? And, perhaps more importantly, what tactics are we going to use when we encounter them?”

Ensign Cooper spoke up. “Ah, Captain … as the Undersea Warfare Officer, that would be my ball of wax …”

The captain nodded for him to continue. “Absolutely, Pat. What do you have in mind?”

Ensign Cooper swallowed visibly. “First, I suggest a thorough review of our tactical USW doctrine. Our teams are pretty sharp right now, but it never hurts to polish up. Then I recommend we select the proper tactics for engaging diesel submarines in shallow water, and we construct two or three training scenarios utilizing the On-Board Trainer. If we run each scenario twice a day, we should be razor-sharp by the time we get far enough south to commence our search.”

Heads nodded around the table, but Chief McPherson felt her muscles tighten. Her boss’s plan sounded great, but she knew that it had a hole in it—a big one. She chewed the inside of her lower lip for a few seconds. Would it be better to point it out now? Or should she wait and do it in private, so as not to embarrass Ensign Cooper in front of the other officers? Of course, if she waited to bring the problem to his attention, he would have to come back to this same table some time in the future with his hat in his hand and admit his mistake. That might be even more embarrassing for him.

The chief glanced up to discover that the captain was staring at her with a strange look on his face. Then it hit her. The captain already knew there was a problem. That was why he’d summoned her to a meeting that was otherwise all commissioned officers. He not only knew that there was a problem; he knew that she would spot it. And, obviously, he expected her to have a hand in fixing it.

She cleared her throat. “Uh … Captain? If I may?”

The captain nodded. “Of course, Chief.”

She continued. “Captain, the USW Officer’s plan is a good one, but I’m afraid that I have to disagree with one major part of it.”

Ensign Cooper stared at her, obviously shocked at the idea that his own chief petty officer would contradict him in front of the captain. “Um … which part do you … um … disagree with, Chief?”

Every eye in the room was on the chief now, and she was suddenly conscious of just how far out of her territory she was. “I don’t think we can afford …” She stopped, swallowed, and started again. “I don’t think we can afford to trust our tactical USW doctrine in this situation. In fact, I think we have to avoid using our tactical doctrine at all costs.”

The USWO rubbed behind his ear, a puzzled look on his face. “Help me out here, Chief. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” the chief said. “But think about it, sir. Nearly every tactic in those books has been shared with NATO. Search patterns. Attack patterns. The timing of our zigzag plans. Even the spacing of our sonobuoys. The lion’s share of our doctrine was designed for use in cooperation with NATO. The Germans have been members of NATO since the get-go—which means they’ve already read our playbook. If we follow our doctrine, they already know what we’re going to do before we even do it.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “I think you hit the bull’s-eye, Chief. Excellent job. That explains how the Germans managed to clean Kitty Hawk’s clock so easily.”

The XO’s eyebrows went up for a few seconds. Then, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together briskly. “Sooooo … I guess we start by throwing the old book out the window and coming up with some new tactics.”

“I agree, sir,” the Combat Systems Officer said. And when we do get something hammered out, we can punch it into the Link and shoot it over to Benfold and Ingraham and see if they can suggest any improvements.”

The captain nodded. “Good call.” He turned back to the chief. “You’ve been doing this half your life—got any pet theories you want to try out against some no-shit hostile subs?”

Chief McPherson nodded. She’d been right. This was why the captain had invited her to this meeting. “I might just have one or two ideas gathering dust at the back of my brain, Captain.”

The captain smiled. “I kind of suspected that you might.”

The chief glanced at Ensign Cooper. His face had whitened visibly. She could nearly hear the thoughts tumbling around in his head. All of his knowledge of Undersea Warfare had come from studying tactical doctrine. Now, those neatly bound tactical manuals were useless to him. Even his training in the Undersea Warfare Evaluator’s course had been based entirely on the tactics written into the manuals. Outside of scheduled exercises, which were—again—based upon the doctrine contained in the manuals, he had no experience chasing submarines. He had no personal knowledge to fall back on, no pet tactical theories based on hard-won expertise. And now, the captain was asking him to forget everything he had studied and start from scratch.

Apparently catching the USW Officer’s expression of near terror, the captain said, “You look like you just stepped off a cliff, Pat, and you’re waiting to hit bottom.”

The USWO didn’t say anything.

“Don’t worry,” the captain said. “We’re going to be making this up on the fly, so anything we do is right. It may not work, and it might get us killed, but—since we have to shit-can the play book—nobody will be able to say that we were wrong.”

CHAPTER 26

U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)

BAHRAIN

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

1025 hours (10:25 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Admiral Vincent Rogers, Commander Fifth Fleet, leaned back in his chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger. The ever-present stack of paperwork on his desk seemed to grow every time he took his eyes off it for a few seconds. Maybe it was reproducing itself through some mechanism of parthenogenesis that had heretofore lain dormant in paper products—perhaps a recessive gene hidden deep in the paper’s DNA that had somehow been activated by the stifling Middle Eastern heat.

Rogers ran his fingers through the iron-gray stubble of his flattop haircut. Eight days shy of his fifty-seventh birthday, he was an old man to the Sailors he commanded, but—to his own way of thinking—he was far too young to be chained to a desk full of reports, operational summaries, force projection studies, feasibility matrices, and whatever the hell else had found its way into his Urgent stack.

There were two quiet knocks on his door.

Admiral Rogers sat up. “Enter.”

The door opened, and his chief of staff, Commander Troy Moody, stepped into the office. Moody carried a yellow folder in his left hand. Under the color-coding system used by the USNAVCENT staff, yellow was reserved for SITREPs, or situational reports, from ships assigned to Fifth Fleet’s command.

The admiral’s eyes stayed locked on the yellow folder. “Say, Troy, I was just wondering … whatever happened to that paperless Navy we were supposed to be headed for? Remember that?” He pointed to his desktop computer and then to his laptop computer and finally to his palm-top. “As I recall,” he said, “these were supposed to get rid of those.” He pointed to the fat stack of papers on his desk. “That was a great idea. Whatever happened to it?”

Moody smiled. “Um … I believe that paper covers computer, sir.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Moody held out the folder to the admiral. “You remember the rules, sir. Rock smashes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Well, somebody did a study, and it turns out that paper covers computer as well.”

Admiral Rogers accepted the folder. “By extrapolation, I assume that means that rock smashes computer.”

Moody pointed to the desk. “It certainly does, sir. Unfortunately, that still leaves paper.”

The admiral sighed. “No way around it, I guess.” He opened the folder. “What have you got here, Troy?”

“A SITREP from USS Antietam, sir.”

“I can see that,” the admiral said. “But I don’t feel like wading through four pages of minutiae in search of whatever little nugget of wisdom you found buried in there. Just give me the Reader’s Digest version.” He closed the folder. “What’s going on with Antietam?”

“They’ve completed repairs to their starboard rudder nearly a week ahead of schedule, sir. Barring problems during shakedown, they’re ready to put to sea now. I know you’ve been trying to scare up a fourth ship for your Search Attack Unit, sir. Looks like Antietam is going to be available after all.”

The admiral nodded. “Excellent work, Troy. The CNO has been up my ass for two days to come up with another ship.”

“So I understood, sir.”

“Good man. Now, get on the horn and tell the admin weenies to cut steaming orders for Antietam.”

“Already done, sir. They won’t be final until you sign them, of course, but I’ve taken the liberty of starting the ball rolling, just in case you decided to assign Antietam to the SAU.”

The admiral nodded. “Excellent.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to waste any time,” Commander Moody said. “Antietam still has to do a quick shakedown after her rudder repairs. They’ll really have to drop the hammer to catch up. The SAU has a head start, and those guys are hauling ass.”

Rogers looked at his chief of staff. “Whiley will catch ‘em,” he said. “He’s up for admiral after this tour, and he’s not going to pass up a chance to play war hero. They can use the sprint south as their shakedown. Then, if the rudder gives them any trouble, they can turn back to port and let the SAU continue on without them. But that’s not going to happen. Whiley won’t let it happen. He’ll be there, all right. You can bet your ass on it.”

“One more thing, sir,” Commander Moody said. “Captain Whiley is a senior full-bird captain, sir. He’s going to want to assume command of the SAU. I don’t imagine Captain Bowie is going to like the idea of giving it up.”

“Bowie’ll shit a brick,” the admiral said, “but there’s nothing I can do about that. Whiley outranks him seven ways from Sunday. If Whiley wants SAU Commander, it’s his.”

“Antietam is an air-shooter, sir,” Moody said. “I’ve been looking back through the daily OPSUM messages; that crew hasn’t done anything but Anti-Air Warfare for a long time. Undersea Warfare is a highly perishable skill. If you don’t use it, you lose it. If Captain Whiley is smart, he’ll let the Towers run the show.”

The admiral smiled. “If he were smart. Have you met Whiley?”

“No, sir.”

“He’s a dip-shit,” Admiral Rogers said. “Don’t quote me on that. Oh, he did all right with those Iranian MiGs last month, but the man is a weasel at heart.”

Commander Moody kept a carefully neutral face. “No comment, sir.”

The admiral’s smile grew even wider. “Good man! Now, get Antietam on the horn, and let’s kick their ass out of port.”

CHAPTER 27

LONDON

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

0928 hours (9:28 AM)

TIME ZONE +1 ‘ALPHA’

Andrew Smythe Harrington (OBE) was a top-echelon analyst with the British Secret Intelligence Service, better known to the world as the SIS, or “the Firm.” Nearing fifty, he looked closer to thirty, and—he admitted to himself as he twisted in his chair to ease the kink in his lower back—felt closer to sixty. Handsome in an Errol Flynn sort of way, Harrington had garnered a reputation as something of a ladies’ man (which he most certainly was not) and an exceptional chess player (which—all modesty aside—he most certainly was). But Harrington liked to refer to his real talent in life as “a gift for seeing the obvious.”

His office was on the third floor of SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. Unlike the toweringly elegant Century House, which had served as the headquarters for the Secret Intelligence Service until 1995, the Vauxhall Cross complex was an architectural polyglot of cylinders, cubes, and truncated pyramids that had led its detractors to nickname it Legoland.

Harrington was entitled to a corner office on the top floor, both by seniority and by the influence conferred by his Order of the British Empire. But he had rejected a large, prestigious office in favor of a smallish cubicle with no windows. His job was to think, and he took that job very seriously. To ensure that his thinking was as efficient as possible, he avoided distractions wherever he could, including windows, unnecessary decorations, and the attractive female secretary that so many of his peers seemed to find indispensable.

He scanned the American newspaper article for the third time and then placed it carefully on top of the neat stack of papers in the center of his desk. There were over four hundred pages in the stack. Police reports, USAMRIID and CDC contagion projections, toxin concentration counts from the embassy after decontamination, medical reports from Walter Reed Hospital, regional threat assessments, a forensic analysis of the T2 trichothecene mycotoxin, and traffic analyses of known and suspected terrorist movements before, during, and after the attack. Also in the stack were the only three documents that really mattered: a copy of the visitors log from the British Embassy in Washington, a transcript of the interview of one Mr. Larry S. Burke, shift supervisor for the carpet cleaning company, and the Washington newspaper article.

Harrington laid his hand on top of the little stack. Everything was right here, in those three little bits of paper, as difficult to miss as the fox in the proverbial henhouse. How was it possible that no one else had seen it?

The carpet cleaning company, WizardClean, had dispatched a three-man crew to the British Embassy. But only two men had shown up to do the job. The Washington police were still searching for the third man, the missing Sailor, who hadn’t been seen since the night of the attack.

But Seaman Apprentice Jerome Gilbert was not the key to the puzzle. He had been added to the work crew just an hour or so before the attack. It was extremely unlikely that he could have been in on the plot. In all probability, Gilbert had been dead well before the two attackers had reached the embassy.

That meant the real third man was still missing, the regular third man for the WizardClean work crew assigned to the embassy. A twenty-eight-year-old Arab American named Isma’il Hamid. According to the shift supervisor from the carpet cleaning company, Hamid had reported for work with the rest of his crew, but he’d been too sick to go out with the truck.

Harrington picked up the transcript of the supervisor’s interview with the Arlington police, flipped to the fourth page, and scanned down to the relevant section.

------------------------------

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] You said Mr. Hamid showed up for his shift, but he was too sick to work?

----

Witness Larry S. Burke:

WTN-16/CA-23077 That’s right. Sick as a dog, the poor bastard. Throwing up all over the place, and you could tell he was in major pain. He was trying not to show it, that whole macho Arab thing, but his stomach was hurting him so bad he could hardly breathe. He couldn’t even walk right. He was in rough shape.

----

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] But he tried to work his shift anyway?

----

Witness Larry S. Burke:

WTN-16/CA-23077 Yeah. Hamid tried to play it off like he had the stomach flu. Said he’d taken some Pepto Bismol, and it was getting better. He wanted to go out with the truck.

----

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] And you wouldn’t let him?

----

Witness Larry S. Burke:

WTN-16/CA-23077 Hell no, I wouldn’t let him. His crew was assigned to the embassy. That’s a big contract. Important people. I couldn’t have him puking all over the fucking place. I sent the new guy, the Gilbert kid, out with the truck in Hamid’s spot.

----

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] Did Hamid seem to get upset about that?

----

Witness Larry S. Burke:

WTN-16/CA-23077 Upset? There’s your understatement of the year. He was fucking furious! Started yelling at me in Arabian, or Egyptian, or one of them rag-head languages. Excuse me. I mean some kind of Iranian talk, or something. Shocked the hell out of me when he started going ballistic on me. Hamid was always one of the quiet ones. Hard worker. Good attitude. I could use a half-dozen more workers just like him.

----

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] Did he calm down after you sent the truck out?

----

Witness Larry S. Burke:

WTN-16/CA-23077 Not really. He collapsed. His knees just sort of folded, and he went down like a sack of bricks. He didn’t look like he was breathing right. That’s when I called 911. The paramedics said it was his appendix. He had it bad, like it was rupturing, or something. The paramedics said he’d have been dead in another half-hour or so.

----

Detective Scot J. Barnes:

ARLINGTON PD [3127] Thank you. Now, tell me more about this Jerome Gilbert.

------------------------------

Harrington closed the transcript and returned it to the stack. Hamid had been slated as the third man in the attack; Harrington had no doubt of that.

The FBI and Washington police were searching for Hamid, and the American immigration authorities were watching the airports for him. But Harrington was nearly certain that Hamid was neither hiding nor trying to flee.

He pulled a telephone directory from his desk drawer and thumbed through to the government section. He found the listing he was looking for under Army Medical Directorate. It took him nearly ten minutes of conversations with underlings to actually lure a doctor to the telephone, and then another two minutes to explain who he was. At last, Dr. Kenneth Hale seemed to be prepared to answer his questions.

“I’ll try not to keep you long, Dr. Hale,” Harrington said.

“I appreciate that,” Dr. Hale said. “I am busy on the best of days, and this doesn’t happen to be a very good day at all.”

Harrington kept his voice carefully neutral. With another telephone call or two, he could have easily compelled Dr. Hale to appear in person. He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. “Doctor, I’d like to discuss the human appendix for a moment.”

“What would you like to know?”

“First of all,” Harrington said, “how difficult is an appendectomy? And what is the normal postoperative recovery time?”

“The procedure is fairly straightforward,” the doctor said. “In most cases, the patient recovers very quickly and can be discharged in two or three days.”

“I see,” Harrington said. “I’d like to discuss a hypothetical patient. Let’s assume that an otherwise healthy young man, between the ages of twenty and thirty, underwent an appendectomy on Saturday a week ago. Is it safe to assume that he would be back on his feet by now?”

Dr. Hale laughed. “Back on his feet? By now, he’d probably be kicking footballs.”

“Ah,” Harrington said. “But what if there were complications?”

“These days, there are almost never complications with an appendectomy. It is, as I said, a fairly straightforward procedure, with an excellent postoperative prognosis.”

“But suppose,” Harrington said, “that the young man in question did not seek medical attention.”

“He would,” the doctor said. “An inflamed appendix can cause pain of the highest magnitude. The average person would be unable to ignore that sort of pain and unable to function in the face of it.”

“But suppose our hypothetical young man has extraordinary willpower,” Harrington said. “Or assume that he was unable to seek medical attention in a timely manner, for whatever reason.”

“Then,” Dr. Hale said, “we would be looking at an entirely different scenario. The patient’s appendix might perforate, or rupture. There could be all sorts of complications. Intraperitoneal abscess, pylephlebitis, wound infection, diffuse peritonitis, and possibly, but not likely—appendiceal fistula. Some of these conditions are potentially lethal.”

“And how long would treatment typically take, in such a case?”

“Perhaps three weeks,” the doctor said. “Even longer if there are surgical complications as well.”

Harrington smiled, although no one was around to see it. “Thank you very much, Dr. Hale. You have been extremely helpful.”

He broke the connection, waited for about three seconds, and then dialed the number for the Operations Directorate.

It was answered on the first ring. “This is Keating.”

Harrington cleared his throat. “Yes, George, Andrew Harrington here. I know where to find Isma’il Hamid.”

“Where?”

“In the hospital, recovering from his appendicitis.”

“Andrew, my friend, you are looking down a blind alley,” Keating said. “The recovery time for an appendectomy is only two or three days. Hamid would have been treated on Sunday the sixth. He would have been released by Tuesday at the latest. No one even knew to look for him until Wednesday. He was well and truly gone by then.”

“I thought so too,” Harrington said. “And apparently, so did everyone else, since the American police reports don’t mention a follow-up with the hospital that treated Hamid’s appendicitis.”

“You can’t blame anyone for that,” Keating said. “With a few thousand leads to track down, that would have been at the bottom of my priority list too.”

“Have another look at the transcript of the interview with the shift supervisor at WizardClean,” Harrington said. “Mr. Hamid tried to ignore the pain and complete his shift. The supervisor attributed Hamid’s tenacity to cultural machismo, but he was wrong. Hamid expected to be dead in a few hours from exposure to the T2 mycotoxin. And, after all, what are a few hours of agony when one is about to sit at the right hand of Allah?”

“All right,” Keating said. “Hamid tried to tough his way through. But his body was obviously weaker than his spirit, because he collapsed. What does that tell us that we didn’t know before?”

“Perhaps nothing,” Harrington said. “But how long did Hamid suffer before he collapsed? How long did he manage to hide his pain before it got the better of him?”

“I have no idea,” Keating said. “Does it matter?”

“It may. I believe that Mr. Hamid may have held out long enough for his appendix to burst. And the recovery period for that is not two or three days, but three weeks or more. If I’m right, Hamid is flat on his back in a hospital bed somewhere. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to find out which bed and which hospital.”

“I understand,” Keating said. “I’m on it.”

CHAPTER 28

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 121–122] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

On December 7, 1941, six aircraft carriers of the Japanese Imperial Navy launched nearly 400 aircraft in a sneak-attack bombing raid against the U.S. Pacific Fleet based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Twelve American warships were sunk or beached, including every battleship in the Pacific Fleet. Another nine ships were heavily damaged. Over twenty-four hundred Americans were killed. A significant portion of the damage can be attributed to conventional aerial bombs, but the real killer of the day was the air-launched torpedo. Carried beneath the fuselages of Kate bombers, the Japanese torpedoes cut through the shallow waters of the harbor like knives, leaving swaths of fire and death in their wakes. America was at war again, and again it had begun with torpedoes.

*  *  *

Twenty-three years later, in the Tonkin Gulf, off the coast of Vietnam, the American naval destroyer USS Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. The high-speed attack boats fired at least four torpedoes at the American ship, as well as several rounds from their 14.5mm deck guns. The torpedoes all missed, and USS Maddox returned fire with her own guns. Two days later, North Vietnamese patrol boats conducted torpedo attacks on another American naval destroyer, USS Turner Joy. As in the attack on USS Maddox, the Turner Joy came away from the engagement without serious damage. President Lyndon B. Johnson saw the attacks as justification for increasing U.S. military presence in Vietnam. The ensuing escalation ultimately led to what we now know as the Vietnam War.

Critics of Johnson (and the war) accused the president of stretching the incident out of proportion and (essentially) fabricating an excuse to go to war with the North Vietnamese. The arguments over the war and President Johnson’s role in escalating it continue to this day, but two facts remain undisputed: America was at war again, and it had begun (again) with torpedoes.

CHAPTER 29

FIREWALKER TWO-SIX

SOUTHERN ARABIAN GULF

(STEAMING TOWARD THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ)

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

1330 hours (1:30 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Chief McPherson adjusted the four-point harness that held her in the flight seat and leaned forward far enough to see over the shoulders of the pilot and copilot. The green flight suit she wore over her khakis tugged uncomfortably at her collarbone as she craned her neck to look through the helicopter’s windshield. The helo was new, less than a year into its service life, but the Plexiglas windshield was already beginning to take on a vaguely frosted look—the inevitable product of a thousand tiny scratches born of countless collisions with the desert sand that always seemed to ride the back of the hot Middle Eastern wind.

The chief scanned the wave tops as they slid by a thousand feet below. Their destination, USS Antietam, was down there somewhere—supposedly close now, but she couldn’t see the ship yet.

She stole a glance to her right, where Captain Bowie sat belted into his own flight seat. He seemed lost in thought, but—from the way the muscles in his neck were bunching up—they weren’t pleasant thoughts.

Up in the cockpit, the pilot keyed his mike. “Antietam, this is Firewalker Two-Six. I am on final approach. Request your numbers, over.”

The reply came back a second later. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is Antietam. My numbers are as follows … Winds are thirty degrees off my port bow at twenty-seven knots. Pitch is one degree. Roll is one degree. My SPY radar is silent aft. All HF antennas within thirty degrees of your approach vector are silent, over.”

The pilot nodded and looked over his shoulder. “Captain, everything is looking good. We’re going to head for the barn.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “Understood.”

The pilot keyed the mike again. “Antietam, this is Firewalker Two-Six. Copy all. Your numbers look good. Request green deck, over.”

“We’re going the wrong way,” Captain Bowie said. He spoke softly, and it was difficult to hear him over the wail of the twin turbine engines and the syncopated thump of the helo’s rotors.

Chief McPherson leaned closer to him. “Sir?”

The captain looked up. “Just thinking aloud,” he said. He jerked a thumb over his left shoulder toward the tail of the helo—toward the southern end of the Arabian Gulf. “My ship is back that way, steaming toward the bad guys at top speed.” He pointed in the direction of the helo’s nose. “Meanwhile, I’m flying this way—away from my ship and away from the threat—so that we can go drink coffee and make polite conversation with the man who’s about to snatch the rug out from under us.”

The chief thought for a few seconds and said, “We don’t know that, sir. Captain Whiley may be planning to leave you in command of the SAU. That’s certainly the smart thing to do.”

“He’s going to take command,” Captain Bowie said. “That’s why we’re being summoned to his ship. He wants to do this on his turf, where he is the captain, and I’m just a visiting commander.”

That, Chief McPherson knew, was likely to be true. According to naval custom, there could only be one captain aboard any warship, and that was the commanding officer. The instant Captain Bowie’s foot touched the deck of Antietam, he would revert to his actual rank of commander and remain as such until he departed the ship.

Captain Bowie cocked one eyebrow. “Of course, if I were in a position to do the same thing to him, this is probably how I would do it. It’s actually a half-decent piece of political maneuvering, even if it does piss me off.”

Chief McPherson nodded once and turned back to look through the windshield again. After a few seconds, she spotted the Antietam, still steaming south toward her rendezvous with the other ships in the Search Attack Unit. From a thousand feet up, the aging Aegis guided missile cruiser looked like a bathtub toy—a trick of perspective that would soon change, the chief knew. In fact, at 566 feet, the cruiser was 37 feet longer than the Towers.

Approaching from the cruiser’s bow, the pilot flew down the ship’s starboard side and made a tight buttonhook turn to the right, lining up with the flight deck and shedding unneeded altitude with the same neat maneuver. The toy-sized ship began to grow rapidly in the helicopter’s windshield.

The voice of Antietam’s radio talker came over the speaker. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is Antietam. My deck is green, over.”

The pilot keyed his mike. “Antietam, this is Firewalker Two-Six. Copy your green deck. I am making my approach, over.”

*  *  *

Less than a minute later, the helo touched down on the ship’s gently rolling deck with a thump that was barely audible over the din of the rotors. It was as smooth a landing as the chief had ever seen. Of course, it should have been; the seas were calm, and the relative winds across the deck were nearly ideal. But not all shipboard landings were so easy. Navy pilots and flight deck crews were trained to make landings under unbelievable conditions, on heavy seas, in low visibility, with the ship bucking and rolling, the winds shifting freakishly, and maybe an engine failure thrown in for good measure.

A few seconds after they were down, a young enlisted man wearing a purple flight deck jersey and a cranial-style flight deck helmet opened the door from the outside. The roar of the helo’s rotors grew instantly louder. The Sailor threw Commander Bowie a quick salute and shouted, “Welcome aboard, Commander. Can you please follow me, sir?”

Commander Bowie gave the man a thumbs-up and reached to unbuckle his safety harness. Being senior, the commander was first out, followed a few seconds later by the chief. They followed the purple-jerseyed Sailor across the flight deck at a quick trot, heads ducked to avoid the helicopter’s thundering rotor blades.

The Sailor led them to a watertight door, which he opened for them. They stepped through, and the Sailor stepped in after them and dogged it closed. The noise level dropped dramatically.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” the Sailor said again—at a more reasonable volume this time. “The captain is waiting for you in the wardroom. If you’ll follow me, please.”

Commander Bowie nodded. “Thank you, son.”

The Sailor led them through a series of passageways and up several ladders to officers’ country. When he came to the door of the wardroom, he knocked, opened the door, and held it for them, but he didn’t enter.

They stepped past him into the wardroom. It was even fancier than the wardroom aboard Towers, one of the perks—no doubt—of having a senior full-bird captain as commanding officer.

Captain Stuart Whiley stood when they entered the room and beckoned them further into his inner sanctum. He was a short, wiry man in his late forties. His crisply starched khakis were impeccably tailored, and his brush-cut hair was a shade of black so improbably deep that it was almost certainly colored. His movements were quick and adroit. He smiled, showing a mouth full of very white teeth, and extended a hand. “Welcome aboard, Commander.”

Commander Bowie gripped the offered hand and shook it. “Thank you, Captain. You’ve got yourself a fine-looking ship here.”

Captain Whiley nodded and released the commander’s hand. “Kind words coming from the man who drives the most advanced ship the Navy has to offer.”

He made introductions around the table. “This is my XO, Commander Don Palmer.” A tall, blond man stood up and offered his hand. “And this is Commander Rachel Vargas, CO of the Benfold.” A trim woman with copper skin and deeply chiseled cheekbones stood up and shook Commander Bowie’s hand. She smiled. “Commander Bowie and I are old steaming buddies. I’ve been keeping him out of trouble for years.” She looked him in the eye. “Good to see you, Jim.”

The last person at the table was a stocky redheaded man. He stood up and stretched out his hand. “This is the CO of Ingraham, Commander Mike Culkins.”

Commander Bowie shook his hand. “Mike and I know each other too. We did our first Divo tours together on the Bunker Hill. I coached Mike on ship handling, and he taught me how to drink too much without falling down.”

Commander Culkins grinned. “A skill that remains useful through the years.”

“Well,” Captain Whiley said, “looks like this is old-home week for you three.” His smile was theatrical, and it didn’t fool anyone.

His eyes lit on the chief, as though noticing her for the first time. He paused for a second. “Perhaps your chief will be more comfortable down in the CPO Mess.”

Commander Bowie looked at his chief. “Will we be starting immediately?”

The captain nodded. “We’re ready to begin now, unless you’d rather change out of your flight suit first.”

Commander Bowie shook his head. “I’m fine, sir. Ready to start when you are.”

“Good,” Captain Whiley said. He motioned to the table, which was laid out with trays of deli-style sandwiches. “I thought we’d have sandwiches and coffee while we work.” He smiled again. “Sort of a power lunch.”

“Looks great, sir,” Commander Bowie said. “But if we’re going to get started right away, I’d prefer that Chief McPherson stay up here. With your permission, of course. I brought her along because she’s been chasing submarines for the better part of twenty years. I know that I wouldn’t want to plan a sub hunt without her input.”

Captain Whiley’s smile narrowed perhaps a millimeter. “Fine,” he said with a quick nod. His tone of voice said that it was anything but fine. “We’d be foolish to ignore that sort of expertise.” He looked at the chief. “Make yourself at home, Chief. Welcome to Antietam’s wardroom.” His eyes carried not the barest glimmer of the welcome that he’d just offered her.

Chief McPherson took the nearest seat. “Thank you, sir. I hope I contribute something worthwhile.”

“I’m certain that you will,” the captain said. “Chief petty officers are the backbone of the Navy. I’ve always said that, and I’ve always believed it. They’re the subject matter experts.”

“Thank you, sir,” the chief said. She noticed that Captain Whiley was making no move to summon his own Chief Sonar Technician.

Commander Bowie found a chair, and as soon as he was seated, Captain Whiley walked to the far end of the room. A projection screen hung from the ceiling. He pulled a pen-shaped laser pointer from his shirt pocket and picked up a small remote control unit from the corner of the table. He pressed a button on the remote, and the lights dimmed. He pressed another button, and a ceiling-mounted projector flared to life. A map of the Middle East appeared, extending from the northern tip of the Arabian Gulf—at the top left-hand corner of the screen, to the Gulf of Oman and Northern Arabian Sea—near the lower right corner of the screen. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is our playground.”

The map, and the images that followed, were crisp, brightly colored, and had a professional edge to them. It rapidly became obvious that the briefing material had been prepared by someone who knew what they were doing, undoubtedly using slick commercial software. And Captain Whiley had studied his material well. He used the laser pointer to great advantage as he worked his way through screen after screen of images and charts.

Chief McPherson put down the sandwich she had been nibbling on and watched the captain’s presentation with a growing sense of alarm. First off, this was not a tactical planning meeting; it was a dog and pony show. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Whiley had not invited them here to brainstorm tactics and search plans. He’d brought them here to wow them with his plan—one that he’d already formulated—meaning that it probably wasn’t up for debate. Taken by itself, that was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. Whiley’s planning was straight out of the textbook.

The chief shifted uncomfortably in her seat. There were three commanding officers in the room, besides Whiley himself. Surely they wouldn’t leave it up to her to say something. She was the only non-commissioned officer present, and Whiley had already made it perfectly clear that she was less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels. If she opened her mouth, he would stick his foot down her throat. And pissing off a full-bird captain would not be a good way to start her afternoon.

She was about to take her chances and say something anyway, when Commander Bowie spoke up. He cleared his throat. “Ah, Captain? If I may?”

Whiley continued for a few seconds before the interruption filtered through to his brain. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at Commander Bowie. “Can I do something for you, Commander?”

Commander Bowie cleared his throat again. “Yes, sir. I can’t help noticing that your search and attack plans follow Navy doctrine pretty closely.”

Whiley smiled. “Thank you for noticing that, Commander. I pride myself on keeping abreast of the latest tactics. Train like you fight, and fight like you train. Anything else will get your ass shot off.”

“Yes, sir,” Commander Bowie said. “Ordinarily, I would agree with you one hundred percent. But we’re dealing with an unusual case here, Captain. We’re taking on submarine crews that are trained in NATO tactical procedures. If we try to use NATO strategies against them, we’re going to get our heads handed to us.”

Captain Whiley’s cheeks reddened visibly, even in the semidarkness. He opened his mouth to speak, but Commander Vargas, commanding officer of the Benfold, jumped in. “With all due respect, Captain, I have to agree with Commander Bowie. So far, every ship that has tangled with these guys has followed standard doctrine, and all they’ve got to show for it is a string of downed aircraft, dead Sailors, and broken ships. We’re the last line of defense here, sir. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes they did.”

Captain Whiley pressed a button on the remote, and the lights snapped on without warning, half-blinding everyone in the room. “Are you two seriously suggesting that we flush years of battle-tested doctrine down the toilet and start over from ground zero?”

Commander Culkins piped up. “We wouldn’t exactly be starting from ground zero, sir. Commander Bowie and his USW team have already cranked out some preliminary tactics. Commander Vargas and I have been helping them plug the leaks, and I must say they look pretty sound to me.”

Captain Whiley’s eyes narrowed. “Do they now? And I assume you’ve worked out some method of testing these new tactics before you encounter the enemy? An enemy, I might add, that has already sent one ship to the bottom and put two others in dry dock.”

Commander Bowie shook his head. “No, Captain. There isn’t time to test them, but I still think it would be safer to avoid …”

Captain Whiley’s voice rose. “Did I hear you right, Commander? Did you actually say ‘safer’? How can it possibly be safe to chuck everything we’ve learned about USW in the trash can and substitute a bunch of untried theories? Good god, man, these new tactics you’re trying to shove on me haven’t even been tested in simulations, have they?”

“No, sir.”

Commander Palmer, Captain Whiley’s executive officer opened his mouth to say something and then snapped it shut. He obviously had an opinion on one side or the other, but it looked as though he had decided that it was better to keep it to himself.

“So, in a nutshell,” Captain Whiley said, “you have no idea whether or not your ideas are tactically sound.” He looked around the room, the scorn on his face as evident as it was in his voice. “Am I really the only person who’s bothered by this little technicality? Safety comes from doing what works. Well, we know what works, and we are damned well going to do it. I am NOT going to jeopardize four United States Navy warships, and their crews, so that you can try to armchair quarterback your way through an engagement with proven hostile forces! You can forget that business, right now, mister. You can all forget it!”

Chief McPherson got to her feet. Every eye in the room snapped to her. “Captain? Request permission to speak, sir.”

Breathing heavily, Captain Whiley stared at her for a few seconds. “What is it?”

Chief McPherson swallowed and tried with limited success to still the trembling in her knees. “May I show you something, sir? It will illustrate an important point that needs to be taken into consideration, no matter whose search plans get used.”

“Very well,” Whiley snapped. “But make it fast. We don’t have time for much more of this nonsense; those submarines are getting closer every second.”

The chief nodded. “I understand that, sir. In fact, what I have to say hinges on that very thought.” She reached across the table toward the captain. “May I borrow your laser pointer, sir?”

Captain Whiley glared at her, and for a half-second he seemed to consider refusing to give her the pointer. But apparently he couldn’t think of an even remotely viable reason for refusing such a simple request, so he dropped the pointer into her outstretched palm.

“Thank you, sir.” The chief flicked the power button on the pointer and directed the beam toward the all-but-forgotten video screen. The computerized projection was nearly washed out by the fluorescent overhead lights, but enough of a ghost image was visible to make out the Straits of Hormuz and the neat black arcs and lines that represented Captain Whiley’s assessment of the tactical situation.

In the lighted room, the dot of the laser pointer appeared more pink than red. Chief McPherson maneuvered the pink dot back and forth in a semicircle, tracing and retracing a curved black line on the captain’s programmed projection.

“As I understand it, sir, this is the farthest-on circle for time fourteen hundred local. Is that correct, sir?”

“Yes,” Captain Whiley said. “Yes, it is.”

“And you computed it using the formula for diesel submarines found in standing Navy USW doctrine?”

“Of course I did.”

The chief swallowed again. “Sir, with all due respect, it’s not only wrong, it’s not even in the ballpark.”

The captain grabbed a stack of hardcopy printouts of radio messages lying on the table and began to rifle through it. “You sound pretty sure of yourself, Chief. Am I to assume that you have better access to satellite intelligence data than I do? I assure you that my data is up to the minute!”

“I’m certain that it is, sir. But you’ve calculated the rate of travel for the subs at fifteen knots for the first hour and five knots for every hour after that.”

The captain nodded. “In accordance with tactical doctrine, Chief. Now, will you please make your point?”

“Captain, those speed figures are based on the fact that a normal diesel submarine operating on batteries can only sprint for about an hour before its batteries begin to go flat. After that, it has to slow down drastically, or it won’t have enough battery power to run even basic systems.”

The captain crossed his arms. “I know this, Chief. In fact, I’d venture to say that every person in this room knows it. That’s just about the first thing the Navy teaches you in Surface Warfare Officer school. But I’m sure we all appreciate the refresher training.” He reached for his pointer. “Can we continue, now?”

The chief took a breath. “Captain, that theory doesn’t apply to the Type 212 diesel submarine. The 212s are equipped with an air-independent propulsion system. Basically, they’re a modified version of the hydrogen fuel cells used on the space shuttle. They can produce about 300 kilowatts of power for … well, never mind that. The point is, sir, the 212Bs can do nineteen or twenty knots submerged for days at a time.” She directed the laser pointer back toward the screen and drew a huge curve, far outside the captain’s neat black arc. “If we recalculate the farthest-on circle for a continuous speed of twenty knots, it will fall way out here somewhere.” She flicked the laser pointer off and handed it to the captain. “Sir, those submarines are already outside of your containment area. If we go looking where doctrine tells us to, we’re going to be searching where those subs have already been. We can’t follow doctrine, Captain. If we try, we’ve already lost the battle.”

Captain Whiley stood without speaking, and for nearly a minute the room was silent. Then Whiley’s eyes focused on Chief McPherson, and he nodded. “Thank you for pointing out the error in my calculations, Chief. We will, naturally, recompute the farthest-on circles using speeds appropriate for the 212 diesel submarine.”

Commander Bowie said, “Captain, with regard to the rest of the standing doctrine …”

“With regard to the rest of standing doctrine, there will be no change.”

“But sir …”

“But nothing, Commander. A single miscalculation is hardly sufficient cause to dump the entire body of our Navy’s accumulated knowledge of Undersea Warfare.”

“Sir,” Commander Culkins said, “the Germans will be able to predict our every move.”

“So what?” Whiley snapped. “Every baseball team in America plays by the same set of rules, from the same book. No secret strategies. No tricky little surprises. But somebody loses and somebody wins, every single time. Same rules. Same bases. Same ball. Because one team is faster, and better trained, and better coached, and—most important—they want it more.” He glared at everyone in the room. “That is how we will win this fight. We will follow proven doctrine, and we will be smarter, faster, and deadlier than those goddamned submarines. Those are my orders, and they are not subject to negotiation.” He slammed the laser pointer down on the tabletop. “Any questions?”

He obviously didn’t expect any questions, but Commander Culkins raised his hand. “What kind of backup can we expect on this mission, sir?”

“Backup?”

“Yes, sir. Can we get P-3 assets? How about a friendly sub to run interference?”

Captain Whiley shook his head. “There will be no backup. We have been ordered to complete this mission utilizing only assets organic to our four ships. No P-3s, no friendly submarines, no cavalry. We’re on our own, here.”

Commander Bowie frowned. “Can we go back to Fifth Fleet and ask them to rethink this one? USS Topeka is not that far away, and I’m sure USNAVCENT can whistle up a couple of P-3s, sir.”

Captain Whiley leaned over the table. “Admiral Rogers assures me that my orders come from the president himself, through the Chief of Naval Operations. I intend to follow those orders to the letter. And that means that every one of you will follow my orders without question, and absolutely without fail. Am I making myself clear here?”

He waited several seconds. “Good. You are dismissed. Return to your ships and make ready for combat!”

As they filed out of the wardroom, Chief McPherson leaned near her skipper and whispered, “We’re all going to die, sir.”

CHAPTER 30

WHITE HOUSE PRESS ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

3:30 PM EDT

White House Press Secretary Lauren Hart stood at the podium and leaned close to the bank of microphones. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “the President of the United States.”

The men and women of the news media came to their feet as President Chandler strode into the room. The usual smattering of polite applause died away when he reached the podium.

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle watched from just inside the door.

Camera flashes began popping at irregular intervals. The president looked out over the assembled press corps and marshaled his thoughts. “Good afternoon,” he said finally. “As most of you are no doubt aware, five days ago, a squadron of German war planes engaged in an extended sea battle with two warships of the British Royal Navy. One of the British ships, HMS York, was sunk as a result, and the other ship, HMS Chatham, was severely damaged. Four German aircraft were destroyed. Over two hundred British Sailors were killed, as well as the pilots of the downed German planes.

“Last night, shortly before midnight eastern daylight time, two squadrons of British Sea Harriers conducted coordinated missile strikes on a German warship in the North Sea, apparently in retaliation for the earlier attacks on York and Chatham. The German guided-missile frigate FGS Sachsen sustained major damage. Eighty-six German Sailors were killed along with one British pilot, who failed to eject when his aircraft was destroyed.

“There has been a great deal of speculation in the media as to who fired the first shot, and—more to the point—what led the German and British navies into conflict to begin with.

“I’m afraid that I can’t shed much light on the first question. Analysts from the Pentagon and the Naval War College have been over the available data in detail, and they are no closer to knowing who pulled the trigger first. And, since both countries have denied initiating the hostilities, it seems likely that we will never know who fired first.

“But I can answer the second question. HMS York and HMS Chatham were conducting a naval blockade against four submarines of the German Navy. And they were carrying out that blockade at my request.”

The room broke into an uproar of voices as the journalists leapt to their feet and began shouting questions. A male voice cut through it all. “Mr. President, can you tell us about the attack on USS Kitty Hawk?”

The president held up a hand and waited for silence. It was several minutes in coming. Only when it became clear that he was not going to say another word until order was restored did the journalists take their seats.

Eventually, the president nodded. “I asked Prime Minister Irons to blockade the Strait of Gibraltar to prevent the passage of the German submarines. I made the decision to do so on the basis of compelling evidence that the government of Germany intends to deliver those submarines, and other high-tech weaponry, to the Middle Eastern nation of Siraj, in clear violation of international law and standing United Nations sanctions.”

Once again the press corps erupted into a clamor of confused questions. And, once again, the president held up his hand and waited for silence.

“As I mentioned, we have compelling evidence of Germany’s intentions,” he said finally, “and we have made arrangements to deliver that evidence to the United Nations Security Council. I am confident that, upon reviewing the evidence, the UN will take appropriate action to prevent the German government from arming a nation known to support terrorists.

“Unfortunately, the wheels of international diplomacy turn slowly. By the time the United Nations can react to this situation, Germany’s first shipments of military hardware will have reached their destinations in Siraj.” The president paused for a second to let his words sink in.

“Abdul al-Rahiim styles himself as the president of Siraj, but the world knows better. You and I know better. Abdul al-Rahiim is a dictator and a tyrant. He is a lawless brute who rules by violence and by the threat of violence. He has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use military force against his neighboring countries and against the very people he claims to govern.

“Until this point, the United Nations has chosen to contain his abuses through restrictive political and economic sanctions, enforced largely by a multinational naval blockade. Though many people—and I include myself on the list—have advocated for more direct action against the government of Abdul al-Rahiim, the UN’s sanctions have had significant success in keeping a lid on his oppressive regime.

“But those efforts will all come to nothing if we allow this tyrant to rearm his military. Think of the damage he was able to do with aging ex-Soviet military hardware. And then imagine what he could do with state-of-the-art weaponry. Imagine what the Middle East will look like if Abdul al-Rahiim finds himself in possession of cutting-edge submarines, fighter jets, and missile systems.

“The United States cannot—will not—stand by and watch as advanced weapons systems are handed over to Siraj. And so I asked Prime Minister Irons for assistance in blocking the delivery of four technologically advanced submarines. The resulting blockade ended in the attack on HMS Chatham and HMS York.

“Early this morning, United States Navy warships operating on my orders attempted to intercept the German submarines in the Gulf of Aden, south of the Middle Eastern country of Yemen. A naval battle ensued. An aircraft carrier, USS Kitty Hawk, suffered serious battle damage, and two U.S. Navy helicopters were shot down. Twenty-one American Sailors were killed: fifteen aboard the Kitty Hawk, plus the air crews of both helicopters.

“I spoke at length with Chancellor Shoernberg on the phone, shortly after we received word of the attack on USS Kitty Hawk. He formally declined to apologize for the attacks on our ships or the ships of the Royal Navy. Chancellor Shoernberg also refused to comment on Germany’s intentions with regard to Siraj. In the hours since our phone conversation, the chancellor has rejected all attempts to open a diplomatic dialogue.”

The president gripped the edges of the podium and stared directly into the television cameras. “I do not wish to believe that a long-trusted ally has turned against the United States, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to view the actions of the German government in a friendly light.” His eyes narrowed. “To Chancellor Shoernberg, President Bremen, and the Federal Assembly of the German government, I say this: I have already dispatched ships to intercept and sink the four submarines in question. It is neither my desire nor my intention to threaten a sovereign nation with a long history of peaceful ties to the United States, but we will not permit aggression against our citizens or our military forces to go unpunished. We remain open to a diplomatic solution, but we will take whatever steps we deem necessary to prevent the delivery of those submarines to Siraj. Chancellor Shoernberg, turn back those submarines!”

The president turned and walked toward the door. Flashbulbs began popping furiously and an entire choir of reporters began shouting, “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

Press Secretary Hart stepped up to the podium. “The president thanks you all for coming. He regrets that he cannot answer questions at this time.”

*  *  *

“That’s not going to hold them for long, sir,” Veronica Doyle said as the president passed her on his way out the door.

“I don’t expect it to,” the president said. “But it should put that son of a bitch Shoernberg in the hot seat for a while.”

CHAPTER 31

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

4:42 PM EDT

The laminated hospital ID badge hanging from the breast pocket of his lab coat identified him as Dr. Richard Warren. He looked like any one of the fifty young interns and residents who frequented the wards on the third floor of Columbia Memorial. He wore the usual stethoscope draped around his neck, and his face had the slightly harried appearance that seemed to mark most doctors young enough to still be scrambling for a foothold in the world of HMO-driven medicine. But his name was not Richard Warren, and he was not a doctor. And the two men who walked behind him were not hospital orderlies, despite their green scrubs and hospital IDs.

To the casual eye, all three men blended in perfectly with their surroundings. A careful observer might have noticed that the trio moved with the animal grace of athletes, or that their eyes swept the hallway with the mechanical precision of radar scanners. But—thanks to the closure of DC General, the patient load at Columbia Memorial was nearly forty percent over rated capacity, and the third-floor staff had its hands full just staying on top of emergencies.

The man who was not Dr. Warren stopped at the nurse’s station and flipped through the rack of stainless steel clipboards until he found the chart for Room 31, Bed 4. The floor nurse glanced up from her own paperwork just long enough to register his lab coat and ID. He nodded without speaking, and she returned to her work.

The patient’s name was Isma’il Hamid. His diagnosis was listed as diffuse peritonitis and inflammatory bowel obstruction, secondary to perforated appendicitis. He was on a regimen of high-dose antibiotics and, according to his chart, was responding well to treatment.

The counterfeit doctor closed the chart and returned it to the rack. His pair of bogus orderlies followed him down the hall toward Room 31.

*  *  *

About twenty minutes later, the orderly delivering dinner to Room 31 discovered that Bed 4 was empty. Isma’il Hamid was gone.

CHAPTER 32

U.S. Department of State

Executive Summary on Siraj

Section VII Impact of Sanctions

[Synopsis and Recommendation(s)]

1. Synopsis:

A. In last week’s statement to the United Nations Security Council, Siraji President Abdul al-Rahiim accused the UN of playing politics with hunger. “My people are starving,” he said. “The sanctions against my country are squeezing the life out of my citizens. You sit in judgment over what you refer to as my excesses, and yet you ignore the fact that it is your resolution and your sanctions that condemn the Siraji people to slow death.”

When reminded that food, medicine, and humanitarian supplies are exempted from standing UN sanctions, Abdul al-Rahiim had no comment.

(See Appendix-B, Tab-C for a full transcript of President Abdul al-Rahiim’s remarks.) [Cross-index 737465616c7468626f6f6b732e636f6d]

B. Even as Abdul al-Rahiim claims that his people are suffering, he persists in obstructing humanitarian supplies intended for the citizens of Siraj. Despite Abdul al-Rahiim’s protests, his regime continues to export food in exchange for hard currency. In many cases, the exported foodstuffs are diverted directly from humanitarian shipments. Less than a week ago, ships charged with enforcing the UN blockade against Siraj seized the container ship MV City of Light outbound from the Siraji port city of Zubayr. Among the cargo were 1,500 metric tons of rice and over 1,200 tons of powdered baby formula, baby bottles, and other nursing supplies. The seized materials were all earmarked for resale overseas, and all items could be traced back (by lot and batch numbers) to supplies delivered to Siraj in humanitarian shipments. Kuwaiti authorities continue to report seizures of supply trucks traveling overland out of Siraj. In most cases, the supplies in question can be traced directly back to shipments of humanitarian goods.

C. Not since Saddam Hussein have we seen a Middle Eastern leader whose motives are so unambiguously mercenary. Abdul al-Rahiim has built twenty-one palaces for himself since the UN blockade against his country was imposed. He continues to use all resources at his disposal to rearm the Siraji military and to finance his opulent lifestyle. His priorities are clear, and they do not include the welfare of the Siraji people.

2. Recommendation(s):

A. It is overtly obvious that relaxing or lifting the sanctions against Siraj will bring no relief to the inhabitants of the country. Such a move will only offer an already dangerous man increased leverage for destabilizing this politically fragile region. State recommends no change in U.S. position regarding the standing UN sanctions against Siraj.

AIR FORCE ONE FRIDAY; 18 MAY

7:03 PM EDT

President Chandler dropped the state department summary on the briefing table and settled into his plush, gray-leather swivel chair. Except for the seat belts and the obvious fact that ordinary office furniture was rarely bolted to the floor, the chair would have looked at home in any high-powered corporate boardroom.

At its cruising altitude of thirty-six thousand feet, the huge Boeing 747 200B was slicing easily through the bright morning sky. So far, the flight had been free of turbulence. Even so, the president fastened his seat belt almost immediately after sitting down. He would have preferred to leave the seat belt off, but safety protocols dictated otherwise. There were people in the world who would attack the presidential jet if given the chance, and the pilots might be forced to take evasive maneuvers with little or no warning.

As long as the captain of the aircraft kept the “Fasten Seat Belts” light turned off, anyone else on the plane was free to sit without buckling in. This was a minor source of irritation to Frank, but as one of the pilots had once pointed out, the president’s safety was a matter of immediate national security. The lives of the president’s staff and the press corps, as valuable as they were, could not be considered a national security issue.

Of course, the president could have ignored the safety guidelines. Many presidents had. But there were too many people who spent their lives trying to protect him—too many whose jobs and training would require them to sacrifice their own lives in order to save his. He owed it to them to do what he could to protect himself. And that meant, among other things, fastening his seat belt even when he didn’t feel like it.

He gave the belt an extra tug. It was a nice seat belt, as seat belts went. Like every one on the plane, the buckle was embossed with the presidential seal.

Satisfied that he had done his tiny part to comply with the safety protocols, the president looked up at the small group of people on the opposite side of the briefing table.

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven sat directly across from him, flanked on the left by White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, and on the right by Undersecretary of State Lawrence Mitchell.

The president leaned forward and rested his arms on the briefing table. “Let’s start with China.”

Brenthoven glanced at his notebook. “Both sides have stepped up their military air presence over the Taiwan Strait, sir. About three o’clock this morning local time, a pair of Taiwanese Mirage 2000s made simulated attack passes on three Chinese J-10s. Nobody actually launched, and none of the aircraft crossed the invisible line down the middle of the strait, but they traded lock-ons with their fire control radars and generally crowded the hell out of each other.”

“Playing chicken?”

“That’s all it is so far, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “But both sides are flying about three times as many sorties as usual, and they all appear to be carrying full wartime weapon load-outs. Having that much military hardware flying around creates a lot of opportunities for mistakes. This could turn into a shoot-out in about a split-second.”

The president looked at Undersecretary Mitchell. “Larry, your boss has been back and forth between Taipei and Beijing about a dozen times recently. What does the water feel like over there? Is this whole thing just posturing? Or do you think they could be gearing up for a fight?”

“The diplomatic rhetoric is hard-line as hell on both sides of the strait, Mr. President. China is about a half-inch from threatening outright war if Taipei continues to move toward a formal referendum on independence. And the new Taiwanese government is openly referring to this latest Chinese ballistic missile test as nuclear blackmail. The Taiwanese army is repositioning land-based missile launchers and recalling reserve personnel for combat training. And China is mobilizing army units for their largest military exercise in ten years. The Chinese government says that the timing is a coincidence, but nobody’s buying that.”

The president nodded. “What about the naval side of things?”

“We’re keeping a close eye on the infrared picture for both navies,” Brenthoven said. “Our satellites can detect the heat plumes when their ships light off their engines. So far, the deployed force levels for both navies look pretty much status quo. No sign that anyone is rushing to put more ships to sea, but that could change pretty quickly.”

“How quickly?” the president asked.

“It would take either side about two hours to put a significant patrol force to sea,” Brenthoven said. “And about twelve hours to scramble most of their frigates, destroyers, and submarines. The newer gas turbine ships can get under way in about an hour, but the older steam-powered ships will require the better part of a day to light off their engineering plants, heat up their boilers, and get up a head of steam.”

“How many ships are we talking about?”

Brenthoven scanned his notes again. “China has what the CNO likes to call a ‘frigate navy,’ sir. Their order of battle includes about four hundred patrol boats, missile boats, and torpedo boats, but they have fewer than fifty major combatant ships. Taiwan is severely outnumbered with regards to patrol, missile, and torpedo boats but has roughly the same number of major combatants as China. However, from a qualitative standpoint, Taiwan’s ships are a lot more modern and generally a lot more mission capable. If it comes down to a gunfight, they’re pretty evenly matched. Taiwan has the edge in shore-launched anti-ship missiles, though. And that could well tip the balance in a major naval engagement. The Chinese military has concentrated more on ballistic and surface-to-surface missiles than on anti-ship missiles. That’s going to cost them if they try an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.”

“An amphibious invasion?” Under Secretary Mitchell asked. “I didn’t think China had enough amphibious transport ships to do the job.”

“They don’t, Mr. Secretary,” Brenthoven said. “According to our latest assessments, China can only move about one division at a time, and that’s not enough to seize and maintain a decent foothold if the Taiwanese resistance is even half as good as we think it would be.”

Doyle nodded. “At least we don’t have to worry about the Chinese mounting an invasion.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” the national security advisor said.

The president stared at him. “Make up your mind, Greg. The Chinese either have the amphibious capacity to mount an invasion, or they don’t. Which is it?”

“They … might, sir,” Brenthoven said. “If you count strictly military assets, they certainly don’t. But a few years ago, the RAND Institute’s National Security Research Division published a report on the military aspects of a China-Taiwan confrontation. The report referred to something called a reverse Dunkirk tactic. The short of it is, China has a large number of commercial vessels that could be pressed into service as troop ferries, along with a few thousand smaller civilian craft, all of which could be used to transport small numbers of troops.”

“Will it work?” the president asked.

“About half of the military experts say no, and the other half say yes, sir. A lot of it depends on Taiwan’s anti-ship missiles, and on whether or not Taiwan can gain air superiority over the strait.”

“So it still comes down to a coin toss,” Doyle said.

Brenthoven nodded. “Pretty much. But if that coin gets tossed, a lot of people will die, no matter which way it falls.”

The president exhaled through his teeth. “What can we do to prevent that coin from being tossed?”

“We’re already doing it, sir. Our carrier-based F-18Es are flying regular sorties over the straits too. They’re sticking to the neutral zone between Taiwanese and Chinese airspace, but their presence is sending a pretty strong signal. The Chinese know that Taiwan will gain air superiority over the strait if we help them. China can’t launch an effective invasion if Taiwan owns the sky over the strait.”

“Once again we’ve got our finger stuck in the dike,” the president said. “If we pull the carriers out, do you think the Chinese will actually try anything?”

Brenthoven shrugged. “The Pentagon thinks an invasion scenario is possible but extremely unlikely.”

“So we can’t rule it out,” the president said.

“No, sir.”

The president sighed. “Okay. We keep working the diplomatic angle, but we leave the carriers in place, for now at least.”

He leaned back. “Germany.”

Undersecretary Mitchell spoke up. “The diplomatic situation between Germany and Britain is deteriorating rapidly, Mr. President. Chancellor Shoernberg has publicly refused to apologize for the attack on HMS York and HMS Chatham. He claims that Britain defaulted on all existing treaties and agreements the second the Royal Navy tried to impede the passage of German submarines through international waters. He’s calling for a formal apology from Prime Minster Irons, and he’s demanding reparations for the aircraft that were destroyed and the pilots who were killed. He’s really pitching a fit over the German warship, the Sachsen.”

“Reparations? I don’t see that happening,” Doyle said.

“I don’t either,” Mitchell said. “The average British man on the street has blood in his eye right now. They were already mad as hell over the attack on their embassy. They’re ready to hurt somebody, and the shooting match with the Germans has just given them a target for all of that anger. Prime Minister Irons is addressing Parliament this afternoon. The grapevine says she’s going to ask for suspension of diplomatic ties with Germany.”

The president grimaced. “Not good. When countries stop talking …”

“They have a tendency to start shooting,” the national security advisor finished. “Sad, but true, Mr. President. And from the looks of things, both sides are gearing up for it. Military bases on both sides of the English Channel have been ordered to increased states of readiness, and air activity for both countries has picked up by about fifty percent.”

“Is the naval operating tempo increasing as well?”

“Not yet, sir,” Brenthoven said. “But that’s probably coming.”

“What’s the latest on the submarines?”

“No word on their current location, sir. Fifth Fleet has assigned four ships to intercept them south of the Strait of Hormuz. I have to tell you, Mr. President, it’s going to take a lot of luck to pull this off.”

“Unfortunately,” Doyle said, “luck has been in rather short supply around here lately.”

The president nodded. “Right now, we’re looking at about eighteen different ways the world could go to shit.”

Undersecretary Mitchell smiled weakly. “Well, at least it can’t get any worse.”

CHAPTER 33

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

2200 hours (10:00 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Chief McPherson ran her fingers down the back of one of the Mark-54 torpedoes. She’d been chasing submarines for nineteen and a half years, first as an Ocean Systems Technician Analyst, then as a Sonar Technician, but she had never fired a torpedo.

The weapon’s anodized metal skin was smooth and cold, perhaps as cold as the bottom of the sea. As cold as the torn, lifeless bodies of the German Sailors would be.

First would come the fire, the shaped charge blasting through the steel hull, burning everything its white molten plasma jet passed close to. Then the sea would burst in through the broken hull, flooding compartments with the roar of a tidal wave, drowning the few men not already killed by the explosion, or crushing them to a pulp. And then the cold would come, the intense cold of the sea. Quenching the fierce heat of the man-made volcano, leaching the warmth from the still-twitching bodies of the crew, until everything—the twisted steel, the mangled flesh, the terrified screams of dying men—were all the same temperature as the frigid water of the ocean bottom.

Behind her, the air drive motor started up with its characteristic hiss. The huge armored door to the torpedo magazine began to swing slowly open.

Chief McPherson looked over her shoulder. Who would be coming into the magazine at this time of night?

She popped to attention as soon as she recognized the figure standing in the widening gap of the doorway. “Good evening, sir.”

Captain Bowie smiled and stepped into the magazine. “Carry on, Chief.”

The chief relaxed and turned back toward the rack of stowed torpedoes. She laid her hand on the top weapon again. “I can see their faces, sir.”

The captain waited a second before asking, “Whose faces?”

“The faces of the German submarine crews.” She took a heavy breath and released it. “I’ve been chasing subs as long as I can remember, and I’ve always pictured them as these sort of dark, foreboding shapes, sneaking through the depths, hiding in the shadows.” She patted the torpedo twice with the palm of her hand. “I’ve been training to kill submarines, and talking about killing submarines, and planning the best ways to kill submarines since I was nineteen years old. And now that I’m going to actually do it, I can’t picture the submarines at all anymore. All I can see are the faces of those German Sailors. Faces of people I’ve never even met before … never will meet.”

The captain nodded slowly. “What do these faces look like?”

Chief McPherson’s eyes locked on the captain’s for a half-second and then flitted away. “Young, sir. Trained and confident. More than a little scared, but trying like hell to be brave. But young. Too goddamned young to die.” She looked up at her captain again. “They look like the faces of our crew, sir. And in a few hours, I’m going to have to kill them.”

The captain was silent for several seconds, and Chief McPherson began to wonder if she had said too much. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, finally. “Maybe this is a woman thing. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’ll do my job when the time comes. I’ll be ready, sir.”

“I know you will,” the captain said. He laid his own hand on the back of a torpedo. “And don’t worry. It’s not a woman thing. It’s a human thing. And believe me, Chief. You are not the only one feeling it.”

CHAPTER 34

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN GULF OF OMAN

(SOUTH OF THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ)

SATURDAY; 19 MAY

1830 hours (6:30 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

In Combat Information Center, Ensign Patrick Cooper stood near the Computerized Dead-Reckoning Tracer and looked down at the digital flat-screen display that covered the unit’s entire upper surface. Five feet wide and nearly six feet long, the CDRT display screen was much too large to fit on a regular operator’s console. It had to be large, because Anti-Submarine Warfare was complex and intricate. Displayed on a normal-sized operator’s console, a typical ASW engagement would clutter the screen with so many tracking symbols and trial target geometries that it would quickly become impossible to sort anything out. The large CDRT display allowed the symbols to spread out enough to remain legible.

Cooper shifted his weight from his left leg to his right. The large size of the display had a downside. It was impossible to see the entire screen clearly from a sitting position. To take in the complete display, it was necessary to stand close to the unit and look down, directly into the screen. Consequently, the CDRT was the only watch station in Combat Information Center without a chair for the operator. Cooper had been on watch for less than an hour, and he could already feel his leg muscles beginning to tighten up. The hours of standing made for some long watches.

Ensign Cooper shifted his weight again and scanned the display. Friendly ships appeared on the display as small green circles, each with a single line sticking out from its center, like the stick of a lollipop. The lines were called speed vectors. The direction of each vector indicated the course of the ship it represented, and its length indicated the ship’s speed through the water. Fast-moving ships had long speed vectors; slower ships had shorter vectors. The circles and lines were called NTDS symbols, short for Naval Tactical Data System. (Although the NTDS system itself had long been superseded by more advanced technology, its easy-to-read catalog of symbols had carried its legacy into the twenty-first century.) The particular NTDS symbol that represented USS Towers was marked by a bright green cross that divided the circular part of the symbol into four equal quadrants.

Each symbol on the display was trailed by a small three-character code in capital letters: the tactical call sign for that particular ship. Today, Towers’ call sign was Y7M, pronounced “Yankee Seven Mike.”

To Ensign Cooper, the deployment of ships looked excellent. Spaced at eighty percent of their predicted sonar ranges, Towers, Benfold, and Ingraham formed a moving wall of acoustic sensors. They would sweep west in a locked-step zigzag pattern, searching every inch of water between themselves and the probable position of the enemy subs. In the “pouncer” position, Antietam would run behind the advancing barrier. When a submarine was detected, Antietam would come to flank speed and drive around the end of the formation to engage the unsuspecting sub with Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rockets. Then, while the sub was on the run, Antietam’s helicopter, Samurai Seven-Nine, would swoop down out of the sky like a hawk and drop a torpedo right off the target’s bow. Running at high speed to escape the ASROC, the sub should run right into the helo’s torpedo before it even had time to react.

It was a good plan, maybe even a great plan. Unfortunately, it was right out of the book. Ensign Cooper felt uneasy about his captain’s idea of abandoning established doctrine. But the thought of facing an enemy who knows your moves ahead of time had him really scared. No matter how good the Pouncer Plan looked on the color-coded screen of the CDRT, it bordered on suicide.

*  *  *

A voice broke over the encrypted Navy Red radio circuit. “All units, this is SAU Commander. Execute Passive Search Plan Delta, over.”

Ensign Cooper grabbed the red telephone-style handset of the Navy Red terminal and keyed the mike. “SAU Commander, this is Towers. Roger. Executing Search Plan Delta, out.”

Over the next few seconds, Ingraham and Benfold both acknowledged the signal.

Now it begins, Ensign Cooper thought. He leaned over the CDRT and waited for the Sonar Supervisor’s contact report.

For the next few hours, Cooper was the ship’s USWE, or Undersea Warfare Evaluator. It would be his job to coordinate the actions of the Towers USW team: cross-referencing contact reports from the ship’s sonars, targeting information from the fire control computers, oceanographic data—particularly the thermal structure of the water and the topographic shape of the ocean bottom—predicted acoustic ranges, non-acoustic sensor information, the locations of friendly or neutral ships and aircraft, and an almost overwhelming array of other variables that could affect the tactical situation. And to make matters more interesting, much of the data was based on computer projections, not all of which would be correct. The USWE was expected to take this mishmash of information, swirl it around in his head for a bit, discard some pieces of it, latch on to others, and come up with a mental picture of the tactical situation. Then, if the contact was designated as hostile, the USWE would supervise the programming and launching of USW weapons. If the USWE’s tactical picture was accurate enough, those weapons should get close enough to the target submarine for their acoustic seekers to lock on, and (hopefully) destroy the bad guys. Conversely, if the USWE’s tactical picture was too far off the mark, the ship’s weapons wouldn’t be properly placed or programmed, and the submarine would eat their lunch.

Hunting submarines was still more art than science, and the best computers in the world—while they could help him—could not do the job alone. Ensign Cooper smiled nervously to himself. He might not have Chief McPherson’s years of experience, but he was good at this part. At least he had been in school. He’d been the best USWE in his class, and his tactical awareness had been excellent. He’d killed the sub in sixty or seventy percent of the tactical simulations the course instructors had thrown at him—a far better record than anyone else in his class.

Of course, this was not a simulation. The enemy subs out there were real, and their weapons were real. If Cooper guessed wrong at a critical juncture, people would die. The wrong people. His people.

Which meant that he couldn’t let that happen.

*  *  *

The search continued. Seconds dragged into minutes. Then the minutes began to stack up.

He keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE, testing Net One One.”

The Sonar Supervisor answered instantly. “Read you Lima Charlie, USWE. How me?” (Lima Charlie was net-speak for Loud and Clear.)

Ensign Cooper keyed his mike again. “Read you same, Sonar.”

There was nothing wrong with the communication circuit.

He tapped a fingertip on the glass display screen of the CDRT. Why hadn’t sonar reported anything yet?

*  *  *

Ten more minutes passed, and Ensign Cooper keyed his mike again. “Sonar—USWE, report all contacts.”

The Sonar Supervisor’s reply came a few seconds later. “USWE—Sonar, my tracks are as follows: Ingraham, designated Friendly Surface Zero One, bears three-one-five. Benfold, designated Friendly Surface Zero Two, bears two-one-seven. Antietam, designated Friendly Surface Zero Three, bears zero-niner-four. Sonar holds negative passive or active POSS-SUB contacts at this time.”

The ensign chewed on this for a few minutes. Could the subs have slipped by them already? Were the Sonar Technicians searching in the right place? He keyed the mike again. “Ah … Sonar—USWE, your Threat Axis is two-eight-zero. Your Search Sector is two-five-zero to three-one-zero.”

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice carried a note of annoyance. “Sonar copies, sir. I promise you, if we get anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

“USWE, aye.” Ensign Cooper let his finger off the mike button. He was getting his first glimpse of real Undersea Warfare, and it was a waiting game. Hours, maybe days of searching between contacts, most of which would ultimately turn out to be biologics or distant shipping traffic.

The Tactical Action Officer keyed his mike. “USWE—TAO. Now do you understand why we call it U-S-W?”

“Sir?”

The TAO chuckled. “It stands for Unbelievably … Slooooooow … Warfare …”

Ensign Cooper smiled wanly. “USWE, aye.”

“Roger that,” the Sonar Supervisor said over the net. “Do you know the definition of USW, sir?”

Cooper said, “I know the definition that’s in the book, Sonar. What’s your version?”

“Six months of boredom, followed by thirty seconds of sheer terror.”

Although no one could see him, Ensign Cooper nodded. “Point taken, gentlemen. I’ll try to be patient. But if you get anything …”

“You have my word, sir,” the Sonar Supervisor said. “We won’t keep it a secret.”

*  *  *

Three hours and about six cups of coffee later, Chief McPherson showed up to relieve the watch. The hours of uneventful searching had dulled Ensign Cooper’s enthusiasm a bit, and the idea of hitting his rack was starting to sound pretty attractive.

The chief yawned and took a sip from her own coffee. “What have you got, sir?”

The ensign echoed her yawn. “Not a hell of a lot, Chief. We’re about two and a half hours into Passive Search Plan Delta. No luck so far.” He looked up at the clock. “We don’t roll over to a new Zulu-day until after your watch, so you don’t need to worry about updating call signs or loading new-day crypto.”

He yawned again and was about to start a rundown of all surface contacts being tracked by radar and sonar, when the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “USWE—Sonar, request clear-or-foul, bearing three-zero-seven.”

Cooper slapped his palm on the CDRT’s trackball and slewed the cursor over to three-zero-seven. His heart skipped a beat. There were no surface symbols on the plot anywhere near that bearing; the SPY-1 radar had no contacts. But it might still be a small craft. Sometimes wooden boats, especially those with low profiles, didn’t show up very well. He keyed his mike. “Bridge—USWE, request a visual clear-or-foul, bearing three-zero-seven.”

The reply came back in less than ten seconds. “USWE—Bridge, your bearing is clear. Lookouts report no surface contacts to thirty degrees either side. Mast-mounted sight shows negative visual and negative infrared.”

Ensign Cooper swallowed. Instantly awake, his fatigue and boredom were forgotten. He keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE, bearing three-zero-seven is clear. Tag it, bag it, send it to fire control, and then call it away.”

A few seconds later, speakers for the 29-MC announcing circuit crackled to life all over CIC. “All stations—Sonar has passive broadband contact off the port beam, bearing three-zero-seven. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level low.”

Even before the contact had popped up on the CDRT screen, Ensign Cooper was punching the button that patched his comm headset into Navy Red. The sync pulse warbled crazily in his ear for a second until the ship’s encryption system synchronized with the encryption system aboard Antietam. He cleared his throat before keying the mike. “SAU Commander, this is Towers. Contact report to follow. Time, seventeen fifty-one Zulu. My unit holds passive broadband contact, bearing three-zero-seven. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level low, over.”

Less than a second later, Captain Whiley’s voice came over the scrambled radio net. “SAU Commander, aye. Your contact designated Gremlin Zero One. My unit will launch Samurai Seven-Nine in approximately five mikes. Alert status of your aircraft, Firewalker Two-Six upgraded to Ready-Five, over.”

“SAU Commander, this is Towers, roger, out.” As soon as he punched out of the radio circuit, Ensign Cooper keyed back into the USW control net aboard Towers. “TAO—USWE, the SAU Commander has upgraded our helo alert status to Ready-Five.”

The TAO’s voice came back immediately. “TAO, aye. Break. ASTAC—TAO, set Helo Ready-Five.”

The current Ready-Five helicopter, Samurai Seven-Nine was sitting on Antietam’s flight deck, spinning its rotors up for launch at that very second. It would be in the air in five minutes or less—time the screening ships would use to build a firing solution and refine their classification of the contact.

Cooper shifted his attention to the CDRT. Now came the tough part. The next four or five minutes would be crucial. He needed to know what the submarine, designated Gremlin Zero One, was up to—before Antietam’s helo was in the air.

The first piece of the USW puzzle was in place; they knew the contact’s bearing. Instead of a tidy NTDS symbol, the contact appeared on the CDRT display as a red line extending from the center of the symbol for USS Towers to the edge of the screen. The angle of the line was 307 degrees: the bearing of the contact from Towers. The contact could be anywhere along that line of bearing, at a range of anything from a couple of hundred yards, to hundreds of thousands of yards. To localize him further, they would need to know his range. For an effective firing solution, they would also need to know the target’s course and speed, but that could be estimated with a good degree of accuracy once they knew the contact’s range.

Cooper keyed his mike. “UB—USWE, got anything yet?”

The Underwater Battery Fire Control Operator keyed up. “USWE—UB. That’s a negative, sir. The sonar track is looking pretty good, but it’s going to take me a while to nail this guy down off passive broadband alone. If you want something quick, I’m going to need a turn.”

“USWE, aye.”

If they’d had passive narrowband frequency data on the contact, the fire control computer could have calculated the target’s range based on minute changes in Doppler as the submarine moved through the water. Without frequency information, they were restricted to Target Motion Analysis. While it would eventually give them the information they needed, TMA could take twenty minutes or more and would require them to turn at least once (and maybe twice) to feed the computer enough changes in bearing rate to do its magic. But turning wasn’t an option right now. He couldn’t afford to open up a hole in the formation. If he did, the submarine could slip through it and get inside the screen’s defenses—which was exactly what had happened to Kitty Hawk.

The ensign stared at the colored symbols on the CDRT. Every thirty seconds, another red line appeared, each one tagged by a tiny set of digits that represented the Zulu time of that particular bearing update. The red lines accumulated slowly. Using only bearings, this was going to take a long time. Too long.

He exhaled fiercely. “Shit.” He keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE, have you got any kind of narrowband on this contact at all?”

“No discrete tonals, sir. The target is showing a tightly packed cluster of frequencies up around 550 hertz, but it’s so garbled I can’t do anything with it. Everything else I’ve got is too broad and diffused to track or classify. We are definitely not getting anything we can use for Doppler. Request permission to go active, sir.”

Cooper’s answer was immediate. “Negative, Sonar. Remain passive. If we spook this guy, he’ll pop off a shot at us and run like hell.”

Chief McPherson nodded. “Good call, sir. No sense in tipping our hand this early in the fight.”

Cooper tapped his fingers on the face of the CDRT. “Thanks, Chief. What do you think about having Sonar adjust the depth of the towed array, to see if we can get some useful narrowband?”

Chief McPherson shook her head. “Never violate the second rule of USW, sir: ‘If you’ve got contact, don’t screw with anything.’”

“We’re running out of time, Chief. Antietam’s helo is going to be airborne in …” he checked his watch—”about two minutes.”

“It’s your call, sir,” the chief said. “Until we finish our watch turnover, you’re still the USWE. But if it were me, I’d say screw the helo. That’s a LAMPS III bird, strictly re-detect and attack. They’re not set up for search. They’ve got no business launching until we have the contact localized.”

A hand squeezed Ensign Cooper’s shoulder. He looked around to find the captain standing behind him. “Listen to your chief, Pat. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen somebody lose contact because they were futzing with equipment line-up, trying to get a better picture.”

“What do I tell the SAU Commander when he starts screaming for amplifying contact data?”

“You let me worry about Captain Whiley,” Captain Bowie said. “You follow your search plan and keep your eyes open. And don’t get tunnel vision.”

“Sir?”

“There are four subs out there. Don’t let yourself get wrapped around the axle over one contact, especially if it’s POSS-SUB low. We still don’t have any real classification data on this guy. We don’t even know his range. He might still turn out to be an Omani fishing boat way the hell and gone outside of radar range, and his signal’s caught in the surface duct.”

“I’ve seen it happen, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “More than once. Just be ready to shift gears on a second’s notice if we get any new information on the contact.”

The ensign nodded. “I’ll remember that.” He looked up. “Are you ready to assume the watch?”

The captain said, “Hang on to it for a while, if you want to, Pat. This is your first no-shit bad guy, and he showed up on your watch. In my book, that means you get to chase him down. This will be your kill … if you want it.”

Ensign Cooper swallowed heavily. He was frankly surprised that the captain wasn’t pulling him off in favor of a more experienced USWE. He suspected that he’d been given the watch for the first leg of the search because the captain hadn’t anticipated any action so early in the hunt. But now the captain was trusting him with the safety of the ship—saying as much right in front of the CIC crew. True, the captain and Sonar Chief would be close at hand, in case he screwed up, but it was still a pretty clear vote of confidence from the old man. He felt a surge of nervous pride.

“I want it, Captain.” He turned to the chief. “This one is mine, Chief. You can have the next one.”

Chief McPherson took a step backward and crossed her arms. “Your show, boss.”

Ensign Cooper looked at the chief out of the corner of his eye. “Okay, I know the second rule of USW. What’s the first rule?”

The Sonar Chief smiled. “USW is hard. If you’re stupid, it’s impossible.”

The ensign raised an eyebrow. “You’re making this up as you go along.”

“No, sir, I am not.”

Cooper opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted by a burst of warbling tones from the Navy Red secure radio circuit, followed by a voice transmission. “SAU Commander, this is Benfold. Contact report to follow. Time, seventeen fifty-four Zulu. My unit holds passive broadband contact, bearing three-two-five. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level low. Believe this contact correlates to Towers’ Gremlin Zero One, over.”

Captain Whiley’s reply was as rapid as before. “Roger, Benfold.SAU Commander concurs. Designate your contact Gremlin Zero One, over.”

Ensign Cooper forgot whatever it was he’d been about to say. He was too busy punching keys on the CDRT. A bright blue line popped up, extending from the center of Benfold’s NTDS symbol to the edge of the screen. The blue line crossed the most recent bearing line from Towers. His keyed-in commands instructed the computer to plot a hostile-submarine NTDS symbol (a red V-shape with a dot in the center) directly on top of the intersection of the blue line from Benfold and the red line from Towers. It was called a cross-fix. That’s where the submarine was. “Gotcha, you little bastard.” He keyed his mike. “All Stations—USWE, we’re in business. Break, UB, stand by for range updates from the CDRT.”

“UB, aye.”

Every thirty seconds, the CDRT updated the range and bearing to the contact. After only two updates, the underwater battery fire control computer had a rough estimate of the submarine’s course and speed. Each set of bearing updates refined the solution. The search was about to become the chase.

*  *  *

Captain Whiley’s voice broke over the Navy Red radio circuit. “All units, this is SAU Commander. I am executing Pouncer Maneuver—now, now, NOW!”

Cooper watched on the CDRT. Sure enough, the symbol for Antietam was increasing speed and heading toward the southern flank of the formation. The symbol representing Antietam’s helo, Samurai Seven-Nine, cut around the northern end of the formation—to approach the sub from an unexpected angle. According to the tactical plan, the helo’s altitude would be above 2,000 feet; high enough so the submarine’s sonar wouldn’t be able to detect the sound of his rotors.

The plan was going perfectly.

Whiley’s voice came over Navy Red right on schedule. “All units, this is SAU Commander. My Anvil is away—now, now, NOW!”

*  *  *

Anvil (USS Antietam):

A small armored hatch snapped open on the cruiser’s forward missile deck, exposing the weatherproof membrane that covered the upper end of a vertical launch missile cell. A millisecond later, the membrane was shattered as Antietam’s Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC), code-name Anvil, blasted out of its missile cell and roared into the night sky on a silvery-orange pillar of fire.

Although it came out of the launcher like any other missile, the ASROC’s flight profile was like no missile in the world. Instead of diving toward the surface of the ocean to begin a sea-skimming run, or turning toward its target and accelerating to an intercept point, the ASROC heeled itself over at a forty-five–degree angle and began boosting toward the top of a pre-programmed ballistic arc.

Ten thousand feet above the ocean, it hit the top of that arc, and any passing resemblance it had to an ordinary missile vanished. An electronic module inside the weapon sent trigger pulses to a pair of explosive blocks in the airframe. The explosives detonated instantly, shattering the steel restraining bands that held the missile together, and splitting the fiberglass airframe into two pieces. The missile literally came apart in midair, and from the expanding cloud of discarded debris fell the ASROC’s payload: a specially configured Mark-54 torpedo.

The torpedo dropped toward the sea like a stone, completing the downward half of the ballistic arc as it hurtled toward its rendezvous with the waves. As the weapon fell past two thousand feet, a parachute deployed, slowing its rate of descent just enough to prevent damage when it hit the water.

Falling somewhat slower now, the weapon slammed into the ocean with enough force to shatter its nose cone along a series of pre-stressed structural points—absorbing a little more of the shock and protecting the delicate sonar transducer in the nose of the weapon.

As it sank through the ocean, seawater rushed in through small vents, completing the electrical circuit for the weapon’s salt-water batteries. The batteries transmitted power to the weapon’s computer, and the computer (in turn) sent signals to other systems, lighting off the sonar sensors, pre-arming the warhead, and taking control of the fins and stabilizers.

All of this happened very quickly. Less than six seconds after its launch from USS Antietam, the torpedo’s turbine engine spun to life. The weapon calculated its depth and position, and then accelerated toward the start point for its search pattern.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“USWE—Sonar, we have weapon startup. It’s Antietam’s ASROC, sir, and it looks like they got it right in the pocket.”

A friendly-weapon symbol appeared in blue on the CDRT. Ensign Cooper kissed the tip of his finger and touched it to the glass screen directly over the symbol. “Come on, baby, acquire … acquire …”

A half-minute later, the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “USWE—Sonar, Antietam’s weapon has acquired the target. Looks like it’s starting its attack run now.”

Ensign Cooper clapped his hands. “All right!”

Chief McPherson stared at the CDRT without saying anything.

Captain Bowie watched her for a few seconds. “What is it, Chief?”

The chief shook her head. “Something’s not right here, Captain.”

Ensign Cooper looked at her. “What?”

“The sub isn’t doing anything,” Chief McPherson said. “He’s got a torpedo screaming up his ass, and he’s not doing anything about it. No evasion, no flank speed, no nothing …”

“It’s a decoy!” Ensign Cooper shouted. He nearly broke a finger jabbing the button for Navy Red. “SAU Commander—Towers, it’s a decoy! I say again, your target is a mobile decoy! Recommend you take immediate evasive action!”

From across CIC, a Radar Operator yelled, “TAO, I’ve got two, no … make that three missile pop-ups! Bearing two-two-zero!”

The TAO yelled, “Use the goddamned net!” Into his own comm-set mike he half-shouted, “All Stations—TAO, we have in-bound Vipers! I say again, we have missiles in-bound! This is not a drill! Weapons Control, shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage. Break. EW, I need your best course for minimized radar cross-section, and stand by to launch chaff!”

The Electronics Warfare Technician’s response came a half-second later. “TAO—EW, standing by on chaff. I have active H-band seekers on all three missiles. Looks like Exocet SM-39s, ‘November Variants.’ EW recommends we avoid jamming, sir. I say again, recommend we do not jam. The November birds have home-on-jam capability.”

The captain sprinted for his chair at the center of CIC, between the giant Aegis display screens. Three missile symbols were rapidly closing on the ships. It was still too early to determine which ships had been targeted. He pulled a comm-set over his head and keyed up. “Give me a plot on the pop-up point for those missiles.”

A hostile-submarine symbol appeared on the screen in flashing red.

“What’s the range? Can we hit that bastard with ASROC?”

Ensign Cooper keyed up. “Captain—USWE. Range to missiles’ point of origin is fifty-five thousand yards, sir. No way we can hit it with ASROC.”

“Damn it!” the captain shouted. “TAO, what’s the estimated time-on-top? When are those bastards going to hit us?”

Before the TAO could answer, the captain punched the button to jumper his comm-set into the 1-MC General Announcing Circuit. When he keyed the mike, his voice came out of speakers all over the ship. “This is the Captain speaking. We have three in-bound Vipers off the port bow. All hands rig for impact. This is not a drill.”

The ship heeled over as the bridge began to maneuver to minimize the ship’s radar cross-section.

The TAO said, “Vipers are not targeted for Towers, Captain. All three are locked on Antietam. Estimated time-on-top is ninety seconds.”

As the words left his lips, a second set of hostile-missile symbols popped up on the screen. Three more Exocet missiles—all bound for Antietam.

The captain keyed his comm-set. “Weapons Control, this is the Captain. Can we get some birds up there to help Antietam out?”

The response was a few seconds in coming. “Captain—Weapons Control. Negative, sir. Antietam is fouling our range. As low as those Vipers are to the water, we’d have to shoot through Antietam to get to them.”

The Air Supervisor spoke up. “Antietam is firing, sir. Two salvos of surface-to-air missiles, looks like six and six.”

The captain nodded.

Antietam was following shoot-shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine for incoming Vipers: fire two missiles at each Viper, take a peek with radar to see if they’ve been destroyed, and then fire two more missiles at each Viper that survived the initial salvo.

Captain Bowie nodded at the Aegis display screen and said quietly, “Whiley, you stubborn bastard, still playing it by the book. And look what it’s got you.”

The battle seemed to unfold in slow motion on the big display screens. Six friendly-missile symbols and three hostile-missile symbols vanished as Antietam’s first salvo took out three of the incoming Vipers. Ten seconds later, the scenario repeated itself as Antietam’s second salvo of six destroyed the remaining three in-bound Vipers.

The Towers CIC team began to cheer.

“I’ll say this for Whiley,” the captain said, “that son of a bitch can shoot!”

The cheers were suddenly chopped off by a voice over the 29-MC speakers. “All Stations—Sonar has multiple hydrophone effects off the port bow! Bearings three-one-five, and three-one-seven. Initial classification: hostile torpedoes!”

“Crack the whip!” Ensign Cooper said into his comm-set. “Bridge—USWE. We have in-bound hostile torpedoes. I say again—crack the whip!”

“Bridge, aye!”

In the background came the muffled wail of the gas turbine engines as they spun up to flank speed.

The Officer of the Deck’s voice broke over the 1-MC. “All hands stand by for heavy rolls while performing high-speed evasive maneuvers.”

The deck began to heel to starboard as the big destroyer whipped into the first in a series of tight, high-speed turns. The crack-the-whip anti-torpedo maneuver would take the ship through a rapid succession of near-hairpin turns, designed to create multiple propeller wakes at very close intervals. A torpedo attempting to follow a ship through the aftermath of a crack-the-whip maneuver would find itself faced with a confusion of wakes to choose from, not to mention a wall of acoustic interference as the millions of bubbles churned up by the ship’s screws collided, collapsed, and popped. Coupled with the towed acoustic decoy system called Nixie, the maneuver was highly effective. Some tactical analysts rated its probability of success at nearly seventy percent. And in the world of torpedoes, it didn’t get any better than that.

Ensign Cooper gripped the edge of the CDRT to maintain his footing as the deck surged first one way, and then the other. The symbols on the screen had devolved into a mad little dance as every ship in the formation executed its own torpedo evasion maneuvers.

“Antietam is outside the screen,” he said quietly. He braced one hip against the side of the CDRT and let go with his right hand so that he could key his mike. “Captain—USWE. Both of the enemy torpedoes are locked on Antietam, and Antietam is outside of our defensive screen.”

He stared at the CDRT’s tactical display, and then looked over his shoulder at the big Aegis display screens. They all told the same story. From the wild movement of her tactical symbol, it was obvious that Antietam was running her own crack-the-whip maneuver. It was just as obvious that the maneuver was going to fail. The hostile torpedoes had been fired from too short a range. They had far too good a sniff of the cruiser’s real acoustic signature to be distracted by decoys and tricky maneuvers.

Ensign Cooper watched helplessly as the flashing red hostile-torpedo symbols began to merge with the symbol that represented Antietam.

*  *  *

DMA37 Torpedo:

Powered by a four-stage axial-flow turbine and a sophisticated planetary gear drive train, the German torpedo was capable of slightly over fifty knots. And at the moment, it was using every scrap of that power to close the range to its target.

The target was fast, but not fast enough. And it was tricky, but not tricky enough.

Inside the torpedo’s acoustic seeker head, an array of 152 miniature sonar transducers were bombarded by a powerful source of white noise. Under other circumstances, the interference might have been enough to mask the target entirely, but the target was close, and the acoustic seeker could still detect it clearly through the cacophonous barrier of sound energy.

The transducers detected another sonar contact, with acoustic characteristics that closely resembled the target. For a few milliseconds, this confused the targeting algorithm running through the torpedo’s digital processors. Two targets to choose from, both displaying acoustic characteristics within acceptable parameters, both easily within the weapon’s attack envelope. It could strike either target in a matter of seconds.

With no compelling criteria to use for target selection, the torpedo’s computer did exactly what its programmers had intended: it locked on to the closer of the two potential targets and started the final arming sequence on its warhead.

Slightly less than ten seconds later, the weapon’s acoustic sensors determined that it was nearing optimum range for detonation. The torpedo dove to twelve meters, a depth calculated to place it beneath the hull of the target. The algorithm’s calculations were precise; the torpedo reached the twelve-meter mark at the exact instant that the target’s acoustic signal strength reached its peak. The torpedo was under the target.

The warhead contained 250 kilograms of plasticized-hexite high-explosive. It detonated with a destructive force equivalent to nearly 500 kilos of TNT.

The target was vaporized.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“Holy shit!” the Sonar Supervisor shouted over the net. “They just blew up the Antietam’s Nixie! The torpedo fell for the decoy! Yeah! Fuckin’-A!” The sonar team was cheering in the background.

Ensign Cooper jabbed his comm button. “Sonar—USWE. Can it! Maintain net discipline! This is no time to get excited anyway. There’s still another torpedo out there, and there’s no way Antietam can get her backup Nixie fish deployed in time.”

*  *  *

USS Antietam:

About five seconds later, the second of the DMA37 torpedoes proved Ensign Cooper right. With the other distracting target out of the way, it dove to an optimum depth of twelve meters, slid neatly under Antietam’s hull, and detonated.

The explosion flash-vaporized a huge volume of water directly beneath the cruiser’s keel, simultaneously ripping and burning an enormous hole through the steel hull plates of the ship’s bottom. The keel, the structural backbone of the ship, fractured like bone under a sledgehammer. With its spine shattered and nearly all support snatched out from under its hull by the still-expanding bubble of vaporized water, the cruiser bent near the middle, and then broke. The sound was unbelievable, an ear-rending cacophony of tearing metal and roaring water, punctuated by the screams of the injured and dying. The overburdened steel hull plates separated completely, ripping the old ship in half.

The aft section of the ship rolled over on to its starboard side and began to sink immediately.

The forward half of the ship remained afloat somehow, without power, as the generators had been destroyed along with the engineering spaces. Fires raged through the powerless steel hulk that—ten seconds ago—had been a United States warship.

*  *  *

Samurai Seven-Nine:

“Jesus Christ,” the copilot whispered. “Oh Jesus …”

The pilot stared down at the flaming remains of their ship. “SENSO, did you get a fix on the spot where those Vipers left the water?”

In the rear of the helo, the Sensor Operator stared blankly into space, too stunned to even answer.

The pilot keyed the mike of his inter-phone and shouted, “Goddamn it, Perkins! Snap out of it! We don’t have time for this shit!”

The Sensor Operator jerked as though he’d been slapped. “What? What? I’m sorry, what did you say, sir?”

“Did you get a fix on the spot where those Vipers left the water?”

The Sensor Operator scanned his console. “Um, I think so. Ah … yes, sir. I’ve got a fix.”

“Good,” the pilot said. “Shoot me a fly-to point.”

The SENSO nodded. “Yes, sir.” He used his trackball to roll a cursor to the screen coordinates that corresponded to the point where the missiles had popped up on radar. He punched a button. “Fly-to point coming up now, sir.”

“Got it,” the pilot snapped. He tweaked the cyclic and the collective, swinging the helo around until his instruments showed that they were pointing toward the appropriate spot in the ocean. “Start your weapons check-off list,” he said. “Cut corners if you have to, but get that weapon ready now! The longer we wait, the farther that sub’s going to be from the spot where he launched those missiles. We’re only going to make one pass. We’re going to make it low, and we’re going to shove a torpedo up that bastard’s ass.”

“Yes, sir!”

The copilot keyed the radio. “SAU Commander, this is Samurai Seven-Nine. I am prepping for an attack run, over.”

The pilot looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Who’re you talking to?”

“SAU Commander.”

The pilot jerked his head in the direction of what was left of USS Antietam. “SAU Commander just got his ass shot off. We’re on our own, Larry.”

“Who’s the next most senior captain?” the copilot asked. “He’s the next in the chain of command, so he’s the SAU Commander now.”

“Fuck the chain of command,” the pilot snarled. “Our people are dead or dying down there. We’ve got maybe sixty seconds to kill the bastards that did it. After that, they’ll be outside the search envelope of our torpedo.”

“Weapon is ready, sir,” said the Sensor Operator. “Standing by to launch on your order.”

A voice came over the radio. “All units, this is the commanding officer of USS Towers. I am assuming SAU Commander at this time. I say again, I am assuming SAU Commander at this time, over.”

The pilot pitched his aircraft into a shallow dive. “Weapon away on my mark”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

The ocean rushed up toward them. “Here we go,” the pilot said. “Launch—now, now, NOW!”

The Sensor Operator jabbed a button. The airframe of the helo jerked as it was suddenly relieved of its five-hundred–pound burden. “Weapon away, sir!”

The pilot pulled back on the stick. “Eat that!”

“Oh shit!” the Sensor Operator shouted. He began pointing frantically out the window at a bright flare of light down on the water. “Missile emergence! We’ve got a missile coming out of the water, bearing three-three-zero!”

“Chaff!” the pilot screamed as he threw the helo into a wild side-slip. “I need chaff right fucking …”

He never finished the sentence. The sub-SAM came through the port side of the aircraft, just forward of the sonobuoy launchers. The detonating warhead flash-fried the air crew, even as it blasted the fuselage of the helicopter into burning bits of wreckage.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“TAO—Air Supervisor. Samurai Seven-Nine just dropped off the scope. We lost his IFF signal and all communications. Looks like he went down, sir.”

“TAO—Bridge. Lookouts are reporting a fireball on Samurai Seven-Nine’s last bearing. I concur with the Air Supervisor; Samurai Seven-Nine is down.”

Captain Bowie slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair. “Damn it! What the hell were they doing below two thousand feet? They had specific orders to stay high enough so the subs couldn’t hear their rotors. If they had followed their orders, they’d still be alive.”

The TAO looked up at the Aegis display. “All right, guys. We need a break here …”

As if in answer, the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “USWE—Sonar, we have weapon start-up. It’s a Mark-54. Looks like Antietam’s helo managed to get off a shot, sir.”

Chief McPherson nudged Ensign Cooper’s elbow. “Ask them if it’s acquired, sir.”

The ensign nodded. “Sonar—USWE. Has the helo’s weapon acquired?”

“USWE—Sonar. Affirmative, sir. Sounds like it locked on right after it started up. They must have dropped it right on top of the target.”

Ensign Cooper gritted his teeth and held up his fingers to show that they were crossed.

The Sonar Supervisor’s next report came over less than a minute later. “USWE—Sonar. We have a loud underwater explosion, bearing two-eight-two. Sounds like secondary explosions on the same bearing. I think Antietam’s helo got themselves a submarine!”

“USWE, aye,” Ensign Cooper said. “I hope you’re right, but we don’t have any confirmation yet. But even if you are right, there are still three hostile submarines out there somewhere. This engagement may not be over, so stay sharp!”

“Sonar, aye!”

But the engagement was over. The ships continued searching, even while they were rendering assistance to the stricken Antietam, but the submarines had disappeared again.

CHAPTER 35

U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)

BAHRAIN

SATURDAY; 19 MAY

2240 hours (10:40 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Commander Moody stood at the foot of the admiral’s desk with a yellow folder in one hand and a green folder in the other.

Admiral Rogers looked up at the clock. “What do you suppose would happen if we actually knocked off before midnight some night?”

Commander Moody’s eyebrows went up. “One of us would turn into a pumpkin, sir.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’d have to check the duty roster. But I think it’s your turn.”

“Figures,” the admiral said. He sighed. “What have you got for me, Troy?”

Moody opened the yellow folder and flipped through several pages, scanning rapidly. “The latest SITREP from USS Towers, sir. Per Captain Bowie’s orders, Benfold and Ingraham are continuing to render assistance to Antietam. The fires are out. They’re still pulling people out of the water. Dead, mostly, but every once in a while they come across another survivor. So far, they have forty-one confirmed dead, but it’ll probably be quite a while before we get an accurate casualty count. There are still over a hundred missing. Captain Bowie also thinks there may be air pockets trapped in the sunken part of Antietam’s hull. There could be survivors down there. He’s requesting a team of emergency divers to survey the wreck and conduct rescue dives if they locate any survivors.”

The admiral nodded. “Bowie’s a good man. Drop what you’re doing and get on the horn to OPS. I want a dive team in the air ten minutes ago.”

Moody smiled. “I’ve already taken the liberty, sir.” He glanced at his watch. “They should be airborne just about now. In the meantime, the Towers and a couple of the helos have set up a defensive screen around the rescue operations, but Captain Bowie is asking for a relief force. He’s eager to get back to the hunt.”

The admiral nodded. “I’m working on that. One way or the other, we’ll have somebody down there to cover for them before tomorrow morning. Then we have to figure out how to get Antietam towed back in to port. Or what’s left of her, anyway. Any further sign of the subs?”

Commander Moody shook his head. “Not yet, sir. But Ingraham’s helo did a fly-by of the area where they thought one of the German submarines went down. They found a field of floating debris, an oil slick, and a half-dozen bodies. No survivors. Looks like Antietam’s helo got a kill after all. And that makes us even, again. Three ships—three subs.”

“Even isn’t good enough,” the admiral said. “It’s not nearly good enough.”

Moody nodded. “Understood, sir.”

Admiral Rogers leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “You’ve got two folders there, Troy. What’s in the other one?”

Moody opened the green folder. “It’s an incoming Personal-For message from Captain Whiley, sir.”

The admiral opened his eyes. “I told Captain Bowie to keep Whiley on bed rest until we can arrange to helo him and his crew back to shore. He’s in no shape to be up and around.”

Commander Moody shrugged. “Apparently Captain Whiley doesn’t agree with your diagnosis, sir. He’s asking you to put him back in command of the SAU.”

The admiral sat up. “Is he fucking crazy?”

“I have no opinion on that, sir.”

The admiral leaned back and closed his eyes again. “Drop that message in the burn bag, son. I’m not even going to dignify it with an answer.”

CHAPTER 36

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

STRAITS OF HORMUZ

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

0700 hours (7:00 AM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

The executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Tyler, was the last to arrive. He nodded in the captain’s direction and took a seat at the wardroom table. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“Just got in a message from USNS Arapaho,” he said. Arapaho was the ocean-going tug that was rigging the battered remains of the Antietam for towing. “The last of Antietam’s casualties have been evacuated to Bahrain. They’re continuing search and rescue operations in the surrounding waters, but they don’t expect to find any more survivors. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: the team of rescue divers you requested finally arrived. They’ve completed their initial survey of the wreck, and you were right; there are survivors down there. The dive team has located two groups of survivors. Somebody in one of the groups is communicating with the divers by tapping out Morse code signals on the hull. There are eleven people in that group. The other group, unfortunately, doesn’t have anyone who knows Morse. They’re banging on the hull too, but the divers can’t make heads or tails out of what they’re trying to say. So they can’t tell how many people are in the second group.” The XO smiled tiredly. “The situation looks good for getting both groups out.” He shrugged. “And the divers may get lucky and find more survivors down there who haven’t been able to communicate.”

Chief McPherson shuddered involuntarily at the thought of being trapped in the hull of a sunken ship. The emergency battle lanterns would only last a few hours, and then would come a darkness blacker than anything she could imagine. After a while, the small volume of air trapped in the pocket would become stale, and then foul, and finally impossible to breathe. And the air pocket might not even hold. The unstable wreck could shift, bleeding precious air out through some newly formed crack. The water might gradually find its way into the space, slowly flooding the compartment until all the air was gone. The chief swallowed heavily and tried to push these thoughts from her mind.

Captain Bowie nodded toward the XO. “Thanks for the update, Pete.” He looked at the team of men and women assembled around the table. “I’ve already said a few prayers for the crew of Antietam—the unharmed ones, as well as the injured, and the missing, and the dead. I intend to say a few more. I know that you all have different religious beliefs, and that some of you don’t believe in God in any form. But I would take it as a personal favor if you would find the time over the next few days to say a few words of prayer for the crew of Antietam.”

Every head around the table nodded slowly.

“Thank you,” the captain said. “Now, I’d like to turn this meeting over to Chief McPherson.”

Chief McPherson stood up. “Thank you, Captain.” She walked to a pair of charts that had been taped to the wall. The first was a navigational chart of the Arabian Gulf region. The second was a geographic map of the world. She nearly smiled; her visual aids were a far cry from Captain Whiley’s whiz-bang computer graphics. She pointed to the chart of the Arabian Gulf. “We are currently steaming through the Straits of Hormuz at thirty knots. Our sonars are degraded by our speed, and we are generating quite a bit of noise, which makes us vulnerable to submarine attack. But it’s a calculated risk, and the captain has decided to take it. The German Type 212B diesel submarine has a maximum submerged speed of only twenty knots.” She pointed to the northern end of the Straits of Hormuz on her chart. “The idea is to outdistance the submarines and establish a choke point at the northern end of the straits, before the subs can get there.”

“Works for me,” the XO said. “Then what?”

“Well, that’s what we’re here to figure out, sir. The next time we encounter those subs, we have got to give them something unexpected. And therein lies the problem. Whatever it is can’t look like something they’re not expecting.”

Ensign Cooper frowned. “I’m not following you, Chief.”

“Look at it like this,” the chief said. “In the three battles that have occurred so far, the German submarines have met only with variations of NATO tactics. By now, they are probably convinced that the U.S. Navy is too hidebound by doctrine to try anything creative. Hopefully, that means they’ll be expecting more of the same. Therefore, whatever the SAU tries should break the rules of NATO tactical doctrine without looking like it’s going to break them.”

The XO’s eyebrows went up. “So we have to hit them with something that’s not in the NATO tactical doctrine, but it has to look like something that is in the NATO doctrine?”

Chief McPherson nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“I think everyone’s got the idea, Chief,” the captain said. “Move on.”

“Yes, sir. If the subs run flat-out at their top speed of twenty knots, the earliest they can possibly reach the choke point is 1100. At thirty knots, we can be on station nearly forty minutes ahead of them—more than enough time to get in position to intercept.”

The chief pointed to a series of penciled X-marks on the world map. “I’ve done a little math here. And based on the timing of the various sightings and skirmishes with the submarines, I calculate that they are covering an average distance of 13.5 nautical miles per hour. Although they are undoubtedly traveling at a higher rate of speed, the deceptive maneuvering they’re using has reduced their actual speed through the water. All that zigging and zagging slows down their progress. If they continue their deceptive maneuvering, I estimate that the subs won’t reach the choke point until some time after 1700 this evening. As I say, the SAU will be in position by 1020 hours, just in case the Germans decide to forgo their tricky maneuvering routine, in favor of achieving maximum possible speed through the water.”

She looked around the table. There were no questions, so she continued. “We want our setup to duplicate our previous deployment of forces as closely as possible.” She pointed to the Arabian Gulf chart again. “I recommend we put Benfold and Ingraham here and here, spaced at eighty percent of their predicted sonar ranges, just like before. They’ll use the same locked-step zigzag pattern that we used before, forming a two-ship version of the moving barrier. Last time we used three ships in the barrier, but the Germans know that we are down a ship, so they’ll expect our formation to be one ship short.”

The Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Sikes, tapped a pencil against her palm. “When do we pull the rabbit out of the hat?” she asked. “So far, this looks like what we did when we got our butts shot off.”

Chief McPherson grinned. “That’s exactly how we want it to look, ma’am. The good old U.S. Navy, too dumb to learn from its mistakes, trying the same old plan—even after it’s fallen on its face.” She pointed to a spot on the chart, behind the formation. “The Germans will assume that Towers is back here in the Pouncer position, running behind the advancing barrier—ready to charge around the end of the formation at the first sign of trouble.” She moved her finger to a different point on the chart. “This is where the rabbit comes out of the hat. Because Towers will actually be way down here, in front of the formation, where they won’t be expecting her.”

Ensign Cooper furrowed his brow. “It won’t matter what the Germans are expecting. They’re going to see us. One peep through a periscope, and they’re going to know that we’re not on the back side of the formation. The jig will be up long before those subs are within weapons range.”

The chief waved a hand toward the Operations Officer. “Sir?”

Lieutenant Nylander stood up. “Thank you, Chief.” His eyes traveled from face to face. “Chief McPherson and I have worked this out. The Germans will not see us, because we’re going to make the ship invisible.”

The Combat Systems Officer waved her pencil around in circles like a wand. “See? I knew there was some hocus-pocus in here somewhere. Rabbits out of hats, invisible ships. Maybe we should levitate the Chief Engineer as a finale.”

“Watch it,” the CHENG snapped.

“Patience,” the captain said. “There is a method to this madness.”

The Combat Systems Officer caught herself before another quip left her mouth.

“Thank you, sir,” the Operations Officer said. He looked around the table again. “What’s the best way to hide a cat?” he asked.

“Stick it in the microwave,” the CHENG said softly.

The Combat Systems Officer elbowed him in the ribs.

“Close,” said the Operations Officer. “You put it in a room full of other cats.”

“The Straits of Hormuz is a major shipping lane, and dozens of oil tankers go through every day, in both directions. If we want to disappear, all we have to do is become a tanker.”

“Child’s play,” the Operations Officer said. “We rig deceptive lighting, so we look like an oil tanker in the dark. We secure the SPY radar and every other piece of electronics that transmits anything on military frequency bands. That still leaves us the Furuno radar, for safety of navigation, but Furunos are carried by two-thirds of the merchant ships in the world. The Germans will expect a tanker to carry a Furuno, or something like it.”

The Chief Engineer was nodding now. “We can configure the engineering plant for turn-count masking. If we run one engine a little faster that the other one and offset the difference in thrust by angling the blades of the propellers differently, we’ll get a loud, mushy blade signature. With a bit of experimentation, I’ll bet we can make ourselves sound like an old tanker with a poorly maintained screw.”

Ensign Cooper tugged at his lower lip. “This is all well and good, as long as the subs show up in the evening, at or after sunset. What if they turn up at lunchtime? By the chief ‘s calculations, that could happen if they run at high speed. We might fool them with tricky lighting after dark, but no amount of fan dancing can make a destroyer look like a merchant ship in broad daylight.”

“It’s a risk, sir,” Chief McPherson said, “but a calculated risk. Once they make it out of the straits and into the gulf, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to find them. They’ll have a lot more room to maneuver, and a lot more places to hide. Our best chance is to bottle them up before they get out of the straits, and they know that as well as we do. They’ve got to be expecting us to try for a choke point at the northern end of the straits.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Ensign Cooper said. “But what’s to stop them from running the choke point at high noon?”

“Sub skippers don’t like to attack when visibility is good,” the chief said. “It’s too easy for a lookout to spot a periscope, or for an aircraft to see the silhouette of the sub’s hull through the water. Given the choice, a submarine commander will either attack after dark, or as close to sunrise or sunset as he can get. The human eye has trouble picking out detail under changing light conditions.”

Ensign Cooper nodded. “They hit the Brits after dark, and they hit us after dark. When did they hit the Kitty Hawk?”

“Just as the sun was coming up,” the executive officer said.

“So they’ll probably try to run the choke point after the sun goes down?” the ensign asked.

“That’s what we’re hoping, sir,” the chief said. “As I said, it’s a calculated risk. If they decide to crash the party early, we shoot about a dozen ASROCs in their general direction to keep their heads down, and we run like hell.”

“Fair enough,” the ensign said.

The Combat Systems Officer looked thoughtful. “We should lay a sonobuoy barrier to the south,” she said. “Passive buoys only, so the subs won’t be able to detect them. The subs will have to pass through the barrier to transit the straits, and we’ll see them coming.”

“We’d need to launch a helo to monitor the buoys,” the XO said.

The captain shook his head. “Negative. No helos. The Germans have displayed an excellent ability to localize low-flying aircraft from the sound of their rotors. I don’t want to take a chance at tipping our hand. One sniff of a helo and those subs will be alerted.”

“What if we don’t launch it?” the Operations Officer asked. “If we’re in the mood to be tricky, why don’t we leave the helo on deck, lights out, and rotors not turning? The flight crew can sit in the helo and monitor the buoys in the dark, right from the flight deck. If they keep their engines spun up for a rapid launch, they could still be at Ready-Five.”

“Yeah,” said the CHENG, “but they’ll be burning fuel the whole time they sit there. What if we have to launch, and the helo’s nearly out of gas?”

“We could hot-pump the helo,” Ensign Cooper said. Hot-pumping was a method of refueling helicopters on deck, with their engines running and their rotors still turning. It was a technique most often used when a helo needed to land, take on fuel, and get back into the air as quickly as possible. “The rotors are usually spinning when we hot-pump a helo,” he said, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.”

“Good point,” the captain said. “We’ll keep their tanks topped off constantly. If we do have to launch, they’ll have a full bag of fuel.”

*  *  *

The discussion continued for another fifteen minutes before it became clear that they were rehashing the same ideas. The captain looked around the table. “Anybody see any good reasons why this plan won’t work?”

No one said a word.

“Does anyone have a better idea, or a refinement that we haven’t discussed?”

Again, no one had anything to say.

The captain stood up. “All right, then. I’ll run through this with the COs of Benfold and Ingraham, and give them a chance to poke holes in it. But unless one of them thinks of something that we missed entirely, this is the plan we run with.”

CHAPTER 37

USS INGRAHAM (FFG-61)

NORTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

1844 hours (6:44 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Auxiliary Machinery Room #3 was a labyrinth of piping, pumps, relay panels, and electrical junction boxes. The compartment was home to several critical engineering systems, including high- and low-pressure air compressors, the fresh-water distillers of the potable water system, and #4 and #5 fire pumps. But through the center of the maze ran the most important piece of equipment in the compartment: the propeller shaft, known to the engineering crew who maintained it as simply the shaft.

Over two feet in diameter, the huge steel shaft performed much the same function as the drive shaft on a car, only instead of carrying power from the transmission to the rear axle, this shaft carried power from the ship’s main reduction gears to the screw that drove the ship through the water.

Gas Turbine System Technician–Mechanical Third Class Michael Carpenter laid his hand against the housing for the line shaft bearing that supported the shaft. He could feel the throbbing vibration of the huge propeller, right through the thick steel housing of the bearing’s oil sump. Of all the spaces on the ship, this was where you could feel the power of the turbines the best. You could hear it better in the Main Engine Room, where even the acoustic enclosures could not eliminate the jet engine scream of the twin General Electric LM-2500 gas turbines. But you could feel it better here, in AMR #3.

Standing in the bilge next to the line shaft bearing, with only about a half-inch of steel hull plating between his feet and the ocean, Carpenter could feel the hiss and rumble of the water as it passed under the hull. Just a few yards aft of where he was standing, the tremendous bronze screw churned the water into froth as it drove the ship forward.

The sample valve was located on the bottom of the oil sump. Carpenter unclipped the locking arm from the hand wheel of the sample valve and pulled a glass sample bottle from the left hip pocket of his coveralls. As Engineering Messenger of the Watch, part of his job was to take regular oil samples from key pieces of engineering equipment. The oil lab, which operated twenty-four hours a day, would test the samples for seawater, metal filings, dirt, or other contamination that could degrade the lubricating property of the oil. Carpenter opened the valve a crack and waited as the dark amber liquid began to ooze into his sample bottle. Hot oil-scented air surged up from the open valve, the signature aroma of heavy machinery at work.

Something flew past his head and ricocheted off the bearing housing. It startled him, and he jerked away involuntarily. The object fell into the bilge. It was a balled up piece of paper.

Carpenter turned in time to dodge a second paper projectile that was also aimed at his head. Standing a few feet away was Seaman Wayne Harris, a general wise-ass and Carpenter’s best friend.

Harris grinned, showing his mulish front teeth. “Hey shit-for-brains, let’s go up to the starboard break and smoke a ciggy-butt.” His voice was loud. It had to be to carry over the sounds of the machinery.

“I’ve got to get this oil sample up to the lab,” Carpenter said.

“So get a move on,” Harris said. “We can swing by the lab on the way up.”

Carpenter checked the oil level in the sample bottle out of the corner of his eye, not willing to turn his back entirely on Harris, who was a bit of a prankster. The bottle was about two-thirds full. “What’s the rush?”

“Your Hot-a-malan girlfriend is up there taking a smoke break. She usually likes to smoke two, so she doesn’t feel like she wasted the trip. If we hurry, we can catch her.”

Gitana Delgado was Guatemalan, not Hot-a-malan, as Harris insisted on calling her. And she wasn’t Carpenter’s girlfriend. Not that he would have minded …

It struck Carpenter for about the thousandth time how lucky Harris was that Gitana Delgado didn’t take his nickname for her personally. With a word or two in the right direction, she could have nailed him for sexual harassment, or maybe even racial discrimination. The Navy didn’t play games with either one of those subjects. If you had opinions on someone’s gender or ethnic background, you had damned well better keep them to yourself. Gitana could get Harris into serious trouble if she wanted to. Carpenter smiled. For that matter, she could probably kick Harris’s ass. Gitana spent a lot of time in the gym, and everybody knew that Harris’s most developed muscle was his mouth.

Carpenter looked around suddenly, as he felt the hot oil flow over his fingers. Damn. He had overfilled the bottle. He shut the valve quickly and tried to get the lid on the sample bottle without spilling any more than he had to. As soon as the lid was on tight, he pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped the bottle down. He slid the bottle into his hip pocket and surveyed the mess. He hadn’t spilled much. Just a few ounces. Nothing major.

He flipped down the locking arm and pinned the sample valve in the locked position. That done, he knelt down and used his rag to mop up the tiny puddle of oil in the bilge. There. No harm done.

He looked up at Harris. “All right, I’m done. We have to make a quick stop by the lab, and I have to tell the Engineer of the Watch that I’m taking a quick smoke break.”

“Stop dragging ass,” Harris said. “My lungs are overdosing on oxygen.”

Carpenter bumped into Harris on purpose as he walked toward the ladder. “Sorry. Excuse me. Pardon me. Coming through.”

Harris followed him. “Shithead!” A few seconds later, the watertight door closed behind him with a bang.

*  *  *

Down in the bilge beneath the line shaft bearing, a fresh spot of oil appeared on the steel deck. After a second or two, it was joined by another one. And then another. The sample valve on the bottom of the oil sump was locked in its current position. It was nearly closed, but the disk was not completely sealed against the seat. The drip became a trickle.

CHAPTER 38

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

2115 hours (9:15 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Chief McPherson swirled the last bit of coffee around the bottom of her cup and glared at the dark liquid with accusatory eyes. She knew the coffee was cold, and she could see the grounds in it. She thought for a second about getting a fresh cup, but she would be going off watch in about a half hour, and she didn’t want the caffeine kicking in just when she was trying to catch a few winks. Not that she’d sleep for long anyway. She’d be back in CIC in an hour or two. She was having a hard time staying away, even when she wasn’t on watch. In fact, she probably wouldn’t hit her rack at all. Maybe she’d just catch a catnap in a chair at one of the unused consoles.

She was very careful not to actually do the math in her head. Because, when she did, she’d have to admit to herself that she had been awake for two days and counting. The logical part of her mind knew that dedication and willpower only went so far. Her energy reserves were running low, and she’d have to put in some major sack time in the not-too-distant future. But she was all right for now. Or, rather, she would be after a little nap.

She looked up at the big red digits on the CIC battle clock. She and the sonar watch teams were due for turnover at 2145—in a little less than thirty minutes—and that nap was starting to look better all the time. With any luck, the subs wouldn’t show up during the watch turnover, the way they had the last time.

She slurped the last swallow of coffee and made a face when the cold, sludge like liquid hit her taste buds. She was in the process of picking stray grounds off the tip of her tongue when it hit her. She stared dumbly at the CDRT for several seconds with her tongue still sticking out. Last time, the subs had struck during the watch turnover. But what about the time before that?

Her tongue retreated into her mouth. She punched keys on the CDRT, calling up a history of encounters with the German submarines. The data she was looking for came up quickly. The subs had tangled with the Antietam SAU at 2152, right in the middle of watch relief for the 2200–0200 watch. The day before, in the Gulf of Aden, they’d nailed the Kitty Hawk strike group at 0647, during the turnover for the 0700–1200 watch.

The pattern fell apart when she looked at the attack on the British ships in the Straits of Gibraltar. That one had taken place at 0348, and the Brits wouldn’t have been turning over the watch then.

Or maybe they had been …

In the late 1990s, in response to reduced manning, the U.S. Navy had shifted from six watches a day to five. Instead of the traditional rotation, with six four-hour watches per day, the Navy now ran a five-section rotation, with four five-hour watches and one four-hour watch—the 2200–0200.

What if the Brits were still running an old-style six-watch rotation? That would put the Gibraltar Straits attack, which had occurred at 0348 hours, right in the middle of the 0400–0800 watch turnover!

The chief stared at the list of attacks on the CDRT and shook her head slowly. “Every time,” she said softly. “You crafty bastards hit us during watch turnover every single time. Right when we were at our most disorganized. And you were even smart enough to account for the differences between our watch rotation and the British rotation.”

She glanced up at the battle clock above the Aegis display screens again. The large red digits read 21:22. The early birds would start trickling in about ten minutes from now, but the majority of the reliefs would show up at about 2140. She keyed her mike. “TAO—USWE, I think I know when the subs are planning to attack, sir.”

The Tactical Action Officer on watch was Lieutenant Nylander, the Operations Officer. His voice sounded as tired as Chief McPherson felt. “USWE—TAO. Practicing a little black magic over there, Chief?”

“No, sir. Just your run-of-the-mill crystal ball. And if you’ll step over here to the CDRT, I’ll show it to you.”

“On my way,” the TAO said.

*  *  *

Two minutes later, he keyed his mike. “Bridge—TAO. Call away GQ.”

“TAO—Bridge. Say again?”

“Bridge—TAO. Call away General Quarters. Do it now! We’re about to be attacked. I’ll give you the details in a minute.”

“Bridge, aye!”

The raucous growl of the General Quarters alarm began to blare from every 1-MC speaker on the ship. After a few seconds, 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.”

The alarm and announcement were repeated, and as soon as the speakers fell silent, the TAO keyed into Navy Red. “All units, this is SAU Commander. Post-mission analysis of every encounter with the hostile submarines shows that the Germans have attacked during scheduled watch turnovers on every single occasion. I say again—the Germans have shown a preference for attacking during scheduled watch turnover. Recommend all units set General Quarters and prepare for USW action, over.”

The ship’s standard for manning battle stations and setting material condition Zebra (all watertight doors and hatches closed) was seven minutes. It was just a few minutes before taps, and a goodly portion of the crew would be asleep already. They’d be lucky to do it in twelve or fifteen minutes. The TAO decided to try to speed things up by getting the crew’s attention. He keyed into the 1-MC and spoke to the entire ship. “This is the Tactical Action Officer. We have reason to believe that the ship will be attacked by hostile submarines within the next ten to fifteen minutes. This is the real thing, people. Get to your stations now! The safety of this ship depends on it.”

*  *  *

The XO made it to CIC in about two minutes, followed by the captain about three seconds later. They were both still zipping coveralls and tying shoes as they gathered at the CDRT. The XO rubbed his left eye. “What have you got, Brian?”

The TAO nodded toward Chief McPherson. “Chief? It was your idea, you tell them.”

Chief McPherson pointed to the flat screen display. “The Germans always attack during watch turnover, sir.”

The CO ran a hand vigorously over his hair several times. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir,” the chief said. “They’ve done it every single time. With us and with the British Navy.”

Seats were filling all around CIC, as watchstanders in various stages of battle-dress took their stations. Over the 1-MC, the Damage Control Assistant’s voice said, “This is the DCA from CCS. General Quarters time—plus four minutes. All stations expedite setting Zebra.”

The captain looked up at the battle clock. It read 21:31. “Well, Chief, we’ll know if you’re right in the next fifteen minutes or so.”

*  *  *

CCS reported that all stations were manned with material condition Zebra set at 2135. The TAO nodded. Eight minutes was not bad, considering the circumstances.

*  *  *

A couple of minutes later, Benfold reported ready for battle, followed by Ingraham a minute or so after that.

*  *  *

The critical moment, 2145, came and went with no sign of the submarines. By 2155, everyone was stealing glances at the clock. At 2158, Chief McPherson said, “Come on … I know you’re out there …”

Another minute passed. The chief was about to say something when a message came in over Navy Red. “SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. Contact report to follow. Time, twenty-one fifty-nine Zulu. My unit holds passive broadband contact, bearing three-one-five. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level low, over.”

Chief McPherson looked at the CDRT. “Three-one-five? That’s on the other side of the formation. How in the hell did they slip past us?”

The TAO keyed up Navy Red. “SAU Commander, aye. Your contact designated Gremlin Zero One. My unit standing by to launch Firewalker Two-Six when contact is localized. Request you confirm your Gremlin is northwest of formation, over.”

“SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. Affirmative. Gremlin Zero One is behind the formation and outside the straits. Believe contact has penetrated our barrier. Request permission to break formation to pursue, over.”

“Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Stand by, over.”

The TAO looked at Captain Bowie. “What do you think, sir? Do we let Ingraham break formation?”

The captain turned to Chief McPherson. “How about it, Chief? Did those subs sneak by us?”

Blue lines of bearing were beginning to appear on the CDRT, angling away from Ingraham’s NTDS symbol. “I don’t know, sir,” the chief said. “It looks like they did, but … maybe Ingraham’s Gremlin isn’t one of the subs. Maybe it’s a fishing boat, or something too small to give a decent radar return. We need to find out if they’ve got any narrowband frequencies we can use to classify this guy.”

The XO looked at the TAO. “Brian, ask Ingraham if they’re getting any narrowband.”

The TAO nodded. “Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Interrogative narrowband tonals, over.”

The reply came back a few seconds later. “SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. Negative narrowband tonals at this time, over.”

“How about small craft?” the chief asked.

The TAO went out over Navy Red again. “Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Interrogative surface small craft in the area of Gremlin Zero One, over.”

“SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. Negative small craft in area of my Gremlin. My radar did show one motorboat near the initial bearing of my contact, but I am now seeing over thirty degrees of bearing separation. Do not believe my Gremlin is a small craft, over.”

The XO said, “That’s it, then. I say we let them break formation, Captain. If those subs have gotten past us, they’re either going to slip away or jam a torpedo up our ass. We need to jump on this sucker before it gets away.”

The captain nodded. “Looks like we just proved Patton’s old adage: No plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I hate to throw this one out the window, but we can’t take a chance on even one of those subs getting by us. Let Ingraham go, Brian. And tell them we’re standing by to assist.”

The TAO said, “Yes, sir.” He keyed up Navy Red. “Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. You are cleared to break formation to pursue your Gremlin. Towers is standing by to assist, over.”

“Wait a second,” Chief McPherson said. “Ask them what their contact looks like, sir.”

The TAO’s eyebrows went up. “What?”

“What it looks like,” the chief said. “Is it strong or weak? Fuzzy or discrete? What are its acoustic characteristics?”

The TAO cocked his head to one side. “Uh … Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Interrogative acoustic characteristics of your Gremlin, over.”

The reply took nearly a minute. “SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. My Sonar Operators describe the contact as strong and discrete broadband, with diffused swaths of narrowband that are too broad and indiscrete to track or classify. Target is showing a tightly packed cluster of frequencies up around 550 hertz, but it’s too muddled to process, over.”

Chief McPherson slapped the CDRT. “I knew it!” She looked up. “Captain, that’s a decoy!”

“Where the hell did it come from?”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe that motorboat launched it; they don’t weigh more than fifteen or twenty pounds. But what they’re tracking sounds like a perfect description of the one we had earlier—the one that suckered Antietam out of the formation.”

Captain Bowie snapped his fingers and pointed to the TAO. “Tell them! Do it quick!”

The TAO keyed up Navy Red. “Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Gremlin Zero One evaluated as a mobile decoy. Return to formation immediately, over!”

“Ingraham, aye!”

On the CDRT, the Ingraham’s NTDS symbol began to swing back toward the hole it had left in the formation. She was almost back in position when the net crackled with an incoming message from the Sensor Operator aboard Firewalker Two-Six. “USWE—SENSO, buoys five and six are hot. We hold narrowband tonals consistent with Type 212 diesel submarines. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level high!”

Immediately afterward, a call from the pilot came over the HAWK-Link. “SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. Request permission to break hot-pump.”

The TAO keyed his mike. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is SAU Commander. Break hot-pump. Stand by for green deck.”

He turned to the captain. “Request permission to launch the helo, sir.”

The captain nodded. “Do it.”

The TAO keyed up again. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is SAU Commander. Your contact designated Gremlin Zero Two. You have green deck. Launch when ready.”

Less than a minute later, the helo keyed the HAWK-Link again. “SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. I am up for Towers control. My fuel state is three hours plus four zero minutes. Three souls aboard. My load-out is one Mark-54 torpedo and a mixed rack of sonobuoys, over.”

“Roger, Firewalker,” the TAO said. “Break. Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Alert status of your aircraft, Gunslinger Four-One upgraded to Ready Five, over.”

Ingraham acknowledged.

Captain Bowie said, “Tell Firewalker to clear to the east until we get our VLAs off. Then prep us a couple of ASROCs, and let’s take this show to town.”

“TAO, aye.”

“USWE, aye.”

“Keep an eye out,” the captain said. “There are two more subs out there.”

As if in answer to his words, the speaker rumbled again. “SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. New contact! Buoys nine and ten are hot. I hold narrowband tonals consistent with Type 212 diesel submarine. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level high! Looks like another one is trying to run the barrier, sir.”

The TAO answered immediately. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is SAU Commander. Your new contact designated Gremlin Zero Three, over.”

The chief keyed the net. “TAO—USWE. Recommend we target both Gremlins with ASROC, and assign Benfold to target both subs as a backup.”

The TAO looked at the captain. “Sounds like a good call to me, sir.”

The captain nodded.

“USWE—TAO. Good call. Target both Gremlins with VLAs and inform me as soon as you have a firing solution.”

“USWE, aye.”

Chief McPherson scanned the unfolding tactical picture on the CDRT. Towers, Benfold, Ingraham, and Firewalker Two-Six were shown in blue. The contacts designated Gremlins Zero Two and Zero Three appeared as red V-shaped hostile-submarine symbols. To the northwest, behind the formation, was the symbol for the motorboat that might or might not have launched the acoustic decoy. It was shown in white, for neutral. The boat appeared to be loitering harmlessly, but they couldn’t count on that. The chief clicked on the motorboat symbol and upgraded its status from neutral to potentially hostile. Its color changed to a lighter shade of red than the submarines. That done, she spoke into her mike. “UB—USWE. I need the status of your firing solutions on contacts Gremlin Zero Two and Gremlin Zero Three.”

“USWE—UB. Just a second, Chief. My processors are updating now.” There was a brief pause, and then, “USWE—UB. I hold an excellent firing solution on Gremlin Zero Two. I am just starting to get tracking data on the second submarine.”

Per the chief ‘s recommendations and the captain’s orders, the TAO got on Navy Red and directed Benfold to target both submarines with ASROCs.

“USWE—UB. I hold excellent firing solutions on both contacts.”

“UB—USWE. Stand by. Break. TAO—USWE. Request batteries released.”

The TAO looked at the captain, who nodded. “USWE—TAO. You have batteries released.”

“USWE, aye. Break. UB—USWE. Kill Gremlin Zero Two and Gremlin Zero Three with Vertical Launch Anvils.”

“UB, aye. Going to launch standby on weapon one. Launch ordered. Weapon away—now, now, NOW!” On the third now, the entire ship shuddered as the first ASROC missile blasted its way out of the forward vertical launch system. “Anvil one is away, no apparent casualties. Going to launch standby on weapon two. Launch ordered. Weapon away—now, now, NOW!” The ship shuddered again as another ASROC missile rocketed out of its cell. “Anvil two is away, no apparent casualties.”

*  *  *

The second ASROC hadn’t even pitched over into its ballistic arc when the Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Bridge. Lookouts are reporting two bright flashes, bearing three-four-four. We’re getting confirmed infrared signatures from the mast-mounted sight cameras. Flight profiles consistent with small missiles.”

“TAO, aye.”

“TAO—Surface. Three-four-four is the bearing to that motorboat. Recommend we re-designate that contact as hostile.”

“TAO, aye. Break. All Stations—TAO, we have in-bound Vipers! I say again, we have missiles in-bound! Weapons Control, shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage. Break. EW, give me your best course for minimized radar cross-section. Stand by to launch chaff!”

The Electronics Warfare Technician responded a half-second later. “TAO—EW, standing by to launch chaff, but I don’t think it’ll do any good, sir. I’m showing negative active missile seekers at this time. These Vipers are possible heat seekers, or maybe they’re laser-guided.”

“EW—TAO. Understood. Stand by to launch torch rounds, just in case they’re heat seekers.”

“EW, aye.”

The TAO keyed the net again. “Air—TAO. Where are these missiles heading?”

*  *  *

Scorpion II (mid-flight):

The two missiles streaking through the night were beam-riders, German-built Scorpion II laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Both were targeted on Benfold, and they closed their target at just under three-quarters the speed of sound. They had been fired from well inside the minimum range of Benfold’s SM-2s, so the luckless destroyer would not have the option of launching her own missiles to intercept.

The target began launching chaff. A half-dozen blunt projectiles rocketed away from the ship. Four of them exploded at predetermined distances, spraying clouds of aluminum dust and metallic confetti into the air to create clusters of false radar targets. The remaining two projectiles were torch rounds: self-igniting magnesium flares designed to seduce heat-seeking infrared guided missiles.

The Scorpions blew past the expanding chaff clouds with zero hesitation. Aluminum dust could fool radar, but the Scorpion missiles had no radar. The missiles ignored the torch rounds for the same reason. With no infrared sensors, the Scorpions couldn’t even see the heat signatures from the flares, much less be distracted by them. In fact, the Scorpions couldn’t see anything but the narrow beams of their laser directors. Their seeker heads were amazingly simple, and—in this situation—that made them amazingly effective.

The target ship’s Close-In Weapon System opened fire. The six-barreled Gatling gun spewed a fusillade of 20mm tungsten bullets into the darkness, cutting the first of the incoming Scorpions into bite-sized chunks. The defensive Gatling gun spun to cover the other incoming missile, but it was too late. The second Scorpion had reached its target.

*  *  *

USS Benfold:

The missile slammed into the destroyer’s starboard bridge wing, passing through an inch-thick window before detonating. The expanding cloud of shrapnel and fire ripped through the pilot house like a tornado, killing everyone in the bridge crew except the Helmsman. Badly burned, deafened by the concussion, and blinded in one eye, the twenty-two-year-old deck seaman struggled to his feet and stood amongst the wreckage and the smoldering bodies of his shipmates.

Driven so far into shock that rational thought was an alien concept, the young Sailor became only dimly aware of the searing pain coming from the area of his left hand. Perhaps it’s still on fire, he thought, but even that idea felt detached and unimportant. He slowly raised the wounded arm so he could inspect it with the eye that still seemed to be working. But the hand wasn’t there. Someone had taken away his hand, and left in its place a bleeding stump. Splinters of bone protruded from the mangled wrist, and blood shot from the mass of torn flesh and cartilage in a pulsating jet that was fascinating to watch. The Helmsman sank to his knees, and then lay down on the scorched deck, surrounded by the bodies of the bridge crew. Just for a minute, he thought. I’ll just rest here for a minute, until my head clears. He closed his one good eye.

*  *  *

Out on the forecastle, Benfold’s 5-inch deck gun opened fire, hurling six shells at the enemy motorboat in rapid succession.

The little boat zigged and zagged with insane abandon as the sky began to rain exploding naval artillery shells. The boat was small, fast, and incredibly agile. Through some combination of skill and luck, it slipped unharmed through the barrage of steel and fire.

Benfold’s big gun began barking continuously, pumping out shell after shell, pausing only long enough between firing for the gun’s auto-loading system to raise the next shell and ram it into the barrel.

The ninth round caught the motorboat, blasting it into thousands of burning fragments no larger than a pack of cigarettes. The tenth and eleventh rounds were already in the air. Both landed and detonated in the same stretch of water that the motorboat had recently occupied. But the target was gone, and the exploding shells succeeded in killing only saltwater.

*  *  *

Anvil (USS Towers):

The nose cone of Towers’ first ASROC shattered on impact, and the Mark54 torpedo came to life and detached itself from its parachute.

Placement of the weapon was nearly textbook perfect. It acquired its target on the first pass and accelerated to attack speed before the submarine could even maneuver.

The water was shallow in the straits, and the shock wave of the explosion was magnified, sending a base surge of displaced water fountaining thirty feet into the air. Gremlin Zero Two was obliterated.

*  *  *

Anvil two didn’t meet with the same level of success. At the top of the weapon’s ballistic arc, the second VLA’s airframe jammed and didn’t separate properly. The torpedo couldn’t detach itself, and the entire missile assembly fell out of the sky well down range of its target. Falling ten thousand feet without a parachute, the faulty weapon disintegrated on impact with the water.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the 29-MC: “All Stations—Sonar has multiple hydrophone effects off the starboard beam! Bearings two-six-zero and two-six-five. Initial classification: hostile torpedoes!”

Ensign Cooper stabbed at the mike button. “USWE, aye! Break! Bridge—USWE. Crack the whip! We have in-bound hostile torpedoes. I say again—crack the whip!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The whine of the gas turbines increased in pitch and volume as the engines wound up to maximum rpm.

The Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the 1-MC. “All hands stand by for heavy rolls while performing high-speed evasive maneuvers.”

The deck tilted sharply to port as the ship veered into the first evasive turn.

*  *  *

USS Benfold:

Captain Vargas punched the button that patched her comm-set into the 1MC. “This is the Captain speaking from CIC,” she said. “The bridge has been knocked out by a missile hit. I need a damage control team and medical personnel on the bridge now. CCS take rudder and engine controls. Engineering Officer of the Watch, establish communications with CIC on Net One Zero, and stand by for maneuvering orders. Get to it people! That is all.” She released the mike button.

The TAO’s console lost power. He was about to report the failure when the call came in.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Aegis is down hard!”

“What the hell happened?” the TAO snapped.

“We lost primary and alternate power to the computers, sir. Probably one of the automatic bus-tie transfers, since they’re about the only pieces of gear common to both primary and alternate legs of power. The Combat Systems Officer of the Watch says his people are checking prints and chasing cables now. As soon as they find the bad ABT, they can rig casualty power.”

“TAO, aye. What’s your estimated time of repair?”

“The CSOOW is calling for ten minutes, sir. They might be able to cut that in half, if they get lucky and find the bad ABT quickly.”

“We don’t have ten minutes,” Captain Vargas said. She looked up at the darkened Aegis display screens. “We don’t even have five minutes.”

The TAO nodded. “I know that, ma’am.” He keyed his mike. “Weapons Control—TAO. With Aegis down, two-thirds of your consoles are dead. Send your unused operators down to assist the CSOOW’s crew on chasing cables. Let’s try to speed this up.”

“Weapons Control, aye.”

Captain Vargas looked at the TAO. “Go out to SAU Commander on Navy Red. Tell him we’ve taken a hit to the bridge, and we’ve lost Aegis. We will not be able to make the backup VLA shots he ordered.”

The TAO nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He punched in to the secure radio channel and started his report.

*  *  *

USS Ingraham:

Captain Culkins gritted his teeth as Benfold’s status report came over the speaker. “Well, ain’t this a pretty picture,” he said quietly.

Ingraham’s CIC was about half as well equipped as the ones on her more powerful sister ships. But her crew was well trained, and the gear they did have was good, even if it wasn’t quite state-of-the-art. She might not have the most impressive weapons and sensors in the Search Attack Unit, but at least her combat systems hadn’t crapped out in the middle of the battle.

Captain Culkins allowed himself a tiny, humorless smile. Okay, maybe that last bit had been a bit below the belt. Benfold had just taken a missile hit right in the face; some equipment was bound to be knocked off-line. It was just a hell of a time to lose Aegis, the heart of the destroyer’s combat system.

Culkins shook his head and keyed into Navy Red. “SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. Request permission to break formation and close Benfold’s position. We can provide missile defense coverage until Benfold gets her Aegis system back on line, over.”

“Ingraham, this is SAU Commander. Roger. You are cleared to break formation. Keep an ear in the water, though. Those subs are still out there.”

“You don’t hear that every day,” Ingraham’s Tactical Action Officer said. “A frigate providing missile coverage for a destroyer. My, my, how the mighty have fallen.”

“Don’t enjoy it too much,” Captain Culkins said. “Those are our people dying over there.”

“Of course, sir,” the TAO said. All traces of mockery were gone from his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

“Don’t sweat it,” the captain said. “It’s an honest mistake. I went down that road myself, for a couple of seconds.”

“Yes, sir.”

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“USWE—Sonar. Hostile torpedo number one has broken acquisition. Looks like we fooled it.”

On the CDRT, Chief McPherson watched the symbol for one of the enemy torpedoes go astray. She keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. What’s the status of the second torpedo?”

“Still closing, Chief. It’s sticking to us like peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth.”

“USWE, aye. Break. TAO—USWE. We have evaded the first torpedo, but the second torpedo is still locked on. We’re not going to shake this one, sir.”

“TAO, aye.” Lieutenant Nylander looked at the captain. “Any ideas, sir?”

“One,” the captain said. “A crazy idea that one of my academy buddies came up with about a hundred years ago. I have no idea if it’ll work, but it’s not like we’ve got a lot to lose.” He looked up at the Aegis display screens. “The torpedo is coming dead up our stern, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right,” the captain said. He keyed his mike. “Bridge—Captain. Come right thirty degrees and steady up.”

“Bridge, aye. Coming right thirty degrees.”

The ship began to turn.

“The idea,” the captain said, “is to get the torpedo to come in from your quarter, about thirty degrees off your stern.”

The TAO watched the tactical displays. “What does that do for us, sir?”

“Nothing, by itself,” the captain said. “But we know the torpedo is programmed to dive under our hull and detonate. So we have to give him as little hull as possible at the critical moment. It won’t eliminate the damage, but—with a little luck—it might keep this fucking torpedo from blowing us in half.”

“Captain—Bridge. We are steadied up on new course zero-six-five.”

“Captain, aye. Stand by for my orders. When I give the command hard to starboard, I want you to throw the rudder over hard to starboard, then go all-ahead flank on the port engine, and all-back on the starboard engine. Got that?”

“Bridge, aye. Copy all, sir. Standing by for your order.”

“Good,” the captain said. He keyed his mike again. “USWE—Captain. I need to know when that torpedo is going to hit us. I know you can’t give me an exact answer, but I want Sonar’s best guess, based on signal strength and elapsed run-time. Understand?”

“Uh … I think so, sir. That is, yes, sir. Do you want us to give you a countdown?”

“That’s an excellent idea,” the captain said.

*  *  *

USS Ingraham:

“TAO—Air. I’ve got three missile pop-ups! Bearing two-seven-five!”

The Electronics Warfare Technician confirmed the report a few seconds later. “TAO—EW, standing by on chaff. I have active H-band seekers on all three missiles. Classification: Exocet SM-39s, ‘November Variants.’”

“TAO, aye. Break. Weapons Control—TAO. Let me know the second you get fire control lock on those Vipers.”

“TAO—Weapons Control. We are locked on and tracking all three Vipers. Request batteries released.”

Captain Culkins keyed the net. “This is the Captain. You have batteries released.”

*  *  *

Out on the forecastle, the Mark-13 missile launcher rotated up to the zero position and an SM-1 surface-to-air missile rode up the vertically aligned rail to lock into place on the launcher’s single arm. Nicknamed the one-armed bandit, the Mark-13 system was an unwieldy-looking contraption, but it was fast. Although it could handle only one missile at a time, it could load and launch fast enough to keep up with most twin-armed launchers.

The one-armed bandit slewed around and pointed the nose of its missile in the direction of the enemy Vipers. With a brilliant flash of light and an unholy roar, the SM-1 leapt off the rail on a trail of fiery smoke. The launcher swung back around to the zero position, and another missile slid up the rail.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“Torpedo impact in approximately ten seconds,” Chief McPherson said over the net. “Nine … Eight …”

“Bridge—Captain. Hard to starboard!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The ship heeled over sharply, and the bow swung to the right as the rudder shot around to the hard-over position. A fraction of a second later, the ship began to shudder as the blades on the starboard propeller rotated from full ahead to full astern, reversing the direction of thrust on the starboard side of the ship. The bow came around even faster, and the ship heeled over even farther as it reefed into the turn.

Chief McPherson shouted into her mike, “Three … Two … One … Impact!”

*  *  *

DMA37 Torpedo:

The acoustic signal strength from the transducers was close to optimal. The torpedo dove toward twelve meters and slid under the target’s hull, exactly according to the targeting algorithm in its computer. But the calculations were off somehow. The target signal strength peaked before it should have and was falling off rapidly by the time the torpedo reached twelve meters.

The target had made a violent turn toward the torpedo at the last second, and the torpedo overshot its mark, rocketing under the hull and beginning to come out the other side before it could correct its course.

Had the DMA37 been a hair smarter, it might have aborted the arming sequence and swung back around for another pass at the target—one with better placement. But the arming conditions had been met, however briefly, and the computer followed its program. The detonating signal reached the warhead, and 250 kilograms of high-explosive erupted into an expanding sphere of fire and death.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

For an instant, the underwater explosion illuminated the darkened ocean like a flash of lightning. A microsecond later, the shock wave smashed into the port side of the destroyer, lifting the stern completely out of the water, and rolling the ship far onto its starboard side.

With a shriek of rending metal, hull plates buckled and collapsed. The ship’s stern seemed to hang in the air for a second, apparently suspended on a mushrooming bubble of steam and fire. The keel began to bend.

Then the spell was broken, and the stern crashed back into the waves, throwing plumes of seawater fifty feet into the air. The whipsaw effect torqued the keel in the other direction, and the steel backbone of the ship groaned like a wounded animal, a resonating sound that rose through the deck plates at an incredible volume. But the keel held.

Towers rolled a little farther onto her starboard side and then sluggishly, she rolled back to port. She settled onto her wounded side and began to take on water.

*  *  *

Emergency battle lanterns came on automatically as power failed through two-thirds of the ship. The lanterns cast circles of light in the darkened passageways, raising the illumination level from Stygian blackness to something approaching evening twilight. The engines had fallen silent, but the semidarkness was far from quiet. The screams of injured Sailors echoed through the passageways, their cries competing with the shouts of damage control crews and the torrential rumble of the rising floodwaters.

*  *  *

CIC was a shambles. Captain Bowie climbed to his feet. His ears were still ringing, and a gash across the left side of his forehead leaked blood across his face and into his eyes. He clamped his left hand over the laceration and used his right hand to wipe the blood from his eyes as best he could. He blinked and strained to see in the near darkness. “TAO!”

Lieutenant Nylander’s voice came from behind him. “Here, sir!”

The captain turned to see the Tactical Action Officer struggling to get to his feet. The lieutenant winced and clutched at his right knee. Then he stood with a visible effort, holding on to the edge of a console for support.

“Establish comms with CCS. I need damage reports, casualty reports, and a report on the status of damage-control efforts. I want to know how long before we can make way and how long before we can fight.”

“Aye-aye, sir!”

The captain reached for his comm-set and then realized that he had lost it. He looked around and selected a face at random. “Surface!”

“Yes, sir!”

“See if we can go out over Navy Red. If we can’t fight, maybe we can still run this show from the sidelines.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

A minute later, the Surface Radar Officer made his report. “The HF transmitters are out, Captain. We can hear, but we can’t transmit. The techs are working on it now, but we don’t have an ETR yet.”

The captain nodded. “Very well.”

A very young and timid voice asked. “Captain? Are we going to sink, sir?”

The captain made no move to locate the owner of the voice. The young man was scared, and he had every right to be. There was no sense in singling him out. “No, son,” the captain said. “We are not going to sink. We’re going to kill those bastards. Every goddamned one of them.”

*  *  *

USS Ingraham:

Ingraham’s first SM-2 reached its intercept point with one of the Vipers bound for Benfold, and a distant flash in the sky told the story. Radar confirmed the kill a second later. “Splash one!” the Weapons Control Officer shouted. Then, a few seconds later, “Splash two! Splash three!” He clenched his fists and waved them in the air. “We got ‘em all!” He let go with a loud wolf whistle. “And that … ladies and gentlemen … is how it is done!” The CIC crew began to cheer.

Captain Culkins smiled. “Nice shooting.” This fight was far from over, but he could let them have a few seconds of self-congratulatory fun. They’d earned it.

He keyed up Navy Red. “SAU Commander, this is Ingraham. We have splashed all three of Benfold’s inbound Vipers, over.”

There was no reply.

Captain Culkins keyed up again and repeated his message.

Again, there was no answer.

This time, he went out to Benfold. “Benfold, this is Ingraham. Radio check, over.”

“Ingraham, this is Benfold. Read you Lima Charlie, over.”

Captain Culkins frowned. Towers must have been hit pretty hard; they were off the air. He went out over Navy Red again. “Benfold, this is Ingraham. SAU Commander has taken damage and cannot respond via Navy Red. You are next in seniority. Are you prepared to assume SAU Commander at this time, over?”

The reply took nearly a minute. Rachel Vargas must have been tearing her hair out over there. No commanding officer ever wanted to turn down a position of command, especially in the heat of combat, but her bridge was knocked out and most of her weapons and sensors were off line. When she finally answered, the frustration in her voice was palpable. “Ingraham, this is Benfold. I’d love to take the ball, but I’m in no shape to run with it. This one is all yours, Mike. Good luck, over.”

“Ingraham, aye. Break. All units, this is the commanding officer of USS Ingraham. I am assuming SAU Commander at this time. I say again, I am assuming SAU Commander at this time, over.”

He released the mike button and scanned the tactical plot. He didn’t have much of a SAU left to work with. Benfold was out of it for the moment and so was Towers. That left Ingraham and Towers’ helo, Firewalker Two-Six. His own helo, Gunslinger Four-One, was at Ready Five. He could launch it in a matter of minutes if he had to. He decided to hold off on that for the moment. So far, helicopters hadn’t fared very well against the submarines. It wouldn’t pay to risk both of the SAU’s remaining air assets at the same time.

He keyed up Navy Red. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is SAU Commander. Say your current status, over.”

“SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. My fuel state is three hours plus zero two minutes. Three souls aboard. My load-out is one Mark-54 torpedo and a mixed rack of sonobuoys. I am currently monitoring passive buoys, tracking one POSS-SUB contact, designated Gremlin Zero Three, over.”

“SAU Commander, aye. Do you have a firing solution on contact Gremlin Zero Three, over.”

“SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. That’s affirmative. I’ve got this guy tagged and bagged. Give me batteries released, and I’ll bring you his head on a plate, over.”

Captain Culkins thought about this for a few seconds. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is SAU Commander. You have batteries released. You are authorized to drop below two thousand feet only long enough to make your attack. Your approach and return are to be made above Angels Two, over.”

“This is Firewalker Two-Six. Copy all. Out.”

Captain Culkins swallowed. The Navy had sent helicopters after these submarines three times, and three times the helos had been blasted out of the sky. He hoped like hell he hadn’t just ordered Firewalker’s air crew to their deaths.

*  *  *

Firewalker Two-Six:

The pilot’s name was Lieutenant Clinton Brody, or just Clint to his buddies. He scanned his instrument panel and keyed his inter-phone. “Start your weapons check-off list,” he said to the Sensor Operator. He looked over at his copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Julie Schramm. “Here’s the plan, Jules. We stay above Angels Two for the approach. As soon as we start our attack dive, you launch a pair of flares. My guess is the sub will pickle off a heat seeker with our name on it the instant he detects our rotor wash. The flares will give the missile something to play with. As soon as our weapon is away, we bank hard to port, climb like hell, and you pop off two more flares. Got it?”

His copilot nodded. “Piece-o-cake, boss.”

“Good. Now, go ahead and make your reports.”

The copilot keyed her radio. “SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. I am prepping for my attack run, over.”

“SAU Commander, aye. Good hunting.”

About a minute later, the Sensor Operator reported that the weapon was ready to drop. “Standing by to launch on your order, sir.”

“All right, let’s do this,” the pilot said. He nudged the stick forward, pitching his aircraft into a dive. “Weapon away on my mark”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

The copilot punched a button. “Flares away.” Two brilliant flashes of light appeared at the edges of their peripheral vision and rapidly fell away behind the aircraft.

In the darkness the ocean was invisible. But it was down there all right, rushing up to meet them at breakneck speed.

“Stand by …” the pilot said, watching the numbers on his altimeter unwind. “Launch—now, now, NOW!”

The Sensor Operator smashed his thumb down onto the firing button, and the aircraft lurched as the torpedo dropped clear. “Weapon away, sir!”

The pilot pulled back on the stick, and the helo began to climb. “Pack a bag, kids, ‘cause we are out of here!”

The copilot punched another button. Two more flares ignited and fell away into the darkness. “Flares away!”

“Here it comes!” the Sensor Operator shouted. “Missile-emergence, bearing one-three-six!”

“Holy shit!” Lieutenant Brody said as he jogged his aircraft into a sharp bank to the left, still fighting for every inch of altitude he could get. “The welcoming committee doesn’t fuck around!”

Something caught his attention at the lower threshold of his hearing. His copilot was mumbling something. Her words were very soft, and he had to strain to make them out over the hammering of the rotors. “Hail Mary, full of grace … Hail Mary, full of grace … Hail Mary, full of grace …”

He looked over his left shoulder. “Where’s the missile?”

“I don’t know, sir!” the SENSO said. “I lost it!”

“Well find it!”

Below them, a circle of the night sky flashed yellow-white as the heat-seeking missile homed in on one of the flares and detonated.

“See that?” Lieutenant Brody said. “No big deal when you fly with the pros.” His cocky tone of voice gave no hint of the fact that he’d just been hit by a nearly overpowering urge to urinate.

The SENSO held his headphone closer to his ear. “We’ve got weapon startup, sir.” A few seconds later, he added, “Looks like good placement, sir. The weapon has already acquired.”

For the briefest of instants, a patch of ocean two thousand feet below lit up like daylight.

“Bull’s-eye!” the Sensor Operator shouted. “Loud underwater explosion with multiple secondaries! I think we just bagged us a submarine!”

“Outstanding!” Lieutenant Brody said. “Now comes Miller Time …”

His copilot looked at him. “Now comes what?”

“Miller Time,” the pilot said. “You know … the old beer commercials …”

Lieutenant (jg) Schramm shrugged. “Must have been before my time, boss.”

The pilot raised an eyebrow. “It all becomes clear, now. You’re the brilliant young Jedi apprentice, and I’m the toothless old codger who must educate you in the ways of the Force.”

“I don’t know about the toothless part,” the copilot said, “but the rest of it sounds dead on the money.”

“Uh … sir?” the SENSO said. “I hate to interrupt all that official pilot talk, but I think I’m getting a sniff on the third submarine.”

The pilot stared over his right shoulder. “Get out of town, kid.”

“I’m not joking, sir. Buoys three and four are coming up hot. I’ve got narrowband tonals consistent with a Type 212 diesel submarine. I think the other member of this wolfpack is about to crash the barrier.”

“You’re not shitting me?”

The SENSO’s eyes were locked on his display. “No, sir. This guy is getting stronger all the time.”

The pilot looked over at his copilot. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare torpedo in your pocket, would you?”

“Afraid not.”

“Damn it!” the pilot said. “Make the call to the SAU Commander. Tell him we’ve got another sub in our sights, and we are fresh out of torpedoes!”

*  *  *

USS Towers:

Chief McPherson listened to Firewalker’s contact report and shook her head. Ingraham was the only unit left that was capable of engaging the sub. But the frigate was not equipped with ASROC. Ingraham would have to close the submarine to within a few thousand yards and conduct a torpedo attack using her over-the-side torpedo tubes. An iffy proposition at best. The last place a surface ship wanted to be was within weapons range of a hostile submarine.

The chief stared at the dark screen of the powerless CDRT as if it still had the capacity to show her something. If she’d been in Commander Culkins’ shoes, she would have launched Gunslinger Four-One. Of course, the launch itself would take about five minutes. Add to that another ten minutes for the helo to get into attack position. Fifteen minutes minimum before the helo would be able to engage the submarine. Fifteen minutes was a long time. The sub could launch more Vipers, or it might disappear again. Commander Culkins wouldn’t want to take that risk. He would go after the submarine himself, despite the risks.

Perhaps thirty seconds later, the SAU Commander responded to Firewalker’s contact report, and all of the chief ‘s predictions came true.

“Firewalker Two-Six. All units, this is SAU Commander. Your contact designated Gremlin Zero Four. Maintain track and pass targeting data to all units. Break. All units, this is SAU Commander. Ingraham is detaching from the formation to pursue and engage Gremlin Zero Four. Wish us luck, over.”

Chief McPherson’s eyes stayed glued to the useless screen of the CDRT. “Come on, baby,” she whispered quietly. “You’ve got the ball. Now bring it on home to mama.”

CHAPTER 39

USS INGRAHAM (FFG-61)

NORTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

2247 hours (10:47 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Engineman First Class Donald Sebring, the Engineering Officer of the Watch, stared at a cluster of instruments on the Propulsion and Auxiliary Control Console. “Oh, come on, not now …”

He keyed his mike. “Bridge—CCS. We’ve got high vibrations on the output side of the main reduction gears. In accordance with standard EOSS procedures, recommend slowing one major speed while we investigate.”

The reply came almost immediately, but it wasn’t the bridge; it was the commanding officer. “CCS, this is the Captain. Conduct your investigation but do not reduce speed. You are directed to maintain speed at all costs.”

The captain’s words took Sebring by surprise. Maintain speed? The casualty response was clearly outlined in the Engineering Operational Sequencing System. EOSS called for a reduction in speed while investigating out-of-tolerance vibrations. Didn’t the CO realize that he was risking the entire engineering plant?

Petty Officer Sebring switched channels and keyed his mike again. “Messenger—CCS. We have high vibrations on the output side of the MRGs.”

“CCS—Messenger, high vibrations on the output side of MRGs, aye.” The voice belonged to Fireman Sandra Cox. “Do you want me to walk the shaft?”

Sebring keyed his mike again. “Messenger—CCS. That’s affirmative. Walk the shaft starting at the MRGs and report ASAP.”

“Messenger, aye.”

Walking the shaft was an engineering term for visually inspecting every inch of the ninety-four-and-a-half–foot propeller shaft—from the Main Engine Room, where it coupled with the output side of the main reduction gears—to Shaft Alley, where it passed through the watertight seals of the stuffing box and out through the bottom of the hull into the ocean. With luck, the Messenger’s inspection would turn up something simple, like a broken pipe or a shifted bracket rubbing against the shaft.

On Sebring’s first ship, a mop bucket had gotten loose during a high-speed turn and had somehow managed to wedge itself under the shaft. The metal sides of the bucket had formed a natural resonating chamber, amplifying the vibrations of the spinning shaft until it sounded like the mating cry of a brontosaurus.

The memory brought a flicker of a smile to Sebring’s lips, but any trace of humor was driven instantly from his mind by the angry buzzing of an alarm on the Damage Control Console.

A half-second later, the DC Console Watch shouted, “Smoke alarm in AMR #3!”

Sebring switched back to the bridge circuit and keyed his mike. “Bridge—CCS. We’ve got a smoke alarm in Auxiliary Machinery Room #3. Report to follow.”

“CCS—Bridge. Copy your smoke alarm in AMR #3. Call it away.”

Sebring grabbed the flexible microphone stalk for the general announcing circuit and swung it down near his face. There was a brass bell bolted to the bulkhead to the right of his console. He grabbed the lanyard, pressed the microphone button, and rang the bell rapidly eight times, paused for a couple of seconds and then gave three distinct rings of the bell to indicate that the casualty was in the aft portion of the ship. The sound of the bells and his voice blared from 1-MC speakers all over the ship. “Smoke, smoke, smoke. We have a smoke alarm in Auxiliary Machinery Room #3. Away the Flying Squad. Provide from Repair Three.” He rang the bell again and repeated the message. And then he shoved the 1-MC microphone away.

“DC Console Watch, start your plot.”

“Already started, boss.”

Sebring glanced at the clock. Because of the possible presence of smoke, the Flying Squad would have to wear Self-Contained Breathing Apparatuses to enter AMR #3. Of course, at General Quarters, they would already be wearing their SCBAs. But they would still have to light off their breathing gear and conduct seal checks. Figure one minute for that, plus another minute to haul ass to AMR #3, check the door for heat and pressure, and enter the space. It would be at least two minutes before any damage reports started coming in. By that time, the Damage Control Assistant would have shown up and taken control of the investigation and repair efforts.

Sebring keyed his headset mike again. “Messenger—CCS. Continue your walk down of the shaft, but skip over AMR #3. The Flying Squad will handle that space.”

“CCS—Messenger. Continue my walk-down of the shaft, but skip over AMR #3, aye.”

Sebring looked at the readouts from the vibration sensors. The vibrations were getting worse. This didn’t look much like a runaway mop bucket.

He heard it in the distance at first—a low, slow groaning sound that reminded him vaguely of whale songs. But this sound didn’t taper off to silence the way that whale songs did. It grew continually louder until Sebring could feel it resonating through the very deck plates. And then it grew louder still, loud enough to rattle the glass faceplates of the dials on his console. And he began to realize what the sound must mean.

Sebring looked at his watch. Where in the hell was the Damage Control Assistant? The DCA should have been running this show. Where was he?

“CCS—Flying Squad. Four SCBAs lit off, time two-two-one-eight. Door checks are complete. We are entering the space.”

Sebring nodded unconsciously. “CCS, aye.”

The second report came almost immediately, at a near shout as the Flying Squad leader struggled to be heard over the noise of the strange groaning vibration. “CCS—Flying Squad. We have heavy smoke in AMR #3. We are preparing to scan with Nifty.”

Nifty, or NFTI, was the Naval Firefighting Thermal Imager: a handheld infrared viewer that could spot sources of heat even in total darkness.

“CCS, aye.” Sebring was only half-listening to the reports of the Flying Squad. The groaning was still growing louder, and its accompanying vibration was beginning to rattle the entire ship. He was picturing AMR #3 in his mind now, and he knew what the Flying Squad was going to find.

The door behind him rattled as the dogging lever came up. Lieutenant (junior grade) Mark Wu, the ship’s Damage Control Assistant, came through, dogging the door behind himself. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I shouldn’t have had that damned chili. It’s killing my stomach. I can’t seem to get more than fifty feet from the head.”

He walked up behind EN1 Sebring. “Give me a pass-down.”

He was interrupted by a half-shouted voice over the speaker. “CCS—Flying Squad. The line shaft bearing is smoking! I say again, the main line shaft bearing in AMR #3 is smoking. It’s so hot that it whited out my Nifty. Recommend we rig a fire hose to attempt seawater cooling.”

Sebring keyed his mike. “Flying Squad—CCS. Negative. Do not attempt to cool the bearing. Evacuate the space and wait for orders.”

“Good call,” the DCA said. “If that bearing is hot enough to zap the Nifty, it’ll explode when cold water hits it.”

Sebring switched circuits and keyed up again. “Repair Three—CCS. Set primary fire boundaries around Auxiliary Machinery Room #3.”

The repair locker phone talker acknowledged and repeated back his order.

The groaning sound was a roar now, and the entire ship was rattling like an old car on a dirt road.

Sebring pulled off his headset and handed it to the DCA. “You’ve got to talk to the captain, sir. He won’t listen to me.”

Lieutenant (jg) Wu pulled the headset on and keyed the mike. “Captain—DCA. The main line shaft bearing in AMR #3 is burning. Recommend we stop engines and lock the shaft immediately to prevent serious damage to the engineering plant.”

The CO’s voice came back immediately. “DCA—Captain. Negative. We are in pursuit of a hostile submarine. You are ordered to maintain speed.”

The DCA keyed his mike again. “Captain—DCA. If that bearing locks up while the shaft is still turning …”

The captain cut him off. “I know we can wreck the plant, Mark. I also know what can happen if we don’t sink this damned sub. Two minutes, Mark. That’s all I need to get within firing range. You give me two more minutes of speed, and then you can trash the whole plant.”

Wu keyed his mike. “DCA, aye.”

He looked down at Sebring. “What do you think? Will that bearing hold together for another two minutes?”

Sebring shrugged. “I have no idea, sir. I’ve never even heard of anyone running flank speed with a burned line shaft bearing. I’m amazed that it’s held this long.”

*  *  *

For a little while, it seemed as if the captain might actually get his two minutes. But suddenly, there was a brief but harsh metallic scraping sound, followed immediately by the shriek of tearing metal.

In AMR #3, the burning bearing seized up, grinding the spinning propeller shaft to an abrupt halt.

In the Main Engine Room, Ingraham’s gas turbine engines continued to crank forty-one thousand horsepower of torque into the input shaft of the main reduction gears. But the reduction gears couldn’t turn, because the output shaft was locked in place. The transverse frames that supported the reduction gear housing began to buckle under the strain, as the howling turbines attempted to turn the entire main reduction gear, housing and all.

The monstrous stress ripped open welds between plates of the ship’s hull, and the sea came flooding in. The MRG housing cracked, spraying lubricating oil all over the engine room, and throwing off hot steel shrapnel like a bomb.

A fist-sized chunk of broken gear caught the Upper-Level Watch in the left cheek. Moving at the speed of a meteor, it tore the side of his head off without even slowing down. His limp body fell off the catwalk and into the rapidly flooding bilge.

*  *  *

Ingraham drifted to a stop and wallowed at the mercy of the waves. The chase was over. The submarine was gone.

CHAPTER 40

OVAL OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

4:03 PM EDT

“Just a second, Bob,” President Chandler said. “Let me go secure.” He inserted the magnetically coded encryption key into the slot on his STU-6 secure telephone unit and gave it a half-turn clockwise. The key clicked as it locked into place, and a brief series of warbling tones came out of the earpiece while the phone synced up with the encryption algorithm in a twin phone on the desk of the Chief of Naval Operations. The red “clear” lamp went out, and the green “secure” lamp came on.

“Okay, Bob,” the president said. “We’re in the green. I assume you’re calling to give me an update on the sub hunt. How are we looking?”

“It’s the old joke, Mr. President,” Admiral Casey said. “Good news and bad news.”

“What’s the good news?”

“We have clear battle damage assessment. Towers took out one of the submarines. Her helicopter took out another one.”

“So there’s only one hostile sub left?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent,” the president said. “What’s the bad news?”

“Towers and Benfold are both shot up pretty badly, and Ingraham is totally out of the picture. Somebody is going to have to write a bunch of those ‘The U.S. Navy regrets’ telegrams, sir. Quite a few of our young men and women out there are coming home in body bags.”

“We’re paying a hell of a price,” the president said. “But we can still win this thing, can’t we?”

The CNO sighed. “I don’t know, sir. Towers has already restored her electrical power, and Benfold should be back under way within an hour or so. How much speed they can make still remains to be seen. Maybe they can catch that sub. Then again, maybe not.”

“If they catch it, can they kill it?”

“I think so, Mr. President. I damned sure hope so.”

“You aren’t exactly filling me with confidence here, Bob.”

“With all due respect, sir, if you want more confidence you’ve got to give me more assets. It’s not too late to get a couple of P-3s out there. Then I could pretty much guarantee you a kill.”

“I can’t do that, Bob,” the president said. “We’ve got to show that we can go toe-to-toe with the best the Germans can offer up and still come out on top.”

“I understand that, sir. But what if that sub gets by us? Why risk losing when there’s still a chance to guarantee a win?”

“Goddamn it, Bob! Can’t you see what this is about? In the minds of the people, perception is reality. Shoernberg is making a power play here, and he’s only thrown a few cards on the table to do it. If we have to call up the militia, the Boy Scouts, and the Air National Guard to catch one lousy German submarine, he wins. Shoernberg will have successfully demonstrated that the United States cannot win in a fair fight against German military hardware and tactics. He’ll come out of this flexing his muscles, and we’ll end up looking weak. And about twenty minutes after the dust settles, every pocket Napoleon in the developing world is going to start wondering if the U.S. is really so tough after all.

“We’ve only got one choice here, Bob. We’ve got to take Friedrik Shoernberg’s little power play and shove it so far up his ass that he can’t remember what he had for breakfast. He sends out four submarines; none of them get through. Not one of them! Then he only has two choices: escalate the conflict or back down. And I don’t think he’s stupid enough to escalate.”

“Mr. President, if what you say is true, then we need to guarantee a kill on that last submarine,” the CNO said. “And, if you need a guaranteed kill, you’ve got to let me throw some more assets into the hunt.”

“No, Bob. How we kill that submarine is every bit as important as whether or not we kill it at all.”

“That’s what you keep telling me, sir,” the CNO said. “But I’ve got two ships out there that have already had the shit shot out of them, and I’m asking them to take on a killer submarine without backup.”

The president sighed. “Okay, Bob. Let’s try it this way … In a one-on-one fight between a surface combatant and a submarine, who wins?”

“Whoever shoots first, sir.”

“Exactly. And who shoots first?”

“Whoever gets contact first.”

The president chuckled. “You’re going to make me drag this out of you, aren’t you? All right, you stubborn bastard, who gets contact first?”

“Three times out of five, it’s going to be the submarine, sir.”

“So, if a surface ship mixes it up with a submarine, three times out of five, the ship gets its doors blown off. Would that be a safe assumption?”

“Pretty much, sir.”

“And anybody who has a clue about Undersea Warfare knows this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, how many of our ships have the Germans sunk so far?”

“One, sir, if you count the Antietam.”

“I do not count the Antietam,” the president said. “She isn’t sunk, and she isn’t going to be. In fact, we’re going to repair her and keep her in service.”

“With all due respect, sir, that doesn’t make any sense. We can build a Flight-Three Arleigh Burke with every bit as much firepower and a thirty-year service life for what it would cost to put Antietam back together. Why waste that kind of money on a cruiser that’s over twenty years old?”

“Perception,” the president said. “Perception. The political value will be tremendous. Think about how it will look to the man on the street … Submarines kill surface combatants three times out of five, but not when they take on the United States. We go one-on-one, ship-to-sub, and we kill everything. The Germans lose every single unit they send out, but all of our ships make it home. Every single one of them lives to fight another day. In a fight where the Germans have the inherent advantage, Shoernberg loses it all. He comes away with no military victory, no propaganda coup, no bragging rights. Nothing.”

“And you think he’ll tuck tail and go home?”

“If he does, maybe we can stitch NATO back together for a few years,” the president said.

“What if he doesn’t, sir? What if Chancellor Shoernberg comes out with guns blazing?”

“Then we teach him a lesson that his country has already learned twice.”

The line was silent for nearly a full minute before the president spoke again. “Bob, we can’t afford to lose this one.”

The CNO’s voice was very quiet. “I know, Mr. President. I know.”

CHAPTER 41

U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)

BAHRAIN

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

1740 hours (5:40 PM)

TIME ZONE-4 ‘DELTA’

The shore version of the admiral’s Flag Plot bore very little resemblance to the sort found on aircraft carriers. Gone were the radar consoles and radio handsets, replaced by computer terminals and desks with secure telephones. The walls—uncluttered by piping and cable runs—were decorated with bronze and wooden plaques bearing the names and coats of arms of nearly every ship, submarine, and aircraft squadron that had ever served within the U.S. Naval Central Command’s area of responsibility. The large tactical display screens that dominated the east wall were of civilian design: the type used by corporations for training or briefing large groups of people. But despite the obvious physical differences, the shore and ship versions of Flag Plot were more alike than they were different. The tools were different, but the conversations that took place over the secure telephones tended to cover the same subjects that were discussed over shipboard secure radio circuits. The tactical symbols that peppered the big civilian-built display screens were from the same catalog of symbology used on ships.

The Duty Intelligence Officer, Lieutenant Commander Calvin Fisk, didn’t give the differences or similarities of ship and shore facilities even a passing thought. In addition to his other duties, he had an inch-thick stack of reports and message traffic to plow through. Luckily, most of the information was routine, meaning that he could skim some of the pages—checking only for significant changes in matters of tactical interest.

One message grabbed his attention. It was a contact locator report from SUCAP (Surface Combat Air Patrol), the squadron of fighter jets dedicated to monitoring—and if necessary, engaging—hostile and unknown surface craft operating in the Gulf region.

According to the report, three unmarked fishing trawlers had spent several hours cruising around off the coast of Siraj. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have even been worth mentioning, but the SUCAP aircraft had spotted the trawlers several times, and none of the boats had ever made any visible efforts to deploy fishing nets.

Lieutenant Commander Fisk looked up from the stack of paperwork. He wasn’t particularly concerned, but it was a little strange. He picked up the phone and punched the extension number for the Plot Supervisor.

“Plot Supe.”

“This is the Duty Intelligence Officer,” Fisk said. “I’m holding a SUCAP locator report on some Siraji fishing boats that are acting a bit on the squirrelly side. I’m sending a copy your way. I want each reported position for the boats recorded on the master tactical plot. I also want you to update the positions of the boats if any new reports come in.”

“Will do, sir,” the Plot Supervisor said.

As soon as he hung up the phone, Fisk realized that he hadn’t mentioned the lack of nets. It probably wasn’t important anyway.

He summoned an orderly. “Here,” he said, handing the young Sailor the SUCAP message. “Make a copy of this. Put the original back on the Read Board and take the copy over to master tactical plot and give it to the Plot Supervisor.

“Aye-aye, sir.” The orderly turned and walked away with the message.

The Duty Intelligence Officer went back to his stack of reports and didn’t give the fishing boats another thought.

*  *  *

Four hours later, the on-coming Plot Supervisor examined the master tactical plot as part of his preparations for assuming the watch. He pointed to the track history for Lieutenant Commander Fisk’s fishing trawlers. “What the hell were these guys doing?”

The off-going Plot Supervisor shrugged. “Fishing, probably. The intel officer got a bug up his ass and made me put them on the plot.” He laughed. “Why? Do you think they’re fishing in a manner that poses a threat to the security of the United States of America?” The last part was in an exaggeratedly masculine voice that was obviously meant to mimic the overly histrionic narrators used in Navy training videos.

The on-coming Plot Supervisor didn’t smile. “I don’t think they’re fishing at all,” he said. He pointed to the track history. “Look at all these course changes, like they were weaving a blanket, or something. If they were fishing, they ran over their own nets at least a dozen times. Where are they now?”

The off-going Plot Supervisor yawned and stretched. “They pulled back into Zubayr about forty minutes ago. Why? What do you think they were doing?”

“You’ve got me by the short and curlies,” the on-coming supervisor said. “But you can bet your ass it wasn’t fishing.”

CHAPTER 42

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHERN ARABIAN GULF

SUNDAY; 20 MAY

2140 hours (9:40 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Captain Bowie addressed the small group of men and women gathered around the wardroom table. “I apologize for calling this meeting at such a late hour, but we may very well be in combat again by tomorrow morning, and that means we have to make our preparations tonight.” His eyes lit on the commanding officer of USS Benfold, and he nodded in her direction. “I’d like to thank Commander Vargas, and her USW Officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Sherman, for accepting my invitation to join us tonight. I know that they have personnel casualties and damage-control issues to deal with back on their own ship, and I can appreciate how difficult it must have been to tear themselves away.”

Commander Vargas nodded. “I’m glad to be here, Captain. This really isn’t an easy time to leave my ship, and I have to confess that I was tempted to send Lieutenant (jg) Sherman by himself. But I have a top-notch exec, and I’m certain that my ship is in the best of hands. Still, I had to do some soul searching before deciding to come. Here’s what made up my mind … Our SAU is down to two ships now, both of which are damaged. We have a tremendous amount of firepower at our command, but very little of it can be brought to bear against a submerged submarine, which tells me that we probably can’t outrun this guy, and we certainly don’t outgun him. If we’re going to sink that submarine, we’re going to have to out-think him.” She looked around the table. “And since this is where most of that thinking is going to take place, this is where I need to be tonight.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “Well said, Commander. Well said.” He looked at the XO. “I’ve asked my executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Tyler, to kick us off with an outline of our current status. Pete?”

The XO nodded. “Thank you, sir.” He paused for a second and briefly consulted some notes that he’d made on a yellow legal pad. “The torpedo hit that we took on the port side did a number on us. We have a hole in the hull, to the port side of the keel. We’ve estimated its size at about twenty feet by fifteen feet, but we don’t know the actual dimensions of the hole, because the compartments that it opens onto are all flooded to the overheads. If we had time, we could ask for a team of divers to conduct an underwater survey of the damage, but time is the one thing we haven’t got. However large the hole is, we know that it’s added four inches to our draft in the aft end of the ship, and it’s given us a five-degree permanent list to port. We considered counter-flooding some compartments on the starboard side, to balance out the list and improve our stability, but we’re already hauling around enough flooding water to slow us down.

“To make matters worse, the hydraulic oil power module for the port shaft has at least a dozen leaks from shrapnel damage. We can’t control the pitch of the port screw, and right now it’s set pretty close to zero. We can spin the port shaft, but, without pitch control, it’ll just thrash the water and make a lot of noise; it won’t actually give us any headway.

“Between the weight of the flooding water and the loss of the port screw, our top speed is reduced to about eighteen and a half knots. Our engineers are working their asses off to restore pitch control to the port screw, but we can’t count on it being ready in time to be of use.”

He glanced at his legal pad again. “Personnel casualties, thank God, have been surprisingly light. Three dead, three reasonably serious injury cases—none of them life-threatening—and a couple of dozen minor injuries … sprained ankles, broken noses, and superficial lacerations, that sort of thing.”

The captain touched the bandage over his left eye and gave a grim smile. “Easy for you to say, XO. They’re only superficial when it’s not your head.”

The XO reddened. “Of course, sir. The point is, we have a few personnel shortages, but we’re not cut so short that we can’t steam or fight.” He checked his legal pad one last time. “That’s about it for now, sir. We’ve taken some lumps, but we’re not out of the fight.”

The captain nodded. “Thanks, XO. Commander Vargas, could you give us a quick rundown on your own status?”

“Of course, Captain,” Commander Vargas said. “I didn’t bring my notes, but I think I can wing it.” She thought for a few seconds. “I’m afraid that our personnel casualties were a bit heavier than yours. The rocket attack killed all six members of my bridge crew. The Helmsman was still alive when our stretcher team got to him, but he died on the way down to Sick Bay.” She paused again before continuing. “Our Ship Control Console is totally wrecked, but we’ve worked out a system of steering from the bridge. The Conning Officer has to relay his course orders to the Secondary Control Console in After Steering, and his speed orders to Propulsion Control Console in CCS. It’s awkward, but it works. The explosion blew out most of the windows, so the watch team is constantly getting about twenty knots of hot desert wind right in the face. Not pleasant, but they’re dealing with it.

“Let’s see …” she said. “What else?”

“The helo,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said softly.

“Right,” said Commander Vargas. “Thanks. Since Ingraham is down for the count, we’ve borrowed their helo, Gunslinger Four-One. We don’t have a helo hangar, but I figure that any aircraft that costs thirty million dollars should be able to survive for a day or two strapped to our flight deck.” She gave a tired smile. “Our flight deck crew wanted the air crew to feel at home, so they went out and painted a welcoming sign on the door to the helo control tower. It’s one of those big blue road signs, like the ones you see near highway off-ramps. It’s got those three symbols on it that mean gas, food, and lodging.” Her voice trailed off. “I think that’s it.”

“Thank you, Commander,” the captain said. “I guess we’re ready for the tactical part of the brief. Ready, Chief?”

Chief McPherson unrolled a navigational chart of the Arabian Gulf and laid it on the table. “Yes, sir.” On the chart, in colored marker, she had drawn a series of lines and symbols describing the current tactical situation. The last known position of Gremlin Zero Four was marked by a red datum symbol. The datum was now two and a half hours old, and a black dashed circle enclosed it at a scaled range of fifty nautical miles. Based on the submarine’s maximum submerged speed of twenty knots, this dashed line—or farthest-on circle—represented the farthest that it could have possibly traveled in two and a half hours.”This chart is already time-late,” Chief McPherson said. “A contact moving at twenty knots will travel two thousand yards in three minutes. Therefore, every three minutes, the radius of the farthest-on circle increases by two thousand yards, or one nautical mile. The piece of ocean that we have to search grows by a corresponding amount. Our top speed is limited to eighteen and a half knots. So, if the sub is running away at top speed, we’ll never catch him. If he’s headed northwest toward Siraj at a dead run, every three minutes he gets a hundred and fifty yards farther ahead of us. The longer we chase him, the farther ahead he’s going to get.”

Lieutenant (jg) Sherman shook his head. “In theory that’s true, Chief. But your own calculations show that these 212s have only been covering an average distance of 13.5 nautical miles per hour. No doubt this guy can outrun us, but—based on the performance they’ve shown so far—I don’t think he will.”

“We were his last roadblock,” the chief said. “If I were him, I’d forget about sneaking around. I’d be hauling ass toward the Siraji coastline. There’s nothing between him and Zubayr but open water.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know that,” Ensign Cooper said.

Chief McPherson gave her boss an uncertain look. “German intel on our positioning has been pretty damned good. Which probably means that sub is getting downloads from reconnaissance satellites. If he is, he already knows there aren’t any more ships in his way.”

“That could be,” Captain Bowie said. “But he can’t possibly know whether or not we’re planning to send P-3s after him.”

“That raises an excellent question,” Commander Vargas said. “Why aren’t we trying to get some P-3s? Captain Whiley is out of the game; why are we still trying to fight this thing with one foot in a bucket?”

Around the group, heads nodded in silent agreement.

“I don’t know,” Captain Bowie said. “I asked Admiral Rogers that same question. He told me that the answer was classified at a need-to-know level way above his head. He hinted that the CNO had told him that it was a matter of the highest national security.”

Commander Vargas ran her fingers through her hair. “They won’t give us backup, and the reason why they won’t give it to us is a matter of national security. What kind of sense does that make?”

Captain Bowie’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t know, Rachel. But think about this: Three nations, all of whom are members of NATO and the United Nations, have been in direct military conflict for the past few days. A lot of political and military alliances are on the chopping block. There’s no telling what kind of bizarre diplomatic maneuvers are going on right now, or what might upset the apple cart.”

Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said, “Maybe the Saudis have clamped down on their airspace until this thing blows over. The French did that when Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, back in the 1980s.”

“That’s possible,” Captain Bowie said. “But for right now, the brass hats don’t want us to know the reason. So we move on, and we work with what we’ve got.”

Commander Vargas said, “What we’ve got is a big piece of water and damn few assets to search it with. Anybody got any ideas on where to start?”

“I think we should sprint up to the north end of the pond,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said with a weak smile, “or maybe I should say ‘hobble’ … and set up a blockade off the coast of Siraj. Then we nail them when they think they’re on the home stretch.”

“Not a bad idea,” Captain Bowie said. “We may use that as our fall-back plan, but I hate to let the sub get that close to Siraj. If he slips by us then, we’ve lost him. We need to catch him down at this end of the pond, if we can.”

Commander Vargas nodded. “I agree with you, in theory. But there aren’t any choke points between here and Siraj. If we sweep the western side of the gulf, the sub can run up the eastern side. If we sweep the middle, he can slip past us on either side. We just don’t have enough assets to string a barrier all the way across the gulf.”

“Maybe we don’t have to,” Ensign Cooper said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s not as big a pond as we think it is.”

Captain Bowie looked at him. “What have you got, Pat?”

Ensign Cooper stared at the chart. “I have to wonder where those subs have been refueling.”

“The intel weenies say they topped off in Port Suez,” Chief McPherson said. “Just after they transited the canal.”

“That would get them down the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Aden,” Ensign Cooper said. “But they wouldn’t have made it across the Arabian Sea, and certainly not all the way up to the Straits of Hormuz.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “Good call, Pat. They must have fueled up again some time after they mixed it up with the Kitty Hawk strike group. If we can figure out where, we can make a decent guess at where that last sub is going to run out of gas.”

Ensign Cooper ran a fingertip across the chart and brought it to a stop on an island at the southwest end of the Arabian Sea. “I’m betting it was here, Captain. The island of Socotra.”

The captain scratched his chin. “How did you come up with that?”

“Look at this entire operation, sir. The Germans put a lot of work into planning this. They didn’t leave a lot to chance.”

“I can’t argue with that. But how does it tell us where they stopped for fuel?”

“They had to plan for the possibility that word would be out by now,” the ensign said. “In which case ports that are friendly to the United States would be closed to them.”

“Makes sense to me,” the XO said.

Ensign Cooper nodded. “They would have mapped out their fueling stops ahead of time, and I’ll bet you they stuck to ports that don’t have close ties to the U.S.” He used his finger to trace a rough arc on the chart. “They would have been running low on fuel somewhere in here.” Only two countries fell within the arc he was tracing on the chart: Oman and Yemen. “That gives us two likely candidates, and Oman—if you’ve been following the news—has been kissing up to our government for months now. They’re trying to wheedle their way into ‘favored nation’ status, so we’ll lift the technical embargo that’s keeping their communications and computer infrastructure in the dark ages. I figure they don’t want to risk screwing that up, so they’ll probably steer clear of anything that even smells like conflict with the U.S. That leaves our buddies down in Yemen, and they have been known to play footsie with enemies of the United States. Remember when the USS Cole was bombed back in 2000? That happened in a port called Aden, and guess what country Aden is in?”

“Yemen,” Chief McPherson said.

Ensign Cooper nodded. “Bingo.”

“Okay,” Commander Vargas said, “admittedly, Yemen is not at the top of our national Christmas card list. But how did you happen to pick this island? Scotroa, was it?”

“Socotra, ma’am. And it’s mostly a hunch. It’s owned by Yemen, but it’s far enough away from their coastline that the Yemeni government can deny involvement if anything goes wrong. Plus, it’s on an almost direct line from the point where the Kitty Hawk encountered the subs, to where the subs entered the Straits of Hormuz.”

Captain Bowie’s eyebrows went up.

Chief McPherson smiled. “That’s pretty heady stuff, sir. Have you been eating your Wheaties?”

Ensign Cooper frowned. “Why, Chief? Did I say something wrong?”

The chief shook her head. “Not as far as I can see, sir. I think you nailed it.”

Commander Vargas tilted her head to one side. “It’s still just a guess, but I have to admit, it looks like a pretty damned good one.”

“Looks good to me,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said.

“Okay,” Captain Bowie said. “We go with Pat’s hunch until something better comes along.”

Ensign Cooper’s eyes widened.

Captain Bowie laughed. “Don’t look so shocked, Pat. We’re not so hidebound that we can’t recognize good thinking when we see it, even if it does come from the new kid on the block. Now, reach into your hunch generator and see if you can pull out the next place that sub is going to take on fuel. He’s got to be thirsty by now. Where’s he going to stop for a drink?”

Ensign Cooper studied the chart. After a few seconds, he said, “Qatar.”

Commander Vargas looked at Captain Bowie. “Where did you find this kid? The Psychic Hotline?”

“It’s within the sub’s range, if it fueled up in Socotra,” Ensign Cooper said. “The current regime is not particularly friendly to the United States. It’s even roughly in line with the sub’s last known position and the Siraji port of Zubayr.”

“What about Iran?”Lieutenant (jg) Sherman asked. “They’re not big fans of the U.S., and they’ve got tons of coastline that a sub could slip up to.”

“Iran doesn’t like us much,” Ensign Cooper said, “but they hate Siraj a lot more. Those guys have been sniping across the border at each other for thirty years. I doubt the Iranian government would jump through hoops to break an arms embargo against one of their long-running enemies.”

“I’ll admit,” Commander Vargas said, “that Qatar is copping an attitude toward us. But would they risk international censure to help out Siraj?”

“They might, if the money was right,” Ensign Cooper said. “But, if they’re smart, they won’t let the submarine pull into any of their ports. They’ll keep it at sea, so they can claim ignorance if things go bad.”

Captain Bowie frowned. “Does Qatar have any oilers configured for at-sea replenishment?”

Ensign Cooper shook his head. “Not that I know of, sir. But they don’t need one. All they have to do is pull up to an oil platform.”

“An interesting theory,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said, “but subs don’t run on crude oil. They’re going to need diesel, and oil platforms aren’t set up to refine crude oil into fuel.”

“Actually, oil platforms do have diesel tanks,” Ensign Cooper said. “For their generators and the small boats that work the rigs—that sort of thing.”

Chief McPherson whistled slowly. “You have been eating your Wheaties!”

Commander Vargas nodded. “You could be right.”

Captain Bowie nodded also. “Maybe the pond isn’t as big as we thought.”

CHAPTER 43

OVAL OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 21 MAY

1:07 AM EDT

The president held the receiver to his ear and verified that the green “secure” lamp was lit before speaking. “Okay, Emily. We’re green.”

The voice of British Prime Minister Emily Irons warbled slightly as it came through the encrypted phone. “I appreciate you taking my call at this hour, Frank. I should have checked the time difference before phoning.”

“Don’t give it a second’s thought,” the president said. He did his best to suppress a yawn. Emily Irons wasn’t known for wasting time on pleasantries, and she never called without a compelling reason. It was worth getting up before the roosters to hear anything she had to say.

“What’s on your mind, Emily?”

“The attack on my embassy,” she said.

The president automatically sat up straighter and tightened the belt of his robe. “I’m listening.”

“The attack was planned by Abdul Kaliq, the Siraji minister of defense, and financed by the government of Siraj through a series of blind bank transactions in the Cayman Islands.”

The president felt a twinge, deep in his bowels. “You’re certain?”

“There’s no room for doubt, Frank. I’ve seen the proof.”

“Are you going to take it to the UN?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to handle the matter myself.”

“I see,” the president said. “Do you mind if I ask how you found out who was behind the attack?”

The British prime minister paused before answering. “That’s a bit of a sticky question, I’m afraid. I must ask you to trust me when I tell you that you will be much happier if you don’t ever know the answer to that question.”

It was the president’s turn to pause. “I had a homeland security briefing yesterday evening. It seems that there was a third man involved in the attack on your embassy—a Mr. Isma’il Hamid. He was struck down by a ruptured appendix before he could carry out his part of the plan. My intelligence people tell me that Hamid disappeared from his hospital bed at Columbia Memorial just about a half-hour before the FBI showed up to take him into custody. The hospital staff is certain that Mr. Hamid was far too sick to escape under his own power. You wouldn’t have any idea where Mr. Hamid disappeared to, would you?”

Emily Irons sighed into the phone. “Frank, I’m a little deaf in my left ear, and I didn’t hear that question. But, whatever it was, both of our lives will be much less complicated if you never ask it again.”

“I see,” the president said again. He rubbed his eyes. “No, Emily, I don’t see. I’m not trying to be rude, but surely you didn’t call me just to tell me that you can’t tell me anything.”

“Friedrik Shoernberg knew about the attack on my embassy, Frank.”

“What?”

“The BND, the German Federal Intelligence Service, had advanced intelligence on Abdul Kaliq’s plan to attack my embassy. I know for a fact that Shoernberg received a detailed brief on the attack at least a week before it happened.”

Frank swallowed. “You’ll have to excuse me, Emily, but I find that a little hard to believe. I’ll grant you that Friedrik has made some pretty dicey decisions lately, but the idea that he would …”

“He knew, Frank. The bastard knew the Sirajis were planning to murder my people, and he didn’t raise a finger to stop it.”

She paused for a few seconds. When she resumed speaking, her voice had a strangely formal quality to it. “Under its current regime, the Federal Republic of Germany constitutes a clear and present danger to the security and the sovereignty of the United Kingdom. In a few hours, I intend to ask Parliament for a formal resolution authorizing war with Germany.”

The president sat in silence for nearly a minute. “Are you certain you want to do this?”

“The Germans attacked my ships, in clear violation of Article 5 of the NATO Charter,” the British prime minister said. “And under Article 5, member nations of NATO are required to take whatever action is necessary to restore the security of the North Atlantic Treaty area.” Her voice took on a hard edge. “The charter doesn’t say we’re authorized to take action, Frank. It says we are required to take action. Article 5 also requires other signatory nations to assist any NATO country that has come under attack. I’m going to take the fight to Shoernberg’s door, Mr. President. And I expect the backing of the United States.”

The president closed his eyes. “I assume you’re going to petition the other NATO countries as well …”

“Of course,” Irons said.

“You’ll have trouble getting support,” the president said. “Shoernberg is claiming that your ships fired first at Gibraltar. Without concrete evidence, it’ll be difficult to prove that Germany struck the first blow.”

“The German government knew about the biological warfare attack on my embassy, Frank. They didn’t warn us, and they didn’t do anything to prevent it. And now they’re selling weapons to the very people who attacked us.”

“I know,” the president said. “But both of our countries lost a lot of popularity in NATO when we took on Iraq. Some of our NATO partners will want to believe Germany’s claim that your ships fired first at Gibraltar. And you’ll have to reveal your intelligence sources if you’re going to prove that Friedrik Shoernberg knew about the embassy attack ahead of time. From what you’ve told me, I suspect you’re not going to be able to reveal your sources. That’ll give France all the excuse it needs to side with Germany. Belgium will probably follow Germany on this as well. Italy could go either way. They gave us nominal support during the liberation of Iraq, but they’ve bucked us on nearly everything since. Turkey’s another coin toss. They’re still mad at us because we wouldn’t let them beat up the Kurds in northern Iraq.”

“Greece will back us,” Irons said. “So will Portugal, and Poland. And I think we can convince the majority of the others.”

“Maybe you’re right, Emily,” the president said. “Maybe you will be able to persuade most of the others. But at what cost? NATO is going to come apart at the seams. Do you really want that?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But the NATO alliance is worthless if we can’t call upon it to live up to its charter. Either NATO protects its members, or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it isn’t an alliance at all. It’s just a lot of high-sounding words on paper.”

“What if I can take Shoernberg down?” the president asked. He gripped the phone more tightly as the words came out of his mouth, and he wished instantly that he hadn’t said them.

“What do you mean?” Irons asked.

The president gritted his teeth. In for a penny, in for a pound …

“Suppose I can take Shoernberg’s regime out of power … That would remove the threat to your country, wouldn’t it? The German people aren’t really your problem. It’s Shoernberg and his cronies.”

“How would you go about it?”

“For starters,” the president said, “I squash his last submarine like a bug. And if necessary, I order a surgical strike on the air base where the Germans are staging fighter jets for delivery to Siraj. I don’t let so much as a slingshot get through to Siraj.”

“Go on.”

“Then I rake Friedrik over the coals. I stand before the United Nations General Assembly and formally accuse him of violating everything from standing UN resolutions, to international law, to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. I pull down his pants in front of the media. I paint him as not only a criminal, but an incompetent criminal. It’s not bad enough that he violates international law, but he’s not even smart enough to do it successfully.”

“That won’t be enough to push him out of power.”

“No. But it’s a start. Siraj won’t be supplying Germany with oil, because Germany won’t be delivering any weapons. My analysts tell me that the German economy is going to take a nosedive without that oil. They’re going to have one hell of an energy shortage, complete with power rationing—maybe even blackouts. I’ll crank up import tariffs on German-made products and squeeze their economy even harder. Once the crunch is really on, the German people will be screaming for Shoernberg’s head on a stick. I’ll have the CIA dig up every scrap of dirt that Shoernberg or his people ever touched. If one of them ever stole a candy bar, cheated on his taxes, or pinched a secretary on the rump, we’ll plaster it all over the six o’clock news. We’ll humiliate him every morning and discredit him every evening. Hell, I don’t know what all we’ll do. I’m just freewheeling here. I’ve never played dirty politics before. But I’ve got some smart people working for me, Emily. So do you. We’ll turn them loose on this.”

The prime minister paused before speaking. “I don’t think it will work, Frank.”

“Maybe it won’t,” the president said. “But it’s certainly worth trying. Anything is better than war. You know what happened the last two times your country butted heads with Germany …”

“This situation isn’t remotely similar,” Irons said. “We’re not going to drag the entire world into this. It won’t happen that way again. The world has changed too much.”

“We’d like to believe that,” the president said. “But we can’t be sure.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “If war with Germany cannot be avoided, the United States will honor its obligations of treaty and its long-standing friendship with Great Britain. But I beg you, Emily … give me a chance to prevent this war.”

“You sink that submarine, Mr. President,” the British prime minister said, “and then we’ll talk.”

CHAPTER 44

GUNSLINGER FOUR-ONE

CENTRAL ARABIAN GULF (OFF THE COAST OF QATAR)

MONDAY; 21 MAY

0758 hours (7:58 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Lieutenant Vincent Brolan yawned hard enough to make his ears ring. “I fucking hate dawn patrol,” he said, for about the eighth time that morning. “I mean I really fucking hate it.”

“I know you do, Vince,” the copilot said. “And you really hate spending all that flight pay that you get for flying it.”

Brolan eased his aircraft, Gunslinger Four-One, a little closer to the oil platform. They were close enough to see the workers going about their morning routines, doing whatever the hell it was that oil rig workers did. A few of the workers turned at the sound of the helo’s rotor blades, and some of them even waved. Most of them paid no attention whatsoever. Helicopters were a dime a dozen in the gulf.

Lieutenant Brolan leaned his helmet against the port-side window and felt the vibration of the engines resonating through his skull. “Lucky Number Seven is a bust,” he said. “Let’s move on to our next contestant.”

The copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Enrico “Henry” Chavez, pointed down at the platform. “Don’t you think we ought to swing around and check out the back side?”

“It’s a waste of time, Henry. There’s nobody home.” Under his breath, he said, “This whole thing is a waste of time.”

“We ought to do this by the numbers, Vince. That sub has got to be hiding somewhere.”

“Yeah? Well if it ever was here, it’s long gone by now.”

“Come on, Vince. You know our orders.”

In the rear seat, the Sensor Operator, Aviation Warfare Systems Operator Second Class Linda “Mojo” Haynes, listened to the exchange and didn’t say a word. As the only enlisted member of the flight crew, she made it her business to stay out of disagreements between the officers.

The pilot let out a heavy sigh. “All right, okay, I’m turning already.” He banked the helicopter into a broad turn that would take them around behind the oil platform.

As they rounded the corner of the platform, it slid into view: a fat black cigar shape riding low in the water, tethered to the platform by a web of lines and hoses.

“Jackpot,” the SENSO said over the intercom. “There’s our submarine.”

Lieutenant (jg) Chavez reached up to key his mike, when a pair of nickel-sized holes surrounded by spider webs blossomed on the Plexiglas windshield to the left of his head. Simultaneously the helicopter was jarred sharply several times, as though someone with a hammer was banging on the fuselage.

“Holy shit!” Chavez shouted. “They’re shooting at us!”

Lieutenant Brolan swung the helo into a tight turn away from the station and put on the speed. A stream of tracers leapt up from the oil platform and blasted through the air where the helo had been a split second before. Brolan keyed his radio. “This is Gunslinger. I’m under fire!”

Lieutenant (jg) Chavez half turned in his seat and keyed his intercom. “Hey, Mojo. You okay back there?”

“I think I just peed my pants, sir!”

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, kid!”

Lieutenant Brolan jogged the helo to the right just in time to avoid another burst of machine-gun fire. He shouted into the radio, “My aircraft is hit and still receiving hostile fire!”

“Gunslinger Four-One, this is SAU Commander. Evade and return to home plate. Help is on the way, over.”

Lieutenant Brolan jerked the stick to the left, but a series of rapid-fire hammer blows to the airframe told him that he hadn’t been quite fast enough. A chattering vibration started to come from the tail boom, and the indicator needles on several instruments began to swing crazily.

“I’m hit again!” Lieutenant Brolan shouted into the radio. “Gunslinger is hit again! We are still taking fire!”

“Gunslinger Four-One, this is SAU Commander. Can you tell me what kind of fire are you taking, over?”

“How the fuck should I know? Some kind of machine gun!”

Chavez keyed the radio. “SAU Commander, this is Gunslinger Four-One. We have located Gremlin Zero Four, moored to oil platform Golf. Our aircraft has taken several hits from one or more automatic weapons. Damage report to follow, over.”

He switched over to his intercom. “Mojo, I need a damage report. Give me a rapid survey; we’ll check for little stuff in a minute.”

A few seconds went by, but he didn’t receive an answer. He keyed the intercom again. “How’s it looking back there?”

No answer.

Chavez turned far enough in his seat to see into the rear of the cabin. Petty Officer Haynes was slumped over in her seat, her head hanging limply, bobbing and rolling with each movement of the aircraft. A dark stain was spreading across her chest, but against the olive drab of her flight suit, it was impossible to tell if it was blood. The helo took a particularly violent bump, and the young woman’s head lolled far enough to the side so that her face was partially visible. A dark red bubble formed over one nostril, broke, and then another one began to form. It was blood all right.

Chavez keyed his intercom. “Mojo is hit!”

Lieutenant Brolan was silently chanting, “Come on baby … come on baby … come on baby …” With a rapid interplay of hand and foot work, he managed to throw his crippled helo far enough to the side to avoid another hail of bullets. At least he thought he had avoided it; the airframe was rattling so badly that they might have taken a hit and not been able to feel it. He keyed his intercom. “How bad is she?”

“I don’t know,” Chavez said. “But it doesn’t look good.” He keyed the intercom again. “Mojo, can you hear me? Come on, Mojo, talk to me. You’re gonna be okay; you’ve just got to hang on for a few minutes.”

He switched back to the radio. “SAU Commander, this is Gunslinger Four-One. My SENSO is hit. I can’t tell how bad, but it looks like a chest wound. I’m going to need a medical crew standing by as soon as I hit the deck, over.”

“Roger, Gunslinger.”

Another burst of gunfire came from the oil platform, but this one fell short, the tracers dropping harmlessly into the ocean at the ends of their trajectories.

“I think we’re out of it,” Lieutenant Brolan said. “I think we’re …” The tension in his voice was easing. He looked up. “What’s our damage like?”

“I can’t tell,” Lieutenant (jg) Chavez said. “My dials are all over the place. But I think I’m smelling oil.”

Lieutenant Brolan nodded. “Yeah, I smell it too. Think we can make it back to the barn?”

The radio kicked in. “Gunslinger Four-One, this is SAU Commander. We are approaching at all speed. Return to home plate, over.”

Brolan stared at the radio as if it were from another planet. “No shit.”

Chavez thumped his instrument panel, where a red tattletale was flashing. “Oh shit! I’m showing a ‘chip-light’ on engine one.”

“Is it for real? Or are your instruments taking a dump?”

“You want to chance it?”

Lieutenant Brolan shook his head. “No way.”

According to the flashing tattletale, a sensor in the oil sump had detected metal filings in the starboard engine. If the sensor was reporting an actual condition (instead of an erroneous reading caused by instrument damage), the engine could seize up, tearing the aircraft apart, or even exploding like a bomb.

“Shut down engine one,” Lieutenant Brolan said. “I’ll mow the lawn,” he said under his breath. “I’ll help the kids with their homework. I will never look at another woman again …”

The aircraft took on a shudder so violent that it jarred Brolan’s teeth. Only four hundred feet up, they were starting to lose altitude. The cyclic and collective were becoming less responsive with every second, and now he’d been forced to shut down one of his two engines. He hoped the increasingly powerful stink of burnt oil was coming from the now-dead starboard engine. If it was coming from the transmission casing or the port engine, they were going to have to ditch in the ocean. And no matter what the Navy’s air-sea survival courses taught, he knew that the odds for surviving a helo ditch were not good at all.

The copilot keyed up the radio. “SAU Commander, this is Gunslinger Four-One. My starboard engine is out, and I am losing altitude.” He glanced at his Tactical Air Navigation screen before continuing. “My ETA to Benfold is three mikes. Request emergency green deck, over.”

The reply came over the radio a few seconds later. “Gunslinger Four-One, this is SAU Commander. Towers is designated as your home plate. You have emergency green deck on Towers. Do not attempt to rendezvous with Benfold, over.”

Pilot and copilot both stared at the radio. “What the hell are they thinking?” Chavez asked. He immediately keyed the radio. “SAU Commander, this is Gunslinger Four-One. I have an emergency. My SENSO is injured, I am down one engine, and my aircraft is about to fall out of the goddamned sky, over!”

On the TACAN, Benfold was approaching at thirty-five knots. Towers was limping after her at eighteen and a half knots. Benfold would be within range a hell of a lot sooner.

“Gunslinger Four-One, this is SAU Commander. I acknowledge your emergency. Your ETA to Towers is six mikes. You are not, I repeat not authorized to rendezvous with Benfold. Their deck is red to you, over.”

“This is Gunslinger Four-One. Roger, out.”

Lieutenant (jg) Chavez looked out his side window at the ocean, only about three hundred feet below and coming up way too fast. “I sure hope those guys brought some body bags.”

CHAPTER 45

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

CENTRAL ARABIAN GULF (OFF THE COAST OF QATAR)

MONDAY; 21 MAY

0812 hours (8:12 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

The executive officer looked at Captain Bowie. “You sure about this, Jim? If those guys have to ditch, all we’ll be able to do is steam around in circles and try to fish the body parts out of the water. It will take an act of God to get one of them out of that thing alive.”

Captain Bowie nodded slowly. “I know.”

“Benfold can recover that aircraft in …”

The captain cut him off. “By the time Benfold recovers the helo, that submarine will be gone. Right now, if they pull out all the stops, they might get lucky and catch it on the surface. With a busted screw, we can’t get there in time.”

“What if we can’t get to the helo in time?”

“We will,” the captain said quietly.

“But, what if we don’t? That air crew is going to die …”

Captain Bowie wheeled around. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you really think for a second that I don’t know that?”

The XO didn’t say anything.

“How many people are dead already?” the captain snapped.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“We lost three to that goddamned torpedo, not counting the wounded. Benfold’s whole bridge crew was wiped out; that’s six more. Plus our three, that makes nine. One on the Ingraham makes it ten. Call it an even hundred and fifty on the Antietam. And let’s not forget the Kitty Hawk; they lost fifteen, plus two entire air crews—that would be six more. And how many have the Brits lost? Nearly all hands on the York. Their crew would be, what? Two hundred? Two seventy-five?” He covered his eyes with his left hand and rubbed his temples with thumb and fingertips.

When he dropped his hand, his voice was much softer. “We will do everything we can to save the crew of that aircraft. But those subs have racked up an unbelievable body count. We sink that bastard, priority one. Everything else is a secondary consideration. If it costs us three more lives, then we pay the price.” He turned away and half-whispered, “We pay the price.”

*  *  *

They stood in silence for several moments, until the TAO interrupted. “Captain, Gunslinger is on final approach.”

“Is the crash-and-smash crew standing by?”

“Yes, sir, and Sick Bay is prepped to receive casualties.”

The captain punched keys on his console, and views from each of the three flight deck cameras popped up on the Aegis display screen. The video was black-and-white but very high resolution. Even so, the helo appeared as a blur at first, a gray and white smudge against black waves.

The pilot had bought himself some time by jettisoning his torpedo and ejecting his load of sonobuoys. Somehow the helicopter was still managing to claw its way through the air, darting and fluttering like a sparrow with an injured wing.

*  *  *

The crippled aircraft came in from the aft starboard corner of the flight deck, and it was immediately apparent that its angle of approach was all wrong. The LSE (short for Landing Signal Enlisted) tried to wave the helo off, but it was obvious that it didn’t have the power to gain altitude for another approach.

The helo’s tail wheel caught the edge of a flight deck net, and the belly of the aircraft slammed into the deck, crushing the landing gear.

The pilot cut power instantly, but the helo rolled far enough onto its port side for the rotors to scrape the deck. The blades shattered, and shrapnel flew in all directions.

A hand-sized chunk of the rotor hit the chock-and-chain man just below the right knee, shattering the bone and nearly amputating his leg. A larger piece of rotor hit the front window of the helo control tower, turning the safety glass to an instant network of spider webs. A smaller piece dealt the LSE a glancing blow to the side of the head, dropping him to his knees, but his cranial helmet reduced the impact to merely bruising force.

Miraculously, though pieces of the shattered rotors ricocheted off the deck and bulkheads, no others found human targets.

The crash-and-smash team started moving the instant the helo was on deck—one team spraying the wrecked aircraft with firefighting foam, and another rushing up to access the cabin and rescue the crew.

The pilot and copilot, both of whom could walk with assistance, were out in less than a minute. The SENSO, Petty Officer Haynes, had to be carried out on a stretcher.

*  *  *

The Helo Control Officer watched as his crash-and-smash team continued to blanket the downed aircraft with foam. “We’re going to have to push it over the side,” he said.

“We need the captain’s permission to do that,” the LSE said.

“Of course we do,” the HCO said. “But it’s not like he’s going to have a choice. No way that bird is leaving the flight deck under its own power. Maybe if we were back in the States, they could crane it off and haul it back to the squadron for a rebuild. But right now, it’s blocking the flight deck, and we can’t launch or recover Firewalker until it’s gone.”

*  *  *

His words proved prophetic. Ten minutes later, the captain ordered a fifty-man working party to muster on the flight deck. Working together under the orders of the HCO, they rocked the damaged aircraft back and forth until they could roll it off the deck.

Gunslinger Four-One slipped over the side. The crippled helo floated only for a few seconds before disappearing beneath the waves.

CHAPTER 46

USS BENFOLD

CENTRAL ARABIAN GULF (OFF THE COAST OF QATAR)

MONDAY; 21 MAY

0818 hours (8:18 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

The image on the left Aegis display screen was a live video feed from the Benfold’s mast-mounted sight. The high-resolution black-and-white camera was focused on oil platform Golf.

Captain Vargas pointed to the screen. “Look at those bastards. Going about their business-as-usual routine, just as innocent as you please. And not a hint of the fact that they just cut one of our aircraft to ribbons a few minutes ago.”

“Can’t say I blame them for playing nice,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said. “A couple of shots from our 5-inch gun, and they’ll be visiting Allah in person. A helo is one thing, but they’re not stupid enough to risk mixing it up with a destroyer.”

“Looks like the sub is gone,” Captain Vargas said, still watching the screen as Benfold swung around to check out the back side of the oil platform.

“It hasn’t had time to go very far, ma’am,” said the USWE. He started punching buttons on the CDRT. “I’m setting datum at the northern edge of the oil platform, since that’s the last known location of the sub.” He punched another few keys and watched the display screen. “Okay, here’s our farthest-on circle. I’m building in the assumption that the sub got under way about fifteen minutes ago, or within five minutes of the last sighting by Gunslinger Four-One. Based on a maximum submerged speed of twenty knots, that sub has to be within ten thousand yards of the oil platform.”

The captain nodded. “What’s our predicted sonar range?”

“About forty-five hundred yards,” the USWE said. “But I’d rather err on the side of caution and base our search plan on thirty-five hundred yards.”

“We can cover the search area in three parallel passes,” the captain said.

“My thoughts exactly, ma’am.”

“Do it. Execute your search plan.”

“Aye, aye,” the USWE said. He keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE. Go active on sonar. Commence your search. Remember how shallow the water is and adjust your depression angles accordingly.”

“Sonar, aye.”

“UB—USWE. I expect to gain contact within the next few minutes, and the water is too shallow for ASROC. We don’t know what side of the ship this guy is going to show up on, so go ahead and prep an over-the-side shot for the port and starboard torpedo tubes.”

“UB, aye. Recommend we configure both weapons for shallow runs, minimum initial search depths, and minimum ceiling depths.”

“Good call, UB,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said. “Make it so.”

He watched the CDRT, waiting for the first sign of the submarine. “We’ve got you now, you son of a bitch,” he said softly. “The fat lady is about to sing, because this opera is over.”

*  *  *

But twenty minutes later when Benfold came to the end of her search run, there was still no sign of the submarine.

Captain Vargas laid her hand on Lieutenant (jg) Sherman’s shoulder. “How did he get past us, Alex?”

Her USWE stared at the CDRT, still devoid of submarine contacts. “He didn’t, ma’am. He couldn’t have.”

“Then he’s still here.”

“I don’t think so, Captain. We would have picked him up.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Alex,” the captain said. “The sub is either still here, or it got past us. Which is it?”

“He’s here, Skipper.”

“Then maybe he’s under the oil platform, blending in with its sonar return,” the captain said.

Sherman furrowed his eyebrows. “I don’t think he can do that, Captain. Between the scaffolding, and the piping, and the pumps, there’s an awful lot of equipment down …” He stopped. “What did you just say, ma’am?”

“I said, ‘He might be under the oil platform … ‘“

Lieutenant (jg) Sherman shook his head rapidly. “Not that part, ma’am. The other part.”

Captain Vargas shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I said something about the sub blending in with the oil platform’s sonar return.”

Sherman snapped his fingers. “Not the oil platform, the bottom.”

“You think the sub is sitting on the bottom?”

“Could be, Skipper.”

“Wouldn’t sonar have picked him up when we ran over the top of him?”

“No, ma’am,” the USWE said. “The SQS-53D’s automatic gain control clips the bottom return out of the signal when it processes it. If it didn’t, the system would show a sonar return in all directions; our scopes would be saturated. If the sub is sitting on the bottom, his signal could be getting clipped out along with the bottom signal.”

“Can we just shut the automatic gain control off, or bypass it?”

“No, ma’am. The bottom return would saturate our scopes, and we’d be completely blind.”

The captain stared at him. “You’re telling me that the American people spent millions of dollars on a sonar that refuses to see the submarine?”

“I’m afraid so, Skipper.”

“And that submarine could be directly underneath us at this very second?”

“That would be a hell of a coincidence, but yes, ma’am. It’s certainly possible.”

“There’s a case of our tax dollars hardly at work. Can we call him up on the underwater telephone and invite him to come out and play?”

Lieutenant (jg) Sherman’s eyebrows went up. “That’s not a bad idea …”

“Great,” the captain said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Now all we have to do is find someone who speaks German.”

Sherman smiled. “Actually, Skipper, what we need is someone who speaks Submarine.” He keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE. Does your On-Board Trainer’s sample library contain a recording of a Mark-54 torpedo?”

“USWE—Sonar. Yes, sir. It does.”

“Sonar—USWE. Can you patch an audio signal from the OBT into the underwater telephone?”

The reply took several seconds. “Uh … yes, sir. I guess so. Is that what you want me to do?”

“Affirmative, Sonar. Go ahead and rig the patch and load the Mark-54 recording, but do not transmit until I give the word.”

“Sonar, aye.”

The captain nodded slowly. “You’re going to broadcast a fake torpedo signal and scare the sub off the bottom?”

“That’s the idea, ma’am. When the sub hears that torpedo start up, he’s going to assume that we’ve detected him somehow, and that he’s about to get a high-explosive enema. He’ll be off the bottom, running his torpedo evasion maneuvers in nothing flat.”

“He’s going to launch a counter-battery attack as soon as he detects our weapon.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s how we’re going to locate him. As soon as he shoots, we’ll put a torpedo down his firing bearing.”

“So we have to draw fire from his torpedo to get a firing solution for our own torpedo?”

“I know it’s a risky plan, Captain. I just can’t think of a better one.”

Captain Vargas didn’t speak for over a minute. Finally, she said, “Neither can I. Looks like we do it your way, Alex.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman keyed his mike. “Sonar—USWE. Commence transmitting your recorded torpedo signal and keep it up until I tell you to stop.”

“Sonar, aye. Transmitting now.”

The next two reports came back-to-back, less than thirty seconds later. “USWE—Sonar has active 53 Delta contact off the starboard quarter, bearing one-five-five. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level high!” Before the USWE could acknowledge, the Sonar Supervisor started in on his second report. “All Stations—Sonar has multiple hydrophone effects off the starboard quarter! Bearings one-five-five and one-five-seven. Initial classification: hostile torpedoes!”

“Holy Christ!” the USWE shouted. “This guy is right up our ass.” He keyed the net. “Bridge—USWE. Crack the whip! I say again, crack the whip!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the 29-MC. “The first torpedo has acquired! Torpedo is close aboard!”

The turbines began to spin up, and the ship started to turn.

It was too late.

*  *  *

The DMA37 torpedo slipped under the hull and detonated directly beneath the destroyer’s after fuel tanks. The shallow, hard-packed sand bottom reflected a great deal of the shock wave back toward the surface—toward Benfold—effectively doubling the destructive power of the warhead. The magnified explosion ripped through the steel hull plates, rupturing the fuel tanks. Sixty thousand gallons of diesel fuel marine erupted into flame, instantly transforming USS Benfold into an inferno.

The blazing steel hulk had barely settled back into the waves before a second torpedo darted in and hammered the ship again.

When the smoke and spray from the base surges of the explosions cleared, all that remained to mark the last position of USS Benfold was a debris field and a burning oil slick.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

Captain Bowie stood on the forecastle and watched the scattered pieces of Benfold’s debris field slide past the bow wake and drift aft. The desert wind was hot, and it carried enough sand to sting his cheeks. He felt, rather than saw, the executive officer walk up behind him. He spoke without looking over his shoulder. “Any more survivors yet?”

“No, sir,” the XO said. “Just the one man. A kid, really. I just came from Sick Bay. He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen. Doc says he’s got burns over about 40 percent of his body.”

“He’s not going to make it, then,” the captain said.

“Probably not, sir.”

The captain nodded once, but didn’t say anything. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have happened. Despite the damage to her bridge, Benfold had been operating at near full capacity, with her speed, maneuverability, and firepower undiminished. Her captain, Rachel Vargas, had been a skilled tactician and a master of sea-maneuver warfare. Her USW team had been well trained and well prepared. And now they were all gone.

The thoughts turned slowly over and over in Captain Bowie’s brain, but they refused to become real for him. The U.S. Navy hadn’t lost a warship in combat since World War II. And now a ship under his command was gone, and—except for one burned and dying teenager—every human being on board was dead. All three hundred thirty-seven of them.

Captain Bowie shifted his eyes to the horizon. Gremlin Zero Four—God, what an innocuous sounding designation for such a ruthlessly efficient killer—was still out there.

The captain turned toward the XO. “I’m going to head down to Sick Bay for a few minutes. Get a hold of the Navigator and have him plot a course to the coast of Siraj, using our best speed.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Captain Bowie walked down the port side, toward the door that would lead him down to Sick Bay. He knew that he should go to CIC instead. They needed him there. His crew was looking to him for the plan, the stroke of tactical genius, the rabbit out of the hat that would let his crippled ship take on a cunning and deadly enemy and somehow emerge triumphant.

But that could wait, for a few minutes at least. He could spare two minutes for the last surviving member of a United States warship.

*  *  *

The Chief Hospital Corpsman met him at the door to Sick Bay. “He’s already gone, sir. We did everything we could, but he just slipped away from us. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, Doc,” the captain said. “What was his name?”

“His uniform was mostly burned off when they pulled him out of the water. We couldn’t find any ID. We … don’t know his name, sir.”

The captain nodded and walked away. “Thanks, Doc,” he said over his shoulder. Bowie headed for CIC. He shook his head as he walked. They didn’t even know the kid’s name.

CHAPTER 47

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 21 MAY

03:14 AM EDT

Admiral Casey looked at the president. “It’s confirmed, sir. USS Benfold is gone. It looks like all hands were lost.”

“I thought Towers picked up a survivor,” Gregory Brenthoven said.

“They did,” the CNO said. “He died shortly after he was pulled out of the water.”

The president shook his head slowly. “Jesus … When was the last time we lost a ship with all hands?”

Admiral Casey thought for a second. “I believe that would have been 1968, sir. A nuclear fast-attack submarine, USS Scorpion, suffered some kind of accident in the mid-Atlantic and went down with all hands. Ninety-nine dead, if my memory serves me.”

“That was an accident,” the president said. “What about in combat?”

“I’m not sure, sir. Certainly not since the Second World War.”

The president closed his eyes and ran both hands slowly through his hair, fingers combing from front to back. “So much for my total victory, huh? Germany loses everything, and we get away clean as a hound’s tooth. It sounded so goddamned brilliant. What the hell was I thinking, Bob? Did I really think those guys could just sail out there, sink a bunch of cutting-edge killer subs, and sail home in time for lunch?”

No one attempted to answer.

After a few seconds, the president opened his eyes. “All right, I guess that puts us in damage-control mode. What have we got left that can stop that submarine?”

“Towers, sir,” the CNO said.

“I can’t leave it to them anymore,” the president said. “They’re beat to shit. I need to put enough assets out there to guarantee a kill. What have we got in-theater?”

The CNO took a breath and exhaled heavily. “Nothing, sir. What’s left of Kitty Hawk’s strike group is at least twenty hours too far south and west. Even if we turn them around now, that sub will be in Zubayr before they can get through the Straits of Hormuz. My P-3s in Saudi are pinned down by a sand storm. If it clears in the next couple of hours or so, I can get them up into the northern Gulf, but even that will probably be too late.”

The national security advisor asked, “What about that nuclear submarine you wanted to send after them?”

“We had to clear the Topeka out of the Gulf. With four ships up there hurling torpedoes right and left, we couldn’t risk a blue-on-blue engagement with a friendly sub.”

“Those nuke subs are fast,” Brenthoven said. “Get it back up there!”

The CNO shook his head. “They’re not that fast. Topeka is too far out of position.”

“What you’re telling me,” the president said, “is that I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it.”

“I didn’t say that, Mr. President,” the CNO said.

“But it’s true, nevertheless …”

“I’m afraid so.”

CHAPTER 48

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

MONDAY; 21 MAY

2318 hours (11:18 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

The Chief Engineer dropped heavily into one of the chairs at the wardroom table. His coveralls were streaked with grease and his face and hands were filthy. “My boys have managed to restore pitch control to the port screw, but it’s got a lot of vibration in it. Obviously, we can’t tell for sure without divers, but I think the screw itself is pretty chewed up. It must have taken some direct damage from the torpedo hit. We’re not going to be able to run it at full speed, and frankly, Captain, that screw is going to howl like a dog whenever we run it.”

“How much difference will it make in our speed if we run the damaged screw?” Captain Bowie asked.

The Chief Engineer shrugged. “We won’t have exact figures until we put some power to it, but I’m guessing about five or six knots. We can do eighteen and a half on the starboard screw. With both screws going, I’d expect to see between twenty-three and twenty-five knots.”

“But we’ll be noisy as hell …”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Stealth or speed,” the XO said. “That’s a hell of a choice to have to make when you’re chasing a submarine.”

“It’s not really much of a choice, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “If we don’t beat that sub to the Siraji coast, we’re out of the ball game. Stealth or no stealth, I think we’re going to have to sprint like hell to get ahead of the sub.”

“What’s that kind of noise going to do to our sonar ranges?” the captain asked.

“We’ll be blind as a bat, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “At least while we’re sprinting. Sonar will be back to normal as soon as we slow down and drop the port screw off line again.”

“Noisy and blind,” Ensign Cooper said. “What a great way to chase a submarine.”

“I agree, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “It’s certainly not my first choice, but if we try it quiet and slow, that sub is going to be tied to a pier in Zubayr before we even get up to the north end of the gulf.”

The XO whistled through his teeth. “It looks to me like we are damned if we do, and double-dog-damned if we don’t.”

“Anybody got any brilliant suggestions?” the captain asked.

No one had any.

The captain stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Bring the port screw on line and head for Zubayr with the best speed we can manage. No matter how noisy the coach is, Cinderella cannot be late for the ball.”

*  *  *

An hour later, Chief McPherson knocked on the door to the captain’s stateroom.

“Enter.”

The chief opened the door. “Captain? May I have a word with you?”

“Come on in,” the captain said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Sir, I just came from Sonar Control. We are making a lot of noise. The sub is going to see us a hundred miles away.”

The captain said, “No choice, Chief. We’ve got to have the speed.”

The chief nodded. “I realize that, sir. The problem is we sound like a destroyer with a bad screw.”

“I’ve talked to the Chief Engineer, and he tells me there’s nothing we can do to quiet that screw.”

The chief nodded. “I understand, sir. So I think we should take it in the opposite direction. If we can’t make Towers quiet, we should try to make her as noisy as possible.”

The captain frowned. “And then the sub will be able to detect us even farther away.”

“Yes, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “But will it be able to classify us?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I went through Acoustic Analysis, they taught us a simple rule for spotting U.S. subs on a sonar gram: ‘If you look at the gram, and there’s nothing on it, you’re probably looking at a U.S. nuke.’”

“I’m not following you, Chief.”

“When a Sonar Operator looks at a contact that’s generating big fat broadband and lots of narrowband tonals, he’s not thinking U.S. nuke. He’s thinking merchant ship. He’s thinking beat-up old tanker with worn-out engines. He’s thinking anything but U.S. nuke. Ordinarily, he would be correct. If we play it right, I think we can take advantage of that kind of thinking.”

“We make ourselves so noisy that no Sonar Operator in his right mind would even think about classifying us as a stealth destroyer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Chief, have you ever read Poe?”

“Sir?”

“Edgar Allen Poe. He was one of the early horror writers. Some say that he’s still never been equaled.”

“I read The Telltale Heart in high school. And what was that poem? The Raven, I think …”

“I had in mind a different story,” the captain said. “Your idea smacks of Poe’s Purloined Letter. You should read it, when this is over. It’s a story about how to hide things in plain sight.”

“I’ll do that, sir.”

The captain nodded. “Good. Now, let’s see how obnoxiously noisy we can make ourselves.”

CHAPTER 49

U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)

BAHRAIN

TUESDAY; 22 MAY

0147 hours (1:47 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

“Zubayr is a ghost town,” the off-going Duty Intelligence Officer said. “No surface traffic in or out of the harbor in the past twenty-four hours.”

Caught in mid-yawn, Lieutenant Commander Fisk drew back. “What? That can’t be right. Half of Siraj’s surface traffic goes through Zubayr. It’s always crawling with activity.”

The off-going DIO was a heavyset lieutenant with a bad comb-over. “I know. Weird, isn’t it? Maybe it’s some obscure Islamic holy day.”

“I don’t think so,” Fisk said. “State would have given us a heads-up. Has Siraji air activity slacked off?”

The lieutenant shook his head. “Business as usual, air-wise.”

“Has surface traffic been affected in any other Siraji ports?”

The off-going Duty Intelligence Officer shook his head again. “No. Normal shipping density everywhere except Zubayr.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Fisk said.

“I’m just giving you the skinny. There hasn’t been so much as a kayak in or out of Zubayr harbor all day.” The lieutenant looked at the master tactical plot. “The last movement we show was yesterday morning. Three fishing trawlers pulled in, and then everything got quiet.”

“Three fishing trawlers?” Lieutenant Commander Fisk stared at the master tactical plot. “Oh shit.” He looked up. “Plot Supervisor, get me SPECWAR on the line. Do it now!”

The off-going DIO held his hands up. “Whoa, cowboy! Why are we calling in the Special Warfare Unit?”

“They need to see this plot,” Fisk said.

“Why? What in the hell is going on?”

“I hope like hell I’m wrong,” Fisk said. “But I think the Sirajis have just laid a minefield across the approach to Zubayr.”

CHAPTER 50

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

TUESDAY; 22 MAY

0328 hours (3:28 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

The noise was incredible. Steaming at her maximum (damaged) speed of twenty-three knots, the Towers was generating an unholy racket. True to the Chief Engineer’s prediction, the port screw was howling like a banshee, but the damaged propeller wasn’t the only voice singing in the choir. Every pump, every fan unit, and every piece of engineering equipment was running at maximum speed. And (where possible) the acoustic suppression systems had been disabled. On the bottom of the hull, the masker belts, which were designed to inject low-pressure air into the sea to acoustically decouple the ship’s engine noise from the water, had been turned off. The prairie air system, which performed a similar function for the ship’s propeller signature by injecting air through tiny capillaries in the propeller blades, had also been turned off. In the galley, the garbage disposal was running continuously, as were the paper shredders in Radio Central. The decibel level was so high that the Chief Hospital Corpsman had asked the captain to issue an order requiring all crew members to wear earplugs.

The noise levels in CIC were slightly lower, but only slightly.

“So much for that stealth bit,” the TAO said.

The captain cupped a hand to an ear and shouted, “What?”

The TAO opened his mouth to repeat himself, but the captain held up a hand. “Just kidding. I heard you.”

“Do you think this is working?” the TAO asked.

The captain shrugged. “Hard to say. We haven’t gotten our asses blown off, so I guess that’s a good sign.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, sir,” the TAO said. “And then I catch myself straining to hear the sound of high-speed screws. Sometimes I think I can hear a torpedo approaching, but it always turns out to be my ears playing tricks on me. Maybe it’s caused by the same portion of the brain that makes you think you hear the phone ringing every time you climb into the shower.”

“It won’t be much longer now,” the captain said. “We’re almost close enough to the Siraji coast to start our search.”

“It can’t come a second too soon,” the TAO said. “I never appreciated how wonderful silence could sound.”

Navy Red began to warble with an incoming message. The captain reached up and cranked the volume to maximum so that he could hear the radio over the noise.

“Towers, this is COM Fifth Fleet. Have your Charlie Oscar stand by for the president, over.”

Navy Red was patched into the overhead speakers, so everyone in Combat Information Center heard COM Fifth Fleet’s voice. Eyebrows went up all over CIC. President? The president? And he wanted to talk to their CO?

The captain turned to the TAO. “Slow the ship down and try to cut down on some of the racket. I’d hate for my first and probably only conversation with the commander in chief to be a shouting contest.”

The TAO nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.” He keyed his own mike and began issuing orders.

But the noise level was still largely unabated when the captain keyed up Navy Red. He spoke a little louder than usual, in the hopes that his raised voice would carry over the clamor. “COM Fifth Fleet, this is the Charlie Oscar of Towers. I am standing by for the president, over.”

The noise began to ease off as crew members rushed to silence the offending pieces of equipment.

After a few seconds, the president’s trademark baritone came over Navy Red. “Am I speaking to Captain Samuel H. Bowie?” Even through the modulations of the encryption software, the voice was instantly recognizable.

“Yes, sir, this is Captain Bowie, over.”

“Let’s dispense with the radio jargon, shall we, Captain? I don’t know much about it, and this is hardly the time to learn.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Bowie said. “By all means.”

“Good,” the president said. “Now, may I call you Sam?”

“Um … I don’t really answer to that, sir. Most people call me Jim.”

The president’s chuckle came over the line. “Was Colonel Bowie a relation of yours?”

“Not as far as I know, sir. But I grew up in San Antonio, so the nickname was pretty much inevitable.”

“It’s a good name anyway,” the president said. “Your namesake was a warrior and a patriot. It’s a compliment to have your name associated with his.”

“I’ve always thought so, Mr. President,” the captain said.

The president paused for a few seconds. “Now Jim, as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t make it a habit of calling my Navy captains at sea. You don’t call me in the Oval Office, and I generally try to return the courtesy.” He laughed briefly at his own attempted joke. Then he chopped it off, and the humor was gone from his voice. “So the fact that I’m calling you in the hour before battle must tell you something of how important this is.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain said.

“I know that this mission has personal importance to you. The lives of your crew are at stake, and—obviously—your own life as well. The recent loss of the USS Benfold is also, no doubt, on your mind—as it should be. Your comrades-in-arms have fallen at the hands of the enemy that you are set to face, and if there is an element of vengeance in your thinking, I don’t believe that anyone could criticize you.”

“I must admit that it’s a factor, sir.”

“If you said otherwise, I’d be inclined to doubt your word,” the president said. “But there is a larger picture here, and the stakes are greater than you perhaps imagine. If Germany manages to deliver that submarine despite the concerted efforts of our Navy, it will seriously damage the credibility of our naval deterrence. It will also prove to many of the nations who are watching that German military hardware, and German military tactics, and German military training are the equal to—if not superior to—our own. To say that this will alter the balance of power in Europe would be a gross understatement. But even that is not the worst of it. I’ve spoken at length to Prime Minister Irons, and she makes no secret of the fact that she is preparing for war with Germany. I don’t believe I need to remind you of what happened the last couple of times England and Germany went to war with each other.”

“No, sir.”

“We may have a chance to prevent that war,” the president said. “If you can send that last submarine to the bottom, we can paint this whole thing as a military disaster for Germany. Really rub the German government’s nose in it: in the United Nations, in the media, and in the eyes of the man on the street. If we can do that, I think I can talk Prime Minister Irons into accepting a symbolic defeat of Germany, in lieu of the real thing.”

The noise level was dropping rapidly now, and that was a good thing, because the president’s voice became softer. “I hate to put the pressure on you, Jim, but this may well be the most important naval engagement of our time. It’s the bottom of the ninth, and you’re our last batter.”

“We’ll do our best to put it over the back fence, Mr. President,” the captain said.

“I know you will, Jim. May God bless USS Towers and all who sail in her. Good luck and good hunting.”

The speaker warbled again, and Navy Red dropped sync. The president was off the line.

CIC was silent for nearly a minute, and then Captain Bowie clapped his hands together. “TAO, let’s get Firewalker airborne. Then tell the engineers to drop the port screw off line and set Quiet Ship.” He looked around CIC. “It’s show time, folks. Time to kill us a submarine.”

CHAPTER 51

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF (OFF THE COAST OF SIRAJ) TUESDAY; 22 MAY

0358 hours (3:58 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

The helo pilot’s voice came over the Navy Red speaker in Combat Information Center, “SAU Commander, this is Firewalker Two-Six. I am up for Towers control. My fuel state is three hours plus four zero minutes. Three souls aboard. My load-out is one Mark-54 torpedo and a mixed rack of sonobuoys, over.”

“Roger, Firewalker,” Chief McPherson said. “Proceed to your fly-to points and begin seeding your buoys. You are at the edge of Siraji airspace, so keep your eyes peeled and don’t wander outside our missile envelope. You might get some company up there, over.”

“This is Firewalker Two-Six. Copy all. Roger, out.”

The chief switched her comm-set from Navy Red to the USW tactical net. “Sonar—USWE. Go active. Stay sharp and change your equipment lineup every couple of minutes until we find the combination that gives us contact.”

“Sonar, aye.”

The chief looked at the CDRT and ran through the tactical situation in her mind. She wanted to be sure that she hadn’t missed anything.

Navy Red warbled. “Towers, this is COM Fifth Fleet. I hate to follow the president’s pep talk with bad news, but intelligence estimates indicate that you are steaming into a Siraji minefield, over.”

The XO looked up. “A minefield? How much more good news can we stand?”

“Tell me about it,” the captain said. He keyed up Navy Red. “COM Fifth Fleet, this is Towers. Understand my unit is steaming into a minefield. Request estimated boundaries of the field and any known safe transit lanes, over.”

“Towers, this is COM Fifth Fleet. I am transmitting boundaries of the minefield to you now. There are currently no known safe transit lanes, and I do not have time to get a mine sweeper up there before you encounter the field, over.”

The XO snorted. “This just keeps getting better.”

The TAO said, “Captain, the parameters of the minefield just showed up in the link.”

An irregular geometric shape appeared on the Aegis display screens, a series of thin red lines connected at each end to form a lopsided trapezoid off the coast of the port city of Zubayr. The NTDS symbol for Towers showed the destroyer a little less than a mile and a half south of the edge of the minefield.

“Nothing like cutting it close,” the XO said. “They could have waited another six minutes or so, and we’d have found out by ourselves.”

The captain keyed up Navy Red. “COM Fifth Fleet, this is Towers. I am in receipt of your minefield coordinates. I would have liked to have known about this sooner. I almost steamed into this thing blind, over.”

“Towers, this is COM Fifth Fleet. Sorry about that. We just confirmed this info about two minutes ago. You were the first to know, over.”

“COM Fifth Fleet, this is Towers. Roger, out.” The captain punched out of Navy Red and walked over to Chief McPherson at the CDRT. “How are we looking, Chief?”

The chief tapped the screen with her fingertip. “Farthest-on circles put Gremlin Zero Four somewhere south of this line, Captain.” She indicated a dotted arc on the display, just south of the minefield. “Assuming he’s been traveling at maximum submerged speed since he torpedoed the Benfold, he could be inside our own Torpedo Danger Zone in the next ten minutes or so.”

“Are you expecting to gain contact immediately?”

“Not really, sir,” the chief said. “So far, he’s depended a lot on deceptive maneuvering; I’d be surprised if he makes a straight run for home. But he might just want to surprise us, so we’re prepared for it.”

She pointed to a series of small green circles, each with a lightning bolt–shaped line coming out of its top at a forty-five–degree angle. “Firewalker Two-Six is laying a passive sonobuoy field to the south. When Gremlin Zero Four breaks the barrier, he’ll be inside torpedo range.”

“I hate to wait until he’s that close,” Captain Bowie said. “Are you sure we can’t get ASROC to work here? I thought the new shallow-water configuration was supposed to be pretty effective.”

The chief shook her head. “It is, sir. But this water is too shallow even for the modified ASROCs. They’ll end up buried in the sea bottom.”

“Is there any way to reprogram the ASROCs?” the XO asked.

“I wish we could, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “But it’s not a software issue. It’s a physics problem. We call it dynamic overshoot. An ASROC missile drops its torpedo from an altitude of about ten thousand feet. Even with the parachute pack to slow it down, when it hits the water, an ASROC-launched torpedo is moving fast. The saltwater batteries start the motor up almost immediately after the weapon splashes down, but the torpedo is still sinking fast. The computer takes control of the rudder fins and elevator fins and starts leveling off the torpedo as quickly as it can—sort of like a pilot trying to pull an airplane out of a steep dive. If the water is deep enough, the torpedo levels itself off and goes into its search pattern. If the water is too shallow, the weapon slams into the sea bottom before it can level off. Maybe the bottom is soft mud, and it buries itself. Maybe the bottom is hard-packed sand, and the torpedo is demolished by the impact. Either way, the torpedo is history.”

The XO scratched his chin. “And this water is definitely too shallow?”

“Yes, sir,” the chief said. “An ASROC torpedo will hit the water, run its motor for maybe ten seconds, and then crash into the bottom. It’ll make a bunch of noise, but it won’t do anything useful.”

The XO’s eyebrows went up. “If the water is so shallow, what’s going to keep our tube-launched torpedoes from hitting the bottom? Or any torpedo dropped by the helo?”

Chief McPherson held up two fingers. “Two things, sir. First: over-the-side torpedoes and helo-dropped torpedoes hit the water with only a slight nose-down angle, so they’re much closer to being level when the motor starts up. And second: they don’t fall as far, so they don’t build up much inertia. Our torpedo tubes are only about twenty feet above the water. The helo drops its torpedoes from an altitude of only a few hundred feet, not ten thousand feet like an ASROC. They’re not moving all that fast when they hit the water, so they don’t sink very far before they can level off.”

“I see,” the captain said. “And there’s no way to program the ASROCs to drop their torpedoes from a lower altitude? Or maybe program the ASROC torpedoes to strike the water at a shallower angle?”

“Sir, it would take a complete redesign of the ASROC missile,” Chief McPherson said. “A team of engineers with a billion-dollar budget could probably figure out how to do it if they had a couple of years to play around with the idea. But there’s nothing we can do here and now.”

“So we’re stuck with over-the-side torpedoes,” the XO said.

“Afraid so, sir. We’ll have Firewalker running interference for us. If we get lucky, he’ll be able to put a torpedo on Gremlin Zero Four before the sub knows what’s up.”

“Or he’ll get blown out of the sky by a sub-SAM, like Antietam’s helo did.”

“That’s one of the risks, sir. But by the time the sub is close enough to shoot at Firewalker, he’ll also be close enough to shoot at us. We’re all going to be in the line of fire.”

“We can’t afford to forget about Vipers,” the XO said. “The 212B can carry three Exocet missiles. They’re supposed to fire them one at a time, but these bastards have shown a preference for launching them all at once.”

“There were four subs left when we got into this fight,” Captain Bowie said. “That makes twelve Exocets. We saw them shoot nine, so there are three left.”

“There might be three left, sir,” the TAO said. “We’ve sunk three out of the four submarines. There’s an excellent chance that this guy has launched one or more of his birds.”

“Forget percentages,” the XO said. “Until he’s dead, as far as I’m concerned, this guy is armed with Exocets. Hell, with the kind of luck we’ve been having, he’s got a couple of extras lying around for a rainy day.”

Chief McPherson half-smiled. “Good thing it doesn’t rain much in the Middle East, sir. Or we’d be screwed.”

The XO glared at her for a couple of seconds, and then turned to the Tactical Action Officer. “TAO, I want Aegis ready-auto, CIWS set to auto-engage, and the Electronics Warfare guys standing by to jam or launch chaff. Set Tac-Sit One; I want all four .50-caliber mounts manned, and both 25mm chain-guns. Make sure that the 5-inch gun is loaded with HE-rounds. We have no friendly units within weapons range. If anything out there so much as farts, I want a missile, a torpedo, or a 5-inch shell shoved up its ass before its sphincter can slam shut.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” The TAO keyed into the tactical command net and began issuing orders.

*  *  *

Towers steamed back and forth, a wounded but determined sentry guarding the harbor against the approaching enemy. The crew settled in for a long wait, but less than twenty minutes had passed when the call came from the Electronics Warfare module. “TAO—EW, I have six active J-band radar seekers! We have in-bound missiles from the coast. First cut looks like Siraji HY-1 Silkworms.”

The TAO was about to acknowledge the report when the Electronics Warfare Technician cut him off with a follow-up report. “TAO—EW. Make that twelve! We have a second flight of six. I say again, we have twelve in-bound Vipers! Request permission to initiate jamming protocols.”

“EW—TAO. Initiate jamming and stand by on chaff. Break. Air—TAO, can you confirm inbound Vipers?”

“TAO—Air. That’s affirmative, sir. We just picked them up about two seconds ago. Twelve inbounds!”

“TAO—aye! Break! All Stations—TAO, we have in-bound Vipers! I say again, we have missiles in-bound! This is not a drill! Weapons Control, verify that we are in Aegis ready-auto and CIWS is set to auto-engage.”

“TAO—Weapons Control. Affirmative, boss. We are locked and cocked. Bring ‘em on!”

“TAO—EW. Standing by on chaff. Recommend new course three-one-zero to minimize our radar cross-section.”

The TAO looked up at the Aegis display screens. Twelve hostile-missile symbols had appeared, and all of them were rapidly closing on the Towers. “TAO, aye. Break. Bridge—TAO. Come right to new course three-one-zero.”

“Bridge, aye! Coming right to three-one-zero.”

All around CIC, operators began glancing up from their own consoles to steal looks at the big screens. Twelve missiles? They’d never trained for that many at one time.

“This is going to get ugly,” an unidentified voice said.

“All right, people,” the captain said. “Stay focused. Do your jobs, and everything will be okay.”

Suddenly, three of the missile symbols veered away and disappeared off the display.

“TAO—Air. Splash three.”

“Maybe that jamming gear is finally going to pay for itself,” the XO said.

The TAO frowned. “Why only three? We’re transmitting a broadband jamming strobe. It should be hitting all of those Vipers at the same time. If Silkworm missiles are impervious to jamming, we shouldn’t have gotten any of them. If they’re vulnerable to jamming, we should have gotten them all.”

“Not necessarily,” the XO said. “Remember, Siraj has been under an arms embargo for nearly two decades. Their arsenal is composed of what they had prior to the embargo, supplemented by whatever hardware they’ve been able to smuggle in. Those Silkworms they’re launching may span three or four generations of technology.”

“Launching chaff,” the EW announced. His voice was followed by a rapid series of muffled thumps. “Six away.”

“So far, so good,” the TAO said.

The captain keyed his mike. “Weapons Control—Captain. How much longer until the Vipers come within our missile-engagement range?”

“Vipers are entering the Auto-Engage Circle right … about … now, sir.”

The Aegis computers transmitted pre-launch programming data to eighteen SM-3 missiles, two for each of the enemy missiles remaining. This shoot-shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine would remain in effect until Towers expended fifty percent of her available SM-3 missiles. Then the Aegis computer would automatically fall back to a shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine, firing only one initial missile at each incoming Viper before checking to see if it had been destroyed.

On the forecastle, nine armored hatches flipped open in rapid succession, and nine SM-3 missiles blasted free of their launch cells and climbed into the darkness on actinic pillars of fire. The combined roar of the solid-fuel missile boosters reverberated through the ship like the rumble of an earthquake.

At the exact same instant, nine other armored hatches popped open on the after-missile deck, and nine more surface-to-air missiles leapt into the sky. Dividing the missiles between the launchers was a standard consideration built into the Aegis computer program. By assigning the missiles in equal or nearly equal proportions from both launchers, the Aegis computers could maintain a measure of redundancy.

The Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “Splash one! Splash two! Splash three!” As he watched, the tally of destroyed missiles continued to mount. A few seconds later, he said, “Looks like we got ‘em all!”

“Round One goes to Towers,” the TAO said quietly.

Round Two was only seconds in coming. “TAO—EW, here comes the second salvo! I have six active J-band radar seekers! Wait! Six more! I have twelve in-bound Vipers.”

The Air Supervisor confirmed the report immediately. “We’ve got them on SPY! I confirm, twelve Vipers in-bound!”

Captain Bowie keyed his mike. “Air—Captain. Backtrack the trajectories of those Vipers! I want to know where they’re coming from. Break. Weapons Control, stand by on guns. As soon as we get some coordinates, I want you to pound the hell out of those missile launchers!”

“With pleasure, sir!”

The twelve new hostile-missile symbols appeared on the Aegis display screens and began to close on the ship’s symbol at alarming speed.

“TAO—Air. We’ve got party crashers, sir. Two Bogies inbound from the north. No modes, no codes, and no IFF.”

The TAO watched as two unknown-aircraft symbols popped up on the tactical display. “TAO, aye. What’s their flight profile?”

“They’re coming in low and fast, sir. They’re still over land, but I expect them to go feet-wet in about thirty seconds. In the meantime, they’re hugging the ground.”

“They’re trying to sneak in under our radar,” the XO said. “I guess their mamas didn’t tell them that SPY sees all the way down to the ground.”

“Air—TAO, copy all. Break. EW—TAO, can you classify those Bogies by their radar emitters?”

“TAO—EW, I could if they were showing me anything. So far, both of them have been as quiet as church mice.”

“Right out of the old Soviet tactical book,” the captain said. “Low, fast, and quiet. They won’t point their radar at us until they’re ready to illuminate us for missile-lock.”

“They meet all the requirements for an auto-engage,” the TAO said. “Aegis will take them out as soon as they come into missile range.”

The captain shook his head. “Negative. Prohibit auto-engage on all Bogies.”

“But, sir,” the TAO said, “you said yourself they’re going to shoot us as soon as they get missile-lock.”

“We can’t shoot them,” the captain said. “Not now, anyway. The Rules of Engagement won’t let us. We can’t even technically classify them as hostile.”

“Captain, I don’t understand,” the TAO said. “The Sirajis have already launched two dozen missiles at us. What more do we need?”

“For one thing,” the captain said, “we don’t even know for certain that those planes are Siraji.”

“They’re coming out of Siraji airspace, and they’re flying strike profiles,” the TAO said.

“Not good enough,” the captain said. “We fly planes through Saudi air space all the time, but it doesn’t make our planes Saudi. As much as I hate to say it, under U.S. Rules of Engagement, flying low and fast without radar is not considered a hostile act. As soon as one of them launches or lights off his fire control radar, they all become fair game. Until then, keep an eye on them but concentrate on your Vipers.”

The TAO sighed. “Aye-aye, sir.”

Three hostile-missile symbols disappeared from the Aegis display screens.

“TAO—Air. Splash three more. Two of them got jammed, and the third one got suckered by chaff.”

“TAO, aye. Break. EW—TAO. Nice job. Stay on it.”

The ship gave a rapid sequence of shudders, accompanied by a series of thunderous roars.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Eighteen more birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two each on the inbound Vipers.”

“TAO, aye.”

A trio of red octagonal symbols appeared on the tactical display, each of them superimposed over a different part of the Siraji coast. “Captain—Radar Supervisor, I’ve got cross-fixes on three of the enemy missile launchers, sir!”

“Punch them into the link!” the captain said. “Weapons Control, you have batteries released. Engage those missile launchers, now!”

A few seconds later, the ship jerked as the 5-inch deck gun fired for the first time. The report of the big gun was astonishingly loud, even in the insulated confines of CIC. The gun quickly fell into a rhythm, punching out a high-explosive shell every three seconds, with a series of teeth-rattling booms.

The TAO keyed his mike. “Air—TAO. What’s going on with those inbound Bogies?”

“They’ve sheared off, sir, but they’re not bugging out. They’re staying outside of our engagement circle but just barely. I think they’re waiting for their shore-based Silkworm launchers to saturate our defenses. Or they could be hoping we’ll run out of missiles.”

The captain said, “At the rate we’re using up SM-3s, either one could be a good bet. Keep an eye on them, son. They might decide they want a piece of this fight at any second.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

*  *  *

On the Aegis displays, eighteen friendly-missile symbols merged with the nine flashing red symbols that represented inbound Vipers. For a few seconds, the converging array of symbols made a confusing knot on the screen, and then they began to disappear as the Aegis computers sorted out which missiles had been destroyed and which were still providing valid radar returns. When the display finished updating itself, only two missile symbols remained—both shown in flashing red.

“TAO—Air. Two of the Vipers have gotten past our first salvo of interceptors.” There was another quick series of shudders, followed by the thunder of launching missiles. “Four more birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two each on the inbound Vipers.”

“TAO, aye.”

Twenty seconds later, the interceptors merged with the inbound Vipers on the tactical display, and—when the display updated itself—one of the Viper symbols remained, still closing rapidly.

“Shit!” the Weapons Control Officer shouted. “TAO—Weapons Control, one of the Vipers got through. It’s kicked into terminal homing phase, and it’s too close to re-engage with missiles.”

“It’s up to CIWS, now,” the XO said.

*  *  *

As if in answer, the forward Close-In Weapon System locked onto the incoming missile and opened fire. The six-barreled Gatling gun rapped out a burst of 20mm tungsten rounds. Somewhere out in the darkness, a brief flash of exploding fuel announced the destruction of the Viper.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Got the bastard!”

“Good job,” the TAO said. “Break. Air—TAO, what’s the status of our Bogies?”

“They’re just inside our missile range, sir. And still circling.”

“Don’t lose track of them,” the TAO said. “And watch for more Vipers.”

*  *  *

The next missile attack wasn’t long in coming. “TAO—EW, I’ve got five more inbounds! Make that ten; they’re all getting off a second bird!”

“God damn it!” the Radar Supervisor shouted. “I’ve got ‘em too! Confirm, ten inbound Vipers! How many are they going to throw at us?”

*  *  *

“TAO—Weapons Control. I think we’ve got a kill on one of the missile launchers, sir. I’m shifting my fire to the other two cross-fixes. I’m going to need position data on the remaining three sites pretty quick here, sir.”

“I’m working on it, sir!” the Radar Supervisor shouted.

Captain Bowie keyed his mike. “Radar Supervisor, this is the captain. Calm down, son. I need you to keep a clear head right now.”

“Yes, sir! I mean, I’ll try, sir!”

*  *  *

The 5-inch gun continued to hammer out high-explosive rounds every three seconds or so.

Navy Red warbled. “Towers, this is Firewalker Two-Six. My buoys five and six are hot! We hold narrowband tonals consistent with a Type 212 diesel submarine. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level high!”

The XO’s voice was incredulous. “How in the hell do they do that? How do they always manage to show up just when the shit is hitting the fan?”

The captain keyed Navy Red. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is Towers. Take your shot. Try to make it a good one.”

On the Aegis display screen, three of the ten incoming-missile symbols winked out.

“Splash three Vipers,” the Air Supervisor said over the net. “Chalk up two to jamming and one to chaff.”

A quick series of rumbles announced the launch of another salvo of missiles. “TAO—Weapons Control. Ten more birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two each on the first three inbound Vipers and one each for the remaining four Vipers.”

The odd report stopped the TAO cold. He keyed his mike. “Weapons Control—TAO, why did we only launch one interceptor on the last four Vipers?”

“We’ve expended more than fifty percent of our SM-3 inventory,” the Weapons Control Officer said. “The computer has throttled us back to a shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine.”

“Fifty percent?” the TAO said. “We carry ninety-two SM-3 missiles. How in the hell can we be at fifty percent of our inventory?”

“Fifty percent of ninety-two is forty-six, sir,” the Weapons Control Officer said. “We’ve launched fifty missiles.”

The TAO looked at the captain.

The captain nodded. “Stick with it. The shooting’s not over yet.”

“Well,” said the XO, “at least we know what those Bogies have been waiting for.”

*  *  *

“Towers, this is Firewalker Two-Six. My weapons check-off list is complete. I am prepping for my attack run, over.”

The TAO keyed Navy Red. “Towers, aye. Good hunting, Firewalker.”

The captain’s eyes traveled over the faces of the men and women of the CIC crew. “Cross your fingers and say a prayer,” he said. “If Firewalker pulls this off, the show’s over, and we’re out of here.”

“Amen to that,” the XO said.

Firewalker Two-Six’s buoy cross-fixes began popping up on the CDRT. Chief McPherson rolled the trackball until her cursor was centered over the first cross-fix symbol and began playing connect-the-dots. The CDRT’s computer gave her a rough course of three-five-seven at an estimated speed of sixteen knots. Gremlin Zero Four was headed north, toward the minefield. Toward Zubayr harbor and safety.

*  *  *

The TAO watched on the Aegis display screens as Firewalker Two-Six’s green friendly-aircraft symbol vectored across the screen toward the red V-shape of Gremlin Zero Four’s hostile-submarine symbol. He cocked an ear toward the speaker, expecting to hear Firewalker’s attack report at any second.

But the next report came from the Weapons Control Officer. “TAO—Weapons Control. Scratch another Silkworm launcher. Shifting to the next target at this time.”

“Two down,” the TAO said.

“We’re not getting them fast enough,” the captain said. “At this rate, we’re going to run out of SM-3s before they run out of Silkworms.”

The Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Air. The Bogies are moving!”

“TAO, aye. Are they closing us?”

“Negative, sir,” the Air Supervisor said. “They’re going after the helo!”

“TAO—EW, the Bogies just lit off their radars! French-built. Thomson-CSF Cyrano IVM series. That makes our Bogies either Mirage F-1s or Mirage F-50s.”

“There aren’t any F-50s in-theater,” Captain Bowie said. “So our bad guys are F-1s, which means we still can’t shoot them. They might be Siraji, but they might also be from Iran, Jordan, or Kuwait. Mirages aren’t exactly rare in this part of the world.”

The TAO keyed Navy Red. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is Towers. Watch your back, you’ve got two Bogies inbound from the north, over.”

“Towers, this is Firewalker. Copy inbound Bogies. Keep them off my back for another thirty seconds, until I get off my shot, over.”

“We’ll try, Firewalker,” the TAO said. “But the Bogies have not satisfied Rules of Engagement criteria to be designated as hostile.”

*  *  *

On the Aegis displays, ten friendly-missile symbols merged with seven flashing red Viper symbols. When the display finished updating itself, the flashing red missile symbols were gone.

The Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Air. Splash seven! We got them all!”

*  *  *

The Tactical Action Officer was about to key his mike to acknowledge when another report came in.

“TAO—EW, Bogies just lit up their fire control radars!”

“That’s it!” the captain said. “Batteries released! Take them out!”

The TAO keyed the net. “Weapons Control—TAO, Bogies have been designated as hostile. You have batteries released. Engage and destroy!”

Without waiting for acknowledgment of his order, the TAO shifted to Navy Red. “Firewalker Two-Six, this is Towers. The Bogies are setting you up for an attack! Abort your torpedo launch and get the hell out of there!”

“Just another three seconds,” Firewalker Two-Six’s copilot said over Navy Red. “Here it comes … Weapon away—now, now, NOW!”

*  *  *

Under the starboard side of the helicopter’s fuselage, solenoid-controlled latches snapped open, releasing Firewalker Two-Six’s torpedo. The weapon dropped like a rock until its parachute pack deployed a fraction of a second later, slowing the torpedo’s rate of descent and drawing it into a slightly nose-down angle for optimum water insertion.

The copilot keyed his mike. “Towers, this is Firewalker Two-Six. My torpedo is away. I am going evasive to avoid Bogies.”

*  *  *

“TAO—Air. Bogies are launching. I count two missiles, both targeted on the helo.”

The ship shuddered as two SM-3s blasted out of their missile cells and turned toward the enemy jets.

“Can we intercept their missiles?” the captain asked.

“Not a chance, sir,” the TAO said. “By the time our birds get there, Firewalker will already be toast.”

The little drama played itself out on the Aegis display screen, two hostile-missile symbols merging with the helicopter symbol. Somewhere out in the night sky, twisted metal and burning flesh were falling toward the darkened wave tops. On the screen, Firewalker Two-Six’s symbol changed to a last-known-position marker, and the helicopter and its crew of three were gone.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Our birds have acquired the Bogies.”

Seen from the Aegis display screen, the destruction of the enemy jets was no more dramatic than the loss of the helo had been. Two friendly-missile symbols converged on two hostile-aircraft symbols. Each of the missile symbols touched the symbol for one of the hostile aircraft, and the Bogies were gone. The destruction of two aircraft depicted in the sterile exchange of computer icons. No hint of the fire and violent death that those symbols represented.

“I hope they suffered,” the XO said. “I hope those bastards shit their pants when they saw our missiles coming, and I hope they burned and bled and screamed for Allah—all the way down to the water. And I hope their souls fry in hell!”

Captain Bowie laid his hand on his second-in-command’s shoulder and quietly said, “That’s enough, Pete.” He gave the shoulder a quick squeeze. “I understand what you’re feeling, but we don’t have time for that.”

As if on cue, the Weapons Control Officer’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Weapons Control. Silkworm launcher number three is down for the count. Shifting to launcher number four.”

*  *  *

Out on the forecastle, the 5-inch gun fell silent for a second, swung to cover its new target, and began hammering out another barrage of shells.

*  *  *

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the tactical net. “USWE—Sonar, we have weapon start-up. It’s Firewalker’s torpedo, sir. Placement looks pretty good.”

A friendly-weapon symbol appeared in blue on the CDRT.

Chief McPherson keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. Has the weapon acquired?”

“USWE—Sonar. That’s affirmative. Firewalker’s weapon has just now acquired the target. It’s a tail-chase, Chief. Even odds as to whether it can catch the sub.”

“USWE, aye.”

*  *  *

U-307:

“Kapitan!” the Sonar Operator shouted. “The American torpedo has acquired us!”

“Calm down!” Gröeler snapped. “Estimated range?”

“Close aboard, sir! The signal strength is high. Estimated range—less than fifteen hundred meters.”

“Very well,” Gröeler said. He nodded, as though he had been expecting this. The Americans were good—far better than he had thought. He had three missing U-boats to prove it. But this wasn’t over yet.

He turned to the OOD. “Officer of the Deck, I have the Conn!”

“Officer of the Deck, aye!”

Gröeler barked, “All engines ahead one-third, slow to five knots! Left standard rudder, steady new course three-one-zero!”

The boat began to heel over as the Helmsman executed his orders. “Sir, my rudder is left fifteen degrees! Coming to new course three-one-zero. All engines ahead one-third! Slowing to five knots!”

The Officer of the Deck stared at Gröeler. “Five knots, Kapitan? Sir, how can we outdistance a torpedo at five knots?”

Gröeler held up a hand. “Launch two static noisemakers,” he said. “Then wait thirty seconds and launch two mobile decoys. Set one of the mobile decoys for low speed and the other for high speed.”

The Officer of the Deck stared at his kapitan for another second. Then he blinked and turned to the Countermeasures Control Panel. “Aye-aye, sir. Launching static noisemakers now!”

A pair of pneumatic hisses followed by a pair of metallic thumps announced the ejection of the two countermeasures.

*  *  *

The Officer of the Deck began punching buttons rapidly, programming the mobile decoys as his kapitan had ordered. His hands trembled as he worked. Five knots? They should be racing away at flank speed, not waiting for the torpedo to catch them!

*  *  *

“The American torpedo is too close,” Gröeler said. “There is no time to run. It will catch us before we go a thousand meters. Our only chance is to fool it.”

“Launching mobile decoys, now!” the Officer of the Deck reported. There was another pair of hisses and thumps as the second set of countermeasures was ejected.

“Excellent,” Gröeler said. “Diving Officer, ten degrees up-angle on the bow planes. Make your depth twenty-five meters.”

“Diving Officer, aye! Sir, my bow planes are up ten degrees. Coming to new depth two-five meters.”

“Steady on new course three-one-zero,” the Helmsman called out.

“Very well,” Gröeler said. He looked at his Officer of the Deck. “We give the torpedo two static noisemakers to activate its anti-countermeasure algorithm.” He spoke in a quiet, unhurried voice, as though unaware that death was rushing toward them. “Then we give it a pair of mobile decoys—not so easily identifiable. The torpedo is faced with two invalid targets and three possibly valid targets. Two of them move slowly and do not seem to be actively evading. The third moves away at high speed.”

The American torpedo was close enough now to be heard with the naked ear. The growling whine of its high-speed screws resonated through the hull of the submarine like the buzzing of an insanely powerful electric razor. The sound grew rapidly louder as the torpedo approached.

The Officer of the Deck’s eyes darted frantically around the control room, as though searching for somewhere to run. There was, of course, nowhere to go. “The torpedo …” His voice came out in a squeak. He stopped himself and tried again. “The torpedo will acquire the high-speed decoy and attack it instead of us?”

Utterly calm, Gröeler turned back to the tactical display. “I estimate that we will find out the answer to that question in approximately one minute.”

*  *  *

USS Towers (DDG-103):

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the 29-MC announcing circuit. “All stations—Sonar has multiple active 53 Delta contacts off the starboard quarter, bearing one-five-five. Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level low.”

Chief McPherson keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE, what have you got?”

“USWE—Sonar, I’m tracking five separate contacts. Unless I miss my guess, we’re looking at a cluster of decoys, Chief. Two of my contacts are dead in the water, so they’re probably static countermeasures. The other three are all showing motion. Looks like two are moving slowly, and one is getting the hell out of Dodge.”

The chief keyed her mike again. “Sonar—USWE. Watch your net discipline. The fast-moving contact is probably our submarine, trying to outrun Firewalker’s torpedo. But I want you to maintain a track on all three of your mobile contacts until we get a clear classification. Your two low-speed contacts are designated Alpha and Bravo. Your high-speed contact is designated Charlie. Tag all three contacts and send them to fire control.”

“Sonar, aye. Slow-movers are designated Alpha and Bravo. Fast-mover is designated Charlie. All three contacts are tagged. Transmitting them to fire control now.”

“USWE, aye. Break. UB—USWE. You should be getting contact data on three POSS-SUB contacts in a few seconds, designated Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. We believe Alpha and Bravo are decoys, and Charlie is our submarine, but we don’t have final classification yet. Prep the starboard tubes for an over-the-side torpedo shot and stand by to launch it on zero-notice.”

Before the Underwater Battery Fire Control Operator had a chance to reply, the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “USWE—Sonar. Firewalker’s torpedo has acquired contact Charlie, the fast-mover. Torpedo is accelerating to attack speed now.”

The Sonar Supervisor’s next report came over the 29-MC announcing circuit almost immediately. “All stations—Sonar has loud underwater explosion off the starboard quarter, bearing one-six-zero.”

Chief McPherson keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. Are you detecting secondary explosions?”

The answer was a few seconds in coming. “USWE—Sonar. Negative. We did not detect secondaries. But we have no echoes on contact Charlie.”

Chief McPherson keyed her mike. “USWE, aye.” She released the mike button. This was the tricky part. When a torpedo killed a submarine, there was usually a string of secondary explosions following the initial detonation of the warhead. Fuel tanks, battery cells, and the submarine’s torpedoes, all going off in explosions of their own. The lack of secondaries wasn’t conclusive proof that the submarine hadn’t been destroyed. It was possible for the submarine’s hull to crack and fill with water without setting off a string of secondary explosions. But it was rare, and—when it did happen—it turned battle damage assessment into a guessing game.

Had Firewalker’s torpedo killed the sub? Or had it destroyed a decoy? Was their mission complete now? Or was the sub still lurking out there, waiting for a chance to kill them?

The answer was not long in coming.

“USWE—Sonar. Contact designated Bravo has increased speed and turned toward the minefield. We’re detecting shaft and blade signatures consistent with a Type 212 series submarine.”

The chief banged her fist on the CDRT. “Damn! He tricked us again!” She keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. Copy all. Your contact Bravo is now re-designated as Gremlin Zero Four. Break. UB—USWE. Contact Bravo is now re-designated as Gremlin Zero Four.”

“USWE—UB, copy all. Be advised that Gremlin Zero Four is at the very edge of our torpedo engagement envelope. I hold a firm fire control solution. If we’re going to shoot this guy, we need to do it soon.”

Chief McPherson looked at Gremlin Zero Four’s track history on the CDRT’s display screen. The submarine was heading straight for the minefield.

“USWE, aye. Break. TAO—USWE. Sonar holds a solid track on Gremlin Zero Four, and UB has a firm fire control solution. Request batteries released.”

The TAO’s voice came back at once. “USWE—TAO. You have batteries released. Kill contact Gremlin Zero Four.”

“TAO—USWE, Batteries released, kill contact Gremlin Zero Four, aye. Break. UB—USWE. Kill contact Gremlin Zero Four with over-the-side torpedo.”

“UB, aye. Going to Standby. Going to Launch. Torpedo away—now, now, NOW!”

The Sonar Supervisor’s report followed a second later. “USWE—Sonar, we have weapon start-up.”

A blue friendly-weapon symbol appeared on the CDRT. Chief McPherson watched it begin to move toward the hostile-submarine symbol that represented Gremlin Zero Four. “Go get the bastard,” she whispered.

The 29-MC speakers thundered to life. “All Stations—Sonar has hydrophone effects off the starboard quarter! Bearing one-five-three. Initial classification: hostile torpedo!”

“Damn! He’s shooting down our line of bearing!” Chief McPherson said. She keyed her mike. “Crack the whip! Bridge—USWE. We have an inbound hostile torpedo. I say again—crack the whip!”

“Bridge, aye!”

With a rising wail, the ship’s gas turbine engines spun up to flank speed.

The Officer of the Deck’s voice blared over the 1-MC. “All hands stand by for heavy rolls while performing high-speed evasive maneuvers.”

The deck heeled to starboard as the big destroyer came sharply about for the first high-speed turn demanded by the crack-the-whip torpedo evasion maneuver.

Chief McPherson latched on to the edge of the CDRT as the deck tilted one way and then the other. On the screen, she could see new POSS-SUB symbols appearing. Gremlin Zero Four was launching another set of decoys.

*  *  *

After nearly five minutes of evasive maneuvering, the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over Chief McPherson’s headset again. “USWE—Sonar. The hostile torpedo has not acquired. Seems like we dodged the bullet.”

“USWE, aye,” the chief said into her mike. “Looks like we’re not the only ones.” On the CDRT, it was obvious that Gremlin Zero Four’s tricky little maneuver with the decoys had worked again. The submarine had managed to evade their torpedo.

She paused to reassess the tactical situation. With half an ear, she heard the Electronics Warfare Operator report six more inbound Vipers, followed a few seconds later by the rumble of launching SM-3s. She keyed her mike. “UB—USWE, do you hold a good track on Gremlin Zero Four?”

“USWE—UB. That’s affirmative. I’ve got a firm solution on the target, but the submarine is outside our torpedo engagement envelope now. We’re going to have to close the range before we can shoot again.”

“USWE, aye.”

Updated tracking data for Gremlin Zero Four was coming through on the CDRT display. Chief McPherson slewed her cursor over to the most recent position symbol for the submarine and began punching keys. “Shit!”

She punched into the tactical net. “TAO—USWE. Based on current course and speed, I hold Gremlin Zero Four as entering the minefield in less than one minute.”

Captain Bowie was at her side before she had even released the mike button. “Are we within torpedo range?”

The chief shook her head. “Negative, sir. We need to get closer. But, as soon as we close within range, he’s going to shoot at us again.”

“We can’t let that sub get away,” the captain said.

“I know, sir.”

“We don’t have much of a choice,” the captain said. “Shift the sonar to Kingfisher mode. We’re going into the minefield.”

“Sir, with all due respect, that’s not going to work,” Chief McPherson said. “The Kingfisher software is designed to detect mine-sized objects only. It will clip out anything with a cross-section larger than about six feet. We won’t be able to see the submarine, sir.”

“Then we’ll alternate: two sweeps in Kingfisher mode, and one sweep in Search mode. Your operators will have to look sharp; they’re only going to see the mines two-thirds of the time, and the target one-third of the time. Understand?”

Chief McPherson’s eyebrows went up. “I understand, sir.” She pointed to the CDRT display. “The submarine is entering the minefield now.”

The Tactical Action Officer appeared at the captain’s elbow. “Sir, Silkworm launcher four is out of business. We’re shifting fire to site number five.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “We need to knock those last two launchers out quickly. We’re headed into the minefield.”

“Sir?”

The captain patted the TAO on the shoulder. “Let chief here worry about the mines. You just keep the heat on those missile launchers.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

*  *  *

Another report came over the Tactical Action Officer’s headset, snatching his attention away from the submarine and the minefield. “TAO—EW. I have two active J-band radar seekers! And there’s the second flight, two more. Make that four inbound Vipers.”

“TAO, aye. Break. Air—TAO. Can you confirm incoming Vipers?”

“Affirmative, sir,” the Air Supervisor said. “SPY confirms, four Vipers inbound!”

“TAO, aye. Break. EW—TAO. Jam and chaff at will. We won’t be able to maneuver in the minefield, so forget about minimizing our radar cross-section.”

“TAO—EW. Copy all. Launching chaff.”

The TAO looked up at the four inbound missile symbols on the tactical display. “TAO, aye.”

*  *  *

Out on the forecastle, the 5-inch gun continued to pound out high-explosive shells.

*  *  *

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the 29-MC speakers. “All Stations—Sonar. Mine off the port bow! Bearing three-one-two. Recommend turn to starboard!”

Chief McPherson keyed the net. “Bridge—USWE. Emergency Mine! Come right to new course three-four-zero!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The ship heeled over in nearly instant response to the order. They had been on the new course less than a minute when the next report came. “All Stations—Sonar, mine off the starboard bow! Bearing zero-one-five. Recommend turn to port!”

Chief McPherson keyed the net. “Bridge—USWE. Emergency Mine! Come left to new course three-one-five!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The ship heeled over to port and began to come about.

The XO looked at their progress on the Aegis display. “This is turning into a drunkard’s walk.”

“Yes, sir,” the TAO said. “But it looks like it’s working.”

*  *  *

Chief McPherson watched the CDRT. The ship’s track history was very nearly a blind stagger through the minefield, but they were slowly closing the range to the target. They would be within the torpedo engagement envelope soon, close enough to shoot at the submarine again. But what good would it do them? The sub commander had obviously figured out how to outfox their torpedoes. If they shot another torp at him, he’d just evade it with his tricky little decoy tactic. Not only that, but he was certain to return fire with his own torpedo, and Towers couldn’t exactly evade in the middle of a minefield.

There had to be a way to trick him, the way he was tricking their torpedoes. Some way to disguise or hide a torpedo until it was too close for the sub to evade. The Germans had been using decoys of nearly every sort imaginable since this whole crazy chase had started. If only she had some decoys of her own …

In the background, she heard the rumble of another set of missiles launching. They must still be trading punches with the shore-based missile launchers.

Too bad she couldn’t launch her own missiles. If only the water was deep enough for ASROCs. She could keep the sub distracted with an over-the-side shot, and—while he was busy evading the torpedo—she could drop an ASROC right off his bow. She could …

She stopped. Wait a minute … Maybe she could do it backward … Keep the sub distracted with ASROCs long enough to sneak up on him with an over-the-side torpedo.

She felt herself grin as she reached for the mike button. “UB—USWE. How long until the target is within our torpedo engagement envelope?”

*  *  *

U-307:

“Kapitan!” the Sonar Operator shouted. “I have splash transients and hydrophone effects, bearing two-six-five. Initial classification: hostile torpedo! Estimated range—less than two thousand meters.”

“Very well,” Gröeler said. “All engines ahead one-third, slow to five knots!” He glanced at the double dotted lines on the tactical display that indicated the zigzagging pattern of the clear lane through the minefield. “Right standard rudder, steady new course one-four-zero!”

The boat began to come about. “Sir, my rudder is right fifteen degrees! Coming to new course one-four-zero. All engines ahead one-third! Slowing to five knots!”

Gröeler was about to order the launching of the first pair of decoys, when the Sonar Operator shouted again.

“Kapitan! All hydrophone effects have ceased. Hostile torpedo has shut down.”

Gröeler turned to stare at the man. “What?”

“The torpedo has shut itself down, sir. Its motor started up, ran for maybe fifteen seconds, and shut down.”

“That doesn’t make any …”

The Sonar Operator cut him off. “Kapitan! I have new splash transients and hydrophone effects, bearing three-zero-zero. Initial classification: hostile torpedo! Estimated range—less than one thousand meters.”

Gröeler took three quick steps to the sonar console. The Sonar Operator was correct; the high-speed blade signature of an American Mark-54 torpedo was clearly visible on the screen. He verified the bearing to the new torpedo and decided that his current course was still viable. He turned toward the Officer of the Deck. “Launch two static noisemakers. Then wait thirty seconds and launch two mobile decoys. Set one of the mobile decoys for low speed and the other for high speed.”

The OOD, who was now familiar with the tactic, had already been reaching for the Countermeasures Control Panel. “Aye-aye, sir. Launching static noisemakers now!”

A pair of hisses and thumps marked the ejection of two decoys.

“Kapitan!” the Sonar Operator said. “I have splash transients and hydrophone effects, bearing zero-five-zero. Initial classification: hostile torpedo! Estimated range—two thousand meters.”

Gröeler looked at the sonar display. The previous torpedo had shut down, just like the first one. Its signature began to fade from the screen. The first torpedo’s signature was also fading but still visible. The third torpedo signal was bright and strong, bearing zero-five-zero, exactly as the Sonar Operator had reported.

What were the Americans trying to do? He opened his mouth to order a course change, when his Sonar Operator reported yet another torpedo. Where were these torpedoes coming from, and why were they all shutting down so quickly?

“Kapitan?” It was the Officer of the Deck. “Do you wish me to launch more decoys, sir?”

“Yes,” Gröeler said. “Launch two …” He stopped himself. “No …”

“These Americans are crafty,” he said. “They drop their useless ASROCs all around us, to force us to expend our decoys. Then, when we have no decoys left, they will fire their torpedoes. Launch no more decoys until I give the order.”

*  *  *

USS Towers (DDG-103):

Chief McPherson watched the tactical display on the CDRT. It was working! Gremlin Zero Four had stopped reacting to the ASROC attacks. A distant rumble announced the launch of another ASROC. Hot on its heels came two more rumbles, as a pair of SM-3 missiles climbed into the sky in search of incoming Vipers.

The chief keyed her mike. “UB—USWE. Kill contact Gremlin Zero Four with over-the-side torpedo.”

“UB, aye. Going to Standby. Going to Launch. Torpedo away—now, now, NOW!”

The Sonar Supervisor’s report confirmed the launch almost immediately. “USWE—Sonar. We have weapon start-up.”

A blue friendly-weapon symbol popped up on the CDRT and began moving toward Gremlin Zero Four’s hostile-submarine symbol. There were several friendly-weapon symbols on the screen. “That’s right,” she whispered. “Keep your eyes on the right hand, and you’ll never even see what the left hand is doing.”

Another rumble, and another ASROC climbed into the sky.

*  *  *

U-307:

“Kapitan …” The Sonar Operator’s voice sounded strange. “This one is not shutting down.”

Gröeler turned toward him. “What?”

“This torpedo is not shutting down,” the Sonar Operator said.

Gröeler stepped over to the sonar console. “Which torpedo?”

The operator pointed at the screen. The display was a nearly unintelligible mishmash of torpedo signatures, all faded to varying degrees. All except one. The torpedo signature at bearing one-seven-eight wasn’t fading at all. It was getting stronger rapidly.

Gröeler could hear it now, the electric-razor whine of high-speed propellers. The sound quickly growing to a howl.

Gröeler gripped the Sonar Operator’s shoulder. “Give me an estimated range!”

“Extremely close aboard! Less than five hundred meters!”

“Decoys!” Gröeler shouted. No. It was too late for decoys.

“Belay that order! Counter-battery fire! I want a torpedo in the water NOW! Firing bearing one-seven-eight!”

The Fire Control Officer acknowledged his order and began to punch buttons with the speed of a touch-typist. “Torpedo away!” he shouted after a few seconds. “Firing bearing one-seven-eight!”

The water-jet ejection system emitted its characteristic burbling vibration as it propelled the torpedo out of its tube. The sound was almost lost under the shriek of the American torpedo.

The Fire Control Officer turned toward his kapitan. “Sir! What do we do now?”

Gröeler stared back at him. “Now? Now, we die …”

The bulkhead to his left imploded, the metal first fracturing and then vaporizing under the incredible heat of the Mark-54 torpedo’s plasma-jet explosive. Gröeler was blown from his feet and incinerated before his lifeless body hit the deck.

The pressure inside the dying submarine dropped instantly, as the hungry fireball sucked up all of the available air. A millisecond later, the sea crashed through the broken hull and pulverized everything inside.

The broken pieces of U-307 tumbled to the bottom of the sea.

*  *  *

USS Towers (DDG-103):

The 29-MC speakers thundered to life. “All Stations—Sonar. Loud underwater explosions with secondaries, bearing zero-zero-two! I think we got the bastard!”

A cheer went up in Combat Information Center, followed by what seemed to be a collective sigh of relief.

The 29-MC speakers thundered to life again. “All Stations—Sonar has hydrophone effects off the starboard bow! Bearing zero-zero-five! Initial classification: hostile torpedo!”

Chief McPherson’s eyes jerked back to the CDRT. Oh shit! It wasn’t over yet! She keyed her mike. “TAO—USWE. We can’t evade in a minefield! Look at the plot, sir! We’ve got mines on both sides of us!”

*  *  *

Captain Bowie stared at the hostile-torpedo symbol flashing red on the Aegis display screen. There was nowhere to run. They couldn’t evade. The torpedo screaming toward them was a German-built DMA37, the same model that had broken the Antietam like a child’s toy. The same model that killed the Benfold.

The seconds dragged on, and the captain gradually became aware that nearly every pair of eyes in CIC was locked on him. He was their commanding officer, and their eyes were begging him to lead them out of this trap. He kept his eyes on the tactical display. There was nowhere to go.

The XO nudged him, “Jim?”

Captain Bowie stood without speaking. They were surrounded by mines. If they tried to run, they were nearly certain to hit one. If they didn’t run, the torpedo was going to kill them anyway. With a little more time, they could map the minefield with their Kingfisher sonar—find a clear passage out into safe waters.

He started to open his mouth and then stopped himself. A clear passage … They didn’t have time to find one. Could they make one?

He keyed his mike. “Weapons Control—Captain. Forget that last missile site. Train the 5-inch gun directly off the bow. Use maximum elevation and reduced powder charges. I want those rounds to fall as close to the bow as possible. HE-CVT, fused to go off when they hit the water.”

“Sir?”

“No questions, just do it. In fact, I want every gun we’ve got, including the .50-cals and the chain-guns pointed into the water off the bow. Maybe we can blow ourselves a safe path out of here.”

*  *  *

Two hostile-missile symbols vanished off the Aegis display screens, leaving two more inbound missiles.

“TAO—Air. Splash two more Vipers. Both of them to jamming. No takers on the chaff.”

“TAO, aye.”

The ship gave two shudders, accompanied by the roar of two missiles launching.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Two birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one each on the inbound Vipers.”

“Screw the missiles,” the captain said. He keyed his mike. “Weapons Control, this is the Captain. Let Aegis handle the missiles. We’ve got an inbound torpedo that we can’t shoot down. Concentrate on blowing us a path out of here.”

“Weapons Control, aye.”

The gunfire increased in intensity as the rest of the ship’s guns joined the 5inch. The barrage was unholy.

“Captain—Weapons Control. We’re pumping everything we’ve got into the water, sir. You may maneuver when ready.”

The captain keyed his mike. “Bridge—Captain. Let’s go! Left standard rudder! Get us out of here!”

“Bridge, aye!”

As the ship heeled over into its turn, the XO leaned near the captain’s ear. “Do you think this’ll work?”

The captain shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that it’s better than sitting back there waiting to die!”

A thundering boom rattled the ship.

“TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion off the port bow.”

Another explosion followed immediately.

“TAO—Bridge. Close aboard explosion dead off the bow.”

All around CIC, watchstanders began exchanging glances. Maybe this really was going to work …

On the Aegis display screen, the speed vector for Towers’ NTDS symbol was pointed back out of the minefield. They were turned around now and headed for safety. The ship’s symbol inched toward the bright red line that represented the border of the minefield.

“TAO—Air. Splash one more Viper. We still have one inbound, and it’s too close for another missile shot.”

“TAO, aye. We’ll have to let the aft CIWS mount handle it.”

Another explosion rocked the ship, this one much closer than the others had been. The shock wave rolled the ship hard to starboard, and circuit breakers began to trip, cutting off electrical power to parts of the ship.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Aegis is down! Primary computer is off line! I’m taking control of the backup computer and reloading in alternate configuration.”

“Weapons Control—TAO. What’s the status of the aft CIWS mount?”

“Just a second, sir,” the Weapons Control Officer said. “It’s … uh … It’s … I can’t tell, sir! I lost my data feed from CIWS! I can’t tell if CIWS is up or down!”

*  *  *

HY-1 Silkworm (mid-flight):

The missile was an ugly thing. It bore little resemblance to the sleek, dart like airframes of the German and American missiles. Its blunt nose, fat cigar shape, and stubby wings gave it the same general lines and proportions as a 1950s airliner. Seen in the daylight and under other conditions, it might have seemed comical.

But in the darkness, it was invisible, except for the yellow-blue streak of glare that trailed its engine exhaust.

It was a capable machine, despite its comic appearance, and there was nothing even remotely amusing about the 454 kilograms of high explosive packed in its warhead.

The missile made a last-second course correction and darted in for the kill.

*  *  *

USS Towers (DDG-103):

The aft CIWS spun on its mount and pointed its six barrels at the incoming missile. With a sound akin to a lawn mower, the high-tech Gatling gun spun its barrels up to speed and unleashed a burst of 20mm rounds. A fraction of a second later, the cluster of hardened tungsten bullets slammed into the incoming missile, and the HY-1 Silkworm missile disintegrated in an expanding cloud of fire and shrapnel.

The CIWS mount swung back around to its zero position and waited for another target.

*  *  *

“TAO—Bridge. We are clear of the minefield.”

Chief McPherson nearly broke her finger jamming the mike button. “Bridge—USWE. Crack the whip! I say again, crack the whip!”

“Bridge, aye!”

The ship heeled abruptly to starboard as the bridge began the series of tight switchback turns that were supposed to throw off the pursuing torpedo.

*  *  *

“Weapons Control—TAO. Cease fire on all guns!”

“Weapons Control, aye!”

The deck heeled to port as the ship began a switchback turn in the opposite direction. The guns stopped firing, leaving a strange, ear-ringing silence in their wake.

*  *  *

Over the 29-MC, the Sonar Supervisor shouted, “Hostile torpedo is still locked on!”

“Crack the whip!” Chief McPherson said into her mike. “Crack the whip!”

The ship heeled again as the bridge threw the destroyer into a second set of switchback turns.

“It’s not going to work,” a voice said from over her shoulder.

The chief turned to see Captain Bowie standing behind her, his eyes glued to the CDRT’s tactical display. “It’s not going to work,” he said again. His voice was quiet, almost as if he was talking to himself rather than her.

The captain swung the microphone of his comm-set up to his mouth and keyed into the tactical net. “Bridge—Captain. Bring the port screw on line! I want all engines ahead flank right now!”

The OOD’s voice came back over the net immediately. “Bring the port screw on line, all engines ahead flank—Bridge, aye!”

A metallic groan resonated through the ship, and the damaged port screw began to turn. The sound gained rapidly in pitch and volume as the mangled propeller came up to speed, rising from a groan to an ear-splitting shriek that rivaled even the explosive hammering of the now-silent guns.

The sound turned Chief McPherson’s blood to ice water. In torpedo evasion, sound was the enemy. An acoustic torpedo could home in on a sound source like a bloodhound sniffing out a fox.

“Captain!” Chief McPherson said. “The torpedo can hear that!”

“I know,” the captain said. His eyes never wandered from the flashing torpedo symbol on the tactical display.

“Sir! Speed won’t help us now! We can’t outrun this thing! And it’s going to follow that howling screw right up our ass!”

“Let’s hope so,” the captain said. He keyed his mike. “Bridge—Captain. Starboard engines all stop! Port engines maintain flank speed!”

Chief McPherson stared at her commanding officer in abject disbelief. “Sir! What are you …”

“We can’t stop this torpedo from hitting us,” the captain said. “But maybe we can control where it hits us.”

The chief frowned. “You’re saying it’s safer to get shot in the gut than in the head?”

“That’s the idea,” the captain said, his gaze still not wavering from the flashing red torpedo symbol. “Of course, a gut shot can kill you too, but it’s the only chance we’ve got.” He punched his comm-set into the 1-MC general announcing circuit. When he spoke, his voice came out of every speaker on the ship. “All hands, this is the Captain. Brace for shock!”

*  *  *

R-92:

The fifth-generation computer that formed R-92’s digital brain noted the changes in signal strength caused by the target’s evasive maneuvers. R-92 was not fooled by the target’s bobs and weaves. Over two-thirds of the 152 miniature sonar transducers in R-92’s acoustic seeker head had strong signal locks on the target. And then—improbably—the target signal grew even louder, giving R-92 a better acoustic lock.

R-92 did a range calculation on the target and determined that it was approaching optimum range for detonation. It sent a coded digital pulse to its warhead, initiating the final arming sequence.

R-92 did not know anything about the people it was programmed to kill. It had no understanding of politics, or national boundaries, or the fates of men. The torpedo had no way of knowing that the successful destruction of its target would point the future of the human race toward all-out war, whereas the failure to destroy its target would create a respite in which careful and thoughtful men might still be able to salvage the peace. The machine that was about to become the axis upon which history turned was not aware of history at all.

The weapon checked its depth and adjusted the angle of its elevator fins to take it under the hull of the target. Satisfied that its calculations were accurate, R-92 closed in for the kill.

The torpedo reached its optimum attack depth of twelve meters at the same instant the target’s acoustic signal strength hit its peak. R-92’s digital brain transmitted one final signal, and 250 kilograms of plasticized-hexite high-explosive erupted into an expanding shock wave of fire and vaporized water.

*  *  *

USS Towers (DDG-103):

The torpedo impacted on the port screw, near the after-edge of the huge hole left by the previous torpedo hit. The explosion crashed into the ship like the fist of God, rolling the destroyer onto her starboard side, ripping through the already damaged hull, and letting in tons of seawater.

All over the ship, people and unsecured equipment slid down the swiftly tilting deck toward the starboard side. The angle of the deck was crazy now, and still the wounded ship continued its roll.

*  *  *

Chief McPherson careened across the deck of CIC, her speed increasing as the slant became even steeper. Her shoulder slammed into the base of an Aegis radar console, and she screamed as she felt her bones shatter with horribly audible crunches.

The ship hung there for what seemed an eternity, wallowing on her starboard side, as though considering whether or not to complete the death roll and give herself up to the waves.

Someone screamed, “We’re going under!”

But then, with agonizing slowness, the wounded ship began to right herself. She finally settled, with a heavy list to port—where the water was still pouring in.

*  *  *

Captain Bowie tried to claw his way to his feet. His left knee was badly wrenched, broken maybe, and every movement brought nauseating waves of pain.

“The nets are down,” he hissed. “TAO, get a messenger to CCS! I want damage control teams down there now!”

He turned to the XO, who was just beginning to try to stand. “You all right, Pete?”

The XO’s face was a mask of pain. His arms were wrapped tightly around his chest. He staggered but managed to stand. “Broken … ribs … I think.” He gritted his teeth and stood up a little straighter. “Yes, sir, Captain. I’m okay.”

The captain stared at him for several long seconds before speaking. “Good. See what you can do to put this place back together; the Sirajis might not be done shooting at us.” He took a painful step and his knee nearly collapsed. His vision narrowed, and he had to grab a console to steady himself. “I’m going up to the bridge and see if I can still get some fight out of this old girl.”

The XO nodded. “Yes, sir.”

*  *  *

Chief McPherson lay on the deck, a fetal ball of pain and dizziness. Her comm-set was missing. She tried to turn her head to look for it, and the pain came down on her like an ax. She squeezed her eyes shut, and hot tears ran down her cheeks. She blinked them away.

An Operations Specialist who was just climbing to his feet looked down at her. The young man’s right cheek was bleeding, and it was clear that he was going to have two black eyes. “We made it, Chief! We’re still here!”

*  *  *

Hobbling as he was, it took Captain Bowie ten minutes to make it to the bridge. His left knee was already swelling, and each step he took got a little harder.

He staggered through the airlock and seized the back of the OOD’s chair to keep from falling down. “Officer of the Deck?”

The OOD was Lieutenant (jg) Karen Augustine. Her hair was matted with blood, and she was holding a scrap of bloody T-shirt to her scalp, but her eyes were bright and alert. “Yes, sir?”

The captain glanced down at the helm indicators. “How much speed can you give me?”

The OOD scanned her consoles. “A little less than eight knots, sir. Engineering is working to get us more, but right now, it’s a miracle that we can make way at all.”

“Eight knots it is,” the captain said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

CHAPTER 52

OVAL OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 28 MAY

4:30 PM EDT

The television was a rear-projection model, a big one that slid neatly into a recess in the ceiling when it wasn’t needed. The big screen made Friedrik Shoernberg’s face look huge.

Veronica Doyle pointed a remote at the screen, and the Chancellor of Germany’s face winked out of existence. “I guess that makes it official,” she said. “How did you know he’d resign, Mr. President?”

“I gave him a little incentive,” the president said. “I assured him that the United States wouldn’t seek reparations if he stepped down quietly. And I told him we would back a British attack on Germany if he didn’t.”

Gregory Brenthoven stared at him. “Tell me you’re joking, sir.”

The president shook his head. “I’m not joking, Greg. I did tell him that, and I was serious. Shoernberg’s resignation and a formal apology from the Bundestag were the only things that could keep Emily Irons from declaring war on Germany. If Chancellor Shoernberg had refused to step down, I don’t think I could have prevented a war. And if I couldn’t stop it, the least I could do was try to end it quickly.”

“Lucky for us that you read Chancellor Shoernberg correctly, Mr. President,” Doyle said. “You called this play all the way down the line.”

“Bullshit,” the president said. “Bull … shit.” He shook his head slowly. “I predicted that Friedrik would take the easy way out if his ass was on the line. That’s the only thing I was right about in this whole god-awful mess.”

He looked down at a folder on his desk, bound in dark blue leather and embossed with the presidential seal. He hadn’t opened it yet, but he knew what was in it: an operational summary of the entire incident, complete with charts, graphs, and satellite photos. Some of those charts represented dollars spent. Others discussed fuel expended and the amount of ordnance that had been launched. And one of the charts would show him the cost of this fiasco in human lives.

“I was wrong about a lot more things than I was right about,” he said softly. “And an awful lot of fine young Americans had to die to show me how wrong I was.”

CHAPTER 53

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

CONTINENTAL MARITIME SHIPYARDS

SAN DIEGO, CA

THURSDAY; 21 JUNE

1320 hours (1:20 PM)

TIME ZONE-8 ‘UNIFORM’

Captain Bowie stood at the rail of dry dock number four and looked down at his broken ship. Out of the water and up on the blocks, the massive damage to the port side was clearly visible, and it was much worse than even the most pessimistic part of him had suspected. Showers of sparks fell like blue neon rain into the concrete bottom of the dry dock, as shipyard workers cut out mangled sections of steel and welded in new ones.

Many of the crew were gone now—the injured to hospitals for treatment, the dead to their families for burial. Some of the injured would return to Towers when their wounds were healed, but not many. The next time the destroyer put out to sea, much of the old crew would be gone, replaced by newcomers to whom the battles that Towers had fought would be the stuff of legend.

“She put up a hell of a fight, sir,” a voice at his elbow said.

Captain Bowie turned to find Chief McPherson, her right arm still in a cast from shoulder to wrist.

The chief saluted with her left hand. “It’s tough to get used to saluting with the wrong hand.”

Captain Bowie returned her salute with a shadow of a smile. “It won’t be for much longer. You’ll be out of that thing pretty soon.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be all patched up and ready for battle.” She nodded toward the ship in the dry dock. “Just like the grand lady down there. Weld on a couple of hull plates, run some wiring, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and we’re both as good as new.”

She sighed. “We got lucky, sir. If that last sub had gotten past us, the Brits would be gearing up for war right now.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “We did get lucky, Chief. But I think our little tango in that minefield used up the last of my four-leaf clovers.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“They’re taking her away from me,” the captain said. “I got a heads-up call from SURFPAC this morning. Vice Admiral Hicks is hand-carrying my orders over himself.”

“I’ve never heard of SURFPAC hand-delivering orders before,” the chief said.

“I have,” said Captain Bowie. “Sometimes that’s how they do it when you’re being relieved of command.”

“What?” the chief said. “Relieved of command? They can’t do that!”

Captain Bowie smiled. “I’m afraid they can, Chief.”

“They’ve got no grounds to relieve you, sir.”

“Yes they do,” the captain said. “A ship under my command was sunk in combat, and that hasn’t happened since World War II. Not to mention that we lost every helo attached to our SAU. Apparently, the upper command thinks I mismanaged the situation pretty badly.”

“Mismanaged? Sir, with all due respect, that’s bullshit! Nobody could have done it any better than you did.”

Bowie shook his head and stared down into the dry dock at his wounded ship. “I worked for this my whole life,” he said. “I never gave a damn about making full-bird, and I never even thought about admiral. I wanted to command a destroyer at sea.” He shrugged. “I was lucky enough to live my dream, for a while anyway. I always knew that my time as CO of Towers would go by too quickly. But I never expected to get pulled out of the game early.”

He looked up the pier and pulled his walkie-talkie from its belt holster. “Quarterdeck, this is the Captain. Sound six bells. Admiral Hicks is approaching.”

“Quarterdeck, aye.”

A few seconds later, the ship’s bell rang six times—three groups of two bells each, followed by the Petty Officer of the Watch’s voice over the 1-MC. “Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific—Arriving.”

Captain Bowie and Chief McPherson came to attention as the admiral approached. When he was about eight paces away, they both rendered hand salutes, the captain with his right hand and the chief with her left.

The admiral promptly returned their mismatched salutes with a snappy one of his own. “At ease.”

They dropped into slightly more relaxed postures.

Vice Admiral Douglas Hicks had a folder tucked under his left arm. He looked down and tried to brush a smear of dirt off the right leg of his uniform pants. “I shouldn’t have worn my whites to a shipyard,” he said. He looked up. “But this is an official visit, so it seemed appropriate.”

He retrieved the folder from under his arm and held it out to Captain Bowie. “Do you know what’s in here?”

Bowie accepted the folder but didn’t open it. “My orders, sir?”

The admiral smiled. “I like you, Jim. But I wouldn’t have bothered to trot my fat carcass down here to deliver an ordinary set of orders.”

Captain Bowie started to open the folder and then stopped himself. “I’m not being transferred, sir?”

The admiral shrugged. “That’s up to you, son.” He nodded toward the folder. “What you have there is what amounts to a blank check. They’re orders all right. Signed by the Secretary of the Navy himself.”

The captain looked puzzled. “Where am I going, sir?”

“Anywhere you want,” the admiral said. “You can take your pick of any O-5 billet in the Navy. And I have it on the highest authority that, if your dream billet is taken, the bureau will move somebody to make room. You think about it for a while and then get back to me when you’ve made up your mind.”

“I don’t need to think about it, Admiral. I already know where I want to go.” He pointed into the dry dock where cascades of welding sparks were falling. “Right there. I want to do another CO tour aboard the Towers.”

The admiral grinned. “You just won me fifty bucks. I told my chief of staff to pencil you in for the Towers. He said I was nuts.” The admiral reached out and shook Bowie’s hand. “You’re a good man, Jim. And Towers is a hell of a ship. I envy you. And on that note, I’ll have to take my leave. There’s a stack of reports on my desk a foot high, and my name is on every damned one of them.”

Captain Bowie and Chief McPherson came to attention and saluted. The admiral returned their salutes and then turned on his heel and walked briskly back up the pier.

Captain Bowie radioed the quarterdeck and shortly afterward they were treated to a 1-MC broadcast announcing the admiral’s departure.

When the speakers had faded to silence, Captain Bowie turned to Chief McPherson with a grin. “What do you think, Chief? Are you ready to do it again?”

EPILOGUE

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 22 JUNE

3:07 AM EDT

The phone woke President Chandler on the third ring, but it took him five rings to grope for it and get the receiver to his ear.

“Mr. President, this is Lieutenant Feinstein in the Signals Office. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is requesting your presence in the Situation Room, sir. Something has come up.”

The president turned on the bedside lamp and did a quick check to make sure it wasn’t shining in Jenny’s face. “What kind of something?”

“Sir, it’s China.”

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in bringing this book to life:

Bill Keppler of the State Department Office of Protocol; Michael A. Petrillo, Arabic linguist and Middle Eastern cultural specialist; Cathy Monaghan of the British Embassy in Washington, DC; the staff of the Los Angeles office of the British Consulate-General; the Chinese Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego; TM1(SW) Gary D. Johnson; TM1(SW) Charles Copes; Peter H. Zindler, marine engineer; and several others, some of whom asked not to be named, and others whose names have slipped my leaky brain. The information I received from these fine people was superb. Any errors that have crept into this work are mine, not theirs.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Master Modeler Richard Melillo of The Modeler’s Art (TheModelersArt.com) for building me an extraordinary model of the DMA-37 torpedo.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my editor and close friend, Don Gerrard, for believing when I had forgotten to, and for making me go back and do the hard parts until they were right.

THE SEVENTH ANGEL

Jeff Edwards

San Diego

To Vailia Dennis

For a lifetime of friendship, love, and shared wisdom

— all squeezed into a few short years.

“…we witness today, in the power of nuclear weapons, a new and deadly dimension to the ancient horror of war. Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

September 19, 1956

“And there came a seventh angel, his robe hemmed with fire and the sword of doom in his hand. Written upon his brow was the name of death.”

Jashar 10:21

(Sefer haYashar)

Lost book of the Old Testament

Translation circa 1552, from the private archives of Giovanni del Monte.

Image used by permission of NORTON DEEPWATER SYSTEMS, Inc.

PROLOGUE

The deck gun fired again, sending another ninety-six pound naval artillery round thundering into the night. For an instant, the muzzle flash from the big gun stripped away the concealing darkness, revealing the low angular profile of a U.S. Navy destroyer.

The vessel revealed in that microsecond of illumination was strange-looking. The squat pyramid shapes of her superstructure and the steep angle of her mast gave the destroyer very little resemblance to any previous generation of warships.

The flare of light was as brief as a camera flash, gone almost the instant it appeared, and the ship was once again hidden against the dark waves of the Northern Arabian Gulf.

The ship’s name was USS Towers, and she was the fourth (and last) of the Flight III Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. She was a blend of superb naval engineering and cutting-edge military stealth technology, a combination that had caused a great deal of hype and wild speculation.

News magazines had taken to calling her a ‘ghost ship,’ and a growing body of Internet mythology credited the destroyer with capabilities that could only be managed by Hollywood special effects wizards. The reality was impressive enough, but it was considerably short of the myth, and well within the boundaries of known physics.

The vessel’s radar cross-section, infrared profile, and acoustic and magnetic signatures were all severely minimized, and a layer of phototropic camouflage made the ship difficult to detect and track visually. Even so, the Towers was far from invisible, despite the ever-growing body of myth that surrounded her name.

But hype didn’t matter now, and neither did speculation. USS Towers was wounded, and she was running for her life.

Three-thousand yards aft of the ship, hidden beneath a dark blanket of seawater, a second torpedo was coming to finish the job that the first had begun. No amount of myth or hype could stop it, or even slow its approach.

The deck gun fired again, and the strange-looking warship was again silhouetted against black water for an instant. The gun barrel was at maximum elevation, and the firing charge was reduced, making the trajectory very high and extremely short. The round crashed into the wave tops a few hundred yards ahead of the ship.

To either side of the bow, the ship’s smaller guns followed with their own lesser furies, hammering .50-caliber machine gun bullets and 25mm chain-gun rounds into the waves just forward of the vessel. It was a tactic of purest desperation.

The ship was surrounded by a field of naval mines, their numbers and locations hidden by black water. Any one of those mines could crack the hull of a warship like an eggshell. The guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had learned that lesson the hard way two decades earlier, in this very same body of water, just a few hundred nautical miles to the south. The Samuel B. Roberts had nearly been blown in half. Whether or not Towers was about to repeat that lesson was still yet to be seen.

Under any other circumstances, the proper tactic would have been to maneuver at two or three knots, locating each mine with the ship’s Kingfisher sonar, and mapping a safe route to the edge of the minefield. But moving slowly was not an option now. The torpedo was getting closer by the second. It was locked on to the ship’s acoustic signature like a cybernetic bloodhound, and the deadly machine was following the trail with a ruthless precision that no living creature could equal.

The Towers needed every ounce of speed that her engineers could squeeze out of their wounded vessel. Every fifty yards of forward motion was another second of life. But it wasn’t going to be enough. The torpedo was faster, and—unlike its target—it was not slowed by damage. The weapon was rapidly overtaking the destroyer. The seconds were beginning to run out.

Standing behind the Tactical Action Officer’s chair in the air-conditioned semi-darkness of Combat Information Center, Captain Bowie watched the chase rushing toward its conclusion on the giant Aegis display screens. The fingers of his left hand gripped a steel crossbeam in the overhead, steadying his body against the motion of the ship. His right hand rested casually on the back of the TAO’s chair. His posture was carefully-relaxed, and he concentrated on keeping the tension out of his facial expression.

He knew without looking that the men and women of his CIC team were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They were measuring his reactions, drawing confidence and hope from the calm assurance of his demeanor.

His crew needed hope right now. They were scared, and they had every reason to be. They were exhausted, and their bodies were bruised and bloodied. More than a few of their shipmates were already dead. Their ship was grievously damaged, and the fight was not over yet.

Bowie ran a hand through his short black hair, and relaxed the set of his shoulders. He looked more like an accountant than a naval officer, and he knew it. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him an air of clean efficiency, and the slight downturn of his mouth tended to make him look pensive, even in the most relaxed of circumstances. The effect was usually offset by his quick brown eyes and his easy laugh, but there was nothing to laugh about tonight. Nothing at all.

This was the craziest tactical situation Bowie had ever heard of. Even the worst-case everybody-dies training scenarios weren’t this bad. His plan for dealing with the situation was even crazier, if such a thing was possible.

It was not a good plan; Bowie knew that. Maybe it wasn’t even an entirely sane plan, but what the hell else could he do? If there were other options, he hadn’t been able to think of them.

There was no time to sniff out a safe path through the minefield. If they reduced speed enough for sonar to detect the mines, the torpedo would catch them and kill them. If they tried to run without seeing the mines, they were nearly certain to hit one. That would kill them just as quickly.

On the big display screen, the Towers appeared as a small green cross, enclosed by a circle. A single green speed vector protruded from the center of the symbol, like the stick of a lollipop. The symbol was pointed southwest now, inching toward the irregular red boundary that represented the edge of the minefield. They were moving in the right direction—toward safe water—but the flashing red torpedo symbol was less than 2,500 yards behind now, and moving a lot faster as it continued to close the gap.

The mines didn’t appear on the tactical display at all, except the general outline showing the boundaries of the minefield. That information had come from COM Fifth Fleet, via the Special Warfare unit attached to U.S. Navy Central Command. But there were no coordinates for the mines themselves: no clues to their locations, or even how many were there. It might be a hundred, or five hundred, or five thousand.

The Towers couldn’t map a safe route through the minefield, and the ship could not survive without one. The only choice was to create their own path through the mines, clear a safe route where none existed.

Out on the darkened forecastle, the deck gun continued to pound the water with naval artillery shells every two and a half seconds. The forward machine guns and the two chain-guns continued to hammer their own projectiles into the wave tops. The ship was pumping a tremendous amount of mechanical force and shrapnel into the sea. Theoretically, some of that brute kinetic force should penetrate far enough down to reach the mines. That was the plan: to pulverize the water hard enough to trigger the mines at a distance, clearing the way ahead of the ship.

But it wasn’t working. Bowie’s crazy plan, which had seemed at least distantly feasible when he’d given the order, did not seem to be bearing fruit. There were no answering explosions to show that the guns were finding targets. For all of the racket and thunder, the guns had not yet triggered a single mine.

Bowie felt a hand on his left shoulder. He turned to find his second in command, Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler, standing behind him. Pete was a good man, and a damned fine executive officer. Just the kind of guy you’d want in your corner if things got ugly.

He leaned in close, and spoke quietly into his captain’s ear. “Do you think this’ll work?”

Bowie shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that it’s better than sitting around waiting to die.”

His last word seemed to echo in the chilled air of CIC, and Bowie wished instantly that he hadn’t said it.

He opened his mouth to add something else—anything—to wipe that dreadful word out of the air. Before he could speak, a thundering boom shook the entire ship.

For a half-second, Bowie thought they’d been hit, but the Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the Tactical Action Officer’s communications net. “TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion off the port bow!”

The TAO keyed the microphone of his headset to acknowledge the report, but his voice was drowned out by a second explosion.

“TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion dead off the bow!”

All around him, the members of Bowie’s CIC team began exchanging glances. He knew what they were thinking. Maybe the skipper’s crazy plan was going to work. Maybe … just maybe, they were not all going to die tonight.

On the Aegis display screen, the symbol for Towers was moving toward the boundary of the minefield. The torpedo had closed within 2,000 yards and was gaining fast, but it looked like the ship might be clear of the minefield before the weapon struck. If the ship could make it that far, they could maneuver without fear of mines. They could crack the whip—run the tricky evasion maneuvers designed to throw pursuing torpedoes off the scent. They might have a chance.

“I think this is working,” a voice behind him said. “Looks like you might still pull the fat out of the fire, sir.”

Bowie turned, expecting to see his XO. Instead, he found himself staring into the eyes of Lieutenant Clinton Brody, the pilot of the USS Towers helicopter, Firewalker Two-Six.

A prickle ran down the back of Bowie’s neck. Something wasn’t right here. He felt a stirring in his gut: an indefinable certainty that some crucial element of reality had suddenly veered off in an unexpected direction.

The gun roared again. The sound had a different character to it—muted, with a sort of weirdly-metallic echo. A report blared from one of the overhead speakers, but the voice was tinny, and too garbled to understand.

Bowie’s gaze was still locked on the young pilot’s face. Lieutenant Brody was not supposed to be here. No, that wasn’t right. He couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible.

The realization came instantly, and it brought another abrupt shift in the fabric of reality. The world seemed to stutter and then freeze in place, like a film break in an old-fashioned movie projector, the last frame of broken celluloid still trapped behind the lens. All action had stopped, but that last image persisted, Combat Information Center and its crew held motionless in an instance of frozen time.

Lieutenant Clinton Brody could not here, because the man was dead. His body had been burned and cut to ribbons by the Siraji missile that had ripped his helicopter from the sky.

He couldn’t be here. But here he was, staring back at Bowie.

The world had gone eerily silent. The pounding of the guns, the murmur of the CIC crew, the whisper of cooling fans, the surge of the ship through the water, were all gone. The sound of Bowie’s own breathing suddenly seemed almost painfully loud.

“You’re dead,” he said softly. It was somehow both a statement of fact, and an accusation.

The dead helicopter pilot nodded, and a long slice opened in the flesh of his left cheek—skin parting almost magically—blood spilling down the side of his face as the cut widened and the ivory-yellow of the man’s cheekbone was revealed. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I am.”

He squared his shoulders and saluted, as though presenting himself for inspection. As he lowered his hand, it fell limply at his side, injuries manifesting instantly, leaving the pilot’s arm mangled and fractured in numerous places. “My crew are dead too. Both of them.”

The other two members of the helicopter aircrew were suddenly standing behind the dead officer: his copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Julie Schramm, her brown hair singed and twisted, her once pretty face scorched and nearly black with bruising and blood; and the aircraft’s Sensor Operator, Petty Officer Second Class Daniel Gilford, his right leg missing from the hip, the side of his head a mass of ragged tissue and splintered bone.

Bowie had only a second to register this hideous sight before more of the grisly figures began appearing. Commander Rachel Vargas. Lieutenant (junior grade) Alex Sherman. Seaman Terrence Archer. Petty Officer Gerald Blake. Fireman Apprentice Thomas James Keiler. Each of their bodies burned, or bleeding, or broken.

The gathering of corpses continued to grow, and Bowie recognized every one of their faces.

This was the accounting of souls. Every man and woman in that growing crowd had died under Bowie’s command.

His chest tightened until he could barely breathe. He had tried to protect them. He had done his best to lead them well. He had tried to keep them safe from harm. But they were dead, despite his intentions.

Every one of them was dead, and there was nothing Bowie could do about it.

The thought seemed to break the spell. The transition from dream to wakefulness was instantaneous. Combat Information Center vanished, and the bodies of the dead Sailors were gone with the flicker of an eyelid.

Bowie lay in the bunk of his at-sea cabin, staring up into the darkness and feeling the pounding of his heart and the gentle rolling of the ship. The sheets had gotten themselves twisted around his legs, the way they always did when he had the dream. He knew without checking that his cheeks were damp with tears.

He made no move to wipe them away. The commanding officer of a warship is not supposed to cry, but Bowie thought—as he always did after the dream—that his tears were an honest tribute to Rachel Vargas, and Alex Sherman, and Clint Brody, and the rest of them. They deserved his tears. And, like it or not, Bowie knew that he deserved the dream.

He supposed that it was technically a nightmare, but he rarely thought of it that way. In his mind, it was something different. It was a reckoning. It was a balancing of karma: a none-too-subtle reminder that human lives depended on his actions and his orders, and that he did not always wield that power with perfect judgment.

He fumbled for his watch in the darkness, found it, and pushed buttons until the dial lit up. It took him a couple of seconds to focus his eyes well enough to read the time. It was 02:07, just a few minutes after two AM.

Bowie tugged the sheets away from his legs and groaned. Two in the morning. Damn.

He could have used more rest than that, but he knew from past experience that it was no good to try again. Once it got started, the dream was with him for the night. If he went back to sleep now, the dream would come again. And again.

He climbed out of his bunk. Better to get up now, and make a long day of it. He’d grab a cup of coffee and head over to CIC. Maybe one of the civilian engineers would be up already, and he could get some more information on this Mouse unit they were supposed to be testing.

His fingers located the light switch. He flicked it on, blinking in the sudden illumination. He yawned hard, and reached for his coveralls.

The dead deserved to have their say. He couldn’t begrudge them that, no matter how much sleep it cost him. They could haunt his dreams as often as they wanted. They had earned that right. But Bowie’s waking hours belonged to the world of the living. He planned to keep it that way.

CHAPTER 1

MANILA, REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

0302 hours (3:02 AM)

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

Oleg Grigoriev should not have been alive. The part of his mind still capable of rational thought was aware of that. By all rights, he should have died back there in that alley, where those Chinese bastards had dumped his body with the rest of the garbage.

But he was not dead. Not yet.

He staggered down the darkened sidewalk, following the pools of feeble yellow light cast by the street lamps. The dim circles of illumination had become his mile posts—the only method of measuring progress toward his destination.

The Americans… He had to reach the Americans.

His senses were playing tricks now. He could hear the whine of distant traffic, but not the scrape of his shoes on the cement. He could feel the damp of the sweat on his cheeks, but not the hot flow of blood down his ribs. Even his sense of distance had become weirdly distorted. His courier duties had brought him to Manila many times, and he had driven down this stretch of Roxas Boulevard more than once. It was only a few city blocks. But it had somehow stretched itself into an impossibly-long tunnel of darkness, punctuated by widely-spaced glows of sickly yellow.

His left knee buckled, and he tottered sideways, slumping against the windows of a car for support. He drew a long breath, doing his best to ignore the rattling gurgle in his chest.

It was getting harder to breathe, but at least the pain was gone. Most of it, anyway. The white-hot agony in his ribs had faded to a distant ache—disconnected—as though it belonged to someone else.

He wondered dimly if the lack of pain might be a bad sign. Was he in shock? Or was his nervous system shutting down as his bodily functions began to fail? Certainly his mind seemed to be slipping. He could no longer remember how many times the bastards had shot him.

That last thought brought a grim smile to his lips. They obviously hadn’t shot him enough times. Not enough to kill a rangy old Russian bear like Oleg Grigoriev. A few Chinese bullets would kill an ordinary man perhaps, but not a former Sergeant in the Tamanskaya Guards. Not an old Soldier of the Iron Saber brigade.

Grigoriev took another gurgling breath, and forced his eyes to focus. He could see it now in the distance, the brighter white glow of the security lights that surrounded the American Embassy.

He pushed himself upright, and swayed back to a full standing position. His knees would have to hold out a little longer. Keep walking. He had to keep walking. He had to reach the Americans.

His own people had betrayed him; that much he knew. The Chinese would not have dared to harm him without authorization from Zhukov. The bastards wanted the warheads too badly. They’d never risk blowing the deal by killing Zhukov’s courier. That could only mean that Zhukov had authorized the hit. And then he’d sent Grigoriev to Manila, to a rendezvous in a deserted alley, in this cesspool of a country where life was cheap. Straight into the hands of the Chinese killers.

Grigoriev coughed, sending a spasm of pain through his chest. He lurched forward, stumbling toward the lights of the embassy one faltering step at a time.

They wanted to throw him out with the garbage, did they? Leave him dying among the broken beer bottles and the cat piss? Trying to protect their precious secrets. Hide their plans from the Americans.

Grigoriev could taste blood in his mouth now, but the tough old Russian grinned anyway. He’d show the bastards. The Chinese. Zhukov. All of them. He’d tell the Americans everything, and then he’d sit back with a fat bottle of Moskovskaya and watch the whole thing go to hell.

CHAPTER 2

ICE PACK - NORTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

LATITUDE 58.29N / LONGITUDE 155.20E

FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

1421 hours (2:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The helicopter came to a hover less than a meter above the ice. It hung there for nearly a minute as the downwash from its rotors blasted snow from the rugged icescape below. The roaring vortex of mechanically-induced wind created an instant blizzard around the aircraft, reducing effective visibility to almost zero. But there wasn’t enough snow to cause a true whiteout. Within seconds, the light accumulation of powder had been blown away, revealing a circle of dirty gray ice a little larger than the sweep of the rotor blades.

This was not the smooth ice sheet of the Arctic. The ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk was strained and twisted by the collision of two opposing ocean currents, and the relentless hammering of the Siberian wind. The ice was pocked with hillocks, ridges, and fractures—a frozen diorama of unreleased pressure.

The helicopter made no attempt to land on the torturous surface. It maintained position, while doors slid open on either side of the fuselage. Three men made the short jump to the ice, and began unloading equipment through the open doors of the aircraft. As soon as the equipment was unloaded, the helicopter lifted away, climbing to an altitude of a thousand meters where it circled while the others carried out their mission down below.

The men moved quickly and smoothly, despite the roughness of the terrain. They worked without speaking, communicating via hand signals when required, but even that was rarely necessary.

They were a well-oiled team, and they had already performed this operation four times before at other locations on the Okhotsk ice pack. This would be the fifth and final time.

Their cold weather gear was ex-Soviet military issue. The dappled grays and dingy whites of the snow camouflage were a near-perfect match for the surrounding ice. From a few hundred meters away, they would be all but invisible, not that visibility particularly mattered out here. They were the only living souls for at least two hundred kilometers.

In forty minutes, the job was done; the team was back aboard the helicopter and thundering away through the frigid Russian sky.

Already the winds were beginning to hide the evidence of their work beneath a thin layer of grubby snow. The seven new holes in the ice were rapidly disappearing, as was the network of thin wires that cross-connected the holes like a spider web.

A scrap of torn plastic fluttered and skidded across the ice, sticking for a moment against the slope of a pressure ridge. For the briefest of seconds, a single word was visible—black Cyrillic lettering stenciled against gray plastic. The word was vzryvchatka. Explosive. And then the wind caught the scrap and snatched it away, leaving no visible trace that man had ever set foot on this forbidding stretch of ice.

CHAPTER 3

NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY

0942 hours (9:42 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

It was like falling into night. The deepwater submersible Nereus continued its descent into the Aleutian trench—passing from the midwater zone, where blue wavelengths of light were still visible—into the aphotic zone, where no light penetrated at all.

Charlie Sweigart stared through the Nereus’s forward view port as the last traces of light deepened from twilight blue to a shade of black that few human eyes had ever seen. A half mile above, the Nereus’s tender, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, was enjoying the bright morning sunshine. But down here, the only light came from the mini-sub’s interior lights, and the glowing faces of the instrument clusters.

“Bottom coming up in fifty meters,” Gabriella said.

Her voice sent a tiny shiver down Charlie Sweigart’s spine. Gabriella’s English was flawless, but her voice carried a musical French-Canadian lilt that never failed to give Charlie a tingle.

Charlie nodded without looking back. “Thanks.”

The cabin of the submersible was as cramped as the cockpit of the space shuttle. Charlie sat in the pilot’s seat, nearest the bow of the little submarine, surrounded by gauges, digital readouts, and equipment status lights. Gabriella’s seat at the sensor console was behind Charlie and to his left, so he couldn’t see her without turning almost completely around in his chair. That would be a bit too obvious, so Charlie made do with glimpses of her reflection in the ten-inch thick plate of curved lexan that formed the forward view port.

The reflections weren’t perfect. The curvature of the surface brought some distortion to the images. But Charlie could look at Gabriella in that imperfect mirror as often as he wanted.

Who was he kidding, anyway? What would a tall, willowy blonde want with a pudgy little sub-jockey like Charlie? A tall, willowy, smart blonde. Doctor Gabriella Marchand—on loan to NOAA from Centre océanographique de Rimouski, in Quebec—had PhDs in Oceanography, Geochemistry, and Marine Geophysics. She didn’t like for Charlie to call her doctor, but doctor she was. She was one very smart lady, and she was rapidly becoming one of the world’s leading experts on methane hydrate deposits, whatever those were.

Charlie had read the research proposals and goals for this project. He’d been to the pre-dive briefings, and studied the mission plans carefully. This was their seventh dive, so he knew the plan inside and out. He had the navigational waypoints all programmed into the Nereus’s computers. He knew the currents in the Aleutian trench, and he knew how to compensate for the drift they’d try to put on his boat. He could put the submersible within inches of every sampling site on the Dive Plan. But the real work on this project was up to Gabriella. Charlie was just the bus driver.

He glanced at the glide angle indicator, and eased back on the control yoke to slow the boat’s rate of descent. Outside of the pressure hull, the submersible’s four propulsor pods rotated slightly, canceling some of the vessel’s negative buoyancy with vectored jets of water.

“Forty meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie suppressed another shiver. Gabriella’s bottom was considerably closer than forty meters, but it was not a good idea to think about that.

Charlie nodded again. “Forty meters. Thanks.”

He was just sneaking another peek at Gabriella’s reflection when a different voice came from behind him.

“So, what color is it?”

Charlie flinched. He’d almost forgotten that Steve was even there.

Steve Harper, the other permanent member of the Nereus crew, sat at the engineering station, behind Charlie and to his right. Steve was a good guy. He could be a jackass when the mood struck him, but he was usually pretty easy to be around. He was also a skilled technician and an excellent button masher. Charlie liked working with him, at least when Steve wasn’t startling the hell out of him.

Charlie cocked his head. “Huh?”

“I asked you what color it is,” Steve said.

“What color is what?” Charlie asked.

“The Porsche,” Steve said. “Didn’t you just buy a new Porsche?”

“Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Well, it’s not new. But it’s in really good shape.”

“You’ve got a Porsche?” That was Gabriella.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a ninety-eight Turbo Carrera. Low mileage. It’s pretty nice. Good paint. Nice interior. Excellent mechanical condition.”

“I like the nineties-models better too,” Gabriella said. “I think they changed the suspension in the new ones. I don’t like the way they handle as much.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that Charlie’s decision to buy a used model was a matter of preference rather than finance.

“What color is it?” Steve asked again.

Charlie grimaced. “It’s – uh, red. Sort of a light red.”

Steve whistled through his teeth. “Dude, you got a red Porsche turbo? You are sooooo set!”

“What’s our distance to bottom?” Charlie asked. It was time to derail this conversation. He did not want to talk about the Porsche.

“Thirty-two meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie nodded. “Thanks.” He eased back on the yoke a little more. They were still a little too far away from the bottom to see anything, but this was as good a time as any to heat up the exterior lights. “Floods coming on,” he said, and he flipped three switches near the top of his console.

Outside the hull, three banks of sealed halogen floodlights flared to life, casting a sphere of light around the little submersible. The darkness was not banished; it hung just beyond the reach of the floods, like an impenetrable curtain of blackness. This was where night lived. On the surface, the sun ruled half of the planet at any given time. But down here, night was always master.

The thought gave Charlie a mild case of the creeps, despite the fact that it had occurred to him a hundred times before. It was a little creepy. But it was also cool. Because this was Charlie’s domain. Anywhere else in the world, he was just a geeky looking guy with a spare tire around his waist. But down here, Charlie flew like Icarus through the secret realms of darkness. He’d had that thought before too, but it never failed to bring a smile to his lips.

He dimmed the cabin lights, to make it easier to see through the view port. Gabriella’s reflection faded with the interior illumination.

Steve snorted. “What exactly is a light red? Is it like a candy apple red? Or a fire engine red?”

Damn it. He wasn’t going to let it drop. “No,” Charlie said with a sigh. “It’s more of a whitish red.”

“A whitish red?” Steve’s voice was incredulous. “You mean like a pink?”

“It’s not pink!” Charlie snapped. He stopped and corrected himself. “I don’t like to think of it as pink, okay?”

Steve’s laugh sounded like the cackle of a hen. “Dude! You bought a pink Porsche?”

Charlie tapped a pressure gauge with unnecessary force. “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

“Aye-aye, sir!” Steve said it in a theatrically-formal voice. “Shutting the hell up as ordered, sir!”

If past behavior was anything to judge by, it was a fair guess that Steve had accompanied the words with a brisk simulation of a salute, pointed in the direction of Charlie’s back.

A laugh from Gabriella confirmed the suspicion.

Charlie opened his mouth to call Steve an asshole, when the control yoke gave a strange twitch. All thoughts of playful banter vanished instantly from his mind. “Steve, did you feel that?”

“Did I feel what, Porsche Boy?”

“I just felt some kind of a jerk in the control yoke,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, yeah … Let me guess, it was me, right? I’m the jerk?”

“Knock it off,” Charlie snapped. “I’m not joking!”

The control yoke twitched again, harder this time—an abrupt twist to the right that nearly wrenched the pistol-shaped grips out of his hands. The submersible rolled about ten degrees to starboard, in instant response to the movement of the controls.

Charlie snatched the yoke back to the left, and then centered up quickly, compensating for the sudden roll. The sub righted itself, but he could feel a definite starboard drag.

“I’ve got some kind of steering casualty,” Charlie said. “Switch me to backup, now!”

“I’m on it,” Steve said. “Switching to backup steering now!” He punched a button and relays clicked softly.

“Thanks,” Charlie said. The drag on the control yoke vanished as the backup steering circuits kicked in. For a half-second, he considered trying to finish the dive on backup steering. But the deep ocean is unforgiving. When something went wrong a half mile under water, the smart thing to do was head for the surface before a little problem could become a big problem.

He checked the dive clock on the instrument panel above his head. “I’m declaring a mission abort at time zero-nine-five-seven. Call it in.”

“Got it,” Steve said. “Mission abort, time zero-nine-five-seven. Is this an emergency abort, or a deliberate abort?”

Charlie thought about that for a few seconds. An emergency abort meant releasing the fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible. The boat would instantly gain three-quarters of a ton of positive buoyancy. They’d shoot for the surface like a cork. Their ascent would not be easily controllable, and there was the possibility of ramming into their tender ship as they broke the surface. Charlie was a good pilot, and he was pretty certain that he could steer clear of the Otis Barton, but there was a degree of risk.

A deliberate abort would allow him to control the Nereus’s ascent. It would also save the expense of the lead ballast plate; those things were custom-manufactured to excruciatingly fine technical tolerances, and they were not cheap. A deliberate abort also meant a lot less hassle once they got to the surface.

If he declared an emergency, formal investigations would follow. They would be required by law. Everyone associated with the project would be interviewed within an inch of their lives. Every nut and bolt on the submersible would be removed and inspected. The Nereus would be decertified for diving operations for weeks, or even months. Gabriella’s research project would be over the second Charlie spoke the word ‘emergency.’

If he called for a deliberate abort due to minor technical issues, the troubleshooting and repair of the steering problem would go down in the logs as routine corrective maintenance. They might be able to resume the diving schedule tomorrow, or the day after.

His fingers tightened on the controls. “Deliberate abort,” he said. “I am not declaring an emergency.”

“Understood,” Steve said. “Deliberate abort.”

Charlie heard him lift the handset for the underwater telephone. Like all other forms of electromagnetic energy, radio waves are rapidly absorbed by water. Within a hundred feet of the surface, they could talk to their mother ship, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, by radio. But even the most powerful radios can’t penetrate a thousand feet of water. When the Nereus was this deep, all communications had to be carried out via the underwater telephone, a two-way acoustic transponder system that could transmit and receive amplified voice signals.

Steve began his report. “Otis Barton, this is Nereus. We are declaring a deliberate mission abort. I say again—deliberate mission abort.” He spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable with great deliberation. Amplified acoustic voice signals had a tendency to become garbled as they propagated through the water. He paused to give his message time to stop reverberating through the water.

Charlie pulled back on the yoke, bringing the nose of the submersible up. “Let’s go, old girl. Time to head back toward fresh air and sunshine.”

“I’m not that old,” Gabriella said softly.

It was obviously intended as humor, but her words gave Charlie a chill. This was not the pleasant tingle of attraction, but the cold realization that his decision to avoid an emergency abort might be putting Gabriella’s life at risk. He’d gotten so locked up in weighing the technical issues of the decision that he’d forgotten to factor in Gabriella. Charlie and Steve were accustomed to the risks. This was what they trained for. This was their job. But to Gabriella, this was a scientific expedition. She probably hadn’t considered how badly things could go wrong at the bottom of a three thousand foot tall column of water.

At this depth, the water pressure on the hull was over 1,300 pounds per square inch. Suddenly, Charlie could almost feel the ocean squeezing his little submarine, pressing in the way that the darkness tried to crush the sphere of light cast by the flood lamps.

From somewhere near the rear of the cabin came a rapid metallic chattering. Electrical relays were clicking on and off many times a second, making electrical connections, breaking them, and then making them again. The exterior floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again, and then went out.

“Holy shit!” Steve shouted. “I’m losing the main electrical bus! I’ve got breakers tripping all over the board, and I’m showing low volts on the auxiliary bus!”

Charlie lifted his right hand from the control yoke to fumble for the emergency ballast release. The hot ozone smell of burning electrical insulation filled the air. His fingers wrapped around the handle, but—before he could release the safety latch—the control yoke darted hard to the right. Charlie couldn’t hold it steady with only one hand. It twisted out of his grasp, rolling the sub almost ninety-degrees, onto its starboard side.

Charlie was thrown against his safety belts. His head slammed into something. Neon colors exploded in his brain, smearing bright streaks of pain on the insides of his eyelids. Far away, he could hear someone screaming. He wanted to turn and find the screaming person, to help if he could, but his body didn’t seem to be obeying his commands.

Like Icarus, his magic wings had failed him. They folded uselessly and tore away from his body. And Charlie Sweigart tumbled helplessly into the heart of darkness.

CHAPTER 4

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

In the years since the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the word bomb has come to be associated with terrorism. We use the term to describe car bombs, roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices, and the feared—but never seen—dirty bomb. When we think of bombs, we think of wounded American Soldiers, dead or injured Middle Eastern civilians, and innocent victims in European train stations. But for the last half of the twentieth-century, the word meant something altogether different.

I was a child of the Cold War. I was born in the shadow of Sputnik, when America’s nuclear adversary, the USSR, dominated the strategic high ground of outer space. I took my first steps at just about the time a Soviet surface-to-air missile blasted Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane out of the sky over Sverdlovsk. I was learning to brush my own teeth right about the time the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world teetering on the brink of nuclear holocaust. John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to drag us back from the edge of destruction, but it was nearly a foregone conclusion that, sooner or later, the Cold War was going to go hot.

Back then the bomb was the big one: the A-bomb. The term didn’t refer to any individual weapon. Outside of James Bond movies and the pages of Dr. Strangelove, there was no ultra-secret doomsday device waiting to bring nuclear annihilation to the human species. The bomb was the label we gave to the collective nuclear arsenals of the world. It was cultural shorthand for our bombs, and China’s bombs, and the bombs of the Soviet Union. And, in carefully unspoken subtext, the term signified the eventual extermination of man by his own hand.

That was the world I grew up in. A world in which it was taken for granted that we would see Armageddon within our lifetimes. When I enlisted in the Navy that was the world I served in. We didn’t look forward to it. We certainly didn’t want it. And, despite what you may have seen in movies or political commentaries, the militaries on both sides went to extraordinary lengths to prevent it. But many of us labored under the mortal certainty that a nuclear showdown was inevitable. The United States and the Soviet Union were going to unleash their nuclear arsenals upon each other and the world. It wasn’t a matter of if; it was a matter of when.

Now, so long after the fall of the Berlin wall, those fears seem distant and even a bit foolish. We’ve refocused our worries on terrorism at home and abroad. We’re concerned about the stability of the Middle East. We’re nervous about the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea. But the specter of the Russian bomb has been laid to rest. The apocalypse will not arrive riding on the shoulders of a Soviet-built ICBM. Or will it?

The Russian military, under-funded at the best of times, is having trouble paying its own people. According to the U.S. National Intelligence Counsel, Russian Strategic Rocket Forces are suffering from wage arrears, food shortages, and housing shortages. Put simply, the Russian military is having difficulty paying, housing, and even feeding the very people entrusted with safeguarding their strategic nuclear weapons.

In 1997, the 12th GUMO (Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense) was forced to close a nuclear weapons storage site due to hunger strikes by its workers. In 1998, the families of Russian nuclear workers organized protests to recover back pay and benefits. The Russian media reports that the pay problems have been ironed out, and that most Russian military personnel are now paid regularly. But even on full pay, many members of the Russian military cannot afford to feed their families. Russian officers rarely receive more than $70.00 a month, and their enlisted personnel are paid considerably less than that.

Contrary to the reassurances of the Russian press, the problem hasn’t gone away, and it doesn’t stop at pay shortages. The U.S. intelligence community believes that weapons-grade plutonium, seized in Bulgaria in 1999, originated in Russia. Some time between 2001 and 2002, Chechen rebels stole radioactive materials from the Volgodonskaya nuclear power station near the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Control over the material at the site in question was so lax that the date of the theft can only be estimated to within about 12 months. This is not the plot of a bad science fiction movie; it’s an ongoing state of affairs.

In 2000, sailors aboard a Russian submarine in Kamchatka stole nine radioactive catalyst tubes used for igniting the nuclear reactor. The tubes contained palladium, which is more valuable than gold. Not realizing that the stolen tubes were radioactive, the sailors hoped to sell them to a local scrap metal dealer. Following the incident, the Kamchatkan newspaper Vesti reported that the thieves had nearly caused a nuclear disaster when they attempted to lift the control rods out of the reactor. The Vesti article claimed that an accident was only averted because an unidentified Russian submarine engineer had the foresight to weld the handle of the control mechanism down, so that the thieves couldn’t lift it.

Two senior Russian submarine officers were relieved of duty after the incident came to light, and two Russian admirals and ten other officers were penalized for negligence. The deputy head of the Russian North East Army Group’s press center accused the media of exaggerating the danger.

The crime rate in the Russian military is skyrocketing, with theft, criminal assault, drug dealing, and illegal weapons trafficking as the most persistent problems. Desertions and suicides are both on the rise among the enlisted ranks. The problem, in other words, appears to be getting worse rather than better.

If the difficulties were confined to the conventional Russian military, I’d call it an internal problem. After all, the crime rate in the Russian Federation and the readiness of their military are their business, not ours. But the incidents mentioned above and many more like them make it clear that the integrity of the Russian nuclear forces is being affected. Men guard Russian nuclear stockpiles. And the mounting evidence tells us that those men are in serious trouble.

As a veteran of the Cold War, I feared the former strength of the Russian military. Now, in the wake of its virtual collapse, I’m beginning to fear its weakness even more. In other words, the danger of nuclear attack may not be as remote as we’d like to believe. Our margin of safety may be narrower than ever. To the eyes of this old Sailor, it appears to be eroding by the second.

How did we arrive at this precarious state of affairs? Is it possible to trace the chain of events that led us here?

If we hope to gain any true degree of insight, we must understand the weapons themselves. What are these engines of destruction that cast the shadows of annihilation over our very planet? Where did intercontinental ballistic missiles come from? How were they developed? And, perhaps more importantly, why?

Any study of ICBMs must begin with the history of rocketry. And that takes us back to ancient China.

CHAPTER 5

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY

6:30 PM EST

At six foot four, President Francis ‘Frank’ Chandler was taller than both of the Secret Service agents who escorted him through the double doors into the White House Situation Room. In truth, there probably wasn’t much more than an inch of height difference between Frank and the shorter of the two agents. Both agents were large men in superb physical condition, but something about the president’s long-boned frame and shambling walk made him seem larger than he really was.

The impression was further exaggerated by some indefinable element of presence. The agents looked sharp and professional in the conservative business suits that were the de facto uniform of the plainclothes branch of the Secret Service. Their suits were probably off the rack, with only the amount of alteration needed to make them fit properly. Frank’s suit was a masterpiece of single needle tailoring in blue-gray Hunt & Winterbotham wool, and he still came off looking like a farm hand dressed in someone else’s clothes. Even the legendary Georges de Paris, tailor for every American president since Lyndon Johnson, could not make Frank Chandler look at home in a necktie.

Back during Frank’s now famous underdog bid for Governor of Iowa, Jenny had started calling it the Jethro factor. His wife had only used the term in private, but Frank’s campaign manager had come unglued at the first mention of Jenny’s secret joke.

The man had very nearly shouted into Jenny’s face. “The Beverly Hillbillies? I’m trying to get the media to treat the son of a corn farmer like an honest-to-god political heavyweight, and you’re coming out with the Beverly-frickin’-Hillbillies? If word of this gets around, it’s going to make the front page of every newspaper in the state.”

Jenny hadn’t been the least bit intimidated by the man’s outburst. “It’s a joke,” she’d said calmly. “Lighten up.”

The campaign manager’s nostrils had flared visibly. “I know it’s a joke. And that’s exactly what your husband’s campaign is going to become when the media gets a hold of it.” He’d crammed his hands into his pockets with a force approaching violence. “What are you going to say when some reporter shoves a microphone in your face and asks you why your private nickname for your husband is Jethro?”

Jenny had rewarded the campaign manager with a mischievous little smile. “When he played the role of Jethro Bodine, Max Baer Jr. was six feet-four inches of strapping young stud. And—from what I’ve heard—the man is hung like a plow horse. So I guess I’ll tell the reporters that it’s an utterly natural comparison to make.”

She’d turned up the wattage on her wicked little smile. “Let’s see them run that on the front page of the papers.”

Frank nearly grinned at the memory. He knew perfectly well that Jenny would have made good on her threat if the Jethro question had ever come up at a press conference. She would have pointed her blue eyes directly into the camera lenses, and happily informed the assembled reporters and a few million television viewers that her husband was hung like a plow horse.

It wasn’t true, of course. But after sixteen years of marriage and two children, Jenny still seemed to be under the happy delusion that it was true. Sometimes she still called him Jethro in private moments, unless she had a couple of vodka martinis in her, in which case she might substitute the words plow horse.

Frank covered his mouth and faked a cough to hide the dopey smile that threatened to seize control of his face. He used the half second of respite to compose himself. He wasn’t twenty-five years old any more, or even forty-five. It was time to act his age and get his mind back on the job. It was time to be the President of the United States.

He covered the last few steps to his chair at the head of the long mahogany table, and turned to face the four members of his national security short staff. Per the dictates of protocol, everyone had come to their feet as their president had entered the room. He sat down, and motioned for the others to take their seats.

At the left side of the table sat White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, and National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven. To the right sat the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Horace Gilmore, and the newly-appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, Becka Solomon—brought in after a third heart attack had forced her predecessor to retire from public service.

Most of the chairs at the long table were vacant. The small gathering formed the core group of regular attendees of the President’s Daily Security Brief: the so-called ‘short’ staff.

For a full-fledged meeting of the National Security Council, the vice president would have also been present, along with the secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury. In that case, the Director of Central Intelligence would have probably conducted the briefing himself, in his role as statutory intelligence advisor to the NSC. But this was a routine daily briefing, and the point man was a solemn-faced young analyst from CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.

The president flipped open the blue-jacketed briefing folder and looked up at the analyst. The man was in his mid-twenties, probably not long out of college. Were they really getting younger? More than likely not, but it certainly seemed that way.

The analyst nodded, “Good evening, Mr. President.” He pointed a small remote toward the oversized flat screen plasma television at the far end of the table. The screen flared to life, showing the Presidential Seal against a blue background. The analyst pressed a button and the famous emblem vanished, replaced by a passport-style photo of a stocky middle aged man with heavy Slavic cheekbones and graying whiskers.

The analyst nodded toward the screen. “At approximately three AM local time on Friday the twenty-second of February, this man—a Russian citizen named Oleg Yurievich Grigoriev—approached the front gate of the U.S. Embassy in the Republic of the Philippines and asked for asylum. The Marine guards called for the embassy’s emergency medical team, because it was obvious that Grigoriev had been shot several times.”

“That’s not standard procedure, Mr. President,” the national security advisor said. “Grigoriev is not a U.S. citizen or a member of the embassy staff. By the book, the guards should have contacted Manila emergency services and let the locals handle things. But the man was in shock, and losing blood fast. The guards figured he would bleed to death before the locals could get a medical team to the scene.”

Veronica Doyle jotted a note on the cover page of her briefing folder. “We should give State a heads-up on this,” she said. “We’re going to take some heat from the government of the Philippines for not following diplomatic procedure. They may want you to make a formal apology, Mr. President.”

“I don’t mind taking a punch in the nose over this,” The president said. “Human life outweighs political protocol. Period. End of sentence. If the Republic of the Philippines wants to make a ruckus over this, we’ll turn it back on them. I’ll do a press conference, and publicly ask President Layumas if she thinks our embassy guards should stand around and watch gunshot victims bleed to death in order to satisfy the niceties of diplomatic procedure.”

“I … uh … I don’t think there’s going to be a diplomatic issue, Mr. President,” the analyst said. “I don’t believe the locals even know that Mr. Grigoriev is in our custody. And the Operations Directorate doesn’t think we should tell them, sir.”

“Hold it,” The president said. “This hasn’t been reported to the Philippine locals?”

The analyst swallowed visibly. “Uh … no, Mr. President.”

Becka Solomon, the Secretary of Homeland Security, closed her briefing folder with a thump. “Why the hell not?”

“I’d like to take a crack at that question,” Brenthoven said. He pulled a small leather-bound notebook from the pocket of his jacket, flipped it open, and read for a few seconds. His eyes were still on the notebook when he resumed speaking. “The CIA has been interested in Mr. Grigoriev for several years, now. He was a soldier in the Red Army before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a tank commander with the Soviet Iron Saber Brigade during the last eighteen months of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His highest rank was Stárshiy Serdzhánt, or Senior Sergeant—roughly equivalent to Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army. You’ll find a short dossier on the man in your briefing packages.”

Everyone except for the DI analyst and Brenthoven stopped to thumb through the blue folders on the table in front of them.

The national security advisor continued. “Mr. President, the CIA has fairly conclusive evidence that Grigoriev is a covert international operative.”

Doyle’s eyebrows narrowed. “You mean a spy?”

“More of a bag man,” Brenthoven said. “A courier, who hand carries sensitive documents and information back and forth between his sponsor nation and foreign countries they want to communicate with.”

“Isn’t that kind of thing usually handled by diplomats?” the president asked. “Wasn’t that the whole point of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations? Governments send sensitive documents by diplomatic courier, because it’s illegal to detain a diplomatic pouch, or search its contents.”

“You’re quite correct, Mr. President,” the analyst said. “But there are cases in which a particular government might not want even its diplomatic corps to know what it’s up to. Circumstances that call for a higher-than-normal level of secrecy, or circumstances where a country’s leaders want to maintain maximum deniability.”

The secretary of homeland security looked at the analyst. “So that’s this man’s job? To bypass the Russian government’s legitimate diplomatic channels of communication?”

The analyst nodded. “Yes, Madam Secretary. That’s Langley’s assessment. Except we don’t think Grigoriev is working for the Russian government.”

General Gilmore stared over the tops of his black-framed glasses at the analyst. “If it’s not his own government, then who does our Russian friend work for?”

The general’s voice was quiet and even-toned. Like his round pleasantly-featured face, his voice seemed out of place in a professional warrior. He looked and sounded more like a librarian than a fighting man. But, appearances aside, he was a combat Soldier, from his boot laces to his regulation Army hair cut. The rack of ribbons above the left pocket of his uniform jacket included the Bronze Star medal, with the affixed “V” insignia for valor under enemy fire.

The analyst shifted his gaze to the general. “The … uh … The Operations Directorate thinks that Mr. Grigoriev works for Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, the governor of the Kamchatka kray, on the Kamchatka peninsula in southeastern Russia.” The analyst paused for a second to let this strange pronouncement sink in. Then he continued. “Analysis of Grigoriev’s travel and spending patterns over the past year suggests strongly that he has been acting as the go-between for confidential negotiations between Governor Zhukov and certain elements of the government and military of the People’s Republic of China.”

The last word caught the president’s attention. “China? What does the Chinese government want with the governor of an obscure Russian province?”

“We don’t know for certain,” Brenthoven said. “We have very little hard evidence, but what we do have is frankly scaring the hell out of us, Mr. President.”

The president nodded. “Alright, Greg. Enough pussyfooting around. You’ve set us up for the bad news. Now, go ahead and deliver the knockout punch.”

Brenthoven closed his notebook and looked directly into the president’s eyes. “Sir, due to the extent of his injuries, Mr. Grigoriev has only been conscious for short periods of time since he came into our custody. It may be several days before we can interview him properly. However, during his brief periods of lucidity, he’s managed to let us know that he wants to negotiate a trade. He’ll tell us what he knows in exchange for political asylum.”

The president cocked an eyebrow. “If he crawled into our embassy with a bunch of bullet holes in him, there’s a good chance that this man qualifies for asylum whether he knows anything useful or not. What do we think he can tell us?”

“We’re not sure yet, sir,” the analyst said. “But he’s already revealed one piece of information that we didn’t have before.”

“And what would that be?” the general asked.

The analyst took a breath. “Most of the top positions in the government of Kamchatka are held by former officials of the Soviet communist regime. Sergiei Zhukov is no exception. In the eighties, he was a mid-level apparatchik in the communist party. That’s pretty much common knowledge in the intelligence community. But we didn’t know that Zhukov used to be senior security officer for KB-11.”

Veronica Doyle frowned. “KB-11 … Where do I know that from?”

“KB-11 was the old Soviet designation for Design Bureau Number 11,” General Gilmore said quietly. “It was the main laboratory at a Soviet military research city called Arzamas-16. After the collapse of the USSR, the facility was renamed the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. Back in the bad old days, that’s where the Cold War got started. Design Bureau Number 11 designed and assembled the nuclear weapons for the Soviet military arsenals. That’s where the Russians first built the atomic bomb.”

The president looked at the analyst. “You’ve followed up on this?”

The analyst nodded. “Yes, sir. We don’t have much to go on yet, but the few pieces we know about all appear to confirm Grigoriev’s story. The Ops Directorate has verified that Sergiei Zhukov was the senior security officer at Design Bureau Number 11.”

“You still haven’t told us how this all connects to China,” The president said.

Brenthoven looked at the president. “Sir, Mr. Grigoriev claims to have been the middle man for a deal between Zhukov and the Chinese Politburo. Russian nuclear technology in exchange for some kind of Chinese military intervention.”

Doyle brushed a speck of lint from the lapel of her gray silk business suit. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “China already has the bomb. They don’t need to get it from Russia, and certainly not from a Podunk province like Kamchatka.”

“It’s not that simple,” the national security advisor said. “China does have the bomb. But not the kind of bomb they want. Their nuclear weapons are all single warhead configurations; each missile carries one nuclear warhead. But they’ve been trying since the eighties to develop MIRV technology, or multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles. One missile can carry multiple nuclear warheads, and strike several different targets at the same time. The People’s Republic of China has poured a lot of time and money into MIRV research, but they haven’t been able to make it work. Remember the big stink at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late nineties? One of our scientists was caught trying to pass nuclear secrets to China. That’s what the Chinese were after. MIRVs.”

General Gilmore smiled ruefully. “In the minds of a lot of the minor nuclear powers, MIRV technology has become the admission ticket to the grown up table. The United States has MIRVs. Russia, Great Britain, and France have them. But Israel doesn’t. India, Pakistan, and North Korea don’t. And neither does China.”

“Okay, the Russians have this MIRV technology, and the Chinese want it,” Doyle said. “Does it necessarily follow that the governor of Kamchatka can deliver it to them?”

“We don’t know yet, ma’am,” the analyst said. “But it’s possible. He did work in close proximity to the technology at Arzamas-16. And he’s got a fairly significant slice of the Russian Navy’s nuclear arsenal right in his own back yard.”

The analyst clicked his remote, and the photo of Oleg Grigoriev was replaced by a map of the Russian Federation. Near the right edge of the map, the Kamchatka peninsula dangled from the southeastern edge of Siberia. The shape of Kamchatka was vaguely like that of Florida, narrow at the northern edge where it connected to the mainland, bulging broadly in the middle, and then tapering to a dagger point at the southern end.

The analyst pressed another button and his remote became a laser pointer. He directed the beam toward the video screen. The red dot of the laser pointer flitted across the map of Kamchatka, and came to rest on a black dot labeled Petropavlosk-Kamchatkskiy.

“This is Petropavlosk, the capital city of Kamchatka.” Another click of the remote brought up a pop-up window to the left of the Kamchatka peninsula. The new window contained a grainy black and white photo of a naval base. A trio of submarines were visible, each moored to a battered concrete pier. “Petropavlosk also happens to be the home port for the Russian Pacific Fleet’s nuclear missile submarines. Based on the latest threat assessments, there are three Delta III class nuclear ballistic missile submarines based in Kamchatka. Each of the Delta III submarines carries sixteen Russian R-29R ballistic missiles, better known to NATO countries as the SS-N-18 Stingray. And each of these missiles is armed with three nuclear weapons, in a MIRV configuration. That works out to 48 nuclear warheads per submarine.”

He paused for a second to let his words sink in; then he looked at the White House chief of staff. “To answer your question more clearly, ma’am, we think there’s a very good chance that Sergiei Zhukov can deliver MIRV technology to China, if that is indeed his intention.”

Veronica Doyle frowned. “Those submarines aren’t under Zhukov’s control, are they? I mean, the Russian military isn’t going to hand command authority for strategic nuclear weapons over to a local politician, right?”

“No,” said Brenthoven. “Ultimate control of those subs rests in Moscow, with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Local command authority flows through the senior naval officer in Petropavlosk, who takes his orders from Moscow. Provided the Russian command structure remains intact, Zhukov shouldn’t be able to touch those submarines.”

“Do we have any reason to expect a disruption of the Russian command structure?” the president asked.

Brenthoven rubbed his chin. “We don’t have any specific intelligence about an external threat, Mr. President, if that’s what you mean. But the Russian Navy is having a rough time right now. They’re drastically under-funded. Their sailors are underpaid to begin with, sir. And it’s not at all unusual for them to go months without being paid.”

“This has been going on for a while, sir,” General Gilmore said. “It’s a problem in all branches of the Russian military, but it’s especially bad in their Navy. The crime rate among their officers is spiraling out of control, and it’s even worse among their enlisted sailors. Extortion, theft, robbery, you name it. Sailors are stealing parts and supplies from their own ships and submarines, and selling them to feed their families.”

The president looked at his national security advisor. “So the deteriorating state of the Russian military could make it vulnerable to destabilization?”

Brenthoven nodded. “That’s a possibility, sir.”

“It’s a very real possibility,” General Gilmore said. “Not so much in places like Moscow, or Vladivostok. The Russians pour a lot more effort and resources into maintaining their military units stationed in high-visibility areas. But some of the obscure bases in Siberia, the Urals, and Kamchatka get little or nothing these days. When people get hungry enough, and desperate enough, the system starts to break down.”

“This is the twenty-first century,” said the White House chief of staff. “Russia may not be the great Soviet Empire any more, but it’s still a major industrial nation. Conditions can’t possibly be as bad as all that.”

“Yes they can,” the secretary of homeland security said quietly. “Look at how quickly and utterly our own infrastructures broke down when Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans. Evacuation systems failed; communications failed; emergency relief efforts were overwhelmed; police officers deserted their posts. Hell, in some parishes, the police were looting and shooting right alongside the nut jobs and the criminals.”

She shook her head. “We tell ourselves that we’re beyond such things, but we’re not. The fabric of civilization is much thinner and more fragile than we’d like to believe. And, if the system can break down in the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, it can certainly happen to the Russians.”

The president stared at the video screen—the Russian nuclear missile submarines superimposed over the map of the Kamchatka peninsula. “Do we have any reason, beyond oblique hints by Mr. Grigoriev, to suspect a legitimate connection between China and the Governor of Kamchatka?”

“What little evidence we have is almost entirely circumstantial,” the national security advisor said. “But the medical team at the embassy in Manila pulled a half-dozen 5.8mm military rounds out of Oleg Grigoriev. Ballistic analysis tells us that the bullets were fired from a short-barreled Type 95 assault rifle, the same configuration favored by the Special Operations Forces of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.” Brenthoven closed his leather-bound notebook and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket. “That doesn’t prove that the shooters were Chinese military, but it certainly seems to fit the scenario. If Grigoriev is telling the truth, it makes sense that the Chinese would try to shut him up.”

The president scanned the faces of the people gathered around the table. “We’re smelling a lot of smoke, but I don’t see any fire. I’m not saying that it’s not there, but I can’t see it yet. If one of you can connect the dots on this Kamchatka-China thing, now is the time to speak up.”

No one spoke.

“Okay,” the president said. “Keep on this, Greg. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’m not ready to make that call yet.” He nodded to the analyst. “Let’s move on. What’s next?”

The analyst keyed his remote, and the pictures on the video screen were replaced by an image of a small submarine hanging from a launch and recovery crane on the fantail of a white-hulled oceanographic research ship. “Mr. President, this is the deepwater submersible Nereus…”

The president sighed. Submarines. Why did it always have to be submarines?

CHAPTER 6

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

0947 hours (9:47 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

“How much oxygen have they got left?” The voice came from one of the half-dozen or so khaki-clad men and women milling around near the ship’s boat deck. Ann Roark made a point of ignoring them as she worked through the list of pre-launch procedures to get Mouse ready to go into the water.

Some of the onlookers were probably chiefs and some of them were probably officers, but Ann couldn’t tell the difference. It had been a man’s voice, but beyond that, Ann didn’t make any effort to figure out which of the Navy types had spoken. As far as she was concerned, they were all pretty much interchangeable.

The pattern was fairly set now; one of the uniforms would toss out some variation of that question every minute or so, always delivered in hushed tones, and always unanswered. “Do you think they’ve still got air?” “Are they alive?” “How did it happen?” “How bad is the damage?” “Why aren’t they communicating?”

The Navy types weren’t really talking to Ann. They probably weren’t even talking to each other. The whispered questions seemed to be a kind of conversational defense mechanism. By recycling the same unanswerable queries, it was somehow possible to imagine that the crew of the Nereus was still alive. When the questions stopped, the mental images began to filter in: two men and one woman lying dead in the darkened confines of the tiny submarine.

Ann didn’t indulge in the useless string of unanswerable questions. She had her own mindless litany: a statement, not a question. “This is not supposed to be a rescue,” she said through her teeth. Her breath came out like smoke in the cold Alaskan air. “This is not supposed to be a rescue. This is not supposed to be a freaking rescue!” She had repeated those words to herself at least fifty times, as though blind repetition could alter the situation.

She moved carefully as she worked. There was frost on the deck, and she didn’t want to slip and fall on her ass in front of all these Navy yahoos. They’d laugh about that for forty years, wouldn’t they?

Mouse hung from the heavy steel arm of the boat davit, swinging gently from the cable that was ordinarily used to raise and lower the ship’s two Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats. The robot was bright yellow, disk-shaped, and about seven feet in diameter. A pair of large multi-jointed manipulator arms protruded from the leading edge of the disk, and three pump-jet propulsion pods were mounted to the trailing edge in a triangular formation. The forward end of the robot was arrayed with clusters of camera lenses, sonar transducers, and other sensors.

The curve of the machine’s yellow carapace was stamped with the words NORTON DEEP WATER SYSTEMS, and the streamlined black ‘N’ of the Norton corporate logo. It was the company’s mark of ownership, there for all the world to see. For all of Ann’s personal sense of ownership, Mouse belonged to Norton, not to her.

She unscrewed a waterproof pressure cap from the ventral data port, and plugged a length of fiber-optic into the narrow connecting jack beneath. She plugged the other end of the cable into a hand-held test module about the size of a brick, and began to punch buttons and watch the results on the built-in digital display. The readouts were all in hexadecimal, but Mouse was Ann’s baby. She knew every status code by heart.

Officially, the machine’s name was Multi-purpose Autonomous Underwater System Mark-I. Usually, that was shortened to M-A-U-S, or Mouse. By classification, it was an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, not a robot. The United States Navy didn’t care for the word robot, with its science fiction movie connotations. Consequently, that word was never officially used, and even unofficial use of the R-word was discouraged. The machine was either referred to as Mouse, or by one of several more generic designations: the unit, the package, the system, the equipment, or even the UUV. Never the robot.

To Ann, the controversy over that one word was a perfect example of the warped logic at the heart of the military value system. Military types had no problem launching missiles at people they’d never even met, but they practically wet their pants if you called a piece of equipment by the wrong name.

Ann’s coworker, Sheldon Miggs, attributed that particular fixation to improved communications. According to Sheldon, standardizing the names for equipment, tactics, and supplies went a long way toward making sure that someone didn’t launch the wrong missile at the wrong time, shoot the wrong target, or pour the wrong kind of chemical extinguishing agent onto a raging fire. When Sheldon told it, the whole thing made a certain twisted degree of sense. Then again, Sheldon bought off on too much of that whole ‘defense of freedom’ shtick. To him, these military types represented something heroic. Ann saw them for what they really were—robots in starched uniforms, responding to programs written by greedy politicians and the military industrial complex.

And that, come to think of it, might explain why the Navy didn’t care for the R-word. Maybe they didn’t like the competition—one group of robots to another.

Screw the Navy. Not one of their acceptable terms came as close to describing Mouse’s nature and abilities as the dreaded R-word. Mouse was a robot, and Ann was damned well going to call it a robot.

She sequenced through the test readouts one at a time, verifying that every one of Mouse’s components was operating within design specifications. She paid particular attention to the error-checking routines for the robot’s command code. She’d put in a brand new patch in the software last night, and she wasn’t entirely sure that it was stable. But no errors were showing up this morning, so maybe she was worrying for nothing.

Just for good measure, she sequenced through every test readout again. Again, every test passed without error. The robot was purring like a kitten.

Ann disconnected the test cable and replaced the pressure cap on the data port. She was careful to check the o-ring seals, and to make sure that the threads of the cap were properly seated. Like all of the other external fixtures, the data ports were waterproof, and rated to withstand the pressure at the robot’s maximum operating depth. She could have theoretically left the cap off entirely without affecting the robot’s performance, but there was no point in taking unnecessary chances.

When she was satisfied that the port was properly covered, she checked the seals and alignments on every other external fitting. Finally, she looked up at the burly Navy man standing by the controls for the boat davit. She knew from earlier introductions that he was a second class petty officer, but she couldn’t remember what it was about his uniform or rank insignia that was supposed to tell her that.

She had forgotten the man’s real name, but she knew that the Navy types all called him Boats. Maybe that was because he was in charge of the boat deck. Ann didn’t know, and she didn’t particularly care. As long as he handled her equipment with respect, the man could call himself the Queen of Sheba.

Ann caught his eye and nodded. “Let’s do this thing.”

Boats gave her a thumbs-up, then he glanced around the boat deck and spoke in a loud voice. “All hands stand clear of the boat davit while conducting over-the-side operations.”

The crowd of khaki onlookers was well clear of the work area, but they all shuffled backwards a few steps anyway. Their murmuring trailed off as the angled arm of the boat davit pivoted smoothly to the left, swinging Mouse out over the lifelines, where the robot dangled twenty feet above the wave tops.

Boats checked the alignment of the davit, made a minor adjustment, and then punched the control for the winch motor. With a muted hydraulic rumble, the winch began to reel out cable, and Mouse descended toward the water.

This was what the looky-loos had come to see: the weird yellow machine, embarking on the great rescue mission. What a bunch of freaking idiots.

The davit operator was good. At the last second, he reduced the speed of the winch, and Mouse settled into the water with barely a splash.

Boats caught Ann’s eye, and waited for her signal.

Ann looked over the side of the ship. Mouse was trailing at the end of the cable, his bright yellow hull about three-quarters submerged in the cold slate-gray waves.

This was always the scary part. As long as Mouse was hooked to the cable, they couldn’t lose him. But the second they let him off the leash, the robot would be on his own—beyond human control.

In some places, the Aleutian trench went down more than 25,000 feet. If something went wrong in water this deep, Mouse could be lost forever.

But they couldn’t keep the robot on the leash. He couldn’t do his job with the cable attached, and even if he could, that went against the entire purpose of an autonomous machine. Ann had devoted years of hard work to making sure that Mouse could operate safely without human intervention. Why was it always so difficult to turn him loose?

She took in a deep lungful of the startlingly cold Alaskan air, and exhaled, her breath coming out as a cloud of vapor. She gave Boats a nod. “Let him go.”

The Sailor manipulated the davit controls, and the clamp at the end of the cable disengaged itself with a metallic thump. Hydraulics moaned again, and the winch began reeling in the cable.

Free of his tether, Mouse floated just below the waves for a couple of seconds, bobbing gently with the swells, as though gathering his wits or getting his bearings. And then the robot’s propulsion pods came to life, driving the machine forward, and down.

For a second or so, Ann could see the robot’s yellow form through the water, and then it disappeared into the depths. For better or for worse, Mouse was on his own.

*  *  *

Twenty minutes later, Ann sat in the ship’s Combat Information Center, and stared at the screen of the ruggedized laptop computer that served as the display and control interface for Mouse. Somewhere out there, across two miles of ocean and three thousand feet under water, Mouse was approaching the downed mini-sub. The robot was due to transmit a final updated position report before beginning its survey of the accident site.

The khaki-brigade had followed her inside. They were lingering around CIC, keeping mostly out of Ann’s way, but sticking close enough to see the action—if there was any.

Jesus. Didn’t these people have anything else to do?

A flashing status indicator on the laptop screen grabbed Ann’s attention. Personal feelings aside, she had a job to do. Part of that job meant swallowing her distaste for the military, and simulating a degree of courtesy that she didn’t really feel. But the other part of her job—the important part—was making sure the robot did what it was supposed to do. That part Ann was very good at.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen. If something was going to go wrong, this was when it would probably happen.

Mouse’s onboard computer sometimes failed to transition properly from directed transit mode to autonomous mission mode. The robot had no problem following programmed navigational waypoints from one set of geographic coordinates to the next. It also operated pretty reliably under full autonomy, using the situational-response algorithms built into its core programming to make decisions, and its maneuvering motors, sensors, and manipulator arms to take whatever actions were dictated by the results of those decisions. It even made good decisions, the majority of the time. That was supposed to be the tricky part: getting a self-directed machine to assess complicated problems without human intervention, and then plan and carry out appropriate corrective actions.

Mouse could do all that. But sometimes the damned thing went crazy during the transition from one mode to the other. During two out of the last five test runs, the robot had completed transit mode without a hitch, and then promptly abandoned its mission and returned to its launch point, where it had driven itself to the surface and steered in circles until it was captured and shut down.

In Ann’s technical log, the unplanned excursions were written up as Unpredicted Vehicle Behavior. That was geek-speak for ‘the robot did something freaky and I don’t know why.’

Ann had been up most of the night, working on a software fix to patch the mode transition problem. She’d located a bug in the command code, but she had no idea if correcting it would fix the problem. The patch looked pretty good on paper, but she needed a week or so of testing to be sure. Not that there’d been any time for tests. Mouse had gone back into the water just minutes after she’d uploaded the new code—orders of the ship’s commanding officer—Captain Bogie, or whatever his name was.

It wasn’t fair, damn it! This was just supposed to be an Advanced Technology Demonstration. They were here to put the Mouse prototype through its paces, find out what worked and what didn’t, in an actual shipboard environment. What the hell was the Navy thinking, trying to turn it into a rescue? For that matter, why were those idiots at corporate going along with it? Until the Navy signed off on the final contracts, Mouse was still the property of Norton. The company could have said, ‘no.’ They should have said, ‘no.’ Why hadn’t they?

Ann knew the answer to that question. She just didn’t like it. The International Submarine Escape and Rescue Liaison Office was rushing people and equipment to the scene as quickly as possible, but the nearest submarine rescue equipment was still at least eight hours away. Unfortunately, the men and women aboard the Nereus might not have eight hours. For all anyone knew, they might not even have eight minutes.

Finding the submersible wasn’t an issue. Like most manned underwater vessels, the Nereus was equipped with an emergency transponder. The little black box was working just fine. It had been transmitting an emergency locator beacon every six minutes since the accident had occurred.

The real problem was depth. The Nereus was nearly three thousand feet down. Much too deep for divers. Even the advanced hardsuit dive rigs couldn’t withstand the water pressure that far down. At this particular moment in time, one Navy destroyer and one crazy-assed underwater robot were the only hope of rescue.

That was so wrong that it was nearly perverse. The lives of human beings should not be allowed to hang by so thin a thread.

The software wasn’t ready. The hardware wasn’t ready. And Ann sure as hell wasn’t ready.

This whole situation had disaster written all over it. The people on that submarine were going to die, and Ann and Sheldon were going to get the blame.

Where was Sheldon, anyway? Ann risked a quick look over her shoulder. No sign of Sheldon. Nobody back there but the gaggle of Navy officers and chiefs, watching over her shoulder. Waiting for Ann to either pull a miracle out of her ass, or make a mistake that would kill the people on that submarine.

She swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried to will her body to relax. Forget about the Navy boneheads. They don’t matter. Watch the screen. Do the job. Pretend they’re not even here.

The cool semi-darkness of CIC made it a little easier to ignore the unwanted onlookers. As long as they remained relatively quiet, she could mostly tune them out.

Someone tapped Ann on the left shoulder. She flinched at the unexpected contact, and whipped her head around see the newcomer. It was that captain guy, Brodie, or whatever.

The man held out a ceramic mug and smiled. “Coffee?”

Ann took the offered cup. “Thanks.” She turned back to the screen. Still no sign of Mouse’s updated position report. Had the robot stopped communicating altogether? Could her program patch have caused some unexpected side-effect that made the mode transition problem worse rather than better?

“I’m Captain Bowie,” the man said, apparently oblivious to the fact that Ann was attempting to ignore him. “We met briefly when you came on board, but I haven’t really gotten around to chatting with you yet. It’s Ms. Roark, right?”

Ann nodded. “Just Ann, sir.”

She kept her voice carefully polite. It was a simple matter of self preservation. There were not exactly an infinite number of job opportunities in the robotics industry, and fewer still in Ann’s area of specialty: underwater robotics. If she wanted to keep paying the rent, she had to be civil to the uniforms.

Anything beyond courtesy was Sheldon’s responsibility. Sheldon was the talker. It was his job to shake hands, answer stupid questions, and generally keep people too busy to bother Ann. A job at which he was failing miserably at the moment.

The captain stepped closer and leaned over to look at the screen. “How are things looking?”

Ann suppressed a sigh. This guy wanted to make small talk.

“I’m waiting for an updated position report,” she said. “Mouse is coming up on his last navigational waypoint. We should be getting a fix on his position any time now.” She paused for a second, and decided to be honest. “He’s actually a little bit overdue. I expected to hear from him almost a minute ago.”

“Is there a problem?”

Of course not, Ann thought. Everything is just fine. I’ve got three lives depending on an untested code patch that I wrote at three in the morning, when I was practically cross-eyed from sleep deprivation. But everything is peachy here, Mr. Captain, Sir. Just freaking peachy.

She glanced up at Captain What’s-his-name, and wondered for a second if she had said some of that last bit out loud. More than likely not, because he didn’t seem to be ramping up to indignation. His brown eyes looked tired, but not angry.

Ann returned his stare with one of her own. From a strictly physical perspective, she liked what she saw. He was in his late thirties or early forties, about six feet tall, and almost good looking in a nerdy clean-cut sort of way. His black hair was too short to have any real character to it, and his narrow face seemed slightly out of proportion to his neck and body. Still, the overall package wasn’t bad, if you were into overgrown Eagle Scouts.

Looking beyond the physical was another matter. Whatever points he picked up in the looks category were far outweighed by his non-physical deficits. The man obviously bought into that whole bullshit warrior-Zen thing. Ann could see it in everything about him, from his body language to the starched creases in his uniform. He was a card carrying member of the ‘Defenders of Freedom Club,’ just like Ann’s father had been.

She caught herself and mentally shifted gears before she could say anything stupid. This was not the time for a drive down that particular stretch of Memory Lane. “Where’s Sheldon?” she asked.

The captain shifted his gaze to the laptop screen. “I believe he’s up in the wardroom, talking to your company on the satellite phone. COMPACFLEET is busy signing promissory waivers, to make sure that you guys get paid in case we break your Mouse prototype, or lose it somehow in the rescue attempt.”

Ann nodded and turned back to the laptop.

“You didn’t sign on for any of this,” the captain said. “We understand that. You come out here to run some tests, and the Navy shoves a rescue mission in your face. We know you’re not ready, and we know that your equipment isn’t ready either.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “But, right now, your Mouse Mark-I is the only game in town.”

Ann nodded absently. “I understand, Captain.”

“I’m sure you do,” said the captain. “But I’d like to hit one more quick point before you get too far into this.”

Ann looked up and found that he was staring at her again.

“I know you’ll do your best,” he said. “But there are a lot of ways that this operation could go sour. There hadn’t been any communication with the Nereus for hours. The guys on that submarine might already be dead.”

Ann nodded slowly. This was not quite turning into the Go-Navy pep talk she’d been expecting.

“We don’t know what kind of damage that submersible has taken,” the captain said. “They could be flooding, or running out of breathable air. If their electrical system has failed, they could die from hypothermia. The ocean temperature at three thousand feet is just a hair above freezing. Twenty four hours is a long time to go without heat, especially when your only clothes are light duty coveralls.”

He looked back to the laptop screen. “If they had an electrical fire, they might even have burned to death, or died from smoke inhalation.”

Ann rubbed her eyes and blinked several times. “Are you trying to cheer me up, Captain?”

The corners of his mouth turned up—the ghost of a rueful smile. “No. I’m just telling you that the odds of success are not in our favor. Everyone in the chain of command knows that. The Navy will take the heat if things don’t work out. You’re not going to be left holding the bag.”

Ann nodded. “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate that.”

She turned back to the laptop. Yeah, right. For all of his noble words, Captain Eagle Scout would throw Ann and Sheldon to the wolves about two milliseconds after the shit hit the fan. That was the way these guys worked. When something went wrong, they went hunting for a scapegoat.

She scanned the screen. Mouse still hadn’t reported in. She’d give it another minute or so, just to be sure. But she was grasping at straws. This rescue, if you could even call it that, was over.

CHAPTER 7

NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1006 hours (10:06 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

The flashlight shook in Charlie Sweigart’s hand, the dull circle of yellowish light bobbing and jittering spasmodically as another uncontrollable wave of shivers wracked his body. He tried to thumb the off switch, to conserve the little remaining battery power until the worst of the spasms had passed. But his hands were too numb from the cold to properly obey his commands.

The batteries rattled inside the body of the flashlight. The light grew marginally brighter for a few seconds, and then dimmed again. The glow seemed pitifully small and weak in the tomblike blackness of the submersible. The Nereus carried three emergency flashlights, and this was the last of them. Charlie had already worn out the batteries in the other two, fruitlessly searching for the electrical fault that had robbed the submersible of power.

The submersible lay on its starboard side, heeled over about thirty degrees, its bow slightly elevated by the rising slope of the Aleutian trench. The odd tilt put the chairs at the wrong angle for sitting. The only stable position was sort of a leaning crouch, with feet braced against the deck for support.

The angle of the deck wasn’t just a matter of discomfort. The fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible was designed to drop vertically from a form-fitted recess in the keel. But the canted deck pushed the weight of the ballast plate to one side, putting some massive amount of lateral torque on the emergency release mechanism.

Charlie had fought with the release handle until his hands were raw. The latches were too far out of alignment. The release mechanism was hopelessly jammed, and—along with it—their chances of getting the Nereus back to the surface.

The shakes running through Charlie’s body were nearly convulsive now. His teeth were chattering so hard that he thought they might shatter. He clamped his jaw shut and forced himself to override the tremors in his muscles.

When he had regained a measure of control, he pointed the dwindling beam of the flashlight toward the open faceplate of the secondary electrical bus. Like every other surface in the cockpit of the little submarine, the open doors of the access panel were beaded with moisture—water vapor from their breaths, condensed out of the air by the cold.

That was how they were going to die. Charlie knew that now. The cold. Of all the ways they could die down here … drowning … asphyxiation … implosion … they were going to freeze to death. He would never have predicted that.

At the current rate of consumption, the emergency air flasks would probably last another two days. The hull was holding pressure. There were no leaks, and no escaping air. But the heaters had died along with the electrical system. Without the heaters, the cold water surrounding the Nereus had gradually leached away all the warmth in the submersible. The temperature of the air in the cockpit had reached equilibrium with the temperature of the water outside the hull: just a couple of degrees above freezing.

There was irony in that too. The cold was going to kill them, but they weren’t technically going to freeze to death. The core temperatures of their bodies were well down into the range of hypothermia now, more than cold enough to kill them. But they wouldn’t quite freeze. When the cold had sucked the last of the life from their bodies, they would hover in a lethally refrigerated state just a few degrees warmer than the temperature of ice. Not quite popsicles. More like …

Charlie shook his head, sending throbs of pain through his bruised cheek and battered forehead—both still tender from their collision with one of the instrument clusters during the accident. He was losing focus again, his mind wandering down blind alleys; another symptom of hypothermia.

He forced his eyes to focus on the relay panel below the electrical bus, trying to locate the bundle of wires that he’d just been tracing with his eyes.

“Turn off the light.” It was Steve’s voice, floating out of the darkness somewhere behind Charlie.

“I can … fix this,” Charlie said. His speech felt halting and strange. “Just give me … another few … minutes. I can find … the problem.”

“Turn off the damned light,” Steve said again. “And get that stupid dog out of here.”

Charlie didn’t turn off the flashlight. He could feel another round of tremors coming on. “Dog? What … dog?”

“The one in your pocket,” Steve said. “And don’t think I can’t hear you. I’ve got your ass set for speed-dial.”

Charlie’s eyes lost focus on the wires. He blinked several times and tried to will them to work properly. “What … What in the hell … are you … talking about?”

“He’s hallucinating,” Gabriella said. It was the first time she had spoken in over an hour. She was shivering so violently that it was difficult to understand her words. Charlie could hear her teeth chattering.

“Late… stage… hypothermia,” she said. “His… brain is starting to… shut down.”

“I better not catch that dog using my phone again,” Steve said. “I’ll kill him. Him and his damned motorcycle.”

Steve’s voice was muffled and strange, but it didn’t have the stuttering hitch that was present in Charlie and Gabriella’s speech. Steve wasn’t shivering any more. That meant something, but Charlie couldn’t remember what. When a cold victim stopped shivering, something bad was happening. Was Steve already dying?

The flashlight gave one final flicker and died. Damn it! He’d let his attention wander again, and now the last flashlight was dead.

No more light. No more heat, and no more light. Just darkness. And cold.

“I should have done an emergency abort,” he said. “This is my fault.”

Listening to his own words, Charlie realized that the hitch in his voice was gone. He wasn’t shivering anymore. He wasn’t even all that cold. His feet were beginning to feel warm. So were his hands.

This wasn’t a good sign either. He was aware of that in a detached sort of way. “I should have dropped the ballast the second I knew we had a problem.” He was talking to himself now. “This is my fault. This is all my fault.”

The cold was receding now. He knew that the growing warmth in his body was an illusion, maybe a sign that he was sliding into some deeper and more languorous stage of existence. He didn’t care. The cold wasn’t as painful down here. In fact, it was kind of pleasant.

He closed his eyes, not that it mattered much in the pitch darkness that had taken command of the submarine. He could sleep now. Just for a few minutes. And, while he was sleeping, he could trace the wiring harnesses in his mind. When he woke up, he would fix the broken whatever it was, and they would get back to the ship in time for lunch.

Everything was going to be fine now. Charlie knew that. Everything was going to be just fine.

“You never asked me out.”

The words caught him as he was dozing off. “What?”

“You never asked me out,” Gabriella said again. “I kept waiting for you to ask me out, but you never did.”

Charlie smiled languidly. “Now I’m hallucinating.”

Gabriella’s French-Canadian accent was like birdsong in his ears. She wasn’t shivering any more either.

“No you’re not,” she said. “You may be dying, but you are not hallucinating.”

“This is my fault,” Charlie said softly.

“Yes” Gabriella said. “It is your fault. You’ve had plenty of chances, but you’ve never asked me out.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Charlie said. “We’re going to die here. We’re already dying. And it’s my fault.” He was getting sleepy now.

Gabriella sighed, the sound echoing off of unseen surfaces in the darkness. “If you don’t ask me out, I’m going to kill you before the cold does.”

“And that damned dog,” Steve said feebly.

“Right,” Gabriella said. Her voice was getting sleepy too. “You and that damned dog.”

Charlie nodded, although no one could see him. This was all part of the hallucination; that much he knew. But what better time to do the impossible? The unthinkable …

“Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” He winced at the sound of his words. Even in this dying world of frozen dreams, he was terrified of what Gabriella might say.

“That’s the best you can do?” she asked. “You’re in your dying moments, and possibly hallucinating, and you ask me out to dinner?” She snorted. “If this was my hallucination, I’d go straight to the sex.”

Charlie felt himself grin. “Can we go straight to the sex?”

“Of course not,” Gabriella said. “You have to buy me dinner first.”

And with those words, Charlie suddenly knew that it was okay to die. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, still smiling. He could feel sleep tugging at him. But he wanted to be awake for another minute or two, to savor the amazing idea that Gabriella actually wanted to go out with him, even if it was only the delusion of a dying brain.

It took him a few seconds to notice the light. It started small, a tiny glowing pinprick moving through the curtain of black water outside the view port. He watched it idly as it grew, moving closer in a series of looping zigzags that reminded him vaguely of a bloodhound sniffing out a trail. Still it moved closer, the light growing to the size of a golf ball, and then a basketball.

Charlie lifted his head to get a better look at it. The thing, whatever it was, came to a stop about ten feet from the nose of the Nereus, and hovered there. Charlie raised a cold-numbed hand to shield his eyes against the light. He squinted into the hallucinatory brightness.

He could see something behind the light now: some sort of bizarre machine, perhaps a quarter the size of the Nereus. It was vaguely disk-shaped, with a pair of heavy-looking mechanical arms, flanked by clusters of lenses. To Charlie’s foggy brain, it looked like a crab riding a Frisbee.

The strange machine turned to the side, revealing a yellow-painted stretch of hull marked with large black lettering. Charlie struggled to force his blurry eyes to focus on the words. ‘Something-or-other DEEP WATER SYSTEMS.’

Then, the machine moved again, curving to the left until it had disappeared from the viewport’s line of sight.

Charlie’s eyes remained locked on the place where the machine had been. Could he have imagined it? He was still trying to figure that out, when the water outside the viewport lit up with an eerie blue-green light. For about a second, the light seemed to strobe and pulse rapidly. Then it was gone, leaving behind only the blackness of the ocean bottom.

“I think I’m having another hallucination,” Charlie said.

Gabriella was almost asleep now. “I already told you,” she muttered. “Dinner first.”

CHAPTER 8

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

In tracing the roots of modern rocketry, some historians prefer to begin with the ancient Greeks. According to the writings of Roman author and grammarian Aulus Gellius, a Greek philosopher named Archytas built a steam-powered rocket device in approximately 400 B.C. Cast from clay and shaped like a pigeon, this device reportedly flew about 200 yards. The pigeon was attached to a guide wire during its flight, which may have supported the device’s weight, so there is some dispute as to whether or not it was powerful enough to fly without external assistance. Very few details of the flight are known, so it’s difficult to gauge the significance of the Archytas pigeon, beyond the basic fact of its existence.

About three centuries later, a Greek mathematician and engineer named Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria invented another steam-propelled device with rocket-like characteristics. Known as an aeolipile, Hero’s invention consisted of a rotating sphere, driven by steam from a heated kettle of water.

History generally remembers Hero’s aeolipile as the first operational steam engine, but it can (arguably) be classified as a rocket-type reaction engine.

Like the work of Archytas, the direct impact of Hero’s invention on the history of rocketry is difficult to assess. It’s therefore understandable that many historians have opted to discount the earliest attempts of the Greeks, and begin the timeline of rocketry with the Chinese.

Some time prior to the 10th century A.D., alchemists in China stumbled across the formula for gunpowder, possibly while attempting to create the legendary elixir of immortality. Although the combination of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal dust did not have mystical life-extending properties, the unknown alchemists quickly discovered that their new compound would flare and burn vigorously when exposed to flame.

The timing of this momentous discovery is a matter of contention, with some historians fixing the date as early as the 1st century, and others arguing that it may have occurred as recently as the 9th century. Regardless of the precise date, there is no doubt that the invention of gunpowder transformed the nature of warfare, and ultimately altered the path of human history.

The first people to utilize the mysterious new compound may have been religious Mandarins, who filled bamboo tubes with the volatile mixture, and threw them into fires to frighten away demons during religious festivals. The results were predictably loud and impressive, and it was probably only a matter of time until one of the bamboo tubes failed to explode, and shot out of the fire on a trail of burning gas.

These crude bamboo rockets were almost certainly the product of accident rather than design, but it was an accident that many Chinese experimenters were eager to repeat. Some resourceful soldier, whose name has been lost to history, began attaching bamboo rockets to arrows. When lit and fired from a bow, these fire arrows streaked through the air, to drop like flaming meteors on the armies of China’s enemies.

Eventually, as Chinese rockets became more powerful and more reliable, the arrows became an unnecessary component. The rockets became viable weapons without arrows attached. By the mid 11th century, gunpowder rockets were one of the deadliest weapons in China’s military arsenal.

In 1232 A.D., the armies of the Sung Dynasty used rockets to repel Mongol invaders at the battle of Kai-Keng. The Mongol hordes, which were legendary for their ferocity in battle, broke and ran before this devilish device that rained fire and death from the sky.

Historical accounts of the period indicate that the Chinese rockets were large in scale, and there is evidence that the military engineers of the Sung Dynasty developed new ways to magnify the lethality of their weapons. Where previous generations of rockets had relied on unaugmented gunpowder explosives, these new rockets were armed with iron shrapnel and incendiary materials, in what may have been the first application of advanced warhead technology.

During the same period, the Chinese military made similar advancements in rocket propulsion techniques. Simple cylindrical exhaust tubes gave way to ‘iron pot’ combustion chambers, that shaped and directed the thrust of the rocket exhaust.

The cumulative effect of these advances was dramatic. Thirteenth century documents reported a Chinese rocket so massive that the sound of its launch was heard fifteen miles away. Everything within a half-mile of the weapon’s point of impact was flattened or destroyed.

The destructive potential of the Chinese rockets was not lost on the Mongols. Following the battle of Kai-Keng, the Mongols began producing their own rocket weapons. It’s not clear if the early Mongol rockets were the product of independent development, reverse engineering, or espionage.

Regardless of the source of their knowledge, the Mongols introduced rocket warfare to the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, where they blasted the unsuspecting armies of their enemies without warning, and without mercy. The famously ruthless Mongol leader Genghis Khan, and his third son, Ögedei Khan, used rockets with devastating effect when they conquered parts of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe. Descriptions of rocket attacks also appear in literature detailing the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258.

The enemies of the Mongol hordes were at first stunned by the unexpected appearance of this frightening weapon. But like the Mongols themselves, the armies of these other nations were quick to copy this new form of warfare. The proliferation of rocket technology began to accelerate rapidly.

There is evidence that Arabian warriors used rockets in 1268, to attack the French armies of Louis IX during the 7th Crusade. The writings of Syrian military historian Al-Hasan al-Rammah suggest that the Arabs were routinely using combat rockets to attack their enemies by the year 1285.

It didn’t stop there. At the close of the 13th century, Japan, Korea, India, and Java had all begun to integrate rockets into their military strategies. Rocket warfare was quickly spreading through Asia and Eastern Europe.

This strange and lethal weapon was no longer confined to the borders of China. It had been unleashed upon the nations of the earth.

The ancient Chinese alchemists had begun with the search for eternal life. Instead, they had given birth to a massively-lethal engine of war, and perhaps even planted the seeds of the destruction of mankind. But the rocket’s legacy of devastation was just beginning. The true and terrible power of China’s creation had yet to be felt. The world had seen barely a hint of the carnage that was yet to come.

CHAPTER 9

KAMCHATKA KRAY ADMINISTRATION BUILDING

#1 PLOSHAD LENINA (LENIN SQUARE)

PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

0817 hours (8:17 AM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

The edges of the windows were frosted with ice crystals, but the center of each pane was clear enough to see through. Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, Governor of the Kamchatka kray, stared through one of these ovals of transparency at the park across the street. It was snowing again, but Zhukov’s eyes looked past the falling flakes to the statue of Lenin.

Nearly ten meters tall, the enormous bronze statue stood atop a red marble obelisk of nearly equal height. It was a majestic thing, the father of the modern communist ideal towering like a god above the heads of ordinary men.

But the statue was an anachronism. Lenin’s magnificent dream of a world ruled and managed by common workers had crumbled along with the Warsaw Pact. His teachings had been abandoned and then reviled by his own people. The workers complained that their god had failed them, or worse yet, that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had been a false god all along.

Zhukov’s jaw muscles tightened. The god had not failed his people. Instead, the people had failed their god.

A door opened behind him, but his eyes never left the statue.

“Governor Zhukov?” It was the voice of his chief assistant, Maxim Ivanovitch Ustanov. “The latest satellite imagery is in, and we have updated position reports on the Chinese ships. Both ships are moving exactly according to the schedule. In a little less than an hour, they will turn north out of the shipping lanes and divert toward Petropavlovsk.”

Zhukov nodded. “Thank you, Maxim Ivanovitch.”

Ustanov paused for a few seconds before speaking again. “We’re approaching the point of no return, sir. When those Chinese ships tie up at our piers, there will be no turning back.”

Zhukov smiled slightly without looking up. “Are you getting cold feet, my old friend?”

Ustanov coughed. “Not at all, sir. I … ah … I just wanted to keep you advised of the status of the plan.”

Zhukov nodded again. “We were masters of the world,” he said softly. “We were the great Soviet Empire: the Russian bear who crushed everything in its path. When we roared, the earth trembled.”

He sighed. “Now look at us. Look at what we have become, what we have been reduced to. We are a toothless old dog. We cower in the corner and hope that no one throws a boot at us.”

Zhukov looked up for the first time, making eye contact with his assistant. “No, my old friend, we cannot stop. We must do this thing. We owe it to Mother Russia. We owe it to the future.”

Ustanov made an uncertain face. “But the risk …”

“It is worth the risk,” Zhukov said. “It is better to seek greatness and fail, than to strive for mediocrity and succeed.”

He checked his watch. “Wait another hour, then have the militia begin rounding up the tourists and the foreign business executives. All personal electronics must be confiscated, including wristwatches, calculators, cameras, and music players. This new technology is too difficult to keep track of. Nearly anything might be used to send a message or make a call.”

He shifted his eyes back to the park. The snow was falling faster now, nearly obscuring his vision of Lenin’s statue. In another day, maybe less, the secret would be out. All eyes would turn to this obscure little smudge on the face of the globe, and the world would rediscover the true power of Russia. But the secret must keep for a few more hours.

The world had taught itself to fear little men, with little bombs, and the insignificant dreams of insects. This they had labeled terror. The very word brought a mirthless smile to Sergiei Zhukov’s lips. The world had forgotten what terror really was. But it was about to remember.

CHAPTER 10

MOUSE (MULTI-PURPOSE AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER SYSTEM)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1021 hours (10:21 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

In technical terms, Mouse was experiencing a third-order heuristic non-parity as a function of suboptimal iterative taxonomic indexing. In plain English, the robot was confused. It had reached the designated navigational coordinates, performed a detailed sensor survey of the area as specified by its current mission program, and located an object that closely matched the identification criteria for its target.

The object under examination was approximately the correct shape (nominally ellipsoid with dorsal and ventral protrusions), approximately the correct size (7.924 meters in the major axis, and 2.438 meters in the minor axis), and closely located to the center of the designated search grid (31.626 meters from grid reference zero). Based upon these factors, and the lack of any other remotely qualifying objects within the perimeter of the search grid, Mouse’s onboard computer had labeled the object as “Presumptive Target #1,” and assigned a confidence factor of 98.2%. Mouse was 98.2% certain that Presumptive Target #1 was the object that it had been sent to locate.

None of this had been difficult for Mouse. These were exactly the sorts of evaluations and decisions that the robot made best. The problem was mud. Mouse didn’t know anything about mud, and that lack of knowledge was interfering with the robot’s ability to make a critical decision.

The next phase of the mission required Mouse to identify a loop-shaped fixture on the upper surface of Presumptive Target #1. Mouse had located a fixture near the designated area of the object. Using physical location as a primary criterion, the fixture was a high-confidence match, after correcting for variations in spatial orientation. Presumptive Target #1 had approximately 12.5 degrees of y-axis rotation and 30.0 degrees of z-axis rotation, but—corrected for that—the candidate fixture had a location confidence factor of 99.8%.

The problem lay in the shape of the fixture. Mouse’s mission program queue contained a detailed digital model of the fixture the robot was programmed to identify. And the fixture at the specified location was not a good match for the model, only 41.2%. It was in the correct place and was roughly the correct size, but it was not the correct shape.

The fixture had a name. It was a lifting shackle. And, as Mouse had been advised, it was loop-shaped. Unfortunately, the lifting shackle was packed with mud, compliments of its encounter with the sticky sediments of the Aleutian Island slope during the accident that had put the submersible Nereus on the bottom of the ocean.

Had Mouse known about the mud, the robot could have completed its identification of the lifting shackle, and moved on to the next phase of its mission: locating the lifting cable that the Research Vessel Otis Barton had lowered into the ocean. The phase after that, connecting the Otis Barton’s cable to the Nereus’s lifting shackle, would not be difficult at all. But to get there, Mouse had to correctly identify the lifting shackle, hiding under several layers of Aleutian Island mud.

Mouse wasn’t aware of any of these things. It had not been told that the fixture had a name. It didn’t know that Presumptive Target #1 was the deep water submersible Nereus, or that the three human beings inside the submersible were either dead or dying. Mouse didn’t even know what a deep water submersible was. The robot only knew that it was at the correct geographic coordinates, hovering five meters away from an object that closely matched its search criteria, evaluating a candidate fixture that was not the correct physical shape.

The situational-response algorithms built into Mouse’s core programming decided to examine the puzzling fixture from another position. With measured surges from its maneuvering thrusters, the robot moved ten meters to the East, and swung its nose a corresponding amount to the left, so that it faced the object from a different angle.

When the maneuver was complete, the candidate fixture was once again centered in the cone of light cast by Mouse’s sealed Halogen lamps. Satisfied with its new position, the robot studied the illuminated fixture through a pair of high-resolution video cameras. The results were no more satisfactory. The fixture was still the wrong shape.

Once again, the situational-response algorithms did their work. The computer shut off the robot’s Halogen lamps to minimize optical interference, and triggered its LIDAR scanner for a more detailed look at the improperly-shaped object. Short for Light Imaging Detection And Ranging, LIDAR was similar to radar, except that it transmitted and received low-intensity laser light instead of microwaves. The LIDAR scanner mounted on the upper leading edge of the robot’s hull directed a burst of laser light toward the presumptive target. In the space of one second, the scanner emitted 400 pulses of high-frequency laser light in a clockwise reticulated-rosette scanning pattern, and recorded and evaluated the resulting reflections.

The wavelength of the laser was tuned to 495 nanometers, in the blue-green band of the optical spectrum, the frequencies least likely to be refracted and absorbed by water. The individual laser transmissions were timed so closely together that a human eye could not have distinguished them as discrete events. A human observer—had one been present—would have seen only a second of flickering blue-green light.

The LIDAR scanner completed its transmission sequence. The laser went dark, and the Halogen lamps snapped back on to provide illumination for the video cameras as the robot processed and assembled images from the laser scan.

The detailed LIDAR images revealed nothing new. The candidate fixture was still the wrong shape.

The cognitive architecture that formed the core of Mouse’s operating program was designed to continue functioning in the event of one or more logical failures. In computer-speak, this concept was called fault tolerance, or graceful degradation. Had the graceful degradation software been correctly coded, Mouse would have been able to override the programming conflict and continue its mission. But there was a bug in the program code. When the graceful degradation loop was triggered by an error, it was supposed to activate a subroutine to record the nature of the mistake for future correction, and then bypass the error to continue functioning. Instead, the faulty program activated the emergency maintenance subroutine, erroneously informing the robot that it had sustained critical damage, and ordering it to return to the surface for repair. This was the software bug that Mouse’s programmer, Ann Roark, had been chasing, and it wasn’t corrected yet.

Faced with an insolvable logical conflict—this fixture on the upper surface of Presumptive Target #1 must be the one specified, but this fixture cannot be the one specified—Mouse’s core program activated the graceful degradation routine. The faulty software responded by triggering the emergency maintenance subroutine.

The robot’s computer immediately noted the damage signal and prepared to abandon its mission and head for the coordinates it had been launched from.

Without Ann Roark’s middle-of-the-night tinkering, the rescue of Nereus would have ended there. But Ann, in a burst of desperate and bleary-eyed wisdom, had crafted a slight modification in Mouse’s program code. The patch didn’t fix the problem because Ann Roark still hadn’t found the bug that was causing the problem. This was a different type of programming. This was a workaround.

In the lingo of programmers, a workaround is a temporary and usually imperfect way of forcing a computer to operate in spite of an uncorrected malfunction. A workaround does not repair a broken piece of program code, it merely tricks the computer into pretending that the problem doesn’t exist.

The workaround Ann Roark had patched into Mouse’s program had four simple elements: one conditional statement, and three commands:

(1) <<<< IF [emergency_maintenance_routine = active]

(2) CANCEL [emergency_maintenance_routine]

(3) RESUME [normal_operation]

(4) INVERT [last_logical_conflict] >>>>

The first line of the patch triggered the workaround as soon as Mouse’s computer went into emergency maintenance mode. The second and third lines of the patch canceled the call for emergency maintenance mode, and ordered the robot to continue operating as if no error had been received. The last line of the patch did the important work; it inverted the results of the logical conflict that had caused the error in the first place.

Mouse had been stymied by the fact that the fixture it had located did not match the shape of the digital model stored in computer memory. The code patch inverted that logical state, changing “INCORRECT SHAPE” to “CORRECT SHAPE” in Mouse’s memory.

The logical conflict was resolved. Mouse’s computer determined that all conditions had now been met for this phase of the mission. The robot moved on to the next phase and began searching for the Otis Barton’s lifting cable.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

Fifteen minutes later, three thousand feet above Mouse’s position and two miles to the south, a small triangular green icon appeared on the screen of Ann Roark’s laptop computer. Ann yawned so hard that her ears popped, and she thumbed the trackball, scrolling the computer’s pointer over the new symbol. A tight block of letters and numbers appeared next to the icon.

It took a few seconds for her tired eyes to focus on the tiny status report. She read it, and then she read it again. And then she screamed at the top of her lungs.

She jumped out of her chair and clasped her hands over her head like a prizefighter celebrating a victory by knockout. “Yes!” she shrieked. “Yes, damn it! YES!”

She turned around and locked eyes with the first of the Navy geeks who caught her attention. “Call the Otis Barton,” she said. “Tell them to start hauling in their cable!”

The Navy guy looked stunned. “Does this mean …”

“Yes!” Ann shouted again. “It means that mama’s little mouse is bringing home the cheese!”

*  *  *

Otis Barton:

The Research Vessel Otis Barton rode easily on the waves, the white paint of her hull and superstructure gleaming in the midday sun. Originally constructed as a Victorious Class acoustic surveillance ship for the United States Navy, the squat little vessel had been retired from military service and reconfigured for marine research by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

On the ship’s fantail, a large hydraulic winch turned steadily, reeling in a long cable of braided steel at the painfully slow rate of fifty feet per minute. The winch had been designed to launch and retrieve a towed acoustic sensor array known as SURTASS. But the object hanging from the end of the submerged cable was not an underwater listening device. It was the deep water submersible Nereus, and within its pressure hull were three human beings.

No one knew the nature of the accident that had trapped the submersible on the slope of the Aleutian trench, under three thousand feet of water. There had been no communication with the Nereus since the little submarine had declared a mission abort more than twenty-four hours earlier. No one knew whether the crew of the Nereus were alive, or dead. This might be a rescue operation, or it might be nothing more than the recovery of three bodies.

The retrieval crew was composed of five workers: a winch operator, two riggers to attach tag-lines to the miniature submarine and guide it onto the deck of the ship, and a pair of divers in insulated wetsuits — standing by to go into the water if anything went wrong. In warm weather, there would sometimes be a few spectators, out on deck to enjoy the sunshine and watch the mini-sub come out of the water. When the weather was cold or the seas were rough, the spectators tended to stay inside the ship, where they could keep warm and dry.

This close to Alaska, the weather was much too cold for casual onlookers. If this had been a routine operation, no one but the retrieval crew would have turned out to watch. But this was not a routine retrieval operation, and there were nearly twenty people on the fantail. Two of them were medical personnel, ready to render emergency treatment if required. The rest of the crowd was there to watch, and to add their silent moral support.

Every man and woman not actively engaged in the safety and navigation of the ship was present. No one had called for them. There had been no announcement over the ship’s public address system. They had been drawn to the fantail by instinct, and by unspoken common consent.

At fifty feet per minute, the slowly-turning winch had taken almost exactly an hour to haul in three-thousand feet of cable. The onlookers had stood the entire time, braving the cutting cold of the Aleutian wind as foot-after-foot of dripping steel cable was reeled in.

They were coming to the end now. The damaged submersible was nearing the surface. In a minute or so, the Nereus would break through the wave tops — hauled unceremoniously back from the dark ocean depths.

The winch operator watched the cable meter on his control console scroll slowly, like the odometer of a car. “One hundred feet!” His words seemed to hang in the cold bright air. No one else made a sound.

“Fifty feet.” His voice was softer this time, as if he were a little unnerved by the oddly persistent ring of his own words.

“Twenty feet.” It was the last depth report he gave.

The water surrounding the cable was beginning to bubble and churn. The crowd held its collective breath as the water heaved and frothed. Almost without warning, the Nereus broke the surface.

The winch continued to turn, lifting the little submarine free of the water. The hull of the submersible was streaked with the sticky dark silt of the sea bottom. The orange and blue paint scheme of her hull looked almost toy-like, as if this were the plaything of some spoiled child. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to entrust human lives to such a frail and silly machine.

The riggers moved forward, attaching their tag-lines, and swinging the submersible into her cradle. The divers were moving almost before the sub was firmly seated, scrambling up the curved silt-covered sides of the hull to the hatch at the top. They spun the handle furiously, and the pressure seal relaxed with an audible hiss.

The hatch swung up and open, and one of the black-suited divers lowered himself through the opening immediately. His head and shoulders reappeared through the hatch a few seconds later. He raised his hands into the air, and pointed both of his thumbs toward the sky. “They’re alive!”

He said something else, but his words were lost in a roar of shouts and laughter.

They were alive!

CHAPTER 11

21ST SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER

ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1238 hours (12:38 PM)

TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’

Technical Sergeant George Kaulana looked at the two oblong smears of video on the display screen of his SAWS console and raised his eyebrows. “Where are you guys going?” The SAWS console—short for Satellite Analyst Workstation—was receiving an imagery download from Forager 715, a U.S. Air Force Oracle III series surveillance satellite currently passing over southeastern Russia. Forager’s primary surveillance mission was the nuclear reactor facility in Brushehr, Iran, so the perigee of the satellite’s elliptical orbit was designed to bring it to an altitude of only about 280 kilometers during passes over the Middle East. The digital cameras built into the satellite’s 2.4 meter mirror telescope were designed to take their best pictures from that altitude.

At the moment, Forager was on the outbound leg of its transit, heading toward apogee, the farthest reach of its orbit, 1,005 kilometers above the earth. The altitude of the satellite as it passed over southeastern Russia was about 500 kilometers and increasing steadily. Its cameras were still functional at that altitude, but they were operating well outside of their optimum focal length. The images scrolling across the screen of Technical Sergeant Kaulana’s console were of significantly lower resolution than images shot from Forager’s preferred altitude, but the satellite analyst had no trouble identifying the two blurred oblongs as ships.

Kaulana’s job for this particular satellite pass was to count the number of submarines tied to the pier at the Russian naval base at Petropavlosk, Kamchatka. The ballistic missile submarines based in Petropavlosk represented a sizeable fraction of Russia’s nuclear strike capability. The movement of those subs was an ongoing concern. The United States and Russia might not be enemies anymore, but it wasn’t smart to lose track of another country’s nuclear arsenal if you could avoid it.

The two blurry shapes on Kaulana’s screen were obviously not submarines and the Russian Navy didn’t maintain surface warships in Kamchatka, so the two unidentified ships were probably nothing to worry about. If they’d been following the shipping lanes toward the West Coast of the U.S., he wouldn’t have given them a second look. But both of the unidentified ships were well north of the shipping lanes, and based on the orientation of their hulls, it looked like they were heading toward Petropavlosk. There wasn’t necessarily anything unusual about that. Avacha Bay, the harbor at Petropavlosk, got quite a bit of merchant shipping. But the destination of the ships was cause enough to give them a closer inspection, just to verify that they weren’t military vessels. If Kaulana let a couple of warships slip unnoticed into Petro on his watch, the Lieutenant would skin him alive. Better to check them out.

He used his trackball to pull a wireframe cursor around one of the shapes and keyed the SAWS console for image enlargement and digital enhancement. The video display flickered briefly as it reacted to the increased demand for processing power. A few seconds later, the enhanced image appeared on Kaulana’s screen.

He looked at the blocky white superstructure that ran most of the length of the ship. It wasn’t a tanker or a container ship, but it was definitely some kind of merchant vessel.

He shifted his cursor to the other shape on his screen and repeated the enlarge and enhance process. A few seconds later he was looking at another merchant vessel with the same sort of blocky white superstructure, an apparent duplicate of the first ship.

He increased the image contrast to make the details of the ship’s structure stand out more clearly, and then spent nearly a minute using his cursor to carefully tag points along the outline of the hull and the corners of all visible topside features. When he thought he had given his console’s computer enough clues about the shape of the vessel, he pressed a key to activate a silhouette recognition module in the system’s software.

He got a match in seconds. His unknown ships were 20,000-ton Ro-Ro vessels, built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.

Kaulana drummed his fingers on the gray steel shelf that housed the SAWS console’s keyboard. He could identify nearly every class of warship in the world by sight, but he wasn’t very well versed when it came to merchant ships. What in the heck was a Ro-Ro?

He punched a few keys to query the computer, and was rewarded with a brief explanation. Ro-Ro was the common abbreviation for Roll-on/Roll-off. Ro-Ro ships were vehicle carriers, designed to transport cars or other vehicles from one seaport to another. The Roll-on/Roll-off designation referred to built-in hydraulic ramps that could be lowered to allow a vessel’s cargo of vehicles to drive onto the ship at loading, and drive off when the ship reached its destination. According to the computer summary, the two Ro-Ros on Kaulana’s screen were capable of carrying about 2,000 cars each.

He whistled. That was a lot of cars. He shrugged and released the images from his console’s processing queue. As long as the ships weren’t military, it didn’t really matter where they were going. The destinations of a couple of Chinese car carriers could hardly be considered a matter of national security.

*  *  *

Kaulana would repeat that line of reasoning at his court martial a little over a year later. The officers of the court would ultimately give him the benefit of the doubt and find that—based upon the information available to him at the time— Technical Sergeant George Kaulana had not been derelict in the execution of his duties when he’d declined to investigate the Ro-Ro vessels further. But the military court would also remind Kaulana that all of the death and destruction that came after might have been averted if he’d paid more attention to that harmless looking pair of Chinese merchant ships.

CHAPTER 12

KUZBASS (K-419)

NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KURIL ISLAND CHAIN)

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

1402 hours (2:02 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Kapitan Igor Albinovich Kharitonov of the Russian Navy stood to the left of #1 periscope and glanced at the spot above the ballast control panel where the master dive clock should have been. He felt a familiar stab of annoyance as his eyes found the gaping rectangular hole where the oversized digital clock had been pried from its mounting.

They had stolen the master dive clock. His fists tightened unconsciously. The Kuzbass was a front-line nuclear attack submarine, and some svoloch had stolen the master dive clock. The very thought made Kharitonov want to punch someone repeatedly in the head. He was kapitan of the boat, and such behavior was not permitted in senior naval officers. But regulations wouldn’t keep him from beating the thieving bastard to death if they ever caught him.

The theft had occurred at Pavlovskoye submarine base, the submarine’s home port near Vladivostok. The Kuzbass had been moored to a guarded pier in the naval station’s security area, and still someone had managed to get into the control room and make off with the damned dive clock. How was such a thing even possible?

The base militia was investigating the theft, which meant precisely nothing. It had probably been one of their guards who had let the thief on board to begin with, no doubt in exchange for a couple of hundred rubles, or a few American dollars. Unless, of course, the thief was a member of Kharitonov’s own crew. He couldn’t rule that out. A man could barely feed himself on what the junior Sailors got paid. It was impossible to provide for a family on wages that low, and some of the junior men did have families.

Kharitonov sighed and shifted his gaze to the clunky analog clock that had been borrowed from the Officer’s Mess and strapped to a pipe as a temporary replacement for the missing dive clock.

Temporary, of course, was a relative term. The Supply Officer had requisitioned a replacement part. But there were no master dive clocks to be had in the navy warehouses. The inventory records showed eleven clocks available for requisition, but none could actually be located. Officially, the missing clocks had been misplaced, which likely meant that they were sitting alongside the clock from Kuzbass in the back room of some dealer in stolen property.

The temporary clock said fourteen-oh-three. It was nearly time.

Kharitonov checked his wristwatch a half-second later: a habit born out of a career’s worth of training and personal experience. A nuclear submarine Sailor could afford to take nothing for granted. Every cross-check was an opportunity to catch a mistake or malfunction before it killed you.

The watch was a relic of the Cold War: a stainless steel Vostok Komandirskie, with brushed steel hands, and a featureless black dial with large white machine-stamped numerals. The only ornamentation on the watch was the red star of the Soviet Union, embossed above the 6 o’clock position near the bottom of the dial.

Kharitonov noted with satisfaction that his watch matched the time on the temporary master clock to the second. Not that he’d expected otherwise, but expectations and certainties were not quite the same things.

He gave the stem three twists to keep the mainspring taut. The steel gears clicked solidly, oddly loud sounds that spoke of both mechanical precision and overkill craftsmanship. According to popular rumor, the old Komandirskie models were supposed to be bulletproof: an assertion which Kharitonov had never felt the slightest desire to test. But the watch’s rugged construction did seem to lend credence to the idea.

He lowered his wrist and scanned the control room, his eyes carefully avoiding the empty spot that marked the theft—instead taking in the oversized gauges, clumsy electrical switches, and heavy-duty pipes and valves that formed the submarine’s control systems. Like the heavy old watch, his submarine, the Kuzbass, was a masterpiece of Soviet brute force engineering. And, like his watch, the Kuzbass had out-lasted the old Soviet Union, and now lived on in the service of Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, the Russian Federation.

The Americans called this class of submarines the Akulas, akula being the Russian word for shark. The official Russian Navy designation was Schuka-B, after a highly aggressive breed of freshwater pike. Kharitonov preferred the American term. The image of a shark was more dangerous and glamorous than that of any fish, but—far more significantly—the term conveyed a compliment of the highest order. The Americans were the most lethal nuclear submarine Sailors on the planet, and the Schuka/Akula class were the first Russian-built attack subs that scared the hell out of them.

Although they bore many of the unwieldy earmarks of Soviet Cold War engineering, the Akula subs were extremely fast, and exceptionally quiet. Not as silent as the new American Virginia or Seawolf class boats, but quieter than the vaunted Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs that were the backbone of the US Navy’s submarine fleet. In any case, the Akulas were nearly undetectable to most types of sonar.

Armed with a combination of 65 centimeter and 53 centimeter torpedoes, RPK-255 Granat strategic cruise missiles, and an impressive array of mines and antisubmarine missiles, Akula class submarines were far more deadly than any shark that had ever prowled the ocean depths.

Kapitan Kharitonov was proud of his boat. Despite the heavy hands of her designers and the light fingers of the unidentified asshole who had stolen the dive clock, Kuzbass was 110 meters of lethal black steel.

Kharitonov himself looked like he might have been designed by the same brute force engineers who had laid the plans for his submarine. Exactly two meters tall, he was within centimeters of the maximum allowable height for Russian submarine Sailors. His shoulders were broad enough to force him to go through hatches at an angle, and his arms were so thick that even the heavy steel Komandirskie looked like a child’s watch against the wide bones of his wrist.

His dark hair and eyebrows were a near perfect match for the black serge of his winter uniform. Thanks to some skillful needlework on the part of his wife, the uniform did a bit to disguise his oversized frame, as did the speed and agility of his movements. In his youth, Kharitonov had been a fencer. Although he hadn’t touched a saber or a foil in nearly a decade, he’d never lost the quickness and balance he had learned on the fencing floor at Pogosov.

What had happened to the Russia of his youth? A few short years before, the formidable Soviet military had been undefeatable. The vision of worldwide communism had been a foregone conclusion. Now the great Russian military couldn’t even keep the riff-raff from stealing its submarines a piece at a time. How had the mighty Soviet empire fallen so far and so quickly?

Kharitonov checked the temporary dive clock again. Fourteen-oh-five. It was time. He tapped the Watch Officer on the shoulder. “Take the boat to periscope depth.”

The Kuzbass had been ordered to rendezvous with a Tupolev TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo air station on Kamchatka. Upon establishing contact, the submarine and aircraft were to conduct a detect and evade exercise. For three hours, the big lumbering bomber-turned-submarine-hunter would pepper the ocean with sonobuoys and crisscross the waves with its magnetic detection equipment in an attempt to locate and track Kuzbass. All the while, the submarine would be doing its best to avoid detection by the sensors of the searching aircraft.

The Watch Officer glanced back at Kharitonov and nodded. “Sir, take the boat to periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth forty meters.”

The Diving Officer acknowledged the order and repeated it back. Not more than two seconds later, he issued his own order to the Stern Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth four-zero meters.”

The Stern Planesman, Seaman Viktor Petrovich Ermakov, repeated back his orders and pulled back slowly on the steering wheel shaped control yoke. Eyes locked on the plane angle indicator, he leaned slightly closer to the Helmsman seated to his right. “I’m sick of this recycled air,” he said quietly. “In a few moments, I’ll be topside with the kapitan, breathing real air for a change!”

Before the official start of the exercise, the Kuzbass was scheduled to surface in order to give the sensor operators on board the TU-142 an opportunity to practice using their video cameras and infrared cameras to detect and track a real submarine.

Once the boat was on the surface, depth control would be handled by the controlled flooding and pumping of the trim and drain tanks, leaving the Stern Planesman with nothing to do. Aboard the Kuzbass, as aboard most Russian submarines, the Stern Planesman became the topside lookout when the sub was on the surface. Which meant that Viktor would soon be up in the conning tower with his commanding officer, enjoying sunshine and non-recycled air.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” the Helmsman said. “We aren’t more than twenty kilometers from the ice pack. It’s nice and warm down here, but the air up topside will be colder than a Siberian whore.” He chuckled. “Your sosiska will freeze and fall off!” A sosiska was a thin Russian sausage.

Viktor elbowed his friend in the ribs. “You’ve been drinking the water from the reactor again, haven’t you? You’re hallucinating. My sardelka is fat and juicy! It is a man’s sausage!”

The Helmsman snorted. “You’ll see how fat and juicy it is when that cold air hits it.”

Viktor laughed, but kept his eye on the depth readout. He cleared his throat. “Passing sixty meters.”

The Diving Officer nodded. “Very well. Zero your bubble. Take all planes to horizontal. Level off at four-zero meters.”

The Watch Officer pulled a communications microphone from its cradle in the overhead angle irons. “Sonar—Watch Officer, coming shallow in preparation for going to periscope depth. Report all contacts.”

The answer came from an overhead speaker a few seconds later. “Watch Officer—Sonar, we hold three contacts at this time, all evaluated as fishing boats, and all bearing to the South. Target number one, surface, bearing 176 degrees with slow left bearing drift. Target number two, surface, bearing 194 degrees with moderate left bearing drift. Target number three, surface, bearing 212 degrees with slow left bearing drift.”

“Watch Officer, aye.”

The Watch Officer reached up and grasped the hydraulic control ring that encircled the upper hull penetration for number one periscope. He rotated the control ring about ten degrees to the right. With a muffled thump, the scope hydraulics engaged, and the periscope began to rise from its form-fitting well beneath the deck.

As soon as the optics module slid clear of the deck, the Watch Officer leaned over and flipped the periscope grips into place. A second or so later, when the scope had risen about a meter, the Watch Officer crouched and placed his left eye against the black rubber collar surrounding the eye piece. He followed the still rising optics module, starting from a crouch and turning the scope as he duck-walked his way through an entire 360 degree revolution.

Kapitan Kharitonov observed his Watch Officer’s periscope procedures without speaking, noting with silent approval that the young lieutenant managed to complete a full visual sweep by the time the eyepiece had reached eye-level above the deck and he could stand normally.

The Watch Officer thumbed a control button, increasing the optical magnification of the scope and began a second visual sweep. At forty meters, the head of the periscope was still well submerged, but enough sunlight filtered down to that depth to backlight any sizeable object on the surface of the ocean. The lieutenant was checking for shapes and shadows: the telltale silhouettes of any ships or boats floating on the surface.

In a perfect world, sonar would detect any surface vessels well ahead of time, allowing the sub to steer clear, but it’s nearly impossible to hear a boat or ship drifting with its engines cut. In the past, more than a few submarines had collided with quiet surface craft, usually with devastating consequences to both vessels. A little extra caution during this procedure could easily make the difference between safety and disaster.

The Watch Officer increased the magnification of the scope again and conducted a third sweep. When he was finally satisfied that the surface near the submarine was clear of collision hazards, he pulled his face away from the periscope. “Diving Officer, make your depth twenty meters.”

The Diving Officer nodded. “Make my depth twenty meters, aye!” He turned and began issuing orders to the individual watch stations. Five minutes later, he had the boat holding steady at its new depth and trimmed to his satisfaction. “Sir, my depth is two-zero meters.”

Kapitan Kharitonov nodded. “Raise the radio mast.”

The Watch Officer acknowledged the order and flipped a switch on an overhead panel. The muffled whine of hydraulics announced the raising of the radio antenna mast. A green status light illuminated on the panel. The Watch Officer looked at his kapitan. “Sir, the radio mast is deployed and locked.”

Kharitonov nodded. “Very well.” He lifted a radio microphone from its cradle and verified that the channel selector was set to the designated frequency for the exercise. He held the mike to his lips, pressed the transmit key, and spoke. “Volk-shentnadtsatiy, this is Kuzbass.”

Volk-shentnadtsatiy, Wolf-sixteenth, was the call sign of the Tupolev TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft that would be attempting to track the Kuzbass for the next few hours.

The radio speaker rumbled with static, but there was no reply.

After about a minute, he keyed the mike and tried again. “Volk-shentnadtsatiy, this is Kuzbass.”

Again there was no answer.

“We are at the proper coordinates, at the correct time, and on the designated frequency,” Kharitonov said. “Perhaps our esteemed shipmates in naval aviation have forgotten how to locate the ocean.”

Most of the members of the control room crew chuckled.

Kharitonov looked over at the hole where his master dive clock should have been. “Or it could be that some gutless idiot has stolen their clock and they don’t know what time it is.”

There were fewer laughs this time. His men knew that, joking aside, their kapitan was still torqued over the missing clock.

Kharitonov keyed the mike again. “Volk-shentnadtsatiy, this is Kuzbass. Do you read me?”

This time, there was a response. “Kuzbass, this is Volk-shentnadtsatiy. I read you clearly.”

Kharitonov’s eyebrows went up. “Volk-shentnadtsatiy, this is Kuzbass. I am at periscope depth and preparing to surface for your camera and infrared sensor runs. Do you read?”

The reply came almost immediately. “Kuzbass, this is Volk-shentnadtsatiy. Understand you are at periscope depth. Can you mark your position with a smoke float?”

Kharitonov frowned. A smoke float? If those flying idiots were any good at their job, they wouldn’t need a smoke float to locate a submarine.

He sighed. “Watch Officer, launch a smoke float for our cloud-hopping shipmates.”

The young lieutenant repeated the order and carried it out. “Smoke float deployed, Kapitan.” He grinned. “I used an orange one so they won’t have any trouble finding us.”

Kharitonov returned the grin. “Good thinking, Lieutenant.” He started to key the microphone when an ear-splitting squeal erupted from the radio speaker. He grabbed the gain control and cranked the speaker down to minimum volume. The painful sound was diminished but still audible.

He was about to call for a technician when one of the radiomen stuck his head into the control room. “Sir! Our communications are being jammed!”

Kharitonov’s ears were still ringing, but he heard the man without difficulty. “Are you certain?”

“Positive, sir,” the radioman said. “We’re getting broad spectrum jamming on all naval communications frequencies.”

“Understood,” Kharitonov said.

The air crew of that plane really were idiots. Obviously one of the operators had hit the wrong button by mistake. No doubt they’d realize the error before long and shut down their jammers.

An intercom speaker crackled in the overhead. “Control—Sonar, torpedo in the water! Repeat, torpedo in the water, bearing zero-four-four! Recommend immediate evasive maneuvers!”

Kharitonov’s brain went into high gear immediately. The torpedo report had to be a mistake, but he couldn’t take that chance. “I have the deck,” he shouted. “All ahead flank! Left full rudder!”

The boat heeled over instantly as the Helmsman executed his orders. “Sir, my rudder is full left! All ahead flank!”

“Very well,” Kharitonov said. “Launch countermeasures!” He paused for a half-second. At flank speed, hydrodynamic force would mangle the periscope and the radio antenna. “Down scope! Retract the antenna mast!”

The deck began to vibrate as the turbines brought the screw up to maximum speed. Something had to be wrong with the sonar equipment. The torpedo had to be a mistake. But no … he could hear it now, right through the hull, the unmistakable dental drill whine of high-speed propellers. It wasn’t a sonar error. It really was an incoming torpedo. The sound was quickly growing to a howl.

“Countermeasures away!” the Watch Officer shouted.

The intercom speaker flared again. “Control—Sonar, we have startup on a second torpedo! Repeat, we have two inbound torpedoes! Classify both torpedoes as 400 millimeter type UMGT-1!”

Those were Russian torpedoes, air launched. They had to have come from Volk-shentnadtsatiy. Why was their own aircraft shooting at them?

“Emergency dive!” Kharitonov said. “Full down bubble on all planes!”

Before the Diving Officer could acknowledge the order, the intercom speaker crackled again. “Control—Sonar, no takers on the countermeasures. Both torpedoes have acquired.

Outside the hull, the howl of approaching torpedo screws rose to a deafening shriek.

Kharitonov opened his mouth to order an emergency rudder change, but his voice was drowned out by the explosion of the first torpedo. He couldn’t tell where it hit, but the shock of the impact slammed into him like a speeding car, lifting him off the deck and throwing him sideways against the housing for #2 periscope. He felt several of his ribs break.

The submarine heeled well over to port in response to the explosion. Kharitonov tumbled to the deck where he lay in a haze of shock and confusion, his body too stunned to even draw breath.

His left wrist was turned at such an angle that his old watch, the Vostok Komandirskie, was positioned just a few centimeters from his face. He stared stupidly at the heavy stainless steel timepiece, his addled mind not really registering its presence. Slowly his eyes slid back into focus and his brain began to process information again. Somewhere beyond the numbing silence of his damaged eardrums, he thought he could hear the thunder of rushing water.

He blinked, and his body began to think about moving again. He could dimly perceive the first ghostly twinges of pain, and he realized that he had been temporarily shielded from the reality of his injuries by shock. It would all come back to him; he knew that. His body’s defense mechanisms could delay the inevitable for a little while, but they could not prevent it.

He couldn’t stay down here any longer. He needed to get to his feet, get his brain working, regain command of the situation. He had to save his boat.

But something caught his attention. It was his wristwatch. The second hand was frozen in place. The watch had stopped. The all-powerful bulletproof masterpiece of Soviet craftsmanship had given up the fight. It was almost funny if one only knew when to laugh.

Then the second torpedo struck, and the world disappeared in a fury of fire and water.

CHAPTER 13

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

The 14th and 15th centuries were periods of great experimentation in the field of rocketry, and several major advances came about as a result. An English monk named Roger Bacon developed improved formulas for gunpowder, greatly increasing rocket flight ranges. In France, poet, historian, and inventor Jean Froissart discovered that the accuracy of a rocket’s trajectory could be improved by launching it through a straight length of pipe, or tube. His idea became the precursor of the modern bazooka.

Meanwhile, rockets continued to become more common on the battlefield. French troops led by Joan of Arc used rockets in the defense of the city of Orleans in the year 1429. The French also used rockets during the siege of Pont-Andemer in 1449, and at the assault on the city of Ghent in 1453.

By the 1500s, rocket warfare began to fall into disfavor. Advances in artillery made the smoothbore cannon an increasingly attractive alternative for the armies of Europe and Asia. Nevertheless, the 16th century brought a new development to rocketry: one that would ultimately open the door to both space travel, and nuclear warfare.

In 1591, a German fireworks maker named Johann Schmidlap began building ‘step rockets’ in order to lift his fireworks to greater altitudes. Schmidlap’s earliest step rockets had two stages, consisting of a large sky rocket (first stage), which carried a smaller sky rocket (second stage). The larger first stage would propel the rocket as high as it could go before its engine burned out. The engine of the smaller rocket would then ignite, and the second stage would separate from the husk of the first, and continue to climb to higher altitude.

Schmidlap’s goal was simply to build more impressive fireworks, but his multi-stage rockets would become the foundation for manned spacecraft, and nuclear missiles.

It should be noted that the idea of multi-stage rockets may have originated with Conrad Haas, an Austrian artillery officer who described the concept in a manuscript written between 1529 and 1569. Johann Schmidlap may or may not have been aware of the works of Conrad Haas, but—regardless of his possible influences—Schmidlap was the first to put the concept into practical use.

The next great breakthrough in rocketry occurred in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Although the text was not geared specifically toward rockets, Principia Mathematica outlined ‘Newton’s Laws of Motion,’ and described the natural principles that allow rockets to function. This work has been credited with elevating rocketry from blind trial and error into the realm of science.

Thanks in part to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, rocket warfare experienced a revival in the 18th and 19th centuries.

After a series of successful Indian rocket attacks against the British Army in the late 1700s, artillery expert Colonel William Congreve began designing rockets for the British military. Congreve’s rockets proved to be highly effective weapons. British ships used Congreve rockets to bombard Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

Francis Scott Key, who witnessed the assault from the deck of a British warship, was inspired to write the poem that became America’s national anthem: The Star Spangled Banner. When he penned the famous line about the rockets’ red glare, Francis Scott Key was referring to the British Congreve rockets that were pounding the besieged American fort.

In 1903, a Russian schoolteacher by the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published a report in which he suggested the switch from traditional solid rocket fuel to liquid rocket propellants. Tsiolkovsky theorized that the range and speed of a rocket are controlled by the velocity of its exhaust gasses, and he calculated that liquid rocket fuels would provide higher gas velocities than solid rocket fuels.

Tsiolkovsky’s writings influenced the research of Robert Goddard, who began building liquid fuel rockets in the early 20th century.

Unlike solid fuel rockets, which require few (if any) moving parts, a liquid fuel rocket is a highly-complex machine. In place of a simple combustion cylinder and exhaust nozzle, a liquid fuel rocket requires feed-pumps, turbines, oxygen tanks, and an intricate network of piping to connect them all. And where a solid fuel rocket needs only an ignition source, a liquid fuel rocket requires precise control mechanisms.

The task before Goddard was daunting, but he believed that the potential benefit was worth the difficulty and risk.

On March 16, 1926, after a long string of failed attempts, Robert Goddard managed to successfully launch a liquid fuel rocket. Powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, his rocket flew for about two and a half seconds, reaching an altitude of 41 feet before landing in a cabbage patch about 180 feet from the launch pad.

By current standards, it was not much of a flight. It didn’t even approach the performance of the least successful solid fuel rockets in history. But a liquid fuel rocket had flown. Like the Wright Brothers, with their first faltering airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, Robert Goddard had proven that his strange machine could fly.

While Goddard was still struggling to get a liquid fuel rocket into the air, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, another great rocket pioneer was making his own mark upon the face of history. In 1922, a German/Romanian physicist named Hermann Oberth submitted a 92-page doctoral dissertation on rocket science. His dissertation was rejected as ‘utopian,’ and his doctoral degree was withheld.

Oberth responded by publishing his dissertation in 1923, under the title ‘Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen’ (“By Rocket into Planetary Space”). Oberth went on to expand the work to 429 pages, re-publishing it as ‘Wege zur Raumschiffahrt’ (“Ways to Spaceflight”) in 1929.

Oberth’s writings inspired scientifically-minded people of many nations. Rocket clubs and associations began springing up all over the world.

Of particular note was a German rocket association, called ‘Verein fur Raumschiffahrt,’ the Society for Space Travel. The club’s membership included Wernher von Braun, Hermann Oberth, and Arthur Rudolph, and many others who would go on to play major roles in the field of rocket science.

After purchasing a plot of land near the city of Berlin, the club members built a ‘Raketenflugplatz’ (rocket airfield), and began launching rockets of their own design. The earliest of these, the Mirak series, were largely failures. But the club’s Repulsor series was highly-successful. Some of the Repulsor rockets reached altitudes of over 3,000 feet.

In 1932, the club approached the German army for funding. Club officers arranged a demonstration launch for the army. The rocket failed, but Captain Walter Dornberger—who was in charge of the German army’s rocket program—was impressed with the knowledge, skill, and dedication of the club members. He offered to fund the club’s experiments if the members would agree to operate under conditions of secrecy, and focus their efforts toward developing military rockets.

Some of the members voted to accept Dornberger’s offer, and others voted to reject it. The ensuing argument, coupled with a continued lack of funding, caused the club to dissolve in 1933. Even so, the impact of Verein fur Raumschiffahrt was far from over.

Following the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Chancellor Adolf Hitler combined his office with the office of President, and declared himself to be the Führer. Under his command, the National Socialist German Workers Party (better known to history as the Nazi Party) began a massive campaign to build up the German military. Hitler’s goal was nothing less than the conquest of Europe, and—ultimately—the subjugation of every nation on earth.

To achieve the Führer’s objectives, the German military began a number of aggressive research programs, all aimed at creating the kind of super-weapons needed to conquer an entire planet. Among these secret projects was the German rocket program, and several members of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt rocket club, including Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, were seduced or coerced into joining the Nazi quest to build super rockets.

One of the most successful developments of the Nazi rocket program was the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or V-1 rocket. Also known as the buzz bomb or doodlebug, the V-1 was powered by a pulse jet engine, and guided by a gyro-magnetic autopilot system. The first test flights occurred in late 1941 or early 1942. After some initial guidance problems were ironed out, the V-1 proved to be an incredibly powerful weapon. Many military historians classify it as the first cruise missile.

By 1944, Germany was launching V-1 rockets at England, literally by the thousands. According to a report written by American General Clayton Bissell in December of 1944, about 8,025 self-guided V-1 rockets were launched at targets in England during a nine-week period of that year. As a result of this unrelenting barrage of rockets, more than a million houses and other buildings were destroyed or damaged, and tens of thousands of people were killed.

The rocket, which had been a formidable engine of war almost from the outset, was becoming the first weapon of mass destruction.

The V-2 rocket program (Vergeltungswaffe 2) ran concurrently with the V-1 project, but the V-2s were much more technologically advanced. Under the engineering expertise of Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, the V-2 rocket became the first true ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to reach sub-orbital space.

After climbing to the fringes of outer space, a V-2 rocket would tip over and drop back down into the atmosphere, diving toward its target at four times the speed of sound with a 2,150 pound warhead of highly-explosive Amatol. The combination of extreme altitude and supersonic speed made the rockets invulnerable to anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes, and the enormous warheads made the rockets exceptionally powerful. A single V-2 rocket could reduce an entire city block to ankle-high rubble.

In terms of technological achievement, the V-2 was a quantum leap forward. In terms of tactical effectiveness, it was somewhat less impressive. Despite its speed, range, and warhead capacity, the V-2 was not very accurate. Also, the V-2 became operational too late in the war to have much impact on the outcome of the fighting. Of the more than 6,000 V-2 rockets built, only about half were ever launched as weapons. The remainder were destroyed, expended by testing, or captured by the Allies at the end of World War II.

The war in Europe came to an end on May 7, 1945, when Generaloberst Alfred Jodl signed the documents of unconditional surrender on behalf of the German High Command. Adolf Hitler lay dead by his own hand, and his beloved Berlin was in flames. Hitler’s dream of world domination had fallen to ashes, along with much of his erstwhile Nazi empire.

Hitler’s super rockets had come too late to turn the tide of the war, but no one could deny that the V-1 and V-2 really were the super rockets that he had threatened to build.

On the other side of the world, the war in the Pacific was entering its bloodiest phase. The defeat of Imperial Japan was considered a certainty, but the Japanese were preparing to fight to the very last man, woman, or child. Japan would not surrender.

But everything changed in August of 1945. On the sixth day of that month, an American B-29 bomber obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb. More than 70,000 people were killed instantly, and nearly a quarter of a million more would die from the effects of nuclear radiation over the next few years.

Three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, while Japan was still reeling from the shock of losing an entire city to a single bomb, America followed up with a second nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Once again, a single atomic bomb was used, and once again the devastation was complete. Somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 people were killed by the direct effects of the explosion. And—as with Hiroshima—tens of thousands more would die over the following years.

Representatives of the Japanese Emperor formally signed the documents of surrender on September 2, 1945, aboard the battleship USS Missouri, at anchor in Tokyo Bay. The Second World War was officially over. The nations of the earth were ready to turn towards peace. But the threat was not ended.

Germany’s rocket scientists had shown the world how to build missiles and rockets capable of reaching space, and spanning the distances between nations. America’s own scientists had discovered the secret to building nuclear weapons. It was only a matter of time before the two deadliest technologies in history merged to become a single weapon with unimaginable destructive power.

The weapons of World War II had given rise to the weapons of World War III. For the first time, mankind had the knowledge and the ability to destroy all life on planet earth.

CHAPTER 14

AVACHA BAY COMMERCIAL SEA PORT FACILITY (OJSC)

PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

1814 hours (6:14 PM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

The sun was just beginning to dip below the volcanic peaks to the west of the city, when Customs Officer Evgeny Petrov spotted the militia car. The big black Volga squeaked to a stop near the head of the pier, about thirty meters from where the customs man was standing.

Arms wrapped around himself for warmth, Petrov hunkered farther down into his heavy wool greatcoat, and trudged toward the car, his boots crunching through the layer of rime ice and snow that covered the cement quay. He had called for militia backup nearly two hours ago, and the idiots were just now getting here.

A car door opened and a man climbed out and tightened his own coat, as Petrov covered the remaining distance to the car. The driver wore the uniform and insignia of a major in the militia.

A major? That much was good, at least. The militia man was going to need some clout to handle this situation. But where were his men? Had the fool come alone?

The militia officer straightened his hat and turned up the collar of his coat against the wind. “I am Major Noviko,” he said. “Are you Petrov?”

Petrov nodded. “Yes.” He looked around. “Where are your men?”

“A truck is coming behind me,” Noviko said. “It should be along in a minute or two. In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

Petrov pointed toward the pier. “There is the problem,” he said.

Moored to the pier were two ships: enormous boxy vessels, the size of skyscrapers laid on their sides. The ships were car carriers, both of the same design, with blue-painted hulls and white superstructures.

The vessel closest to the head of the pier had the name Shunfeng lettered on the hull near the bow. The second ship had the name Jifeng painted in the same location.

Both ships had large open cargo doors, and steel ramps extended down to the pier. As the two men watched, strange-looking six-wheeled vehicles drove down the ramps of both ships, and fell into line behind long rows of similar vehicles that were already parked on the pier.

There were perhaps a hundred vehicles on the pier already, their motors all running as they sat idling on the snow-encrusted concrete. They were all painted dark green, and they all had angular profiles and heavy construction. Some were relatively featureless. Others bristled with antennas, or were topped by what were unmistakably guns. They were obviously military vehicles.

“These ships have no authorization,” Petrov said. “We have spoken to the masters of both vessels, and they claim that these vehicles are for delivery to the naval base at Rybachiy. But they have produced no proof of clearance, no manifest transfers, no delivery authorization of any kind.”

Petrov nodded toward the still growing ranks of military vehicles. “I have formally notified both masters that it is against the law to offload their cargoes without customs clearance.” He scowled. “As you can see, they ignore our warnings.”

The major nodded gravely. “Yes, I see. And how many men do you have in your charge, here?”

“Three,” Petrov said. “Myself, and two other customs agents.” As he watched, another pair of the angular six-wheeled vehicles rolled onto the pier. These were topped by what seemed to be rocket launchers.

“So far, they are remaining inside the fence of the customs area,” Petrov said. “But we can’t keep them here if they decide to leave. That’s why I called the militia for reinforcements.”

“A prudent move,” Major Noviko said. He checked his watch and frowned. “My men should be here by now.”

“Perhaps you should call them, to check,” Petrov said.

“I will,” Noviko agreed. “But first, please summon your other two agents.” He surveyed the lines of military vehicles. “We’re going to need a much larger response force to contain this. I want to have more information before I call in the request.”

Petrov nodded and unclipped a tape-swaddled radio from his belt. The pier lights were flickering on now, and the sun was nearly gone behind the peak of Koryaksky mountain.

As he summoned his men by radio, Petrov noted that the stream of vehicles had finally halted. They sat idling on the pier, clouds of vapor rising from their exhaust pipes.

Shubin arrived almost immediately. Borodin took a couple of minutes longer. He’d been down at the far end of the pier, and he was breathing heavily when he stumped over to stand near his supervisor and the militia officer.

Major Noviko nodded. “Is this everyone?”

“Yes,” Petrov said. “At least until our reliefs show up in about an hour.”

“Good,” Noviko said. His right hand came out of the pocket of his greatcoat, and Petrov had barely registered the presence of the automatic pistol when he heard the crack of the first bullet.

Borodin dropped to the frozen concrete like a sack of potatoes. Shubin raised his hands and took a rapid step toward the militia officer, but the gun whipped around quickly, and a bullet hammered through his forehead. His body collapsed beside Borodin, blood spilling among the ice and snow.

Stunned by the suddenness of the attacks, Petrov’s only thought was to run. He turned, his boot heels slipping on ice, but Noviko’s pistol barked again.

He felt himself slammed forward, as though someone had punched him in the spine. He pitched forward, and fell to the pier. The impact with the frost-covered concrete was somehow more painful than the bullet.

He lay in the ice and snow, his faced turned toward the nearer ship. Men were coming down the cargo ramp now. A lot of men. Soldiers. In black uniforms.

Petrov’s vision was failing by the time the first squad of soldiers came near. He couldn’t turn his head for a better look, and he couldn’t see them clearly. But as his brain processed his very last rational thought, he wondered why the strangers were speaking Chinese.

CHAPTER 15

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

3:12 AM EST

President Chandler nearly dropped the phone before his sleep-numbed fingers managed to fumble the receiver to his ear. “Yes?”

“Mr. President, this is Lieutenant Colonel Briggs, the Situation Room Watch Officer. I’m sorry to wake you at this hour, but we have a developing situation that requires your attention, sir.”

The president muffled the mouthpiece of the phone with one hand and yawned heavily. When the worst of it was past, he uncovered the receiver. “Situation room?”

“No, sir,” the lieutenant colonel said. “This is a National Command Authority issue. The Secret Service is going to want you in the bunker, Mr. President. And the National Military Command Center is requesting permission to initiate COG protocols.”

The president sat upright in bed, the sudden movement jerking the phone to the edge of the bedside table, where it teetered precariously. COG was short for Continuity of Government. COG protocols were rapid action plans for moving designated cabinet secretaries and members of Congress to secure locations outside of the Washington, DC area, to protect the succession of national leadership in situations that directly threatened the survival of the American government. In theory, COG protocols were intended to react to unknown threats as well as known. In practice, that was understood to mean one of three things: extraordinary natural disasters, terrorist acts of nearly unimaginable scope, or impending nuclear attack.

The thought drove the last vestiges of sleep from President Chandler’s brain. “Are we under attack?”

“No, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Briggs said. “Fighting has broken out in Kamchatka. We don’t have many details yet, but it appears to be some kind of revolution or military coup. There are a relatively large number of Russian long-range nuclear missiles stationed in Kamchatka, and we don’t know who has control of them at this time.” He paused for a few seconds. “I can’t go into details over a non-secure phone, Mr. President. We should have more information for you when you get down to the bunker.”

As if on cue, there was a light knock on the door. A second later, it opened to reveal a pair of Secret Service agents. “Mr. President? We have orders to escort you down to the bunker.”

The president hung up the phone and looked over at Jenny, still snoring softly beside him. He peeled the blankets off his legs and turned to put his feet on the carpet. “I’ll wake up Jenny,” he said. “Make sure the agents assigned to Susan and Nicole get them down to the bunker, and try not to frighten them any more than necessary.” He lifted his robe from the back of a chair and began pulling it on.

The nearer agent nodded. “We’ll wake up your family if you’d like, sir. But Command Post is online with the National Military Command Center, NORAD, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the 21st Space Operations Center. If there’s a launch, missile flight-time from Kamchatka will give us about thirty minutes warning. In the event of a nuclear launch alert, we can evacuate your family to the bunker in under five minutes. If I may offer a suggestion, Mr. President, it would probably be less frightening to let them sleep, for the moment at least.”

The president shook his head and opened his mouth to repeat the order to wake his family. Then, he caught himself. His own concern for his family’s safety grew out of the love he felt for his wife and daughters. The Secret Service’s motivations were professional rather than emotional, but they were at least as powerful. He had no doubt that any member of his protection detail would willingly step in front of a bullet to protect his wife and children. It was their profession, their sworn duty, and the central tenet of their entire way of life. Reminding them to consider his family’s safety was entirely unnecessary, and probably insulting.

He checked his head shake and turned it into a nod. “Fair enough,” he said. Then the father-husband instinct made a last quick attempt to override logic. “Don’t let anything … I mean, if there’s any doubt about their safety …”

The agent nodded. “You have my solemn word, Mr. President. If there’s any doubt at all, we won’t waste a second in moving your family.”

President Chandler pulled the belt of his robe tight and took one more look at the sleeping form of his wife. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

*  *  *

Three levels below the East Wing of the White House was a tube-shaped citadel known officially as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. Unofficially, the shelter was called the bunker, a nickname that had emerged during the Reagan administration when nuclear war with the Soviet Union had seemed like a very real possibility. Protected by a forty foot blast shield of high-tensile ferroconcrete, Kevlar, and armored steel plating, the bunker housed office facilities, sleeping quarters, computer systems, communications equipment, and a command center that duplicated the functions of the West Wing’s Situation Room.

According to popular rumor, the bunker was designed to survive a direct nuclear blast. But despite its extraordinarily reinforced architecture and multiply-redundant life support systems, no engineer familiar with the physics of nuclear warfare had ever made such a claim. In the evaluation of most experts, the bunker could provide a high-degree of survivability against a near-miss. Where nuclear weapons were concerned, that was as good as things got. Even the massively protected NORAD facility, tunneled deep into the hard Colorado rock of Cheyenne Mountain, was only estimated to have a 70 percent probability of surviving a multiple-megaton nuclear strike. Against high-yield nuclear warheads, words like ‘bomb proof’ and ‘impenetrable’ lost all meaning.

Conspiracy buffs had long conjectured that the bunker contained enough food, water, and bottled air to last three years. In reality, the size of the facility limited the provision stockpiles to months, not years. Despite the claims of the supermarket tabloids, there were no secret preparations to keep the president, his family, friends, and cabinet members alive for decades following the nuclear annihilation of the American people. In the event of a full scale nuclear attack, it was hoped that the bunker and similar emergency preparations would keep the president alive long enough to coordinate retaliatory strikes and the last ditch defense of the country. But if America died—the president, his family, and all of his friends and political allies—died right along with it.

When President Chandler walked through the heavy blast doors, he bypassed the entrance to the operations room, detouring to his emergency sleeping quarters for just long enough to throw on some clothes. He chose simply: khaki trousers, a pullover shirt embroidered with the University of Iowa logo, and loafers. He didn’t want to waste time on a suit and tie, but neither was he willing to preside over an emerging nuclear crisis in his bathrobe and slippers. He dressed quickly, and was sliding into his chair at the head of the conference table within two minutes.

A tall dark-haired woman in a white U.S. Navy uniform came to attention until he was well seated. “Good morning, Mr. President. I’m Commander Kathryn Giamatti, the Deputy Situation Room Watch Officer. Lieutenant Colonel Briggs is engaged in a secure conference call with the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security, so I’ll be handling your initial briefing, sir.”

The president nodded. “Thank you, Commander. Has the national security advisor been notified?”

The commander nodded. “Affirmative, sir. Mr. Brenthoven is on his way to the White House. We’re expecting him any time now.”

“Correction,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “Mr. Brenthoven has arrived.”

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven stood in the doorway. His suit was rumpled and there were dark circles under his eyes, but his gaze was focused and alert. He nodded toward the president. “Good morning, sir. Sorry I’m late. I was in Foggy Bottom when I got the call.”

“No problem, Greg,” the president said. “Are you planning to take over this briefing?”

“Not unless you want me to, sir,” Brenthoven said. “I got the basics over secure phone during the drive in, but I’m sure the commander here is more up to speed than I am. With your permission, Mr. President, I’d rather sit in and maybe ask a few questions.”

“Of course,” the president said. “Pull up a chair.”

The national security advisor did so, retrieving a small leather-bound notebook from the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

The president turned back to Commander Giamatti. “Proceed.”

The commander pointed a remote toward a large flat screen display built into the wall opposite the president’s chair. The Presidential Seal appeared, set against a blue background. “Sir, this will be a preliminary briefing. With your approval, we’d like to schedule a full meeting of the National Security Council for nine AM.”

The president nodded.

Commander Giamatti thumbed a button on the remote, and the Presidential Seal was replaced on the screen by a map of southeastern Siberia and the Kamchatka peninsula. Another click of the remote, and a window popped up, displaying a fairly high-resolution satellite image of a city.

“About two hours ago,” the commander said, “major fighting broke out in the Kamchatkan capital city of Petropavlovsk. Our most current satellite imagery of Petropavlovsk is more than ten hours old, well before the apparent onset of hostilities, and we don’t have any airborne surveillance assets in position for an immediate look. One of our destroyers, USS Albert D. Kaplan, is equipped with Sea Shrike unmanned reconnaissance drones, but they’ll have to violate Russian airspace to get close enough to see anything. The Air Force has already initiated orbital burns on two surveillance satellites to maneuver their footprints to cover Kamchatka. For the moment, we’re relying on HUMINT reports, and feedback from the Russian government. And frankly, Mr. President, there’s not a lot of either at the moment.”

HUMINT was the military acronym for Human Intelligence: information gathered and reported by people, rather than surveillance hardware.

“Understood,” the president said impatiently. “We can’t see anything; we don’t know anything, and we’re reduced to reading tea leaves and staring at the entrails of goats. I’ve got that. But somebody woke up half the government for a reason. I’d like to know what the damned tea leaves say.”

Commander Giamatti’s cheeks reddened. “Yes, sir.” She swallowed before continuing. “Mr. President, we have indications that the Russian military is ramping up to an advanced state of combat readiness. Intelligence sources in Moscow and Vladivostok confirm that Russian nuclear forces have been ordered to an increased alert status. Analysis of Russian Command and Control message traffic is consistent with a rapid escalation of nuclear and conventional readiness. We haven’t seen this level of activity since the worst days of the Cold War. Almost half of the Russian Pacific Fleet is putting out to sea.”

“Why half?” the president asked.

The commander paused. “Pardon me, sir?”

“Why half?” the president asked again. “If the Russians are gearing up as heavily as we think they are, why are they only putting half of their Pacific Fleet to sea?”

Brenthoven looked up from his notebook. “That’s probably the best they can manage, Mr. President. The Russian Federal Navy is in bad shape. I’ll be surprised if they actually manage to get half their units to sea in any sort of realistic fighting condition.”

The president waved a hand. “Continue.”

“Initial indications from Petropavlovsk suggest that the fighting there is military in nature, rather than insurgent,” Commander Giamatti said. “A rough assessment of the scale indicates major combat operations. There’s some fighting scattered through the city itself, but most of the activity appears to be concentrated in the vicinity of Rybachiy naval station.”

President Chandler pursed his lips. “I haven’t memorized the name of every Russian military base, but we’re sitting in the bunker, the Russians are peeing their pants, and the National Military Command Center wants to initiate Continuity-of-Government protocols. So I’m assuming that this Rybachiy naval station is home to part of the Russian nuclear arsenal.”

“Yes, sir,” the commander said. She thumbed her remote again, and a pop-up window appeared on the screen to the left of the Kamchatka peninsula. Inside the new window was a grainy black and white photo of a naval base. Three submarines were moored to battered concrete piers.

The president realized that he’d seen this exact same slide just a couple of days earlier, during the briefing about that Russian courier who claimed to be the middleman in some back-channel deal between the Chinese military and … the president frowned … the Governor of Kamchatka.

“Rybachiy naval station, at Petropavlovsk, is the home port for the Russian Pacific Fleet’s ballistic missile submarines,” Commander Giamatti said. “According to the most recent threat assessments, at least three Delta III class nuclear ballistic missile submarines are based at Rybachiy. Each Delta III submarine carries sixteen Russian R-29R missiles …”

“Also known by the NATO designation of SS-N-18 Stingray,” the president said. “And each missile is armed with three nuclear warheads, for a total of 48 nuclear warheads per submarine.”

The commander nodded. “You’re up on your Russian missile subs, Mr. President.”

“Not really,” the president said. “But I got some of this during an intelligence brief a couple of days ago.” He frowned. “Tell me, Commander, is the Chinese military involved in this somehow?”

The naval officer looked puzzled. “Mr. President, how did you …”

“The intelligence brief I mentioned. I’m just playing connect-the-dots.”

“We do have uncorroborated reports from Petropavlovsk, suggesting that Chinese soldiers—or military personnel who appear to be Asian—are present in large numbers, and appear to be heavily engaged in the fighting.”

“Is this the HUMINT you spoke of?”

“Part of it, sir,” the commander said. “But the source is unofficial and unconfirmed. A twenty-two year-old American college student on an ecotourism vacation to Kamchatka. Her name is Janeane Whitaker. She claims she’s been hiding in an attic above a café since the militia, the local police, began rounding up all visitors and foreigners about twelve hours ago.”

Brenthoven paused in his note-taking and looked up at the commander. “Why did it take us twelve hours to find out about this?”

“Ms. Whitaker’s mobile phone is apparently not compatible with the cellular networks in Russia. Her only means of communication is a notebook computer or a tablet; we’re not sure which. She tapped into the café’s wireless internet signal and began firing off emails. She’s an ordinary citizen, without any particular connections in the military or government, so she didn’t have any fast-track method of communicating with anyone in positions of authority. She ended up sending emails to the ‘Contact Us’ links on every government website she could think of. The White House, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Pentagon.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very efficient process,” the president said.

“It’s not, Mr. President,” the national security advisor said. “Every agency in the government receives thousands of crackpot emails every day. I know who shot JFK; my neighbor is running a secret al-Qaeda training camp in his basement, and brain-sucking aliens have taken over the local television studio. Don’t get me wrong, sir. There are some useful suggestions buried in all of that junk, and occasionally even some bona fide intelligence tips, but it’s not easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. An uncorroborated email from a foreign internet café about secret police activity in Kamchatka? Frankly, it’s a miracle that anybody followed up on it at all.”

“They didn’t at first,” Commander Giamatti said. “Until the Russian military went into overdrive.”

“Do we still have contact with this woman? Janeane Whitaker?” the president asked.

“Uh … No sir. She reached her daily spending limit.”

“Her what?”

“Her daily spending limit,” the commander said. “The wireless internet provider charges by the minute, and apparently Ms. Whitaker’s credit card has a low daily spending limit. They cut her off and we lost contact.”

The president stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t believe this. We have a multi-billion-dollar intelligence apparatus and the one person in the entire world who can tell us what’s going on has maxed out her credit card?” He turned to his national security advisor. “Can’t we do something about this? Every agency in the government has at least a few thousand dollars of discretionary funds. Can’t someone get on the phone to the bank and deposit some money into this woman’s account?”

Brenthoven sighed. “The State Department has people working on that right now, sir. Ms. Whitaker’s bank is based out of California, and it doesn’t offer twenty-four hour customer service. State is on the phone to California, waking people up. It’s after midnight out there.”

The president looked down at the table and shook his head. “If we weren’t sitting on the brink of a nuclear emergency, this might actually be funny. Can we just forget about Kamchatka, and launch some missiles at the damned bank?”

The door opened, and an Air Force lieutenant colonel walked in, carrying a white folder bordered with red diagonal stripes. He moved quickly to the national security advisor, whispered into his ear and handed him the red and white folder.

Brenthoven opened the folder and scanned the document inside as the Air Force officer quietly made his report. After a few seconds, Brenthoven looked up. “Mr. President, we have updated satellite imagery of Petropavlovsk. One of the Delta III nuclear missile submarines has gotten underway, and is currently unlocated. As far as we can determine, it’s carrying a full loadout of nuclear ballistic missiles.”

“Jesus Christ,” the president said.

The Air Force Officer faced the president and came to attention. “Sir, I’m Lieutenant Colonel Briggs, the Situation Room Watch Officer. I’ve just been on the phone to the Joint Chiefs. The National Military Command Center is still waiting for permission to initiate Continuity-of-Government protocols, and CINCNORAD is recommending DEFCON 2.” The lieutenant colonel paused and took a breath. “Mr. President, the Joint Chiefs concur with CINCNORAD’s recommendation. They are also recommending DEFCON 2, sir.”

President Chandler felt his stomach tighten. DEFCON 2, or Defensive Readiness Condition 2, was the highest level nuclear alert for American military forces. The United States hadn’t been to DEFCON 2 since the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world had come within days—perhaps hours—of World War III. The only higher readiness level was DEFCON 1, full preparation to launch nuclear war.

He frowned. “No. From what we can see, the Russians are already jumpy as hell over this. If we hike up our own nuclear alert levels, we’re only going to make them more nervous than they already are. And the spookier they get, the more likely they are to do something stupid. We don’t have enough information to justify that sort of risk.”

He looked at his national security advisor. “The Russians have definitely got themselves a problem, but I don’t see any reason to believe that it involves us. For all we know, that submarine put out to sea to safeguard its missiles, to keep them out of the wrong hands. No one has shown me any evidence that the intentions of that sub are hostile to the U.S.”

“Mr. President,” the Air Force officer said, “with all due respect, anything that affects the stability of the Russian nuclear arsenal involves us. That submarine has enough firepower to incinerate every major city in the western United States.”

The president shook his head. “We’re over reacting. We can’t let things move this fast.”

“I understand your caution, sir,” the lieutenant colonel said. “And I understand that I’m just a light colonel and you’re the Commander-in-Chief. But I’ve been doing this all my life, sir. If this escalates into a nuclear engagement, it’s all going to happen fast. Nuclear warfare follows a completely different timeline than conventional war, Mr. President. Our reaction window won’t be measured in weeks, or even hours. We’ll have minutes. And if we get caught with our pants down, we won’t have any time at all.”

The president nodded gravely. “I understand, Colonel. I’ll keep that in mind.”

He turned to his national security advisor. “This is what that courier was talking about. We were briefed about him a couple of days ago, remember? The Russian bagman who staggered into our embassy in Manila, bleeding to death from five or six bullet wounds. Gregorovitch? Is that his name?”

Brenthoven laid the folder on the table. “Grigoriev, sir. Oleg Yurievich Grigoriev.”

The president nodded. “That’s the guy. He was claiming to have information about a deal between the governor of Kamchatka and the Chinese Politburo. Something about trading Russian nuclear missile technology for Chinese military intervention.”

The president looked at the screen. The black and white photo of the Russian submarine base stood out next to the map of Kamchatka. “I didn’t put much stock in Mr. Grigoriev’s claims at the time, but it looks like he might have the inside track on this. Let’s see if we can find out what that gentleman has to tell us.”

“We’ve been trying, sir,” Brenthoven said. “We’ve got agents by Mr. Grigoriev’s bedside around the clock, but he’s in pretty bad shape. His doctors don’t know when he’ll be stable enough to talk to us.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long,” the president said. “We may not have a lot of time.”

CHAPTER 16

WHITE HOUSE

ROOSEVELT ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

9:37 AM EST

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven opened a door, and ushered the tall Russian man into the Roosevelt Room. A pair of tucked-leather Kittinger armchairs had been drawn up near the fireplace at the center of the curved east wall. The chairs created a small and informal meeting area, away from the long conference table.

Brenthoven nodded toward the chair on the right. “Please, Mr. Ambassador, make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you,” Ambassador Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kolesnik said. His English was only slightly accented. He sat in the offered chair, and ran a long-fingered hand through his thick white hair.

Brenthoven took the other chair. Before he could begin with the traditional diplomatic pleasantries, the Russian Ambassador cut directly to the point of the meeting.

“My government thanks you for your generous offer,” Kolesnik said. “But we do not require military assistance at the present time.”

The national security advisor watched the man for several seconds without speaking. In appearance, Kolesnik was as far removed from the stereotypical Russian bear as it was possible to be. He was thin and fastidious, with deep-set eyes and a triangular face that made his bushy white eyebrows look as though they belonged to someone else.

Brenthoven thought about allowing the pause in conversation to stretch a few seconds longer. In matters of diplomatic exchange, Ambassador Kolesnik was not comfortable with silence, a trait that could sometimes be taken advantage of. But now was not the time for gamesmanship. The Russians were already climbing the walls; there was nothing to be gained by intentionally putting their senior diplomat on the defensive. Better to get to the hard part quickly, and hope that open discussion could somehow allow them to work past more than a half-century of mutual distrust.

Brenthoven raised his eyebrows. “Mr. Ambassador, at the very least you have what appears to be a military coup on your hands,” he said. “Your own news services are openly describing it as a civil war.”

“It is not civil war,” Kolesnik said. “It is a minor local struggle. Nothing more. An insignificant uprising.”

Brenthoven fished his small leather notebook from the pocket of his jacket, and held it without opening it. “The entire Russian military has been moved to a state of high alert, including your strategic nuclear missile forces. You’ve mobilized nearly every available naval vessel in your Pacific Fleet. There are foreign combat troops on your soil. From the perspective of the U.S. government, that doesn’t sound insignificant.”

“It does not involve the United States.” Kolesnik said. “We appreciate your concern, but this is an internal matter.”

“My government does not agree,” Brenthoven said. “We have reason to believe that the insurgents have managed to deploy one of the ballistic missile submarines that was stationed in Kamchatka, along with its arsenal of 48 nuclear warheads. Mr. Ambassador, that’s more destructive force than the entire human race has unleashed in the history of this planet.”

The ambassador nodded gravely. “It is the K-506, the Zelenograd.”

Brenthoven jotted the name and hull number of the submarine in his notebook. “Has the sub been located yet? Have your naval units detected her?”

“Him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You asked if our naval units have detected her. But Zelenograd, submarine ‘K-506,’ is a he, not a she.”

The national security advisor smiled weakly. “I’ve never been much of a Sailor, sir. It was my understanding that seagoing vessels are always presumed to be female.”

The Russian Ambassador returned the thin smile with an equally weak smile of his own. “American ships, yes. Russian ships, no. Russian vessels are always male. The tradition goes back at least to Pyotr Alekseyevich Romanov: Peter the Great. Perhaps farther.”

Brenthoven rubbed his chin. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“There is much that America does not know about Russia,” the ambassador said. “And there is much that Russia does not know about America. Even with the Cold War behind us, our countries do not understand each other.”

He shook his head. “We thought we understood you as adversaries, but we were deluding ourselves. Now we attempt to understand you as allies, and we are still … what is the word? Baffled? We are still baffled by you.”

Brenthoven nodded. “Both of our governments have mastered the art of misunderstanding,” he said. “But Mr. Ambassador, this is one case in which we can not afford misunderstanding.”

“You are quite correct,” the Russian Ambassador said.

“I’m glad we’re in agreement,” Brenthoven said. “Are you in a position to discuss the level of U.S. involvement? Or is that a matter better arranged by our respective presidents?”

Ambassador Kolesnik held up a finger. “Again we misunderstand each other. I agreed that our countries must make every effort to avoid miscommunication during this crisis. I did not agree to American involvement in my country’s internal affairs. My instructions from my government are quite specific. This matter will be handled by the Russian military, under the command of the Russian government.”

“Mr. Ambassador, the nuclear missiles aboard that submarine have more than enough range to reach the United States. With all due respect, sir, that’s exactly what they were designed to do. Unless you have some method of guaranteeing that they will not be launched against American cities, I don’t see how we can sit back and treat this situation as an internal Russian issue.”

“You can treat it as an internal issue because that’s exactly what it is: an internal issue,” the ambassador said. “As to a guarantee that your country will not be targeted, I think we can make such a promise.”

The answer took Brenthoven by surprise. “Pardon me, sir … Are you saying that there is some sort of foolproof technical safeguard that prevents the missiles from being fired?”

The ambassador brushed a speck of lint from the left sleeve of his suit jacket. “As with your own missile submarines, there are certain mechanical and electronic safeguards in place, but their effectiveness depends upon the loyalty of the crew. If the crew of K-506 is disloyal, as their actions so far seem to indicate, we cannot rely on those safeguards. With the cooperation of the First Officer, the Missile Officer, and most—or all—of the crew, the captain of that submarine can launch those missiles whenever he wishes.”

Brenthoven frowned. “What you’re saying is …”

“I’m saying we must assume that K-506 can launch its missiles.”

“Mr. Ambassador, now I’m really confused,” Brenthoven said. “How does this guarantee that the United States will not be targeted by that submarine’s missiles?”

“K-506 is running southwest, toward the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula,” the ambassador said. “Senior naval officers in our Ministry of Defense are confident that the submarine will attempt to pass through the Kuril island chain and into the Sea of Okhotsk, where it will hide under the Siberian ice pack.”

“And how does this help us?”

The ambassador held up his right hand and tugged at the cuff of his shirt sleeve with the fingers of his left hand. “Because we have, as you say, an ace up our sleeve.” He dropped his hands into his lap. “The attack submarine Kuzbass is patrolling the Kuril island chain. At this very moment, orders are going out from our Pacific Fleet headquarters. Kuzbass will intercept and destroy K-506 at the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk.”

Brenthoven rubbed the back of his neck. “Mr. Ambassador, that sounds like a good strategy to me, but what if K-506 manages to slip past your attack submarine? We have a renegade nuclear missile submarine on our hands, with enough firepower to jumpstart Armageddon. Do you have a backup plan, in case Kuzbass doesn’t get the job done?”

“Of course,” the ambassador said. “If K-506 makes it into the Sea of Okhotsk, which our Ministry of Defense assures me will not happen, our naval units will trap him under the ice pack. They will keep K-506 safely contained under the ice until our attack submarines can hunt him down and sink him.”

“What if the submarine breaks through the ice layer and surfaces? American submarines break through the ice pack all the time. If K-506 surfaces through the ice, how will you stop it from launching its missiles?”

The ambassador shook his head. “K-506 is a Project 667 BDR class submarine. We call this type of submarine the Kal’mar class. Your NATO designation is Delta III. This class of submarine was not constructed with the hull reinforcements required to punch through ice.” He shrugged. “If they try, the ice slices into their hull and they sink like your Titanic. The crew drowns, or freezes to death in minutes. They do not launch missiles.”

The Titanic had been a British ship, not American, but this didn’t seem to be a good time to point that out. Brenthoven sighed. “I hope you are right, Mr. Ambassador. But I don’t believe my president will share your confidence. Unless I’m very much mistaken, he is going to insist on U.S. military involvement.”

“My instructions from my government are quite specific,” the ambassador said again. “This is an internal Russian matter; and it will be handled by the Russian military, without help or interference from outside forces.”

“President Chandler will not be pleased,” Brenthoven said.

Kolesnik smiled. “No one will be pleased. This is the nature of Russian politics.”

“I’ll relay your intentions to my president,” Brenthoven said. “He will want to discuss the matter with your president.”

The Russian ambassador’s smile vanished. “I’m certain that he will. And President Turgenev will look forward to his call. But the outcome will be the same. There will be no U.S. involvement in this matter.”

CHAPTER 17

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

THURSDAY; 28 FEBRUARY

1120 hours (11:20 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

Captain Bowie opened the watertight door and led the way out onto the starboard side main deck. The two civilians, Ann Roark and Sheldon Miggs, followed him out into the morning sunlight, stamping their feet and adjusting their coats as their breath steamed in the chilly Alaskan air.

Bowie suppressed a smile. It wasn’t really all that cold out here. The temperature was less than a degree below freezing, but the sudden transition from the warm interior of the ship made the air seem colder than it really was. The psychological effect was further magnified by the light coating of frost on the Kevlar life rails and most of the topside surfaces.

Bowie rapidly scanned the horizon and then the sky, automatically checking for other vessels, navigational hazards, aircraft, and weather features that could endanger his ship. The sky was a vivid cobalt blue, marred only by a handful of wispy cirrus clouds above the jet stream. The sea within his arc of vision was clear of visible threats. He turned his eyes back to the civilians.

The two could have hardly been less alike. Sheldon Miggs was a plump little dumpling of a man, with a bad comb-over and bright, lively eyes that signaled a keen wit and playful spirit. He was quick to laugh, even quicker to smile, and seemed genuinely fascinated by Bowie’s ship and crew.

By contrast, Ann Roark was slim, dark haired, and pretty in a severe sort of way. From what Bowie had seen, the woman rarely smiled, and—unlike her co-worker—she didn’t seem much impressed by the ship, the crew, or the Navy in general. Oh, she was civil enough. Her conversation was never less than polite, but it was never more than polite either. And there was always something in her expression that hinted at a kernel of detached contempt.

Not for the first time, Bowie felt a fleeting urge to ask Ms. Roark what it was about him, his ship, or his people that she found so distasteful. He let the urge pass. She was entitled to her own opinions, however unflattering they might be to Bowie or to his chosen profession. All that really mattered was her performance, and that had been superb.

Bowie still couldn’t believe that she’d managed to pull off the rescue of the Nereus. But she had pulled it off, despite his doubts. The woman was nearly as odd as her robot, but she was damned good at her job, no question about it. And as far as Bowie was concerned, that earned her a bit of slack.

Miggs clapped his gloved hands together several times and looked around. The grin on his face was positively child-like. He was excited by the prospect of exploring the ship with the commanding officer as tour guide.

Roark was just as plainly disinterested. Bowie had half-expected her to decline his invitation, but her desire to maintain the appearance of courtesy had apparently overridden her disinterest. She probably saw this as a necessary customer relations function, to be endured rather than enjoyed. Keep the Navy guys happy so they’ll keep signing the R&D checks.

“Every time I see this ship, it’s a different color,” Miggs said. “Is that a stealth feature?”

Bowie nodded. “It is.” He used the fingers of this left glove to brush away a small patch of frost on the bulkhead next to the watertight door. The surface under the frost was not the traditional haze gray color of U.S. Navy ships, but a dusty blue-gray. “We call this PCMS,” he said. “It’s short for Passive Countermeasure System.” He nodded toward Miggs. “Poke it with your finger.”

Miggs did so. “It’s springy. Like rubber.”

“There’s some rubber in it,” Bowie said. “But mostly it’s made up of polymerized carbon fiber, which makes it absorbent to radar.”

“So this is like that stuff they use to make the stealth bombers?” Miggs thumped the springy material with the tip of his index finger. “What do they call that? RAM? Radar Absorbent Material?”

“RAM is the Air Force version,” Bowie said. “We call the Navy implementation PCMS. It’s the same basic idea, but we have to use different technology.”

Roark looked at the bulkhead but didn’t touch it. “Why is that? Was there something wrong with the Air Force way of doing things?”

“Not at all,” Bowie said. “But a B-2 bomber weighs about a hundred and sixty tons, and it’s constructed mostly from advanced composites, with low radar signatures.” He patted the bulkhead. “A Flight Three Arleigh Burke Class destroyer displaces nearly ten thousand tons, and it’s built mostly from steel, which has a very high radar signature. Put simply, the Navy faces different technical challenges than the Air Force, so we have to take a different technological approach.”

He smiled. “But we’re not above stealing good ideas from the Zoomies.” He waved a hand toward the superstructure of his ship. “Take a look at her topside design and tell me the first thing that pops into your head.”

“It looks a little …” Miggs paused, as if unsure how to phrase what was on his mind. “… strange. Sort of … squashed, and oddly shaped.”

“That’s as good a way to put it as any,” Bowie said. He looked up at the low pyramid shapes of the destroyer’s minimized superstructure and the steep rake of her short mast. “There are no right-angles in the topside design. No perfectly vertical surfaces, and damned few perfectly horizontal surfaces, apart from the decks. It’s called an advanced-geometry design. Every angle is calculated to minimize radar reflections. We got the idea from our buddies in the Air Force, and I believe we even cribbed some of their math for calculating the angles.”

Miggs poked the springy PCMS tile again. “How well does it work?”

“Well, the exact numbers are classified,” Bowie said. “But the ballpark figures are releasable to the public. Towers is 529 feet long, 66½ feet wide, and her radar cross section is just a hair larger than your average fiberglass motorboat.”

Miggs looked impressed. “They can do all that with some tricky angles and these rubber tiles?”

“Not entirely,” Bowie said. “Those are just the most obvious changes. If you’ll notice, the life lines are made from Kevlar. Until a few years ago, life lines were made from braided steel cable, which has a much higher radar signature than Kevlar.” He used the toe of one boot to point toward an oval seam in the deck. “You may also notice that the deck fittings are all retractable. Every chock, padeye, and cleat on the ship can fold down into a form-fitting recess below the deck, and lock out of sight. That shaves a little more off our radar cross section. It all adds up.”

“You mean it all subtracts,” Ann Roark said.

“Right,” Bowie said. “That’s what I should have said. It all subtracts. It all goes to make us stealthier.”

“So why do these tiles change color?” Miggs asked.

“That’s a different feature of the PCMS,” Bowie said. “Ordinary PCMS tiles are just gray. But our PCMS tiles are impregnated with a special pigment that changes color in response to shifts in lighting. Under bright sunlight, it turns about the shade you’re seeing now, which is supposed to be nearly ideal for blending into the haze boundary between sea and sky. When the lighting starts to fall off, the pigment turns darker. It gets nearly black when the ship is in total darkness.”

Miggs raised his eyebrows. “Wicked.”

“We call it phototropic camouflage,” Bowie said, “and it does make us a little harder to spot visually and with optically-based sensors. But—popular myth to the contrary—it does not make us invisible.”

Ann Roark flipped up the collar on her coat, and burrowed her hands into her pockets. She looked out to sea without speaking.

“Let’s head forward,” Bowie said. “We can look at the gun and the forward missile launcher. Along the way, I’ll show you what we do to mask our infrared signature.”

He turned toward the starboard break, but before he had taken two steps, the watertight door behind him opened and Lieutenant (junior grade) Patrick Cooper stepped out.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Cooper came to attention and saluted. “Captain, the XO sends his compliments, and requests your presence in your at-sea cabin. You have classified Flash message traffic, sir. Immediate execute orders.”

Bowie frowned. Immediate execute? That didn’t make any sense. Towers wasn’t on the emergency surge list. The ship wasn’t even technically qualified for deployment yet.

He nodded. “Thanks, Pat.” He turned to the civilians. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you for a few minutes. Duty calls. But Lieutenant (junior grade) Cooper will be glad to take over as your tour guide until I return.”

Cooper’s eyebrows went up. He obviously hadn’t expected to get roped into tour-guide duty.

Bowie winked at the two civilians. “Pat’s a smart guy, and he’s just about ready to transfer to Naval Postgraduate School, so be sure to ask him plenty of difficult questions.”

Miggs smiled and returned the wink. Roark did not.

*  *  *

Three minutes later, Bowie was sitting at the little stainless steel fold-down desk in his at-sea cabin, staring at a hardcopy radio message.

//SSSSSSSSSS//

//SECRET//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//272042Z FEB//

FM      COMPACFLEET//

TO      COMTHIRDFLEET//

USS TOWERS//

USS ALBERT D. KAPLAN//

INFO      COMSEVENTHFLT//

CTF ONE TWO//

SUBJ/SURVEILLANCE TASKING/IMMEDIATE EXECUTE//

REF/A/RMG/ONI/270812Z FEB//

NARR/REF A IS OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT OF LIVE-FIRE HOSTILITIES ON KAMCHATKAN PENINSULA 27FEB//

1. (UNCL) AS OUTLINED IN REF A, LARGE-SCALE ARMED CONFLICT BROKE OUT IN AND AROUND THE KAMCHATKAN CAPITAL CITY OF PETROPAVLOVSK AT APPROXIMATELY 0600Z 27FEB. INITIAL INDICATIONS SUGGEST THAT FIGHTING IS MILITARY IN NATURE, AS OPPOSED TO INSURGENT. ONI ASSESSMENT OF SCALE INDICATES MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS, CENTERED IN THE AREA OF RUSSIAN NAVAL FACILITY AT RYBACHIY.

2. (SECR) U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES IN RECEIPT OF UNCORROBORATED REPORTS THAT UNIDENTIFIED ASIAN COMBAT TROOPS, POSSIBLY CHINESE, ARE PRESENT IN LARGE NUMBERS IN PETROPAVLOVSK. SAID TROOPS REPORTED TO BE HEAVILY INVOLVED IN COMBAT OPERATIONS. THESE REPORTS ARE UNCONFIRMED AT THIS TIME. U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES UNABLE TO ASSESS LEVEL OF ASIAN AND/OR CHINESE MILITARY INVOLVEMENT, IF ANY.

3. (SECR) AT LEAST ONE (1) DELTA III CLASS BALLISTIC MISSILE SUBMARINE IS BELIEVED TO HAVE DEPLOYED DURING OR SLIGHTLY PRIOR TO ONSET OF HOSTILITIES. ONI HAS TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED DELTA III SSBN AS HULL NUMBER K-506, THE ZELENOGRAD. THIS IDENTIFICATION CORROBORATED BY RUSSIAN DIPLOMATIC SOURCES. REF A REFERS.

4. (SECR) INITIAL ASSESSMENT OF DELTA III MOVEMENT SUGGESTS THAT SSBN IS TRANSITING TO SEA OF OKHOTSK, WHERE IT MAY ATTEMPT TO HIDE UNDER ICE PACK. REF A REFERS.

5. (SECR) RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT REPORTS AKULA CLASS SUBMARINE KUZBASS PATROLLING IN VICINITY OF KURIL ISLANDS. KUZBASS HAS ORDERS TO INTERCEPT AND DESTROY K-506 AT OR NEAR ENTRANCE TO SEA OF OKHOTSK. REF A REFERS.

6. (SECR) DELTA III SUBMARINE BELIEVE TO BE ARMED WITH SIXTEEN (16) SS-N-18 MISSILES, EACH CARRYING THREE (3) NUCLEAR WARHEADS IN MIRV CONFIGURATION. RUSSIAN AND U.S. GOVERNMENTS UNABLE TO CONFIRM THAT DELTA III HAS OVERRIDDEN SAFEGUARDS TO PERMIT INDEPENDENT LAUNCH. ALL PARTIES, U.S. AND RUSSIAN, AGREE THAT WORST CASE SCENARIO MUST BE ASSUMED. REF A REFERS.

7. (SECR) ONI AND NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE HAVE INDICATIONS THAT RUSSIAN MILITARY IS RAMPING UP TO AN ADVANCED STATE OF COMBAT READINESS. HUMINT SOURCES CONFIRM THAT RUSSIAN NUCLEAR FORCES HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO INCREASED ALERT STATUS. APPROXIMATELY FIFTY-PERCENT (50%) OF THE RUSSIAN PACIFIC FLEET IS PUTTING OUT TO SEA.

8. (SECR) RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT HAS FORMALLY DECLINED OFFERS OF U.S. MILITARY ASSISTANCE. RUSSIAN DIPLOMATIC SOURCES INSIST THAT COMBAT OPERATIONS IN KAMCHATKA AND UNAUTHORIZED DEPLOYMENT OF DELTA III NUCLEAR MISSILE SUBMARINE ARE INTERNAL RUSSIAN MATTERS. AS SS-N-18 MISSILES HAVE THE RANGE AND CAPABILITY TO STRIKE NUMEROUS U.S. TARGETS WITH NUCLEAR WARHEADS, SENIOR U.S. LEADERS ARE NOT INCLINED TO TREAT THIS AS AN INTERNAL RUSSIAN PROBLEM.

9. (SECR) USS TOWERS AND USS ALBERT D. KAPLAN ARE DIRECTED TO DETACH FROM CURRENT DUTIES AND DEPART THEIR RESPECTIVE OPERATING AREAS UPON RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE. PROCEED AT MAXIMUM AVAILABLE SPEED TO INTERNATIONAL WATERS IN VICINITY OF SOUTHERN KAMCHATKA PENINSULA FOR COVERT SURVEILLANCE OF DEVELOPING EVENTS. AS MENTIONED ABOVE, RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT HAS DECLINED U.S. MILITARY ASSISTANCE, AND PRESENCE OF U.S. WARSHIPS MAY BE TREATED AS PROVOCATION. IN VIEW OF THIS, BOTH UNITS ARE DIRECTED TO OPERATE WITH MAXIMUM STEALTH, AND TO AVOID DETECTION BY RUSSIAN MILITARY FORCES. DO NOT CROSS INTO RUSSIAN TERRITORIAL WATERS.

10. (SECR) ADDITIONAL ORDERS AND AMPLIFYING INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION TO FOLLOW.

11. (UNCL) THIS IS A TRICKY ASSIGNMENT, BUT I KNOW YOU’RE UP TO THE JOB. GOOD LUCK. ADMIRAL DAVIS SENDS.

//272042Z FEB//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

737465616C7468626F6F6B732E636F6D

//SECRET//

//SSSSSSSSSS//

Bowie read the message through twice before looking up at his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Nicolas Bishop. “What do you think, Nick?”

The XO grimaced. “You know I’m a can-do kind of guy, Captain. But we are not ready for this. Not even close. The crew is only about half-way through the training cycle, about forty-percent of our missile cells are empty, and we don’t even have a helicopter embarked yet.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “I’m not too worried about the helo,” he said. “We probably couldn’t use it anyway. Our orders are to make like the Invisible Man, and while SH-60s might be good helos, they’re not exactly stealthy.”

“We’re going to have to borrow a helo from somewhere, sir,” the XO said. “In the short term, at least. These are immediate execute orders. We don’t have time to pull into port, and we’ve got to get our civilian guests off the ship before we head into harm’s way.”

“Good point,” Bowie said. He sighed. “I agree with your assessment, Nick. We’re not ready for this. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have much of a choice.” He scanned the message again. “I’ll contact the bridge and order the Officer of the Deck to steam due-west to get us moving in the right direction until the Navigator has a chance to lay out a new nav-track. Have Ops get on the satellite phone and arrange a helo for the civilians, and then pass the word to have all officers gather in the wardroom for briefing and tactical planning.”

He dropped the message on his desk. “We should try to tune into a satellite news feed. CNN may not exactly be a reliable intelligence source, but if things are really heating up in Kamchatka, they probably know about it by now. I’ve got a feeling we’re about to stick our head in the lion’s mouth. If we don’t want to get it bitten off at the neck, we’re going to need all the smarts we can get.”

CHAPTER 18

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

FRIDAY; 01 MARCH

0901 hours (9:01 AM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

Lieutenant Eric Hogan, MD, United States Navy, yawned and rubbed the back of his neck as he ambled down the corridor toward the nurse’s station. He needed a cup of coffee, but first he wanted to order some more labs on Seaman Landry, the young Sailor with the heart arrhythmia. The patient was lean and muscular, an obvious gym-hound, so the arrhythmias were probably just premature ventricular contractions, triggered by an electrolyte imbalance, or too much exercise.

But the patient’s skin showed signs of pigmentation loading. That might mean nothing, but it could be a subtle symptom of hemochromatosis. They’d better pull some more blood and run the genetic differentiation tests, just to be on the safe side. The kid was probably tired of being poked with needles, but the only other way to rule out hemochromatosis would be a liver biopsy, and the seaman would like that a lot less.

Hogan made a left at the nurse’s station, and walked the thirty or so feet to his office. He’d punch the new test orders into the computer, and then he could slip down to the break room for that coffee. And maybe a sweet roll, if the stuff in the vending machine didn’t look too wilted.

He swung the door open to find two people waiting in his office: Captain Krantz, the commanding officer of the hospital, and a stranger wearing a dark gray civilian suit.

The captain nodded. “Good morning, Dr. Hogan. Come in, please. And close the door.”

Hogan hesitated for a fraction of a second. He’d been stationed at Naval Hospital Yokosuka for the better part of two years, and the commanding officer had never come down to his office before. What was going on here? He supposed he was about to find out.

It was not a large office. Hogan had to squeeze past the civilian to reach a standing spot near his bookcase.

He nodded to his superior. “Good morning, Captain. What can I do for you, sir?”

Captain Krantz crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned a hip against Hogan’s desk. His words and tone of voice were cordial, but his posture and body language were overtly defensive. The captain was not a happy camper.

“Dr. Hogan, this is Agent Ross, from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He and his partner, Agent DuBrul, have just arrived on this morning’s MEDEVAC flight from the Philippines. They were escorting the MEDEVAC patient, whom—I’m led to understand—is a foreign citizen under the protection of the U.S. State Department.”

Hogan nodded, still not seeing what any of this had to do with him, or what the captain and this agent were doing in his office.

The man identified as Agent Ross was almost professionally nondescript. He was of about average height and weight, and his medium brown hair was cut in a style (or perhaps anti-style) typical of middle class office workers. Even his face was unremarkable. He had the sort of features that your eyes could glide over without settling. You could see the man, and then instantly forget him.

Only his eyes stood out. They were a quite ordinary shade of blue-green, but there was a concentration of focus in the agent’s gaze that was nearly feral in quality.

Hogan was struck by the sudden and oblique certainty that this oddly-intense man remembered every person he had ever seen, and every word that had ever been spoken within his range of hearing. That almost certainly couldn’t be true; the human mind didn’t operate that way, but the impression stuck with Hogan anyway.

“The patient’s real name is Oleg Yurievich Grigoriev,” Ross said. The agent’s voice was flat and atonal, an acoustic match for his undistinguished appearance.

“That information is classified,” he continued. “The patient will be registered in this facility under the cover name of Dmitry Hugo. You will refer to him only by his cover name, and no member of the hospital staff is to be given any information regarding his identity, his medical condition, or his treatment regimen without direct authorization from Agent DuBrul or myself.”

Hogan looked at his commanding officer. “Sir, I don’t understand what’s going on here. We’re a U.S. military facility. We’re prohibited from treating foreign civilians, and we’re not trained or equipped to do cloak and dagger work. In any event, my patient load is already over max allowance. I …”

The captain interrupted. “Dr. Hogan, your other patients will be handed off to other doctors. I’ll take some of them myself, if I have to. As of this moment, you are relieved of all other duties for the duration of this case. Mr. Grigoriev … excuse me, Mr. Hugo … is your only patient. He will remain your sole priority until he leaves this hospital.”

“Captain, I can’t just …”

“That’s an order, Lieutenant.”

“But, sir …”

“Lieutenant!” It was a command.

Hogan nodded once. “Aye-aye, sir.”

The captain’s voice softened. “I don’t like this any more than you do, doctor. But my orders come directly from Vice Admiral Gibson, the Surgeon General of the Navy. Those orders have been countersigned by Commander Naval Forces Japan, and Commander Pacific Fleet. I’ve been ordered to give these agents extreme latitude in the treatment of this patient, and to comply with any and all security protocols they require. That includes enforced secrecy and armed guards, if required.”

He glanced at the agent, and then back to Hogan. “The patient, Mr. Hugo, is suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. His condition is critical, but stable, and I’ve been directed to assign my most experienced gunshot doctor to his case. You did three tours treating combat casualties in Iraq, so that would be you, Dr. Hogan. Do you have any questions?”

Hogan suppressed a huff of incredulity. He had about four thousand questions. In all likelihood, most of them would never be answered. He decided to try an easy one.

“What will I do for staff, Captain?”

“You can hand-select a team of nurses and corpsmen. Get your list to the XO, and we’ll pull them out of the duty rotation and put them at your fulltime disposal.”

“Try to select people who can keep their mouths shut,” Agent Ross said. “Keep your team as small as possible. Use whoever you need to get the job done, but don’t pad the roster. The fewer people we involve, the easier it will be to keep this low-key. And make damned sure they understand that they talk about this to no one. I don’t want to lock up any of your people for talking out of school, but I will if I have to.”

“You can’t arrest people for talking,” Hogan said.

Ross showed him a grim little smile with no amusement in it. “Wrong answer. This is a matter of the utmost national security. A leak could endanger the lives of literally millions of American citizens. If one of your people talks and I find out about it, I’ll shoot him for treason myself, and take my chances with a Federal judge.”

Hogan threw a questioning look at his commanding officer. Was this clown for real?

“I don’t think we need to resort to threats,” Captain Krantz said.

Ross straightened the lapels of his suit jacket. “I just want to make sure everyone understands how serious this is. We all have to be on the same wavelength here.”

“This is crazy,” Hogan said. “I’m a doctor, not a spook, or an operative, or whatever you call it.”

“A doctor is all we want you to be,” Ross said. “Leave the spook stuff to us.”

Hogan said nothing.

“I can’t tell you very much,” Agent Ross said. “You don’t have the clearance, or the need to know. But I’ll tell you what I can, so that you’ll have some idea of why these precautions are necessary. Does that sound reasonable?”

“I guess so,” Hogan said.

“Mr. Hugo,” Ross said, placing emphasis on the cover name, “was—until recently—the go-between in a deal between two foreign powers. I can’t give you details, but the deal involves the transfer and possible employment of weapons of mass destruction. I’m talking the big stuff; not piddly crap like Anthrax or chemical warfare.”

Hogan and his commanding officer watched Agent Ross without speaking.

“Six days ago,” Ross said, “one or both of the foreign powers in question decided that Mr. Hugo’s services were no longer required. They left him in an alley in Manila, with a half-dozen 5.8mm assault rifle bullets as a parting gift. They think he’s dead, and we’ve gone to considerable effort to encourage that belief. If they find out that he is not dead—if, for instance, they should discover that their former associate is recovering in a U.S. military hospital in Japan—they’re going to want to come back and finish the job. Because Mr. Hugo knows things that they cannot allow us to discover. And Mr. Hugo has already indicated that he’s willing to share that information with us, in exchange for political asylum.”

Agent Ross raised his eyebrows. “The guys who tried to murder Mr. Hugo are not nice people, Dr. Hogan. We don’t want those people visiting your hospital. We don’t want them going after you, or your staff, or your collective families. Because—if this slips—they will come after you, doctor. And they prefer to operate with leverage, so they’ll probably go after your families first. Do you understand?”

Hogan nodded. His mouth suddenly felt too dry to speak.

“Excellent,” said Agent Ross. “Your captain has kindly consented to loan us a private room on the fourth deck. I believe you usually reserve them for Flag Officers and government VIPs. Agent DuBrul and the MEDEVAC crew are getting Mr. Hugo settled into the room now, and setting up basic equipment with the help of the fourth deck staff.”

“We know the fourth deck personnel are going to ask some questions,” Captain Krantz said. “So Agents Ross and DuBrul have supplied us with a ready-made cover story. We’re hoping that it will keep questions to a minimum.”

Ross nodded. “Hospital personnel will be informed that Mr. Hugo is a mid-echelon diplomat, attached to the office of the assistant secretary of state for Eastern European Affairs. Further questions will not be encouraged. If people get too nosey, we’ll drop hints that Mr. Hugo was injured by Chechen separatists during a diplomatic mission in the Caucasus mountains. We’ll also let it be known that the incident is under investigation, and that anyone who pokes his nose into an ongoing Federal inquiry will find himself answering some very unpleasant questions.”

Hogan nodded mutely.

“Either Agent DuBrul or I will be within eye contact of your patient at all times,” Ross said. “Security will be supplemented around-the-clock, by an armed Marine guard. The Marines have been briefed. They will not interfere with your duties. Make sure your people don’t interfere with theirs.”

He held out a green cardboard folder. “Here’s the patient’s medical file. It covers his treatment following the shooting. In addition to the paper file, the folder contains digital copies of all x-rays, pre-op and post-op photos, lab results, MRIs, what have you. We need to talk to this patient, doctor. We need to ask him a lot of questions, and he has to be conscious enough and healthy enough to answer. That’s your job.”

Hogan accepted the folder without opening it.

“You can look that over, and start making your list of personnel,” Ross said. He glanced at his watch. “Let’s meet in Mr. Hugo’s room in an hour.”

“Agent Ross?” Hogan’s voice was nearly a croak. “What if your cover story doesn’t keep the lid on?”

Ross shrugged. “Then the guys who shot your patient are going to come knocking. And a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt.”

CHAPTER 19

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 01 MARCH

9:24 PM EST

President Chandler nodded toward the television screen. “Run it again, Greg.”

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven pointed the remote control toward the oversized television and punched a button.

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, Secretary of Defense Rebecca Kilpatrick, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Army General Horace Gilmore—sat in silence as the video disc chapter-skipped to the beginning and the recorded news feed began again.

The screen filled with an establishing shot of Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, framed against the giant statue of Lenin in the park at Ploshad Lenina. A light snow was falling, adding to the thick blanket covering the ground. A pair of uniformed soldiers stood behind the newly self-proclaimed President of Kamchatka, Nikonova assault rifles held at port arms, their breathing marked by plumes of vapor.

The ticker at the bottom of the screen flared with the CNN logo and a graphic depicting a map of the Russian Federation with the Kamchatka peninsula broken off like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. A snippet of the Russian national anthem played as the words ‘Crisis in Russia’ scrolled below the graphics.

The camera zoomed in for a close-up until Zhukov filled the screen. Dressed in a double-breasted greatcoat of dark wool and a black Ushanka hat, he looked like an old Soviet hardliner, which indeed he was.

Zhukov stared into the camera and began speaking in Russian. The voice of the CNN interpreter cut in a few seconds later with the English translation.

“I speak now to the people of the Rodina—the great land of Russia, who is mother to us all. You have learned by now of the events unfolding in this small corner of our great nation. Perhaps you have heard our struggle described as an uprising, or an insurgency.” He shook his head. “Those are the wrong words. Those are the words of weak-willed fools who would have you believe that what happens here is the act of a handful of delinquents and miscreants.” His heavy eyebrows came down like hammers. “No! This is not an uprising. This is not a riot among criminals. It is a revolution. It is a spark to ignite the flame that will illuminate the world!”

Zhukov turned his head to the left and then to the right. “Look around you, people of Russia. Look at what we have become. Look at how far the great Russian empire has fallen. A few short years ago, we were the greatest country this earth had ever seen. And now we are the largest third-world nation in history.”

His voice climbed to a shout, nearly eclipsing the voice of the CNN translator. “Where has our greatness gone? Where has our power gone? Where has our honor gone? And the will of the great Russian people? I will tell you where they have gone! They have been stolen from us. They have been leached away from us by treachery and fraud.”

Zhukov lowered his voice. “The West could not defeat the Soviet Union with tanks, and missiles, and soldiers. Our might was too great. Our courage was like iron. So they defeated us with lies, and with lust for material objects. They were afraid to face the naked power of the Soviet military, so they attacked our national ideals instead. They whispered their capitalist perversions into our ears until our minds were clouded. They eroded our internal values, made us lust after designer jeans and cellular telephones until we lost all touch with our moral center.”

His eyebrows drew even tighter. “And it worked. We stumbled blindly into their velvet-lined trap and we were destroyed.”

“Look at us,” he said again. “Look at the Rodina, the great land of Russia, the invincible Soviet empire. We are nothing. We are less than nothing. We have traded our national identity, our strength, and our self-respect for microwave ovens and video games. We made a whore’s bargain with the enemies of our country, and now we lay in the gutter, violated and bleeding, wondering how we could have fallen so far.”

He pointed a thick index finger toward the camera. “It stops here! It stops now! Like Vladimir Ilyich before me, I DECLARE THE REVOLUTION! I have raised the sword and drawn the blood of the true Russia’s enemies. There will be more blood, I am certain. But no price is too high for reclaiming Russia’s rightful place in the world.”

“What has happened here is only the first step,” he said. “I proclaim the independence of Kamchatka. As of this moment, Kamchatka is a sovereign country, entitled to the recognition and rights enjoyed by all nations. And I will make this new nation the cornerstone of the reborn Russia.”

Zhukov’s features softened. “My fellow Russians, I do not raise my fist against you. We are brothers and sisters, children of the Motherland. Together we are the rightful inheritors of the Russian dream, and together we will seize that dream and return our nation to its former greatness. I invite you, all true people of Russia, to join me in taking back that which is rightfully ours.”

His voice changed pitch, became lower and harder. “To the false government in Moscow, I say this … You cannot stop what has begun here. You are not the leaders of this nation, no matter what titles and honors you have conferred upon yourselves. You are parasites and fools. You have betrayed the very people you were sworn to protect. You have brought Russia to her knees. Now I order you to stand aside as the true patriots of this country lift their beloved mother to her feet.”

Zhukov lifted his right hand and clenched it into a fist. “If you attempt to interfere, the will of the Russian people will rise up to crush you. And I, Sergiei Mikhailovich, will be the instrument of their anger.”

He slowly lowered his fist. “You have read your reports by now. You know what I have at my disposal. But what you do not know—what you cannot know—is that my resolve is stronger than you can imagine. If you test me, I will do that which you fear above all things. I will use the weapons at my disposal.”

His eyebrows came down until his eyes were nearly slits. “I do not bluff, and I will not negotiate. The revolution is now, and it is utterly unstoppable. Your choice is simple. Step aside, or die.”

The camera held on Zhukov’s face for a few seconds as the English interpretation wound down, then the scene cut to the CNN studio where a grim-faced news anchor began the inevitable follow-up commentary.

The national security advisor thumbed the remote again, and the screen froze. “That’s about it, Mr. President. The rest of the news cycle amounts to speculation and tail-chasing.”

President Chandler closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. He opened his eyes and let out a deep breath. “Somebody please tell me that this lunatic is bluffing.”

The secretary of defense nodded. “He may very well be bluffing, sir. The Russian Ministry of Defense says he’s full of hot air, at least with regard to his thinly-veiled threats about going nuclear. Our satellite imagery confirms that Zhukov’s rebels were only able to put one ballistic missile submarine to sea. The other two ballistic missile subs are still tied to the pier at Rybachiy naval station, possibly because he couldn’t find enough nutcases among the Russian sailors to crew more than one submarine. But whatever the reason, all of Zhukov’s eggs are in one basket. If the Russians can take out that one missile sub, Mr. Zhukov’s nuclear threat evaporates.”

The White House chief of staff leaned back in her chair. “Madam Secretary, how sure are we that the Russians can knock out that missile sub?”

“The Russians are pretty confident,” the secretary of defense said. “Their attack submarine, the Kuzbass, is in an excellent position to intercept and destroy Zhukov’s ballistic missile sub before it reaches the Sea of Okhotsk.”

The president made a steeple of his fingers. “So we’re waiting for one Russian submarine to destroy another Russian submarine? Do we have a fallback plan?”

“We don’t think we’re going to need one,” General Gilmore said. “Mr. President, the Kuzbass is an Akula class attack sub. Fast, quiet, and very very good at hunting other submarines. The missile sub, the Zelenograd, is an older Delta III class boat. Her missiles are deadly against land-based targets, but the Chief of Naval Operations assures me that she won’t last ten seconds in a shooting match with an Akula.”

Gregory Brenthoven smiled, “His missiles.”

The General frowned. “Pardon me, sir?”

“Russian ships and submarines are male,” Brenthoven said. “But never mind that. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please continue, General.”

The general scratched his chin. “That’s about it, sir. The Kuzbass will sink the missile sub. If that doesn’t work, the Russian Navy chases the missile sub under the ice pack, where they can hunt it down and kill it at their leisure. I guess that’s our fallback plan: let the Russian Navy trap the missile sub if they can’t kill it outright.”

Veronica Doyle glanced at her palmtop computer. “And we’re absolutely certain that this submarine can’t launch missiles through the ice?”

Brenthoven nodded. “The Delta III has no ice penetration capability. Once that submarine is under the ice, it won’t be able to launch.”

“There could be millions of lives at stake here,” the president said. “I’m not comfortable with any plan that amounts to chasing the snake into a corner and tossing a blanket over it. And I’m not particularly crazy about leaving it up to the Russians to do the work.”

“Understood, sir.” the secretary of defense said. “But our options are fairly limited at the moment. Moscow has made it unmistakably clear that U.S. involvement is not welcome. Their diplomatic language is only about two notches short of outright threats. If we insert ourselves into what they regard as an internal situation, we may find that both sides are ready to shoot us in the head.”

“What you’re basically telling me,” the president said, “is that we sit on our hands and hope nobody decides to push the button?”

“We’re not happy about it either, sir,” General Gilmore said. “The Navy has ordered a pair of stealth destroyers into the area to keep an eye on things, and the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office are getting us all the satellite coverage we need. We’d like to get one of our own subs up there, but—with Russia trying to kill Zhukov’s sub, and Zhukov’s insurgents trying to kill Russian subs—that could easily blow the lid off the powder keg. Both sides in this conflict are ready to shoot first and ask questions later. Any direct involvement on our part is likely to provoke the kind of response we don’t even want to think about.”

“Which brings us back to sitting on our hands,” the president said.

The door opened and a young Marine lieutenant walked in, carrying a red and white striped folder. He went directly to General Gilmore, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and spoke softly to the general as he handed over the folder.

General Gilmore opened the folder and read the short document it contained. After a few seconds, he laid it on the table in front of him. “Mr. President, we’ve just received word from the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Kuzbass has been destroyed.”

The president’s eyebrows shot up. “What? How did an aging missile submarine manage to get the drop on an Akula class hunter-killer?”

“It wasn’t the missile sub,” General Gilmore said. “Apparently the Kuzbass was destroyed three days ago, during a scheduled training exercise with a TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo. The exercise was scheduled as a non-firing event, but early assessments suggest that the TU-142 dropped one or more torpedoes on the Kuzbass.” He looked down at the folder. “The timing of the exercise appears to correspond to an unidentified explosion recorded by our Navy’s acoustic surveillance arrays in the region.”

The White House chief of staff cocked her head to one side. “The Russians are just now finding out that one of their submarines was destroyed three days ago?”

The general nodded. “I’m not intimately familiar with the communication cycles for Russian submarines, but I know that our subs like to communicate as little as possible. They have to surface or come to periscope depth to raise an antenna above the water, and that makes them vulnerable. It makes them easier to detect acoustically, and their electronic transmissions can give away their position. Since their mission and their survival depend on remaining undetected, they communicate as little as possible.”

“There are technologies for letting a submerged submarine know that it needs to come shallow for communication,” the national security advisor said. “We call our methods bell-ringers. I don’t know what the Russians call theirs.”

“Neither do I,” the general said. “But the Russians have been trying to communicate with the Kuzbass since Wednesday morning, with no joy.”

The president frowned. “This anti-submarine warfare aircraft that attacked Kuzbass, where was it from?”

“It was based out of Yelizovo, Mr. President,” General Gilmore said.

“And this Yelizovo is on Kamchatka?”

The general nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”

The president looked up at the television. The CNN news anchor was still frozen in mid-syllable. The words “Crisis in Russia” jittered slightly at the bottom of the screen, an artifact of the DVD player’s pause feature. “Anybody here think the timing of the attack on Kuzbass was a coincidence?”

No one spoke.

“This dovetails too neatly with the onset of hostilities in Petropavlovsk,” President Chandler said. “Zhukov planned the attack on Kuzbass, and he set it up in advance. He needed to ensure that his missile submarine had a clear path into the Sea of Okhotsk.”

The secretary of defense pinched her lower lip. “The Russians are going to bottle that sub up. It’ll be trapped under the ice, and it won’t be able to launch its missiles.”

The president shook his head slowly, his eyes still locked on the motionless image of the television newscaster. “Zhukov is thinking farther ahead than we are. He’s planning farther ahead. He’s got it all laid out. He already knows how he’s going to launch those missiles, ice or no ice.”

The president sat up and looked at the secretary of defense. “Zhukov’s not bluffing. He can launch. He’s planning to launch. Count on it.”

CHAPTER 20

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

1835 hours (6:35 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark took a sip of her coffee and made a face. “Ugh! How do the Navy guys drink this crap?”

Sheldon Miggs finished pouring his own cup from the wardroom coffee urn, and carried it carefully to the chair next to Ann’s. “Are you kidding? This is good Navy java.” He made a face of mock machismo. “It’ll put hair on your chest, Sailor!”

Ann treated him to her best you-are-a-complete-idiot glare. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a Sailor. And unlike certain middle aged wanna-bes, I don’t have any desire to be a Sailor.” She glanced down at her chest. “Nor do I want hair sprouting from my cleavage. That’s a waxing experience I don’t even want to think about.”

She lifted one eyebrow and stared pointedly at Sheldon’s receding hairline. “But if this stuff really grows hair, you should think about rubbing some on your head.”

Sheldon grinned. “Forty-thousand comedians out of work, and I have to get paired up with Donna Rickles.”

Ann took another sip of the acrid coffee and swallowed with another grimace. “Who?”

Sheldon sighed. “Never mind, little princess. I’ll explain when you’re older.”

Ann rubbed her nose with her middle finger, making certain that Sheldon could see that she was flipping him a covert bird.

After a few seconds, she let her hand drop and picked up her coffee cup, trying to decide whether or not to risk a third sip. Maybe if she downed two or three quick swallows, her taste buds would be too stunned to object. “So what’s the latest from Captain Bligh? Any word on when we’re getting off this floating madhouse?”

Sheldon took a big swallow of coffee. “His name is Captain Bowie. And they’re trying to arrange rendezvous with a replenishment ship so they can do an underway refueling. We’ll do a helo transfer to the replenishment ship, and then hopscotch from one ship to another until we get within helicopter range of Japan. They hop us over to one of the Japanese islands, and we catch a flight back to the States.”

Ann snorted. “We were practically in the States thirty hours ago. These boneheads should have dropped us off in Alaska before heading out for parts unknown.”

“The ship has immediate orders,” Sheldon said. “The captain can’t tell me what they’ve been ordered to do, but he did make it clear that it’s time critical—whatever it is. They didn’t have time to pull into port.”

“That’s not our problem,” Ann said. “It’s their problem. And it doesn’t give them license to drag us off to who-knows-where. We’re not members of the Secret Navy Club, and they can’t just take us wherever they want without our consent. That’s kidnapping.”

“It’s not kidnapping,” Sheldon said. “And we already gave our consent, when we signed the releases to come onboard the ship in the first place. Somewhere in all that paperwork was a paragraph to the effect that this is a warship, and it’s subject to no-notice changes of mission. There was also a line in there pointing out that the needs of the Navy come first, and the ship can’t guarantee the time and date of our return.” He sighed. “You signed it, Ann, and so did I. It’s a standard clause. Every civilian tech-rep signs the same thing.”

“And that gives them the right to treat us like cargo?”

“They’re not treating us like cargo. We’ve got good accommodations, they’re feeding us the same food that their senior officers eat, and we’re getting paid overtime and sea-bonuses for every extra day we have to spend on the ship. So get your fur down and try to enjoy the trip. We’re riding a stealth destroyer on a high-speed run to a secret location. How much cooler does it get than that?”

Ann took another swallow of the horrid Navy coffee. “You may be enjoying yourself, Sheldon, but I’m not. I came here to demonstrate the Mouse prototype; I didn’t sign on for secret missions. Why didn’t they get a helicopter to pick us up when we were still close to Alaska?” She deliberately avoided the stupid Navy-speak abbreviation. The word was helicopter, not helo. And Mouse was a robot, not an unmanned underwater vehicle. Who did these clowns think they were kidding, anyway?

“They tried to get us a helo,” Sheldon said. “But the flight deck on a destroyer is only rated for certain types of aircraft. Most civilian helicopters aren’t configured for landing on a small-decked ship. And there aren’t exactly a ton of Navy-configured helos in the Aleutian Island chain. The Ops Officer couldn’t get the right kind of aircraft lined up before we were out of flight range.”

Ann set her coffee cup on the table with a thump. “You believe everything the uniforms tell you, don’t you? Why are you always making excuses for them? They screwed up. Why can’t you just admit that?”

Sheldon set his own cup down gently. “Why do you hate them so much?”

Ann rolled her eyes. “Now we’re doing dialogue from A Few Good Men? This is the part where I’m supposed to ask why you like them so much? Well, newsflash, Sheldon—I don’t hate them. I can’t say I like them very much, but that’s not the same thing. And it isn’t even really them I dislike. As military guys go, Navy people are probably less offensive than most. But they make their living killing people, Sheldon. Did you ever stop to think about that? Worse than that, they signed up to kill people. They didn’t get drafted or forced into the job. It was a career decision for them. You chose customer relations; I chose electronics and robotics; they selected war as their chosen profession.”

Ann picked up her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. Couldn’t Sheldon see it? At some point in their lives, every one of these military-drones made a conscious decision to make war for a living. They stood in line, took written tests, endured humiliating physical examinations under the guise of health care, and willingly submitted to training designed to program their minds for wholesale slaughter in the name of truth, justice, and the American way.

Sheldon shook his head. “It’s not like that, Ann. These guys aren’t itching for a fight. If you watched some of their training exercises, you’d know that. I’ve seen them at work for years, and you’d be amazed at how far they’ll go to prevent a fight. Their entire mindset is built around rules of engagement and safeguards to prevent escalation. Given the opportunity, they’ll do their very best to avoid pulling the trigger.”

“Don’t tell me about the military,” Ann said. “I was an Army brat, Sheldon. I grew up around people like this. I know what they’re like. They practice for war. They train for war, and they think about war, and they prepare for war. If you think about it, that’s a pretty sick thing to do for a living.”

“You don’t get it,” Sheldon said. “Firefighters prepare for fires every day. They train to fight fires, and they think about fighting fires, and they practice fighting fires all the time. But that’s just so they’ll be ready when the need arises. It doesn’t mean they hope your house is going to burn down. Being ready to fight fires is not the same as wanting to do it.”

Ann stood up. “No, Sheldon, you don’t get it. Firefighters don’t cause destruction; they stop it.” She pointed to a trio of paintings on the far wall: a young officer in an old-fashioned white uniform, flanked by paintings of two warships. “These guys blow stuff up. Buildings. Homes. People. These guys don’t put the fires out. They start the fires. That’s what they do.”

She turned and stalked out of the wardroom, letting the door slam behind her.

CHAPTER 21

NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KAMCHATKA PENINSULA)

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

2217 hours (10:17 PM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

The first wave of the attack came from the south, a flight of five TU-160 bombers, cutting through the night sky 13,000 meters above the dark surface of the Pacific ocean. Code-named “Blackjack” by NATO, the dart-shaped supersonic jet aircraft were equipped with variable-geometry wings that made them capable of covert low-altitude flight profiles. But there was no need for deceptive maneuvers tonight. The launch point for their weapons was well outside the detection range of any radars or sensors based on the Kamchatka peninsula.

The mission plan called for the bombers to approach at altitude, make their attacks, and retreat at altitude—all without concern for stealth. And the Russian pilots followed their orders precisely.

The only hitch in the plan was minor, and easily corrected. The bombers caught a tailwind on the north-bound leg of the mission, and they reached the designated launch coordinates three minutes ahead of schedule. In accordance with the strike plan, the aircraft turned left and circled once before re-converging on the launch point three minutes later.

At exactly 0920 Zulu (10:20 PM local time), the bombers launched their weapons. Twenty Kh-555 cruise missiles, four from each of the bombers, dropped away from the planes and fell several hundred meters before their engines fired.

In unison, twenty pairs of stubby wings extended and snapped into place, and twenty Soyuz R95-300 turbojets flared to life, smearing translucent streaks of blue flame against the night sky.

Immediately after the transition to powered flight, one of the missiles experienced an engine flameout. Robbed of its power, the weapon tumbled out of the sky, to disintegrate upon impact with the ocean below.

Each of the remaining missiles automatically initiated a satellite uplink, to check its geographic location against the constellation of Russian GLONASS positioning satellites in orbit 19,000 kilometers above the earth. Satisfied that their respective positions were within acceptable mission parameters, each missile dove to its programmed cruise altitude just 100 meters above the waves.

By the time the missiles reached their first navigational waypoint, the bombers had already turned west toward home. For the crews of the TU-160s, the mission was over. For the nineteen cruise missiles streaking toward Kamchatka, the mission was just beginning.

*  *  *

Russian Naval Formation:

The second wave of the attack came from a trio of Russian Sovremenny Class Destroyers steaming in a single column formation a dozen kilometers off the eastern coast of Kamchatka. All three ships—the Osmotritel’nyy, the Boyevoy, and the Burny—had seen hard duty during the Cold War, but not one of them had ever fired a shot under conditions of actual combat.

The strike plan had called for a fourth ship, but the Bezboyaznenny had suffered a crippling electrical fire during the transit, and had been forced to limp ignominiously back into port with the help of oceangoing tugs. Given the condition of the Russian surface navy and the high-speed transit from Vladivostok, most of the Russian Sailors considered it something of a minor miracle that three of the four ships had made the journey intact.

Standing on the bridge of the Osmotritel’nyy, Kapitan, Second Rank Igor Volkov stared through the port side bridge windows of his ship. As the senior naval officer in the formation, he was in command. In accordance with his orders, all three warships were running black—their radars and radios silent, all external lights extinguished. Out on the horizon, the Kamchatkan coastline was a smudge of shadow against the darkened waves.

The ships moved slowly, barely maintaining steerageway, partly to prevent the formation of visible propeller wakes, and partly to ensure that they would be within range of their targets when Volkov gave the order to commence fire.

In addition to missiles and torpedoes, each of the warships was armed with two AK-130 naval gun systems: one mounted near the bow, and the other near the stern. Designed and built during the Cold War, the AK-130s each carried a pair of liquid-cooled 130 mm cannon barrels on triaxially-stabilized gun mounts. Roughly equivalent in speed and firepower to the 5-inch naval artillery of the United States Navy, the AK-130 was one of the most powerful gun systems in the modern world.

The guns were already locked onto their respective target coordinates, elevation drive motors moaning quietly as the fire control computers kept the long steel cannon barrels stabilized against the rolling motion of the ships. Like the ships themselves, the guns had been designed and built during the Cold War, by Soviet engineers and technicians who had no doubt assumed that their handiwork would someday be used to kill Americans. But the guns were not aimed at Americans. They were aimed at Russian buildings, in a Russian city. And when the guns spoke in anger for the very first time, their rain of death would fall on Russian citizens.

Volkov continued to stare out the bridge windows at the darkened coast of Kamchatka. A lifetime spent defending his country, and it all came down to this. He had been ordered to kill his own people.

He knew it had to be done. The insurrection had to be stopped in its tracks or many more people would die. Maybe even the entire world, if that mad idiot Zhukov managed to make good on his nuclear threats. But understanding the necessity did not make Volkov feel much better about killing his own countrymen.

Some of Zhukov’s words had the ring of truth to them. Russia did have problems. Big problems. And some of those problems were undoubtedly the result of his country’s blind leap into an economic and political model that the Russian people did not understand. But the solution to Russia’s problems was not conquest. The Rodina could not regain her footing by holding a gun to the world’s head.

The clock clicked over to 2300 (1000 Zulu). Volkov lifted the handset of the radio telephone and held the receiver to his ear. He took a breath and broke the long-held radio silence. “All ships, this is Formation Command. Commence firing.”

The night was shattered by man-made thunder as six gun barrels spat fire and steel into the darkness. An instant later, the secondary barrels for all six gun mounts fired as the double-barreled weapons fell into reciprocating cycles of load and shoot.

Volkov lowered the radio telephone handset to its cradle just as explosions began erupting along the coastline. He had no way of knowing that some of those explosions came from a flight of nineteen cruise missiles whose arrival had been timed to coincide with the naval bombardment from his ships. He felt every fireball that mushroomed in the darkness, and he mentally took responsibility for every one. They seared themselves into his brain, and he imagined that he could hear the screams of the injured and dying, transmitted to him across the impossible distance on the carrier wave of his own guilt.

He wondered if there might not be a special corner of Hell reserved for warriors who murdered their own people. And in the gloom of the unlit bridge, Volkov began to pray.

CHAPTER 22

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

1929 hours (7:29 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

Consciousness came slowly to Oleg Grigoriev, and its return was not at all welcome. He decided not to try opening his eyes yet.

He was inhumanly tired, and he felt as though every millimeter of his body had been beaten with an iron pipe. The worst of the pain was held at a distance by the drugs given to him by the American doctors. He could sense the ugly mass of it, waiting for him on the other side of the protective haze of narcotics. If the doctors relaxed their vigil, it would come for him again.

He tried to raise his right hand, the one that was free from those damnable tubes and needles. A few centimeters above the mattress, his muscles failed and his hand fell back to the green hospital sheet. He was as weak as a child. No … Weaker. A child could stand. Grigoriev could not even lift his own arm.

What had happened to the tough old Russian bear? Had a few Chinese bullets really brought a battle-hardened Red Army soldier so low? Perhaps they had.

All he could do for now was rest and wait for his body to mend. His strength would begin to return as his wounds were healed. Or would it?

His brain was muddled by the drugs, perhaps too clouded to take accurate stock of his body. The pain wasn’t getting better; he was sure about that. He didn’t seem to be getting stronger. His body was so feeble that he could only remain awake for a few moments at a time. Was he actually improving? It didn’t feel that way.

For the first time, he wondered if he might be dying. The Americans had not said so. But their government wanted the information in Grigoriev’s brain. They needed his cooperation. If he was dying, they might not tell him.

Or perhaps they would. The Americans were confusing. Their values and priorities were so odd. The doctors, nurses, and orderlies in this place wore military uniforms and insignia, but nearly all of them seemed to put medical duties ahead of military obligations. They were healers first, and warriors second. Or maybe, not at all.

It was puzzling. Did it make these people less dangerous as adversaries? Or more dangerous? He didn’t know. And Zhukov, the bastard who had thrown Grigoriev to that pack of Chinese wolves in Manila, probably didn’t know either.

Grigoriev opened his eyes. That small act took far more effort than it should have. The room was a smear of blurred shapes.

He blinked once, and concentrated on dragging the shapes into focus.

One of the American agents, the tall one, spotted Grigoriev’s open eyes and crossed to the bed in two or three long strides.

They watched him closely, these Americans. Not so much the medical people. They monitored his breathing and heartbeat, the dressings on his wounds, and the collection of machines wired to Grigoriev’s body like a telephone switchboard. The others, the ones in the dark suits, were never more than a meter or two away from Grigoriev’s bed. They even watched him when he was sleeping; he was sure of it.

The men in suits would be CIA. Or perhaps FBI. It didn’t matter. For Grigoriev’s purposes, one would work as well as the other.

He took a breath and steeled himself to speak. “Bring paper …” His voice was a whispering rasp.

The man in the suit stepped closer. “I’m Agent DuBrul …”

“Bring paper,” Grigoriev whispered again. The words hurt his throat, and he nearly ran out of air on the last syllable. He breathed heavily for a few seconds, gathering strength before continuing.

The American agent reached into his pocket and pulled out a notebook. “I have paper.”

“Write this …” Grigoriev rasped.

“I’m ready,” the agent said. He stood with pen poised above the notebook.

“Five … eight …” Grigoriev paused to catch his breath. “… two … nine …” He paused again. “One … five … five.”

He was fighting for breath now. His blood was roaring in his ears, and he could feel the wound in his chest pulsing in time to the pounding of his heartbeat. One of the medical machines close to his bed began bleating rhythmically.

The door flew open, and a doctor came straight to his bed.

“Two …” Grigoriev croaked. “… Zero …”

“That’s enough,” the doctor said. He leaned over Grigoriev. “Just relax, sir. Don’t try to talk.”

The agent looked at his notebook and read back the numbers. “Five-eight-two-nine-one-five-five-two-zero. Is that correct? What does that mean?”

“I said that’s enough!” the doctor snapped.

The pain came out of nowhere, squeezing Grigoriev’s heart like a fist. His vision was narrowing. “Tell …” The room was a tunnel now, the doctor and the agent at the far end of a lengthening tube of darkness. “Tell … your … president.”

The bleating of the machine became a continuous squeal, and the hospital room disappeared.

CHAPTER 23

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #3

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

0822 hours (8:22 AM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

Standing at the mouth of the cave, Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov looked down the snowy side of Koryaksky mountain toward Petropavlovsk, the capital city of his new nation. The missile attacks and naval bombardment had ceased—for the moment at least—and thick columns of smoke were rising from at least a dozen places in his city, to mingle with the slate gray clouds blowing in from Siberia.

Zhukov could not hear the sirens from this distance, but he was certain that they were in full-cry as emergency crews rushed to contain fires and rescue the injured. The distance also insulated him from the cries of the wounded and the dying. That was probably for the best. He could not allow his human instinct for compassion to influence his thoughts and actions. He must follow the example set by Lenin, and accept the fact that blood, and pain, and death were part of the cost of revolution.

Later, when the struggle was won and Russia had regained her rightful position as a world power, the people who died here would be properly honored. He would see to that. The history books would record this as the Siege of Petropavlovsk, and he would have the names of those who lost their lives here engraved on every monument in the new Russia. But those were thoughts for the future. If he was going to bring that future about, he needed to concentrate on the present.

He looked again at the columns of smoke. As he had expected, the majority of the damage appeared to be concentrated on the naval station at Rybachiy, and the Oblast government buildings at Ploshad Lenina. Those doddering old fools in Moscow were reacting exactly as he had predicted. By attacking the seat of his government and his largest military base, they hoped to cut off the head of his revolution and break its back in a single stroke. It obviously hadn’t occurred to them that he would not sit still and wait for their axe to fall.

The attacks had been brief, but surprisingly ferocious: an astonishing amount of firepower brought to bear in a very short period of time. The Ministry of Defense had taken a page from America’s book, and tried their own version of the infamous Shock and Awe tactic. But Zhukov had studied American tactics as well. More importantly, he had studied the tactics of America’s enemies. One of the best lessons had come from the mountains of Afghanistan … Your enemy cannot destroy what he cannot find.

Kamchatka was one of the most volcanic regions on the globe. Koryaksky, Avachinsky, and Kozelsky, the three dormant volcanic mountains closest to Petropavlovsk, were riddled with lava caves, and Zhukov had equipment, supplies, and men hidden in most of them. If the mighty United States military could not root Taliban fighters out of the mountains and caves of Afghanistan, the crumbling Russian army would have no better luck trying to pry Zhukov’s own forces out of the caverns and volcanoes of Kamchatka.

Not that they wouldn’t try, once they discovered that their clumsy attempt at a decapitation attack had failed. But he had no intention of letting things go that far.

Weapons were engines of power. The more terrible a weapon was, the greater its power. Lenin had understood that. So had Stalin and Khrushchev. But Brezhnev, with his love for expensive clothes and cars from America and Western Europe, had not understood. And the imbeciles who had stumbled along so blindly in Brezhnev’s footsteps had shown even less understanding of the simple logic of power.

The door to the command post opened behind him, and Zhukov turned to see one of his lieutenants walk between the pair of Chinese soldiers who guarded the entrance to the facility. The lieutenant strode briskly toward his new president, sparing not even a glance for the Chinese guards, as though even the act of looking at them was beneath him.

Zhukov understood the lieutenant’s feelings. Apart from the fact that Asians were ethnically classified as chernyee, or black, to the burgeoning groundswell of racism in Russia, these chernyee were mercenaries. They had come here to fight, not because they supported the reestablishment of communism in Russia, but because their politburo—the Central Committee of the People’s Republic of China—was willing to trade the lives of forty thousand combat troops for access to crucial nuclear missile technology.

Their black uniforms had been stripped of labels and insignia; they carried no identification or personal effects, and the serial numbers had been removed from their weapons. They had even been delivered by civilian automobile transport ships, with no traceable connection to the Chinese government. Their political masters in Beijing were taking every precaution to allow themselves maximum deniability if Zhukov’s plans for revolution went astray.

Of course, the Chinese soldiers had been told none of this. They had been told only that they were part of a covert combat action that was crucial to the defense of their country. They had all received bonuses equal to three years worth of pay, with the promise of a matching bonus upon successful completion of the mission. That, plus the rigid discipline of the Chinese military, was enough to ensure their functional loyalty for the moment at least.

Zhukov had no illusions that the chernyee bastards would stay bought, but he wouldn’t need them for very long. They were not the core of his revolution. They were merely the torch needed to light the fire.

The lieutenant halted, came to attention, and saluted. “Comrade President, there is news.”

Zhukov returned the salute and accepted a small bundle of papers from the lieutenant’s gloved left hand. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant.” He glanced down at the papers. “Give me a summary.”

The lieutenant dropped his salute, but remained at attention. “Comrade President, your staff is downloading press statements from Pravda, Izvestia, and several western news sources. They are all carrying essentially the same story. Moscow has issued a formal statement that the revolution has been put down. They claim to have wiped out our command and control infrastructure, and they are speculating that most of our senior officers and officials were killed by their cruise missile attacks. They confirm the destruction of your offices at Ploshad Lenina, and your private residence. You are listed as missing and presumed dead, Comrade President.”

Zhukov smiled and thumped himself on the chest. “I must admit that I feel pretty good for a walking corpse.”

The lieutenant returned his smile. “Yes, sir! The papers also report that the threat of nuclear action has passed, and that the Zelenograd is trapped under the ice pack, where it will be located and destroyed shortly.”

Zhukov felt his smile widen a fraction. This was the news he had been waiting for. He nodded toward the man. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant. You may return to your duties.”

The lieutenant saluted, did an about-face, and marched past the Chinese guards and into the command post.

When the door had closed behind the man, Zhukov looked down at the printouts from the newspaper websites. He’d read them later. For now, it was enough to feel them in his hand. Once again, Moscow was reacting as he had predicted.

He turned his eyes to the pillars of smoke rising from the city below him. He would let the story percolate through the various news medias for another couple of hours, to give most of the supposed experts an opportunity to weigh in on the swift destruction of his revolution. Then he would give the order for the next phase of the operation, and reveal to the world that so-called Russian government was populated by liars and fools.

CHAPTER 24

ICE PACK - NORTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

LATITUDE 58.29N / LONGITUDE 155.20E

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

1001 hours (10:01 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The timing was precise. All six charges detonated at the same instant, and a circular stretch of the ice pack exploded into an expanding cloud of water vapor and ice fragments. When the rumble of the blast had faded to silence and the last of the scattered ejecta had fallen back to surface of the ice pack, a large opening—about thirty meters in diameter—remained in the ice. Between the displacement effect of the shockwave and the heat of the expanding gases, the hole was nearly clear of debris, leaving a sizeable circle of the Sea of Okhotsk open to the frigid Siberian sky.

Left alone, the newly-formed pocket of open sea would have begun to skin-over with new ice almost immediately. But it was not to be left alone, because the detonation of the shaped charges was only the tiniest precursor of the energies about to be channeled through this particular section of frozen ocean.

The water near the center of the opening began to foam, and the surrounding ice began to vibrate. An enormous bubble broke the surface of the water, followed a millisecond later by the blunt-nosed cylindrical shape of a Russian R-29R nuclear missile.

Still riding the supercavitating gas bubble of its submerged launch system, the 35-ton missile had barely cleared the surface of the water when the liquid-fueled rocket engines of its first stage ignited. Nitrogen tetroxide merged with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine to feed the missile’s fiery exhaust. With a roar like an insanely-massive blowtorch, the weapon leapt toward the sky on a silver-white column of smoke and flame.

Accelerating rapidly, it was moving at 5 kilometers a second—roughly four times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet—when it blew through the thin layer of cirrostratus clouds in the upper troposphere and shot into the stratosphere. Three seconds later and still accelerating, the first stage burned out and the missile passed through 25,000 meters, where the deepening blue of the sky gave way to the blackness of space.

The engines of the second stage fired, blasting the upper third of the missile up and away from the burned out and empty hulk of the first stage. Relieved of its burden, the missile gained still more speed, climbing away on its own pillar of flame while the remains of the discarded first stage fell back to earth like a man-made meteor of scorched aluminum-magnesium alloy.

The second stage burned out at an altitude of 200 kilometers, triggering timed electrical pulses to a ring of small explosive charges in the mating collar that joined the second stage of the missile to the warhead bus. The explosives detonated instantly, fracturing the aerodynamic collar along carefully-engineered structural stress points. The inertia imparted by the small explosion was enough to separate the warhead bus from the expended second stage.

Referred to by missile engineers as mechanical separation, this final severance of the payload from its launch vehicle marked the end of the boost phase of the trajectory, and the beginning of the ascent phase. Moving at 7 kilometers per second, the bluntly-conical warhead bus no longer needed rocket engines to complete its journey. From this point forward, the earth’s gravitational pull and the physics of ballistic flight would do all the work.

The trajectory of the weapon began to flatten now, nosing over into a curving arc toward the east, and that mass of land known to humans as North America.

*  *  *

21ST Space Operations Center (Sunnyvale, California):

Technical Sergeant Diane Claxton watched the screen of her SAWS console and inhaled softly through clenched teeth. This couldn’t be right. This just couldn’t be right. Ignoring the pulsing red alert icon at the top of her display screen, she tapped a rapid series of commands into her console and called up an off-axis view from another early warning satellite. The second bird—another U.S. Air Force Eagle Eye series surveillance satellite—was at the extreme edge of its operational footprint, so the images it produced were grainy and poorly-focused. Despite the lack of optical clarity, the feed from the second satellite confirmed the findings of the first.

Technical Sergeant Claxton adjusted her communications headset so that the microphone hung a few inches in front of her mouth. She keyed the mike. “Senior Watch Officer, this is Station Five. Eagle Eye is tracking a ballistic missile launch alert in sector green, grid reference twenty-eight alpha. The launch point appears to be south of Siberia and west of Kamchatka. Looks like the Sea of Okhotsk.” She tapped in another sequence of keystrokes. “I have off-axis confirmation from a second Eagle Eye bird. Missile trajectory is east, toward California.”

A voice crackled in the sergeant’s left ear. “This is the Senior Watch Officer; I copy ballistic missile launch alert in sector green, grid reference twenty-eight alpha. Cross-check with PAVE PAWS for radar confirmation.”

PAVE PAWS, short for Precision Acquisition Vehicle Entry Phased Array Warning System, was a long-range land-based radar network operated by the U.S. Air Force’s Space Command. Its primary mission was to detect and track ballistic missiles that might pose a threat to U.S. territory.

It took less than a minute for the PAVE PAWS radar installation at Beale Air Force Base, California to corroborate the inbound missile. By that time, the installation at Clear Air Force Station, Alaska had locked on and was also tracking the missile. Both radars confirmed the findings of the Eagle Eye satellites: an unannounced missile launch, with a ballistic trajectory toward the United States.

The Senior Watch Officer lifted the handset of a blue telephone. The phone had no buttons or dial; it was a direct connection to North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The Senior Watch Officer swallowed and then spoke the words he had trained for many times, but never expected to say. “This is Tripwire Command. I have emergency flash traffic for CINCNORAD… Code word PINNACLE.”

*  *  *

White House, Presidential Emergency Operations Center (Washington, DC):

President Chandler was glad he was sitting, because his knees were so weak that he wasn’t sure he could stand. He glanced around the room at the military and civilian personnel who staffed the PEOC. To outward appearances, they were going about the details of their respective jobs as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. People studied video screens, worked at computer stations, spoke quietly into telephones and communications handsets, wrote on clipboards, and exchanged printouts and folders with the same intense but subdued efficiency they showed on any other day. How did they do that? How could they calmly go about their business when a nuclear missile was screaming toward the United States at twenty-five times the speed of sound?

Was it their training, or some unnatural level of personal discipline? Was it possible that it was all a front? Could they all be faking it, putting on the outward signs of professional detachment when they were really quaking in their boots?

This last idea made sense to him, because that’s exactly what he was doing at the moment. On the outside, he was the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, thoughtful, decisive, and utterly unruffled by the emergency unfolding around them. On the inside, he was one step short of peeing his pants. He wanted to run around the room, shrieking at the top of his lungs—not that his shaky knees were up to such an energetic task at the moment.

He jerked his gaze to the wall-sized geographic display screen. The image looked so harmless, just a thin red line curving from the Sea of Okhotsk to a point somewhere above the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As he watched, the arc disappeared from the screen for a fraction of a second, and then reappeared—redrawn slightly longer as the missile came closer to the West Coast of his country.

For all of its graphic simplicity, that curving red line represented destruction and death on a scale almost beyond the scope of imagination. In all of history, only two nuclear weapons had been used against human targets. Between them, the bombs codenamed ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’ had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 150,000 people. Another half million people had died from nuclear radiation over the following five years. The combined yield of those first two atomic bombs had been 36 kilotons: the destructive equivalent of 36,000 tons of conventional explosives.

The missile hurtling through the black reaches of near-earth space carried three warheads, each with a destructive yield of 200 kilotons. Combined, the destructive power of those warheads was more than fifteen times greater than the two most terrible weapons ever turned by man onto his fellow men.

A door opened at the rear of the room and the president glanced over his shoulder to see National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven walk into the operations center, followed by a young Marine lieutenant. The lieutenant made a beeline toward the Deputy Watch Officer, and the national security advisor pulled out a chair and seated himself at the briefing table.

The president turned back to the geographic display. The curving red line on the screen flashed again, and grew longer. The unfinished end of the arc continued to edge its way eastward, toward the coast of California.

The carnage at Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been so dire that the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world had, for the first time in history, shied away from using one of the weapons in their collective arsenals. Nuclear bombs and missiles had been built, tested in remote areas, and stockpiled against some unthinkable future. But they’d never again been used against human beings. Not until now…

The president felt a shudder coming on, and he clamped down on his muscles to suppress it. The Commander in Chief of the United States military could not get the shakes during a crisis.

It wasn’t a personal fear thing. At least he could comfort himself with that knowledge. He’d been in life-threatening situations before, and he’d never reacted this way. He didn’t want to die, but he wasn’t terrified by the idea. He knew that it was in him to sacrifice his life, if the circumstances demanded.

This wasn’t about self-preservation, or the safety of his family. That missile couldn’t get anywhere near Washington. From its estimated launch position in the Sea of Okhotsk, the R-29R missile could hit any American city west of Denver. That put Washington, DC about 1,500 miles outside the target zone.

Personal safety wasn’t the issue here. The real danger was in what that missile could trigger.

On the table in front of him lay a heavy ten-ring binder, with anodized aluminum covers and color-coded pages. Its official title was the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP. It was the strategic blueprint for nuclear war—America’s plan for employing the ultimate Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The binder was open to Section Orange, the pages the color of children’s aspirin. Bold block letters at the top of every page identified this section as “RETALIATORY NUCLEAR STRIKE OPTIONS.”

But the president wasn’t looking at the SIOP. His eyes remained fixed on the geographic display. That harmless looking line of red pixels on the video screen could turn out to be the opening stroke of Armageddon. He might be looking at the first shot of the last war mankind would ever fight. The one Einstein had spoken of as the end of the human species.

The president took a breath and exhaled sharply. “Talk to me, general. Give me the latest.”

General Horace Gilmore, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, looked up from a red and white striped folder of computer hardcopy. He paused for a second, as though marshalling his thoughts.

“Sir, we’re getting the last of the readiness confirmations now. We are at DEFCON 1: full offensive and defensive nuclear readiness. All active missile squadrons are at full alert, and all Minuteman III silos are at launch-standby. The Navy has issued pre-launch warnings to all deployed Trident ballistic missile subs. The Air Force is scrambling B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base, and B-52s from Minot, and Barksdale.”

The president held up a hand. “Wait a second … We’re already launching bombers?”

The general nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s standard operating procedure.”

The president frowned. “Strategic bombers? Carrying nuclear weapons?”

General Gilmore nodded again. “Affirmative, Mr. President. Standard precautionary deployment.” He glanced down at the computer printouts in the red and white striped folder. “The Vice President and the Secretary of Defense are in route to…”

The president cut him off. “Hold it. Just stop right there. I have not authorized the deployment of nuclear weapons. Who in the hell is launching bombers with nuclear payloads?”

Gregory Brenthoven cleared his throat. “Ah … Mr. President, that’s a standard response. As soon as we confirmed the presence of an inbound nuclear missile, the Commander in Chief, North American Aerospace Defense Command declared an Air Defense Emergency. Precautionary deployment is within the scope of his authority, but that’s as far as he can go without presidential authorization. He can put bombers in the air, but he can’t order them to attack. Only you can do that, sir.”

“That’s correct, sir,” the general said. He pointed to the open binder on the briefing table. “It’s all spelled out in the Single Integrated Operational Plan. CINCNORAD is just ensuring that our strategic bomber wings don’t get caught on the ground when that missile’s warheads start hitting their targets.”

The president paused for a second, and loosened his necktie. “I interrupted your briefing, General. Please continue.”

The general glanced down at the striped folder. “Vice President Wainright and the Secretary of Defense are in route to the Alternate National Military Command and Control Center at Site Romeo. Per your orders, Homeland Security is issuing civil defense warnings to all cities and towns west of Burlington, Colorado. After we know the impact zones for the warheads, Homeland Security will coordinate with FEMA and the National Weather Service to calculate fallout footprints. Then they’ll issue radiation warnings in the affected areas and initiate quarantine protocols if necessary.”

President Chandler nodded, partly in response to what the general had not said. When news of the incoming warheads began to take hold, there would be panic in the western states—assuming that it hadn’t started already. The civil defense warning would advise people to stay off the roads and take shelter indoors, in their own homes where possible. But how many people would actually follow the guidelines? And how many would run to their cars and bolt for the nearest highway out of town?

The interstates would be jammed, and a lot of people were going to get hurt in the mad rush to get away from the cities, even in areas far removed from the actual target sites. There would be looting, rioting, and crimes of opportunity.

The loss of life due to ill-conceived panic reactions would probably exceed the casualty counts from the bombs, wherever they happened to strike. That made for a compelling argument against warning the civilian populace of an impending attack.

But the citizenry had to trust its leaders in times of crisis. If the Russian warheads fell on civilian targets without warning, the country would come apart at the seams the instant the public realized that the government had known the truth and chosen to hide it. After that, no amount of good intent would be able to stop the slide into chaos.

The problem was complicated by the fact that they didn’t yet know where the warheads were going to fall. If they could narrow down the list of potential targets, they could confine the emergency warnings to only the areas that were likely to be hit. That would presumably reduce the scope of the panic, which should help limit the resulting injuries. Fewer people stampeding away from target zones should translate into fewer traffic accidents, fewer heart attacks, fewer suicides … fewer instances of all the myriad ways that frightened humans could find to hurt themselves.

But that was part of the terrible beauty of the MIRV design. The warheads would not be locked into their final trajectories until just minutes before they re-entered the atmosphere. By then, it would be too late to warn anyone.

Despite the predictable consequences, there was no real choice. The people had to be told, even if the act of warning them sent some of them to their deaths.

On the geographic display, the curving red line flashed again and grew longer.

A Marine captain walked to General Gilmore’s side, stopped, and spoke softly.

The general nodded, and turned to the president. “Sir, the hotline is up. We’ve got it patched through to your secure telephone, and President Turgenev is on the line.”

The president reached for the phone. “Thank you.”

In movies, the famed hotline between Washington and Moscow is usually depicted as a futuristic-looking red telephone, often decorated with flickering lights and strange mechanical reinforcements intended to convey the impression that the phone is somehow armored or bombproof. In at least one popular action film, the handset of the famous red phone was locked to the cradle by a formidable-looking steel clamp that could only be released by a key worn on a chain around the neck of the president.

But the Secure Terminal Equipment phone sitting on the briefing table looked like any other black multi-line telephone—the kind you might find on a desk in any office building. Only the narrow horizontal slot in the front of the base suggested that the STE phone might be something out of the ordinary.

The Marine captain leaned across the table and inserted a Fortezza-Hyper series encryption card into the slot. The phone beeped once softly, and the word ‘SECURE’ appeared in the rectangular LCD call display.

The young officer slid the phone across the table top until it rested directly in front of the president. “Ready, sir.”

President Chandler lifted the handset.

His Russian counterpart, President Anatoliy Petrovitch Turgenev, spoke almost immediately.

“Mr. President … Frank … Are you on the line?”

The Russian president’s voice sounded hollow and metallic, a side-effect of digital compression, and the encryption/decryption process that scrambled and unscrambled the signal. His English was accented, but very fluent.

“Yes, Anatoliy,” the president said. “I’m on the line.”

“It’s a pleasure to hear your voice,” the Russian leader said. “I only wish we were speaking under better circumstances.”

“So do I,” the president said. “So do I.”

“This attack is not the work of my country,” Turgenev said. “Zhukov is a maniac. He is operating without the support, or the consent of my Government. You must believe that, Frank.”

“I do believe it,” the president said. “I’m well aware of your efforts to put down Mr. Zhukov’s coup. But those efforts have failed, and the situation is now beyond your control. Frankly, Anatoliy, it may have gone beyond anyone’s control.”

There was a pause before the Russian president spoke again. “Frank … Mr. President, I know that this crisis requires your full concentration, and I don’t want to delay you or distract you. But I must ask for your assurance that the United States will not retaliate with nuclear weapons.”

President Chandler felt his grip on the telephone receiver tighten. “Pardon me?”

“The government of the Russian Federation would like your personal guarantee that the United States will not attack targets in Russian territory with nuclear weapons.”

It was President Chandler’s turn to pause.

“I’m, sorry,” he said slowly, “I do not believe I can make that guarantee.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. On the big display screen, the red arc grew longer as the Russian missile continued its trajectory toward California.

After several seconds, the Russian leader spoke again. “Mr. President, if we cannot reach some agreement, this situation can easily get out of hand.”

“My country is under nuclear attack,” the president said. “The situation has already gotten out of hand.”

“I am attempting to prevent an escalation,” Turgenev said softly.

“I understand that,” the president said. “And the United States has no intention of escalating this conflict, if that can be prevented. We’re preparing to intercept the warheads now. If we’re successful, and there are no further attacks, your government and mine can consider how to proceed. But if nuclear warheads fall on American soil, the United States will retaliate in kind.”

“I see,” the Russian president said. “May I at least ask that you confine your counterstrikes to targets in Kamchatka?”

“Of course,” President Chandler said. “Our retaliation will be directed against the rogue element who launched this attack, not against your country. Will that be satisfactory?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the Russian president said. “I will convey your message to my government. Let us hope for the best.”

“Yes,” said the president. “Let’s do that.”

He replaced the telephone receiver gently in its cradle, and looked up at Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Give me a status update, General. Where are we with this?”

General Gilmore checked the latest printouts in his striped folder. “Mr. President, our ground-based Midcourse Defenses at Fort Greely and Vandenberg are preparing to launch EKVs,” he said. “We’re going to try to intercept the incoming missile over the Pacific.”

From earlier briefings, the president knew that an EKV was an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle: a ground-launched missile designed to intercept a ballistic warhead in flight, and destroy it before it could reenter the atmosphere.

“Understood,” he said. “What are our chances of successfully intercepting the warheads in space?”

General Gilmore adjusted his black-rimmed glasses. “Frankly, Mr. President, the odds are not great. Our Ballistic Missile Defense System is still only partially operational. Some of the significant technologies are either still under development, or not fully tested. The system has demonstrated fairly good results against single-warhead test missiles that closely simulate the type likely to be employed by Iran or North Korea. But multiple warheads … MIRVs are a different matter. They’re significantly more difficult to intercept.”

“Because it’s harder to hit three targets than it is to hit one?”

“Not three targets, sir,” the general said. “Seven.”

The national security advisor frowned. “Seven? I thought this missile only carried three warheads.”

“That’s correct,” said General Gilmore. “But the R-29 was designed to deliver up to seven warheads. When the START agreement was ratified, the Russians reduced the payload to three warheads, to comply with the terms of the treaty. They replaced the other four with decoys that mimic the size, shape, weight, and movement of the real thing. They even copied the thermal signature and tumble pattern. We can tell the decoys from the real ones in a laboratory, but there’s no way to spot the difference while they’re falling out of the sky at mach twenty-five. Only three of the reentry vehicles from that missile are going to be real nukes, but we have no way of knowing which three.”

“So we have to go after all seven,” Brenthoven said.

“Unfortunately,” the general said. “We can either shoot them all down before they reach their targets, or wait until they hit the ends of their trajectories and see which ones don’t detonate.”

President Chandler shook his head. “And we waste just as much energy taking out the decoys as we do killing the real warheads?”

The general nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty much the whole idea behind MIRV technology … to complicate the hell out of the problem of intercepting ballistic missiles.”

The president smiled weakly. “Sounds like the Russians have done a pretty good job of that.”

“That’s not the half of it, sir. The R-29R was engineered by the Soviet Union at the height of their Cold War paranoia. It may be a few years old, but it’s a tricky son-of-a-bitch.”

The general’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “The warhead section, or what the engineers call the bus, has a four-chamber liquid fuel rocket engine. Every time it launches a warhead or a decoy, it maneuvers before it launches the next one. Moving at multi-mach speed, even a relatively small amount of vertical or horizontal displacement can create a significant amount of lateral vector, sending each warhead or decoy on a different trajectory—toward a different target. And to just to make things really confusing, the R-29R spits out plenty of anti-radar chaff to confuse our sensors and interceptor missiles.”

“You make it sound impossible,” the president said.

“It’s not impossible, sir,” the general said. “But the odds are not in our favor. Since we can only bring a relatively small number of EKVs to bear, there’s a strong possibility that one of the warheads will slip past our interceptors. If we’re really unlucky, they might all get through.”

The president swallowed. “Understood. What’s our fallback plan if any of the warheads evade our EKVs?”

“Then it’s the Navy’s turn at bat, sir,” General Gilmore said. “The Aegis cruiser, USS Shiloh, is operating off the California coast. The ship has the Ballistic Missile Defense upgrades to its SM-3 missile systems. If the EKVs fail, the ship will attempt to intercept the warheads in the late stages of the midcourse phase, shortly before the warheads reenter the atmosphere.”

“And how do our chances look with that?” the president asked.

The general shook his head. “It’s a coin toss, sir. The Navy’s systems have had even less testing than the land-based systems. The CNO seems to think pretty well of them, but it’s difficult to know if that’s a dispassionate evaluation, or just pride of ownership.”

The president drummed his fingers on the mahogany tabletop. “And if the Navy’s missiles can’t get all the warheads, what then?”

“That depends on where the individual warheads are targeted, sir,” the general said. “When the reentry vehicles go into the terminal phase of their trajectories, one or more of them might pass within range of a Patriot III battery. If so, the Army will get a crack at shooting them down. The good news is that the Patriot III missile system is the most thoroughly developed and tested component of our Ballistic Missile Defense System. It’s had a good operational track record against short-to-medium range tactical missiles in the Middle East. The bad news is that we haven’t got nearly enough coverage. There aren’t enough Patriot batteries deployed in the western states to cover half the cities or military bases. If some of the incoming nukes are targeted on unprotected areas, they’re going to get a free ride to the target.”

The general’s voice didn’t change, and his tone carried no trace of derision. But he undoubtedly knew that his Commander in Chief had cut spending for additional Patriot batteries from the last two annual defense budgets.

At the time, the decision had seemed both right and obvious. It had looked like an easy opportunity to fulfill the public trust and reduce some of the strain on the wallet of the American taxpayer. After all, nobody was crazy enough to launch a nuclear missile at the United States.

President Chandler glanced up at the slender red line on the geographic display. It flashed and grew longer.

Against all conceivable reason, somebody had been that crazy after all.

*  *  *

R-29R:

The warhead bus reached apogee at an altitude of 1,200 kilometers. As the weapon rode through the high point of its trajectory, its onboard computer took optical sightings of three different stars and calculated the elevation angle of each, as referenced to an imaginary line from the center of the warhead bus to the center of the earth. The time of the sightings and the results of the calculations were compared to celestial navigation tables stored in the computer’s memory to determine the precise position and orientation of the warhead bus. That position was, in-turn, compared to the position calculated by the weapon’s inertial navigation system. The results were well within optimal parameters, and the onboard computer concluded that a corrective engine burn would not be required prior to warhead deployment.

The bus began its curving descent toward the earth, gaining additional speed as it nosed over and plunged back down into the steepening well of gravity.

*  *  *

30th Space Wing, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Santa Barbara County, California):

With a low-pitched groan of shielded hydraulics, the armored hatch cover slid to one side, revealing the octagonal opening to an underground missile silo set deep in the reinforced concrete. Fifty yards away, the hatch cover of another silo slid open at the same time, and fifty yards beyond that, a third silo cover duplicated the motion of the first two.

A gush of smoke spewed forth from each open silo, followed a fraction of a second later by the cacophonous roar of three Lockheed Martin booster rockets. In unison, the trio of interceptor missiles shot toward the clear blue California sky, each trailing a wake of flaming exhaust gases. Hydraulic motors groaned again, and the silo hatches began to slide back into position.

About 2,300 miles to the northwest, at the Army missile complex at Fort Greely, Alaska, four more interceptor missiles blasted into the sky. Before the missile silos were fully closed, all seven missiles were climbing toward space at 3.9 miles per second.

*  *  *

R-29R:

Six hundred kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, the computer in the missile’s warhead bus transmitted simultaneous trigger pulses to five electronic relays. Each relay was wired to an electromagnetic latching mechanism and a small, shaped explosive charge. The electromagnetic latches snapped open, releasing the conical shroud that housed the nuclear warheads. A millisecond later, the tiny explosive charges fired, splitting the shroud into five sections, and propelling them out and away, opening the interior of the bus to the vacuum of near-earth space.

The removal of the larger cone revealed seven smaller cones, the narrow ends of which were pointed into the line of flight, toward their ever-nearing targets. Each of the seven cones was a reentry vehicle, wrapped in a carbon fiber heat shield impregnated with phenolic resin. Four of the reentry vehicles were decoys. The other three were Soviet-built 200 kiloton nuclear weapons. To all external appearances, the decoys and the real warheads were identical.

At a precisely-timed instant, another relay tripped, and another tiny explosive charge fired. The first of the reentry vehicles was shoved away from the bus, its nose pointed downward in the direction of the trajectory that it would follow into the atmosphere and then to its target.

As soon as the deployed reentry vehicle was clear, the computer in the warhead bus fired two of its four liquid fueled rocket engines for six-tenths of a second. The short burn was enough to displace the bus slightly to the north, placing it in perfect alignment for the deployment of the second reentry vehicle.

Over the next ninety-eight seconds, the process was repeated and then repeated again, until all seven reentry vehicles had been deployed. When the last warhead was on its way, the bus performed a final burn of its rocket engines, aligning itself for its own terminal trajectory into the earth’s atmosphere. Four hundred kilometers below, the planet rushed up to meet it.

CHAPTER 25

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM

WESTERN UNITED STATES

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

3:23 PM PST

At 3:23 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on the 2nd of March, the Emergency Alert System transmitted warnings of inbound nuclear weapons to all areas of the United States within the target footprint of the Russian R-29R missile. The alert area encompassed most of California, the lower 75 percent of Nevada and Utah, the upper half of Arizona, the northwest corner of New Mexico, the western half of Colorado along a curving line, and a sliver of the southwest corner of Wyoming.

Every AM, FM, and satellite radio station within those states suddenly found its scheduled broadcast preempted by a raucous two-tone attention signal, followed by the baritone voice of a Federal spokesman, warning of the possible approach of multiple nuclear warheads. “Seek shelter immediately,” the strange voice advised. “Get off the roads as quickly and safely as you can. Do not attempt to evacuate. You are safest inside a building. Stay away from windows if possible, and avoid looking toward the sky until the all-clear signal is given. Parents are advised to account for all children immediately, and move them to the nearest available shelter.”

The voice continued to offer warnings and instructions.

The signal went out over television simultaneously, taking control of every cable network, every broadcast facility, and every satellite television provider in the target states. The two-tone attention signal was the same, and the voice of the Federal spokesman came out of the speakers of every operational television in the affected areas, regardless of what channel they happened to be tuned to.

The face of a human announcer might have been reassuring to the more panic-prone viewers, but every television screen showed the emblem of the Emergency Alert System: the letters E-A-S in bright red capitals against a radially-divided blue silhouette map of the United States.

The words of the spokesman scrolled across the bottom of the screen as subtitles, the text alternating between English and Spanish.

Although not required to by law, streaming internet radio stations picked up the alert signal and ran it as a live feed. Several major cellular telephone providers—also operating on a volunteer basis—sent text messages to every phone number in their client rosters, advising customers to get off the streets, take shelter, and locate a television or radio for further instructions.

Many of the inhabitants of the affected areas followed the advice provided by the Emergency Alert System. They rounded up their children and sought shelter in their homes, as far away from windows as they could manage. But a lot of people—too many—decided that the only real safety lay in getting as far away from cities and military bases as possible. They ran to their cars and raced for the nearest roads out of town.

*  *  *

EKV:

Three hundred kilometers above the earth, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle #6 shifted into terminal guidance phase. Somewhere far below, the Lockheed Martin rocket that had boosted the kill vehicle into sub-orbital space was now tumbling back into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The EKV could not see its target. In point of fact, it had no awareness of the target’s existence. It knew nothing of lethal aim-point guidance, convergent trajectories, or even that it was hurtling toward its own destruction at more than 25,000 kilometers per hour. The EKV’s sole attention was focused on the beam of digital telemetry streaming up from the antennas at Vandenberg Air Force Base. It monitored the beam continuously, and reacted instantly to the maneuvering commands imbedded in the digital signal—firing pitch, roll, and yaw thrusters on command—making minute corrections to its own motion vectors to match the predicted position of a Russian warhead that it could never see.

The EKV carried no explosive. It was a hit-to-kill weapon, designed to destroy its target with the kinetic energy created by its tremendous speed, in much the same way that speed and inertia could transform the simple lead pellet of a rifle bullet into a lethally destructive projectile.

The timing was flawless. The microsecond clock in the kill vehicle’s digital brain clicked down to zero at the precise instant that the EKV reached its designated coordinates in space. The kill vehicle and the target warhead slammed into each other at a combined closure rate of more than 50,000 kilometers per hour. The resultant explosion was like the flare of a tiny sun, as the tremendous force of the impact was converted instantly to several hundred megajoules of raw heat.

EKV #6 and its unseen target were no more.

*  *  *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:

Seen from the tracking screens of the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center of the United States Strategic Command, the destruction of EKV #6 and its target was considerably less dramatic. There were no brilliant flares or explosions, just a soft computer bleep, followed by three brief messages in the alert window:

> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #6

> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “FOXTROT”

> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4%

Air Force Major Lionel Humphrey read the lines of text and let out a shaky breath. It was working … It actually seemed to be working …

“Yeah!,” one of the console operators exclaimed. “Oh yeah! I think it’s gonna …”

“Shut up!,” Lionel snapped. His voice was overloud in the quiet of the control room. “Don’t jinx it,” he said in a softer tone. “Just shut the hell up … and let it happen.”

*  *  *

Interstate 8 (San Diego, California):

The unofficial and un-recommended evacuation of San Diego began within minutes of the first emergency alert bulletin. The word tore through the city like wildfire. San Diego was a prime military target: the aircraft carriers at North Island … the amphibious warfare base on Coronado … the warships at 32nd Street Naval Station … the submarine base at Point Loma. Any enemy who wanted to cripple the U.S. would nuke San Diego with the very first barrage of missiles.

It seemed like good logic. And in the pressure cooker of a city succumbing to terror, the idea morphed from educated guess to solid fact in the space of mere minutes. Suddenly, the word was everywhere … San Diego was a confirmed target. The only way to survive was to get out of the city NOW! People jumped in their cars and ran for the freeways like lemmings.

The first casualties were from a pileup on Interstate 8, near the Grossmont Boulevard exit—the inevitable product of too many vehicles moving too quickly through too small an area.

Near the middle of the pack and rolling at eighty miles an hour, the driver of a white Ford pickup misjudged his following distance and slammed into the rear of a green Toyota minivan. With a crunch of buckling steel and collapsing plastic, the minivan careened to the left, smashing into the right front fender of a silver BMW Z8 convertible and slewing the sports car sideways into the side of a fourth vehicle.

Startled by the unexpected impact, and by the split-second shock of his driver-side airbag ballooning instantly into his face, the BMW driver snatched his foot away from the accelerator pedal, and stomped on the brakes. It was an utterly natural reaction. Given the same set of circumstances, a lot of drivers would have done precisely what he did. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

With that simple act of reflex, a multi-car fender-bender was transformed into a chain-reaction, propagating backward through the speeding lines of traffic as cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses crashed blindly into the wall of suddenly stationary vehicles to their immediate front. And amidst the rending of metal and the shattering of glass, drivers and passengers were crushed and broken right along with their vehicles.

The Russian warheads had not even penetrated the atmosphere, and already American citizens were beginning to die.

*  *  *

Alaska Regional Hospital, Anchorage, Alaska:

Charlie Sweigart tapped gently on the door to Gabriella’s room, and then opened it enough to stick his head in. “Hello?”

There was no answer. Gabriella was sleeping.

Charlie shuffled into her room, his hospital slippers making soft shushing noises as they slid across the tiled floor. He wheeled his IV rack in behind himself, taking care that his IV tubes didn’t catch on anything as he quietly closed the door. He probably didn’t need the IV anymore. He was over the hump now, and well on the road to recovery, but the doctors kept reminding him that advanced hypothermia was nothing to play around with.

He felt okay now, or at least well enough to finish his recovery at home. Of course, there might not be any home left to go to. His apartment was in San Diego, and if the news reports were accurate, California was coming unglued. Even if the missiles were shot down, or turned out to be a hoax or something, his two-bedroom loft in Mission Hills might not survive the panic that was ripping through his city.

There was nothing he could do about that now. The missiles would strike, or they wouldn’t. His little home would be preserved, or it would be destroyed. Ten minutes from now, the lid might come off the pot completely, and the superpowers could all start lobbing nukes at each other. Planet Earth might finally get its Third World War, but nothing Charlie could do from this hospital would make the slightest bit of difference. He could do nothing but wait, and Gabriella’s room seemed like a good place to do that.

He turned and looked at her. The sight nearly stole his breath away.

The tall ocean scientist was curled on her side, blue hospital sheets bunched and tangled around her long-limbed body, golden hair fanning across the pillow and spilling over the curve of her cheek. For a half-second, Charlie thought about brushing the hair from her cheek so that he could see her face more clearly. But he didn’t want to wake her, and he wasn’t at all certain that his touch would be welcome.

Gabriella had said things to him in those last few minutes of consciousness aboard the Nereus. Charlie knew that her words might have been nothing more than a delirious symptom of her advancing hypothermia, or even a wishful hallucination from his own cold-addled mind. He didn’t care. He wanted to believe in them anyway. And he didn’t want to break the fragile spell of his hopes by waking her.

He wanted Gabriella’s words to be real, and he wanted her to mean them. But he couldn’t control that, any more than he could control the warheads hurtling toward his country. So he stood and watched the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And his heart was so full that he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.

*  *  *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:

With another computer bleep, another trio of messages appeared in the alert window of the STRATCOM tracking screens:

> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #4

> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “DELTA”

> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4%

To his right, Major Lionel could hear a man’s voice whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

Lionel, who hadn’t felt the slightest desire to pray since he’d outgrown bedtime prayers at the age of nine, suddenly wondered if this might not be a good time to start again.

*  *  *

Highland Shipping and Commercial Freight (Provo, Utah):

Randall Dixon kicked open the door to the shipping office. The flimsy interior door gave way easily under the sole of his size-11 work boot. Particle board fractured and the simulated wood grain laminate split into several pieces as the broken door swung around on its hinges to bounce off the wall adjoining the doorway.

He hefted the ball-peen hammer he’d grabbed from the cab of his Freightliner. He caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his left eye as a little turd of a man dove for cover behind one of the desks. Dixon grinned. “Knock-knock, asshole.”

Silence, and then a quiet scuffling sound as that weasel Gillespie tried to burrow his worthless ass further out of sight.

Dixon took aim at a desk lamp and swung with the hammer. The lamp disintegrated in a shower of electrical sparks and broken glass.

“Eleven violations,” he growled. The hammer came down again, pulverizing an acrylic paperweight full of tiny starfish. The blow sent several pieces of paper fluttering to the floor.

“Eleven violations,” Dixon said again. “You wrote me up for every piddly-ass rule you could think of, didn’t you, you useless sack of shit?” To punctuate the last word, he brought the hammer down again. A coffee cup was jolted off the edge of the desk. It lay on its side, draining dark liquid into the coarse gray weave of the industrial carpet.

“It ain’t enough for you to get me kicked off the long-hauls where a man can earn a living wage,” Dixon said. “You gotta go after my ticket, don’t you? I break my hump for this company for eight years, and that’s how you’re gonna repay me—by jerking my license to drive a rig.”

The only answer was a series of muffled beeps. Gillespie was trying to use his cellular phone to call for help.

Dixon raised the hammer and held it cocked. The next time he swung, it would be to bash in the little pencil-pusher’s brains. “Calling the cops, ass-wipe?” He laughed. “Won’t do you no good. You ain’t heard? Russian missiles headed right for us. In about five minutes, we all gonna be dead. Our ashes are gonna be glowin’ in the dark like one of them science fiction movies.”

He flexed his grip on the wooden shaft of the hammer and began edging around the end of the desk, moving quietly so Gillespie wouldn’t be expecting him.

“You’re going first, you little shit,” he said. He spoke more softly now, hoping that Gillespie wouldn’t be able to tell that he was moving closer.

“If I’m gonna be dead in five minutes,” he said, “I want the pleasure of killing you myself!”

On the last syllable, he lunged around the end of the desk and leapt toward Gillespie. The little man squealed in terror and threw his hands up to protect his face.

Dixon brought the hammer down with every ounce of anger in his soul. He felt one of Gillespie’s wrists break as the blunt steel head of the heavy tool blurred through its arc without slowing. With a crack like the snap of a bullwhip, the hammer collided with Gillespie’s skull.

The first whack probably killed the bastard, but Dixon hit him six or eight more times just to be sure the job was done properly. Then he dropped the hammer on the floor and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the end of the world.

*  *  *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:

The computer emitted its now-familiar bleep, and three more lines of text appeared in the alert window:

> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #7

> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “GOLF”

> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 75.1%

Lionel scanned the last line. Seventy-five percent? Not a lot of safety margin there, but a kill was a kill. They’d managed to knock out three of the inbound warhead shapes so far. It was impossible to know how many of the destroyed targets had been decoys and how many had been real warheads.

Maybe they’d gotten all three of the warheads already, and the remaining four were all decoys. Then again, maybe all three successful intercepts had been decoys, and all three of the real warheads were still out there. The only way to be certain was to destroy them all.

The tracking computer bleeped again, and new lines of text appeared on the screen:

> TELEMETRY CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, EKV #2

> TRACK CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, BALLISTIC TARGET “BRAVO”

> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 00.0%

The words hit Lionel like a punch in the stomach. Zero percent? Telemetry continued past Intercept Point? ZERO percent?

“Oh shit!” one of the console operators said. “We missed one of them. One of the warheads got past us.”

“Calm down,” Lionel said. His voice contained a calmness that he did not feel. “Maybe it wasn’t a real warhead. Maybe it was one of the decoys.”

Please, just let it be the one, he thought. Let us get the rest of them. Let us knock the rest of them out of the sky. Please.

But the next alert message announced the failure of EKV #5, followed closely by the failures of EKV #3, and EKV #1.

Of the seven inbound warhead shapes, the ground-based interceptor missiles had managed to kill only three. Four of the targets had gotten past them.

Lionel could see them in his mind’s eye: four darkly conical shapes, streaking through the blackness of space, bending their trajectories downward. Toward his country. Toward the very people who depended upon Lionel to protect them.

How many of those shapes were nuclear bombs? One of them? None? Three? There was no way of knowing, but the warheads would shortly be passing into the reentry phase of their trajectories. Within the next few minutes, the question would answer itself.

Lionel stared at the screen, and the alert messages announcing the failed intercepts. It was up to the Navy, now. He hoped they were up to the challenge.

Like many of his fellow Air Force types, Lionel didn’t think much of the swab jockeys. They had too much mouth, too much money, and not enough of the Right Stuff. But he’d give a year’s pay to see them show up the Air Force right now. If they could knock down all four of the remaining targets, he’d plant a big sloppy kiss on the first Navy type he met. Male or female, eighteen years old or eighty, seaman or admiral. Lionel didn’t care. He just wanted them to finish the job. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.

*  *  *

Vista Del Rio Assisted Living Community (Long Beach, California):

Harvey Calloway muted the audio on the little bedroom television and hobbled over toward the window. With the sound turned off, he could hear the noise from outside more clearly. Down in the street, car horns were blaring and people were shouting. Harvey heard a pop in the distance that might have been a gunshot, but he couldn’t tell. He was in his nineties and even with his hearing aid turned all the way up, his hearing was pretty bad.

The window was only seven or eight feet away, but it took him a minute or so to cover the distance. The arthritis in his hips and knees made his steps short and difficult, the soles of his slippers scuffing painfully across the carpet in the shuffling walk that his great granddaughter called ‘choo-choo feet.’ He hated having to walk like that, but at least he could still make it around on his own. A lot of guys his age couldn’t get out of bed. Hell, come to think of it, most guys his age were already dead.

He was grateful to still be walking, arthritis and all. But he missed the bouncy swagger of his youth. Harvey had been something else in those days. Nothing but balls, good looks, and a big toothy grin. And man had he cut a figure in his uniform.

Harvey had been a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during the big one. In ‘42, he’d flown F4F Wildcats against the Vichy French over North Africa. And later he’d gone eyeball-to-eyeball with the Japanese at places like Tarawa, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. He’d even bagged himself a couple of Zeroes at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. He’d been flying the F6F by then.

The Hellcat … Now there, by Lord, had been an aircraft. Fueled and armed, she had weighed in at more than 15,000 pounds, but she’d danced on the breeze like a ballerina. And she’d given old ‘Snake Eyes’ Harvey Calloway and his squadron mates absolute dominance of the skies over the Pacific.

He craned his neck and looked through the window at the California sky. They’d beaten the Vichy Frogs, the Krauts, and the Nips. Everyone said they’d beaten the commies too, but Harvey had never really bought that. Everybody with a lick of sense knew the Russkis were bent on world domination. And suddenly they just throw down their guns and give up the fight, without firing a shot? Other people might believe that crap, but Harvey knew better. It had all been a trick, to get America to relax and drop her guard. The commies had been lying quiet and waiting for their moment to strike. And now it had come. Now the sneaky bastards were launching their A-bombs at America.

The guy on television was telling everybody to stay in their homes. Don’t panic. Don’t try to run. Harvey shifted his eyes to the traffic jam in the street below his window. It wouldn’t be too hard to follow the television guy’s advice. Even if he could still drive, there wasn’t a prayer of getting out of here before the bombs started to fall.

Of their own accord, Harvey’s eyes pointed themselves toward the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. There, behind pill bottles, handkerchiefs, and paperback novels, was an old companion: a Navy-issue .45 that had followed him home at the end of the war. He wasn’t supposed to have a gun here; it was against about a dozen of the rules for Vista Del Rio tenants. Harvey had smuggled it in wrapped up in a sweater, because he couldn’t make the staff understand that he needed it for protection.

“We have a security system here,” the Placement Manager had told him. “We have alarms on the doors and windows, and a roving security patrol. You don’t need to worry about burglars, Mr. Calloway. I promise you—you’ll be safe here.”

But the .45 wasn’t for burglars. It was for a different kind of protection. Harvey had promised himself a long time ago that he’d use it the very first day that he couldn’t get to the toilet by himself. A man shouldn’t have to go through life with hoses shoved into his orifices, and plastic bags of slop hanging from the side of his bed. That was something worth protecting yourself from.

Harvey blinked and looked out the window again. Those commie A-bombs should be falling any minute now …

*  *  *

USS Shiloh (CG-67):

Two armored hatches snapped open on the cruiser’s forward missile deck, revealing the weatherproof fly-through covers that capped the upper ends of two vertical launch missile cells. At the same instant, another pair of hatches snapped open on the ship’s aft missile deck.

Some fraction of a millisecond later, all four of the fly-through covers were blasted into fragments as two pairs of SM-3 missiles rocketed out of their vertical launch cells and roared into the afternoon sky on bright columns of fire.

In the darkened confines of the ship’s Combat Information Center, the Weapons Control Officer keyed the microphone of his communications headset and spoke into the tactical communications net. “TAO—Weapons Control. Four birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one-each on the four ballistic inbounds.” The rumble of the departing missiles was still faintly audible as he spoke.

The Tactical Action Officer’s reply came over the net a second later. “TAO, aye. Is there enough time to prep a second flight of birds in case we miss on some of the intercepts?”

The Weapons Control Officer keyed his mike again. “TAO—Weapons Control. That’s a negative. The inbounds are moving at about 14,000 miles an hour. We get one crack at this, sir. By the time we get off a second flight of birds, the inbounds will be outside of our missile engagement envelope.”

The reply was several seconds in coming. “TAO, aye. Let’s hope we don’t miss the first time.”

*  *  *

SM-3 Missiles:

At about the time the Tactical Action Officer was releasing his mike button, the four missiles were shedding their first stage boosters, and igniting the Dual Thrust Rocket Motors of their second stage engines.

The missiles gained speed and altitude quickly, ejecting their second stage boosters as they were climbing out of the upper stratosphere and into the lower reaches of near-earth space. Three of the SM-3 missiles performed this transition perfectly. The fourth missile did not.

A pre-stressed retaining pin in the mating collar between stages failed to shear under the calculated strain of stage separation. The mating collar did not separate, and the second stage booster did not drop away as it had been designed to do.

The missile’s computer was programmed to detect many types of technical casualties, but this simple mechanical failure had not been anticipated by the weapon’s designers. Unable to sense that the second stage booster was still attached, the missile’s computer transmitted the ignition command to the third stage rocket motor on schedule. The jet of hot expanding exhaust gasses, which should have poured harmlessly into the near vacuum of space, were channeled into the small chamber between the second and third stage motors. Unable to contain the expanding pressure wave, the airframe exploded, spewing streaks of shrapnel and fire into the void of the upper stratosphere.

*  *  *

USS Shiloh (CG-67):

The Weapons Control Officer read the flashing warning message on his screen, and keyed his microphone. “TAO—Weapons Control. I’m showing a pre-intercept failure on Bird #4.”

“Weapons Control—TAO. I copy your pre-intercept failure on Bird #4. What happened?”

The Weapons Control Officer scanned his readouts for a clue to the cause of the failure. After a few seconds, he keyed his mike again. “TAO—Weapons Control. I have no idea what went wrong, sir. Bird #4 just dropped off the scope.”

“TAO, aye. How long until we find out how our other birds are doing?”

“TAO—Weapons Control. It should be any time now.”

“Weapons Control—TAO. Is there no chance at all that we can get another bird up there to replace #4?

The Weapons Control Officer looked at the converging vectors on his display screen. “TAO—Weapons Control. No chance, sir.”

He released the mike button. “No chance at all.”

*  *  *

SM-3 Missile #2:

Thirty seconds before impact, the Kinetic Warhead separated from the third stage booster. Unlike the EKVs of the ground-based interceptors, the Mark-142 Kinetic Warhead was equipped with onboard sensors. It detected the target immediately, and used a brief series of pulses from its maneuvering thrusters to improve its angle of approach to the intercept point.

As with the EKVs, the KW’s arrival at the intercept point had to be timed to coincide with the arrival of its target. A millisecond too soon, and the KW would pass through the intercept coordinates ahead of its quarry. A millisecond too late, and the target would blow through the intercept coordinates before the KW arrived. In either case, the Russian warhead would slip past the KW and the intercept attempt would fail. The timing had to be nearly perfect.

It was.

The Soviet-built R-29R reentry vehicle arrived at the calculated intercept point at the exact same instant as the Kinetic Warhead. Several million Newton-meters of additive linear force were spontaneously translated to thermal energy. With a blindingly bright flash that no human eye would ever see, SM-3 missile #2 obliterated its target.

*  *  *

USS Shiloh (CG-67):

The Weapons Control Officer watched his screen. “TAO—Weapons Control. Splash one!”

Before the Tactical Action Officer could acknowledge the report, the Weapons Control Officer keyed his mike again. “TAO—Weapons Control. Splash two! And splash three! I say again, three hits—three kills.”

A cheer went up in Combat Information Center, and somebody shouted, “Nice shooting, Ensign. Kick ass and take names!”

The Weapons Control Officer nodded absently. He wanted to shout and cheer with the rest of them, but they couldn’t see what he could see. On the tactical display in front of him, the speed vector for the last Russian warhead continued to track across the screen. In a few brief seconds, it disappeared as the hurtling weapon passed out of the Shiloh’s engagement envelope.

It was gone, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

*  *  *

R-29R:

The Russian missile’s last remaining reentry vehicle dropped into the ever-thickening atmosphere of the planet below. Its cone shape and internal weight distribution made the device tail-heavy, giving it a nose-up attitude that oriented the widely rounded base into the axis of fall. The reentry vehicle effectively “backed” into the atmosphere, capitalizing on the principles of blunt body gas flow to carry away much of the fiery heat of reentry. The remaining heat load, though still nearly twice the melting temperature of steel, was absorbed and ablated by the vehicle’s pyrolytic graphite heat shield, which charred, sublimed, and then burned away in fractional layers.

The design of the heat shield was not Soviet technology, but the product of military espionage. Early in the Cold War, Soviet intelligence agents had copied the blunt body reentry shape from the work of American aeronautical engineers H. Julian Allen and Alfred J. Eggers Jr., and the ablative layering technique from America’s Mercury space program. And now that American technology was screaming back toward the nation of its birth at several times the speed of sound.

The heat shedding was critical to the vehicle’s mission, because—a few centimeters on the other side of the superheated skin—delicate circuits and mechanisms were at work. The conical device streaking toward the earth was not a decoy. It was a 200 kiloton KBS-34 series nuclear warhead, and it was in the process of arming itself for detonation.

*  *  *

White House, Presidential Emergency Operations Center (Washington, DC):

The red arc on the wall-sized geographic display screen was almost complete now. As President Chandler watched, it flashed and grew a fraction longer.

The firing envelopes of the Army’s Patriot III missile batteries appeared on the screen as green circles. The circles were large; the Patriot system had a good effective range, but there weren’t enough of them to provide adequate coverage. And none of the Patriot batteries intersected the final flight path of the Russian warhead.

As General Gilmore had predicted, the bomb was getting a free ride on the final leg to its target.

*  *  *

Warhead:

The sequence started slowly, but built in speed as the reaction began to escalate. When the reentry vehicle fell past 50,000 meters, a relay clicked open, channeling electrical power into a ring of high-voltage capacitors that encircled the core of the weapon. With a whine like angry mosquitoes, the capacitors began to charge.

At 10,000 meters, another timed relay clicked open. Near the narrow end of the cone, a pair of electrical solenoids rammed their actuator rods downward, forcing pistons into either end of a pressurized cylinder of tritium gas. The pressure within the cylinder exceeded the failure point of a foil membrane that isolated the cylinder from a connected manifold of stainless steel capillary tubes. The foil membrane ruptured, and the pressurized tritium was forced through the manifold, into the steel tubes, and through them into the spherical void between the primary and secondary stages of the bomb.

At 3,000 meters, the ring of capacitors fired, dumping their stored electrical power into a precisely-constructed network of wires. The length of each wire was known to within a nanometer, and its electrical resistance had been calculated to nine decimal places. The attention to engineering precision paid off. The signals shooting through those wires reached their respective destinations with nearly perfect synchronicity.

Ninety-six electrical initiators fired at the same instant, detonating ninety-six trapezoidal blocks of high explosives surrounding a spherical shell of radioactive plutonium 239. The charges were carefully shaped to focus their destructive force inward, toward the center of the plutonium sphere. It was not an explosion, but an implosion.

Faced with more than a million atmospheres of external pressure, the spherical plutonium shell collapsed inward, toward the envelope of tritium gas and the secondary stage of the bomb. The plutonium, already much denser than lead, was further compressed by the converging shock wave of the implosion.

Tortured beyond the boundaries of elemental stability, the plutonium shifted from its natural process of gradual radioactive decay, to an accelerated state of induced fission. The nuclei of many of the plutonium atoms were crushed or split by the extraordinary mechanical force of the compression wave. The shattered nuclei emitted heat, photons, X radiation, gamma rays, and neutrons. The neutrons were flung out to strike adjacent atoms like randomly fired bullets, shattering previously undamaged plutonium atoms and releasing larger quantities of heat, light, radiation, and still more neutrons.

Through a process known as doubling, the chain reaction escalated. Fifty damaged atoms became a hundred. Then one hundred became two hundred, and two hundred became four hundred. In the space of a few nanoseconds, the chain reaction grew a million times more powerful than the implosion that had triggered it.

Heat, radiation, and mechanical force erupted outward in a thunderous explosion of atomic energy.

But it didn’t stop there. The mechanical force and radiation of the primary stage attacked the secondary core of depleted uranium at the heart of the bomb. Tritium atoms merged with uranium atoms, and the expanding fission reaction was magnified by nuclear fusion.

The fireball and shock wave grew, and everything they touched was obliterated. Every living creature within their hideous circle of effect was instantly incinerated.

And the telltale mushroom cloud, not seen in battle since the annihilation of Nagasaki, climbed toward the blue California sky.

CHAPTER 26

NARITA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

0904 hours (9:04 AM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

Ann Roark elbowed Sheldon Miggs in the ribs. “Ask somebody, damn it!”

Ann’s eyes were glued to one of the courtesy televisions mounted high up the side of a support column in the airport departure lounge. The television was showing the feed from a Japanese news program. The images on the screen alternated between studio shots of a Japanese anchorman who looked like Ryuichi Sakamoto, and still images and video clips from some kind of breaking news story centered in California. At least it seemed to be California, as a green silhouette map of the state appeared periodically in the graphics window next to the anchorman.

The screen cut from a quick establishing shot of the White House, to archival footage of a nuclear explosion—complete with trademark mushroom cloud, to an overhead helicopter shot of a major traffic pileup on an unidentified freeway, to what looked like rioting and general pandemonium in the streets, and back to the nuclear mushroom cloud.

Something had happened. Something huge. But what was it?

The voiceovers and the on-screen text were all in Japanese, which Ann could not read or speak a word of. She glanced around at the groups of Asian travelers clustered around every visible television. Most of them stood in what appeared to be stunned silence, while a few spoke to their fellows in intense whispers.

The news feed cut back to the Ryuichi Sakamoto lookalike for a few seconds. Then it switched to a still shot of the U.S. Pentagon, jumped to footage of ambulances and paramedics helping injured people, dissolved to a still shot of a city skyline that might have been San Diego, and then returned to the nuclear explosion.

Ann looked over at Sheldon, whose attention was focused entirely on trying to get his cell phone to work.

Ann sighed. “Will you let that damned thing alone? You’re about three thousand miles outside of your cellular provider’s coverage area. You’re not going to get a signal in freaking Japan. Okay?”

Sheldon shook his head. “I upgraded my service plan to include Japan and South Korea. I’ve got a signal. That’s not the problem.” He punched several buttons and put the phone to his ear. “I need to check on my Mom and my dogs, okay?”

Ann looked back to the television screen. The Japanese news station was running a feed from CNN now. A blonde anchorwoman stood in the foreground, speaking into one of those stupidly oversized network microphones. In the distant background, the Pentagon was visible. Ann listened carefully to catch the anchorwoman’s words, but the local station was running the Japanese translation in place of the original English voice track.

A graphic window appeared beside the American news correspondent. A computer animatic of a fiery mushroom cloud blossomed above the CNN logo. The words, “NUCLEAR ATTACK” appeared over the animated image in a red diagonal banner.

Sheldon jabbed the end-call button on his cell phone. “Damn it. I can’t get through. The phone lines on the West Coast must be overloaded with traffic. Whatever the emergency is, it must be …”

He glanced up at the television screen in time to catch the end of the NUCLEAR ATTACK animation. “Nuclear attack? Where? I mean, who got hit?”

Ann shot him a look. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get you to find out. Now … Will you please freaking ask somebody?”

Sheldon shoved the cell phone into his travel bag. “You’ve got a mouth. Why haven’t you asked somebody?”

Ann rewarded him with another dirty look. “I don’t speak Japanese.”

Sheldon raised an eyebrow. “What am I? Secret Ninja Boy? I don’t speak Japanese either.”

He looked around. “Besides, at least two-thirds of these people speak English. I guarantee it.”

Ann stared at him without speaking. He knew why she hadn’t asked. She couldn’t deal with members of her own culture, let alone a foreign culture. Fifty percent of Sheldon’s job was talking to people so that she didn’t have to.

Sheldon groaned theatrically. “Okay. I’ll go ask somebody.”

He climbed out of his seat and stumped across the room to the closest cluster of locals.

Ann watched him as he struck up a conversation with a thirtyish Japanese couple. They were total strangers, but Sheldon smiled at them almost immediately. His hands flitted about like birds as he talked. His face was alive with interest.

How did he do that? She knew the smile and the interest were genuine. He could walk up to complete strangers in a foreign airport and make an immediate connection. How in the hell did he do that?

Sheldon turned toward Ann. He pointed in her direction, then to himself, and finally to the news story on the television screen. He spoke. The couple responded, and Sheldon spoke some more.

The Japanese man glanced back at Ann, nodded a couple of times, and began using the finger of one hand to trace and retrace something against the palm of his other hand. A curve? It looked like he was drawing and redrawing a curve with his fingertip. Then, he used the fingertip to point to a spot in mid-air, about six inches to the left of his open palm. He poked that spot several times with his fingertip, as though punctuating a sentence with multiple periods.

Sheldon nodded, bowed slightly to the man and to his wife, and walked back toward Ann.

As she watched him approach, Ann was struck by the notion that Sheldon came from an entirely different planet. Or maybe she did. Sheldon seemed to fit, after all. He could talk to the corporate suits, the computer geeks, the gung-ho military types, and total strangers—all with apparently equal facility. He could find a way to fit in just about anywhere, even in countries where he didn’t speak the language. Ann, on the other hand, only seemed to relate to machines. Maybe she was from another planet. If so, she was ready to go home to Planet Z-X-55, or wherever she came from.

Sheldon dropped heavily into the seat next to her. “It was a nuclear attack,” he said.

Ann sat up. “What? Where …”

Sheldon held up a hand. “Slow down. It’s okay. Some whack-job revolutionary in Siberia launched a bunch of nuclear warheads at the West Coast. Our military shot them down. All but one, anyway. That one hit about a hundred miles west of San Diego. Blew up a big piece of water. Probably killed a few million fish.”

“Wait a minute,” Ann said. “You’re telling me they missed? Somebody tried to nuke the West Coast, and they freaking missed?”

“Looks like it,” Sheldon said. “The one that got through missed, anyway.” He tugged at his lower lip. “Or maybe our guys knocked it off course. They hit all the rest of the warheads. Maybe they hit that one too, but it wasn’t destroyed. Just knocked off course, so it landed in the ocean instead of San Diego.”

He grinned at Ann. “Pretty good shooting, huh? The media’s constantly telling us that Ballistic Missile Defense is a waste of our tax dollars. But it looks like it did the job.”

Ann looked up at the television screen. The Japanese news program was showing the ambulances again. Injured and bloodied people being tended to by paramedics. Blue and red police lights flashing. Broken windows, and people running.

She nodded toward the television. “What’s all this, then? If the military knocked out all the bombs, what happened to all these people? How did so many people get hurt?”

Sheldon’s momentary grin vanished. “Panic. When the missile warnings went out, a lot of people just lost their minds. They all thought they were about to be blown to kingdom come. They freaked out, ran for the hills, barricaded their doors. All the crazy things that people do when they think they’re about to be killed.”

His eyes darted to the Japanese couple he’d spoken to a few minutes earlier. “That gentleman over there told me that some kids in Alameda torched a whole strip mall. The cops didn’t get there in time to stop the fire, but they did manage to nab some of the firebugs. Turns out that the ringleader convinced his buddies that some kinds of missiles are attracted to heat sources. I guess they thought the fire would lure the bombs away from their neighborhood.”

Sheldon shook his head. “People get crazy when they’re really scared. They hurt each other. They hurt themselves.”

“The government should have known this would happen,” Ann said. “They shouldn’t have sent out the warnings. They knew people would lose their minds. This is their fault.”

Sheldon exhaled loudly. “Come on, Ann. You’re going to think the worst of them no matter what they do. You know you are. That’s how your brain is wired.”

He unzipped his travel bag and began fishing through the contents with his hand. “If the government had kept this quiet, you’d be screaming for blood right now. You’d be sitting next to me, talking about the conspiracy of silence and the people’s right to know. You’d be telling me that the people should have been warned.”

Sheldon pulled out his cell phone and swiped the screen to life. “No offense, Ann, but you get a lot of mileage out of not liking people. You know that, don’t you?”

Before Ann could answer, he punched a string of numbers and hoisted the phone to his ear.

Ann started to slip in a comeback, but she stopped herself. What was the point? The best she could hope for would be to piss off Sheldon, the one person who seemed to be able to put up with her.

She let her eyes wander around the terminal. People were still gathered around the televisions, staring up at the curved glass screens for a glimpse of the chaos on the other side of the ocean.

Her eyes lit on a huge electronic monitor showing arrivals and departures in Japanese and English. She let her gaze slide down the list of departing flights, pretending for a second that one of them might list an outbound flight to Planet Z-X-55. She was ready to get off this planet.

With a flicker of shifting letters and numbers, the information on the monitor was updated. Times and gate numbers reshuffled themselves as various airlines adjusted their schedules.

Every flight to the United States was now listed as ‘Canceled.’

CHAPTER 27

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

7:17 PM EST

The national security advisor cleared his throat. “Ah … Mr. President?”

The president didn’t answer. The Single Integrated Operational Plan lay untouched on the briefing table in front of him. The thick binder was still open to Section Orange: “RETALIATORY NUCLEAR STRIKE OPTIONS.”

Of all the documents Frank Chandler had been shown, trained on, or briefed about, this was the one he’d least expected to ever need. He understood its purpose. He knew that it had been created specifically for the kind of situation they were in now, but he’d never really believed that this moment would arrive.

And yet … somehow … it had come.

Gregory Brenthoven cleared his throat again. “Mr. President, we have to respond.”

The president raised a hand for silence. He couldn’t seem to think properly.

His eyes drifted down to the SIOP. The open section of the document was divided into numbered subheadings:

6.2-A      Counterforce Responses

6.2-B      Countervalue Responses

6.2-C      Punitive Responses

Counterforce referred to the targeting of missile silos and military sites, to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war. Countervalue meant attacks against cities and the killing of the general civilian populace, to break the enemy’s national will. And punitive responses were designed as punishment: in essence, “spanking” an enemy nation with nuclear weapons.

The terms were so sterile, so scrubbed of emotional cues, that they invited the reader to ignore their grisly implications. There was no hint that selecting any of the proffered choices might condemn millions of human beings to death.

The president absently grasped the tab marked 6.2-C, and flipped the binder open to the section on “Punitive Responses.” Again he encountered three subdivisions:

6.2-C.1      Punitive Responses (Disproportionate)

6.2-C.2      Punitive Responses (Proportionate)

6.2-C.3      Punitive Responses (Minimal)

He selected the third tab, and thumbed the pages to “Punitive Responses (Minimal).” He read the opening paragraphs.

The decision matrices described in this subsection contain non-conventional response options calculated to demonstrate strategic restraint while signaling the willingness to employ nuclear weapons. They are designed to minimize human casualties within the target zone, and limit damage to the physical infrastructure of the target nation.

Where possible, any strike option selected under this subsection should be preceded by and followed by diplomatic overtures to the government of the target nation. The content of such overtures should include language that discourages further aggression against the United States and/or U.S. allies, by implying or overtly declaring a willingness to escalate to a more robust nuclear response. For suggested language and further information, see the U.S. Department of State Recommendations outlined in Annex-D.

Again, the words were almost mind-numbingly banal. If this had been a routine government document, the president might have chalked up the monotonous writing to the self-importance of the bureaucratic mindset. But such cumbersome sentence construction and oblique word-choice probably had not occurred by accident.

In the nineteen-eighties, a political satirist had referred to the SIOP as ‘The Cookbook for Ending the World.’ That little slice of dark humor hadn’t gone over well in the corridors of military power, but—with all social and political niceties stripped away—that’s exactly what the SIOP was. It was the instruction manual for ultimate genocide. Every paragraph in the fat metal binder was monstrous, in both intent and in consequence. Every neatly-numbered option lead to incalculable human atrocity.

The military officers and government officials responsible for wordsmithing the plan had understood that. And they had known that some president might one day have to sit where Francis Benjamin Chandler was sitting right now, and issue orders that would kill massive numbers of people.

So they had buried the ugly truths behind tediously flat phrases, perhaps in the hopes of granting their president a sufficient amount of emotional distance to make decisions that no human being is equipped to make.

If that had really been their intent, it had worked, at least in part. President Chandler found that the semiotically-neutral language of nuclear warfare made it possible for him to consider courses of action that would have been unthinkable if they had been couched in more accurate terms. If he’d been required to utter words like slaughter, massacre, or incinerate, he could not have forced them out of his mouth.

The drafters of the Single Integrated Operational Plan had foreseen that particular hurdle, and they’d built a corrective mechanism directly into the document. Each nuclear strike option had been assigned a so-called brevity code, consisting of a single word paired with a numeral. By referring to an attack plan or a target list by its brevity code, the president and the National Command Authority could discuss options and give orders, while avoiding the kinds of words that trigger mental shutdown and emotional overload.

The brevity code for attacking suspected nuclear weapons facilities in Iran was Typhoon Three. The code for hitting every power plant and electrical distribution facility in North Korea was Castle Eight. The code for total destruction of every city in China was Zebra Two. And the brevity code for unrestricted thermonuclear war—the end of the world—was Angel Seven.

It was the supreme euphemism: the extermination of all human life, concealed behind a hopeful-sounding word and a randomly-selected numeral.

The president slammed the heavy binder shut with a great deal more force than he’d intended.

Angel Seven.

The code phrase stuck in his brain. Einstein had named it World War III. The bible called it Armageddon. The Vikings had known it as Raganarøkr, the Twilight of the Gods. But the Single Integrated Operational Plan called it Angel Seven.

He shoved the binder away from him. The answer, if there was one, was not hidden in the pages of the Cookbook for Ending the World.

He rubbed his eyes, took a breath, and looked up at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “General Gilmore, keep us at DEFCON 1. Have STRATCOM and NMCC prepare a list of prioritized recommendations. Make sure your personal recommendations are on the top of the stack.”

He turned to his national security advisor. “Of course you’re right, Greg. We have to respond. We cannot spend the rest of our lives squatting in bunkers and waiting for Zhukov to drop the other shoe. I want a full strategy meeting in the Sit Room in two hours. Defense, Security, and State.”

He pointed at the geographic display screen, where the red arc of the Russian weapon still burned. “Whatever we do, our number one priority must be to destroy that missile submarine. We got lucky the first time. Zhukov only fired one missile. We threw everything we had at it, but we still didn’t get all the warheads. What happens if Zhukov launches ten missiles?”

The president stood up and pushed his chair back from the table. “We’ve got a maniac out there with a nuclear arsenal, and he’s already shown that he’s not afraid to use it. This is not going to end until we end it.”

He lowered his voice. “Or until that crazy bastard ends it for us.”

CHAPTER 28

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #3

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

1441 hours (2:41 PM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, president of the newly-independent nation of Kamchatka and future premiere of the soon-to-be-restored Soviet Empire, rifled through the sheaf of news reports that his staff had downloaded from the Internet. The American press was so helpful—freely spreading information that Zhukov’s enemies should be keeping to themselves.

He flipped a page and smiled at a printed news photograph of smashed shop windows and battered-looking looters in handcuffs. There was pandemonium in the western states, especially California. The freeways were jammed. Businesses were in turmoil. Petrol stations were extorting ten dollars a gallon for gasoline, and bottled water and canned food were rapidly vanishing into the pockets of a burgeoning black market. Police and emergency services were being overwhelmed by a population that was rushing to escape the next barrage of nuclear warheads.

The missile launch had occurred less than three hours ago, and already opponents of the American president were criticizing their leader’s handling of the crisis. The bolder of them were calling for Chandler’s resignation, with a small but vocal minority demanding impeachment. One of the man’s more famous detractors had publicly announced that it was time for the Farm Boy President to go back to the farm. The media carried every second of the escalating controversy, and splashed it across newspapers, television screens, and Internet websites.

Such were the benefits of their so-called free press. The American news industry was not the voice of the common people as that country’s founding fathers had intended. It had become a self-important money-hungry conglomerate, peddling the worst sort of sensationalist garbage to the unknowing masses. And the people didn’t realize that things should be any different, because this filth-slinging gossip machine was all they’d ever seen.

Zhukov dropped the stack of reports on his desk. For all its shortcomings, the American media was becoming his best ally in this fight, exactly as he had planned.

Lenin had once written that one man with a gun can control 100 men without one. Well, the gun was in the hands of Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov now. And he was depending on the American news industry to tell the world exactly how lethal that gun was, and—more importantly—where it was pointed.

CHAPTER 29

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

9:45 PM EST

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, took her seat to the left of the president’s chair. She leaned close to her boss. “Sir, I think we’re ready to begin.”

The president nodded toward the Chief of Naval Operations. “Admiral, you’re up.”

Admiral Robert Casey, slid back his chair and got to his feet, straightening his immaculate navy blue uniform jacket as he stood. He gave a respectful nod toward his Commander in Chief. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

The CNO swept his eyes over the mix of civilians and military personnel seated around the long mahogany table. To the president’s right, sat Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Horace Gilmore, and Secretary of Homeland Security Becka Solomon. To the president’s left, were White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, and National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven. On the admiral’s side of the table were Secretary of Defense Rebecca Kilpatrick, Secretary of State Elizabeth Whelkin, and Vice President Dalton Wainright.

The admiral picked up a small remote control and slid his thumb across a dial. The lights in the Situation Room dimmed, and a large projection screen slid out of the ceiling at the far end of the conference table. He pressed a button and a map appeared on the screen. The majority of the image was taken up by a large body of water, roughly rectangular in shape. The water was surrounded by landmasses to the north and west, by a dagger-shaped peninsula to the east, and by a narrow chain of islands to the south.

A black dot appeared on the eastern edge of the peninsula, near the southern tip of the dagger shape. A label below the dot identified it as Petropavlosk-Kamchatkskiy.

“Approximately four days ago, armed hostilities broke out in Petropavlosk, the capital city of Kamchatka. Our intelligence sources determined that the conflict was the opening stroke of a military revolution, led by Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, the Governor of Kamchatka. Subsequent statements by Governor Zhukov confirm that he is attempting to break away from the Russian Federation, and establish Kamchatka as an independent and sovereign nation. Governor Zhukov has declared himself president of what he claims is now the country of Kamchatka. He has made it clear that he views this act as the first step toward reconstituting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the re-conquest of the former Soviet satellite countries.”

The admiral continued. “During the early stages of the fighting, a Delta III class nuclear ballistic missile submarine got underway from Rybachiy naval station, outside of Petropavlosk.”

The admiral keyed his remote, and a black and white photograph of a submarine appeared in a pop-up window on the left side of the screen. “We identified it as this submarine—the Zelenograd, hull number K-506—built by the Soviet Navy during the Cold War, and later maintained in service under the navy of the Russian Federation. Our identification has been confirmed by the Russian Ambassador.”

The admiral pressed another button, and the remote in his hand projected a laser pointer, which he directed toward the screen.

“The submarine rounded the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula, and transited through the Kuril island chain into the Sea of Okhotsk, the large body of water shown on this map. The Sea of Okhotsk is to the immediate south of Siberia, and it shares the extreme cold of the Siberian winter.”

The CNO clicked the remote again, and the map on the screen was replaced by an aerial photograph of a rugged icescape. “At this time of year, the northern eighty percent of the Sea of Okhotsk is completely iced over, and the ice pack is heavy. It’s possible that Governor Zhukov timed his coup with this in mind. The Sea of Okhotsk is to the immediate west of the Kamchatkan peninsula, allowing Zhukov to hide his missile submarine under the Siberian ice pack, and still effectively keep it in his backyard.”

The admiral looked at the faces around the table. “The Delta III class submarine carries sixteen nuclear missiles, each of which is armed with three 200 kiloton warheads. That’s about three times the firepower needed to destroy every city in the western United States. So the deployment of submarine K-506 constitutes an imminent threat to our national security, as the events of the last few hours have proven.”

The CNO returned to his chair and nodded toward the national security advisor. “Before I continue, I’d like to ask Mr. Brenthoven to give us a short synopsis of the diplomatic situation.”

Brenthoven stood up. “Thank you, Admiral.” He straightened his tie. “I met with Ambassador Kolesnik shortly after the missile submarine put out to sea. On the instructions of President Chandler, I proposed that the United States and the Russian Federation share diplomatic and military resources in dealing with the problem. But our overtures toward a joint solution were rejected.”

Brenthoven glanced down at his notes. “The government of the Russian Federation insisted that the coup in Kamchatka and the deployment of the K-506 were internal Russian matters. Speaking through his ambassador, President Turgenev declined all offers of diplomatic assistance, and he specifically refused to allow American military participation.”

“I pointed out that the striking range and firepower of the R-29R missiles put the entire western United States in danger of nuclear attack. Ambassador Kolesnik assured me that there was no danger to the U.S. He reminded me that Delta III class submarines, which they refer to as the Kal’mar class, do not have ice penetration capability. They weren’t built with the proper hull configuration, or the right kind of structural reinforcements needed to punch through ice. He assured me that if that submarine tried to break through the ice, its hull would be sliced open and it would sink like the Titanic. He promised me that the Russian Navy would keep the K-506 trapped under the ice pack, where it could not fire its missiles, and they would destroy the sub long before it posed a threat.”

Brenthoven nodded toward the admiral and sat down. “As we all know, that’s not exactly how things worked out.”

Admiral Casey stood up again and pressed a button on his remote. The photo of the ice pack was replaced by the map. A red circle appeared, near the northeast corner of the Sea of Okhotsk. A label next to it displayed the latitude and longitude: 58.29N / 155.20E.

“Three and a half hours ago,” the admiral said, “the submarine in question launched an R-29R series nuclear missile from this approximate position. The launch was detected by a U.S. Air Force Eagle Eye surveillance satellite. The launch and missile trajectory were confirmed by PAVE PAWS radar installations at Beale Air Force Base, California, and Clear Air Force Station, Alaska.”

“The R-29R missile is a MIRV, which is to say that it carries multiple warheads that can be directed at geographically-separated targets. The missile variant we’re up against carries three nuclear warheads, and four decoy warheads that simulate the radar, infrared, and flight characteristics of the real warheads in every respect. It’s impossible to tell the real warheads from the decoys until they hit their targets, so we had to attempt intercepts on all seven warheads.”

He clicked the remote, and a map of the Pacific ocean appeared, with Siberia and Kamchatka near the left edge, and the western United States near the right edge. A curved red line stretched from the left side of the map to the right, climbing from its start point west of Kamchatka to an apex near the top of the map, and then curving back down to a point in the ocean, just west of the California coast line. At irregular intervals along the curve, thinner red lines arched out, each at a different angle, but all pointed in the general direction of the American coast. Clusters of blue lines sprouted from locations in Alaska and California. At various places on the map, each blue line intersected with a red line. In some cases, the red and blue lines terminated at the point of intersection. In other places, the colored arcs simply crossed, each continuing on its way, past the spot where intersection should have occurred.

“Seven ground-based interceptor missiles were launched from the western U.S.,” the admiral said. “Three from Vandenberg Air Force, and four from the Army missile complex at Fort Greely. Between them, the ground-based interceptors knocked out three of the inbound warheads.”

Four gray lines appeared on the screen, sprouting from what appeared to be the open water of the eastern Pacific. Three of these new lines converged with red lines and terminated them. The fourth gray line ended abruptly, well short of intersection with the remaining red line. The last red arc continued uninterrupted to a spot in the ocean near the California coast.

“The cruiser, USS Shiloh, launched two pairs of sea-based interceptor missiles against the remaining warheads, destroying three out of four. The fourth warhead, as you know, impacted in the ocean and detonated about a hundred miles west of San Diego. Based on satellite imagery and seismic readings, we estimate the yield at approximately 200 kilotons. Just about exactly what we would expect to see out of an R-29R warhead.”

He keyed the remote again. On the screen, six dashed red lines appeared, each attached to one of the interrupted arcs that represented an intercepted missile. All six of the dashed lines curved down to points in the ocean, at varying distances from the California coast.

“This is a projection of the unfinished trajectories of the six warheads that were intercepted. Based on their position and movement vectors at the moment of intercept, these are the calculated impact points for each warhead if we had not managed to knock them down. You’ll note that all seven warheads, including the six we intercepted and the one we missed, would have fallen in the ocean. In other words, we don’t think that any of the warheads were aimed at targets on U.S. soil.”

He paused a second, to let the impact of that statement to sink in. “The analysts at the Office of Naval Intelligence offered three possible interpretations of this information. I present them in no particular order. First, the missile might have suffered a mechanical failure that threw the warheads far enough off course to miss their respective targets. Second, the crew of K-506 may lack the expertise to successfully program the R-29R missile guidance package. And third, it’s possible that Governor Zhukov, despite his heavy-handed threats, lacks the will to attack American targets with nuclear weapons. Each of these three theories had supporters at ONI and in the Pentagon. Many of the people looking at this problem felt that one of the three was likely to be the answer. That is, until we discovered this …”

Once again, the admiral keyed the remote. Three red circles appeared on the screen. Two of them were centered on projected impact zones for warheads that had been shot down. The third was centered on the impact zone for the warhead that had slipped by the interceptors to detonate west of San Diego. The three circles formed a nearly perfect diagonal line, with two of the circles grouped close to each other at the southeast end, and the third by itself at the northwest end.

“These impact points were from warheads 1, 5 and 6, numbered for the order in which they were deployed by the missile. As you can tell, #6 got past our interceptors. Numbers 1 and 5 were shot down.”

The admiral laid his remote on the table. “The impact points for the remaining warheads were randomly distributed. But 1, 5, and 6 formed a pattern. We now believe that 1, 5, and 6 were the live nuclear warheads, and the randomly distributed impacts—2, 3, 4, and 7—were the decoys.”

Secretary of State Whelkin rubbed her left earlobe. “I assume there’s a significance to this pattern, Admiral?”

Admiral Casey returned to his seat. “Yes, Madam Secretary. We believe there is. One of the analysts at ONI did a bit of measuring. It turns out that the first warhead was targeted exactly 300 miles west of San Francisco. The second was aimed exactly 200 miles west of Los Angeles. And the third—the one that got past us—detonated exactly 100 miles west of San Diego. Three hundred miles, two hundred miles, and one hundred miles. In that order.”

“It’s a countdown,” General Gilmore said. “Three—two—one. After that, comes zero.”

Admiral Casey nodded. “Or ground zero, which is the traditional name for the center point of a nuclear attack.”

The president frowned. “You think Zhukov was sending us a message? With nuclear weapons?”

“That’s a distinct possibility, Mr. President,” the admiral said. “Governor Zhukov may have been communicating with us in a way that transcends all threats and saber-rattling. We think he was telling us that this was our freebie. This was our one and only warning shot. Three-two-one-zero. Every impact point calibrated to the position of a major city. The next time he shoots, it won’t be offset into the water. It will be right on top of the targets. Ground zero. And he’s going after major centers of population.”

The White House chief of staff pulled out her palmtop computer and started punching buttons. After a few seconds, she looked up. “Six and a half million people,” she said.

The president raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“I just pulled the census projections for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego,” Doyle said. “Sir, if those three warheads had hit their targets, they would have killed about six and a half million people.”

“I see,” said the president. He looked at the Chief of Naval Operations. “I think you’re right, Admiral. Mr. Zhukov is sending us a message. He’s telling us that the gloves are off, and next time, he kills millions.”

Becka Solomon sat back in her chair. “Mr. President, if we’re reading this correctly, we’re going to have to evacuate the entire western United States.”

“I’m not even sure that’s possible,” the vice president said. “We couldn’t get a million people 200 miles up the road from New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit. How are we going to move seventy million people across half the country?”

“I don’t know,” Solomon said. “But Zhukov has got forty-five nuclear warheads left, and he’s communicated quite clearly that he’s not afraid to use them. We’ve got way too many population centers within reach of those missiles. Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Cheyenne, Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Reno, Great Falls, Spokane … Zhukov could wipe out every city and major town west of the Texas panhandle, and still have a few warheads left over for a rainy day.”

“We cannot evacuate the western United States,” the president said. “It would take us years to prepare for a move that big, and I’m not sure this country would survive the effort. The economy would be devastated—maybe completely destroyed. There are no resources to transport that many refugees, much less house them or feed them. And how would we provide medical care and emergency services for eighty million displaced people?”

He shook his head. “A lot of frightened people are trying to run east, and we can’t do anything about that. I’m not going to call out the troops and try to force people to stay in the target zone. If they want to run, we have to let them run. That by itself is going to damage this country in ways I don’t want to think about. But we cannot undertake the job of moving eighty million people. We’re not even going to try.”

He looked at the CNO. “The only way to stop this, is to kill that submarine. How do we do that, Admiral?”

“Mr. President,” the admiral said. “We’re obviously going to have to project military force into the Sea of Okhotsk. We’ll have to go in there after the submarine. And that’s going to be a bit of a problem.”

“Why is that?”

“Geography, sir. The Sea of Okhotsk is landlocked on three sides by Russian territory. Siberia is to the north; Russia is to the west; and Kamchatka is to the east. Governor Zhukov may claim otherwise, but Kamchatka still happens to be Russian territory. The only entrances to the Sea of Okhotsk are to the south, through the Kuril island chain, which—as you may have guessed—is Russian territory as well. Which means that all of the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk is owned by the Russian Federation. To their way of thinking, that makes the whole sea their national property. The United States and the international community don’t happen to agree, but that’s how the Russians see it. As far as they’re concerned, that’s their back yard. They’re not going to want us in there.”

“I don’t understand,” the Vice President said. “If we can’t go into the Sea of Okhotsk, how are we going to get the sub?”

The Secretary of Defense smiled. “The admiral didn’t say we can’t go in there, Mr. Vice President. He said the Russians aren’t going to like it. And he’s right. They won’t like it. But they can’t stop it. According to international law, the Russian Federation doesn’t own that water. They like to think they do, but the law, the United Nations, and the international community say otherwise. We do not acknowledge the Russian claim of ownership.”

Vice President Wainright scratched the lobe of his right ear. “Why is that? If the Russians own all the land surrounding the water, doesn’t that mean they own the water too?”

The CNO shook his head. “No, sir. International law says that a country’s national waters extend twelve nautical miles from the coastline. You’ve heard of the twelve mile limit? That’s what the term refers to. If you go thirteen miles off shore, you’re in international waters. Luckily, there are several passages through the Kuril islands that are more than twenty-four nautical miles wide. Our units can transit through the straits without passing within the twelve-mile limit of any of the islands. We can get into and out of the Sea of Okhotsk without crossing into lawfully-recognized Russian waters.”

Secretary of State Whelkin held up her hand. “I understand that international law backs our right to enter this body of water, Admiral. But are the Russians going to sit still if we send a military force into what they clearly regard as their private sea?”

“They’re definitely not going to be happy about it, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said. “But we send Navy ships and aircraft into the Sea of Okhotsk periodically, despite the protests of the Russian government. They’re called freedom of navigation exercises, and the U.S. has been doing it since the beginning of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union tried to claim ownership of the Sea of Okhotsk. We do it to demonstrate our right of free passage and to remind the Russian government that the United States does not acknowledge their claim of ownership. So we know the Russians aren’t going to like it, but they’re somewhat accustomed to seeing our warships and aircraft in there.”

“Isn’t this a bad time to be provoking the Russians?” the White House chief of staff asked. “We know from the intelligence assessments that the Russian government is already about to blow its top. And they’re cranked up to maximum nuclear readiness levels, just like we are. Is it smart to poke a stick into the hornet’s nest?”

“One of their political leaders has just launched three of their nuclear missiles toward our coast line,” Secretary of Defense Kilpatrick said. Her voice was low, but as hard as steel. “As far as I’m concerned, they should be worried about provoking us.”

“Unless we’re prepared to stay at DEFCON 1 until the spring thaw, we don’t really have a choice,” Gregory Brenthoven said. “That’s a nuclear-powered submarine. A Delta III can remain submerged for months at a time, and the ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk gives it excellent concealment and protection. The commander of the K-506 has maneuvered his boat into a superb tactical position. He’d have to be stupid to come out of there, and he is not stupid. If we want to kill that submarine, we’re going to have to go in there after it.

“How do we do that?” the president asked. “What are our options?”

“We can’t send ships in there at this time of year,” Admiral Casey said. “The ice will cut them to ribbons.”

The admiral’s eyes went back to the large display screen. “Where the hell is global warming when we need it?”

No one laughed.

“What about aircraft?” the Vice President asked.

“We can over-fly with aircraft,” the admiral said. “But they can’t really do much. Airborne sensors can’t see through the ice pack, and air-launched torpedoes and depth charges will just hit the ice face and break up. They’re not designed to punch through ice.”

“That submarine has figured out how to shoot through the ice,” General Gilmore said. “How are they doing it?”

“That’s the big question, General,” the CNO said. “Our engineers are certain that the Delta III does not have ice penetration capability. The differences in design and construction are so major that it would take a couple of years in a shipyard dry dock to modify a Delta III for ice penetration. We track the maintenance and deployment of foreign missile submarines very carefully. If K-506 had been in the yards for a major hull rebuild, we’d know about it.”

“Could the missiles just punch through?” the Secretary of Homeland Security asked. “Like a bullet?”

The Secretary of Defense shook her head. “I don’t think so. Those missiles are fast, but they’re also delicate machines. It would be like a Lear jet slamming into a brick wall at several hundred miles an hour. It would knock a hole in the wall, but the Lear would be hamburger afterward.” She shook her head again. “Any missile that hits the ice is not going to fly afterwards.”

The national security advisor sighed. “Which brings us back around to the original question,” he said. “How is Zhukov’s submarine shooting through the ice?”

“We don’t know yet,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “All we can do is speculate.”

“Fair enough,” the president said. “Speculate.”

The admiral nodded. “Sir, our best guess is that they’ve got explosive charges pre-positioned at various locations around the ice pack. When they need to launch, they sail to a spot at a safe distance from the nearest prepared position, and trigger the explosives. As soon as the spray and debris settle, they’ve got a nice big hole in the ice. They pop off a missile through the hole, and get out of the area before anybody comes looking for them.”

He shrugged. “It’s only a guess, Mr. President. But if the charges are the right size and they’re properly placed, we think there’s a good chance that it would work. We don’t know if that’s what they’re actually doing, but it’s one way they might be doing it.”

“Could they be torpedoing the ice?” Vice President Wainright asked. “Then they wouldn’t have to limit themselves to a few pre-positioned locations. They could make a hole anywhere they wanted.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the CNO. “A torpedo explosion is fairly concentrated. It does a lot of damage in a relatively small area. It would take a lot of torpedoes to make a big enough hole to shoot through. If our guess is correct, they’re using multiple explosives packages spread out over a comparatively large area. The demolitions experts over at Spec Warfare think it would take about five or six shaped charges, drilled into the ice in a big circle, and all wired to a central detonator. The detonator would be connected to some type of external receiver that the submarine can trigger from remote.”

“How many of these prepared spots do you think they’ve got?” the president asked.

“We have no idea, sir,” the admiral said. “But everything that’s happened so far indicates that Mr. Zhukov has been planning this for a long time. He’s had months to line up his assets, while nobody was watching. He might have three or four shooting spots prepared. Or a dozen. If we knew how many, and where they were, it would make catching that sub a lot easier. But we don’t know. At the moment, we’re not even sure if our theory is correct. They may be using an entirely different method to shoot through the ice. Something we haven’t thought of.”

“We’re not going to solve the mystery right now,” the president said. “But we still need a plan for getting to that submarine.”

“Sir,” the admiral said. “We really only have one option. For the reasons we’ve already discussed, we can’t send ships or aircraft. We’re going to have to go after K-506 with another submarine. That would have been my first choice anyway. The best way to kill a submarine is with another submarine.”

He checked his briefing notes. “USS Tucson is operating near Japan. I can have her through the Kuril Islands and into the Sea of Okhotsk in about six hours. I can get the Seawolf up there in about 12 hours, and the Bremerton about three or four hours after that. I’d like to have one of the other Seawolf class boats, but the Connecticut and the Jimmy Carter are both too far out of position. So we’ll have to make do with one Seawolf class and two Los Angeles class boats. I don’t see that as a problem, though. The Los Angeles class are top-notch boats. Born hunters. They’ll get the job done.”

“Are three submarines going to be enough?” the president asked. “The Sea of Okhotsk looks like a big piece of water.”

“It is, sir,” the admiral said. “It’s over 600,000 square miles. Roughly two and a half times the size of Texas. But we’re fairly confident that the K-506 will keep to the eastern half of the sea. Governor Zhukov isn’t going to want his ace in the hole to get too close to Mother Russia. He doesn’t want to risk losing it. Also, the farther west that submarine moves, the more U.S. targets he puts out of missile range. If he wants to keep his strike options open, he can’t stray too far west. I think three attack subs are about right to search the eastern end of the sea. Any more, and they’ll start getting in each other’s way.”

The president nodded. “What’s your fall-back plan?”

“We’re going to try to figure out how Zhukov is communicating with his submarine. If we can interrupt his channel of communication, we can keep him from sending launch orders to the sub. That won’t necessarily help us kill the K-506, but it should prevent any more nuclear strikes while we track it down.”

“So you have to zero-in on their radio frequency, and break their encryption?” Secretary Solomon asked.

The admiral shook his head. “No, Madam Secretary. Ordinary radio waves only penetrate a few feet into water. A submerged submarine can’t transmit or receive radio unless it extends an antenna above the surface, or floats what we call a trailing wire. Neither one of those options works under ice. To transmit through water and ice, you have to use extremely low frequencies, with long enough wavelengths to penetrate. Our navy uses this method, and so do the Russians. We call our system ELF. They call their system Zevs. We use slightly different frequencies and transmission technologies, but the basic idea is the same. But Zhukov can’t access the Zevs system. There’s only one transmitter station, and it’s located near Murmansk. The Russian navy controls it, so there’s no chance that Zhukov is using it.”

The Secretary of State rested her elbows on the table. “Could he have built his own transmitter station? For Zevs, or ELF?”

‘No, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said. “The facilities are enormous, and far too expensive. The entire economy of Kamchatka for twenty years wouldn’t cover the cost. In any case, the antenna feed lines have to be about thirty miles long. You can’t hide a construction project that large. Not in the Congo, not in the arctic, not in the Sahara. Not even in Kamchatka. We don’t know what method they’re using, but do know that it’s not Zevs or ELF.”

“ONI is looking at this right now,” he said. “So are DARPA, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. There’s got to be an answer. We’ll find it.” He faced the national security advisor. “With your permission, Mr. Brenthoven, I’d like to put the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office on the problem as well. Those guys spend all their time peeking over fences and listening at keyholes. They might have some ideas about how Zhukov is talking to his sub.”

Gregory Brenthoven nodded. “I’ll put them on it.”

The president looked around the table. “We deploy the Tucson, Seawolf, and Bremerton into the Sea of Okhotsk to locate and destroy the K-506. We simultaneously investigate Zhukov’s method of communicating with his missile submarine. Does anyone have any objections to the plan, or any refinements to add?”

No one spoke.

The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Go with it, Admiral. And keep me informed at every step.”

He paused, and was about to speak again when the door opened and a Secret Service agent walked in, escorting White House Communications Director Roger Chu.

The man crossed quickly to the head of the table. He was visibly trembling. “Please forgive the interruption, Mr. President, but there’s a breaking story on CNN that you need to see immediately, sir.” His eyes darted to the screen and then instantly back to the president. “My assistant is burning the clip onto disk right now. It should be here in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you, Roger,” the president said. “While we’re waiting for the video, why don’t you give us the short version?”

Chu swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He looked around the table and saw that every face was turned in his direction. His voice wavered. “Mr. President, Governor Zhukov has just made another public statement to the media. Actually, it was a demand—issued to the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan. He wants every submarine in our collective military inventories on the surface in the next three hours. He says he has agents in numerous countries, monitoring commercial imaging satellites. He says he knows exactly how many submarines we have at our disposal, and he wants every one of them out in the open, where he can see it. Attack subs, missile subs, all of them. Then he wants us to put them all in port, and keep them there. But first we have to bring them all to the surface, where he can see them.”

“That’s crazy,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. “Mr. President, we can’t do that.”

“The deadline is 6:00 AM, Greenwich Mean Time,” Roger Chu said. The man was close to tears. “Governor Zhukov says if a single submarine from any of our nations is not clearly visible on the surface, he’ll launch nuclear weapons against …” Chu looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was shaking so badly that he had trouble reading the list he had copied there. “Moscow, Vladivostok, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver.”

Chu lowered the paper, still clutched in his trembling hand. “Mr. President … Governor Zhukov said something about a surprise package, sir. He said he would also hit three cities that are not on the list. But he didn’t say which country those three cities were in.”

The room was utterly silent.

Roger Chu emitted a sound that might have been a sob.

“Mr. President, we can’t do that,” the Secretary of Defense said again. “I’m not just talking about our national policy against negotiating with terrorists, sir. I’m talking about strategic defense. Our attack subs would be bad enough, but we can’t reveal the locations of our missile submarines. The second we put those missile boats on the surface, our national security goes up in smoke. Our deterrence will be gone. Our second strike capability will be gone. We have to keep our missile submarines hidden. Otherwise, we can’t protect this country.”

The president looked at his Director of Communications. The normally rock-solid man was on the verge of breaking down.

“Does anyone see any alternatives?” the president said. “Any ideas at all, I don’t care how crazy.”

Gregory Brenthoven exhaled sharply. “We … My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this … We launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Kamchatka. We wipe out Zhukov before he can issue launch orders to his submarine.”

“That’s not going to work,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “The Kamchatka peninsula is about 140,000 square miles. That’s nearly the size of California, and we don’t have any idea where—in all of that territory—Zhukov might be hiding. How do we know we can even hit him? And what happens if we don’t hit him?”

“I agree,” the president said. “If we launch nuclear strikes against Kamchatka and we don’t kill Zhukov, he’s going to incinerate every city and town west of the Rocky Mountains.”

“Then we hit it all,” Brenthoven said. “We turn the entire peninsula into a fucking parking lot.”

The Secretary of State shook her head. “No, Greg. They’re right. We don’t know what instructions Zhukov has given to the captain of his missile submarine. Maybe the guy’s got orders to nuke everything if he loses communication with Zhukov. We can’t take that chance. If we can’t take the submarine out of the equation, we can’t shoot at Zhukov.”

“Well, shit!” the president said. “Shit, shit, shit, and double-shit. What do we do now?”

“I hate to say this,” the CNO said. “But we’re going to have to put our subs on the surface.”

“We cannot knuckle under to a fucking madman,” Secretary of Defense Kilpatrick said. “We can’t do it. We just can’t.”

“We don’t have a choice,” the president said. “I’m not going to sacrifice six million American lives to protect our national prestige. If we have to kiss this guy’s ass, then we get on our knees and pucker up. Right up until the moment that we stick a knife in his heart.”

He turned his eyes to the Chief of Naval Operations. “Put the submarines on the surface Bob. All of them. Do it now.”

He shifted his gaze to his secretary of state. “Liz, we need to open immediate diplomatic dialogues with Japan and Russia. Make sure they intend to comply with Zhukov’s deadline. Hopefully, they’re smart enough to realize that this nutcase is not bluffing. If they balk, tell them we’re working on a plan to neutralize the threat, and that we’ll share it with them as soon as we nail down the details. In the meantime, they need to get their submarines on the surface so that Zhukov doesn’t start launching nuclear missiles.”

The president lowered himself into his chair. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to destroy the K-506 without submarines.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “And then we’re going to go and kill the maniac who started this nightmare.”

CHAPTER 30

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

At the close of the Second World War, German rocket engineers under the direction of Wernher von Braun were engaged in developing the A9/A10: a powerful two-stage missile capable of reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York and other American cities. The A9/A10 development effort was part of a larger program called Project Amerika, which was dedicated to the creation of specialized bombers, rockets, and other weapons, to be used in Germany’s eventual conquest of the United States.

If it had ever been completed, the A9/A10 would have been the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in history. Instead, it became the theoretical model from which later ICBMs would be built.

The program came to a halt in 1945 with the surrender of the German military, but Wernher von Braun and a number of his fellow scientists were quietly whisked away to America, where they became the core of the rocket and missile research programs for the U.S. military.

Having foreseen the collapse of the Nazi regime, von Braun’s team had managed to conceal and protect many of their blueprints and research papers. In some cases, the recovered technical documents were nearly as useful as the scientists themselves.

This was certainly true for the Soviet Union. Because Soviet agents in post-war Germany did not immediately recognize the potential value of Hitler’s rocket scientists, the Soviets acted too slowly to capitalize on this brief opportunity. Consequently, when Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev began constructing his nation’s missile program, he had captured German blueprints to work from, but almost no German technical expertise to help him decipher them. To paraphrase a prominent military historian: The United States had already snatched up all the good German engineers.

But—Germans or no-Germans—the race was on. Although they had been allies in the fight against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union had very different plans for reconstructing the world in the aftermath of the war. The relationship between the two nations had been strained even when they’d been in formal alliance. With the dissolution of the alliance, mutual suspicion deepened into outright hostility. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.

As a result of military and industrial buildup, economic capacity, and postwar positioning, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the so-called superpowers. The rivalry between them was intense from the outset, but it was also one-sided. America had the atomic bomb. Soviet Russia did not.

Then, in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The US intelligence community would later learn that the Russian weapon had been an almost direct copy of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In point of fact, the Russian atomic bomb was more a product of espionage than research. But the source of the information paled beside a single inescapable fact … The Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons.

The balance of power no longer leaned in America’s favor. It had become a true balance, with the growing might of the US on one side, offset by the growing might of the USSR on the other.

In 1952, America briefly regained a significant technological edge with the first successful test of a nuclear fusion weapon: the infamous hydrogen bomb. This development brought another quantum leap in destructive potential. Previous fission-type nuclear weapons had yielded explosive forces in the kiloton range, equal to the destructive power of several thousand tons of TNT. Fusion-type or hydrogen weapons offered explosive yields in the megaton range, equal to the destructive power of several million tons of TNT. The deadliest weapon in history had just become, quite literally, a thousand times more destructive.

This new capability gave the United States a tremendous strategic advantage, but the shelf-life of that advantage was very short. In 1953, the Soviet Union tested its own fusion weapon, the Sloika (“Layer Cake”). Once again, the US and USSR had rough military parity, and the nuclear balance of power had been reestablished.

The superpowers differed on virtually everything, from political ideologies, to economic models, to human rights, to the very future of mankind. The Soviets believed that the Communist ideal was destined to spread to every nation on earth. Fearing that very thing, the US began building military and political alliances in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The intent was to ‘contain’ the threat of communism, and to guard against Soviet military aggression.

This philosophy led to the signing of the Treaty of Brussels in 1948, and a year later, to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

The Soviet Union interpreted these alliances as a direct strategic threat, and responded in 1955 by forming the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (better known to history as the ‘Warsaw Pact’). Essentially a military alliance of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact was intended to counterbalance the threat posed by NATO.

Sides had been chosen. The battle lines had been drawn for an entirely new kind of war.

Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides—among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.

In hindsight it seems incredible, but the nuclear warhead became both the symbol of absolute national power, and the ultimate tool of military force projection. In their ceaseless contest for strategic dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of funding and effort into building, testing, and stockpiling new and more powerful nuclear weapons.

As the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers grew, the technology of weapons delivery platforms advanced to keep pace. Propeller driven bombers gave way to jet bombers, and then to supersonic jets.

By the mid 1950s, the jet bombers of America’s Strategic Air Command were operating in a state of around-the-clock readiness, continually prepared to obliterate every city and military target in Soviet Russia. The Soviets held their own bombers in a similar state of readiness, poised to rain nuclear death on the United States with equal efficiency.

The total extermination of a nation’s inhabitants was no longer an abstract theory. The assembled firepower of either of the nuclear superpowers was now sufficient to virtually guarantee the annihilation of populations on a national scale.

For the first time in history, two adversarial nations had become so powerful that they did not dare take their disagreements to the field of battle. Any direct military contact between the superpowers might lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons, and any nuclear combat—no matter how small in scale—could lead to a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, until a small conflict escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Neither nation could hope to survive an unrestricted nuclear attack, and a growing body of scientific research suggested that a major nuclear war might well destroy all life on planet earth.

In the context of nuclear warfare, traditional concepts of victory and defeat lost all meaning. No one could win a war in which there were no survivors. Victory and defeat were replaced by a doctrine known as mutually assured destruction, which is often referred to by the somewhat-appropriate acronym: MAD.

The threat of mutual destruction kept the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact from battling each other directly, so the superpowers sought and found indirect methods of combat. They fought small wars by proxy, taking opposite sides in battles between third-party countries as a substitute for the direct military confrontation that neither side dared to risk. They competed for supremacy in industrial capacity, scientific achievement, technological advancement, space exploration, and even cultural development. The competition for military dominance was more intense than ever.

Advances in jet bomber technology had given each side the ability to reach and destroy the cities of its adversary within hours. But the dawning of the space age made that timeline seem almost ludicrously slow. Each side wanted—and felt that it needed—a vehicle that could deliver nuclear attacks against its national enemies within minutes.

The solution had already been addressed, at least in principle, by the Nazi A9/A10 missile program. Hitler’s unfinished ocean-spanning missile incorporated liquid fueled engines for supersonic flight speeds, multiple rocket stages for altitude and flight range, and enough payload capacity to carry a nuclear warhead.

Under the technical guidance of expatriated German engineers, the United States undertook several separate programs to build Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. In part, the division of effort was a reflection of the rivalries between the different branches of the US military, but notes and documents from the 1950s suggest that President Eisenhower may have seen value in taking several different approaches to solving such a difficult technical problem.

The Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and the recently-formed US Air Force, concentrated on land-based missile designs. By contrast, the US Navy plan was to launch nuclear ballistic missiles from submerged submarines. Navy leaders reasoned that land-based launch facilities could be located and bombed. Submarines, on the other hand, could move freely and stealthily around the world, remaining hidden from America’s enemies, and launching nuclear strikes from unexpected locations.

Despite the advantage of multiple programs and the benefit of German engineering expertise, the United States did not win the race to launch the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The Russians reached that milestone first, launching the R-7 Semyorka missile in August of 1957. The first successful launch of an American Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the Atlas-A, took place four months later, in December of the same year.

This emerging class of nuclear super-weapons was initially referred to by the abbreviation ‘IBM,’ short for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. This caused some confusion, because the International Business Machine company was already popularly identified by those same three letters. To avoid further misunderstanding, the US military revised the missile abbreviation to include the letter ‘c’ from the word ‘Intercontinental.’ The new weapons were re-designated as ICBMs.

The superpowers continued to build newer and more advanced ICBMs. Hardened concrete missile silos were carved into the mountains, fields, and prairies of Russia and the United States. The American Atlas ICBMs were joined by Titan I missiles, Titan II missiles, Minuteman I, Minuteman II, and Minuteman III missiles, and the MX Peacekeeper missile series. The Soviets followed the R-7 ICBMs with the R-9 series missiles, the R-16 series, R-24, R-29, R-36, and their successors.

The US Navy’s planned fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines became a reality with the active deployment of the submarine-launched Polaris series missiles, and then the Poseidon series, and then the Trident series. The Soviets designed and deployed their own nuclear ballistic missile submarines, each generation with increasingly lethal nuclear weapons aboard.

The nuclear superpowers had finally obtained the Holy Grail of modern warfare: the ability to completely exterminate an enemy nation in mere minutes. By way of ultimate consequence—whether intended or unintended—each of the major adversaries now had the power to destroy the entire human race.

The last war and ultimate destruction of mankind, was just the push of a button away. The world found itself hovering on the brink of Armageddon.

CHAPTER 31

WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF’S OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

5:59 PM EST

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle rummaged in the top drawer of her desk until she found the slim plastic form of a television remote control. She pointed the remote toward a small high-definition screen tucked into a bookshelf to the right of her desk.

The screen flared to life, and Doyle caught the last twenty seconds of a commercial about medical insurance. She fiddled with the remote, bringing the volume up to an audible level just in time to hear the insurance firm’s duck mascot blurt the name of the company in a brassy nasal twang that could easily be mistaken for a quack.

Doyle smiled, briefly. That silly duck always made her want to laugh, which—she understood quite well—was the entire point of the advertising campaign.

The famously-trademarked quack faded into silence, to be instantly replaced by the opening musical fanfare of an equally-famous news debate program.

The Crosstalk logo appeared: a pair of animated three dimensional arrows—one red, the other blue—rushing toward each other from opposite sides of the screen. They collided in the center with an explosion of silver light, which dissolved quickly to an establishing shot of a television news studio. The camera held this angle long enough for the viewing audience to register the elegantly high-tech trappings of the studio set, and its three-sided interview table. Then the camera zoomed in for a close-up of the show’s celebrated moderator.

The moderator smiled, revealing a set of perfect white teeth below piercing blue eyes. “Good evening,” he said, “and welcome to Crosstalk. I’m your host, Darren Cartwright.”

The camera panned right, revealing the show’s first guest, a lean and hawkish looking man in his late thirties, a flawlessly-tailored black business suit stretched over his angular frame. “With us tonight, we have John Gohar of the National Center for Strategic Analysis, and Republican Senator Richard Blair, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

The camera panned left, centering on the show’s other guest, a fiftyish man in slightly rumpled tweed jacket. The senator nodded toward the camera, with the tiniest suggestion of a wink. His maroon necktie was loose, and it was obvious that the top button of his shirt wasn’t fastened. The message of his wardrobe was reinforced by his thoughtful but relaxed facial expression, and the easy set of his shoulders.

Veronica Doyle smiled. Dick Blair had long been a bitter opponent of the Chandler administration, but the old scoundrel was good; she had to give him that. He was the very image of a seasoned elder statesman: purposeful, intelligent, informed, consummately professional, and—above all—clearly undaunted by the challenges of national leadership.

The camera cut back to the moderator of the show. With the opening pleasantries out of the way, Cartwright traded his introductory smile for a more serious expression. On a wall-sized video screen behind his head, the Crosstalk logo gave way to an aerial shot from a helicopter, loitering above the entrance to a harbor. Superimposed lettering identified the scene as San Diego, California.

In the foreground, the black shape of a submarine was silhouetted against rolling waves, its wake a line of white foam across blue water. In the middle distance, two more submarines could be seen making their way toward the breakwater.

The screen shuffled through a series of similar scenes: submarines tied to piers or returning to various harbors, sometimes accompanied by Navy tug boats, sometimes not. With each changing scene came an identifying caption … Kings Bay, Georgia; New London, Connecticut; Bangor, Washington; Norfolk, Virginia; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii …

The screen finally settled on a view looking out across empty ocean waves, with no submarines in sight. The subtext of the video was clear; our nation has no submarines at sea.

The moderator looked into the camera. “We are witnessing an event that is literally without precedent. For the first time since the creation of America’s nuclear submarine force, every submarine in our country’s arsenal has been ordered to return to port.”

He turned toward the guest on his right. “Mr. Gohar, you’re first in the hot seat tonight. How does the recall of our submarines affect national military strategy? And, more to the point, does this move leave our country open to attack?”

Gohar frowned slightly. “Those are deceptively simple questions, Darren. I can’t really give useful answers without putting your questions into some kind of meaningful context. For all practical purposes…”

Senator Blair cut him off. “Thirty seconds into the program, and you’re already starting with the doubletalk!” he snapped. “President Chandler has handed over control of our nuclear submarines to a proven enemy of the United States. Not one of our submarines. Not some of our submarines. All of them!”

He gestured toward the video screen, the gently rolling waves devoid of any manmade object. “How much context do we need to understand that?”

The moderator raised a hand. “Please, Senator… You’ll get your chance to respond.”

Gohar cut a quick sideways glance toward the senator. “As I was saying…” He paused, as though waiting for another interruption. “For all practical purposes, we already have been attacked. We’ve had a nuclear detonation within a hundred miles of a major U.S. city, and—if we hadn’t managed to intercept them—we would have had two more detonations within a few hundred miles of the west coast.”

Gohar looked directly into the camera. “We’re dealing with a madman here. He has an entire arsenal of nuclear warheads at his disposal, and he’s already proven that he’s not afraid to use them against the United States.”

“Of course Zhukov is not afraid,” the senator said. “We’ve got a president who goes belly-up at the first sign of a threat. Why in the hell should anybody be afraid to attack us?”

“Excuse me,” the moderator said. “I’d like to get back to my original question.”

Gohar ignored him. “Six and a half million,” he said. “That’s how many people would be dead if those three warheads had reached their targets.”

He glared across the table toward his opponent. “I realize that they’re not your constituents, Senator Blair, but surely we don’t have to risk the incineration of six and a half million Americans to uphold your sense of national dignity.”

Sitting at her desk, Veronica Doyle cracked another smile. Ouch! Let’s see how fast old Dick backs away from that one...

“I’m not talking about dignity,” the senator growled. “I’m talking about national security. Strategic deterrence. National policy. Do any of these words ring a bell?”

Veronica Doyle picked up the remote and turned off the television. The show was just warming up, but she’d heard all she needed to hear.

A lot of people around the beltway were already treating Richard Blair as the presumptive Republican nominee for the next presidential election. He was clearly positioning himself for the nomination. One thing was certain; the crafty old bastard had identified the theme of his campaign.

CHAPTER 32

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

0141 hours (1:41 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Bowie woke into darkness, his heart still pounding in his chest as the dream grudgingly released its grip on his mind. He lay in the bunk of his at-sea cabin, tangled in his sheets, his throat burning with remembered adrenaline.

He blinked away tears and concentrated on slowing his breathing while his brain sorted through the jumbled logic of the nightmare, separating dream images and memories of the past, from the realities of the present. The urgency of the dream began to give way, the memories gradually fading from his conscious thoughts.

This was not the Siraji minefield. There was no torpedo clawing its way up the wake of his wounded ship. Those events belonged to the past. They were gone and done with, no matter how many times they came back to haunt his sleep.

The parade of corpses was fading as well. Bowie was lying in his bunk alone. He was not standing in Combat Information Center, and he was not surrounded by the broken and bloody ghosts of the Sailors who had died under his command.

He stared toward the darkened ceiling, and didn’t reach for his wristwatch. He didn’t want to know what time it was. Not yet. He didn’t want to know how much sleep he’d had, or rather, how little.

He thought about trying to go back to sleep.

Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe this time, the dream wouldn’t come again. Maybe he would sleep, with no dreams at all. He jerked the sheets away from his legs. And maybe the Tooth Fairy would leave a quarter under his pillow.

The dream didn’t come often. Sometimes it left him alone for days at a time, and once he’d gone three weeks without a single troubled night. But sooner or later, it always came back. Always.

If he let himself fall asleep now, he’d be back in the minefield, standing shoulder to shoulder with Clint Brody, and Alex Sherman, and Julie Schramm, and all the rest of them—with their torn and burnt flesh, and their mangled limbs.

They wouldn’t question him, or accuse him. They hadn’t done it in life, and they didn’t do it in the dream. They just stood there, mangled and lifeless, reminding Bowie of the terrible price that each of them had paid for following his orders.

Damn.

He might has well get up. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep tonight.

Bowie sat up on his bunk. He was reaching for his coveralls when the phone rang. He fumbled for it in the dark, locating it by touch, and unlatching the receiver from the cradle.

He held the phone to his ear. “Captain speaking.”

The voice of his Executive Officer came over the line. “Captain, this is the XO. I apologize for disturbing your sleep, but we’ve got Flash message traffic, sir. Immediate execute.”

Bowie yawned. “Thanks, Nick. I’ll meet you in the wardroom in a couple of minutes.”

He yawned again. “You’ve seen the message. Is this something we’re going to need to wake up the Department Heads for?”

“I think so, sir,” the XO said.

“Alright,” Bowie said. “Roust them out, and head them up to the wardroom. I’ll be up there in two shakes.”

He hung up the phone. Immediate execute? That could only be one thing.

The XO hadn’t given him any details, because the ship’s regular internal telephones were non-secure. He’d find out in a minute, when he read the message. But it had to be the submarine. Bowie couldn’t think of anything else that would justify Flash message traffic with Immediate execute orders.

He stood up and began pulling on his coveralls. The Towers was getting orders to go after the Russian missile sub. That had to be it.

They were going to go kill the submarine. He whistled through his teeth. Nothing like a little taste of déjà vu to get the morning started off right.

CHAPTER 33

NEW KOBOSHI HOTEL

CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

0326 hours (3:26 AM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

Someone was knocking on the door.

Ann Roark grunted and rolled over, pulling a pillow over her head.

The knocking continued, this time accompanied by a voice. “Ann … Get up.”

It was Sheldon.

Ann opened one eye. The miniscule Japanese hotel room was still dark, the only illumination coming from the green digits of the clock radio and the red LED on the ceiling smoke detector. The muted glow of streetlights against the backs of the curtains made the window a rectangle of lesser darkness.

Ann tried to focus on the clock, but her vision was too blurry to resolve the digits into anything meaningful.

Sheldon knocked again. “Wake up, Princess Leia. It’s time to go save the galaxy … Again.”

Ann reluctantly peeled back the covers and half-stumbled out of bed, shuffling in the general direction of the door. She located a doorknob, twisted it, and found herself gazing blearily into the dark confines of the hotel room’s tiny closet. She shoved it closed, located the correct door, and opened it.

The light from the hallway nearly blinded her. She shielded her eyes with a hand that felt like lead, and squinted toward her intruder. Sheldon stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness like a Blake painting of an angel radiating heavenly glory.

Ann turned away from this vision of ersatz splendor, and reached through the open door of the bathroom to flip on the vanity lights.

“Get in, and shut the door,” she said. “That hallway light is killing me.”

She shuffled back into the room, hearing Sheldon close the door behind himself. She flopped face down onto the bed like a rag doll.

She clamped her eyes tightly closed, and then forced herself to open them again. “Did you get through to Powder and Booty?”

Powder was Sheldon’s three year-old cocker spaniel, a shaggy buff-colored powder-puff of a dog, with a lolling tongue and a golden disposition. ‘Booty’ was Ann’s name for Buddy, the eight month-old Yorkshire Terrier-Chihuahua mix that Sheldon had gotten as a companion to Powder. Ann had taken to calling the smaller dog Booty, because he seemed to take savage glee in leaping up to nip unwary people on the rump. The scruffy little rat was, quite literally, a pain in the butt.

“I got a call through to my mom,” Sheldon said. “She’s scared half out of her wits, but otherwise she’s doing okay. I’m glad she lives up in the hills, because she tells me that Oceanside is coming unglued.”

He sighed. “Powder and Buddy are doing fine, by the way.”

Talking about Booty made Ann gradually realize that her own booty was currently on display. She was dressed in her bed clothes: an old Phantom of the Opera tee-shirt and faded green panties. Her butt was pointed straight at the ceiling.

With a nearly-convulsive jerk, she rolled over, adjusting her tee-shirt to cover her panties. Had Sheldon peeked at her ass when her back was turned? He’d almost certainly wanted to. Between the elliptical and Pilates, her butt was in pretty good shape, and she knew that Sheldon was healthy and hetero. He probably hadn’t looked, though. Sheldon had an annoying habit of doing the right thing, even when nobody was watching.

She tugged the shirt down a little lower, trying to make sure her panties were safely out of view. “What time is it?”

Sheldon checked his watch. “Almost three-thirty.”

“In the morning? Three-thirty AM?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s AM,” Sheldon said. “It’s still dark outside. But this is Japan, and the rules may be different here. Maybe the sun doesn’t come up on any particular schedule.”

Ann yawned. “Why …” Her question was interrupted by a second yawn. “… are you waking me up at three-thirty in the freaking morning, Sheldon?”

“You need to get packed,” Sheldon said. “The Navy wants us back.”

Ann yawned a third time. “The Navy wants us back where?”

“Back on the ship,” Sheldon said. “USS Towers. I got a call from corporate about twenty minutes ago. The Navy wants us to do some more work with Mouse. Apparently, Captain Bowie asked for us by name. They’re sending a van to drive us to the Air Force Base at Yakota. We catch a helo flight from there.”

Ann forced her eyes wide enough to stare at Sheldon. He was still standing near the door, illuminated by the bathroom vanity lights. “I’m the tech, she said. Why did corporate call you?”

Sheldon grinned. “They called us both. But you turn your cell phone off at night. I leave mine on. I imagine you’ve got a voicemail on your phone right now.”

Ann rubbed her eyes, and rotated her head to loosen her neck muscles. “What kind of work does the Navy expect us to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sheldon said. “I talked to Rick Kramer from Norton corporate liaison. He couldn’t give details over the phone. Evidently it’s all pretty hush-hush. But Rick did say that it’s going to be dangerous. We have to sign liability waivers and security agreements.”

Ann shook her head. “I’m not at the Navy’s beck and call. They can’t order me to go anywhere. And they certainly can’t order me to intentionally put myself in danger.”

“Nobody’s ordering us,” Sheldon said. “The Navy’s asking for us. They need our help with something.”

He shrugged. “I’m going. There aren’t any flights to the States anyway. Might as well go do some work and earn some hazard pay. It beats sitting around a hotel room the size of a shoebox, watching Japanese game shows.”

“I’m not going,” Ann said. “The Navy can kiss off.”

“Okay,” Sheldon said. “I’ll tell Rick, and they’ll send somebody else.”

“They can’t do that,” Ann snapped. “Mouse is my baby. I did half the fabrication, and I wrote most of the code. Nobody knows that robot like I do.”

“I understand that,” Sheldon said. “But Mouse doesn’t belong to you, Ann. It’s a very expensive prototype that happens to be the property of Norton Deep Water Systems. And Norton has an extremely lucrative contract to build a few hundred Mouse units for the United States Navy. Ann, you know that corporate isn’t going to piss off their numero-uno customer. If the Navy wants a Mouse technician, Norton’s going to send them one. If it’s not you, it’ll be somebody else. But it’s going to happen. You know that.”

He turned back toward the door. “I’ll call Rick, and tell him to get another tech out here.”

Ann sighed. “Alright! I’ll go, damn it! Just get out of here so I can pack and get dressed.”

Sheldon checked his watch again. “The van will be here in about forty minutes. Why don’t we meet in the downstairs coffee shop in half an hour?”

“Okay,” Ann said. “Have some caffeine ready when I get down there. Otherwise, I may have to kill you.”

“Will do.” He reached for the doorknob.

“Sheldon?”

He paused. “Yeah?”

“Did you look at my butt when my back was turned?”

“Ah … no. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem polite.”

Ann threw a pillow at him. “You’re too freaking nice for your own good. Now, get the hell out of my room and let me get dressed.”

Sheldon laughed. “Meet you downstairs.”

*  *  *

Thirty minutes later, Ann walked through the front door of the coffee shop. The lighted plastic sign by the entrance identified the shop as Hero Coffee Star. The accompanying logo included a bright red Art Deco coffee pot, rendered in the style of a 1950s Flash Gordon rocket ship.

The interior décor of the coffee shop followed the retro-science fiction theme. The walls were airbrushed with cartoon murals of alien lunarscapes, dotted with improbable-looking domed cities in which the buildings all resembled old-school jukeboxes.

Sheldon was seated at a small round table that had been silk-screened to look like the planet Saturn. As promised, he had a cup of coffee waiting on the table in front of Ann’s chair.

He was looking the other way as she approached, and humming a strange little tune—bouncy, but with an odd rhythm.

Ann sat down and started doctoring the coffee with sugar and powdered creamer. “Do you really have to make that much noise this early in the morning?”

“It’s stuck in my head,” Sheldon said. “From a Japanese commercial.”

He hummed the tune again, and used his spoon to gently tap out the notes against the rim of his coffee cup. The musical clink of the metal on porcelain seemed to goad him into song. “Kitty paws,” he sang. “Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws…”

Ann snorted, and had to grab a napkin to keep from spewing coffee. “Kitty paws? What were they advertising?”

Sheldon took his own swallow of coffee. “Have you ever watched Japanese commercials?”

“No.”

“You can never tell what they’re advertising,” Sheldon said. “At least I can’t. They don’t make any sense to me, but a lot of them are pretty funny.”

“I don’t care what language it’s in,” Ann said. “How can you watch a commercial and not know what they’re advertising?”

“The language isn’t the problem,” Sheldon said. “It’s the cultural subtext. The Japanese contextual cues are totally alien to me. They go right over my head.”

Ann snorted again. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” She set down her coffee cup. “I don’t claim to understand people, but I always know when somebody’s trying to sell me something. Describe this commercial to me, and I’ll tell you what they’re selling.”

Sheldon leaned back in his seat. “Okay … Let’s see … It starts out with a view of the earth, seen from outer space. The camera zooms in closer, until you see the Japanese islands, from great altitude and through cloud cover. Then the camera drops through the clouds, and you’re looking down on a major city—Tokyo, maybe. It zooms in even closer, past the tops of the buildings, and then down to a beautiful little Japanese tea garden, sandwiched between two enormous glass skyscrapers. In the middle of the tea garden is a black European sports sedan. Something really sharp looking. Maybe a Saab. I don’t remember. And draped across the hood of the sports sedan is a tall dark haired woman, European or American, with legs that go on forever. She’s wearing a strapless black evening gown, slit way up the thigh to show plenty of leg, a pair of black stiletto heals, and a little headband with black Cat Woman ears attached. The narrator is talking a mile-a-minute in Japanese, while an off-camera choir of little Japanese girls sing the jingle in English. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws …”

Sheldon sat up, and took another sip of coffee. “Then the camera pulls in tight on the tall woman’s face. She does sort of a sexy-pouty thing with her lips, raises an eyebrow, and says, “the excitement has arrived …”

Sheldon looked at Ann. “So, what do you think they’re selling? Japanese tea gardens? European sports cars? Evening wear and sexy shoes? For all I know, they were selling those little Cat Woman ears.”

Ann glared at him. “You just made that whole thing up. Nobody would shoot a commercial like that.”

“I didn’t make it up,” Sheldon said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Japanese commercials are all like that. They don’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t born into the culture.”

He set down his coffee cup. “When we get back to the States, I’ll find that commercial on the Internet, and download it for you. I’m really not joking.” He laughed, and started singing again. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus …”

He chopped off in mid-note. His cell phone was ringing. He fished it out and held it to his ear. “Sheldon Miggs.”

He listened for a second. “Thanks. We’ll be right out.”

Sheldon closed his phone, and took a final gulp of coffee. “Grab your bags. The excitement has arrived. In this particular case, the excitement takes the form of a U.S. Air Force van, with a government-issue driver.”

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “How about it, Cat Woman? Ready to go rescue mankind from certain destruction?”

CHAPTER 34

ICE PACK - EASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

LATITUDE 55.18N / LONGITUDE 154.17E

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

0614 hours (6:14 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The titanium cylinder hung suspended in the water 100 meters below the ice, at the end of a Kevlar-jacketed cable. The cylinder was anodized in a flat gray color, the precise shade of which had been calculated by marine biologists to resemble neither food, nor predator. The protective Kevlar cable jacket had been molded in the exact same color, for the same reason.

The sea creatures inhabiting the strange twilight world beneath the ice pack were ravenously hungry, and the more predatory species guarded their territories with jealousy. Although the Kevlar and titanium were tough enough to resist easy damage, it was important that they not invite attacks by any fish or mammal that might mistake them for an enemy, or for an easy meal.

This last was particularly critical, because the titanium cylinder was an acoustic transducer. It transmitted and received audio signals underwater, and those signals were modulated to closely simulate the noises produced by the shrimp-like krill that lived under the ice pack in teaming schools.

When it was broadcasting, the transducer made the same frying bacon hiss produced by swarms of krill as they fed on ice-algae and phytoplankton. Because the krill themselves were a major source of nutrition for many of the fish and sea creatures living in the water beneath the ice pack, that meant that the transducer’s signals sounded like food. And—the durability of titanium and Kevlar aside—a piece of equipment that sounds like food, should not look like food as well. The carefully non-food coloring of the cable and transducer had been selected with this in mind.

Apart from the obvious drawbacks inherent in making sounds like an easy meal, the feeding noise of the krill was nearly perfect for masking a digital audio signal. The crackling hiss was rich with white noise, a jumble of high and low frequencies into which binary information could be encoded with ease.

The advantages of this were twofold. It would be nearly impossible for an outside listener to decode the digital messages without the proper encryption/decryption algorithm. But more importantly, the sound of feeding krill occurred naturally in the waters under the ice pack. If an acoustic surveillance sensor happened to intercept a transmission, the sound would be classified as typical ambient noise made by local sea life. No sensor operator or acoustic analyst in the world would recognize it as a manmade communications signal. For all practical purposes, that made the system invisible to anyone who did not already know of its existence.

The encryption/decryption algorithm at the heart of this covert transponder system had been programmed by a pair of graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps one or both of the students had eventually grown to suspect that their enigmatic employer did not really represent an eco-friendly alternative energy firm, as he had claimed. Perhaps the young programmers had also guessed that the true purpose of the software had nothing to do with bio-density surveys. But any misgivings the two students might have felt were now moot. Both men had been killed within hours of delivering the final version of their software.

Detectives from the Cambridge Police Department were investigating both deaths, but had failed to turn up evidence of a connection between the cases. One of the students had slipped in a hotel shower and cracked his skull. The other had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The circumstances of the cases were quite different, and both deaths appeared to be accidental. Even so, the police found it exceedingly suspicious that two students from the same department at MIT had died on the same afternoon.

At various points in the investigation, the homicide detectives considered and discarded a long list of possible suspects, including friends of the victims, fellow students, known enemies, relatives, girlfriends, possible romantic rivals, and several smalltime drug dealers known to ply their wares near the MIT campus.

The drug angle was a stretch. Neither of the victims were known users, and the toxicology screens from their autopsies showed no traces of any controlled substances. The dealers had been added to the list when the detectives realized that they’d run out of suspects. With two college-age men dead under suspicious circumstances, it was possible that drugs were somehow involved, and no one seemed to have any alternative leads.

But the suspicions of the police—whatever they might have been—did not involve trained assassins from the Chinese military, nor covert under-ice communications systems, nor hijacked Russian nuclear submarines. Which meant that the Cambridge police had no chance of actually figuring out who had murdered their two students, or why.

*  *  *

A little over 4,600 nautical miles northwest of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the motive for the MIT murders was gliding quietly through the frigid waters beneath the Siberian ice pack. Submarine K-506 had been built as part of the Soviet Union’s Project 667BDR construction program: the Kal’mar class—what the NATO countries called the Delta III class.

Although the submarine was more than three decades old, and much noisier than current generations of missile subs, it was still quiet enough to escape detection at low speeds. So it moved slowly and deliberately, creeping through the dark waters under the ice at less than four kilometers per hour—just enough speed to keep water moving across the rudders and stern planes, for steering and depth control.

At a range of one kilometer from the designated coordinates, the submarine’s Burya underwater communications system began transmitting an acoustic signal into the water. The signal sounded nothing like an ordinary Burya transmission. The equipment had been modified to broadcast and receive only the crackling and hissing signal that so closely mimicked the feeding noises of the under ice krill.

The signal was received by the cylindrical titanium transducer. Thin wafers of piezoelectric crystal within the transducer resonated in time with the vibrations of the sound waves. The tiny stresses created by these vibrations caused the crystal wafers to alternately contract and expand. The fluctuations were nearly microscopic in scale, but each deformation of the piezoelectric crystals generated a minute pulse of electricity.

The technology had been invented for quartz movement wristwatches, but it worked equally well in this application. Each electrical pulse was channeled into a transistor, where it was amplified for better examination. The amplified pulses were then routed to a binary discriminator circuit, where they were converted to digital ones, or digital zeroes, depending upon their strength and polarity.

The stream of digital pulses from the discriminator circuit passed through a splitter bus, and then a short length of ribbon cable, to reach a microprocessor configured as a binary parser.

The parser stripped out ambient ocean sounds and the masking junk information that had been woven into the acoustic signal to disguise it as random biological noise. The output of the parser was a complete and coherent digital message, rendered in perfectly-legible binary code.

The digital message shot up the fiber-optic wires at the core of the Kevlar cable, and followed the cable through the thick ice layer, to another microprocessor, sheltered in an insulated protective housing under a few centimeters of concealing ice and snow.

The second microprocessor examined the contents of the digital signal, to determine whether or not it contained a destruct command. If a destruct command had been present, the microprocessor was programmed to detonate an array of shaped explosive charges drilled into the ice in a circular perimeter.

No destruct signal was present, and the explosives were not triggered.

The microprocessor reverted to its secondary program, encrypting the digital signal to protect its contents. When the encryption process was complete, the computer immediately re-encrypted the signal, using an entirely different code scheme. The double-encrypted block of digital code was uploaded to the outgoing message queue of a satellite phone within the same insulated enclosure.

On command, the phone dialed a pre-programmed telephone number, accessing a commercial communications satellite network. When the connection protocols were synchronized, the hidden telephone unit transmitted its waiting message to a ComStar IV series satellite in standard commercial orbit.

The satellite phone account was legitimate, one of many commercial accounts opened for this specific purpose. The registered account owner was a dummy corporation in Spain, again one of many established solely for this operation. But the bills were paid on time, and the account had never been flagged for suspected misconduct.

Other than an automated notation to charge the call against the user’s account, no human or machine in the telecommunications industry paid any attention whatsoever to the call. It was a routine commercial transaction. The message from K-506 joined the flow of ordinary daily phone traffic, and no one was any the wiser.

When the call was completed, the satellite phone kept the connection open, and transmitted the access code for its voicemail box. There was one waiting message, which the satellite phone downloaded, before terminating the call.

The incoming message was double encrypted in the same manner that the outgoing message had been. It was routed from the phone’s message queue to the adjoining microprocessor, which unraveled both layers of encryption, before shooting it back down the Kevlar cable toward the hanging titanium cylinder.

The process continued in reverse, and ended when the transducer injected a stream of white noise into the water, 100 meters below the ice. The transmission sounded a great deal like the ordinary noises of feeding krill, and not at all like tactical instructions to a nuclear missile submarine.

A kilometer away the K-506 received its updated orders. With slow but deliberate speed, the submarine turned and began to move north.

CHAPTER 35

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

2:40 PM EST

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven walked into the empty room. The high-backed leather chairs were all pushed against the long mahogany table. The air was still, and quiet.

Brenthoven closed the door, and stood alone on the heavy wine-colored carpet.

Something was tugging at his mind, a tiny prickle at the fringes of his subconscious. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but knew that he had missed something. Some little detail that had slipped past his conscious mind without making an impression. He didn’t know what it was, but he had a feeling that it was something important.

He walked the length of the table, stopping behind the chair where he usually sat. At the far end of the room, the projection screen was retracted into its recess in the ceiling. The remote control lay in the middle of the table.

Without knowing why, Brenthoven picked up the remote, and pressed the button that raised and lowered the screen. Electric motors whispered, and the screen descended, hanging at the end of the table like a blank tableau.

He pulled his chair out from the table and sat down, his eyes studying the empty display screen. Something in his mind stirred. He almost had something, flickering just out of sight at the edge of his memory.

What was it? Something he had watched on this screen, maybe?

He pressed another button, calling the hidden projector to life. The default image appeared on the screen: the presidential seal, set against a blue background.

Another series of buttons called up a menu of available presentation files. Admiral Casey’s Sea of Okhotsk brief was at the top of the recent files list. Again without knowing why he did so, Brenthoven called up the CNO’s briefing package.

He paged through the images slowly, studying each in turn. The map of the Sea of Okhotsk. The circle representing the launch point. The photograph of the Russian submarine. The map of the Pacific. The curving lines of the incoming warheads. The converging arcs of the interceptor missiles.

He reached the end of the presentation. Nothing

With a sigh, he dropped the remote on the table. The clatter of plastic against wood seemed to echo in the quiet of the empty room.

He’d been hoping that one of the images might jar something in his memory. But nothing was coming to him.

He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes. Nothing. Damn it.

He’d go back to his office. Maybe it would come to him if he stopped thinking about it so much.

Or maybe there was no ‘it.’ Maybe the ‘it’ was nothing more than wishful thinking. Maybe he wanted so badly to find an answer, that his brain was conjuring phantoms.

He didn’t know. He reached for the remote, and pointed the device toward the screen to shut off the projector.

On the screen, the map of the Sea of Okhotsk was showing. In the northeastern corner was the red circle that represented the submarine’s launch position. The adjoining label showed the latitude and longitude of the circle: 58.29N / 155.20E.

Brenthoven’s finger reached toward the power button. It paused, hovering above the button. He studied the numbers … 58.29N / 155.20E.

Why did they seem familiar? Because he’d seen them during the admiral’s brief?

No, that wasn’t it. Now that he thought about it, they’d seemed familiar then too. He’d seen that same sequence of digits somewhere else, in a different context.

He read them aloud. “Five … eight … two … nine … one … five … five … two … zero …”

Damn it! Where had he seen them before? He almost had it now …

The answer hit him, and he sat up straight in the chair. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for his little leather-bound notebook. His fingers fumbled it, and he nearly dropped it.

He rifled through the pages until he found his notes from a recent intelligence brief. There it was. The same sequence of numbers. Five—eight—two—nine—one—five—five— two—zero.

The unidentified numbers that the Russian courier, Oleg Grigoriev, had given to the DIA agents from his hospital bed in Japan. And that had been the day before Zhukov’s submarine had launched the first missile.

Grigoriev had given them the position for the first missile launch, before the launch had occurred. He’d known ahead of time. He might very well know the rest of the planned launch positions as well.

Up to this point, that bastard, Zhukov, had been five steps ahead of them at every turn. If Grigoriev knew the rest of the launch points, they could get ahead of Zhukov for the first time. They could finally move from defense to offense. They could end this thing.

Brenthoven pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed the White House chief of staff. The instant she picked up the phone, Brenthoven said, “I don’t care what he’s doing. I need to speak to the president. Now.”

CHAPTER 36

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

2218 hours (10:18 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark stumbled climbing the aluminum stairs to the USS Towers wardroom. She would have fallen if Sheldon hadn’t grabbed the sleeve of her jacket and steadied her.

The young Sailor who had led them here from the flight deck looked back down from the head of the stairs. “These ladders are sort of steep, Ma’am. You’ve got to watch your footing.”

Ann rolled her eyes. Like she needed a teenager to tell her how to walk. And they weren’t ladders; they were stairs. Any idiot could see that. Why did the Navy have to use a different word for everything? Why couldn’t they say floors, and walls, instead of decks, and bulkheads? It was like they went out of their way to make things as complicated as possible.

Ann started climbing again. She was so tired that she had trouble lifting her feet enough to make it up the steep incline of the stairs. And the rolling of the ship wasn’t doing anything to steady her.

Even Sheldon, Mr. Perpetual Happy-face, was showing signs of wear and tear. He didn’t look quite as bad as Ann felt, but the fatigue was visible in his face. They’d been travelling for fifteen or sixteen hours since Narita. First the van ride to the Air Force base, and then three helicopter flights, with stops to refuel the aircraft on two ships along the way. They’d probably crossed a couple of time zones in there somewhere, but Ann’s brain was too tired to do the math.

Her ears still felt numb from a very long day spent listening to the shriek of poorly-insulated aircraft engines. Little creature comforts, like soundproofing, were evidently not a priority to the U.S. military.

It was after ten o’clock, and the lighting in the ship’s hallways had been dimmed from bright white, to soft red. In Navy lingo, it was after Taps. Couldn’t they just call it lights out, like everybody else on the planet?

They reached the top of the stairs, and Sailor Boy led them through a short passageway toward a door that Ann recognized as the entrance to the ship’s wardroom.

She stopped, and lowered her bags to the floor. “Wait a second,” she said. “Can’t you take us to our staterooms first? I’d like to drop off my bags.”

What she really wanted was to get a few hours of sleep. Her brain felt like it was stuffed full of cotton. Did the Navy boneheads really think they could drag her out of bed at three in the morning, jerk her all over the Pacific for sixteen hours, and then put her straight to work?

The young Sailor smiled. “Just leave your bags here in the passageway. I’ll take them down to your staterooms. The captain wants to see you right away, Ma’am.”

The kid’s tone of voice pushed Ann’s annoyance up another notch. She resisted the temptation to parrot his words right back in his face. ‘The captain wants to see you right away, Ma’am.’

The kid was probably only nineteen years old—twenty at the outside—and the Navy already had him mentally conditioned. He honestly could not conceive of someone not giving the exalted ‘captain’ exactly what he wanted.

Automatic obedience was dangerous. Couldn’t these people see that? Couldn’t they see what it could lead to? Ann wondered what Sailor Boy would say, if she told him that his almighty captain could go to hell.

Sheldon lowered his bags to the floor and nudged Ann gently with his elbow. “Come on, let’s go save the world.”

Ann didn’t budge.

Sheldon cocked his head and showed Ann his most elaborately pitiful puppy-dog face. “Am I going to have to sing the ‘Kitty Paw’ song?”

Against her will, Ann felt herself smile a little. “Alright, asshole,” she said. She nodded toward the young Sailor. “Let’s go, Popeye. The excitement has arrived.”

The Sailor knocked on the wardroom door, and opened it, but didn’t enter. He stepped to one side, holding the door for Ann and Sheldon.

Sheldon muttered a thank you as he stepped past the Sailor. Ann followed Sheldon into the wardroom without comment.

Captain Bowie stood when they entered the room. He smiled, and motioned for them to sit.

“Welcome aboard Towers,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.”

He nodded, and a young Sailor in a blue smock jacket and white paper hat stepped forward to place cups of steaming coffee in front of the only two empty chairs at the table.

By the looks of it, nearly every officer on the ship was present. At least Ann thought they were all officers. She had never bothered to learn to distinguish military rank insignias, but they all wore khaki uniforms.

Ann took the chair on the right. She skipped the preliminaries, and reached straight for the sugar and cream.

Sheldon returned the captain’s smile as he settled into the chair to Ann’s left. “Thank you for inviting us back, Captain. We’re glad to be here.”

Ann raised her eyebrows, but didn’t comment. They hadn’t been invited. They’d been freaking summoned. And she was, most assuredly, not glad to be here.

She sipped at her coffee, and was mildly surprised to find that it wasn’t horrible. Not as good as coffee in the real world, but better than the acrid glop they usually served aboard ship. No doubt the improvement had something to do with the presence of the captain. When the big boss was in the house, the cooks probably put in a little extra effort.

Ann took a larger swallow. Well, maybe not too much extra effort.

Captain Bowie took his seat and pulled his own coffee cup across the table toward himself. “I realize that we got you up before the roosters,” he said. “And I know you’ve been in the air most of the day. I’m sure you’re both exhausted, so we’ll try to keep this as short as possible.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sheldon said.

“We’ll sketch out the basic tactical situation tonight,” the captain said. “Then we can sleep on it, and get into the details tomorrow morning.”

Sheldon fought off a yawn. “Works for me.”

The captain faced one of his people, a redheaded woman with a rounded face that seemed out of proportion to her trim build. “Chief McPherson, can you get us started?”

Chief McPherson stood up. “Aye-aye, sir.”

She laid a navigational chart on the table top, and unrolled it, weighting the corners with coffee mugs so that the curled paper didn’t roll itself back into a tube. A series of lines and symbols had been drawn on the chart using colored pencils. “Before we jump into the tactical situation,” she said, “how covert is your Mouse unit’s underwater transponder system?”

Ann shrugged. “We don’t really know yet.”

“What do you mean?” the chief asked.

“The Navy contract requires Mouse to be capable of covert operations,” Ann said. “So the transmissions from his acoustic modems are designed to mimic natural ocean sounds. Wave action, biologics, stuff like that. In theory, his communications should be really difficult to detect or identify.”

“How difficult?” Chief McPherson asked.

“We’re still in the development process,” Ann said. “The system has only been tested against a handful of underwater sensors. We won’t have hard data until the detection vulnerability surveys are complete, and they’re not scheduled to start until the end of the year.”

Captain Bowie spoke up. “So you think it’s covert, but you’re not certain?”

“That’s right,” Ann said. “I can’t give you a better answer until we finish the testing.”

The captain rubbed his chin. “I don’t think we can risk an unknown that large. The plan we have in mind depends on keeping your Mouse unit hidden from the submarine.”

Ann shifted in her chair. “What submarine?”

The chief turned her eyes toward Ann, and then to Sheldon. “How much do you know about what’s been going on in Kamchatka?”

“A little bit,” Sheldon said. “We caught some of it from the TV news in Japan, but that was in Japanese. Our hotel rooms had CNN on cable, so we got some follow-up in English. We know that there’s been some kind of military revolution in one of the Russian territories. And the rebels launched several nuclear missiles toward California, but they were intercepted. We know there’s pandemonium on the West Coast, and all of the flights are canceled.” He raised his hands and dropped them. “I guess that’s about it.”

The chief nodded. “Actually, it was only one missile,” she said. “But it was armed with three nuclear warheads.”

“CNN is claiming seven warheads,” Ann said.

“There were seven reentry vehicles,” Chief McPherson said. “Three of them were nuclear warheads. The other four were decoys, designed to tie up our resources, and force us to expend interceptor missiles.”

She pointed to a small symbol on the chart, a red downward-pointing arrow enclosed in a red circle. “The missile was launched from a nuclear submarine at this position, in the northeastern Sea of Okhotsk, about thirty-seven hours ago. The sub in question is hull number K-506, a Delta III class, built in the nineteen-seventies. It carries sixteen ballistic missiles, each of which is armed with three nuclear warheads and four decoys. It’s already fired one missile, so it’s still got fifteen missiles left in the launch tubes. That’s the submarine we’re talking about: the one that launched nukes at the West Coast.”

“And we can’t take a chance on spooking it,” the captain said. “If we use your acoustic communications system and the sub intercepts one of your signals, it’s going to kick up to flank speed and run like hell. It’ll hide so far up under the ice that we’ll never get close to it.”

“I agree, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “We may just have to settle for cueing. Send the Mouse unit under the ice to do the job in full auto mode, with no external comms. If it finds anything, it comes back out, drives to the surface, and calls us on low-power UHF.”

“That’s detectable too,” one of the officers pointed out.

“True,” the chief said. “But only at short range line-of-sight, and not by the sub. The UHF signal might get intercepted by an aircraft, but a submerged submarine will never pick it up. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s probably the best we can do.”

“You’re probably right,” the captain said. “Can anyone suggest an alternative?”

No one spoke up.

“Alright,” he said. “We go with the UHF, and stay away from underwater comms. If Mouse gets a hit, it comes to the surface and calls us on low-power UHF.”

He looked at Chief McPherson. “Continue, please.”

The chief leaned over the chart and the red symbol with her fingertip. “This is ‘datum.’ It’s the last known position of the submarine.”

She waved a hand in a big loop over the chart. “The maximum submerged speed of a Delta III is about 25 knots. If the sub is running pedal-to-the-metal, it could be 900 nautical miles from datum by now. In other words, it could be anywhere in the Sea of Okhotsk.”

Sheldon craned his neck to get a better view of the chart. “Why are you assuming that the sub is going to stay in the Sea of …” He paused. “How do you pronounce it again?”

The chief smiled. “The Sea of Okhotsk. We call it the Sea of O, for short.”

“Thanks,” Sheldon said. “So why are you assuming that the submarine is going to keep to the Sea of O? If it can run 900 miles in 36 hours, it could be through those islands and out into the Pacific right now.”

“We don’t think he’s going to come out,” Captain Bowie said. “As long as that sub skipper stays in there, he’s got the tactical advantage.”

“How so?” Sheldon asked.

“The Sea of Okhotsk is covered by the Siberian ice pack,” said Chief McPherson. “Ships can only get into the very southern end of the sea, because of the ice. As long as it stays in there, the sub can hide under the ice, where it’s protected. If he comes out into the open ocean, we’re going to eat his lunch, and he knows it.”

Ann set her coffee cup on the table. “Where do we fit into this? I assume you dragged us out here for a reason.”

“That submarine still has forty-five nuclear weapons on board,” Captain Bowie said. “We’ve been assigned to engage it before it launches another nuclear attack. Unfortunately, our options are extremely limited. Guns and missiles are no good against a submerged target, and we can’t use ASROC missiles because of the ice cover. That leaves torpedoes.”

“Okay,” Ann said. “I’m still not seeing the connection. We don’t know anything about missiles, or torpedoes, or any of that stuff.”

“Our Mk-54 torpedoes weren’t designed for under-ice operations,” Chief McPherson said. “We’re concerned that acoustic reflections under the ice could prevent the torpedoes from finding their target. Specifically, we’re worried that the Mk-54’s active sonar will lock on to the ice keels that protrude from the underside of the ice pack, and attack them instead of the submarine.”

“I hope you don’t think we can answer that question,” Ann said.

“Not at all,” the chief said. “At the moment, no one can answer it. I’ve spent about three hours on the satellite phone with the torpedo engineers at Raytheon. They designed the Mk-54, and they don’t know the answer either. They’ll have to conduct extensive field tests to be certain, but they ran some quick and dirty computer simulations for me, and the results don’t look good. Our torpedoes will probably not be able to locate the submarine in the under-ice environment.”

“That’s where your Mouse unit comes in,” the captain said. “We need it to go after the submarine under the ice pack.”

Ann was tired, and her weariness made her a little slower on the uptake than usual. So it took a few seconds for the meanings of the captain’s words to sink in.

She frowned, almost certain that she’d misunderstood him. “You’re saying you want to use Mouse … as a weapon?”

Captain Bowie shook his head. “Not exactly. What we need …”

Ann held up a hand. “Mouse isn’t configured for combat. He wasn’t designed to fight.”

“We know that,” Bowie said. “We don’t expect the Mouse unit to attack the submarine. That wouldn’t work. Your machine can’t carry a heavy enough explosive charge to guarantee a kill.”

“So what do you have in mind for Mouse?” Sheldon asked.

Bowie crooked a finger toward Chief McPherson, who laid an odd-looking device on the table top.

It was shaped roughly like a double-decker hamburger—round, with a domed top and a slightly concave bottom. It appeared to be constructed of metal and plastic. Several circuits and mechanical fixtures had been strapped to the outside using the red waterproof adhesive cloth that the Navy called ordinance tape.

“This is the acoustic transducer from a Mark-63 expendable mobile target,” the chief said. “The 63s are training tools. We toss them in the water, and let our Sonar Operators track them for practice. But in this case, we’re only going to use the acoustic section, so we pulled that part out and modified it.”

She pointed to the hodge-podge of add-on circuits. “It’s not pretty, but we’ve got it configured to respond to a coded external pulse. If we ping this thing with the right frequency, it kicks into beacon mode, and begins transmitting a loud acoustic signal that our torpedoes can track.”

“I’m totally lost,” Ann said. “Where does Mouse figure into this?”

Bowie spoke up. “The beacon has a magnetic base. We want Mouse to locate the submarine, and attach the beacon to its hull. Then, we need Mouse to come back out from under the ice and report back to us, so we know that the beacon is in place.”

“Okay,” Ann said slowly. “Then what?”

“Then Mouse keeps an eye on the sub for us,” the captain said, “and lets us know if it comes within weapons range of the ship. When the sub gets close enough, we trigger the beacon so our torpedoes can lock on.”

“You want Mouse to be the finger man,” Ann said. “He doesn’t do the killing; he just points the finger, and you guys take care of the dirty work.”

“Well,” the captain said. “I suppose …”

“Just a second!” Ann’s voice came out much louder than she’d intended. Her words seemed to reverberate in the suddenly-quiet wardroom. “How many people are on that submarine?” she asked. Her voice was softer now.

“We don’t know exactly,” Chief McPherson said. “The crew compliment of a Delta III is 130, but we’re not sure if the sub got underway with full manning. Fighting had already broken out in Petropavlosk when the K-506 put out to sea, so they may not have a complete crew.”

“But it’s around 130 men?” Ann asked.

The chief nodded. “That’s about right.”

“What are their names?”

The question seemed to puzzle everyone in the room.

Captain Bowie studied Ann, a slight frown on his blandly handsome face. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand.”

“The men on the submarine,” Ann said. “What are their names?”

No one spoke. Every pair of eyes in the wardroom stared at her.

“You tell me that there are 130 people on that submarine,” Ann said. “And you want me to help you kill them.”

She locked eyes with the captain. “I’ve never killed anyone in my life,” she said. She snapped her fingers. “Now, just like that, I’m supposed to help you murder 130 people I’ve never even met?”

She slumped back in her chair, letting her weight sag onto the base of her spine. “If I’m going to see the faces of more than a hundred strangers in my dreams every night for the rest of my life, I want to know their freaking names. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

The silence held for nearly ten seconds, before Sheldon broke it. “Ann, we should at least listen …”

“No!” Ann snapped. She looked around the table, meeting each pair of eyes in-turn. “I’m through listening.”

“Mouse does not kill people,” she said. “I do not kill people. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

She stood up. “If that’s what you brought us here to do, you’ve wasted your money and my time.”

Before anyone could respond, she walked out the door.

CHAPTER 37

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

2129 hours (9:29 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

The stocky old Russian lay in the hospital bed, the slow rise and fall of his chest the only movement in his body. The heart monitor mounted to the wall near his bed beeped in a soft continuous rhythm.

Agent Ross watched the unconscious man for several long seconds before turning back to Dr. Hogan. “How much longer is he going to be like this?”

Hogan glanced at the heart monitor, and then down at the medical chart in his hand. “There’s no way to know,” he said.

“Doctor, that’s not good enough,” Ross said. “We’ve got a madman holding three countries hostage with nuclear weapons. And some of those weapons are pointed right here, toward Japan.”

Ross exhaled through his nostrils. “This is a good sized naval base. Chances are, we’re standing at ground-zero for one of those nukes.”

He looked back toward the unconscious form of Oleg Grigoriev. “I’ve got to find out what that man knows. I need to know how much longer he’s going to be out.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Dr. Hogan said. “Because I don’t know.” He sighed. “The patient suffered a major pulmonary embolism, secondary to the gunshot wound in his chest. He coded on us, and we nearly lost him. Your partner was here when it happened. Ask him.”

“Agent DuBrul has given me his report,” Ross said. “But he’s not a doctor. He can’t tell me when the patient will be ready to talk again.”

“Neither can I,” Hogan said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, Agent Ross. I know how important it is that you talk to this man. But I don’t know when he’s going to be conscious again. His vitals are fairly steady at the moment, but he’s not in good shape. We could lose him at any second.”

Hogan studied the patient. His voice was solemn. “This patient could open his eyes ten minutes from now, or ten days from now. Or he may never open them again. Even if he does, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be coherent. A pulmonary embolism restricts blood flow to the brain. The patient may have significant mental deterioration. There’s no way to know until he comes around.”

“If he comes around,” Ross said

Dr. Hogan nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “If.”

CHAPTER 38

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

0609 hours (6:09 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

When Ann opened the door to her stateroom, she found Sheldon standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall, or the bulkhead, or whatever the damned thing was called.

She shot him a quizzical look. “Are you waiting for me?”

Sheldon nodded. “Come on. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“How long have you been standing there?”

“A while,” Sheldon said.

“Why didn’t you knock?”

He shrugged. “I figured you needed your sleep. Anyway, it’s not like I’ve got anything to do today.”

He gave Ann a patented Sheldon smile. “You want some breakfast, or not?”

Ann looked one way down the hall, and then the other. “Lead the way. I can never find anything in this metal maze.”

“Follow me, Madam,” Sheldon said. “One guaranteed five-star military breakfast coming up.”

Ann followed. “Right. I’ll settle for not getting food poisoning.”

As usual, Ann was totally lost. Every door, valve, and electrical junction box was stamped or stenciled with a number. She knew the numbers were all part of some kind of coordinate system for locating equipment, and for finding your way around the maze. But she didn’t like ships enough to invest the effort required to learn the numbering scheme. So she was stuck with trying to recognize landmarks in a world where everything had the same utilitarian blandness about it.

She spotted the door to the wardroom, and was surprised when Sheldon walked past it without stopping. “I think you just missed our exit,” she said.

Sheldon started down one of the steep metal staircases. “I thought we’d go down to the crew’s mess, and eat with the enlisted personnel this morning.”

“Why? Have our wardroom privileges been revoked?”

“Not as far as I know,” Sheldon said. “But the Combat Systems Officer told me they’re holding a tactical planning meeting in the wardroom this morning. And we’ve sort of cut ourselves out of the tactical loop.”

“You mean I cut us out of the loop,” Ann said.

Sheldon stopped at the foot of the stairs and turned back toward Ann. “We’re a team,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who threw the penalty flag. We’re both out of the game. So I figure we should stay clear of the wardroom until they’re finished with the planning meeting.”

“What do you think they’ll do?” Ann asked.

Sheldon started walking again. “I’m sure they’ll try to helo us out of here as soon as possible,” he said over his shoulder.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ann said. “I mean what will they do without Mouse? What’s their Plan-B?”

“I don’t think they’ve got a Plan-B,” Sheldon said. “Unless I’m mistaken, Mouse was something like their Plan-Z. I think they exhausted every tactical option they could come up with before they ever considered something as crazy as Mouse.”

He stopped again, and turned to face Ann. “Mouse is prototype technology,” he said. “It’s full of bugs, and it’s undependable. They know that. And you and I, Princess Leia, are civilians. That makes us unpredictable, and difficult to manage. They can’t order us around. In other words, we’re undependable too. And they know that.”

Sheldon tilted his head forward and looked out of the tops of his eyes. “Do you really think these Navy guys would be calling on undependable civilians with undependable equipment if they had another option?”

Ann didn’t answer.

Sheldon continued walking. Ann followed. About fifty feet later, they came to a long line of Sailors, all dressed in blue utility uniforms.

“I believe this is what they call the chow line,” Sheldon said. He sniffed the air theatrically. “Mmm … Smell that? That’s good Navy chow.”

Ann wrinkled her nose. “Yuck!”

She sighed. “You think I’m wrong, don’t you?”

“It’s a matter of taste,” Sheldon said. “Shipboard food isn’t for everybody.”

“Not about that,” Ann said. “About Mouse. You think I’m wrong for not helping them, don’t you?”

“What I think doesn’t matter,” Sheldon said. “You’re the only person you have to look at in the mirror. And I can certainly understand your position. You didn’t sign on to kill people. Not even indirectly.”

“No,” Ann said. “I didn’t.”

Sheldon said nothing.

The line moved ahead a little, and Sheldon lifted two thick plastic cafeteria trays off of a spring-loaded metal rack. He passed one to Ann.

“You’d help them, wouldn’t you?” Ann asked.

The line moved another pace forward, and Sheldon pulled two sets of knives, forks, and spoons out of round metal holders.

“Yeah. I would help them,” he said. He sorted out a set of utensils and passed it to Ann.

She accepted the small bundle of flatware. The metal was warm, and still a little damp. The utensils were obviously fresh from the dishwasher.

“Why?” she asked. “I know you, Sheldon. You haven’t got a violent bone in your body. Why on earth would you participate in the killing of 130 human beings?”

Sheldon started to say something, and then checked himself. “Let’s talk about this later. This is not a good conversation to have, just before we eat.”

“Now,” Ann said. “Answer my question.”

Sheldon exhaled sharply. “Did you ever study First Aid?” he asked. “Do you know what a tourniquet is?”

Ann nodded.

“I was a Boy Scout when I was a kid,” Sheldon said. “I had merit badges like you wouldn’t believe. I loved it. I was on my way to Eagle Scout. And one summer, I took my little brother camping on Dutch Island, in the Wilmington River. I was fifteen that year, and Charley was thirteen. We had to get there by boat. And man, it was the stuff of pure adventure.

“Imagine it,” he said. “Two boys on an island by themselves. It was Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island, all rolled into one. And on the third day of the camping trip—it was supposed to be the last day—the hatchet bounced off a knot when Charley was chopping firewood. The blade hit his left wrist, and it cut him bad.”

The chow line had moved forward, but Sheldon made no attempt to follow it. He put his tray back on the rack, and returned his utensils to their holders. Then he turned toward Ann. “I couldn’t stop the bleeding,” he said. “I tried direct pressure, and pressure points, and all of the First Aid tricks in the Boy Scout handbook. But nothing would stop the bleeding.”

Sheldon swallowed, and looked away from Ann. “And all I could think of was a tourniquet.”

Someone tapped Ann on the shoulder and she turned to see a line of Sailors bunching up behind them. She tugged Sheldon to the side, and waved for the Sailors to go around.

Sheldon’s voice was hoarse now. “I remembered my scout training,” he said. “They told us to never use a tourniquet unless there was no other choice. Don’t use one unless it’s a choice between the tourniquet and death. Because the limb begins to die the second you tighten down the tourniquet. It shuts off the blood flow to the wound, but it shuts off the blood flow to the entire limb as well. Most of the time, after a tourniquet has been used, the doctors have to amputate the arm or the leg.”

Sheldon wiped at one of his eyes. “My little brother is bleeding all over the pine needles,” he said. “And I can’t stop it. Nothing is working. It’s coming out like a fountain, and I cannot stop it. And I know, if I put a tourniquet on Charley’s arm, the doctors are going to have to amputate. They’re going to take the arm off.”

Sheldon looked at Ann. “Charley’s thirteen years old, and they’re going to have to take his arm off. But there’s nothing else I can do. My belt is too thick to work, but I’ve got boots on, with heavy laces. I double one of them up, tie it off just below Charley’s elbow, and I slide a little piece of tree branch in for tension. And I twist that stick, tightening the tourniquet. And I twist it again. In my heart, I know with every turn of that stick, that I’m killing Charley’s arm. But I twist, and I twist again, until the bleeding stops. And then I carry Charley to the boat, and I head for the docks at Tidewater.”

Ann returned her tray to the rack, and her eating utensils to the round holders.

“Come on,” she said. She turned away from the waiting line of Sailors and started walking.

Ann had no idea where she was going, but Sheldon followed her through the maze of passageways. She came to a staircase and climbed. After a few wrong turns, she found a watertight door that led outside. Sheldon followed her out into the frosty pre-dawn air.

The wind hit them immediately, and it was far colder than Ann was expecting. The sun was a feeble glow below the slate gray horizon, and the sky was still dark enough for the stars to stand out clearly.

Ann’s teeth began to chatter, and her eyes started to water. She wondered if the cold-blasted tears would freeze on her skin.

They’d only stay out here for a minute or two, but Sheldon needed the change of scenery to reset his mental clock. They’d be okay for a couple of minutes. At least Ann hoped they would.

She looked at the dark and motionless form that was Sheldon. She couldn’t see his eyes, but his body posture suggested that he was looking toward the dusky blur of the horizon.

Ann hesitated. She wanted to ask a question, but she was not at all sure she was ready to hear the answer. She braced herself for the worst, and took a breath. The cold air bit at her lungs. “What happened to Charley?”

“They saved his life,” Sheldon said softly. “He lost his left arm, but the doctors saved his life.”

“No,” Ann said. “You saved his life.”

“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I guess.”

His face was still pointed toward the horizon. “You asked why I would help the Navy guys destroy the submarine,” he said. “That’s why. Because sometimes there aren’t any good choices. Sometimes you have to choose between something bad, and something worse.”

He shivered, and looked down toward the darkly rolling waves. “There are 130 people on that submarine,” he said. “And I don’t want to hurt any of them. But there are millions of people in Washington, and Oregon, and California, and Colorado …”

He turned toward Ann. “I’m a liaison and logistics guy,” he said. “Not a technician, or an operator. I can’t make Mouse do his stuff. That’s your end of the business. So this all comes down to you. If you help the Navy destroy that sub, you’ll have 130 deaths on your conscience. I’m not going to lie to you, Ann. You probably will have nightmares. Hell, I’m just the hand-shaker and the pencil-pusher, and I’ll probably have nightmares. But if you do nothing to stop that sub, and it launches more nukes at the United States …” His voice trailed off.

“I wonder, Ann,” he said quietly, “How many nightmares will we get, if we let a million people die?”

CHAPTER 39

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

0631 hours (6:31 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

“Okay,” Captain Bowie said. “Let’s go around the table again. There’s a solution to this, people. We just haven’t found it yet.”

He looked to his left. “XO?”

The Executive Officer of Towers, Lieutenant Commander Bishop, took a deep breath. “ONI thinks the bad guys have pre-staged explosives at various positions around the ice pack. Maybe there’s some way to detect them. If we can get some helos to over-fly the ice, they might be able to pick up infrared sources, or MAD signatures from the hardware attached to the explosives.”

“That’s a good thought,” Captain Bowie said. “We’ll borrow a couple of helos from Seventh Fleet to try it out.” He looked to the XO’s left. “Chief?”

Chief Sonar Technician Theresa McPherson pursed her lips. “I’m not getting any brainstorms, Captain. All I can think of is the obvious. We slip north, under cover of darkness, and get as close to the ice pack as we dare. We deploy the towed array, and run slow search patterns along the southern edge of the ice. About an hour before sunrise, we pull the tail in, and head south before we get caught with our fingers in the cookie jar.” She shrugged. “If we search three or four nights in row, we might get lucky and catch the sub down near the southern end of the ice.”

“That sub is going to be in creep mode,” the XO said. “Slow and quiet. You think you’ll be able to detect him?”

“It’ll take a lot of luck, sir,” the Chief said. “In these latitudes at this time of year, we’ve got about 14 hours of darkness every night. Over a few nights, that adds up to a lot of search time. If one of the Russian sailors does something careless, like leaning a broom handle against a pipe, it might create a sound-short. If we get lucky, that will put some vibration in the water where our tail can pick it up.”

“That sounds pretty iffy,” Captain Bowie said.

Chief McPherson nodded. “It’s extremely iffy, sir. I don’t think my lucky rabbit foot is going to be big enough to handle it. I just can’t think of anything else to do.”

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Patrick Cooper, cleared his throat. “Uh … Captain? Is there any way we could try using that Mouse unit without the help of the civilian technician? We’ve got a lot of smart people on this ship, including some pretty savvy computer geeks. Maybe one of them can figure how to program the Mouse unit to do what we want.”

The captain shook his head. “It’s tempting, Pat. And I’ve thought about it, believe me. But we can’t afford to get this wrong. We may only get one shot at that submarine. If we screw it up because we don’t know how to program that damned robot properly, we may miss our only opportunity to end this.”

“Then you need somebody who isn’t going to screw it up,” a woman’s voice said.

The words came from the entrance to the wardroom. The assembled officers and chiefs turned to see the civilian technician, Ann Roark, holding open the wardroom door. Standing in the passageway behind her was the other civilian, Sheldon Miggs.

The Roark woman nodded toward the captain. “Permission to come aboard your wardroom, or whatever. Sorry, I forgot to knock. I’m not exactly up on the finer points of military etiquette.”

Captain Bowie nodded. “Please, come in, both of you. Have a seat.”

The civilians entered the room and found chairs.

“Thank you, Captain,” Sheldon Miggs said.

Ann Roark leaned back in her chair. “I apologize for last night, Captain. I’m not a fighter, as you’ve probably figured out. And I have serious trouble with the idea of killing people.”

Her fingers drummed nervously on the table top. “But we’re here to help. Whatever you need Mouse to do, we’ll try to help you do it.”

Captain Bowie studied her for several seconds. “We’re going to try to destroy the K-506,” he said. “And that means killing over a hundred people. Are you sure you can handle that?”

Ann Roark swallowed heavily, but nodded. “I’m not going to pretend that I’m okay with killing the crew of that submarine. But I understand that it has to be done. And I can shelve my personal issues and do it. I guess it comes down to the choice between something bad, and something worse.”

“It does indeed,” Captain Bowie said. “That’s precisely what it comes down to.”

Chief McPherson raised her eyebrows. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “What exactly changed your mind?”

Ann Roark looked at her coworker, Sheldon Miggs. “Something I read in the Boy Scout Handbook,” she said.

CHAPTER 40

WHITE HOUSE

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR’S OFFICE

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

3:12 PM EST

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven looked up at the knock on his door. “Enter.”

The door opened, and Cheryl White from the National Reconnaissance Office walked in, carrying a brown leather briefcase. “Good morning, Greg. Can I bother you for a minute?”

Brenthoven motioned her to the chair on the other side of his desk. “Morning, Cheryl. What have you got?”

White sat down, and extracted a yellow folder from the briefcase. The edges of the folder were bordered with black diagonal stripes. She laid the folder on the desk top, and opened it to reveal a thin stack of photographs.

“Remember when you asked NRO to look for signs of Zhukov’s submarine communications system?”

Brenthoven nodded. “Of course.”

“We haven’t found hide nor hair of it,” White said. “Not yet, anyway. But what we did find was pretty interesting.”

She pointed to the top photo on the stack. “These were shot by Forager 715, one of the Air Force’s Oracle III surveillance satellites, as it passed over southeastern Russia on the twenty-sixth of February. The satellite’s primary surveillance mission was a nuclear reactor facility in Iran, so Forager was on the outbound leg of its orbit when these photos were taken. The altitude was about 500 kilometers and increasing, which is outside of the optimal range window for the satellite’s cameras. The clarity isn’t great, but the shots are readable.”

Brenthoven looked at the satellite photo. A pair of blurred oblongs were visible against a dark background of ocean. “These are ships?”

White nodded, and moved a different photo to the top of the stack. “This is the same shot, enlarged and digitally enhanced.”

In this photo, the two oblongs were clearly ships, with blocky white superstructures running most of the length of each vessel.

“The SAWS operator assigned to Forager 715 ran these enhancements,” White said. “His name is Technical Sergeant George Kaulana. He processed this image through silhouette recognition, and correctly identified both of these ships as car carriers. Specifically, they’re the Motor Vessel Shunfeng, and the Motor Vessel Jifeng. They’re 20,000-ton Roll-on/Roll-off vessels, or what we call Ro-Ro’s. Both built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.”

“I’m with you so far,” Brenthoven said, “but I don’t have any idea where you’re going with this.”

White shuffled another picture to the top of the stack. The oblong smudges of the ships were much smaller, and the large gray form of a dagger-shaped landmass dominated the upper part of the image. “Both ships were on a scheduled run from China to Mexico,” White said. “According to the voyage plans filed by the owners of record, the ships were supposed to deliver 4,000 Chinese economy cars from Zhuhai to Veracruz. But both ships made an unscheduled course deviation. They turned north, out of the shipping lanes, and pulled in to Petropavlosk, Kamchatka instead.”

Brenthoven tapped a pencil against the top of his desk. “Hmmm …”

“Hmmm is an understatement,” White said. “Four thousand import cars don’t show up on time, and the Mexican importer doesn’t demand an inquiry, and he doesn’t file a complaint. Two merchant ships, worth several hundred million dollars apiece, sail off into Never-never land, and nobody files a piracy report, or sends out a presumed-lost bulletin. Not so much as an insurance claim. And nobody, and I do mean nobody, is asking where those 4,000 cars went. Not the exporter who shipped them. Not the importer who was supposed to receive them. Not the car manufacturer, who’s suddenly out two entire shiploads of shiny new product. Nobody.”

Brenthoven paused, giving these strange fragments of information a few seconds to assemble themselves in his brain.

“We looked up the Mexican importer,” White said. “And he never heard of this shipment. So we tried calling the Chinese exporter. Their company reps won’t return our phone calls.”

She straightened the stack of photos, and slid them back into the yellow and black folder. “There weren’t any cars, Greg. That was a smokescreen. Those 4,000 Chinese economy cars never existed. Those ships were carrying something else.”

Brenthoven nodded. “Our intel sources have been saying from the get-go that Kamchatka is crawling with Asian shock troops. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out how Zhukov managed to smuggle them in.”

He tossed the pencil on the desk. “I think you just solved that little mystery.”

CHAPTER 41

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

3:52 PM PST

On those rare occasions when he ventured out into the streets of Lynnwood, Jason Hulette looked like exactly what he was: a gangly and plain-featured seventeen year-old boy from a middle class family. Jason was an ordinary kid—or in his own eyes—perhaps something less than ordinary. The real world seemed to regard him as somewhat unsatisfactory, and the feeling was decidedly mutual.

As unremarkable as he might have been in real life, when immersed in his realm of choice, Jason was an entirely different creature. Within the boundless datascape of the Internet, he was a virtual demigod—known, respected, and even feared under the hacker alias ‘Apocalypse-for-you,’ which he spelled as Ap0kA1yp$e4U, in his own personal brand of the geek proto-language known as Leet.

Jason sometimes shortened his alias to Ap0k, in open homage to his favorite Keanu Reeves movie. The web was not a second life for him. It was the world: the only one that mattered. The physical universe outside of his parent’s front door was a shabby and disappointing substitute.

Jason/Ap0k was the leader and founding member of a loosely organized coven of Seattle hackers who called themselves the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y (Dead Crow Conspiracy). Although he fervently denied it, Ap0k had cribbed the name idea from the famous Texas-based hacker gang, the Cult of the Dead Cow. Original creation was not one of his personal strengths. His best ideas were always adaptations of concepts invented by other people.

The plan he put into action on the fourth of March was no exception. Ap0k didn’t create any of the ideas or technologies involved. He just strung the elements together in a new and interesting way.

With the near-miss nuclear attack now slightly more than forty-eight hours in the past, some of the frenzy was dying down in the western states. The east-west roadways were still flooded with cars as the unscheduled migration surged eastward, but most of the remaining people in the threatened states were starting to quiet down. The world had not ended. The attack had not been repeated, and the U.S. military had managed to knock out most of the missiles, or bombs, or whatever. Perhaps flaming death was not going to fall out of the sky after all.

As life in the Western United States began to settle into a shaky equilibrium, two thoughts occurred to Ap0k. First: Seattle, which was an armpit of a city in his opinion, had not received its fair share of blind panic. And second: the attack itself had not harmed a single person, or damaged a single house, or flattened a single convenience store.

There was plenty of destruction; that was for sure. Car crashes, burning buildings, injuries, and even deaths. But those effects hadn’t come from the nuclear bombs. They’d been caused by the spur-of-the-moment craziness that comes with uncontrolled hysteria.

It slowly dawned on Ap0k that the damage had been a strictly social phenomenon, caused by the rapid spread of information. Or more correctly, the rapid spread of misinformation, as the bombs had all been aimed toward the ocean. The mobs of people who had freaked out and started trashing things had never been in any immediate danger. The threat had not been real. But it had looked real, and it had sounded real. And that had been enough.

To Ap0k, this revelation suggested all sorts of possibilities. Because the rapid spread of misinformation happened to be one of the things that he and his fellow dead crows did best.

On the afternoon of March the 4th, Ap0k and the Dead Crow Conspiracy hacked into the Emergency Alert System computer network for the Greater Seattle area. The plan was to trigger the Emergency Alert System, and seize control of every radio and television station within Area Codes 360, 206, 253, and 425. Then, when they had a million or so viewers and listeners glued to their televisions and radios, the dead crows would inject their own fake broadcast into the network.

They’d recorded the audio track in a walk-in closet, draped with blankets to muffle outside noises. They’d copied the timing and format of an actual emergency announcement, and modulated Ap0k’s voice to sound like the baritone of the real EAS announcer. They’d even screen-grabbed a copy of the Emergency Alert System television banner.

With the recording playing over the background of EAS banner, the announcement looked and sounded just like the real thing. Ap0k was sure that the radio and television audiences wouldn’t be able to tell that the broadcast was fake. He was right.

The dead crows were extremely proud of their handiwork. They were already congratulating themselves for having dreamed up the hoax of the century. Their little scam would go down in history, like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast panic of 1938. People would run screaming, and piss their pants, and overload the 911 switchboards, and drive their cars into telephone poles. The Dead Crow Conspiracy would become the stuff of hacker legend.

At 3:55 PM, Ap0k transmitted the go signal to his hacker buddies. The assault on the EAS server farm began simultaneously, from nineteen manned sites around Seattle, and over a thousand zombie machines, recruited for the task by a Trojan horse software application that hijacked control of infected PCs without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.

Under the combined onslaught, the firewall and anti-virus engines protecting the servers crumbled in less than a minute.

At 3:56 PM, the bogus emergency announcement created by the dead crows went out over the Emergency Alert System throughout the Greater Seattle area. The message was seen and heard through every operating radio and television in the network footprint. Nearly a million and a half Seattle area residents were informed that ten nuclear warheads were screaming toward their fair city, and that all military attempts to intercept the missiles had failed.

There were no such warheads, of course. They existed only in the fevered imaginations of Ap0k and his dead crow buddies. But the residents of Seattle had no way of knowing that. They had no reason to suspect that the warning was anything but genuine.

The recorded voice of the fake EAS announcer went on to inform the million-plus victims of his hoax that the bombs would arrive in twenty minutes. Seattle would be completely obliterated. Everyone who wanted to live should evacuate the city immediately, or perish in radioactive fire.

The seventeen year-old boy who styled himself as Ap0kA1yp$e4U had promised his buddies that the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y would be remembered by history. And so they were.

Jason Wesley Hulette and ten of his accomplices and co-conspirators were arrested and tried for domestic terrorism and treason. They were collectively charged with over forty-thousand counts of manslaughter, more than a million cases of assault with intent to wound, and three-quarters of a trillion dollars in property damage.

The remaining eight members of the dead crows were identified, but none were brought to trial. They had been killed in the panic that burned the city of Seattle to the ground.

CHAPTER 42

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

1821 hours (6:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Sheldon leaned over Ann’s left shoulder. “How’s it coming?”

Ann stopped typing, her fingers frozen in midair above the keyboard of her laptop. “Sheldon, if you ask me that question one more time, I’m going to duct tape your mouth shut.”

“I just want to help,” Sheldon said.

“Go away,” Ann said. “Stop asking me questions. That will help a lot.”

“You’re absolutely sure that there’s nothing I can do?”

Ann leaned back and crossed her arms. “Am I absolutely sure? Absolutely?”

She pretended to study the matter for several seconds and then shrugged in apparent contrition. “I guess I’m not totally-positively-absolutely sure. I suppose … if you really feel the need to contribute … I should let you get in here and try to do your part.”

She held a fingertip against her lower lip. “Let’s see … This an entirely new mission profile for Mouse. He’s got to perform some specialized functions that aren’t built into his core program, so you should probably start by dumping the mission package I created for the submersible rescue, and purging the robot’s scratch memory and persistent memory. When that’s finished, upload a clean copy of the core program from the master disc packs, and sort through the mission library for the modules that most closely match the functions Mouse is going to need. Then, append those files to his core program, and modify any parameters that need adjustment. Don’t forget to load the program mods for covert search, and under ice operations, and don’t forget to disable his acoustic communications module. You’ll also need to load the bottom contour database for the operating area, the navigation data, and the environmental package, including currents, known navigation hazards, projected salinity profiles, and thermal structures of the water column. And when you’re done, run an end-to-end, and a loop-back test, and debug to check for errors.”

She smiled with exaggerated sweetness. “If you’re going to take care of all that, I’ll go grab a cup of coffee and a Danish.”

“I get the picture,” Sheldon said. “I don’t know how to do any of the stuff you need to accomplish.”

Ann gasped in mock surprise. “You don’t?”

Her fingers starting pecking away at the laptop again. “Then will you please stop interrupting me, so that I can do it?”

“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I’m sorry.”

Ann stopped typing again. “I’m jerking your chain, Sheldon. I’ve already done all that junk. I just need to run one last program integrity test, to check for disagrees and resource conflicts, and then I’m done here.”

She tapped a key and leaned back. “There. That should take that about ten minutes to cycle. When it’s finished, as long as there aren’t any errors, our buddy Mouse should be ready to go play in the water.”

She checked her watch. “That’s pretty good timing. The Navy boys tell me that the sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes. Since we’re doing all this sneaking stealth business under cover of darkness, that works out just about perfectly.”

Ann stood up and stretched to get the kinks out of her back. “Come on, Cowboy. If you absolutely must help, you can lead me through this metal labyrinth to the wardroom. I really do want some coffee and a Danish.”

*  *  *

An hour later, Sheldon and Ann stood with a bunch of Sailors on the boat deck, bundled up in heavy foul weather coats, and stomping their feet to keep warm. The sun was down now, and the moon wouldn’t rise for several hours yet. The darkness was broken only by the stars and the dim glow of amber-lensed deck lamps, cranked down to minimal intensity.

Mouse hung beneath the boat davit, a dark silhouette dangling at the end of the lifting cable for the destroyer’s Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.

That particular bit of engineering had been Ann’s idea. At her suggestion, the robot’s lifting hardware had been made compatible with the single-point boat davits used aboard Navy warships. Any ship that carried RHIBs could launch and recover a Mouse unit without installing special equipment. From the Navy’s perspective, that made Mouse cheaper to buy and easier to integrate into the fleet, which—by extension—made it more likely that the Lords of Navy Procurement would decide to purchase lots of Mouse-series underwater robots from Norton Deep Water Systems.

As far as the company was concerned, the Navy procurement contract was the whole point of the Mouse project. Ann’s priorities were quite different, but they still came back to the bottom line. The Navy was Norton’s best customer. If the Navy didn’t buy underwater robots, then Norton would have no reason to build them. And if Norton didn’t build underwater robots, then Ann would have to either abandon her chosen profession, or go to work for Big Oil. And that was not going to happen.

Ann might not care for the military yahoos, but at least they thought they were doing the right thing. They were well-intentioned, if misguided. Those planet-killing bastards in the oil industry … they were a whole different breed of bad news. There were no good intentions in them at all: just mindless greed, with no thought to long-term consequence.

Ann looked up at the shadowy form of the disk-shaped robot hanging from the end of the boat davit. Norton had provided the funding, and the engineers, and the facilities, but Ann had breathed life into the strange little machine. Mouse was the culmination of her very best ideas, and the product of the hardest work she had ever done.

She exhaled sharply, the freezing Siberian air turning her breath to vapor in front of her face. She had poured her soul into this project. No way would she do that for the oil companies. Never.

Ann felt a jarring thump through the soles of her feet, followed by a prolonged scraping noise and a groaning of metal that she felt more than heard. The ship seemed to shudder until the groaning died away.

She looked at the nearest Sailor. “What the hell was that?”

“Probably a growler,” the man said.

“A what?”

“A growler,” the Sailor said. “A chunk of sea ice. Smaller than an iceberg, or a bergy bit. Maybe the size of a refrigerator.”

“There are chunks of ice out here the size of refrigerators?” Ann asked. “And they’re not freaking icebergs?”

“That’s right,” the man said.

Ann couldn’t see his face properly in the darkness, but the Sailor had an older voice. He was probably one of the senior petty officers, or maybe a chief.

“We’re transiting through the Kuril islands,” he said. “Passing into the Sea of Okhotsk, which is mostly covered by ice. The plan is to skirt the southern edge of the ice pack. As long as we don’t get too close to the pack edge, we’ll mostly run into grease ice. That’s usually just slush—not fully frozen. We’ll get some growlers too, about like the one we just rubbed up against. If we’re lucky, we won’t run into any bergy bits.”

“What are those?” Sheldon asked.

“Baby icebergs,” the Sailor said. “Maybe the size of a house. Not big enough to qualify as real icebergs. You don’t get real bergs in the Sea of O.”

Ann’s mouth felt suddenly dry. She nodded, though the man probably couldn’t see her in the darkness. “No icebergs,” she said. “That’s good to know. At least we don’t have to worry about sinking.”

The man laughed, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of humor in it. “I didn’t say that.” He stomped on the deck, the sound of his boot audible in the darkness. “Our hull is steel,” he said. “But it’s only a little more than a half-inch thick. A decent sized bergy bit will go through us like a can opener.”

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Sheldon said.

“I wish I was. Even a good sized growler could do a number on us, if we hit it the wrong way.”

“What about that killer radar?” Ann asked. “No sparrow shall fall, and all that crap. You can see the ice with that, right?”

“We’re in EMCON,” the man said. “Stealth mode. The SPY radar could probably see most of the ice, but it would give away our position. We’re running without it.”

“So how do we avoid hitting one of those baby icebergs?” Sheldon asked.

“We’ve got lookouts posted,” the Navy man said. “They’re watching the water in front of the ship. If they see anything off the bow, they tell the bridge and we turn to avoid it. We should be okay.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ann said. ‘But didn’t the Titanic have lookouts posted too? That particular method of ice avoidance didn’t work out too well for those guys, as I recall.”

“You’ve got a point there,” the Navy man said. “But we have two advantages over the Titanic. Our watertight integrity systems and damage control technology are about a century more advanced.”

“Fine,” Ann said. “What’s the other advantage?”

The man laughed again. “We know we’re not unsinkable,” he said. “So we’re a lot more careful.”

“That’s comforting,” Ann said. “Now, we just…”

“Just a sec,” the man said. “I’m getting a call from the bridge.”

He paused for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Boat deck, aye!”

He snapped his fingers. “Peters! Shut off the deck lights. Everybody! Lights off—now!”

The amber lamps went off abruptly, plunging the deck into total darkness.

The Sailor spoke again. “Bridge—Boat deck, all lights are out. We are dark.”

“What’s going on?” Sheldon asked softly.

“Jets,” the Navy man said. “CIC can’t get a lock on the Bogies without lighting off our radar, but our Electronic Warfare guys are tracking emissions from at least four Zaslon S-800’s.”

“What does that mean?” Ann asked.

“It means there are at least four MiG-31 fighter jets out there, probably flying the edge of the ice pack to check for uninvited party guests.”

“Like us,” Sheldon said.

“Yeah,” the man said softly. “Like us. So we’re running quiet and dark, and generally hoping that they don’t detect us. There’s a good chance that they won’t. We’re pretty damned stealthy when we shut down all the toys.”

Ann stared up into the night sky, trying vainly to spot something moving against the backdrop of stars. “What happens if they find us?” she asked.

“Depends on who they belong to,” the Sailor said. “If they’re out of mainland Russia, they’ll more than likely just report our position back to their base. That will stir up some shit, because the Russians don’t like us up here, but it’ll be mostly be political. We probably won’t get shot at.”

“What if they’re not from mainland Russia?” Sheldon asked.

“Then they’re out of the Yelizovo air base on Kamchatka,” the man said. “Which means that they belong to our pal, Mr. Zhukov. If it’s those guys, they’ll shoot us between the eyes about ten seconds after they find out we’re here.”

“This is insane,” Ann said. “We’re dodging icebergs in the dark, and playing hide and seek with freaking fighter jets. What are we going to do for an encore? Juggle chainsaws?”

The Sailor chuckled. “You know what they say. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.”

“I’m not joking,” Ann snapped. “What the hell are we doing here? We’re practically asking to get killed.”

“This is what we do,” the man said. “This is our job. We’re kind of like Secret Service agents. We step in front of the bullet, so that our country doesn’t have to.”

“That’s crap,” Ann said. “That whole military-ethos/warrior-Zen thing is nothing but a load of self-aggrandizing macho bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit, ma’am,” the Sailor said. “We’ve got a trigger-happy lunatic threatening to incinerate the Western United States. If he manages to unleash ten percent of the firepower at his command, he’ll kill more people than every war in history combined. Our job is to stop him any way we can. Even with our lives.”

The man sighed. “We don’t want to die, Ms. Roark. We want to go home to our families. We want to drink beer, and watch football on television, and barbecue hotdogs, and play catch in the back yard with our kids. But we will step into the path of the bullet, if that’s what it takes to stop the bad guys. Like I said—it’s what we do.”

Ann was about to reply, when the man spoke again. “Just a sec. The bridge is talking to me.”

After a few seconds, he said, “Bridge—Boat deck, resume operations, aye.”

He cleared his throat. “The Bogies have passed us by,” he said. “Peters, get the lights back on.”

The amber lamps came back to life. They seemed almost painfully bright after the long minutes of total darkness.

“Alright,” the Sailor said. “The bridge says we’re in position. Let’s get R2D2 in the water, and see if he can find a submarine.”

CHAPTER 43

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

1855 hours (6:55 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

“Ya zamyors…”

The old man’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it snapped Agent DuBrul instantly back to alertness. His head came up and his body posture stiffened. The chair had lulled him into drowsiness. He stood up and took a quick step to the side of the hospital bed.

Swaddled in the green hospital sheets, Oleg Grigoriev looked like a poor job of embalming. His eyes were sunken, and his once swarthy skin was thin and papery. The iron-hard Soviet Sergeant had all but disappeared now, leaving in his place this dwindling husk of his former self.

The old man’s face had become a mirror. Gazing into its unsettling depths, David DuBrul saw the reflection of his own mortality. For the first time, he could truly imagine his own death. And for the first time, he knew in his heart that it was not an intellectual abstraction. It was a real thing. A true thing.

At some point in the future—whether an hour from now, or fifty years from now—he would draw his very last breath. When he released that final purchase of air, his life would flow out with it, expelled from its frail human vessel to mingle with the atoms of the universe. And David DuBrul would cease to exist.

He hoped that it wouldn’t be like this, that he wouldn’t die like this poor old Russian—failing by slow and painful inches in an unfamiliar bed, in a building full of strangers.

“Ya zamyors,” Grigoriev whispered again.

DuBrul nodded. “You’re cold?” He took a folded blanket from a side table, and spread it over the patient.

“Is that better?” He spoke in English. His Russian was fluent, but he knew that Grigoriev’s English was at least as good. And he did not want to speak to this man in his mother language.

From a standpoint of spy craft, the decision was not a good one. According to the book, if you had the language skills, you followed the subject into whatever dialect he was most comfortable using. It was easier that way to establish trust, which made your subject more likely to speak freely. Also, the need for mental translation made most people select their words carefully when speaking in a foreign tongue. Within the easy flow of their primary language, they tended to blurt out things might never be revealed under the more deliberate syntax of another tongue.

DuBrul didn’t care. He wanted the information in this man’s head. He needed it. But he would not speak in the language of the old man’s friends and loved ones in order to draw it out. He would not smile, and pretend to be a friend. The old man deserved better than that.

Grigoriev blinked several times, and struggled visibly to focus his eyes. “U vas est’ karta?”

DuBrul reached for a folder on a bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I have a map.”

The DIA agents had hoped that this moment might come, and they’d prepared for it with a map of Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk mounted to a sheet of foam core poster board. It weighed only a few ounces, but was stiff enough for easy manipulation by weakened fingers.

DuBrul held the map over the bed, within easy reach of the patient. The lines of latitude and longitude were clearly marked, and the place names had oversized labels, Russian above English.

The old man raised a shaky hand, and pointed one trembling finger toward a spot on the map, in the northeastern quadrant of the Sea of Okhotsk. DuBrul recognized the location from which K-506 had launched the first missile attack. He drew a small circle on the map using a felt tipped pen.

“Zdes’,” Grigoriev whispered. “Here. Zashishennaja pozicija.”

Agent DuBrul recognized the term. Zashishennaja pozicija translated loosely into ‘protected position.’ It was the Russian equivalent of the word defilade: a position fortified against attack by geographic barriers. Hills, ravines, that sort of thing.

DuBrul repeated the words. “Zashishennaja pozicija. I think I understand. These are the coordinates the submarine can shoot from, is that right? These are the places where explosives have been set to blow holes in the ice pack?”

“Da,” the old man whispered. “Strelyat. To shoot from …”

“How many zashishennaja pozicija are there?” DuBrul asked. “How many places can K-506 shoot through the ice?”

The old man’s hand dropped back to the sheets. He closed his eyes and breathed heavily for nearly a minute. At last, his eyelids fluttered open again. “Pyat,” he hissed.

DuBrul nodded again. Five.

Grigoriev lifted his finger to the chart again. His hand shook so badly that it took a few seconds to settle down. “Zdes’,” he breathed.

DuBrul circled the spot on the map.

Grigoriev’s palsied finger moved a few inches and touched the map again. “Zdes’.”

DuBrul marked the new spot with another circle. Again the finger moved, and DuBrul drew a fourth circle.

A shudder passed through the old man’s body and his hand fell away from the chart. The heart monitor mounted to the wall near his bed began beeping rapidly. The cardiac trace on the screen blinked from green to red.

DuBrul turned away from the patient. “Doctor?”

He raised his voice. “Doctor? Get in here!”

The door flew open, and Dr. Hogan covered the distance to the bed in two quick strides. He glanced at the monitor, and then looked over his shoulder. “Get a crash cart in here, now!”

Another shudder wracked Oleg Grigoriev’s body. His eyes seemed to roll back in their sockets, and a ribbon of foamy saliva rolled from the corner of his mouth.

A nurse and a pair of Hospital Corpsmen rushed in, pushing a cart full of medical equipment.

DuBrul backed away, to give them room to work, but the patient’s eyes suddenly locked on his face. “Here,” the old man croaked. “Come … here …”

Agent DuBrul edged past the nurse to the side of the bed. “I’m here.”

The nurse started to object, but Dr. Hogan shook his head.

Grigoriev wheezed. “Karta …”

“Right here,” DuBrul said. He held up the map.

Grigoriev’s finger rose with agonizing slowness. It brushed a spot near the southern end of the sea. “Zashishennaja … ,” he muttered. “… pozicijaaaa …”

A final spasm contorted the man’s body, and then he lay still. The heart monitor emitted a continuous whine.

DuBrul marked the last spot, and backed away from the bed. He stood with the map clutched in his hand, watching the medical team work feverishly over their patient. He made no move to interfere, but he could see that they were wasting their time. The tough old Sergeant was gone.

Long minutes later, as the frantic resuscitation attempts began to wind down, DuBrul looked at the map. His five hastily-drawn circles marked the places that Grigoriev had indicated. The locations from which K-506 could detonate pre-positioned explosives, and blow shooting holes in the ice cover.

The northeastern position had already been used; DuBrul was sure of that, leaving four spots from which the submarine could shower its targets with nuclear weapons.

The circles he had scrawled were inexact. He knew that. The old Russian had been too weak and too shaky to indicate the positions with precision. And if—by some miracle—he had managed to identify precisely the correct points, the area enclosed by each circle would still encompass many square miles of ice.

DuBrul and Ross had understood in advance that using the map would yield imprecise results. But after the Russian’s previous collapse, it had seemed unlikely that Grigoriev would recover enough strength to pass detailed verbal information, like map coordinates. So they had agreed on a setup that would permit the patient to communicate by pointing.

Instead of precise navigational coordinates, they had approximate locations, with built-in margins of error. Not exactly ideal, but—outside of James Bond movies—intelligence information was rarely absolute.

With a few jabs of his finger, Grigoriev had reduced the search area from over a half a million square miles, to a few hundred square miles. The area of uncertainty had just shrunk by a factor of two thousand, or maybe even three thousand. As far as DuBrul was concerned, that was pretty damned good work. It was a lot better than they usually managed.

He tucked the map under his arm and walked to the door, signaling to the Marine guard to follow him. The medical team had abandoned their attempt to revive the patient. They were taking last minute readings and making final chart entries—following the procedures required to certify the time of death.

Agent DuBrul paused to look back at Oleg Grigoriev one last time. “Spaciba,” he said softly. “Thank you, old warrior. Go with God.”

CHAPTER 44

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

9:46 AM EST

President Chandler leaned against the railing of the Truman Balcony, and looked across the south lawn to the crowd of protesters gathered on the Ellipse. The District of Columbia was experiencing its last hard cold snap of the year. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, and there were two inches of snow on the ground. But the protesters didn’t care. Their shoes had trampled the Ellipse so thoroughly that the snow had been churned into muddy brown slush.

The Secret Service was now estimating the head count at thirty-thousand, and the mob was still growing. Or—more correctly—the mobs were still growing. There were several groups down there. The Peace-At-All-Costs lobby was rubbing shoulders with the Nuke-the-Bastards-Now gang, and the fundamentalist This-is-the-Wrath-of-God faction was marching beside the America-Must-Rule-the-World-for-its-Own-Good cult.

Those weren’t the real names of the organizations represented here, of course, but their platforms were nearly all that silly, and that simplistic. Most of them couldn’t find Kamchatka on a map, and probably fewer than one out of twenty could spell the name of the country that had suddenly inflamed their passions. But they all knew exactly where the president had gone wrong in managing this crisis, and they all knew exactly how to fix it.

The answer is simple—lay down our arms and live in peace with other nations. The answer is simple—blow those sons-of-bitches to kingdom come. The answer is simple—outlaw all foreign trade and shut off all foreign aid. Let the commies and the ragheads try to get along without American dollars. The answer is simple—fill in the blank here …

Except that the answers were all different, and none of them were simple. The protesters down on the Ellipse disagreed with each other about nearly everything, but they were united on one point. They all wanted Francis Benjamin Chandler to get the hell out of the White House, and make room for the kind of leader who could save the nation in its moment of peril. Of course, depending on which group you talked to, the next person in the Oval Office should either be a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, an unaligned independent, or a pair of Wiccan Siamese Twins with the secret communications frequency of the alien mother ship.

The president snorted, and the exhalation turned to steam in the cold morning air.

“Uh, Mr. President?” The voice belonged to National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven.

The president turned to see the man standing at the open door leading to the yellow room.

He beckoned with his fingers. “Come on out, Greg. I’m just having a look at the newest members of the Frank Chandler Fan Club.”

Brenthoven stepped out onto the balcony and closed the door. He looked out at the roiling crowd on the Ellipse. “What do you think they want, sir?”

“That’s easy,” the president said. “They want world peace, unrestricted warfare, a global economy, utter severance of all foreign trading agreements, open borders, and strict isolationism.”

Brenthoven grinned. “So it’s business as usual, sir?”

The president raised his hands and let them drop. “Pretty much.”

He sighed. “What have you got, Greg?”

Brenthoven walked over to the railing. “The Russian courier, Oleg Grigoriev, is dead, sir. Medical complications from the gunshot wounds.”

The president nodded gravely, and looked back out toward the growing mob of his detractors. “That puts me in a bit of an emotional conflict,” he said. “On the one hand, a man has lost his life. As a human being, my first thought should focus on the tragedy of that loss. But I’m also the Commander-in-Chief of a nation under siege. And I have to confess that I’m more concerned about losing a possible source of critical intelligence. Because some of the secrets that Mr. Grigoriev took to the grave could drastically affect the future of this country, and the world.”

“I understand, sir,” the national security advisor said. “But he didn’t take quite everything to the grave.”

The president turned and met Brenthoven’s eyes.

“Mr. Grigoriev confirmed the CNO’s theory that the submarine is shooting from prepared positions, where explosives have been planted in the ice cover. There were five positions. Governor Zhukov apparently called them …” Brenthoven paused, reading the unfamiliar words from his notebook. “… zashishennaja pozicija.”

He sounded the words out clumsily. “That appears to be the Russian term for a protected position, or a hidden place to shoot from.”

“I see,” the president said. “And did Mr. Grigoriev happen to provide us with the coordinates of any of these protected positions?”

“He gave us approximate locations, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “One of them corresponded pretty closely with the first position that the submarine launched from. If the other four are in the same ballpark, accuracy-wise, we’ve got the remaining launch positions narrowed down fairly well.”

The president frowned. “Why didn’t he just feed us the latitudes and longitudes? That’s what he did the first time, right?”

“He was too weak, sir,” Brenthoven said. “The DIA agent in the hospital room reported that Mr. Grigoriev literally used his dying breath to pass this information to us.”

“It’s pretty tough to complain about that,” the president said. He paused for nearly a minute. “Are we getting this information to our Navy ships?”

The national security advisor nodded. “COMPACFLEET is sending the message out now, sir. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is putting together a tactical proposal for your consideration.”

“What’s he got in mind?”

“I haven’t seen the details yet, sir,” Brenthoven said. “But the general plan is to send Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams onto the ice pack to locate and disarm Zhukov’s explosives. If the submarine can’t blow holes in the ice, it can’t launch missiles.”

“That could give us the opening we need to finish this,” the president said. “If that sub can’t launch, Zhukov’s nuclear threat goes down the drain.”

The national security advisor nodded. “That’s the idea, Mr. President.”

“The upside is obvious,” the president said. “What’s the downside?”

“Our positional information is only approximate, sir. The EOD teams are probably going to have trouble finding the explosives. And they’ll be exposed out on the ice. The longer they have to work out there, the greater the chance that they’ll be discovered by Zhukov’s people.”

The president frowned at this thought. “If Zhukov catches us trying to pull his fangs, he’s going to want to punish us.”

“Do you think he’ll launch another attack, sir?”

The president sighed. “I don’t know, Greg. He’s certainly crazy enough.”

“Maybe our EOD people can get the job done without getting caught.”

“Maybe,” the president said. “We’re due for a bit of luck.”

“Yes, sir,” the national security advisor said.

Neither man made the obvious comment. So far, every lucky break they’d gotten had arrived too late to do any good.

CHAPTER 45

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

0603 hours (6:03 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann watched the screen of her laptop computer, waiting for the small green icon that would appear when Mouse reported his position.

The robot was operating autonomously, following his mission program without human supervision or input. Because communications signals might reveal his presence to the enemy submarine’s acoustic sensors, he was not sending any updates back to the Towers. He would not report in until his mission was complete and he was clear of the ice pack, either because he had located the target submarine, or because the allotted search period had expired and he had transited to the rendezvous coordinates.

Ann glanced at the digital time readout in the lower right hand corner of her computer screen. Mouse’s search program wasn’t scheduled to end for another ten minutes yet, so she really didn’t expect to see anything yet.

There was no need to hover over the computer, but she couldn’t tear herself away. Every time she walked away from it for thirty seconds, she found herself drawn back to the little screen by an irresistible force. She felt like an overprotective mother, hanging around the bus stop a half hour before the school bus was due to bring her child home.

Ann had reason to be nervous. There were plenty of things that could go wrong. Mouse was designed to navigate safely beneath ice cover, but he’d never been under the ice for this long before. Until now, it had only been for a couple of hours at a time, for testing purposes. The conditions had been controlled then, with divers waiting to go after the robot if anything went wrong. There were no controls here. There were no divers, and there was no backup plan.

Also, several of the program modules Mouse was using now had never been put through their paces before. Ann was confident that the software code was pretty stable, but bugs were still cropping up now and then. There was no telling what the robot might do if his software crashed while he was deep under the ice. He could ram himself into an ice keel, or take a wild excursion out of the operating area, to wind up in parts unknown when the power in his battery cells ran down.

The robot might already be lying in pieces on the bottom of the sea, destroyed by an unrecognized technical defect, or some flaw in his program code. The mission could have failed ten minutes after it had started, and Ann wouldn’t find out until the robot failed to report at the end of its search patterns.

Someone leaned over Ann’s left shoulder. “Has the prodigal robot returned?” It was the red headed Sonar Chief. Her name was Mc-something-or-other.

Ann shook her head. “Not yet. He’s not due to report in for another few minutes.”

The other woman tilted her head. “The way your eyes are welded to that computer screen, I figured that he must be overdue.”

Ann felt the corners of her mouth come up just a little—that strange half-smile thing she always found herself doing when strangers tried to engage her in polite conversation. “No,” she said. “Mouse isn’t late. I’m just a little … nervous.”

“I can understand that,” the chief said. “But don’t let it worry you if your robot comes home empty-handed the first few times. Anti-Submarine Warfare is slow. The search part is, anyway. After you find the target, things can heat up pretty damned fast. But until then, it’s mostly a waiting game.”

Ann nodded. “Thanks.”

“My sonar gang is back in TACTASS, pulling in the towed array,” the Navy woman said. “We didn’t get anything either.” She shrugged. “I didn’t really think we would. Even the old Delta boats can be pretty quiet when they’re running slow and dark. But it was worth a shot. We could still get lucky. Maybe we’ll catch a sniff tomorrow night. Or maybe your Mouse unit will.”

“I hope so,” Ann said.

The Navy woman extended her hand. “Theresa McPherson. Around the CPO Mess, they call me Teri, or Mac. Everybody else just calls me Chief.”

Ann shook the woman’s hand. “Ann Roark,” she said. “Or just Ann. I don’t have any idea what they call me around the CPO Mess. And I probably don’t want to know.”

Chief McPherson laughed and started to say something, but she was interrupted by a short burst of static from an overhead speaker box, followed instantly by a man’s voice.

“TAO—EW, I’m tracking four I-band emitters, bearing zero-three-seven. Zaslon S-800 series phased array radars. Looks like MiG-31s. Probably two flights of two.”

A half-second later, a woman’s voice came out of the speaker in response. “EW—TAO, four I-band emitters bearing zero-three-seven, aye. Which way are the Bogies tracking?”

“EW—TAO, Bogies have very slight left bearing drift with rapidly-increasing signal strength. The CPA is going to be right over the top of us, ma’am.”

From the forward end of Combat Information Center, Ann heard a woman say, “Damn it!”

The words didn’t come through the speaker. The woman hadn’t spoken them over the communications net.

Ann turned to the chief. “What was all that about?”

“The Electronic Warfare techs are reporting to the Tactical Action Officer that Russian aircraft are coming our way. From the radar transmissions, the planes appear to be MiG-31 fighter jets. If they don’t change course in the next couple of minutes, they’re going to fly right over us.”

“Will they see us?”

Chief McPherson shrugged. “Don’t know. Our stealth technology is good. We’re not easy to detect on radar, and the phototropic camouflage makes it hard to spot us visually. But the moon is up, and it’s three-quarters full. If one of those pilots looks the wrong way, he might catch our silhouette in the moonlight.”

“That’s the best stealth technology you could get for my tax dollars?”

Chief McPherson smiled. “You didn’t pay enough taxes to buy a Star Trek cloaking device, Ann. We’re sneaky as hell, but we’re not invisible. If somebody looks right at us, he’s going to see us.”

The female voice came over the speaker again. “EW—TAO, give me a recommended course for minimized radar cross-section, and stand by to launch chaff. Break. Weapons Control—TAO, have Aegis and CIWS ready to come on line at a second’s notice if those Bogies start shooting. Break. RCO—TAO, get SPY ready to transmit on zero-notice. If the situation goes hot, we’ll need to get radar information to fire control immediately.”

As the individual stations began acknowledging their orders, a male voice came over a different set of speakers. “Commanding Officer, your presence is requested in Combat Information Center.”

Ann could feel the tension level in the darkened room go up dramatically. Men and women at electronic consoles around the compartment began pushing buttons and speaking into headsets in low voices.

She heard the clang of an opening door, and a voice called out, “the captain’s in CIC.”

Captain Bowie strode into the room, making a bee-line for a woman seated in a chair at the focus of three large tactical display screens. The captain and the woman went into a hushed conference immediately.

Ann nodded toward the woman. “Who’s she?”

“That’s Lieutenant Augustine. She’s the Tactical Action Officer. She’s in charge of fighting the ship.”

“Is that her regular job?”

“She’s the Operations Department Head,” Chief McPherson said. “TAO is a watch station. It rotates with the watch turnover. OPS has got the bubble now, because she’s the best TAO we’ve got, and the captain figured things might get hairy.”

Ann regarded the female officer without speaking.

Chief McPherson cocked an eyebrow. “What? You didn’t think the gals just came along to clean the ashtrays, did you?”

A voice broke over the speaker. “TAO—EW, I’ve got multiple X-band seekers, centered on bearing zero-three-five. We’ve got Vipers, ma’am. I count three … make that four. I say again, EW has four inbound missiles, bearing zero-three-five!”

The woman’s voice came back instantly. “TAO, aye! Launch chaff, now! Break. All Stations—TAO, we have inbound Vipers! I say again, we have missiles inbound! RCO, go active on SPY. Break. Weapons Control—TAO, shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage.”

Ann’s stomach contracted into a knot. “They’re shooting at us?”

“Yeah,” Chief McPherson said. “We’ve got missiles coming towards us, and our radar’s not up yet.”

She gave Ann’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “I’ve got to get to my station. Put on your seatbelt and keep your head down. And hang on to that laptop if you don’t want to lose it. The ride is about to get bumpy.”

She wheeled around, and trotted away before Ann could respond.

Ann heard a quick succession of muffled thumps. “TAO—EW, launching chaff. Six away.”

The reports kept coming through the overhead speaker. “TAO—RCO. SPY is active. Transmitting data to fire control.”

“TAO—Weapons Control. Aegis is at ready-auto. CIWS is set to auto-engage.”

Ann fumbled at the sides of the chair until she located the seat belt. She belted herself in, and then grabbed her laptop computer, hugging the black plastic rectangle to her chest like a sheet of armor plate.

Mouse would be coming to the end of his run, now. The robot might already be out from under the ice pack, bobbing on the surface, waiting for retrieval. Ann knew without asking that no one would care.

“TAO—EW, inbound Vipers are showing staggered monopulse radar signatures. I think we’re looking at AS-23 Kronos missiles, ma’am. Recommend we avoid jamming. Some of the Kronos variants have home-on-jam capability.”

The Tactical Action Officer’s voice came back a second later. “EW—TAO, my memory might be failing me, but I don’t think the MiG-31 can carry the AS-23 missile.”

“TAO—EW. I don’t know what they can carry, ma’am. I’m just telling you what’s on my slick.”

Ann listened to the chatter and wondered what in the hell they were talking about.

Without warning, the ship gave a violent series of tremors, accompanied by a sequence of tumultuous rumbles that seemed to shake the teeth in Ann’s head. She cried out, but her voice was nearly swallowed up in the cacophony of sound.

In the ear-ringing silence that followed, another report came over the speaker. “TAO—Weapons Control. Twelve birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two each on the inbound Vipers, and one each on the Bogies.”

The giant display screens at the far end of the room flickered with cryptic symbols. Their meaning was as foreign to Ann as the unintelligible reports tumbling out of the speakers, but she knew enough to realize that her future was being spelled out in that intricate dance of shapes and lines.

Somewhere out there in the darkness of the pre-dawn Siberian morning, engines of death were screaming towards each other at fantastic speeds. And it came to Ann that guided missiles were complex and intricate machines. They were robots, like her Mouse, but a thousand times faster and more single-minded of purpose. Mouse could do many things. But these robots could only destroy.

The realization that she might be minutes—or even seconds—away from death, crashed over Ann like a freezing wave. She was suddenly glad that she didn’t have a job to do, because her muscles were locked in place. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t breathe.

She wanted to leap out of the chair and run away from this craziness. But where would she go? Even if her paralyzed body would agree to take instructions from her brain, which she very much doubted, there was nowhere to go. Nowhere but a freezing and alien ocean, and this ship—which had suddenly become a target.

On the big screens, a cluster of blue symbols rushed toward a cluster of red symbols. With a quick series of flashes, about half of the red and blue symbols vanished from the screen.

“TAO—Air, splash two Vipers.”

Another voice followed without pause. “Weapons Control concurs. The remaining two Vipers are now inside our minimum missile range. We cannot reengage with missiles.”

As Ann watched, one of the red symbols veered to the side and disappeared.

“TAO—EW, splash Viper number three. One taker on chaff!”

Ann wasn’t quite sure what the exchange of words meant, but it seemed that three of the incoming missiles had been destroyed. One of the red symbols tracked toward the center of the screen without pausing.

Two more red symbols flashed and vanished. “TAO—Air, splash two Bogies.”

The remaining red image kept coming.

Ann began to tremble. She didn’t know how to read the catalog of symbols sprayed across the screens. She didn’t know the color codes, or the significance of the shapes, or the meanings of the blocks of letters and numbers that followed close on each symbol like the tail on a kite. She knew none of these things. But something in her instinctively knew that when the inverted red V shape reached the middle of the screen, she would die.

Another red symbol flashed and disappeared. “TAO—Air, splash Bogie number three. Bogie four is bugging out.”

“TAO, aye.”

The red inverted V continued without pausing. It had nearly reached the center of the screen, and no one seemed to be doing anything about it.

Ann clamped her mouth shut, willing herself not to scream when the moment came.

A throaty metallic rumble split the air, like the roar of an unmuffled lawnmower engine. The sound was followed by the muted boom of an explosion. Not far away, but not on the ship either.

There was perhaps three seconds of near silence, broken only by the hum of electronic cooling fans, and then a cheer went up around Combat Information Center. Some unseen person shouted, “Go CIWS!” followed by a wolf whistle.

The overhead speaker crackled again. “TAO—Weapons Control. Splash Viper number four.”

Ann took a breath for the first time in nearly a minute. The cool air felt strangely unfamiliar as it rushed into her lungs. She felt her muscles begin to relax.

She wasn’t dead.

She gradually became conscious of the laptop computer still clutched against her ribs. She unfolded her arms and opened the computer. Her movements were jerky, as her muscles were still flushed with unneeded adrenaline. That must be why she was feeling slightly giddy.

She smiled weakly to herself, and looked at her computer. Mouse’s friendly green triangle symbol stared back at her from the screen. Her child had reached the bus stop safely. He was ready for his mother to take him home for milk and cookies.

Ann was fine. She was alive. Mouse was fine. And now they’d pick him up and bring him home for cookies.

Ann giggled at the thought. Her laughter was shrill, and oddly modulated. It dragged on long after real humor would have failed, but she couldn’t seem to make herself stop.

People were beginning to stare at her now, but her mind had become a disconnected jumble of missiles, and cookies, and exploding airplanes, and milk-drinking robots. Out there somewhere in the pre-dawn darkness, the mangled bodies of the jet pilots would be sinking through the waves … settling to the bottom of the sea.

The laughter died as suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch. Ann felt slightly dizzy. She took a deep breath to clear her head. She let it out slowly, deciding as she did so that it seemed to be working; her thoughts were becoming a little less manic.

And then she vomited all over the floor of Combat Information Center.

CHAPTER 46

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #2

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

0832 hours (8:32 AM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov hurled the clipboard toward the lieutenant who had just handed it to him, not ten seconds earlier. The clipboard sailed past the young officer’s head, missing his left cheek by less than a centimeter. It was a tribute to the man’s training that he neither ducked nor flinched.

“They did what?” Zhukov screamed.

The officer continued to stand at attention. “Comrade President, they have shot down three of our fighter planes. MiG-31s, flying out of Yelizovo. The fourth plane was fired upon, but not damaged. It escaped and returned to base.”

“Who?” Zhukov yelled. “Who fired upon my planes?”

“We do not know, Comrade President,” the lieutenant said. “The planes were patrolling the southern edge of the ice pack, in accordance with your standing defense plan, sir. They encountered a surface vessel of some kind, operating without lights and without radar near the ice. The vessel was within the exclusion area, and it was not one of ours, so the planes attacked it with missiles, per your orders.”

Zhukov nodded curtly. “And?”

“A missile battle ensued, Comrade President. Three of our planes were shot down. The pilot of the fourth plane believes that the unidentified vessel may have been a missile boat. He reports that the radar signature was much too small for a major combatant ship. The pilot is unable to identify the country of origin.”

“I see,” Zhukov said. His voice was deathly quiet now. “And where is this pilot?”

“In his quarters at Yelizovo air station,” the lieutenant said. “Having a vodka, I imagine. His comrades were killed in front of his eyes. I understand that he is quite shaken.”

“I’m sure he is,” Zhukov said. He ran a hand through his hair and cleared his throat. “Send a message to the commander of the air station at Yelizovo. I want the pilot taken out in the snow and shot, within the hour.”

The lieutenant cocked his head “Sir?”

“We are facing the enemies who brought down the Soviet Empire,” Zhukov said. “We cannot defeat them with incompetence and cowardice. The fool should have pressed the attack, not run away like a frightened child.”

He glared into the lieutenant’s eyes. “Have the pilot shot. Do it now.”

The young lieutenant swallowed and snapped out a salute. “Right away, Comrade President.” He made an abrupt about-face, and marched from the room.

CHAPTER 47

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

1929 hours (7:29 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

“More coffee, ma’am?” The wardroom mess attendant held out a silver pot and tipped it slightly forward, indicating that he was ready to pour. It was the young Sailor who had escorted Ann and Sheldon from the flight deck to the wardroom on their return to the ship.

Ann looked at her watch and shook her head. It was time, maybe a couple of minutes past time. The Navy guys would already be out there on the boat deck, standing around in the cold and the dark, wondering what was keeping that crazy civilian woman.

Ann knew the answer to that question, but she didn’t want to admit it. Not even to herself. She was afraid.

The ship had been sailing north at high speed since an hour before sundown. Now they were back up near the ice pack again, not far from the area where they’d been attacked at the end of Mouse’s last run. Those fighter jets—or others like them—were still out there somewhere, and now they were alerted to the presence of U.S. warships in the area. Last time, the planes had stumbled across the ship by blind chance. This time, they would know exactly what they were looking for. They would be waiting.

Ann discovered that she was waiting too. Her ears were waiting for the distant growl of jet engines and the shuddering roar of launching missiles. Her muscles were waiting—preparing themselves to re-experience the paralysis that had been her body’s fear response to the aircraft attack. Her stomach was waiting to void itself of the breakfast and coffee that she’d foolishly allowed herself to consume. And her soul was waiting for that liminal moment—the critical threshold at which her fellow voyagers would either kill, or be killed, or both.

She looked at her watch again. She was definitely late, now. It was time to go out there and do her job. She decided to stand up and get it over with, but was surprised to find herself still sitting in the wardroom chair. Her body seemed to be on strike.

She frowned, and grabbed the arms of her chair, ready to push herself to a standing position. And found herself still seated.

She was still puzzling over this when the young Sailor spoke.

He set the coffee pot on the table. “Ma’am, can I ask you a question?”

Ann nodded.

“Are you…” the Sailor halted in mid-question. He swallowed, and spoke again. “How did you end up working on robots?”

Ann had almost no skill for reading people, but she knew instantly that this was not what the kid really wanted to ask. He had changed his mind at the last second, shied away from his real question—whatever that was.

She decided to answer him anyway.

“When I was about ten years old, I saw this movie called ‘Silent Running.’ Have you ever seen it?”

“I don’t think so,” the Sailor said. “Is that one of those old submarine flicks? Like ‘The Enemy Below,’ or something like that?”

“No,” Ann said. “It’s science fiction. It’s about the future, when the Earth is so polluted that the atmosphere can’t support trees or plants any more.”

The mess attendant waited for her to continue.

“There are these giant spaceships in orbit,” Ann said. “They carry all that’s left of the world’s forests in these enormous geodesic domes. And on one of those ships is this guy named Freeman Lowell. He’s sort of a botanist and ecologist. He takes care of the forests.”

Ann stopped. Why was she doing this? She didn’t talk about her private life to anyone. Why was she spilling her guts to this kid? Was she looking for an excuse to stall, because she was too freaking scared to go do her job?

“Lowell doesn’t get along with the other people on his ship,” she said. “The others all care about different things than he does. He doesn’t think the same way they do, or value the same things. He doesn’t really understand other people, and he doesn’t like them very much.”

The Sailor was staring now, but Ann forged ahead.

“Lowell likes the trees, and the bushes,” she said. “Because he understands them. He also likes the robots that take care of the ship, for the same reason. He appreciates the clean logic of their thinking. They make sense to him. He doesn’t have to be witty, or charming, and he doesn’t have to try to fit in. The plants and the machines accept him for who he is. They don’t ask him to be anything else.”

“I’ve watched that movie about a thousand times,” Ann said. “The robots weren’t real; they were human actors in little robot costumes. But they looked real. And I knew from the first second I saw them that I wanted to work with robots.”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m cut from the same cloth as Freeman Lowell. Machines make sense to me. Robots make sense. It’s people I can’t figure out.”

The Sailor gave her a judicious nod. “Robotics is a big field,” he said. “What made you decide to specialize in the underwater stuff?”

Again, Ann felt certain that this wasn’t the question the kid really wanted to ask.

“Three-quarters of this planet is water,” she said. “If I’m going to do anything worth doing, the ocean seems like a good place to start.”

The mess attendant paused for several seconds, as if unsure about how to phrase whatever was on his mind. He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, are you … scared?”

Ann felt the heat rise to her face. “What?”

“Scared,” the Sailor said. “You know … afraid?”

Ann wanted to slap the little bastard. Was that was this was about? Popeye the Sailor Man getting her to open up, so he could laugh in her freaking face?

His Sailor buddies must have been talking up a storm, all about the crazy civilian woman who had yakked all over Combat Information Center. They’d probably laughed their asses off about that.

But the kid wasn’t smiling, and there was nothing critical in his voice.

“I’m scared,” he said quietly. “I’ve been to the head twice, and I still feel like I’m going to piss my pants.”

The kid paused, and Ann realized that he wasn’t jerking her around. He really was scared. Maybe even as frightened as she was.

“I told my Senior Chief,” he said. “I figured there’s no point in hiding it if I’m not tough enough for combat. You know what Senior Chief said?”

Ann shook her head. “What did he say?”

“He told me everybody is scared shitless in combat. Everybody except maybe crazy people, and complete idiots. He told me that’s natural. Fear is an instinctive reaction to danger. Somebody’s trying to kill you, you’re gonna get scared. Senior Chief says you have to learn to work through the fear—get past it, so you can do your job, even if you’re scared half to death.”

The Sailor picked up the coffee pot and used a white dish towel to wipe the spot where it had been. “You think that’s true, ma’am? You think it’s okay to be scared, as long as you do your job?”

“I don’t know,” Ann said. “I’m probably not the best person to ask. I mean, it sounds true. Maybe it is true.”

“Are you scared?” the Sailor asked again.

“I’m terrified,” Ann said.

The kid turned away and carried the silver pot back to the coffee maker. “Me too,” he said. “It’s not so bad right now. I’m on mess attendant duties. I clean, I serve meals, and I clean some more. There aren’t exactly lives hanging on my every action. If I screw up, the coffee gets cold, or breakfast is late. Nobody dies.”

He shook his head. “But this is only temporary duty for me. When I go back to my division, I’ll be a Fire Control Technician again. If I get scared then, I mean really scared—too scared to do my job—people are going to get killed. You know what I mean?”

Ann nodded. That was a lot of weight to hang on the shoulders of a nineteen-year-old kid. Hell, that was a lot of weight to hang on her shoulders. But it was true for the frightened young Sailor, and it was true for Ann.

What was it that Sheldon had said? “How many nightmares will we get, if we let a million people die?”

It all came back to that again—Ann’s fears and her doubts, weighed against the lives of countless human beings. Or more precisely, Ann’s personal safety weighed against the safety of thousands, or even millions, of people. Put in those terms, it wasn’t a very difficult decision to make.

Ann glanced at her watch. She was late, but not that late. The boat crew would still be up there, waiting to lower Mouse into the water for the next phase of his search.

Ann stood up; the spell that had bound her to the chair was broken. “Can you help me find the boat deck?” she asked. “I have to go do my job now.”

CHAPTER 48

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

0603 hours (6:03 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The beefy Sailor who called himself Boats stared down over the side of the ship at the robot circling slowly in the dark ocean swells. The big man shook his head sadly. “If you can’t get your machine to sit still, ma’am, I don’t see how we’re gonna be able to get a line on the damned thing.”

Ann followed the Navy man’s gaze. Sunrise was still two hours away, and the waves looked like liquid obsidian under the cold illumination of a three-quarter moon. But Mouse’s brightly-colored hull provided enough contrast to be faintly visible in the moonlight.

Ann burrowed her hands more deeply into the pockets of her foul weather coat. Even with the gloves on, her fingers were freezing in the raw subarctic air. She didn’t even want to think about how cold the water was.

“Mouse’s emergency maintenance subroutine has been triggered,” she said. “When he gets damaged, he’s programmed to return to his launching coordinates, drive to the surface, and circle until he’s picked up for repairs.”

“How did he get damaged?” Boats asked.

“I have no idea,” Ann said. “Maybe he collided with something, or one of his seals started leaking. He might have developed an electrical problem: a short, or a blown component. I won’t be able to tell until we get him out of the water, and I can download his error logs.”

“You can’t stop him?” one of the Sailors asked.

Ann didn’t see which one of the Navy men had spoken, but it wasn’t Boats. The voice was younger: one of the other members of the boat deck crew.

“I can’t control him from remote,” Ann said. “Not when he’s in emergency maintenance mode.”

She shuddered, dreading the very thought of what she was about to say next. “I’m going to have to go into the water, and shut him off by hand.”

Boats exhaled explosively. “No ma’am! Not a chance! You are not going in the water.”

The Sailor’s tone made the hair on the back of Ann’s neck bristle. “That’s not your decision,” she snapped. “That’s my robot down there, and I don’t work for you.”

“No ma’am,” Boats said. “You don’t work for me. But this is my boat deck, and I’m not letting you go in the water unless the captain orders me to.”

Ann made an effort to keep her voice from rising. “I’ve got a wetsuit and swim gear,” she said. “I’m an excellent swimmer, and I’ve done this before. More than once.”

“I’m sure that’s true, ma’am,” the big Sailor said. “But this ain’t Southern California. The water temperature here is low enough to kill you in fifteen or twenty minutes. You’ll be unconscious in half that time. You don’t have the equipment or the training to work in water this cold.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ann said. “I won’t be down there more than a couple of minutes.”

Boats shook his head. “You won’t be down there at all, ma’am. Not while I’m running the boat deck.”

Ann snorted. “How are you planning to stop me? Tie me up, and throw me in the brig?”

“This is a destroyer,” the Sailor said. “We don’t have a brig. But we will use physical force, if that’s what it takes to keep you out of the water.”

Ann looked down at the dim form of Mouse, still driving in wide clockwise circles. “We’ve got to shut him down, or we’ll never get the lifting cable on him.”

“You’re right about that,” Boats said. “We’re going to have to put a swimmer in the water.”

Ann frowned. “You just said…”

Boats cut her off. “Our swimmer. He’s got the cold water gear, and he’s got the training.”

“Wait just a second,” Ann said.

“We don’t have time to argue about this,” Boats said. “The ship is gonna turn south in about a half hour, so we won’t be too close to the ice when the sun comes up. If you want your Mouse gadget to be aboard when we get out of here, we’d better get a move on.”

Before Ann could respond, Boats pointed to one of the shadowy Sailor shapes huddled on the boat deck. “Peters, go get yourself suited up. I’m calling the Bridge for authorization. As soon as I get the thumbs-up, you’re going over the side.”

“Really?” the other Sailor muttered. “That’s just fucking fabulous.”

“What was that?” Boats growled. “I don’t believe I heard you.”

Peters coughed, and spoke more clearly. “Aye-aye, Boats.”

Boats nodded. “That’s what I thought you said. Now, get your butt in gear; we’re running out of darkness.”

*  *  *

Ten or fifteen minutes later, as she listened over a set of headphones to the teeth-chattering grunts and mumbled curses of the Navy swimmer, Ann discovered—to her secret disgust—that she was glad Peters had gone into the water in her place. She could actually hear the bone-numbing cold in the young Sailor’s voice.

Peters had only been in the water a couple of minutes, and his speech was already thick, and slurred.

Ann, who had never been much colder than she was right now—standing on the boat deck, could not even imagine what it must be like down there. Just the sound of the man’s increasing discomfort was beginning to make her own muscles contract and cramp. The frigid water was leaching the life out of him, and Ann was listening to it happen.

“Almost … got … it …,” Peters murmured thickly. “Almost …”

The sound of a ragged exhalation came through the headphones. “Fuck! Missed … I … fucking … missed … it…”

Ann stood at the lifelines, looking down toward the water. The eastern sky was beginning to lighten now, and she could see the swimmer’s orange wetsuit, bobbing near the yellow form of the robot. The suit was thick, and supposedly designed for cold water dives, but it didn’t sound like it was doing Peters a lot of good.

That was probably a false impression, she knew. Without his protective suit, the Sailor might already be unconscious by now, or dead.

She watched Peters thrash in the water as he made another lunge for the cover plate on the robot’s dorsal access port. The trio of propulsion pods on the machine’s stern were still pushing it forward, relentlessly powering through another in a series of continuous clockwise circles.

The retaining latches on the cover plate were mounted flush with the curve of the hull, to minimize hydrodynamic drag. To release them, Peters had to depress each one, and turn it ninety degrees.

Ann knew from experience that this was not an easy task, even in relatively comfortable water temperatures. Mouse was streamlined, wet, and very slippery. The robot pitched and rolled with the waves, and the continuous thrust from the propulsion pods had the effect of constantly scooting the rounded machine away from you.

Peters had three of the latches released. He had only one more to go, but it didn’t look or sound like he was up to finishing the job.

The Sailor wasn’t talking at all now. His breathing had become an irregular rhythm of strangled groans.

Ann looked up at Boats. The sky in the East was still growing brighter, and the big Sailor was becoming easier to see by the minute.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Peters can’t do it. We’ve got to pull him out of the water.”

“Yeah,” Boats said solemnly. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He nodded to the two Sailors holding the swimmer’s tending line. “Standby to heave around.”

A muffled exclamation came over the headphones. The words, if they were actually words, were totally incomprehensible. But the tone of voice carried an unmistakable note of triumph.

Ann turned back toward the water, her eyes scanning rapidly until they located Peters and Mouse. The access cover on the robot’s spine was open, and Mouse was no longer circling. Peters had released the final latch, and hit the emergency kill switch.

“Good job,” Ann said quietly. She looked up at Boats. “Let’s lower the hook, and get them both up on deck.”

*  *  *

Ann sat in her stateroom an hour later, drinking crappy Navy coffee and uploading Mouse’s error logs to her laptop. Mouse was safely strapped to the boat deck, and the ship was headed south at high speed, trying to distance itself from unfriendly territory before the sun was too far above the horizon.

The swimmer, Peters, had been half-led/half-carried toward some place called sickbay. Ann wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded Navy enough to arouse her instinctive skepticism.

Then again, maybe the sickbay thing wasn’t as iffy as it sounded. Sheldon probably knew all about it. She’d ask him later. Right now, she needed to figure out what had gone wrong with her baby.

A soft bleep informed her that the upload was complete. She wiggled her fingers to limber them up, and reached for the computer keys.

The situational response algorithms in Mouse’s core program were written in ARIX, Norton’s proprietary programming language. Like many adaptive computer languages, ARIX had a built-in parser for translating error codes into an easily-understood English-based syntax.

Ann didn’t need the parser. She was perfectly comfortable reading the codes in their native hexadecimal.

She located the most recent time index, the last error recorded before the robot had been powered down. The hexadecimal code read, “46 41 55 4C 54 30 30,” which translated as, FAULT 00.

That wasn’t exactly a surprise. FAULT 00 indicated a critical error that Mouse couldn’t identify. It was a catch-all error designation, common for complex machines in the prototype stages. That particular fault would appear less and less often, as Mouse’s self-diagnostic capabilities were redesigned and improved over time.

The previous time index showed the same hex code, as did the time index before that, and the one before that, and the one before that …

Ann scrolled through several screens of recorded time indexes, seeing hex code 46 41 55 4C 54 30 30 repeated again, and again, and again. The fault—whatever it was—had obviously occurred several hours earlier. She had to work backwards through a few thousand repetitive error codes to locate the triggering event.

After paging through a seemingly endless number of screens, all completely identical except for the time indexes, Ann finally spotted what she was looking for. The triggering event had occurred almost exactly five and a half hours into Mouse’s search mission.

Prior to the occurrence of the fault, every time index read, “54 52 41 4E 53 49 54.” That was the hex code for TRANSIT. Mouse had been operating in normal search/transit mode, carrying out his search plan without errors or problems.

At the five and a half hour mark, the instant before the error had been triggered, the hex code had changed to 43 4F 4E 54 41 43 54, for a single processing cycle, followed by hex code 4D 49 53 53 49 4F 4E.

Ann’s heart froze as she stared at the screen. The two strings of characters seemed to stand out more brightly than anything else in the jumble of letters and numerals on the laptop display.

Ann swallowed, and closed her eyes, trying to change those two error codes by force of will. She must have looked at the screen wrong. Her eyes were getting tired. Because those codes couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be.

She opened her eyes. The codes were still there, staring at her out of the laptop screen like a pair of accusing eyes.

Ann tried not to think about what they meant, but her brain performed the translation automatically. The first code translated as CONTACT. The second translated as MISSION.

She slammed the lid of the laptop closed. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

Mouse had done his job. He had found the submarine. And then, when the robot had attempted to shift from transit mode into mission mode, he’d run into the same software glitch that Ann had been wrestling with for weeks. Right in the middle of the mode shift, his software had faulted and then triggered his emergency maintenance subroutine.

He’d been close enough to complete the mission, and instead, he’d turned away and returned to his launching coordinates.

How had that happened? Ann had written a software patch, to bypass that very problem. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t it worked?

She opened the lid of the laptop, backed out of the error logs, and loaded the program modules she had written to prepare Mouse for this mission.

It took her only a few seconds to find the address in the program where the patch should have been installed. It wasn’t there.

Oh god! How had that happened? Had she forgotten to install the patch? She couldn’t have. There was just no way.

But she had forgotten. She’d been so cocky, so sure that she had done everything perfectly. And she had somehow forgotten a critical step. Maybe even the critical step.

This whole mess with the missile submarine could have been over by now, if she’d done her job. But she’d forgotten.

Or had she? What if it hadn’t been an accident? Or rather, what if she’d wanted to forget? Was that possible?

She didn’t like these Navy people. That wasn’t exactly a secret. And she didn’t want to be party to killing the crew of that submarine. That wasn’t a secret either.

Maybe she had made some subconscious decision to screw this up. She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way. But how would she know? How could she be sure?

What if this had been their one chance to get the sub? And she had screwed it up.

She closed the laptop again. What the hell was she going to do now?

CHAPTER 49

3RD EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL COMPANY

ICE PACK - SOUTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

0752 hours (7:52 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D helicopter was flying low—the pilot hugging the ice, trying to blend his aircraft into the ground clutter to minimize detection by hostile radar.

Aft of the cockpit, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong and the three other Marines assigned to his EOD response element occupied only a small corner of the helicopter’s 30-foot-long cargo/troop compartment. The team’s detection gear and disruption equipment took up more room than the team itself, but the big compartment was still nearly as empty as the icy terrain they were flying above.

Gunny Armstrong looked over his team. Hicks and Travers were sleeping. Staff Sergeant Myers was peering out through one of the starboard windows. They were good Marines, all three of them. They were trained, and motivated, and damned good at their jobs. Gunny was proud to have them under his command.

He turned to look out of his own window. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said. He spoke at a normal volume, and his voice was lost against the howl of the helicopter’s turbines and the chop of the rotors. He was talking to himself, anyway. No one was supposed to hear. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said again. “It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna fucking work.”

He tugged the folds of his neck gator into a more comfortable position, and hauled the zipper of his ECWCS parka up another few notches. The parka, like the rest of Gunny’s Marine Corps issue survival gear, was part of the 2nd generation Extended Cold Weather Clothing System. And—like all the other ECWCS gear—it was patterned in the leafy greens, browns, and tans of the woodland camouflage scheme. There was supposed to be a white outer garment, for operations in snowy environments, but the Supply Sergeant had checked the wrong block on the requisition form, and they’d gotten a shipment of meat thermometers or something stupid like that.

So much for that camouflage shit. In their pretty green suits, Gunny and his fellow EOD techs were going to stand out against the ice and snow like a bulldozer in a bathtub. If anybody came looking for them, they’d be screwed. Of course, there was a good chance that they were screwed anyway.

Through the scratched Plexiglas window, the ice below was nearly a blur, sliding under the belly of the aircraft at 190 miles per hour. This entire mission was a blur. The whole thing had been thrown together at the last minute, with almost no preparation. And that was a good way to get Marines killed.

The plan called for the chopper to insert the team, and then turn south and head for the open sea, where it could refuel with one of the destroyers operating over the horizon. According to intel, the Op-Area was crawling with MiGs, and the CH-53 had a radar cross-section the size of a barn. Moving the aircraft to a standoff position made good tactical sense, but Gunny Armstrong didn’t like the idea of having his Marines stranded on the ice.

If the mission went sour, their options for rapid emergency evac were basically zero. Not that the ancient 53 was much of an evac platform anyway. The damned thing was older than Gunny’s father. It leaked, and rattled, and shook so hard that it wobbled your teeth. If this job was really as important as battalion was making it out to be, why hadn’t somebody called up one of the V-22s instead of this flying relic?

His only satisfaction lay in the knowledge that Master Sergeant Pike and Response Element One weren’t riding any better. They were at the western end of the Op-Area, flying in a CH-53 just as rickety as this old piece of crap, toward the Alfa and Bravo sites.

Gunny’s people, Response Element Two, had been assigned to the Charlie and Delta sites, at the eastern end of the Op-Area. Element One and Element Two had both been directed to work from north-to-south, disarming the northern sites first, and then moving down to handle the southern sites. The longer the disarming efforts dragged on, the more risk there was of being spotted by hostile forces.

In theory, by getting the most distant sites out of the way first, the teams would put themselves closer to evac if anything went wrong in the second half of the mission. It wasn’t much of a theory in Gunny’s book, since the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be any greater in the second half of the operation than it was in the first half. But that was the sort of half-bright thinking that the rear echelon types were famous for.

Nobody was calling this a suicide mission, but that’s what it was starting to smell like. His team of Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs had been assigned to locate and disarm multiple pre-positioned explosives packages of unknown size, strength, and configuration. They had no idea of what these packages might look like, no idea how sensitive they might be to intrusion or tampering, and only rough estimates of their locations. To put the icing on the cake, they’d be working in near-arctic conditions, under a sky dominated by hostile air cover.

If that wasn’t brilliant tactical planning, Gunny didn’t know what was. He grunted. Some genius back at G3 needed to have his ass kicked for dreaming up a goat rodeo like this. If they got out of this alive, Gunny might just have to go look up the idiot in question, and kick down the door to his fucking office.

The idea made the Marine grin—a cold and feral expression, with no trace of humor in it. He was nearly ready for the purge now. Nearly annoyed enough, and worried enough, and frustrated enough for the final piece of his emotional preparation.

The purge had been Colonel Ziegler’s term, back when Gunny Armstrong had been a punk Pfc. with the 11th MEU in Iraq.

“You don’t start a patrol when you’ve got to take a dump,” Colonel Z had said. “You hit the head before you hit the trail. You get all the shit out of your body, so it doesn’t slow you down.”

“Well you’ve got to do the same thing for your brain,” the colonel had said. “You can’t go into combat with a bunch of unnecessary shit clogging up your brain. You’ve got to offload it. You’ve got to purge it. You’ve got to call up all of your doubts and angers ahead of time. Think about it. Stew over it. Get mad about it. And then get rid of it. Let it go, just like taking a dump. So when the time comes to be a Marine, you’ve got nothing else on your mind but being a Marine.”

As far as Gunny Armstrong was concerned, it had been good advice. It had gotten him through three tours in the sandbox. He figured it would probably see him through this mess as well.

He was mad now, and scared, and all the things a Marine cannot afford to be when he’s in the field. He could feel the knot of emotions building inside him, rising through his bones like the shriek of the chopper’s turbines. He wondered for a second if he should sneak something in there about his ex-wife, just to really push things over the top.

But he didn’t need it. He felt the internal safety valve in his chest lift, venting his rage and his fear, and he made no move to stop it. He slammed a fist into his sternum, to make sure that the imaginary tank of feelings emptied itself entirely. “Ooh-rah!” he said to himself. “Ooh-fucking-rah!”

The ritual did its job. He felt the calm descend over him. He was ready. He was focused. The only thoughts in his mind were of the mission, and his Marines. Everything else was insignificant bullshit.

The copilot’s voice crackled in the left ear of his headset. “Two minutes, Gunny.”

Gunny Armstrong felt for the talk button and keyed his mike. “Two minutes, aye. Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant.”

He looked out the window at jagged terrain of the ice pack. It was time to go kick some ass. Time to go be Marines.

CHAPTER 50

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

0821 hours (8:21 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Captain Bowie leaned back in his chair, and set his coffee cup on the wardroom table. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your Mouse unit decided on its own to abandon the search, and return to the position where we launched it?”

Ann Roark nodded. She didn’t like the way this conversation was starting out.

“That’s right,” she said. “According to Mouse’s internal error logs, he operated without problems for the first five and a half hours of the run. Then an event that occurred during the run triggered a spontaneous mission abort.”

“Do you have any idea what that event was? What triggered this spontaneous mission abort?”

Ann took a breath and nodded. “I know what caused it. But it’s a little bit complicated.”

The Navy man lifted his coffee cup and took a swallow. “I’ve got a few minutes. See if you can spell it out for me.”

Ann sighed loudly, and then instantly regretted it. She was a civilian, and technically free to say whatever she wanted, but she knew that senior military people didn’t react well to signs of reticence or dissatisfaction.

Her father had been a major in the Army, until a roadside bomb outside of Ramadi had turned his up-armored HMMV into a few thousand pounds of Swiss cheese. Major Dad had been big on discipline and outward displays of respect. He’d been quick to decode Ann’s body language for any hint of dissent or defiance. He’d interpreted every huff, every roll of the eyes, and every hunched shoulder as a sign of rebellion: a challenge to his authority.

There wasn’t a lot of reason to believe that this Navy captain would be any different. With that single pronounced sigh, she had telegraphed her frustration in a language that the military mind could only interpret in one way. She might as well have told him to fuck off. God, she hated dealing with these people. They made her crazy.

Ann nearly sighed again, but she caught herself, realizing that it would only rebroadcast her frustration. She shifted mental gears, and tried to think of a way to phrase the problem with Mouse.

“Search mode is not much different than transit mode,” she said finally. “As it moves through the water, the robot is using its onboard sensors to scan for the submarine, but it’s essentially following a programmed series of navigational waypoints. We set the waypoints ahead of time, when we plan the search pattern. I upload the coordinates of each waypoint to the robot prior to launch, and Mouse travels from one waypoint to the next, like following a trail of breadcrumbs.”

The captain nodded for her to continue.

“As long as Mouse was searching for the submarine,” Ann said, “he was essentially operating in directed transit mode.”

“I’ve got that,” Captain Bowie said. “So what happened?”

Ann paused. He really wasn’t going to like this part. “Mouse found the submarine,” she said. “About five and a half hours into the search.”

She spoke quickly now, trying to get across the rest of her message before Bowie’s brain had a chance to process the first part.

“That’s what triggered the problem,” she said. “When he found the sub, Mouse shifted from directed transit mode to autonomous mission mode, so he could carry out the next phase of the operation and plant the beacon on the hull of the submarine. And during the mode shift, something glitched in his operating program. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but I think it was that same program error we were getting a couple of weeks ago, when we were running tests … before we rescued that submersible.”

“You wrote a software patch for that, didn’t you?” Bowie asked.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “A workaround. It didn’t fix the bug in the program code. It just bypassed the problem, and allowed Mouse to keep working if the error showed up.”

“So what went wrong?” Captain Bowie asked. “Was this some unforeseen permutation of the error? Something your software patch couldn’t handle?”

Ann hesitated before answering. It would be easy to lie here, attribute the problem to untraceable software glitches. Mouse was a prototype, and they knew he had bugs. If she blamed the problem on unreliable software, she’d probably never get caught.

She decided to stick with the truth. It might bring her some grief, but she wouldn’t have any trouble looking at herself in the mirror.

“I screwed up,” she said. “There was nothing wrong with the patch. I just forgot to re-upload it.”

“I thought it was already installed,” Bowie said. “You uploaded it weeks ago, when you were getting the Mouse unit ready to search for the Nereus.”

“It was installed,” Ann said. “But the program parameters needed for this mission were different from the ones we used for the submersible. I decided that our best chance of success would be to get a clean load. Dump the old operating program, and reload from scratch. That gave me a clean slate to work with when I was modifying the operating program for this mission.”

Bowie looked at her without speaking.

Ann plunged on. “I had about a hundred things to do to prepare Mouse to go after this submarine. I had to modify a lot of code to give him the functions he needs to get the job done. And I didn’t remember to reinstall the patch. I just … forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Yes,” Ann said. “I forgot. I don’t know how. I thought I had everything covered, but I was trying to cram two days worth of programming into a few hours. And I missed something. I forgot the patch. I … forgot.”

“So your Mouse unit found the damned submarine, and—instead of planting the beacon and alerting us to the sub’s position—your robot ran back to its launch position and drove around in circles?”

Ann nodded. “Yes.”

It was the first time she’d heard one of the Navy people use the dreaded R-word to describe Mouse. But given the nature of the conversation, there wasn’t much pleasure in the tiny victory.

Bowie glanced at the wardroom clock. “We could have engaged the submarine seven hours ago. We could have brought this whole tragic mess to an end.”

“I know that,” Ann said. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional. It was an oversight. An accident.”

Bowie drummed his fingertips lightly on the table top. “Are you sure about that?”

His tone of voice took Ann by surprise.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you certain it was an accident?” Bowie asked. “You’ve made it plain since the minute you came aboard. You don’t like me; you don’t like this ship; and you don’t like the Navy.”

Ann started to respond, but he kept talking.

“I don’t know what you’ve got against us, and I frankly don’t care. Your opinions are your business. You don’t have to like us. You don’t even have to pretend to like us. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you don’t actively antagonize my crew, or let your personal views interfere with the job. But now it looks like they are interfering with the job, Ms. Roark. They’re interfering with the mission of my ship. We had an opportunity to finish this, but I think you might be more interested in jerking our chain than in getting the job done.”

He set his coffee cup down a little too hard. “Between the United States, Russia, and Japan, there are literally hundreds of millions of human beings living under the threat of nuclear extinction because of that submarine. We could have stopped it. We could have ended it seven hours ago. When you’re going over your list of reasons to hate the Navy, add that to your list of things to think about.”

“Wait just a freaking second,” Ann snapped. “You think I did this on purpose?”

Bowie lowered his voice. “I don’t know. Did you?”

“It was an accident,” Ann said. “A stupid freaking accident. I forgot. I made a mistake.”

“The mistake was mine,” Bowie said. “I underestimated your contempt for my crew, and the mission of this ship. I misjudged your desire to see us fail.”

He pushed his chair back from the table, and walked to the door. He reached for the doorknob.

“You’re so full of shit,” Ann said. “Do you know that?”

Bowie spoke over his shoulder. His words were quietly icy. “We’re finished with your services,” he said. “I’m calling for a helicopter to pick you and Mr. Miggs up as soon as possible. I don’t want you on my ship any more.”

Ann felt a lump rising in her throat. This man—this idiot—wouldn’t even listen to her.

“You’re so full of shit,” she said again. Her voice was shaky now. “What happened to that song and dance you were giving me when we were trying to rescue the Nereus? Do you remember? All that crap about how I didn’t sign on for any of this, and you know that Mouse is only a prototype and he isn’t ready for the job, but he’s your best hope. Does any of that ring a bell? You said no one would blame us if the mission went wrong. Remember that?”

She felt a hot tear roll down her cheek. “Well guess what, Mr. Captain, sir? Mouse is still a freaking prototype, and he’s still not ready for this job. But I’m not trying to blame this on the robot. I could have done that, and you wouldn’t have known any better. Instead, I told you the truth. I screwed up. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not the one who failed here. I am. And I’m not trying to cover it up. I told you the truth because I want the chance to fix it. I want to make it right. I just need another chance.” The last word came out as a sob.

Captain Bowie stood without speaking for several seconds. Then he released the doorknob and turned around. “I did say those things,” he said. “And I told you no one would blame you if the mission went south.”

He walked back toward the table. “Maybe I am full of shit,” he said. “At least on the current point of discussion.”

“You are,” Ann sniffed.

Bowie’s smile was tinged with contrition. “I’m willing to stipulate that, for the moment. But I’ll have to ask you not to voice that particular sentiment in front of my crew.”

He sat back down in his chair. “Where do we go from here?”

Ann wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “We try again,” she said. “I upload the patch to Mouse’s program code, and—as soon as the sun goes down—we put him back in the water and start over.”

“Do you really think that’s going to work?” Bowie asked.

“Mouse found your damned submarine before,” Ann said. “He can find it again.”

CHAPTER 51

3RD EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL COMPANY

ICE PACK - SOUTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

1113 hours (11:13 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Gunnery Sergeant Armstrong crouched behind an ice hommock about forty yards from the device, and watched through binoculars as Staff Sergeant Myers and Corporal Hicks backed away from the explosive charge buried at the 8 o’clock position. Gunny wasn’t looking at Myers or Hicks, who were both easily visible without the binoculars. He was examining the ice around their feet, looking for any sign of booby traps that might have been missed during the initial recon.

Myers and Hicks moved slowly and cautiously, taking care not to disturb the twisted pair of wires that connected the shaped-charge to the initiator, about fifty feet away. Myers was scanning the snowy terrain with a Föerster Mark-26, moving in as straight a line as the rugged surface of the ice pack would permit. Hicks was his observer and assistant, providing a second set of eyes and hands as they were needed.

The Mk-26 was a fluxgate magnetic gradiometer; it could locate hidden metal objects by detecting the fluctuations they caused in the earth’s magnetic field. Myers and Hicks were nearly finished with the magnetic sweep. They’d already done the visual sweep, the infrared sweep, and sampled the air down-wind of the device using a hand-held Fido detector to sniff for vapors and residue: the telltale molecular traces given off by explosive chemicals.

This was the last step of the secondary reconnaissance. Gunny Armstrong had performed the initial recon himself, with Sergeant Travers covering observe and assist. He was confident that he had the configuration of the device thoroughly sussed out.

Myers was performing the entire recon again, to be certain that Gunny hadn’t missed anything on the first pass. Gunny didn’t expect him to find anything new, but the procedures laid out by the 60 Series EOD manuals were clear: two separate reconnaissance sweeps, conducted by two pairs of qualified Explosive Ordnance Disposal technicians. There were exceptions to the rule, in time-urgent operations, or when there weren’t enough techs available. But Gunny’s team had the personnel and the time. They were going to do it by the book.

The device itself was relatively straightforward. Six shaped-charges were spaced evenly around the perimeter of a large circle, maybe a hundred feet in diameter, all wired to an initiator package in the middle of the circle.

Gunny and Myers had both scanned the initiator using an RTR-4 real-time x-ray unit. The package appeared to consist of two modules of electronic circuits, housed in an insulated enclosure about the size of a shoebox. There were no indications of explosive charges in or near the enclosure.

A Kevlar-jacketed cable led from the package into a hole drilled in the ice. Short of trying to dig it out, which Gunny’s team was not going to attempt, there was no way to know how long the Kevlar cable was, or what might be wired to its other end. The cable probably penetrated all the way through the ice, and into the unfrozen water below. Gunny assumed that the remote triggering device, whatever that might be, was hanging at the submerged end of the cable. There wasn’t really any way to test that assumption, but it seemed logical, and no one else on the team could suggest an alternative.

Of more immediate importance, Gunny hadn’t found any booby traps anywhere around the charges or the initiator package. No motion sensors, no proximity detectors, and no anti-tamper devices. Whoever had planted these explosives had apparently depended on secrecy and the remote location for protection. It would have worked too, Gunny figured, if some intelligence bubba hadn’t gotten his hands on the rough coordinates of the devices. Somebody with inside knowledge had talked.

Myers and Hicks finished the Mk-26 sweep, and backed away from the device until they were well clear of the danger area. Then they made their way across the ice to Gunny’s position, Myers still carrying the L-shaped magnetic sensor.

The wind wasn’t blowing very hard, but it had a whistling quality that made conversation difficult, so Myers leaned in close and spoke loudly. “Secondary recon is complete, Gunny. No big surprises. I count six shaped-charges of roughly thirty pounds each. Cyclohexyl-based plastic explosives. The Fido samples called out cyclic nitramine with high mercury content. Looks like Russian military-grade RDX to me.”

Gunny nodded. He’d gotten the same readings. “Continue.”

“All six charges are wired to a central initiator, enclosed in an insulated housing. On the RTR-4, it looks like a couple of blocks of electronics, connected to each other, to the charges, and to a cable that runs down through the ice.”

Gunny nodded again. The report matched his own assessment.

“No signs of any anti-tamper devices,” Myers said. “I didn’t spot any proximity detectors, no motion sensors, no tripwires. Nothing.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think our render-safe procedure is going to be pretty simple. I say we take out the initiator with the PAN, and use Niffers to cut all six pairs of firing wires simultaneously.”

The PAN, short for Percussion-Actuated Non-electric Disrupter, was a specialty tool of the EOD trade. Consisting of a long stainless steel barrel attached to an adjustable metal frame, the PAN used blank 12-gauge shotgun shells to fire specially-designed slugs into bomb components, destroying key circuits or mechanisms, and making the bomb inoperative.

Niffer was the common pronunciation of the abbreviation NFR, which stood for Nonvolatile Fast-Response Wire Cutter. A Niffer was a tube-shaped device—about the size of a fountain pen—that could be attached to a small bundle of electrical wires, and sever them on command. Unlike the PAN, which had been invented specifically for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Niffers had been adapted from the American movie industry, where special effects technicians used them to remotely control pyrotechnic charges for action films.

“Good plan,” Gunny said. “That’s about what I was thinking. But I want to take out that Kevlar cable at the same time.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the device. “Odds are, that cable leads to a remote trigger. We’d probably be okay if we left it in place. But I don’t want to gamble if we don’t have to. So we take it out of the equation, just to be on the safe side.”

Staff Sergeant Myers nodded. “Understood. How do you want to cut the cable? It’s too heavy for the Niffers, and we’re already using the PAN to disrupt the initiator package.”

“Let’s pop it with detonating cord,” Gunny said. “The cable is Kevlar, so it’s going to be resistant, but a couple of loops of det. cord ought to do the trick.”

“Roger,” Myers said. “I should have thought of that.”

Gunny Armstrong slapped him on the shoulder. “You will next time.”

Myers gave him a thumbs-up, his hand almost cartoonishly large in the thick cold weather glove. “Roger that,” he said.

The Staff Sergeant looked out across the grubby surface of the ice, in the direction of the device. “Is it just me? Or is this turning out to be too easy?”

“Don’t count your chickens,” Gunny said. “When we’ve finished the render-safe procedure on this site and the second site, you can tell me all about how easy this all was while we’re riding home in that raggedy-ass chopper. Until then, make sure you keep eyes in the back of your head, Marine.”

Myers nodded. “Will do, Gunny.” He turned and walked toward the team’s pile of equipment, to select the gear they’d need to safe the explosives.

Gunny Armstrong watched the younger Marine go without speaking. He was feeling it too: the nagging suspicion that this mission was proceeding just a little too smoothly. EOD jobs never went this easily, not even in training exercises.

He kept wondering if they had forgotten something, if all four members of his team had overlooked some critical detail. But as hard as he wracked his brain, he couldn’t think of a thing.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t something they’d missed. Maybe it was a premonition.

The idea brought a grunt of disdain. Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong did not believe in premonitions. That crap was for the Psychic Hotline; dial 1-800-Mystic-Bullshit.

He shook his head. It was just a case of the heebie-jeebies. His best bet of getting out of this in one piece was to forget about premonitions and focus on doing the job safely and correctly.

He picked his way across the ice, toward the spot where Staff Sergeant Myers was breaking out the gear. Gunny spoke to himself as he walked, his voice swallowed up by the whistling wind. It was an unconscious thing; he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said to himself. “It ain’t gonna fucking work.”

*  *  *

But it did work. Despite Gunny Armstrong’s growing sense of foreboding, his team rigged their equipment without incident. When everything was set, they all pulled back to a safe distance, and he gave Myers the go signal.

Myers flipped up the protective cover on the remote trigger, and gave the button three quick squeezes. On the third squeeze, the disrupters all triggered at once. All six of the Niffers rammed their metal pistons home, shearing six pairs of firing wires with a noise like the slamming of several car doors. At the same instant, the long-barreled PAN fired a ceramic-tipped steel slug into the center of the initiator package, punching through the insulated housing to shatter the modules of electrical circuitry inside. The det cord ignited simultaneously, the little knot of chemical explosive parting the Kevlar cable with a bang not much louder than a firecracker.

In an instant, the job was done. The small quantities of smoke from the PAN disrupter and the det cord were snatched away by the brisk Siberian wind, and the single echo bounced off the face of the ice and faded to silence.

Gunny felt his unease relax half a notch. One job down, and everybody still had their fingers and toes. If the second device went as smoothly as this one, they might make it home after all.

He glanced at Myers. “We’ll start packing up the gear,” he said. “You get on short-comm and inform the chopper that Response Element Two has completed Site Charlie, and we’re standing by for transport to Site Delta.”

Staff Sergeant Myers acknowledged the order, and began digging in the side pocket of his parka for the new hand-held battlefield phone known as short-comm.

Gunny Armstrong turned toward the other two Marines, and he was getting ready to issue further instructions when he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up and saw a helicopter flying toward his team, keeping low to the ice and moving fast. For a couple of seconds, it flew in apparent silence, and then he began to hear the throp of the rotors: barely audible at first, but quickly growing louder as the chopper closed on their position.

Gunny’s brain processed three thoughts in rapid succession. First … The helicopter shouldn’t be here yet. It was supposed to stand off to the south until the team called for it, which Myers hadn’t done yet. Second … It was the wrong kind of helicopter. And third … He was watching the evidence of his premonition brought to life.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. An accident, maybe, or a misstep, or a booby trap. But not this.

He pursed his lips and whistled sharply, to grab instant attention. “Hit the deck!” he yelled. “That’s not our chopper!”

As the words left his mouth, he threw himself forward, hitting the ice hard, his body plowing through several inches of grubby snow. The impact with the ice knocked the breath out of him, but there was no time to worry about that. He reached behind him, his hands scrabbling to find the M-4 carbine slung barrel-down across his back.

His right hand made contact with the collapsible stock of the rifle, gloved fingers groping for purchase on the smooth carbon plastic of the butt. He got a hold on his weapon and hauled it around into a two-handed shooting grip.

The helicopter was still getting closer, the sound of its rotors growing from a rumble to rhythmic thunder.

Out of the sides of his eyes, Gunny took inventory of his men. They had followed his lead. They were all prone on the ice, with weapons drawn and tracking the inbound chopper.

Hopefully, hitting the deck made them smaller targets, but it damned sure didn’t hide them. The greens and browns of their woodland camouflage were a sharp visual contrast to the dirty whites and grays of the ice.

Bulldozer in a fucking bathtub, Gunny thought again.

He was getting a better look at the helicopter now. The bulbous nose of the aircraft had two bubble-shaped cockpits, one atop the other and set slightly aft. Angled weapons pylons stuck out from the right and left sides of the fuselage, like stubby wings. Gunny recognized it as a Russian HIND-D. A gunship, well armored against small arms fire. Practically a flying tank, with enough guns and rockets to chew his men to ribbons.

The Soviets had used HINDs in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties, and they’d wreaked a vicious toll on the Afghani fighters until President Reagan had authorized the shipment of shoulder-launched Stinger missiles through back-door channels in Pakistan.

A Stinger could take down a HIND gunship. A rocket-propelled grenade might manage it too, with a lucky enough shot. But the EOD team didn’t carry Stingers, or even RPGs, and there wasn’t a chance of punching through that armored Son-of-a-Bitch with the 5.56mm NATO rounds from their M-4 carbines.

The only spots vulnerable to small arms fire were the helicopter’s rotors and the tail boom, both of which were difficult to hit. It was the only choice they had, so Gunny flipped a mental coin. It came up tails.

“Go for the tail!” he shouted. “You can’t get through the armor with M-4s. We gotta shoot the fucking tail off of this thing!”

His Marines answered with two grunts and an Ooh-rah. Gunny grinned to himself. Stupid Jarheads. Goddamn, they were good men.

He thumped the base of the magazine with the heel of his hand to make sure that it was seated in the mag well, slapped the bolt release to jack a round into the chamber, and flipped the fire selector from safe to burst. The weapon felt clumsy in his gloved hands.

Like the rest of his team, Gunny wore BlackHawk/HellStorm ECW Winter Operations gloves from U.S. Cavalry. They weren’t as cumbersome as the Marine Corps-issue cold weather gloves, but he knew from experience that they would still affect his accuracy. He couldn’t risk shooting bare-handed, because his M-4 had been exposed to the open air for hours. The metal parts of the weapon would be cold enough to stick to his skin.

He glanced at the elevation setting of the rear sight, decided that it was close enough, and sighted in on the helicopter.

The HIND’s gunner opened fire, just as Gunny Armstrong was slipping his index finger into the trigger well of his M-4. The turret beneath the helicopter’s chin swiveled in the direction of Gunny’s team, and the four-barreled Gatling gun cut loose with a sound like a high-speed jackhammer.

A swarm of 12.7mm machinegun bullets slammed into the ice a few yards to Gunny’s left, spraying showers of snow and ice fragments into the air. The Marine paid no attention. His focus was riveted on the tail of the gunship.

He popped off a three-round burst of bullets, corrected his aim, and popped off another burst, and then another. The M-4 shuddered in his hand, the shortened stock thumping hard into his right shoulder with each recoil. From somewhere to his left, he heard a scream as the helicopter’s minigun found one of his men.

Gunny rolled onto his back as the gunship passed directly over him, not more than thirty feet above the ice. The right edge of his parka hood scooped up a handful of snow as he turned, forcing it under the insulated fabric where it was jammed against his cheek and ear. The downdraft from the chopper lifted snow from all around him and sucked it into the air like a dirty mist. The sound of the rotors reached peak volume, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out a cry of pain from one of his Marines. It sounded like Travers, but Gunny couldn’t be sure.

He could smell cordite now, and blood, and the burnt kerosene odor of the gunship’s engine exhaust. He continued firing at the helicopter’s tail rotor, his weapon bucking in his hands as he unleashed one burst after another. His shell casings fell around him, the hot brass sizzling as it tumbled across the ice.

He saw a trio of holes appear in the tail boom of the helicopter, as someone’s bullets found their mark. His weapon locked open on an empty magazine, and then the chopper was past his team, banking hard to starboard and coming around for another pass.

It took the HIND a few seconds to align itself for the next attack run. Gunny used the time to eject the spent magazine from his M-4, scramble for a fresh one, and jam it into the mag well. He hit the bolt release to chamber the first round, and then sighted in on the helicopter again, watching for any sign that the bullet damage to the tail was affecting its airworthiness. The damage didn’t seem to be catastrophic, as the HIND kept right on flying.

Gunny braced himself for the next pass, but it didn’t come. The gunship came to a hover about fifty yards away, its nose pointed in the direction of the EOD team’s position.

A pair of rockets leapt from under the outboard pylon on the starboard wing, shrieking toward Gunny’s people on thin trails of gray smoke. Before they were even clear of the airframe, a second pair of rockets leapt from the outboard pylon on the opposite wing.

Gunny’s brain instinctively solved a dozen complex geometric calculations in the space of two heartbeats, and he knew that one of the rockets was headed straight for him. With a launch velocity not much lower than the speed of a bullet, the rocket crossed the distance in an instant, but somehow he saw it coming the entire way.

His finger yanked repeatedly against the trigger of his weapon, pumping bullets toward the gunship as rapidly as the M-4’s rate of fire permitted—hoping blindly to bring down the helicopter even as it killed him.

He never found out if his final wish was granted. The rocket struck the ice less than a meter from his right elbow. He had only the briefest impression of unbearable light, and heat, and sound. There was a split-second flare of pain, and then there was nothing.

CHAPTER 52

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #2

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

1340 hours (1:40 PM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

“Comrade President?”

Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov wiped a trace of gorokhovye broth from his lips with the rough weave of a homespun napkin, and looked up from his lunch. His chief assistant, Maxim Ivanovitch Ustanov, was standing a few meters away from the table. The man was visibly shaking.

Zhukov did not permit himself to frown. The overt nervousness of his assistant was almost certainly a sign of bad tidings, but Zhukov went to considerable effort to avoid directing his temper toward the members of his trusted inner circle. He kept his voice carefully casual. “What is it, Maxim Ivanovitch?”

“Comrade President,” his assistant said again, “there is news. I am afraid that it is not good.”

Zhukov laid the napkin on the table top next to his brown earthenware bowl. Gorokhovye—pea and onion soup, seasoned with pork—was a traditional Russian dish, dating back to the times before even the Tsars. It was simple, but filling and delicious. A common man’s meal, and Zhukov ate it with thick black bread, as was also the tradition.

He waved to a chair. “Please, my old friend. Sit down. Tell me this news that has gotten you so upset.”

Ustanov did not take the offered chair. “Comrade President, one of our patrol helicopters has encountered and destroyed a team of United States Marines on the ice pack, in the Sea of Okhotsk.”

Zhukov spent several seconds absorbing this news. “Special Forces,” he said finally. “They are looking for me. They hope to decapitate our revolution by assassinating its leader.”

Ustanov shook his head. “I do not think so, Comrade President. These men … these American Marines … were …” His voice trailed off.

“They were what?” Zhukov asked quietly. “It is alright, Maxim Ivanovitch. You can tell me. What were these Americans doing?”

Ustanov cleared his throat. “They … ah … They were disarming the explosives at the northeastern zashishennaja pozicija.”

“What?” The word was practically a roar. Zhukov stood up so rapidly that he jarred the table, causing gorokhovye to slosh over onto the table cloth.

Ustanov flinched, and took a half-step backwards.

Zhukov regained control quickly. He lowered himself into his chair, picked up his napkin, and began dabbing at the spilled soup. As he worked at the small task, he concentrated on slowing his breathing and leveling his demeanor.

He had a reputation for being as fierce in protecting those who were loyal to him as he was in punishing those who were disloyal. He dealt harshly with underlings who didn’t meet his expectations, but he did not attack his close supporters and confidants.

When he spoke again, his voice was more measured. “Forgive me,” he said. “Your news took me by surprise. I hope you can understand my alarm.” He laid the napkin down again with movements of almost supernatural delicacy. “The ice pack conceals and protects our submarine, but it also prevents us from firing. We must maintain the ability to launch attacks at-will. If the K-506 cannot launch, we lose both our leverage, and our deterrence against retaliation.”

He pushed the bowl away from himself. His appetite was gone. “How many of our launch positions have been compromised?”

Ustanov opened and closed his mouth several times, like a fish suddenly snatched from the water.

Zhukov’s stomach tightened. Judging from his assistant’s demeanor, the situation was even more dire than he had initially feared. “Come,” he said. “This knowledge will not improve with waiting. Tell me, Maxim Ivanovitch, how many of our zashishennaja pozicija have been compromised? How many of our precious launch positions have the Americans destroyed?”

Ustanov’s reply came out as a hoarse whisper. “Three, Comrade President.”

Sergiei Zhukov felt the blood pounding in his temples. “Three?”

“Yes, Comrade President.”

“Three? You are certain?”

Ustanov nodded. “Yes, Comrade President. When I received word that enemy forces had been spotted near one of the launch positions, I ordered our technicians to conduct remote circuit tests of all launch positions. The equipment at three of the positions failed to respond. Only the southeast launch position passed the remote test.”

Zhukov fought to keep his voice even. “Are we certain that the explosives at the southeast launch position are functional?”

Ustanov nodded rapidly, apparently grateful to be delivering at least one piece of good news. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I believe the American Marines had completed the destruction of three positions, and were awaiting transportation to the fourth, when our attack helicopter discovered them.”

He paused for several seconds, as though unsure whether or not to continue.

Zhukov gave a short beckoning wave with two fingers.

Ustanov followed the signal, and pressed on. “I suggest a change of strategy, Comrade President. We have been operating from the assumption that air cover over the launch positions would draw the attention of our enemies to locations that we wish to keep secret. For much the same reason, we have minimized our remote testing of the launch positions. Frequent use of the satellite communications link may invite unwanted attention to both our methods and the locations of our launch positions.”

He raised his hands and dropped them. “Despite our plans, secrecy and concealment have obviously not protected our zashishennaja pozicija. In view of this, I suggest we abandon secrecy, and deploy direct protection over the remaining launch position. With your permission, I will order continuous coverage of the southeast position by attack helicopters, supplemented by frequent over-flights by MiG fighters.”

Zhukov nodded. “A wise recommendation, Maxim Ivanovitch. Give the order. Also, send out demolitions teams to prepare six or seven new launch positions, as well as eight or ten decoy positions.”

He brought the fingertips of both hands together. “The Americans have evidently seen past that particular deception. We should give them plenty of new possibilities to keep their minds occupied.”

Zhukov was thinking rapidly. How had the Americans found out? Could it be satellites? The United States had impressive spy satellite capabilities, to be certain, but the launch positions had been prepared nearly two weeks ago—long before the U.S. intelligence community had found a reason to point their expensive surveillance assets in the direction of a backwater province like Kamchatka. He was confident that the Americans had neither noticed, nor cared about a few old helicopters hopping around on a bit of worthless and deserted ice pack to the south of Siberia.

Could one of Zhukov’s own people have talked? That didn’t seem likely. With the exception of three senior officers aboard the submerged submarine, only a dozen people had ever learned the coordinates of the launch positions. Of that dozen, more than half had been eliminated to avoid just this sort of security breach.

The demolitions personnel who had rigged the explosives were now dead. So were their helicopter pilots, and the old courier, Grigoriev.

So, how had the Americans ferreted out the locations of the launch positions? Could they be using some new and hyper-sensitive technology? Zhukov didn’t know.

He decided to treat this unsolved mystery as a not-too-gentle reminder that the Americans could still surprise him. And that thought raised the next question. How could he turn this around? How could he regain the element of surprise?

It was time to do something that America was not expecting. Something that no one would expect. He needed to punish the Americans for sending their filthy Marines to invade the sovereign territory of his new Russia. And he needed to teach the entire world that Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov was prepared to wield power at a level completely beyond their experience. He was not afraid to step boldly into the land of nightmares, where the other so-called leaders of the world feared to tread.

He regarded his assistant, still standing quietly, no doubt waiting to be dismissed. “Maxim Ivanovitch, refresh my memory. The K-506 is currently following a slow counterclockwise circle, is he not?”

“Yes, Comrade President,” Ustanov said.

“When will he pass within communications range of the southeastern launch position?”

Ustanov glanced at his watch. “Approximately 11:50 PM our time, sir. Or 10:50 PM his time, as the submarine is operating one time zone west of us.”

“Excellent,” Zhukov said. He made eye contact with his assistant, and held it. “When the submarine reaches communications range, order the Kapi’tan to carry out Strike Option 7.”

Ustanov stared. “Comrade President, Strike Option 7 calls for nuclear missile attacks against …”

“I know what the order entails,” Zhukov said. “The Americans still wish to play games with us. It’s time to teach them, my old friend. This is not a game. And we make all the rules.”

CHAPTER 53

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

1609 hours (4:09 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

“The update should be coming through the link any time now,” Captain Bowie said. He pointed to one of the giant Aegis display screens in Combat Information Center.

Ann Roark and Sheldon Miggs stood among a group of officers and enlisted personnel, waiting for the captain to outline the latest tactical developments.

Ann suppressed a yawn. She was exhausted all the time now. She didn’t sleep well on ships to begin with, and for the past few days, her dreams had been invaded by the faces of dead Russian sailors. Of course, the sailors on that submarine weren’t actually dead yet, but Ann and the other people gathered in the room were trying pretty damned hard to change that.

She wondered for the thousandth time how she had gotten caught up in a situation where she was actively plotting to kill other human beings. How had her ethical view of the world shifted so dramatically?

It hadn’t, she reminded herself. She didn’t pretend that killing the crew of the Russian submarine was an acceptable course of action. Her personal decision to carry out the plan was a hideous thing, that burned and fumed like acid at the edges of her conscience. Killing those men was an act of evil. But it was not as evil as the alternative: allowing millions of innocent people to perish in nuclear fire.

Ann was caught in a dilemma so ancient that it had become a cliché in nearly every human culture. She had been forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.

The yawn she was battling decided that it was not going to be denied, so Ann gave in to it. When it had released her from its grip, she turned her eyes back to the big tactical screen.

The display was centered on a large two-color map of the Sea of Okhotsk and its surrounding land masses: Kamchatka to the east, Siberia to the north, the Russian mainland to the west, and the Kuril Island Chain to the south. The water was a strangely fake-looking shade of blue that Ann had only ever seen in video games and computer maps. The land was depicted as an almost equally unnatural shade of greenish-brown.

On the screen five rectangular symbols appeared, each with a large dot in the center, topped by a nestled pair of inverted V-shapes, like a round head wearing two dunce-caps—one cap worn on top of the other. All five of the rectangular symbols were red. Four of them were crossed out by thick diagonal lines, also in red. The fifth rectangle, at the lower right, was not.

The new symbols made no more sense to Ann than any of the rest of the strange markings on the tactical screens. They probably didn’t mean much to Sheldon either, but everyone else in the little crowd seemed to nod in response.

“This information comes to us via the Third Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa,” Captain Bowie said. “They’re just sharing it with us now, because these coordinates were provided by a human intelligence source, whose identity is extremely sensitive. Until a few hours ago, this information was too highly classified to transmit via the link, even with full encryption and security protocols. It’s still classified above Secret, but it’s been downgraded far enough for transmission via link, so we’re getting it now.”

One of the female officers, Lieutenant Somebody-or-other, spoke up. Ann couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but she’d been Tactical Action Officer during the MiG attack, a couple of days earlier.

“What happened to downgrade this info, Captain?” the lieutenant asked. “Once the big dogs decide to play poker, they’re usually pretty stingy about letting us little dogs see their cards. Do we have any idea what prompted them to let the warfighters into the game, sir?”

Captain Bowie raised an eyebrow. “Succinctly put, as always, OPS. I don’t know the whole story, but I do have some idea of how the people at flag level were thinking.”

He turned toward the big display screen. “We’ve suspected for some time now that the submarine has been using pre-staged explosives to blow shooting holes in the ice pack. We assumed that Mr. Zhukov’s rebels had prepared these positions by planting explosives in the ice at various locations around the Sea of Okhotsk.”

The captain smiled ruefully. “It turns out that our assumptions were correct. Intelligence has confirmed that there were five of these sites, which they refer to as ‘launch positions,’ prepared at different locations on the ice pack.”

He leaned over and rested his fingers on the trackball of one of the Aegis consoles. He rolled the ball, and a cross-shaped cursor scrolled across the screen to rest above the northeastern most of the rectangles. It was one of the four symbols crossed out by diagonal lines.

“This launch position no longer exists,’ he said. “The submarine used up the explosives at this location when it launched the nuclear missile attack toward California.”

The captain rolled the trackball again, bringing the cursor to hover briefly above three of the other rectangles, all of which were also crossed out by diagonal lines. “These three launch positions were destroyed earlier today, by a pair of U.S. Marine Corps EOD teams, flown up from Okinawa. The Marine CH-53 helo we refueled a few hours ago was the transport bird for one of these teams. The helo for the other team refueled aboard USS Albert D. Kaplan. Each of the EOD teams was assigned to locate and disarm the pre-staged explosives at two of the launch positions.”

A short move of the trackball put the cursor over the top of the fifth rectangle, the only one not crossed out by diagonal lines. “One of the EOD teams completed both of its sites, and was extracted on schedule. The other team finished disarming their first position, but they were detected by a helicopter gunship and killed before they could move to their second assigned position.”

The captain continued talking, but Ann had tuned him out. That one word shot through her guts like a jolt of electricity. Killed. They had been killed. She suddenly wanted to sit down.

“How many of them were there?”

It took Ann a half-second to realize that it was her own voice. She had asked the question, although she couldn’t remember deciding to speak.

Captain Bowie stopped. He had obviously moved past that part of the conversation. “How many of who?” he asked. “Or what?”

“The Marines,” Ann said. “The ones who were killed by the helicopter. How many of them were there?”

The captain spoke softly. “Four,” he said. “The team consisted of four Marines, from the Third Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company.”

His brown eyes somberly regarded Ann for several seconds. “If it helps any, Ms. Roark, we do know their names.”

Ann shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just thought …” She stopped, unable to remember what she’d been about to say. “It just seemed …” She shook her head again, and felt suddenly like she might cry. “It seemed important.”

The captain nodded. “It is important,” he said. “It’s of the utmost importance.”

His brow creased slightly, not in anger or annoyance, but as though he was searching for the right words to express whatever was on his mind.

“I never met Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong,” he said. “Nor Staff Sergeant Scot Myers, or the other two Marines on the EOD team. Chances are, no one else on this ship has met any of them either. But if we get out of this, I’ll go to their funerals. I’ll thank their families personally, and I’ll offer my help and my respect in whatever form the families will accept. And if I know my crew as well as I think I do, I won’t be alone when that day comes.”

He glanced toward the display screen, and then back to Ann. “Today, we have to finish the job those men started. The time will come for mourning our losses, but now is not that time.”

Ann nodded slowly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Bowie looked at the cursor, hovering above the last rectangular symbol. “The fifth launch position remains intact,” he said. He pressed a button on the console, and an irregular white line appeared, cutting across the lower quarter of the Sea of Okhotsk at a mostly horizontal angle. “This is the estimated southern edge of the ice, based primarily on satellite imagery.”

He rolled the trackball in small circles, causing the cursor on the screen to orbit the fifth rectangle. “As you can see, the remaining launch position is close to the boundary of the ice pack. We may be able to maneuver the ship within torpedo range of this position, depending on how accurate the satellite pictures are, and the density of the drift ice near the edge of the pack. If we’re lucky, we might get in close enough to get a shot at the submarine.”

One of the junior officers raised a hand. “Two questions, Captain.”

Bowie nodded and smiled. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Dennis.”

The young officer reddened slightly, but plowed on. “Sir, you said that one of the Marine EOD teams disarmed both of its assigned positions before being extracted. Why wasn’t that team redirected to finish the remaining site? I’m sure they would have needed to refuel their helo, but we’ve got plenty of gas. They could have vectored down south, rendezvoused with us for refueling, and then flown back up to handle the last launch position. Why didn’t Third Marine Expeditionary Force modify their orders to make that happen?”

“Good question,” the captain said. “I imagine that the higher-ups realized the cat was out of the bag when hostile helicopter gunships started showing up. An EOD team is too small and too lightly armed to shoot it out against major opposition, especially air-to-ground forces. Their only chance of pulling it off was to sneak in, do the job, and sneak out. They were depending on stealth, and complete secrecy. That may be why they didn’t let us untrustworthy Navy types in on the plan until the hard part was already over.”

The corners of the captain’s mouth came up slightly. “Everybody knows squids can’t keep their mouths shut. But the fifth launch position has constant air cover now: HIND-D attack helicopters, with frequent over-flights by MiG fighters. There’s not much chance of sneaking another EOD team in there now, and the bad guys are on to the plan. So the Marines must figure that it’s finally safe to tell the Navy.”

He smiled at his own joke. “What was your second question, Dennis?”

“Well, sir,” the young officer said, “we know where the last launch position is, and Zhukov knows that we know. He knows we’ll be watching that spot closely. What makes us think he’ll let his submarine get anywhere near there? It seems to me that his smartest move would be to plant some new launch positions, and keep his sub as far as possible from the one that we already know about.”

“He might well do that,” Captain Bowie said. “If he does, we’ll have to figure out an entirely new way to go after his submarine. But COMPACFLEET thinks our Mr. Zhukov is going to want to demonstrate to the world that he’s still in the game. And they think he’s going to want to do it quickly. They’re expecting something big, and they’re expecting it soon.”

The captain looked around. “Any other questions?”

No one spoke.

Bowie checked his watch. “Alright,” he said. “We’ve already turned north, toward the ice. We’ll be crossing through the Kuril islands just after sunset, a little over two hours from now. We’re going to run quiet and dark—full stealth mode, and full EMCON. We know there are MiGs and helicopter gunships operating just north of our planned search position.”

He turned to one of his officers. “Your show, XO.”

The man he had addressed cleared his throat. “Thank you, Captain.”

Ann had forgotten the man’s name, but she knew that he was the ship’s Executive Officer.

“As the CO mentioned,” the Executive Officer said, “we’ll be operating in close proximity to hostile air cover. And because we’ll be in stealth mode, we’re going to be using passive sensors only. We won’t have any radar to spot the bad guys, or to dodge ice floes, for that matter. We’re going to need as many topside lookouts as we can muster, because we’re going to be depending on human eyes and ears to identify threats to this vessel. Have representatives from your divisions hoof it up to the Boatswains Locker and draw cold weather gear from our UNREP stash for anybody who needs it. It’s going to be freezing up on deck, and I don’t want any of my Sailors getting hypothermia because they don’t have the proper clothing.”

Heads nodded around the small group.

“As the Captain just told us, we’ve got about two hours until sunset,” the XO continued. “We’re going to use that time to strip any unnecessary fittings from the topside of this ship. We’re obviously going to leave the radars, antennas, and weapons alone, and don’t mess with the life lines. We’ll need them when we’ve got Sailors standing up there in the dark. Anything else that’s not vital or protected by PCMS gets unbolted and goes below decks. Fire extinguishers, the J-Bar davits, line handling equipment, whatever. Bring it inside the skin of the ship, and find a temporary place to stow it. We’re going to shave every fraction off of our radar signature that we can.”

He rubbed his chin. “We’d better leave the life rafts alone too. I hope like hell we don’t need them, but things might get ugly tonight, so let’s not take a chance on that.”

“Try to think like ghosts,” he said. “Think of anything you can to make this ship invisible and undetectable. Because if we get caught, those bastards are going to do their best to turn us into ghosts for real.”

He scanned the assembled faces. “Any questions?”

“Yes, sir,” one of the female chiefs said. “What if we’ve got topside gear that won’t fit below decks?”

“If it’s not something we’re going to need immediately, we may have to toss it over the side,” the XO said. “If you’re in doubt, ask your Department Head. Make sure you get the serial number off of anything that goes in the drink. We’re going to have to account for that stuff later.”

If there is a later, Ann thought.

The XO looked around again. “Any more questions?”

No one spoke.

The XO clapped his hands. “Alright, people. Let’s get to it.”

CHAPTER 54

MOUSE (MULTI-PURPOSE AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER SYSTEM)

SOUTHEASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

2139 hours (9:39 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

It began with a single frequency. The sound was weak at first, hovering right at the detection threshold for Mouse’s passive sonar sensors, so the robot tagged the tonal, and began sending frequency and bearing information to its onboard acoustic processors for evaluation. The signal was very close to one of the frequencies listed in the robot’s library of mission data. It was one of the tonals that Mouse’s target was known to generate. But the signal strength was only fractionally higher than the ambient noise level under the ice pack. It was too weak and intermittent for tactical exploitation, and there were no corroborating frequencies to make further identification possible.

Mouse’s onboard computer labeled the lone frequency as “Investigatory Signal #1,” and assigned a confidence factor of 02.1%. Mouse was 2.1% certain that Investigatory Signal #1 was the target the robot had been programmed to find.

The mission was only a few hours old, and Mouse still had most of the search grid left to cover. The computer weighed this knowledge against the low confidence factor it had assigned to Investigatory Signal #1, and decided not to deviate from the search grid to pursue the weak signal. Instead, it would monitor the frequency, and reevaluate later if the circumstances changed.

The robot continued on its course, gliding slowly but quietly toward the next waypoint in the search grid. It cruised past ice keels, which it identified only as navigational hazards, and through swarming schools of under-ice krill, which it recognized only as a source of non-target noises. Mouse was neither interested in these things, nor distracted by them. Despite a high-degree of functional autonomy, it was a very single-minded machine. It had been programmed to carry out a task, and anything not directly related to that task was irrelevant.

As Mouse followed the search grid, the strength of Investigatory Signal #1 began to fade. The robot’s computer noted the waning signal strength, but decided that the priority of such a low-confidence tonal was too low to justify turning away from the search program.

Mouse reached the next programmed waypoint, and turned thirty-five degrees to starboard, to begin its transit toward the waypoint after that. Almost immediately after the robot made the turn, the strength of Investigatory Signal #1 began to increase.

It was slow at first, the signal growing stronger by tiny increments. After three minutes on the new course, the signal strength began increasing more rapidly.

The robot detected a second acoustic frequency, on the same bearing as Investigatory Signal #1. The second signal was routed to acoustic processing, and was identified as another tonal that Mouse’s target was known to generate. The computer tagged the new frequency as Investigatory Signal #2, and noted that the strength of both signals were increasing now.

To say that Mouse became excited would be both an overstatement, and a misnomer. The robot had no emotions whatsoever. It neither liked, not disliked anything. It had no preferences, or fears. Nevertheless, an examination of the machine’s electronic mission records might have easily led an unknowing person to make that mistake.

The electrical activity inside the robot increased dramatically. Mouse’s computer began loading and activating additional subroutines and library function calls as it continued to evaluate the signals that its sonar sensors were tracking. The confidence factor rose to 12.7%, and then 25.8%, and then 33.2%.

Based on signal strength and bearing drift, the computer decided to deviate from its programmed search grid. It was not a large enough deviation to affect the integrity of the search, but a small one that could be easily compensated for if the signals did not turn out to be the target of interest.

The robot turned seven more degrees to starboard, and was almost instantly rewarded with a third acoustic signal. Another search of the mission library revealed that this new frequency, Investigatory Signal #3, was also one of the tonals that the target was known to generate.

More significantly, this third tonal was one of the designated class identifiers. Unlike the first two frequencies—which might have originated from many underwater sources, including Delta III class submarines—this new frequency was known to come only from Delta III class submarines. There were no other known underwater sources for this particular frequency.

In the world of passive sonar, a class identifier is the acoustic equivalent of DNA evidence. It’s as close to positive identification as the physical limitations of the audio spectrum will permit.

The robot’s mission library included the acoustic class identifiers for the target Mouse had been programmed to find. Based on the newly-detected frequency, the computer elevated its confidence factor to 98.2%. Mouse was now 98.2% certain that it had located the assigned target.

This new confidence level was more than high enough to justify abandoning the search plan to pursue the source of the frequencies. Mouse shifted from search mode to autonomous mission mode, so it could carry out the next phase of the mission. And that’s when the problem occurred.

The mode shift triggered a bug in Mouse’s core operating program. If the code had functioned as its programmers intended, a subroutine would have recorded the nature of the mistake for future correction, and then bypassed the error to allow the robot to continue functioning. But the software glitch got in the way.

Instead of bypassing the error, the faulty program activated Mouse’s emergency maintenance routine, falsely informing the robot that it had suffered crippling damage, and ordering it to return to its point of launch to surface for repairs.

The robot noted the damage alert immediately, and prepared to terminate the mission and head for the launch and recovery coordinates.

But Ann Roark’s software patch was installed and at work. As with the rescue of the Nereus, the software workaround had four elements: one conditional statement, and three commands:

(1) <<<< IF [emergency_maintenance_routine = active]

(2) CANCEL [emergency_maintenance_routine]

(3) RESUME [normal_operation]

(4) INVERT [last_logical_conflict] >>>>

The first line of code triggered the workaround the instant that Mouse’s computer kicked into emergency maintenance mode. The second line canceled the order for emergency maintenance mode. The third line ordered the robot to ignore the error and continue operating as if no fault had been reported. The last line of the workaround inverted the logical conflict that had triggered the original error.

The Mouse unit had responded to a false report that it had sustained critical damage. Ann’s code patch inverted the logical state of the erroneous report, switching “CRITICAL DAMAGE = YES” to “CRITICAL DAMAGE = NO” in the robot’s memory.

The conflict was eliminated. The computer determined that all conditions had been met for the autonomous phase of the mission to commence. The robot made a five degree starboard turn to improve its angle of approach, and began moving toward the target.

Mouse had no idea of the nature of its quarry, or the ultimate purpose of its mission. It thought only in terms of waypoints, frequencies, obstacles, and manipulator functions.

Two hundred feet beneath the ice pack, in a body of water that most people couldn’t find on a map, a small unarmed robot glided through the darkness toward a 13,000-ton nuclear missile submarine.

CHAPTER 55

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHEASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

2206 hours (10:06 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark was looking the other way when the icon popped up on the display of her laptop. When she looked up, the computer showed only the ship’s position indicator and a silhouette map of the Sea of Okhotsk. She glanced back down, perhaps a second later, and the triangular green symbol was burning bright on the screen.

Ann had the laptop speakers muted, so the arrival of the icon came without sound or commotion, but it startled her just the same. Something heavy clunked inside of her, as she realized that the next scene of this crazy little drama was about to play itself out.

She thumbed the trackball, scrolling the computer’s cursor over the green triangle. A small block of alphanumerical data appeared to the left of the icon. Ann read the little status report twice, to be certain that she was interpreting the situation correctly.

Then she leaned back in her seat and glanced around. None of the Navy people happened to be standing nearby at the moment, so she stood up, stretched, and walked briskly over to the Tactical Action Officer’s station.

She didn’t know the man in the TAO chair, but she recognized from the silver bars on his collar that he was a lieutenant. The Navy guys called those bars railroad tracks. She was starting to learn this stuff. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.

She tapped the TAO on the shoulder. The man recoiled at her touch, and Ann felt a tiny hint of satisfaction at having startled one of the warrior types. Obviously, she wasn’t the only person feeling the pressure.

When the man looked up, Ann pretended she hadn’t noticed his flinch. “I don’t have a headset, so I couldn’t call you on the net,” she said. “My robot has found your submarine.”

The man sat up straighter. “What? Are you sure?”

Ann looked back toward her laptop. “Yeah. That’s what Mouse is telling me, anyway.”

The man keyed his microphone, and spoke into his headset. “USWE—TAO. Can you step over to my station, Chief? I need to talk to you.”

The redheaded Sonar Technician, Chief McPherson, appeared at the TAO’s chair a few seconds later. The cord of a disconnected headset was draped around her neck. “What’s up, sir?”

The TAO inclined his head in Ann’s direction. “Ms. Roark’s robot has detected the target.”

Chief McPherson raised her eyebrows. “You’ve got high-confidence classification on the contact?”

“Yeah,” Ann said. “Mouse detected three frequencies consistent with a Delta III submarine. One of them is flagged as a class identifier.”

The chief gave a thumbs-up gesture. “Excellent! We need to get a tactical feed to Fire Control immediately.”

Her face took on a thoughtful expression. “We can’t hook your laptop into CDRT or Fire Control, so we’ll have to do this old school. I’ll station a phone talker over your shoulder. He’ll relay the data to us, and we’ll punch it into the system manually.”

Ann held up a hand. “Whoa there, cowboy. I can get you a recent position for the sub, but I can’t give you real-time information.”

Chief McPherson’s eyebrows narrowed. “Why not?”

Ann struggled to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Because your captain told me to lock out the acoustic modems,” she said. “Remember that strategy meeting in the wardroom? You guys decided to restrict Mouse’s communications to low-power UHF, so the submarine can’t detect him. He can’t transmit or receive UHF when he’s under the ice. Every time he needs to make a report, he has to break off his track of the submarine and come out to open water, where he can drive to the surface. With transit time and everything, our first fix is already nearly twenty minutes old.”

Chief McPherson grimaced. “Damn! I forgot about that. What about the beacon? Did he attach it to the submarine’s hull?”

“Yes,” Ann said. “Your beacon is in place, and waiting to be triggered.”

“That’s one piece of good news,” Chief McPherson said.

“We need to bring the Captain in on this,” the TAO said. “Get whatever information you have punched into the CDRT so I can call it up on the screen. Then we can try to figure out the best way to tactically exploit this situation.”

The chief nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.” She looked at Ann. “Let’s go see what you’ve got.”

*  *  *

Five minutes later, they were gathered around the TAO station again, joined by Captain Bowie and the Executive Officer.

The big Aegis display screen depicted a highly-magnified view of the tactical situation. The water and landmasses were shown in the same weird shades of blue and brown, and the ice appeared in white.

Seen at this scale, the southern border of the ice pack appeared to be carved and fissured with irregular inlets, like the fjords of Norway cast in ice. Some of the larger passages wound and twisted for miles into the ice, before ending suddenly in blind cul-de-sacs. Ann knew that the ice fjords had a name, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Polly-something. Pollyanna? That couldn’t be right.

The display showed a red rectangular symbol representing one of the submarine’s prepared launch positions. The rectangle was not crossed out by diagonal lines. This launch position hadn’t been used up, or disarmed. It was still active. The other four launch positions, all now defunct, did not appear on the map at its current resolution.

A few inches to the left of the rectangle was a red circle, enclosing a downward-pointing arrow. This was the datum symbol: the last known position of the submarine. In this case, that amounted to the last place Mouse had seen the sub, prior to breaking off contact to transit out from under the ice.

Mouse’s green triangular icon was south of datum, an inch or so below the border between ice and water. A half inch below that was the circular green symbol that represented the ship.

Captain Bowie’s eyes were locked on the screen. “This is not an easy call to make,” he said. “We can’t prosecute the contact if all of our reports are twenty minutes time-late.”

“Or more,” Ann said. “Every time he breaks off contact to report to us, Mouse is going to have to search for the submarine again. He’s smart enough to calculate an intercept point, based on the sub’s last observed course and speed, but that’s only valid if the submarine doesn’t maneuver between search runs. Mouse may not always find the contact easily.”

The captain nodded gravely. “For that matter, there’s no guarantee that your robot will reacquire the submarine at all.”

“That’s true,” Ann said. She didn’t voice the other thing on her mind. Every time Mouse had to go through the search and acquire process, he would have to make the shift from search mode to autonomous mission mode. Her software patch was only a temporary fix for a bug that she hadn’t even identified yet. The patch wasn’t bulletproof. Every time the mode shift occurred, there was a risk that her little robot would lose his freaking mind, software patch or no software patch.

The Executive Officer frowned. “I understand that we need real-time tracking information. But as Ms. Roark has reminded us, no one has actually verified that her acoustic transponder system is covert. Which means there’s a chance that the submarine will detect our signals.”

“It’s a risk,” Ann said. “I can’t pretend that it’s not. You just have to decide if you need real-time data badly enough to take the chance.”

“Captain, we need the tracking data,” Chief McPherson said. “I don’t see how we can prosecute this submarine without it.”

“We don’t have a lot of choice,” Captain Bowie said. He pointed toward the screen. “The target is heading for the launch position. If COMPACFLEET is right, the sub is going to shoot as soon as he gets there.”

The Executive Officer nodded without speaking.

The captain looked at Ann. “Enable your robot’s underwater transponder system, and try to get him into an intercept position before the submarine reaches the launch position.”

He turned to the Executive Officer. “Nick, I want you to go up to the bridge and assume the Conn. You’re the best ship driver I’ve got.” He pointed toward the Aegis display. “See that big polynya, to the southeast of the launch position?”

Ann followed his finger to a winding passageway that led miles into the ice. Polynya. That was the word.

“Get us as far up in there as you can,” the captain said. “We need to get within torpedo range of the submarine, or all of this is for nothing.”

The Executive Officer studied the screen. “Sir, there’s not going to be much room to maneuver in there. If we need to run, we’ll probably have to back out. There’s not enough fairway to turn around.”

“I know,” the captain said. “And you’ll be sailing in the dark, without radar. So use the infrared cameras on the mast-mounted sight, and make sure your forward lookouts have night vision goggles.”

“We’re going to bump some ice, Nick,” he said. “No way to avoid it. But try not to hit too much of it, and try not to hit it too hard.” He smiled. “I don’t think our ship’s band knows how to play Abide With Me.”

Ann registered the last sentence as a joke, but she didn’t get the reference. Maybe it was some Navy insider thing.

The captain turned to Chief McPherson. “Chief, we can’t use ASROC in there, so make sure we’ve got port and starboard torpedo tubes prepped for urgent attack. We don’t know when we’re going to get a shot, and I don’t want to miss our window.”

He looked at the TAO. “We’ve been operating just across the fence from those MiGs and helicopter gunships all night. We’ve been lucky so far, but now we’re going to climb over the fence and go right into their backyard. Sooner or later, they’re going to notice us and start shooting. When that happens, the jig will be up. Forget about EMCON, and forget about stealth. Get the radars up as fast as you can, so we can shoot back. Engage inbound missiles first, and then worry about hostile aircraft.”

Finally, he turned to Ann. “I appreciate your assistance,” he said. “We couldn’t do this without you.”

Ann nodded, and felt her stomach take a turn. She wondered if this might be a good time to throw up all over Combat Information Center again.

The captain regarded the little group. “Any questions or suggestions?”

No one had any.

“You’ve all got your orders,” he said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 56

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHEASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

2243 hours (10:43 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Seaman Apprentice Richard Melillo—better known to his shipmates as Rich Man—raised the binoculars to his eyes again and resumed scanning the star-flecked Siberian sky. “It turns out,” he said, “that bondoc is the Tagalog word for mountain. So these American Soldiers who fought in the mountains of the Philippines during World War II were fighting in the bondocs. Only the GIs didn’t pronounce it correctly. They called it the boondocks, or the boonies. And that’s where the term comes from.”

Somewhere to his right, Seaman Dreyfus summoned up a measure of phlegm, and hocked it over the lifeline. “Where do you learn all of this crazy shit?” he asked.

Melillo panned his binoculars slowly to the right, methodically taking in small sections of sky at a time, the way they’d taught him during lookout training. “I just pick it up here and there,” he said. “I read. Watch the History Channel. Stuff like that.”

“Yeah,” Dreyfus said. “But how do you remember it? Half the time, I can’t remember where I put my shoes. How do you remember all this history junk? I bet you’d kick total ass if you ever went on Jeopardy.”

Melillo smiled to himself. “I guess,” he said. “Maybe.” In truth, he though he probably would kick ass on Jeopardy. But it didn’t seem right to say so.

Dreyfus hocked another one over the rail, and followed it up with a nasty sounding snort. “This cold is killing me,” he said. “My feet feel like they’re frozen to the deck plates, my damned nose won’t stop running.

He stomped his feet several times, to get his circulation moving. “Damn,” he said. “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”

Melillo grinned. “Yeah it is,” he said. “Hey … Do you know where that saying comes from? About freezing the balls off a brass monkey?”

“Get the hell out of here,” Dreyfus said. “You really know where that comes from?”

“Yeah,” Melillo said. “It goes back to the days of sail, when they used to stack cannonballs on deck, ready for use—next to the cannon. You know, in little pyramids, like you see on pirate movies. Well cannonballs are round, right? So they had to come up with a way to keep them from rolling all over the deck …” He paused, his binoculars held motionless as he listened intently.

Dreyfus got tired of waiting for him to finish. “Yeah?”

“Be quiet for a second,” Melillo said. “I’m listening.”

“Listening for what?” Dreyfus asked.

“Shhhhhhhh!”

Seaman Apprentice Melillo shifted the earphone of his headset to free up his right ear, and pulled the cold weather hood out of the way. The air was insanely cold against his exposed skin, but he stood without moving, straining to recognize a sound near the very bottom end of his hearing.

There it was. Yeah. It sounded like …

His binoculars came up again, sweeping the sky in the direction of the sound. After a few seconds of searching, he found what he was looking for: a cluster of black shapes, silhouetted against the starry sky. He calculated a couple of quick angles, and grabbed the push-to-talk button on his headset.

“Bridge—Starboard Lookout. Multiple helicopters, bearing zero-four-zero. Position Angle thirty-three. Moving from left to right very rapidly.”

Even as he was listening to the reply from the bridge, he saw the helos turn toward the ship. He had a better look at them now, and the sound of their rotors was now easily distinguishable. He keyed his headset again. “Bridge—Starboard Lookout. I have three helicopters, I say again three helicopters, bearing zero-four-five. Position angle thirty-three. Helos have turned towards own ship, and they are inbound. I say again, helos are inbound.”

The phone talker on the bridge said something in reply, but Melillo’s attention was focused on the helos now. Through his binoculars, he saw several brief flashes of light in the night sky.

“Incoming missiles!” he shouted into his headset. “Missiles inbound, from the starboard bow! Bearing zero-four-five!”

Again there was a reply from the bridge, but it was drowned out by the bark of an amplified voice from the ship’s topside speakers. “This is the XO from the bridge. We have inbound Vipers! This is not a drill! All topside personnel get inside the skin of the ship, now! All hands brace for shock!”

The announcement was immediately followed by the raucous whoop of the missile salvo alarm.

Melillo and Dreyfus were nearly knocked over by another Sailor, running past them through the darkness. They made it into the starboard break, clambered through a watertight door, and were dogging it behind themselves when they felt the ship shudder with the first launch of outbound missiles.

As the roar of the missiles was fading, Seaman Apprentice Melillo said, “We’re getting our birds up there. They’ll knock down the inbounds.”

The last word was overpowered by a prolonged metallic burp from the forward Close-In Weapon System, as the defensive Gatling gun hurled a thousand or so 20mm projectiles at the inbound missiles. The sound was followed by two muffled explosions, not very many yards from the ship. The CIWS growled again, pumping out another stream of 20mm tungsten bullets, but it was a fraction of a second too late.

*  *  *

S-24 Rocket (mid-flight):

Even as two of the S-24 rockets were shredded by the ship’s Close-In Weapon System, a third flew toward its target, unaware that it had escaped early destruction by a margin of less than five meters.

The 240mm Russian-built rocket was only marginally more intelligent than a rifle bullet. It had no sensors, no guidance package, and no processing capability of any kind. It knew only how to ignite its solid fuel engine, how to spin its airframe for flight stabilization, and how to detonate when its arming circuit was completed.

It could not be fooled by chaff, or diverted by jamming. It could only fly in a straight trajectory, and explode on cue, but it did these simple things very well.

Ten meters from the target, the rocket’s simple proximity fuse triggered the warhead. One hundred and twenty-three kilograms of RDX-based high explosive erupted into a directed cone of fire and shrapnel.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

The rocket struck the destroyer near the centerline of the 5-inch gun, blowing through the wedge-shaped carbon laminate faring, and ripping the large-bore naval cannon from its mount as easily as a child snapping a wishbone.

The concussion heeled the destroyer several degrees to port. The ship immediately rolled back to starboard, and then righted herself as the kinetic energy of the exploding rocket was transmitted down through the keel, and passed from the steel hull into the icy water of the Russian sea.

Broken and burning wreckage from the gun carriage tumbled down into the carrier room beneath the gun, spilling fire, fragments of scorched metal, and scalding hydraulic fluid on the Gunners Mates below. The Gunnery Officer, Ensign Kerry Frey, was killed instantly.

Automatic fire suppression systems kicked on in the carrier room and the 5-inch magazine, limiting the cascade of damage. Two main electrical junction boxes and a breaker panel were shorted out by penetrating shrapnel. Electrical power failed, plunging the carrier room and magazine into darkness. The few surviving battle lanterns came on automatically, casting yellow circles of light over the injured and dying members of the 5-inch gun crew.

*  *  *

About sixty feet aft of the gun, Seaman Apprentice Melillo and Seaman Dreyfus were thrown bodily against a lagged steel bulkhead by the explosion. Melillo felt his nose crunch as he collided face-first with the lagging, and then bounced to the deck. He lay there for a few seconds, too dazed to move.

The forward missile launcher fired again, and there were explosions in the distance, somewhere away from the ship.

We’re not the only ones getting hammered tonight, Melillo thought groggily. He wiped blood from his nose, and staggered to his feet. A wave of pain and dizziness swept over him, and he stumbled against the bulkhead for support.

The lighting was different now. Electrical power had failed in this section of passageway, and the emergency battle lanterns were on.

Dreyfus lay on the deck, eyes open but not moving.

Melillo looked down at his shipmate. “Hey, Carl? Are you okay?” His words sounded strange, partly because his ears were still ringing from the blast, and partly because he couldn’t breathe through his nose, which was already beginning to swell.

Dreyfus lay on the deck without speaking.

Melillo tried to lean over his buddy, and instantly regretted the move, as a rush of nauseous pain surged through his head and nose. He staggered again, but didn’t fall.

He nudged Dreyfus with the toe of one steel toed boot. “Carl, are you alright?”

Dreyfus looked up at him, blinking slowly. He seemed to be recovering his senses. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I … I think so.” He extended his hand. It trembled at first, but steadied down as Dreyfus began to regain control of his stunned muscles.

Melillo grasped the outstretched hand, and helped his friend climb painfully to his feet.

There was another rumble of launching missiles. Melillo could smell something burning, and people were shouting somewhere at the far end of the passageway.

A voice came over the 1MC speakers. “This is the Damage Control Assistant, from CCS. All available personnel report to the nearest repair locker.” The announcement was immediately repeated.

Melillo looked at his buddy. They were both pretty beat up. But their ship was in trouble, and he knew that some of his shipmates were probably in much worse shape.

“Let’s go, dude,” he said. “They’re playing our song.”

*  *  *

In the semi-darkness of Combat Information Center, Ann Roark was doing her best to tune out the battle. She swallowed, and took a deep breath. Don’t pay any attention. Let the Navy people worry about their business. Take care of your robot, and leave the other stuff to them. Watch the screen. Just do your job.

After a few minutes, she had honed that last sentence down to a mantra. Just do your job. Just do your job. Just do your job. She repeated the words over and over again in her head, unaware that she was rocking back and forth in her seat as she recited the mental litany. Just do your job. Just do your job.

She knew from the reports bouncing around that some of the crew members were dead, and at least part of the ship was on fire. She wondered where Sheldon was. She had to fight the urge to jump up and go looking for him. Not that she thought she had a chance of finding him in this metal maze. Her brain just wanted her to be up and moving, probably because that was as close as she could manage to running away. Just do your job.

Another report came through the overhead speakers. “TAO—Air, splash Bogie Number Three. All Bogies are down. All Vipers are down.”

There was no cheering this time. The helicopters had been destroyed, and the inbound missiles were all gone. But the ship was wounded and there were MiGs out there somewhere.

Just do your job. Just do your job.

A hand touched her shoulder, and Ann nearly screamed.

It was Sheldon, looking rumpled and tired, but otherwise intact. “How are you holding up, Princess Leia?”

Ann tried to smile. “I haven’t thrown up yet.”

“Me either,” Sheldon said. “But that’s not really a problem for me. When the missiles start flying, I’m more worried about peeing my pants.”

Ann nodded. “I’ve been thinking about doing that, myself. I’m trying to figure out if it’s an acceptable alternative to yakking all over CIC. I mean, it might be alright. But I don’t know enough about Navy regulations. Peeing my panties might turn out to be a major breach of military protocol.”

“We can always ask,” Sheldon said.

“You ask,” Ann said. “I’m not good with that kind of thing.”

Sheldon nodded absently. “We’re running out of missiles,” he said softly.

Ann could tell instantly from the expression on his face that he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. She sat up. “What?”

Sheldon blinked, but didn’t say anything.

Ann lowered her voice. “We’re running out of missiles?”

“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “The ship was doing training work-ups when they got tapped for this mission. The Towers wasn’t scheduled to deploy for several more months, so the ship wasn’t fully outfitted for deployment yet. When they got the order to come here, they were only carrying about half of their normal missile load.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Between the fight with those MiGs yesterday, and the helicopters tonight, we’re running out of missiles. And the 5-inch gun was wiped out by that rocket hit.”

Ann felt her jaw muscles tighten. “Why are you telling me this? I was already scared out of my wits. Now you’ve got to dump all this on me?”

“I’m sorry,” Sheldon said. “I thought you’d want to know the truth.”

“Not when I’m trying to decide whether to pee my pants or throw up,” Ann said. “I don’t want the truth right now. I want to hear that everything is fine, and we’re all going to make it home alive.”

“We’re going to be okay,” Sheldon said.

Ann cocked an eyebrow. “It’s too late for that now, asshole.”

“Just take care of Mouse,” Sheldon said.

“That’s what I was trying to do when you came flitting in like the freaking Bad News Fairy,” Ann said. “I was trying to keep my mind on the job. Take care of my little robot.”

Sheldon shook his head. “No. I mean now. Take care of Mouse, now.” He reached over and tapped the screen of Ann’s laptop. “ET is trying to phone home.”

Ann turned her head. Mouse’s little green triangle was blinking. The data in the block to the left of the icon was updating every few seconds.

Ann examined the readout carefully. “Go tell Chief McPherson that Mouse is tracking her submarine.”

*  *  *

Chief McPherson stood near the Computerized Dead-Reckoning Tracer, and looked down at the horizontally-mounted flat-screen digital display that formed the CDRT’s entire upper surface. Five feet wide and almost six feet long, it was essentially an electronic map table, with a viewing area nearly as large as the big Aegis display screens. But unlike the Aegis screens, which could tap into feeds from any sensor or weapons system, the CDRT was optimized for Undersea Warfare. It had been designed specifically for hunting and killing submarines.

Near the center of the display was the circular green symbol that signified USS Towers. The ship was surrounded by the white of the ice pack, broken only by the irregular ribbon of blue that represented the channel of open water they had sailed into. The ship was close to the northern end of the polynya, where the waterway constricted even further, and then narrowed to a close.

A voice crackled in the left ear of the chief’s headset. “USWE—Tracker, testing Net One One.”

The chief was currently the ship’s USWE, short for Undersea Warfare Evaluator. Her job was to coordinate the actions of the ship’s USW team, and direct the efforts to detect, classify, and destroy hostile submarines.

Tracker was the temporary watch station ID she had assigned to STG3 Mooney, the Sonar Technician she had appointed to stand behind Ann Roark’s chair, and relay contact information from the civilian’s laptop.

Because the sensor in question was an underwater robot, Mooney had tried to talk his chief into designating the new watch station as AquaDroid, or RoboGuy, or SubSlayer 2000. The Chief had settled on Tracker. It was simple, efficient, and she wouldn’t feel like an idiot every time she had to call him over the net.

She keyed her mike. “Tracker—USWE. Read you Lima Charlie. How me?” (Lima Charlie was net-speak for Loud and Clear.)

“USWE—Tracker. Read you same.”

“USWE, aye. Break. UB—USWE, what’s the status of your torpedoes?”

The Underwater Battery Fire Control Operator keyed into the net. “USWE—UB. Port and starboard torpedo tubes are prepped for firing. I’m ready to shoot as soon as I get a valid firing solution.”

“USWE, aye. Break. Sonar—USWE, are you standing by to trigger the beacon?”

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came back at once. “USWE—Sonar. Affirmative, Chief. We’re queued up for a single active transmission, Frequency F2, with upward FM ramp. Standing by to transmit on your mark.”

“USWE, aye. Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only, please.”

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came back again. “USWE—Sonar. Say again your last.”

Chief McPherson smiled to herself. “Never mind, Sonar. It’s a line from a movie. One of the good ones, about chasing a Russian missile sub.”

The Sonar Supervisor chuckled. “If you say so, Chief. Must be some of that old-school stuff.”

The chief keyed her mike. “It is old-school, Sonar. I’ll tell you about it when you’re old enough.”

Then, before the Sonar Supervisor could respond, Chief McPherson keyed up again. “All Stations—USWE, stand by to go hot. Break. Tracker—USWE, start feeding me ranges and bearings.”

STG3 Mooney’s voice came through the left ear of her headset. “USWE—Tracker. All bearings and ranges to follow are from the robot. Stand by… Mark. Bearing three-zero-three, range two thousand four hundred yards.”

The chief keyed her mike. “USWE, aye.”

She laid her hand on the CDRT’s track ball, and scrolled the cursor until it was poised over the green triangular symbol that represented the Mouse robot. She punched a button to give the symbol an electronic tag, and then used the CDRT’s keypad to quickly type in the range and bearing information she had just received from Mooney.

When she finished the entry, the red V-shaped symbol for hostile submarine appeared on the screen at the coordinates she had punched in. There was a red dot at the center of the symbol, but no speed vector. With only one range and bearing fix, the computer couldn’t yet begin to calculate the contact’s course and speed.

The positional information was all referenced from the Mouse robot, which was currently tracking the submarine using a combination of passive sonar and laser-based LIDAR imaging. The chief selected the new hostile submarine symbol, and used the CDRT’s offset tracking function to recalculate all target ranges and bearings from the position of USS Towers.

A new data block appeared, containing the requested information. The submarine was outside of the ship’s torpedo engagement envelope, by almost eight hundred yards.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would have recommended a port turn to close the range. But the narrow confines of the polynya didn’t give the ship enough leeway for the turn. If they made the turn, they’d collide with the ice pack. Their only choice was to wait for the submarine to come closer.

She tagged the new data block, typed in a manual designation, and pressed the button to transmit it to the Fire Control Computers. Then she keyed her mike. “UB—USWE, I’m sending you range and bearing updates for new contact, track number zero-zero-one, designated Gremlin Zero One. Start your track, and stand by on port side torpedoes.”

“UB, aye!”

The chief keyed her mike again. “TAO—USWE. We’re receiving track data from the Mouse robot, but contact is currently outside of our torpedo engagement envelope. Request batteries released for contact Gremlin Zero One as soon as target comes within torpedo range.”

The off-going Tactical Action Officer had just turned over the watch. The new TAO was the Operations Officer, Lieutenant Augustine, again. Her voice came back immediately. “USWE—TAO. Copy all. Stand by for batteries released.”

“USWE, aye.”

Chief knew that Lieutenant Augustine would discuss the request with the captain before rendering a decision. For reasons of safety, permission to launch weapons was usually withheld until the last minute, to give the Commanding Officer and the TAO as much time as possible to ensure that the target was valid, and that no friendly or neutral ships or aircraft would be endangered.

It was unusual to grant permission to fire ahead of time, so Chief McPherson rarely requested it. But this engagement—if it happened at all—would be extremely short. Except for a turn directly toward Towers, which only an utter idiot would do, nearly any sort of evasive maneuver would put the submarine outside of torpedo range very quickly. The opportunity for a shot would be brief, and it probably wouldn’t happen twice.

The chief continued to receive updated ranges and bearings from STG3 Mooney. She punched them into the CDRT as they arrived, and watched the hostile submarine symbol move slowly across the screen toward the red rectangle that represented the missile launch position.

After two updates, the Underwater Battery Fire Control Operator’s voice came over the net. “USWE—UB. I have a trial solution on contact Gremlin Zero One. Course zero-three-two, speed four knots. Contact is seven hundred yards outside of torpedo engagement range.

“USWE, aye.”

The computer now had enough track history to give the hostile submarine symbol a speed vector. A stubby red line appeared at the center of the V and extended a short distance to its upper right. The speed vector was a visual representation of the target’s predicted course and speed. The line was short, because the target was moving slowly. It pointed up and right, because the target was moving in a northeasterly direction.

Chief McPherson punched another command into the keypad, and a green ring appeared on the display. It was several thousand yards in diameter, and centered on the symbol for the Towers. The ring was a projection of the ship’s torpedo engagement envelope.

The chief noted that the rectangular symbol for the submarine’s prepared launch position was just inside the border of the green ring. If the submarine truly intended to launch, it would have to cross into the ship’s torpedo engagement envelope to do so, but just barely. They might get a shot at the sub, but it would be at the extreme effective range of their torpedoes, and it would probably end up in a tail chase. The sub might well be able to outdistance their torpedoes. This tactical situation was not really looking good.

These not very pleasant thoughts were interrupted by the Sonar Supervisor.

“USWE—Sonar. I’m getting passive narrowband on the same bearing as Gremlin Zero One.”

The report struck Chief McPherson as strange. It wasn’t in standard sonar reporting format, and it had come over the net. Initial sonar reports were supposed to be made over the 29MC announcing circuit. It wasn’t like her sonar teams to be that sloppy.

She keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. If you’ve got sonar contact on the submarine, call it away over the 29MC.”

There was a short pause before the Sonar Supervisor responded. “USWE—Sonar. Understood, Chief. If these were target-related tonals, I would have called them away. But we’re tracking biologics.”

That took the chief by surprise. Biologics? “Sonar—USWE, what kind of biologics?”

“USWE—Sonar. It sounds like frying bacon, Chief. Maybe a really big swarm of shrimp, or krill.”

This was really getting strange. Why was the sonar team suddenly so worried about krill? She keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE. There are a lot of krill under the ice pack. This is a favorite feeding ground for krill.”

Again the reply was slow in coming. “USWE—Sonar. Understood. But this signal is loud. Much higher signal strength than we usually get from biologics. And it’s tracking right on the bearing for Gremlin Zero One. Unless there a few million krill accidentally swimming in perfect formation with our target, that strikes me as a little odd.”

The chief was about to ask a question when the Sonar Supervisor keyed up again. “USWE—Sonar. I’m getting a second passive narrowband signal, bearing two-niner-zero. Sounds like the exact same kind of krill, and it’s loud, just like the first signal.”

Chief McPherson looked at the CDRT display. Bearing two-nine-zero ran through the exact center of the rectangular symbol that marked the submarine’s prepared launch position. Two exceptionally loud swarms of krill? One centered on the submarine, and the other centered on the submarine’s intended launch position? The chief tugged at her lower lip. That couldn’t be coincidence.

A new voice came over the net. “TAO—EW, I’m tracking one L-band emitter, bearing two-niner-zero. Classification unknown.”

“EW—TAO, can you give me a little more to go on? What are the possibilities? What transmits in the L-band?”

“TAO—EW. The signal is right at 1.52 gigahertz, very weak. I think it’s directional, and we’re only picking up side lobe or back-scatter. Could be a satellite phone, ma’am. Pointed straight up at the sky, so that all we’re catching is the bleed-over.”

Chief McPherson felt the understanding click into place in her brain. It wasn’t coincidence. She knew what the krill sounds meant, and she knew where the satellite transmissions were coming from.

She was reaching to key her mike button when another voice came over the net.

“TAO—Air. We’ve got party crashers, ma’am. SPY is tracking six Bogies inbound from the northeast. Looks like three flights of two. No modes, no codes, and no IFF.” The Air Supervisor paused for a second and continued. “Flight One bears zero-two-eight. Flight Two bears zero-four-three. Flight Three bears zero-seven-one.”

The chief looked up in time to see six unknown aircraft symbols pop up on the Aegis display screen.

“Air—TAO. Copy your six Bogies, bearing zero-two-eight, zero-four-three, and zero-seven-one. What are their flight profiles?”

“TAO—Air. They’re coming in high and fast, ma’am. I think those helicopters we shot up might have called for the cavalry.”

“TAO, aye. Break. EW—TAO. Are you tracking any emitters on these Bogies?”

The Electronic Warfare technician responded quickly. “TAO—EW. That’s affirmative, ma’am. Bogies have just lit off their radars. I’m tracking six I-band emitters, in three pairs. Zaslon S-800 series phased array radars, on the bearings reported by Air. Looks like MiG-31s. EW concurs that Bogies are grouped in three flights of two. Request permission to seed early chaff.”

“EW—TAO. Permission granted. Launch chaff at will.”

Several rapid thumps announced the firing of five or six chaff pods.

Chief McPherson took advantage of a two-second lull to key her microphone. “TAO—USWE. Sonar is tracking unusual passive narrowband signals on the bearing of Gremlin Zero One, and on the bearing of the submarine launch position. One of those signals corresponds to the bearing of the L-band emitter detected by EW. Be advised target may be using acoustic transponders to relay communications to a satellite phone. The signal may be modulated to simulate biologics. The target submarine could be receiving tactical orders via satellite phone right now. Recommend you have EW try to jam that L-band transmission if possible.”

Lieutenant Augustine’s voice came in rapid response. “USWE—TAO. Copy all. Break. EW—TAO, jam all L-band transmissions.”

Before the Electronic Warfare tech could respond, the 29MC speaker roared to life. “All Stations—Sonar. Loud underwater explosions, bearing two-niner-zero. No secondaries.”

Chief McPherson looked down at the CDRT. She knew exactly what had just happened.

*  *  *

Ice Pack, Southeastern Sea of Okhotsk:

All six charges detonated simultaneously. Ninety kilograms of ex-Soviet military-grade RDX explosive erupted into an expanding shock wave of heat and overpressure. A thirty-meter circle of ice was instantly obliterated, blasting water vapor and shards of ice into the Siberian night. The fragments and mist rained back down to earth, leaving a large circular opening in the ice pack.

The last zashishennaja pozicija was ready for action.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

Lieutenant Augustine’s voice came over the net. “Weapons Control—TAO, you have batteries released on all Bogies, and any Vipers. There are no friendly contacts in this area. Engage and destroy at-will. Shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage.”

The instant the Weapons Control Officer acknowledged the orders, the Tactical Action Officer was on the net again. “USWE—TAO. You have batteries released. Kill contact Gremlin Zero One as soon as the target enters your engagement envelope.”

Chief McPherson keyed into the net. “USWE, aye.”

The air was split by the rumble of launching missiles. “TAO—Weapons Control. Six birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one each on the inbound Bogies.”

Chief McPherson’s eyes were locked on the hostile submarine symbol. The target was now only three hundred yards outside of torpedo range. “Come on,” the chief said softly. “Just a little closer. Just a little closer.”

She keyed her mike. “Sonar—USWE, contact is three hundred yards outside of torpedo range, and closing. Stand by to trigger the beacon. Break. UB—USWE, what’s the status of your solution?”

“USWE—UB. I hold a firm fire control solution on contact Gremlin Zero One. Standing by to engage on your order.”

The Chief keyed her mike again. “All Stations—USWE. We’re only going to get one crack at this. Let’s make it a good one.”

Another report came over the net. “TAO—Air. Splash two Bogies! SPY is tracking four inbound missiles, in two flights of two. Bearing zero-four-niner, and zero-seven-five. I say again, four inbound Vipers, bearing zero-four-niner, and zero-seven-five.”

The report was immediately confirmed by the Electronic Warfare technicians, but Chief McPherson was no longer listening. The hostile submarine was now less than two hundred yards outside of weapons range.

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice rumbled out of the 29MC speakers. “All Stations—Sonar has hydraulic transients bearing two-eight-five.”

“Shit!” Chief McPherson said to herself. “He’s opening his missile hatches.”

She keyed her mike. “TAO—USWE. Gremlin Zero One is opening his missile tube hatches. Submarine is preparing to launch ballistic missiles.”

There were three muted explosions in the distance, followed by the roar of more outgoing missiles.

“TAO, aye. How long until you can kill the sub?”

The chief eyed the screen and keyed her headset. “TAO—USWE. Target is one hundred yards outside of my torpedo envelope. At the current rate of closure, I can engage in approximately one minute.”

Her report was punctuated by a prolonged blast from the forward CIWS mount. The ship rocked from the concussion of an explosion, not aboard, but very close.

On the CDRT, the V-shaped hostile submarine symbol crept across the green ring of the ship’s torpedo envelope.

The Underwater Battery Fire Control Operator keyed into the net. “USWE—UB. Contact is at the very edge of my torpedo engagement envelope. UB holds a firm firing solution. Request permission to engage.”

“UB—USWE. Copy all. Stand by. Break. Sonar—USWE, go active now!”

“Sonar, aye.”

There was a brief pause, and then, “All Stations, Sonar is active.”

From Combat Information Center, the transmission was barely audible, but Chief McPherson was listening for it carefully. She caught it: a single shrill warble, nearly lost beneath the noise in CIC.

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “All Stations, Sonar is passive. The beacon has been triggered, and is transmitting. Sonar is tracking acoustic transmissions from the beacon. I say again, the beacon is hot.”

The chief keyed up. “UB—USWE. Kill contact Gremlin Zero One with over-the-side torpedo.”

“UB, aye. Going to Standby. Going to Launch. Torpedo away—now, now, NOW!”

A blue friendly torpedo symbol appeared on the CDRT, followed an instant later by the Sonar Supervisor’s report.

“USWE—Sonar. We have weapon start-up.”

Chief McPherson was dimly aware of a report that three more Bogies were down, but she had eyes and ears only for the submarine. She stared at the screen, her eyes begging the blue torpedo symbol to lock onto the hostile submarine. “You can do it,” she whispered. “You can do it. Come on … You can do it.”

“USWE—Sonar, torpedo has acquired. Estimated impact in four minutes.”

The chief heard CIWS fire again, but this time it was the aft mount. The last Bogie was either bugging out, or trying to attack from a different angle.

There was another close-aboard explosion, and the screen of the CDRT flickered, went dark, and then flared back to life. The chief heard several operators cry out in frustration as their own consoles went down, and apparently did not come back on line.

The ship shuddered as another set of outbound missiles tore off into the night sky.

The blue torpedo symbol continued to close on the submarine, but the sub was making no effort to avoid the attack. The submarine had to hear the torpedo. Why wasn’t it running away? Why wasn’t it coming to flank speed and turning to evade? Why wasn’t it launching its own torpedoes in retaliation?

A chilling thought shot through the chief’s mind. Could this be a mobile decoy? Had they been suckered? With literally everything on the line, had they somehow been seduced into going after the wrong target?

The hostile torpedo symbol crossed the edge of the rectangle that marked the launch position, and suddenly the chief understood. The sub was already committed to the launch cycle. The commanding officer had decided to complete his mission, regardless of the cost to his boat.

The Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Air. Splash Bogie number four. All Bogies are down! All Vipers are down!”

The report was followed quickly by the report from the Weapons Control Officer. “TAO—Weapons Control, our missile inventory is one. I say again, we have one missile in the box.”

“Talk about cutting it close!” someone said aloud.

Someone else cut loose with a whistle.

But chief was still watching the screen. It was a race between symbols now. The red submarine symbol and the blue torpedo symbol, on an iconic rendezvous with destiny.

“Get him,” Chief McPherson said to the torpedo symbol. “Kill the bastard now.”

The 29MC speaker rattled with the voice of the Sonar Supervisor. “All Stations—Sonar has multiple launch transients bearing two-niner-zero!”

The chief’s heart froze in her chest as she saw two hostile missile symbols appear on the CDRT.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God…”

*  *  *

Ice Pack, Southeastern Sea of Okhotsk:

The water at the center of the hole roiled and frothed, and the ice began to tremble madly. A final surge of expanding gas ruptured the surface of the water, and riding in its midst came the blunt-nosed profile of a Russian-built R-29R ballistic missile.

The 35-ton machine rose above its watery launching cradle, and the instant that it cleared the surface, the rocket engines of the missile’s first stage screamed to life in an orgy of burning fuel and manmade thunder.

The missile climbed toward the heavens on a pillar of silvery fire and smoke.

The displaced water had not even fallen back to the surface of the ice when the performance was repeated. Again the water at the center of the hole churned, and a second Russian nuclear missile leapt toward the stars in the black Siberian sky.

In seconds, both missiles were climbing faster than rifle bullets, and still accelerating rapidly as they roared away into the night.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

The captain’s voice was a shout, and it didn’t come over the net. “Weapons Control this is the Captain. Kill those missiles! Kill them now!”

The ship shuddered once in instant reply, and a friendly missile symbol appeared on the Aegis display. “One bird away,” the Weapons Control Officer reported. “No apparent casualties.”

For the first time, Chief McPherson lost track of the submarine. That was it. The missile cells were empty. There were two nuclear missiles streaking toward their targets, and only one missile to go after them. There were no more. The cupboard was bare.

A deathly quiet descended over Combat Information Center, broken only by the hum of cooling fans and the muffled sobbing of an unseen Sailor.

The spell held for several long seconds, until it was shattered by an amplified voice from the 29MC speakers. “All Stations—Sonar. Loud underwater explosions with secondaries, bearing two-niner-zero. I think we just killed us a submarine.”

For the half-second before the Sonar Supervisor released the microphone button, the cheering of the Sonar team came faintly through the 29MC. They had done their job, and they were celebrating. But they didn’t know what the CIC team knew.

On the Aegis display, three missile symbols rushed toward the sky—two of them red, the other blue.

Chief McPherson felt her eyes well with tears as she watched the writ of Armageddon play itself out in a dance of colored icons.

Someone behind her spoke. It was a man’s voice, but she didn’t turn to see who it belonged to.

“And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air,” the man said. “And there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done.’”

As the last word died down into silence, two symbols merged on the screen. A half second later, the Air Supervisor shouted. “Got one! We got one of the bastards! Splash one ballistic missile!”

Someone clapped the Air Supervisor on the back, but no one cheered. On the screen, the remaining missile symbol moved with increasing rapidity as the real ballistic missile gathered speed out there somewhere in the night. Already, it was beginning to edge to the east, toward the United States.

“We’re done here,” Captain Bowie said. He turned to the TAO. “Call the bridge. Tell the XO to take us home.”

He looked away from the screen. “If there’s any home left to go to.”

CHAPTER 57

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

7:20 AM EST

“My God,” the president said. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”

On the wall-sized geographic display screen, a curving red trajectory line arced up from the Sea of Okhotsk toward the United States.

National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven sat at the briefing table. “I know, Mr. President,” he said. “But we can take a little comfort in knowing that this is the last one. USS Towers destroyed Zhukov’s submarine. That nutcase is all out of nuclear missiles.”

As he spoke, the curving red line on the screen flashed and grew longer. The unfinished end of the arc crept toward the U.S.

“One missile is enough,” the president said. “Last time, he was aiming for the ocean, and one of the warheads got past us. This time, I guarantee you he’s not aiming at the water.”

Brenthoven nodded. “I’m sure you’re right about that, sir.”

*  *  *

30th Space Wing, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Santa Barbara County, California):

Hydraulic pumps moaned, and the armored covers slid aside from four of the missile silos. The reinforced concrete silos were octagonal pits of shadow under the dark pre-dawn sky.

Billows of smoke boiled up out of each silo, and four Lockheed Martin booster rockets blasted into the air on snarling trails of fire.

More than 2,000 miles northwest of Vandenberg, three more interceptor missiles climbed away from the Army missile complex at Fort Greely, Alaska, and hurtled toward the fringes of space.

*  *  *

EKV:

Seventeen minutes later, and more than a thousand miles to the west, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle #1 collided with the first reentry vehicle at 25,000 miles per hour. Millions of Newton-meters of kinetic energy were translated instantly to several hundred megajoules of thermal energy.

With a flash that would have dazzled the eyes of any human observer, the EKV and its target were annihilated.

*  *  *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:

A hundred and fifty miles below, and four time zones to the east, the morning watch team in the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center witnessed the destruction of EKV #1 and its target on the tasking screens of their consoles.

Less than ten seconds later, EKV #4 killed another warhead, followed almost immediately by another successful kill as EKV #2 performed the task for which it had been built.

The Air Force personnel held their collective breath. They needed a miracle. And maybe … just maybe … they were going to get one.

A dozen or so seconds later, EKV #5 scored a bull’s-eye, bringing the score to a perfect four out of four. Just two more successful intercepts, and the nightmare would be over. Just two …

EKV #6 slammed home, and another of the Russian reentry vehicles disappeared in a flare of thermo-kinetic destruction.

If the unfolding situation had been an Ian Fleming movie, James Bond would have clipped the red wire at the last possible instant, staving off the threat of nuclear desolation until the super-spy’s next on-screen adventure. If it had been a Tom Clancy novel, President Jack Ryan would have ridden out the attack aboard a guided missile cruiser, lending moral support to the crew and cadging cigarettes as the plucky Sailors blotted the falling warhead from the sky.

But this was not a movie, and it wasn’t an adventure novel. EKV #3 missed its target by less than ten meters. It might as well have been ten million miles.

*  *  *

R-29R:

The last reentry vehicle fell tail-first into the atmosphere, streaking across the darkened sky like a shooting star.

Within the fat little cone of the heat shield, a relay clicked open, routing electrical power to the ring of high-voltage capacitors that encircled the core of the warhead. The capacitors began ramping up to full charge as the Soviet-built nuclear warhead armed itself for detonation.

*  *  *

Latitude 21.37N / Longitude 157.95W:

As the warhead fell past the 3,000-meter mark, ninety-six electrical initiators fired simultaneously, detonating ninety-six trapezoidal charges of high explosive encapsulating a hollow sphere of plutonium 239. Driven inward by the implosion, the shell collapsed toward its own center, super-compressing an envelope of tritium gas and triggering the secondary stage of the bomb.

The local time was 2:38 AM and seven seconds. Dawn was still four hours away, and a yellow three-quarter moon was just climbing above the horizon, when the air above Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was shattered by a flash more than ten times as bright as the sun.

Every eye that happened to be looking toward that portion of the sky was instantaneously blinded. Tourists taking moonlight strolls on Waikiki beach saw an instant of unbearable brilliance and then their vision went dark as their retinas were cauterized. Cab drivers, homeless people, college students, dogs, and seagulls were struck blind without warning. There wasn’t even a sound yet, as the nuclear flash traveled at the speed of light, but the noise of the explosion was limited to the speed of sound, which was many thousands of times slower.

The aircrew of a Qantas 737 were facing directly toward the detonation as their plane was on climb-out from Honolulu International Airport. The sightless captain scrambled to set the automatic pilot by touch, while his First Officer made frantic mayday calls over the radio. Their efforts were useless. The electromagnetic pulse from the detonation fried every microchip and transistor on the plane.

Without computers and flight controls, the 737 ceased to be an aircraft, and became a hurtling collection of unflyable parts. It tumbled out of the air and plowed into a suburban neighborhood, gouging a flaming path of destruction through the homes of the sleeping residents. The aircrew, their eighty-five passengers, and the occupants of the mangled and burnt houses became the first human victims of nuclear attack in nearly three-quarters of a century. But the carnage was just beginning.

The atomic bomb that had devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had yielded an explosive force of 13 kilotons. The warhead that struck Oahu on the morning of March the 7th was more than fifteen times as powerful.

Two hundred kilotons of nuclear energy were converted to nearly a billion megajoules of radiant heat. Thermal radiation burst outward from ground zero in an expanding wave that burned people, buildings, animals, plants, and vehicles with equal efficiency. The firestorm swept through Naval Station Pearl Harbor, and the surrounding communities of Pearl City, ‘Aiea, and Waipahu, searing everything and everyone in its path.

Gamma rays, neutrons, and x-rays shot out from the center of the chain reaction, bombarding everything in the area with lethal ionizing radiation.

Less than a second behind the thermal front came the shock wave, lashing out with the explosive force of 440 million pounds of TNT. Anything not already incinerated by the firestorm was ripped apart, or pulverized by the monstrous overpressure of the mechanical wave front.

Again the Naval Station and the surrounding cities were hammered by a destructive force that nothing and no one could withstand. Miles upon miles of buildings were crushed into powder or torn into minute fragments. Vehicles fluttered through the air like leaves in a hurricane. Roofs were peeled away; walls imploded; steel melted; stone shattered; and concrete crumbled. Airplanes and helicopters were swatted out of the air. Telephone poles, mailboxes, guardrails, fence posts, bodies, dirt, and broken window glass all became part of the roaring maelstrom of debris.

At two-thirty in the morning, the manning level of the naval base was at its low point. Slightly less than a thousand civilians and military personnel were on the base when the bomb exploded. Not one of them survived.

Eighty-percent of the residents of Pearl City, nearly 30,000 people, were dead or dying within five seconds of the blast. The adjoining towns of Waipahu and ‘Aiea were burned to cinders and smashed flat, killing another 40,000 people within seconds.

The hypocenter of the explosion occurred over the harbor itself. Thousands of tons of water were flash-vaporized, forming steam and radioactive water droplets that recondensed and drizzled from the sky like poison rain.

The rapid formation of super-heated low-density gases at low altitude created a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. An enormous volume of hot gas rose rapidly, causing turbulent vortices to curl downward along the outer perimeter of the rising column. Fire, smoke, dirt, debris, and water vapor were drawn upward by the same principle of physics that causes hot air to rise up a chimney.

The column of gas and debris became the stem of the infamous cloud formation. It continued to rise until it reached an altitude where the surrounding atmospheric pressure became lower than the pressure inside the column. The gases ballooned outward, forming a bulbous cap at the top of the column.

For the third time in the history of the species, the mushroom cloud rose above the cities of man.

CHAPTER 58

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

9:38 AM EST

“The casualty figures are coming in now, sir,” the Secretary of Homeland Security said. Becka Solomon looked much older than her thirty-nine years. She was immaculately dressed, as always, but her face was haggard and the circles under her eyes were deep. Hers was a tough job during the most peaceful of times. It was a nightmare now.

Her political career wouldn’t survive this, President Chandler knew. And there was no justice in that. She was doing a good job of coping with the emergencies that had been tossed into her lap, and her advanced planning had been excellent. She was intelligent, forward-thinking, and genuinely dedicated. She was also not afraid to admit her mistakes, which was a rarity in political figures of any stripe.

Of course, the critics would ignore all of that. When the witch hunt started, if it hadn’t started already, the political opposition would scream that she hadn’t been prepared for Pearl Harbor, or the panic on the West Coast. As though anyone could have foreseen events that far outside the scope of human experience.

The president’s eyes were drawn to the wall-sized geographic display screen. It was blank now. No curving red trajectory lines. No incoming nuclear missiles. No escalation to doomsday. And yet, the damage had been quite awful enough.

He nodded. “How bad is it?”

“It’s pretty bad, Mr. President,” Secretary Solomon said. “The initial estimate is about 70,000 dead, about 20,000 injured, and an unknown number of cases of radiation exposure. We’re working with FEMA and the National Weather Service to calculate fallout footprints. We’ll be issuing radiation warnings in the affected areas, and we’ll need to initiate quarantine protocols. That will help us save some lives, but it’s still going to be ugly. If we handle everything properly, we’ll see something like 140,000 more deaths over the next five years from leukemia, cancer, and various long term side effects of radiation. If we mismanage the casualty response and cleanup, it’ll be a lot worse than that.”

Becka Solomon sighed. “The hospitals are overwhelmed, of course. The Secretary of the Navy is calling in the hospital ships USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort. The Mercy is fairly close; she’ll be on station in a couple of days. The Comfort is in the Caribbean so she’ll take several more days. In the meantime, the Coast Guard is …”

Her voice trailed away as she apparently realized that she didn’t have the president’s attention.

He was staring at the blank screen again.

“You’ve got a full Homeland Security briefing scheduled at one o’clock, Mr. President. We can go over the rest of this then. I just wanted to get you the early casualty figures.”

The president nodded. “Thank you, Becka.”

He was still looking at the screen when she left the room, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. He was thinking about the Single Integrated Operational Plan again.

Like it or not, he was going to have to order a retaliatory nuclear strike against Kamchatka. There really wasn’t any other option. America’s allies and enemies were both watching carefully, waiting for the U.S. response. If he allowed a foreign leader to nuke an American city and didn’t retaliate, the credibility of the nation’s nuclear deterrence would evaporate. He might as well declare open season. Every nutcase on the planet would decide that America was too weak or too frightened to defend herself.

That could not be allowed to happen. He had to stop the next punch before it was thrown. And that meant sending an unambiguous message to the enemies of the United States that America could not be attacked with impunity.

He had to answer Zhukov’s attacks with a nuclear response. But he had absolutely no desire to actually do it. Owning the keys to the nuclear arsenal was not the same as wanting to use them.

And he wasn’t entirely sure that he could use them without triggering another nuclear conflict. Kamchatka was a Russian province, after all. Now that Zhukov’s missile submarine had been eliminated, would the Russian government tolerate a retaliatory strike from the United States? Could he expect them to sit on their hands, while America launched nuclear missiles at targets on Russian soil?

The answer to those very questions walked in the door, in the guise of Gregory Brenthoven. The national security advisor nodded as he pulled out a chair and sat down. “Good morning, Mr. President.”

The president stared at him without speaking.

“Okay, poor choice of words,” Brenthoven said. “It is most definitely not a good morning. But I have a piece of news that you might find useful, in light of your current dilemma.”

The president turned his gaze back toward the blank display screen. “What have you got, Greg?”

Brenthoven laid a black diplomatic pouch on the table. “I’ve just finished up a meeting with Ambassador Kolesnik. He hand-delivered a very interesting proposal from President Turgenev. It’s counter-signed by Prime Minister Primakov, and a solid majority of the Russian Federal Assembly.”

“What are our Russian friends proposing?” the president asked.

Brenthoven leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers. “They suggest that the United States and the Russian Federation carry out joint retaliatory strikes against Kamchatka. They recommend that we act in concert, and that we hit Kamchatka hard.”

President Chandler looked around. “What? I think you must have misunderstood…”

Brenthoven shook his head. “No, sir. There’s no misunderstanding. Ambassador Kolesnik was extremely direct. The Russians want to divide the target list. They nuke Petropavlosk and the surrounding volcanoes. We hit Yelizovo and as many of the local geographic features as we want.”

The national security advisor raised an eyebrow. “That last part is only to give us an even bite of the candy bar. The Russians want to go after the volcanic peaks surrounding Petro, because that’s where they think Zhukov is hiding. They’re offering us a chance to nuke a few volcanoes too, so we won’t feel like we’re getting left out of the party.”

“That’s crazy,” the president said. “Why on earth would they agree to such a plan?”

“It’s not all that crazy, sir,” Brenthoven said. “From the Russian perspective, it solves three different problems at one stroke.”

“How is that?”

“Well, sir … First, it allows them to demonstrate to us, to the world, and to their own people that they absolutely are not afraid to play hardball with any would-be republics who try to break away and take part of the Russian arsenal with them. A demonstration this powerful will go a long way towards keeping some of their more troublesome territories in line. Especially places like Chechnya, and Ingushetia. Second, this plan allows the Russians to save face. They know we’re going to retaliate against Kamchatka. If they just sit back and take a punch in the face from another nuclear superpower, they look weak and foolish. On the other hand, if they line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the U.S. and we both retaliate, they get to play the part of the avenging hero.”

The president nodded. “I can see some logic in that. What’s their third reason?”

Brenthoven half-smiled. “We knocked a lot of their warheads out of the sky, Mr. President. We didn’t intercept them all, but we got most of them. From the Russian point of view, that casts serious doubt on the credibility of their nuclear arsenal. This plan gives them the chance to demonstrate the power of the Russian nuclear forces in a way that leaves no room for doubt. It’s sort of a public renewal of their ticket to the Nuclear Superpower Club.”

The president frowned. His advisor’s words were flippant, but the underlying idea seemed to have some merit. The Russian attack plan wasn’t pleasant or humanitarian, by any stretch of the imagination. But it might actually do the nasty job that needed doing.

“I think Russians division of targets is pretty shrewd,” Brenthoven said.

“How so?”

“They know we have a national aversion to killing civilian populace, so they’re offering us Yelizovo as a primary target. It has a population of about 42,000 people. Their primary target, Petropavlovsk, is closer to 200,000 people. This plan gives us a significant enough target to demonstrate that we’re not afraid to retaliate, while allowing us to reduce civilian casualties by about seventy-five percent.”

“That’s a good point,” the president said. “But 42,000 is still a lot of people.”

“You’re right, sir,” Brenthoven said. “It is a lot of people. But Zhukov nuked about twice as many of our people at Pearl Harbor.”

He spoke more softly. “No matter how we do this, it’s going to be hideous, Mr. President. But compared to what’s been done to our citizens, this response is almost merciful. And I suspect that it’s just about the minimum retaliation we can get away with, and still salvage the credibility of our nuclear deterrence.”

“What about radiation?” the president asked. “The prevailing winds are from West-to-East. Are we going to have a fallout cloud over Alaska, Washington, and Oregon?”

“The western states will get some residual radiation, sir. But not as much as you might think. The Pentagon has run fallout projections for just about every conceivable strike scenario. The results are in Appendix G of the SIOP. If we hit Yelizovo, the major fallout footprint will extend about seventy miles downwind from the blast. After that, radiation levels will taper off dramatically.”

“How dramatically?”

“Five hundred miles east of the blast, the contamination level won’t be much higher than the normal background radiation we experience every day. Most of it will blow out to sea, where it will be absorbed and diluted by the ocean.”

“Which isn’t going to do the environment any good,” the president said.

“No, sir, it won’t,” Brenthoven said. “But it’s been done before. Back before the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Russians tested a lot of nuclear weapons in the Pacific ocean, and so did we. If we attack Yelizovo, the environmental impact shouldn’t be any worse than the old tests at Bikini Atoll, or Johnson Island, or Enewetak.”

“That’s not particularly comforting,” the president said. “We still don’t know the long-term environmental impact of Bikini, or any of those other tests. We haven’t even figured out how to accurately measure the damage they’ve caused to the ocean eco-systems.”

“That’s true, Mr. President,” the national security advisor said.

President Chandler didn’t speak for nearly a minute. At last, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry, Greg. I’m just trying to figure out how to make this omelet without breaking any eggs.”

“I don’t think it can be done, sir,” Brenthoven said.

“Neither do I,” the president said. “But that doesn’t stop me from wishing.”

He looked at his national security advisor for several seconds. “Let’s talk this over with State and the Joint Chiefs. If our people can’t offer any compelling reasons to the contrary, I’m going to take the Russians up on their offer.”

He turned back to the blank display again. One way or another, in a few hours there would be missile trajectories painted on that screen again. But this time, they’d be pointed in the other direction.

CHAPTER 59

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #3

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

FRIDAY; 08 MARCH

0401 hours (4:01 AM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov checked his watch for the twentieth time. What was keeping that accursed helicopter? It was time to be away from this place—past time. Didn’t these fools understand that?

It was all arranged; the Chinese treasury bills were safely hidden in three banks on Grand Cayman. Zhukov and his senior advisors would evacuate to the Caribbean islands, submerge beneath the never-ending flow of tourists, and calculate the most effective way to leverage the Chinese money into another opportunity.

Zhukov was not abandoning the plan. This was only a change of tactics. He was still dedicated to restoring the Rodina to her rightful glory.

The Russian people were yearning for a return to their proper place in the world. He could feel the undercurrent of their hidden desire coursing through the streets and alleyways like the flow of an invisible river.

It was his destiny to make the secret dream of his people into a reality. This battle was lost, but the war was far from over. This was a setback—nothing more. He would study his errors, and learn. And then, he would begin again.

He took some comfort in the knowledge that even Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had suffered failures and reversals of fortune in the early days of the great revolution. Lenin had become a hunted man. He’d gone into hiding, to elude his pursuers, and to gather his forces. And he had returned, to triumph over the enemies of the people, to forge the great Soviet empire.

Zhukov would follow that magnificent example. He would form a covert government in exile, operating quietly from the shadows until he was ready to strip away the veil of secrecy, to reveal the reborn revolution. By his hand, Novaya Rossiya, the New Russia, would be molded from the very ashes of this failure.

If only that damned helicopter would arrive …

“Comrade President?”

Zhukov’s head snapped around, his eyes quickly locating the source of the voice. His chief assistant, Maxim Ivanovitch Ustanov, stood at the door.

“Yes,” Zhukov said. “Is it the helicopter? Has it finally arrived?”

Ustanov’s face was a mask of exhaustion. “I’m sorry, Comrade President. No helicopter. Not yet. There is a meteor shower.”

Zhukov felt the frown form on his face. “A meteor shower?”

“Yes, Comrade President,” Ustanov said. “You asked to be notified of anything out of the ordinary. There is a meteor shower.”

Zhukov swallowed the urge to shout at this idiot, for bothering him with such trivial matters as meteor showers. He reached for his coat.

Three minutes later, he stood at the entrance to the cave, staring up into the darkness. It did look like a meteor shower. Trails of flaming brightness were streaking down out of the sky.

Zhukov’s heart went cold. Those were not meteors. They were …

The air above Koryaksky mountain, 1,000 meters directly over Zhukov’s head, was shattered by a flash more than ten times as bright as the sun.

It was the last thing that Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov ever saw.

CHAPTER 60

SHIPPING LANES

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

FRIDAY; 08 MARCH

0437 hours (4:37 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The cargo was divided between the two ships. Strapped to steel cradles on the lower vehicle decks, each of the 20,000-ton Roll-on/Roll-off vessels carried the warhead section of an ex-Soviet R-29R nuclear missile—the unofficial (and unacknowledged) payment for China’s support of Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov’s short-lived revolution.

As true owners of the nuclear warheads, the Russian Federation had not authorized their transfer to the People’s Republic of China, but the transfer was taking place nonetheless. In the bowels of two innocent-looking merchant ships rode the technology that would finally transform China into a nuclear superpower. The balance of world power was poised to shift suddenly and (perhaps) irrevocably toward Communist Asia.

In the years to follow, no one would ever be able to prove the details of the illegal transaction taking place on a lonely stretch of shipping lanes in the Western Pacific Ocean. Despite a mountain of suspicion, and an avalanche of circumstantial evidence, no investigative body would ever manage to formally verify the link between the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Zhukov. No court would ever bring official charges against the Chinese government or the People’s Liberation Army.

Unconcerned by the growing controversy in Russia, the United States, and Japan, the Motor Vessel Shunfeng and the Motor Vessel Jifeng made twelve and a half knots of steady headway against a brisk easterly wind. When they made landfall in their home port of Zhuhai, the masters and crews of both ships would all become very wealthy men, as well as national heroes of the People’s Republic of China. And they would all take pride in having elevated their great nation to its rightful place as the dominant military force of the new millennium.

The West would rattle and rail, but the sluggish mechanisms of the international courts would move far too slowly to have any real effect. By the time the self-important fools had finished wrangling with themselves, the deed would be done.

*  *  *

They came from the northwest: six Mitsubishi F-2A fighter jets, screaming through the darkness in three flights of two, afterburners trailing streaks of translucent blue flame less than 1,000 meters above the wave tops. Although no one aboard the Shunfeng or Jifeng would ever see them, each plane had the ‘rising-sun’ roundel of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force emblazoned on its wings and fuselage.

The attack was sanctioned by no court. It was recorded in no log book, and it was not formally authorized by any agency of any recognized government.

Officially, the attack never occurred at all. Unofficially, it happened quickly and without mercy.

Twelve jewel-like flashes announced the launch of a dozen Japanese ASM-2/Type 93 Air-to-Ship missiles. The dart-shaped weapons locked onto the heat signatures from the two unarmed merchant vessels and hurled themselves toward their respective targets.

The darkness was shattered by a dozen simultaneous explosions, as the Motor Vessels Shunfeng and Jifeng received Japan’s unofficial answer to China’s unofficial bid for nuclear supremacy. The fragments of the broken R-29R nuclear warheads tumbled to the bottom of the ocean, accompanied by the wreckage of two ships and the bodies of their crews.

The fighter planes circled the area until the demands of fuel consumption forced them to turn back toward the waters of their own country.

When the sun finally straggled above the horizon, the location was marked only by a scattered field of floating debris, and the rainbow smudge of an oil slick from the ruptured fuel tanks of the Shunfeng and Jifeng.

There were no survivors.

EPILOGUE

STONE COVE ESTATES

MARINA DEL REY, CALIFORNIA

FRIDAY; 21 JUNE

4:15 PM PDT

Whoever it was would not stop knocking.

Ann Roark grabbed the remote for her stereo and wound up the volume another few clicks. Johan Sebastian Bach fairly flew out of the speakers, the buoyant violins filling the living room of her condo with the brightness and promise that were totally lacking from her life.

The knocking grew louder.

“Go away!” Ann said. She fingered the remote again, and Bach swelled to maximum volume.

The scars on her wrists were fading now, just thin white lines where the razor blades had cut their tracks through her skin. She wondered when she’d have the courage to try again. Maybe she’d get it right this time. And maybe that would finally end the dreams. Maybe she’d stop seeing the fireball in the sky over Pearl Harbor. Stop seeing the faces of the dead strangers she hadn’t been able to save.

The knocking on the door continued unabated.

She would wait them out, whoever it was. She wasn’t going to answer the door.

But the knocking continued, pausing only for brief intervals every now and then, as the unwanted visitor changed up and began knocking with the other hand.

The Bach CD ran out, and the stereo restarted it automatically. Ann wondered if the persistent asshole at the door would still be pounding away when the disc restarted the next time.

She sighed and stood up, trudging to the door as though the weight of the world was on her shoulders. And, in a way, it was.

She left the security chain on, opening the door only as far as the short length of chain would allow. She glared at the dark-haired man outside her door. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him.

“What?” she said. “Can you not take a freaking hint? Are you too freaking dense to see that I don’t want visitors?”

The dark haired man smiled, and suddenly Ann recognized him. It was Bowie. Captain Bowie, from the Towers. She’d never seen him in civilian clothes before. He looked different. Like a regular guy.

“I realize that you don’t want visitors,” he said. “But you know how captains are. We get spoiled. We’re accustomed to having things our own way.”

“So I remember,” Ann said.

Bowie looked through the gap of the partially-opened door, past Ann into her living room. “Brandenburg Concerto Number 3, right? One of my favorite Bach pieces, but I don’t usually listen to it quite this loud.”

Ann turned far enough to point the remote toward the stereo. She brought the volume down.

“Are you going to invite me in?” Bowie asked.

Ann made a face. “Do I have to?”

Bowie smiled again, and she saw again that he really was a decent looking guy, in a Boy Scout sort of way.

“It’s not an order, if that’s what you mean,” Bowie said. “And I don’t really need to come in. I actually came to take you out. Let’s go have a drink, okay?”

The request took Ann completely by surprise.

Bowie must have caught the expression on her face, because he waved a hand. “I’m not trying to pick you up,” he said. “I promise.”

He crossed his heart. “I’m happily engaged. But even if I weren’t attached, I wouldn’t shoot my career in the head, by hitting on a civilian contractor. This is completely innocent. Scout’s honor.”

Ann nearly snorted. The damned Eagle Scout thing again. “What about that girl in every port thing?” she asked. “No mistress on the side?”

Bowie’s smile widened into a grin. “I’ve got the sexiest mistress in the world,” he said. “She’s five hundred and twenty-nine feet long, and she’s made of steel.”

“I’ve seen her,” Ann said. “You can keep her.”

Bowie leaned against the doorframe. He was evidently going to make himself comfortable, whether Ann invited him in or not. “Come have a drink with me,” he said. “I want you to meet some people. Sort of friends of mine.”

He shrugged. “I just met them a few days ago, but I think we’re going to be friends. I hope so, anyway. They strike me as good people.”

Ann frowned. “I’m not really into meeting people,” she said. “That’s Sheldon’s department. I’m more of a hardware type of girl.”

“I understand that,” Bowie said. “But these people want to meet you. In fact, they’re pretty excited about it.”

“Why do they want to meet me?” Ann asked.

“They’re a couple,” Bowie said. “Charlie Sweigart, and Gabriella Marchand. They just got engaged. They want to meet you, so that they can thank you in person.”

Ann recoiled. “Thank me? For what?”

“For saving their lives,” Bowie said. “They were aboard the submersible Nereus. They would have died down there if it hadn’t been for you and Mouse.”

Ann tried to look past him. “Are they here?”

Bowie shook his head. “No. I didn’t want to spring them on you. I know you’re not much of a people person. And I know you’ve been having a rough time lately.”

Ann felt her cheeks go warm. “Did Sheldon tell you that?”

“Yeah,” Bowie said. “Sheldon and I chat sometimes. He tells me you’re having dreams.”

Ann didn’t like where this was going. “Everybody has dreams,” she said.

Bowie cocked his head a few degrees to one side. “Not these kinds of dreams. Sheldon says you’re having nightmares about Pearl Harbor. About the people we didn’t save.”

“Sheldon talks too much,” Ann said.

Bowie smiled again, but it was a different kind of smile. “Would it help any if I told you that I’m having nightmares too?”

His question surprised Ann. “You are?”

“Of course,” Bowie said. “Believe me, I’m no stranger to bad dreams. It goes with the territory.”

“What territory?” Ann asked.

“With saving part of the world,” Bowie said.

“Part of it? What does that mean?”

Bowie’s strange little smile disappeared. “In the comic books, Superman gets to save the entire world. But we’re just mortals, and this is not a comic book. We can only save part of the world. And even doing that much takes a hell of a lot of luck, and more sacrifice than I care to think about.”

“What about the parts you can’t save?” Ann asked. “What do you do about the people who die because you can’t do your job well enough to save them?”

Bowie slid his hands into his pockets. “I try to remind myself that every doctor and every firefighter faces that exact same question. Nobody wins every time, Ann. We just do the best we can.”

He paused for a couple of seconds. “And things get worse the minute we stop trying.”

Ann felt her throat beginning to constrict. “I screwed up,” she said. “When I was programming Mouse to go after the submarine, I screwed up. I forgot to reinstall the software patch.”

“You made a mistake,” Bowie said. “It happens. You’re fallible, just like the rest of us.”

“But you could have killed that sub the first time,” Ann said miserably. “Mouse had the submarine located. If my programming glitch hadn’t driven Mouse off task, you could have destroyed the submarine a whole day earlier. Before it had a chance to launch its missiles.”

Her voice was shaky now. “It’s my fault,” she said. “Those people didn’t have to die. If I had done my job properly, they’d still be alive.”

Bowie rubbed his chin. “Can I share an observation with you? It’s a bit of wisdom that I picked up from a very intelligent person.”

Ann gave a half-hearted jerk of her head, not particularly interested in whatever comforting platitude that Bowie was about to trot out.

“You’re full of shit,” Bowie said.

His words stopped Ann cold. “What?”

“You’re full of shit,” Bowie said again. “That’s what you said to me that day in the wardroom, when you reminded me that you had crammed two days worth of programming into a few hours. You were working under incredible pressure, busting your ass to get the job done, and trying your hardest to do it right, and you missed something. You didn’t do it on purpose; you didn’t try to cover it up; and you fixed your mistake the minute you found out about it.”

Bowie laughed. “You stood right there on my own ship, and told me that I was full of shit,” he said. “And you were absolutely right. Now you want to go back and judge yourself by the same screwed up standards? I’m sorry, but you’re just as full of shit now, as I was then.”

“But those people,” Ann said. “They didn’t have to …”

Bowie cut her off. “We couldn’t have gotten that submarine without you, Ann. If you need to fixate on something, try focusing on that. You saved millions of lives. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Millions.”

Ann didn’t respond.

“Come on,” Bowie said. “Let’s go meet Charlie and Gabriella. We’ll have a drink, and blow off some steam. And you’ll get a chance to meet some of the people you did save.”

He gave Ann a serious look. “It helps,” he said softly. “It won’t make all of the doubts and the bad dreams go away, but it really does help.”

“Where’s the other guy?” Anne asked.

“What other guy?”

“The third guy from the submersible,” Anne said. “There were three people on the Nereus, right? You want me to meet with two of them. What happened to the other guy?”

She stopped, as a horrid thought crossed her mind. “Did he …”

“The other guy is fine,” Bowie said. “His name is Steve Harper. He won’t be here today.”

“Why not?”

Bowie grinned. “Mr. Harper is gearing up to sue NOAA, and the Navy, and the manufacturer of the submersible, and probably the Easter Bunny.”

“You’re joking,” Anne said.

“Nope,” Bowie said. “Mr. Harper is suing everything in sight. I guess he doesn’t want to be seen fraternizing with potential defendants.”

“Is he suing me?” Anne asked.

“Not as far as I know,” Bowie said. “But don’t be surprised if he gets around to it. That’s part of the down-side of saving the day. Not everyone is grateful.”

Ann felt herself reach a decision on some unconscious level. She pushed the door closed, just far enough to release the chain. “I guess I can’t pass up the opportunity to have a drink with my co-defendants.”

She opened the door and stepped back, finally allowing Bowie into her living room. “Have a seat, while I get changed.”

Bowie stepped through the door. “Thanks.”

Ann headed for the hall. Just before she left the room, she stopped and turned around. “I’ll go with you to meet these people,” she said. “But it’s only fair to tell you up front. I still don’t like you.”

Bowie nodded. “I know,” he said. “That’s why you’re buying.”

THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTES

As students of oceanography or climatology will note, I’ve taken a few liberties with the ice formations in the Sea of Okhotsk. I’ve described the location and geography accurately, and the surface topography of the ice is every bit as rugged as I’ve depicted it, but the density and coverage of the winter ice pack are not as heavy as my story suggests. From late February through early March, the ice in the Sea of Okhotsk is often 30 to 50 inches thick, but less than half of the sea will freeze over during a typical winter.

These exaggerations were strictly for dramatic purposes. The Soviet Navy actually did hide ballistic missile submarines under the ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk during the Cold War, and the practice may still continue under the new Russian Navy. I didn’t invent the strategy. I simply embellished the size and thickness of the ice pack to make the task of going after the rogue missile submarine a little tougher for the crew of USS Towers.

I’ve also exercised a bit of artistic license in my portrayal of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The real world mission of the DIA is to provide timely, objective, and cogent military intelligence to warfighters, defense planners, and national security policymakers.

DIA agents don’t generally conduct the kind of field operations that I’ve written about in The Seventh Angel. They are unlikely to stash wounded foreign intelligence operatives in U.S. military hospitals, and they don’t customarily threaten to shoot people for breaches of security protocol. If such extreme actions ever become necessary, the DIA will probably not be called upon to handle the dirty work. I thought it would be fun to let a couple of DIA agents do some cowboy stuff, even if only in the pages of a novel.

I’m sorry to report that I did not invent or exaggerate the tragic condition of the Russian Federation’s nuclear forces. When I wrote this book, the Russian military was in an advanced state of decay and their news media was openly stating that the integrity and security of the massive post-Soviet nuclear arsenal were in serious jeopardy.

The Russian government has since embarked on a series of major funding initiatives to halt and (eventually) reverse this dangerous trend. At the time of this writing, it appears that they’re beginning to make progress.

As strange as it sounds, I believe that a stable Russian military is better for global security than one on the verge of disintegration. If their military collapses, the thousands of remaining nuclear weapons in the Russian stockpile will not magically evaporate. Every one of those warheads will ultimately fall into someone’s hands. In that unhappy event, we cannot predict who’ll gain control over those weapons, or what their agendas might turn out to be.

In the writing of this book, I’ve deliberately created tense situations. I’m a thriller author, and there are no thrills without a sense of danger and dramatic tension. But I didn’t invent many of the scariest parts of this story. I simply looked at the current climate of world affairs, and wrote what I saw.

— Jeff Edwards

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in making this book a reality:

Rear Admiral John J. Waickwicz, USN (Retired), former Commander Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command for his invaluable technical advice and sharp editorial eye; Lieutenant (junior grade) Bryan Wagonseller of the National/Naval Ice Center for his help in understanding ice formations in the Sea of Okhotsk; Bill St. Lawrence for sharing his extensive knowledge of ice-drilling technologies; Peter Bordokoff, Liza Pariser, and Ian Kharitonov for their exceptional Russian language skills; Captain Valery Grigoriev, Russian Navy (Retired), for his help with Russian naval language and Russian Navy procedures; novelist and former Trident submarine officer John R. Monteith for giving me a basic unclassified understanding of ballistic missile trajectories; Master Gunnery Sergeant (EOD) Samuel A. Larter, USMC (Retired) and Sergeant Major R. A. “Skip” Paradine, Jr., USMC (Retired), for answering my questions about Explosive Ordnance Disposal as conducted by the U.S. Marine Corps; Staff Sergeant Justin Schafer, U.S. Army, for help with small arms and the M-4 carbine; Brenda Edwards for her diligent assistance in locating map resources and her excellent editorial advice; Robert MacDougall for his help with ballistic missile defense; OS2 Rob Andrews of the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center for refreshing my memory on matters of ship navigation; Kenneth R. Gerhart of the Defense Intelligence Agency for answering my questions about the DIA.

There were other contributors who are not named here, by their own request, or through oversight on my part. In every case, the information I received from these people was superb. Any inaccuracies found here are either the products of artistic license, or my own mistakes. Such errors are in no way the fault of my contributors.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to model builder and prop maker Frank Cerney for scratch building me an extraordinary model of the MOUSE prototype.

Finally, I would like to thank my editor and friend, the late (and greatly missed) Don Gerrard, for knowing when to encourage me, when to challenge me, when to kick me into shape, and when to get the hell out of the way and let me run.

SWORD OF SHIVA

Jeff Edwards

San Diego

To my mother, Mary Bowers,
who infected me with the reading gene almost before I could walk. For years of wonderful stories, for pinching pennies to buy me my first typewriter, and for having the vision to see my future as a writer before I saw it myself.

“If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky,

That would be like the splendor of the mighty one.

I am become Death,

The shatterer of worlds.

Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction

(The Bhagavad Gita)

PROLOGUE

QINGHAI-TIBETAN PLATEAU, TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION

TUESDAY; 18 NOVEMBER

4:49 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

Jampa flattened his body against the half-frozen earth, and felt the rumble of the oncoming train resonate through his ribcage. His stomach was a knot of nervous tension. The pounding of his heart threatened to drown out the roar of the approaching locomotives.

This was the part he hated—the waiting. Later, after the attack had begun, there would be no time for fear. He would be too busy carrying out the plan. Trying to stay alive, and escape. All doubts would be shoved aside by the need for action and speed. But in these last few moments of inactivity, his mind had time to dwell on all the things that could go wrong—all the ways that he and his men could die—or worse, be captured.

He had chosen this position carefully. The tracks were twenty meters away. The train would pass at a safe distance. Even so, he couldn’t shake the notion that the great mechanical beast was racing straight toward them.

The vibration grew stronger, rising through the icy ground to rattle his teeth, and make his ears throb. Jampa imagined the train rearing up off the tracks like a giant steel dragon. He fought the urge to lift his head—to sneak a look at the on-rushing machine—to be certain that it had not somehow left the track, that the heavy steel wheels were not surging forward to grind him and his men into the permafrost.

He kept his cheek flat against a tuft of shriveled winter grass, and reached for the 80mm rocket launcher lying next to his hip. The fiberglass firing tube was smooth and cold under his gloved fingers.

The weapon was a PF89 anti-armor infantry rocket, built as a tank-killer for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It had been purchased on the black market from a profiteering PLA supply officer. There was something karmic in the knowledge that it would now be used to destroy a train carrying Chinese soldiers.

A few meters to Jampa’s right lay Nima and Sonam, the other two men assigned to his three-man strike team. If they were following orders, both men would be lying flat, using their rough-woven cloaks to camouflage their profiles against the withered grass of the Tibetan plateau.

Nima wasn’t the problem. The old man was a drokpa, one of the nomadic herders who roamed the high grasslands and the foothills of the Himalayas, tending yaks and sheep, and wresting a meager existence from this place that foreigners called the roof of the world.

The old shepherd’s iron character had been forged by a lifetime of hardship. He had patience, and he could follow instructions. Jampa had no doubt that Nima was lying perfectly still, maintaining concealment until he received the order to attack.

Sonam was not as disciplined, or as predictable. He was a good fighter, but he was young, and too headstrong to follow orders reliably. He might be lying flat right now, as Jampa had commanded. Or he might already be on his feet, eager to get in the first shot at the target.

Sonam had grown up in the refugee city of Dharamsala, on the Indian side of the mountains. He had spent his entire life in exile. For him, Tibet was not home. It was a cause.

He fought fearlessly against the Chinese intruders who occupied the land of his fathers. Perhaps a little too fearlessly. Sonam wasn’t just ready for combat. He welcomed it. He wasn’t satisfied with being a raider. He wanted to be a warrior, and his eagerness for battle made him reckless.

There were more than two-hundred soldiers aboard that train, and despite Sonam’s frequent claims to the contrary, the People’s Liberation Army was disciplined, well-trained, and dangerous. More than likely, some of those soldiers would survive the crash. It wouldn’t take them long to come hunting for their attackers. The best chance of getting out alive was to hit the train hard, without warning, and disappear before the enemy had a chance to regroup.

If Sonam followed his orders, the chances of escape were about fifty-fifty. If the young fighter did something stupid, the odds might drop to zero.

Jampa had gone to great pains to make Sonam understand how easily this raid could go astray, if everyone didn’t stick to the plan. He hoped that some of it had penetrated Sonam’s thick skull, but there was no way of knowing.

Jampa had to resist the temptation to lift his head and check. If Sonam broke cover early, they’d just have to deal with the consequences. Jampa could not improve the situation by violating his own order, and breaking cover himself.

The metal thunder of the train grew louder. Jampa waited with a patience he didn’t feel. There would only be one chance at this. If he misjudged the timing…

The noise seemed to hit a peak, the rushing sound somehow synchronized with the mad racing of his pulse. The first of the train’s three locomotives should be passing him now. Not yet. Not… yet…

He maintained cover for the space of a half dozen more heartbeats. And… Now! He threw the heavy cloak aside and leapt to his feet, swinging the Chinese rocket launcher up, even as he shouted, “Shi yag!”—death.

He caught brief images of motion as Nima and Sonam tossed back their own cloaks and scrambled into firing position, but he was not watching his men. He had the tube of the rocket launcher over his right shoulder now, his right hand wrapped around the pistol-shaped firing grip, and the flexible cup of the optical sight pressed against his right eye.

The lens magnified the target, making the train seem even closer than it really was. The sides of the cars were suddenly enormous, and they appeared to be passing directly in front of Jampa’s face. Although he had practiced looking through the eyepiece, the view was startling and unfamiliar. He swung the weapon a few degrees to the left, and found himself staring through a passenger window into the eyes of a young Chinese soldier.

It couldn’t have lasted more than an instant, but Jampa’s sense of time had become distorted by adrenaline, and the foreknowledge of imminent destruction. The seconds had become elastic, stretching into minutes, or perhaps even hours.

In that impossibly-frozen moment, he watched the soldier’s expression flicker from surprise, to recognition, to fear. Jampa had been a teacher of Science, before the Chinese had burned his school. He understood the workings of the human brain well enough to know that he could not possibly see and register so many details in a mere fraction of a second. It had to be his imagination, his own guilt over what he was about to do, but it seemed real. It felt real. It felt like murder.

The train window whipped past and the face of the soldier was snatched out of view, leaving Jampa to stare at the sides of the passenger cars as they careened by. His finger rested on the trigger of the rocket launcher, but he couldn’t seem to squeeze it.

His men held their fire as well. They were waiting for him to pull the trigger first—no doubt assuming that their leader had some valid tactical reason for delaying the attack.

The train cars continued to hurtle by, but the face of that soldier was seared into Jampa’s memory. He was so young. Not much more than a boy.

And then he remembered his little school in Amchok Bora. He remembered the faces of Chopa, Dukar, and his other students as the villagers had dragged the blackened bodies of the young boys from the smoldering ruin of the school. He remembered the olive green uniforms of the PLA soldiers as they had climbed into their trucks and driven away. The trucks had disappeared into the distance, and not one of the soldiers had looked back. Not one of them had spared a single backward glance for the dead and dying children, or the grief-stricken wails of the villagers.

And now, twenty meters from where Jampa stood, was a train loaded with two-hundred more uniformed thugs from the so-called People’s Liberation Army. Another load of impassive brutes, shipped down from China to aid in the ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people. More soulless burners of schools and killers of children, come to reinforce the invaders who were strangling the life out of Tibet.

A surge of heated air washed over Jampa’s face. His body recoiled slightly as the rocket leapt from its tube. He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger, or even deciding to pull the trigger, but he had obviously done it. He didn’t even know where it was aimed.

The 80mm rocket streaked forward on a thin ribbon of smoke, impacting the underside of a passenger car just above the wheel carriage.

The explosion was instantaneous, and much larger than Jampa had been expecting. The forward end of the railroad car rose above the track, shrouded in black smoke and a mushrooming ball of fire.

To Jampa’s right, two more quick ribbons of smoke announced that Nima and Sonam had followed his lead.

The passenger car, already twisting up and away from the first explosion, was blasted sideways in a deluge of sparks and the scream of rending metal. It teetered briefly on its far set of wheels, before leaving the rail completely and crashing onto its side.

The eighteen cars in its wake were still pushing forward at more than 100 kilometers per hour. Several thousand tons of linear force turned the remaining rail cars into an inertial jack-hammer, driving forward with unimaginable relentlessness.

Still burning, the damaged passenger car dug into the ground like the blade of a bulldozer, plowing up truckloads of rock and semi-frozen earth. The inexorable hand of inertia crushed the car into an accordion of fiberglass and steel.

Left with nowhere to go and still driven by the unabated force of the remaining train, the next car rolled sideways off the track, folded in the middle, and began plowing into the earth like the first car, collapsing into a mass of impacted scrap.

Relieved of most of their burden, the trio of locomotives shot ahead, trailing the mangled remains of two passenger cars.

Behind them, the derailment was turning into a chain reaction. As each car was twisted away from the rails and rammed into crushed aluminum foil against the unyielding permafrost, the cars behind drove forward and repeated the sequence. Car after car impacted and collapsed into formless wreckage.

Through it all rushed the fire. The Qinghai–Tibet railway operated at higher elevations than any other train on earth. In some places, the tracks rose more than 5,000 meters above sea level. To prevent altitude sickness for the highest portions of the journey, the train cars were pressurized like the cabins of jet airliners. Every car had its own oxygen concentrators, and its own pressurized oxygen tanks. Under the tremendous heat and force of the crash, the oxygen tanks exploded, sending enormous fireballs coursing down the length of the doomed railroad cars.

Jampa watched in silence, his ears stunned into near deafness by the unending series of impacts and explosions, his mind unable to comprehend the catastrophe unfolding before his eyes. The catastrophe he had caused.

He shook his head absently. He had wanted revenge. But not this…

Someone grabbed his elbow. He turned his head slowly. It was Nima. The old man was tugging at Jampa’s sleeve and shouting something. Nima’s words sounded like vague mumbles. Jampa couldn’t make out what the old shepherd was saying, either because his ears had still not recovered, or because his mind would simply not process human speech.

Sonam appeared at Nima’s side, gesturing and shouting as well, but his words were no more understandable.

The fog began to clear from Jampa’s brain, and the meaning of the words and gestures began to seep into his consciousness. It was time to run. The old truck was hidden on the other side of a rise a few hundred meters away. If they were going to have any hope at all of getting away, they had to go now.

The crew of the train would already be calling for help. Helicopters would come, and vehicles much faster than the aging truck. The only chance of escape was to get as much of a lead as possible. They needed to be half way to the Indian side of the border before the Chinese could put together an organized response.

Jampa nodded and allowed the expended rocket launcher to fall from his fingers. He took a quick look around to get his bearings, and began to trot in the direction of the hidden truck. After a few unsteady steps, he broke into a run, with Nima and Sonam running a few paces behind.

He was about half-way to the hiding spot when he heard a single muffled crack, like the backfire of a distant car. The sound was barely audible over the ringing in his ears. Maybe it was another explosion from the train, or even his addled mind playing tricks on him.

But when he and Nima topped the small hill that concealed the truck, Sonam was not with them. Jampa looked back over his shoulder and saw the hotheaded young fighter lying face down on the ground.

Jampa was turning to rush back toward his fallen man, when Nima seized his arm and shoved him toward the truck. Nima was shouting again, but Jampa still could not hear clearly enough to make out the words. Even so, he understood the meaning. “Go. Now. We can’t go back.”

Jampa stared at Sonam for several seconds, ignoring Nima’s unheard shouts of protest. Sonam was not moving.

Finally, Jampa nodded, and allowed the old shepherd to push him into the truck.

He didn’t look back as they drove away.

CHAPTER 1

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHERN SEA OF JAPAN

WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER

1341 hours (1:41 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

A half-second after the missile strike, the overhead lighting failed, plunging Combat Information Center into darkness. Electrical relays chattered. The battle lanterns flickered on, replacing the blue-tinged battle lighting scheme with the dim red glow of battery-powered emergency lighting.

The overall noise level in CIC fell by several decibels, as nearly half of the electronic consoles in the compartment dropped off line from loss of electrical power. Cooling fans spun down to a stop, and the whine of high-voltage power supplies trailed off into silence. Even the rustle of the air conditioning faded as the compressors in the nearby fan room shuddered to a halt.

Red and amber tattletales began flashing on many of the remaining consoles, spelling out the details of electronic damage and cascading signal loss. The huge Aegis display screens strobed briefly with a chaotic snarl of tactical symbols, before the video feeds dissolved into static.

In the near darkness, two or three of the wounded Sailors groaned pitifully. Somewhere beyond the steel bulkheads of Combat Information Center, an alarm klaxon was wailing and Damage Control teams were shouting. Their words were muffled into nonsense by distance, the intervening metal barriers, and the unavoidable distortion of emergency breathing masks.

Captain Bowie’s voice cut through the blood-colored gloom. “CIC Officer, get me a damage report, now! I need to know where that missile hit us, and how hard!”

Bowie didn’t wait for the young lieutenant to acknowledge, but rolled straight into his next set of orders. “TAO, I want an immediate inventory of sensors and weapons. I need to know what we can see, and what we have left to fight with. And as soon as you can get a line on them, we need to know how many of those Bogies are still alive, and where the hell they are!”

The Tactical Action Officer’s response was almost instantaneous. “Captain, SPY radar is up on alternate power, but Aegis is off line while the computers reboot. Mount 51 is reporting manned and ready, and it looks like aft CIWS is down. Forward CIWS is operational. Recommend we turn toward the last known position of the Bogies and let the forward CIWS provide some missile cover until we get our eyes back.”

Bowie paused for only a split second. “Do it!”

His command was followed almost immediately by a report from the CIC Officer, Lieutenant Westfall. “Captain, I’ve got comms with CCS. Estimated point of impact was starboard amidships, close to the waterline. Both starboard engines are out, and the engineers are reporting Class Bravo fires in Main Engine Room #1. We’re taking on water in several compartments, and #2 Switchboard has been shorted out by flooding water.” The young officer paused. “Casualty reports coming in now… CCS is estimating forty-one dead, and about twice that many wounded, sir. The Chief Engineer is dead. The executive officer is unconscious with a head wound and possible skull fracture.”

Bowie listened to the growing litany of destruction, and nodded. “Understood.”

A voice rumbled through an overhead speaker box. “TAO—Bridge. Forward Lookout reports visual contact on three inbound aircraft off the port bow, bearing three-five-seven, position angle twenty-one. Rate of closure is high.”

Bowie looked toward Commander Silva.

The commander stood with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her dark blue coveralls, her posture erect and alert, her eyes darting quickly from watch station to watch station. She made brief eye contact with Bowie, and then her gaze moved past him. She was taking everything in, like some sort of recording machine—sucking up information—offering nothing in return.

“The Bogies are coming in low and fast,” Bowie said. “They’re setting us up for another missile strike.”

Commander Silva acknowledged with a single nod, but she said nothing in response.

Bowie turned away. “TAO, what’s the status of Aegis?”

“Computers coming on line now, Captain,” the Tactical Action Officer said. “It’ll take SPY a few seconds to sync up and lock onto the targets.”

“We don’t have a few seconds,” Bowie said. “Tell Mount 51 to engage the Bogies using the video feed from the mast-mounted sight. And have the Small Craft Action Team engage all inbounds with the forward fifty-cals, and both of the chain-guns.”

Bowie listened as the TAO relayed his orders to the gunnery stations. It was a desperation ploy. The big 5-inch deck gun mounted on the ship’s forecastle could probably take out an inbound jet with input from the main radar. Trying to engage three hostile aircraft using only the feed from a black and white video camera? That was a hell of a lot harder. Given the damage the ship had already taken, it wouldn’t be much short of impossible.

The .50-caliber machine guns didn’t have a prayer, and neither did the 25mm chain-guns. It was probably a waste of ammunition to even try, but—damn it—they couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.

USS Towers was a state-of-the art naval destroyer. She was a cutting-edge warship, from the bottom of her computer-engineered keel, to the peak of her steeply-raked mast. She’d been designed and built for stealth, speed, and firepower. In her short few years of service, she’d already seen more real-world combat than any other two ships on the current United States Navy Registry.

Bowie smiled a grim little smile. If the Towers had to go down, she was damned well going to go down fighting.

He turned away from the static-filled tactical displays, peering around through the red-hued shadows until he spotted the hulking form of an enormous second class petty officer.

Operations Specialist Second Class Kenfield had grown up on a farm in Gordonsburg, Tennessee. The Sailor’s first name was Bruce, but the crew called him Big Country, partly in reference to his considerable size, and partly because of his molasses-thick southern accent. It was a standing joke among the Towers crew that Big Country didn’t need a tractor or a mule to plow his family’s fields. He just wrapped his oversized hands around the plow, and shoved the blade through the dirt with sheer force of muscle.

Captain Bowie nodded toward the man. “Hey, Big Country… Give us a song.”

The air in CIC was as taut as the skin of a snare drum, but the big Sailor’s grin shone out in the blood-tinged darkness. “Is that an order, sir?”

“You bet your ass it is,” Bowie said.

The Sailor’s grin grew wider. “Aye-aye, Captain!” He cleared his throat theatrically, and let out the only sort of song that anyone had ever heard the big man utter—a rebel yell of positively staggering volume.

Commander Silva, still a newcomer to the ways of this ship, nearly jumped out of her skin when the big Sailor’s unearthly bellow shattered the air. But the CIC crew had the benefit of long experience. They knew exactly what to expect from one of Big Country’s songs. Before the cry could fade into silence, they added their own yells to the mix. Women and men, young and middle-aged, seasoned and inexperienced, their collective yells rising in unison—a defiant refutation of the enemy fighter jets rushing to destroy their ship.

They were a crew. They were one. They would fight together. They would die together. And goddamn it! The Towers was their ship!

Commander Silva’s eyes took in the dimly-seen shapes of the CIC crew. The expression on her face told the tale. She was a seasoned officer, with more than seventeen years in uniform. She’d spent almost her entire adult life at sea, and she’d seen most of what the oceans had to offer. But in all of her years in the Navy, she’d never witnessed anything like this. It was crazy. It was utterly futile. But by God, it was impressive.

Silva opened her mouth, perhaps to add her own yell to the still-raging caterwaul, but she was preempted by an amplified voice from the overhead speakers.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Aegis is up and tracking. We have five Vipers, short range and closing fast! I say again, we have five inbound missiles, estimated time of impact twenty seconds!”

The ongoing yell was stifled instantly as the watchstanders went frantically about their jobs. Twenty seconds was not enough time to do anything useful, but that didn’t stop Bowie’s CIC crew from trying.

The Tactical Action Officer’s voice broke over the net. “All Stations—TAO, we have in-bound Vipers! I say again, we have multiple missiles in-bound! Weapons Control, shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage. Break. EW, I need your best course for minimized radar cross-section, and stand by to launch chaff!”

Acknowledgements and follow-on orders began coming over the various tactical nets. Half of the consoles in CIC were still offline. The ship was crippled. A third of her crew were dead or dying, and—worst of all—the clock had run out. But they were still fighting. Still throwing punches.

The Weapons Control Officer’s voice came over the net. “All Stations—Weapons Control. Brace for shock! Estimated missile impact in six… five… four…”

Bowie crossed his arms and leaned against the bullnose of a defunct radar console. He whistled softly through his teeth as the amplified countdown continued.

“Three… two… one…” The last word was a near-shout. “Impact!”

The compartment was suddenly flooded with brilliant white illumination as electrical power surged into the lighting circuits.

A different voice came over the speakers. “All Stations, this is the Training Coordinator. FIN-EX this exercise. That is, FIN-EX this exercise. Stop the battle problem; stop the training clock. Restore all power, and return all systems to normal operating condition. This training event is complete at time thirteen twenty-five and nine seconds.”

The CIC crew blinked and shielded their eyes against the sudden illumination. Throughout the compartment, “dead” and “injured” watchstanders climbed to their feet, dusted off their uniforms, and went about the business of restoring their equipment to operational status.

A young OS3 lifted a loop of heavy cord from around her neck and examined the yellow cardboard tag clipped to the end. Large block letters on the tag proclaimed: CIC CASUALTY #6 — ELECTRICAL BURNS / BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA / DEATH.

The Sailor handed the casualty tag to a man in orange coveralls, one of the members of the Coordinated Ship’s Training Team. “Here,” the OS said. “I don’t need this. I’m not dead anymore.”

The orange-suited observer tucked the tag into the crook of one arm, where he was cradling several similar tags. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d stay dead until time for chow. Then you wouldn’t get stuck doing afternoon sweepers.”

The Third Class Operations Specialist grinned. “Oh yeah, like that would work. Being dead does not get you out of pushing a broom.” She shrugged. “At least they killed me early. I managed to catch a few Z’s down there on the deck while everybody else was busy trying to save the ship.”

About ten paces away, Captain Bowie met Commander Silva by the Tactical Action Officer’s chair. Bowie raised one eyebrow. “What do you think, Commander?”

Silva nodded. “Impressive, Captain. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve got one hell of a crew here.”

Bowie gave her a wistful little smile. “All modesty aside, they are pretty damned impressive. I’m proud to serve with every one of them. Every man and woman on this ship gives a hundred and twenty percent.”

He shook his head. “But they won’t be my crew for much longer, will they? They’ll be yours in just a couple of weeks, Commander.”

His eyes traveled around CIC, moving slowly, trying to soak up every detail as though he might never again see such a magnificent sight. And that would be true all too soon. The change of command was only sixteen days away. And then this would not be his ship anymore.

When the final salutes were exchanged, Captain Samuel Harland Bowie would be on his way to becoming Deputy Commander of Destroyer Squadron Fifteen. At that same instant, Commander Katherine Elizabeth Silva would become Captain Silva, the new commanding officer of USS Towers.

The most dramatic and important part of Bowie’s career would wind to a close. He already knew that nothing would ever fill the hole that was going to leave in his life. And through it all, he’d have to smile and make polite speeches, pretending that he was happy to surrender command of his ship to a near-total stranger.

Damn. Damn.

He exhaled slowly. If wishes were fishes…

He turned back to Commander Silva, the prospective commanding officer of USS Towers. “Let’s head up to the wardroom. We can grab a cup of coffee while we wait for the Training Team to finish prepping their debrief.”

Silva started to follow him toward the exit.

Bowie slowed his pace a fraction to allow her to walk alongside. “Your friends call you Kate?”

Commander Silva smiled. “Only my father can get away with that. Everyone else calls me Kat.”

“With a K?”

“That’s right. With a K.” She smiled again. “It’s a long story.”

Bowie opened the watertight door and motioned for her to step through. When they were on the other side, he dogged the door behind them and they resumed walking.

“How about you?” Silva asked. “Do your friends call you Sam?”

The captain shook his head. “Nope. They call me Jim.”

Silva halted in mid-stride. “They call you Jim Bowie? Really?”

Captain Bowie grinned. “Really.” He started walking toward the wardroom again. “That’s a long story too.”

CHAPTER 2

BARKHOR SQUARE

LHASA, TIBET

WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER

3:34 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

The helicopter came in low and fast, clearing the ornate golden rooftops of the Jokhang temple by only four or five meters. Flying so close to the 1,300 year old building was a blatant violation of a dozen laws and security ordinances. Any other aircraft that dared such a maneuver would be forced to land, or shot down by ground troops or air forces. Today, the laws and regulations did not apply. Not to this helicopter.

It was an ordinary looking HC-120 Colibri, the plump dragonfly fuselage noticeably European in design, the paint scheme and markings just as clearly Chinese. But the local police and military commanders knew who was riding in the passenger seat, and no one would be foolish enough to interfere.

The pilot had been ordered to land as quickly as possible, by the absolute shortest flight path. He was following those orders to the letter. He steepened the angle of his approach, practically skimming the top of the tall stone stele at the front gate of the temple wall.

The stele was a rounded obelisk, nearly as ancient as the Jokhang temple itself. The stone had been erected in 822 AD by King Relpachen, to commemorate the Sino-Tibetan peace treaty, which had guaranteed that China and Tibet would forever respect one another’s borders. Eroded by centuries of wind, rain, and snow, the words carved in the porous gray stone were still legible. China’s public proclamation of Tibet’s national sovereignty remained easily visible, for all the world to read. The irony was apparently lost on the occupying Chinese forces. It was not so easily overlooked by the Tibetan locals.

A landing zone had been cleared in the center of Barkhor Square. The usual throng of visitors, pilgrims, and shopkeepers had been pushed back to the edges of the square. The onlookers were now held at a distance by a perimeter of wooden barricades, patrolled by several hundred hard-eyed Chinese soldiers.

Into this temporary enclave, the helicopter dropped the last few meters to the ground, the pilot battling an unexpected crosswind at the last second, before bringing his machine to a brisk landing on the flagstones.

The helicopter’s turbine had barely begun to slow when a dark green military vehicle pulled alongside and a young Army major leapt out, ducked under the spinning rotors, and trotted to the passenger door of the aircraft.

The vehicle was a Dongfeng EQ2050, a near carbon-copy of the American-built Humvee. Officially, it was an all-Chinese design, produced completely from parts manufactured in China. In reality, about half of the vehicle’s parts were imported from the American company AM General, in South Bend, Indiana—the manufacturer of the original Humvee. This detail was carefully ignored by anyone who did not want to arouse the ire of the Communist Party.

The door of the helicopter swung open, and the major snapped to attention.

The man who stepped out into the downwash of the rotors did not seem to be particularly formidable. He was in his mid sixties, lean, and fit, with crisp black hair and a creaseless face that seemed to subtract several years from his appearance. His dark suit and sharp white shirt were neatly tailored, but not of excessively fine quality. The one stroke of extravagance in his appearance was a red necktie of lush raw silk. He looked like a moderately-successful Chinese businessman in a fairly ordinary business suit.

The mechanical wind from the helicopter rotors whipped at his hair. He paid no attention, crossing the distance to the waiting military vehicle in several quick strides. He did not bow his head as he passed beneath the whirling blades of the helicopter rotors. He walked with his head held erect. Perhaps he carried some internal confidence that no machine of the Chinese military would dare to threaten the head that rode upon his shoulders. Or, perhaps his thoughts were so distant that he was unaware of the danger.

His name was Lu Shi, and he was the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China. Technically that made him the second most powerful man in the Chinese government, junior only to the Premier himself, Xiao Qishan. In reality, Lu’s role as Xiao’s subordinate was no more than a polite fiction.

Premier Xiao was not a young man, and his health had been declining steadily since his most recent heart attack. The old dragon had earned his position, and the honors that went along with it. Lu Shi was quite content to let Xiao wear the formal title for whatever weeks or months he had remaining to him, but no one in the senior ranks of the Communist Party had any serious doubts about who was running the country.

Even if there had been such doubts, Lu was Chairman of the Central Military Commission. That made him the effective commander-in-chief of the entire Chinese military. When the appearances were stripped away, Lu Shi was secondary to no one.

A half-pace behind Vice Premier Lu came a pair of solidly-built men in identical dark blue suits. Their faces were humorless, and their eyes scanned the crowd and the assembled military personnel with the same calculated degree of suspicion. Both men were Bao Biao, a Mandarin term most often translated as bodyguard, but more properly rendered as protector, or defender.

Lu Shi disappeared into the open rear door of the vehicle, followed immediately by his two guards, and then the military officer.

The crowd watched from the edges of the perimeter, many of them curious about the identity of the oddly imperious businessman who had dropped out of the sky into their midst. Who was this stranger, and how did he command such sway with the military and the police?

For most of the onlookers, those questions would never be answered. The soldiers shifted several of the wooden barricades, and guarded the procession of the car until it had left the square and disappeared into the streets of Lhasa.

The helicopter’s turbine began to pick up speed again. In two or three minutes, the aircraft was lifting away into the sky.

When it was gone, the soldiers began packing up the wooden barricades. In a few minutes more, the soldiers were gone, and people began flooding back into the square. Beyond the aroused curiosity of the crowd, there was no sign at all that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

*  *  *

Lu Shi stared vacantly out the side window as the streets of Lhasa scrolled past. Colors and shapes slid into his field of vision and then slid out again, without making any impression on his conscious mind. His eyes were unfocused, and so were his thoughts.

For a man whose intellect was practically the stuff of legend, such an utter lack of acuity was—quite literally—unheard of. For the first time in his life, Lu Shi could not make himself think. Moreover, he didn’t really want to think.

One of the heavy-grade military tires hit a pothole. The vehicle’s stiff suspension did little to cushion the impact, transmitting the shock directly into the passenger compartment, and sending a jolt up the spine of every passenger. The ride was not smooth; the seats were not at all like the well-padded luxury of the limousines that Lu Shi traditionally rode in. He didn’t notice.

His fingers absently fidgeted with his red silk necktie. It had been a gift many years before, from Lu Jianguo. Even the mental recognition of his son’s name brought a tremor to his hands.

Unwanted images came surging into his brain. Photographs of the burned and twisted wreckage of the train... Video footage of the wreck site… Smoke still rising from the smoldering remains of the passenger cars. Soldiers and emergency crews carrying stretchers loaded with the bodies of the wounded and the dead.

Lu Shi clenched his eyes shut, and tried to block out the visions of blood and mangled flesh.

None of the photographs or accident footage he had seen contained the face of Lu Jianguo. For that small blessing, he could be grateful. He had not been forced to look upon images of his son’s broken body. But Lu Jianguo had been there, among the dead and the dying, unrecognized by the first rescue teams to arrive. Known only to the medical personnel and the soldiers as another injured passenger: another victim of the carnage.

Somewhere in Lu Shi’s mind—below the threshold of conscious awareness—fear, and anger, and grief were circling like sharks. But for now, his emotions were as paralyzed as his higher thinking processes.

His fingers went through the motions of straightening his necktie, tightening the knot, smoothing the silk, loosening it a fraction, and then beginning the sequence again.

After some unmeasured interval, a hand touched his shoulder. “Comrade Vice Premier, we have arrived.”

Lu Shi looked up, willing his eyes to focus. The vehicle had stopped at the entrance to a whitewashed stone building with curved glass doors. He glanced at the raised metal sign long enough to confirm that this was indeed the Tibet People’s Hospital, and then allowed his eyes to drift away. His fingers found the red necktie again.

The rear door opened, and Lu Shi followed the Army major out of the vehicle, across a short stretch of sidewalk, and through the double glass doors into the lobby.

A clutch of white-jacketed hospital personnel inclined their heads respectfully, and then shuffled forward to greet him. Some of them were probably doctors, or perhaps the directors of the facility, but Lu Shi’s guards weren’t interested in credentials. They stepped forward to form a barrier between the Vice Premier and his would-be visitors.

Neither of the guards spoke a word, but their facial expressions and body language announced quite plainly that they would not hesitate to use lethal force on anyone foolish enough to approach the invisible perimeter around their protectee.

The Army major selected one of the white-jacketed men, apparently at random. “You!” He poked a finger in the man’s direction. “Take us to the room.”

The man nodded vigorously, and said something unintelligible.

Lu Shi, his guards, and the major followed the unnamed man down a hall and into an elevator. Three floors later, the man led them out of the elevator, past the circular desk of a nurse’s station, and to the door of a room.

The man opened the door, stepping out of the way so that Vice Premier Lu and his flankers could enter.

Lu Shi stood before the open doorway without moving. He had arrived at a threshold, both figuratively, and literally. This was the place. He had reached the moment that his subconscious had been struggling to postpone, or even to deny entirely.

His senses, which had been dulled into near lassitude, seemed to stir fitfully. The doorframe, the walls, and even the white-coated stranger gradually loomed into sharper focus. His hearing, which had filtered out the majority of the sounds in his environment, began to return. He slowly became aware of the murmur of distant voices, the low hum of electrical equipment, and—he did not want to hear this—the cyclical hiss of a mechanical respirator.

This last sound was both repelling, and hypnotic. The high-pitched shush of a forced inhalation, followed by the gurgling rasp of the suction cycle, and then the shush of another forced breath. There was something obscene about the idea of a machine pumping air into a man’s lungs, and then sucking it out again.

Lu Shi shuddered involuntarily, realizing as he did so that his sense of smell was recovering as well. Accompanying the surge of returning sights and sounds came a torrent of odors. The sharp alcohol reek of disinfectants. The coppery-tang of blood. The fetid scent of human misery.

The numbness was beginning to recede, but he was not ready to let go of it yet. He wasn’t ready to think, or to feel, and he was definitely not ready to walk through the door in front of him.

He became conscious of the fact that his fingers were toying with his necktie. He let his hand drop to his side.

No one spoke.

His guards stood at his elbows like a pair of temple dogs, ready to react instantly, or to wait for a thousand years—hovering one hair breadth away from lethal action.

The Army major waited as well. He was a different breed of warrior. His body and senses were not tuned for instantaneous combat. As a soldier, he was prepared to fight—even to die—if he ever came to a time and place that made such things necessary. But now was not that time, and this was not the place. For the moment, his job was to wait for his superior to make the next move, or to issue the next order.

The stranger in the white lab coat continued to stand without speaking. He did not have the extraordinary discipline of the guards, or even the situational discipline of the soldier. But he was not an idiot. He would stand, holding the door open, for as long as necessary. He would not speak; he would not move; and he most assuredly would not allow the door to close in the face of the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China.

The comforting envelope of disorientation was eroding rapidly now, replaced by a growing sense of fearful expectation.

Lu Shi’s rise to power had not been uncontested, and it had certainly not been gentle. He was no stranger to conflict or adversity. He was not easily frightened, but he was afraid of what he would find on the other side of that open doorway.

He forced down a fleeting urge to turn and walk away from this place. He exhaled slowly, steeling his nerve. Before he could change his mind, he moved forward, walking briskly through the open doorway.

The room had obviously been intended for at least three patients, but there was only one occupant now. The other beds had probably been bundled off to some storage closet, to make room for the son of Vice Premier Lu. The hospital staff was perceptive enough to understand that this was the most important patient their facility would ever care for.

The lone bed was positioned near the window, surrounded by IV racks, medical sensors, and several pieces of equipment that were less easily identified. The entire array was cross-connected by hoses, ribbon cables, and loops of clear plastic tubing.

On the bed, covered by a green hospital sheet, lay a vaguely human shape. Lu Shi averted his eyes from the shape as he crossed the room toward the bed. He was not ready to look. Not yet. He kept his attention on the baffling collection of medical devices. Nearly every piece of equipment seemed to have a wire or a tube that snaked across the floor to disappear under the green sheet. The patient—Lu Shi could not yet bring himself to think of this inert shape as his son—was wired up like a laboratory rat in some hideous medical experiment.

Finally, Lu Shi forced his gaze to travel up the length of the bed, taking in every detail. He paused when his eyes reached the knee level, or rather where knee level should have been. The sheet lay almost flat against the surface of the bed. There was no tenting of the fabric, no raised contours to indicate the presence of legs.

Lu Shi’s throat tightened a fraction. He had been briefed about his son’s injuries, but it was one thing to hear the words, and quite another thing to witness the reality for himself.

His eyes continued their journey up the length of the sheet-draped form, gliding over a pair of telltale bulges that must be the bandages covering the stumps of amputated legs. When he reached the upper body, the left arm lay above the sheet, wrapped in bandages, but essentially intact—at least in form. The dressings on the right arm were much heavier, and—like the legs—they ended suddenly, just above the wrist.

Lu Shi raised his eyes still further, to look at the face (if that torn and engorged mass of flesh could be called a face). A thick cervical collar held the neck in place, keeping the head tilted slightly back, to allow for the bundle of plastic tubing that disappeared into the mouth and nostrils.

The right eye and right ear were both swathed in surgical gauze, and the visible portions of the face were swollen, discolored by bruising, and crisscrossed by wandering trails of sutures. The left eye was open, and staring sightlessly toward the ceiling.

As he focused on that unblinking eye, Lu Shi felt an entirely unwelcome stab of recognition. The patient was approximately the correct age: in his middle-to-late thirties, but Lu Shi decided instantly that the similarity in ages didn’t prove a thing. He did not want to recognize this face. He wanted it to be the face of a stranger; he needed it to be the face of a stranger.

A minute spark of hope still flickered somewhere deep inside of him, just the tiniest glimmer of a chance… This might not be Lu Jianguo. This could be a bizarrely elaborate case of mistaken identity. Somehow, someone had misidentified this poor wretch as his son. And somewhere, somehow—Lu Jianguo was safe, and whole, and alive.

Lu Shi felt the heat of tears on his cheeks. Let it be so. Oh please… let it be so… Let this mangled wreck of a man be anyone but Lu Jianguo.

And then his final hope was extinguished. He could feel the last tiny flare of the spark as it was swallowed by darkness. The face of the man on the bed was ravaged and distorted, but it was not the face of a stranger. The last shreds of denial were ripped from Lu Shi with the force of a hurricane. This thing… this lump of broken humanity… was Lu Jianguo.

Something broke at the very core of Lu Shi’s being—something indefinable and incalculably fragile. He could not have named this thing, and he had no idea what it was. But he was instantly aware of its loss, and he knew without question that it could never be restored. Nothing would ever be the same again.

He stared down at the wounded animal that had once been his son. The raw silk of the red necktie flowed smoothly between his groping fingers.

During his early years, Lu Jianguo had brought his father all the usual gifts of childhood… handmade ashtrays… colorful paper ornaments… picture frames decorated with beads and bits of shell. All the worthlessly priceless trinkets made by children for their parents. The necktie had been different, not just because it was expensive, but because of the care that had gone into its selection. It had been Lu Jianguo’s first attempt to understand his father’s preferences and desires, his first attempt to offer a gift that was utterly appropriate to the tastes and needs of the recipient. It had been a boy’s first act of manhood. Lu Jianguo had been nine years old.

At that moment, Lu Shi had known that he had named his son correctly. Jianguo, meant ‘building the country.’ Looking into the shining eyes of his nine year old son, Lu Shi had seen his own wisdom in selecting that name. Lu Jianguo would build the country. And Lu Shi had not had any doubt that he was standing in the presence of the future leader of China.

Lu Shi blinked, and the memory of that long-past day fell away. He had been so certain that he knew the future of China… the future of his son.

Now, staring at Lu Jianguo’s sheet-draped form, Lu Shi was certain of nothing. After a lifetime spent planning and preparing for the future, Lu Shi discovered that there was no future. There were only dreams and plans that could be snatched away without a second’s warning. The future had been stolen, from Lu Shi, from Lu Jianguo, and from China. For the first time in his life, Lu Shi did not care about tomorrow.

He discovered that his eyes had drifted back down to the flat stretch of bed sheets where his son’s legs should have been.

“Where are they?” he asked quietly.

The man in the white coat seemed to follow the direction of Lu Shi’s gaze. He cleared his throat nervously. “Your son’s legs, Comrade Vice Premier? I… I’m not really sure. One of them was severed before he arrived, and the other…”

Lu Shi silenced the man with a glare. “Not my son’s legs!” he hissed. He turned his head toward the Army major.

The man stiffened visibly. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier?”

“Where are the men who did this?” Lu Shi asked. “Where are the criminals who…” His voice trailed off in mid-sentence. He paused, and continued at a volume just above a whisper. “The terrorists who… did this thing… Where are they?”

The major swallowed before answering. “We… ah… We believe their plan is to escape through the mountains into India. Given current weather conditions, it is likely that they will travel by way of the Nathu La pass.”

“I see,” Lu Shi said softly. “Then you do not know where they are?”

The major responded with a single shake of his head. “Not yet, Comrade Vice Premier. General Zhou has men and aircraft combing the mountain passes between here and the Indian border. The General has also ordered increased satellite surveillance of the most likely escape routes. We will locate the terrorists, Comrade Vice Premier. They can’t hide from us indefinitely.”

Lu Shi nodded slowly. “What of the prisoner? The terrorist you have in custody… Has he broken?”

“Not yet, sir,” the major said. “But he will.”

Lu Shi turned his eyes back to the bed. “Inform General Zhou that the Army is to immediately surrender the prisoner to the Ministry of State Security.”

The words were spoken calmly, but the major could not entirely conceal his grimace. “Comrade Vice Premier… That won’t be necessary. I assure you that our interrogators will soon have the information we need.”

Lu Shi did not look at him. “I’m not offering you a suggestion, major. I’m giving you a direct order. I don’t want the information soon. I want it now. Do you understand?”

The major snapped to attention and saluted. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier!”

He executed an abrupt about-face, and marched briskly from the room.

Lu Shi stood without moving for several minutes after the major had gone. The only sounds in the room were the sibilant rasp and gurgle of the mechanical respirator.

At last, he looked up and made eye contact with the man in the white lab coat. “Disconnect the machines.”

The man’s face was suffused by a look of pure horror. “Comrade Vice Premier, we can’t do that! These machines provide critical life support functions. If we disconnect them, your son will die!”

Lu Shi turned back toward the bed. “Will he ever be free of these machines? Will he recover enough to leave this bed?”

The man cringed under the hard edge of Lu Shi’s voice. “That… That seems unlikely, Comrade Vice Premier. Your son has suffered massive cerebral trauma.”

The man swallowed. “I… I don’t believe he will ever be entirely free of the need for life support.”

Lu Shi’s voice was low and cold. “Then my son is already dead,” he said. “Disconnect the machines.”

CHAPTER 3

QUSHUI PRISON

SOUTHWEST OF LHASA, TIBET

WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER

7:42 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

There was a sound somewhere on the other side of the door. Strapped to a steel chair in the dimly-lighted gloom of the interrogation cell, Sonam came awake instantly.

He had been drifting in that strange half-world between consciousness and oblivion. The pain was still too constant and too insistent to let him sleep, but he could find some relief by letting himself slide down into a haze of senselessness.

His face and upper body ached from repeated beatings and frequent jolts from an electric cattle prod. At least two of his ribs were broken, and every breath brought a stab of pain. The bullet hole in his left thigh throbbed in time with his pulse. The vicious bastards had done a good job of patching up his leg; he had to give them that much. The bullet had been removed; the wound had been neatly sutured, and they kept the dressings clean. Of course, their reasons hadn’t been humanitarian. The Chinese Army was not concerned with his health. They just wanted him kept alive for questioning.

Sonam’s interrogators had been careful to keep well clear of the injury. They had limited their attentions to the parts of his body above the waist. That still left them quite a bit of territory to work with, and they had used it with appalling brutality.

The noise was repeated, and this time Sonam recognized it—the scrape of a boot heel on concrete. It was followed almost immediately by the sound of a heavy key sliding into the door lock, and the dull rasp of the bolt being withdrawn. The soldiers were coming for him again.

Sonam felt a surge of panic, coupled with a sudden urge to urinate, or vomit, or both. He forced himself to slow his breathing.

He could do this. He could withstand another round of the beatings. He could live through another session with the cattle prod. He would clamp his teeth together and summon the will to endure. He told himself again and again that he would not answer their questions. He would not betray his people, no matter what these Chinese animals did to him.

If his interrogators came close enough, he would spit in their faces. With luck, they would become enraged enough to beat him into unconsciousness.

The door swung open, and—after uncounted hours in semi-darkness—even the relatively weak florescent light from the corridor was enough to make Sonam’s eyes blink and water. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was not in for another encounter with the soldiers. This was something different.

The man standing in the open doorway was small framed, and very neat in appearance. He was Chinese, like the soldiers, but the resemblance seemed to end with that. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and he had none of the swagger of the military men. There was nothing brutish-looking about him. He looked like a clerk, or a petty bureaucrat. The man’s eyes were lifeless, like the eyes of a doll. His features were quite ordinary, and his expression appeared to signal mild indifference.

Squinting toward this unremarkable figure, Sonam wondered if the little man had wandered in by mistake.

He was still puzzling over this new development when another man entered the room, carrying a black nylon zipper bag and a small wooden folding table. Like the clerk, this man was dressed in civilian clothes. He quickly erected the table, laid the nylon bag on the tabletop, and exited the room, closing the door behind him.

The clerk did not look at the black bag, but Sonam felt his own eyes drawn to it. The nylon was scuffed, and the seams were gray with hard use. He knew suddenly that the expressionless little man was not a clerk, and—with equal suddenness—he realized that he did not want to see what was inside that bag.

The little man spoke without preamble. “I will ask you questions,” he said. His voice was low and inflectionless. He did not mangle the Tibetan language, as so many of the Chinese did. Unlike Sonam, whose speech was shaded by the Indian influence of Dharamsala, the man had almost no accent.

Sonam stared at him without speaking.

“You will answer my questions,” the little man said. “Please understand that this is not a boast, and it is not a prediction. It is a simple statement of fact. You will answer my questions.”

Still, Sonam said nothing.

The man walked to the table and unzipped the nylon bag. He looked up at Sonam, his face as impassive as ever. “You may answer my questions now, in relative comfort, or you can answer them six hours from now, when you have no fingers, no testicles, no eyes, and your throat is raw from screaming.”

Sonam knew instinctively that these were not empty threats. There was no hint of malice in the man’s voice, but there was not a trace of mercy either.

The man reached into the nylon bag, and pulled out a pair of long-handled pliers with a heavy-looking square head. “I will ask you questions,” he said again. He opened and closed the pliers several times, as though testing the movement of the metal jaws. “The first time you refuse to answer, I will clamp these upon the index finger of your right hand, and I will crush it to a bloody pulp.”

He stared directly into Sonam’s eyes. “Do you understand?”

Sonam’s head began to nod almost of its own accord, but he caught himself and held his muscles rigid. He would not answer, even with a gesture.

The little man stepped forward, stopping within easy reach of the chair.

Sonam remembered his plan to spit in the face of his torturer. The man was certainly close enough now, but Sonam’s mouth had gone dry. He could not summon a single drop of saliva.

He flinched as the man grasped his right hand. He tried to jerk his hand away, but his forearms were strapped to the arms of the chair at wrist and elbow.

The steel jaws of the pliers were cold as they closed around his finger, midway between the second and third knuckles. There was a brief twinge of discomfort as the serrated teeth of tool pinched his skin, but the little man adjusted the alignment of the pliers, and the sensation vanished.

Sonam saw it when it happened, the minute shift in posture as the little man tensed the muscles of his upper body and rammed the handles of the pliers together.

The pain ripped through Sonam, piercing him as deeply and profoundly as the Chinese rifle bullet had done. The bone in his finger splintered and gave way with an obscenely liquid crack that he heard and felt with equal clarity. His vision narrowed, and then collapsed upon itself until all he could see was a searing pinprick of blood-colored light.

His mouth was flooded with the bitter taste of adrenaline, and still the steel jaws continued to move toward each other—crunching through shards of bone, crushing muscle, tendon, and flesh into a formless mass of pulverized meat.

The heavy square jaws met, the section of finger between them smashed into a ribbon of bloody gel. But the pliers were not finished yet. They twisted and pulled, opening and closing repeatedly, like a crocodile trying to get a better grip on the prey trapped between its teeth. The metal jaws worked their way upward and downward from their starting place, searching for undamaged bits of the mangled finger, finding the broken ends of shattered bones, grinding everything to ragged mush.

Sonam’s finger—the thing that had once been his finger—became the very center of the universe. It eclipsed everything. There was nothing else. No life. No world. No thought. Only the ravenous metal jaws, and the pain.

It took him at least a minute to realize that he was screaming. High-pitched keening wails that sounded more animal than human. It took him a minute or two more to force himself to stop. At last, he managed to bring it under control, and he sagged against the straps of the chair, sobbing.

Distantly, through the pounding roar of his pain, he heard the voice of the little man.

“I prefer to begin with a small demonstration,” the voice said. “Something effective enough to gain your attention, but small enough for you to recover from if you choose to cooperate.”

There was still no malice in the man’s speech. No suggestion of threat, and no flavor of sadism. This was not the voice of a man who caused pain for his own pleasure. It was the voice of unconditional confidence, and flawless willpower. And Sonam knew that the little man would not give up the task until his objective had been met. He would not beat his victim into unconsciousness, and he would not make stupid mistakes. He would work methodically and meticulously, and he absolutely would not stop until he had the information he had come for. It would happen now, while there was still enough of Sonam’s body left intact to call itself human, or it would happen hours from now, when there was very little remaining but pain and shredded flesh.

“We will begin again,” the little man said. “I will ask you questions, and you will answer them. Do you understand?”

Sonam nodded.

“Good,” the little man said. “The site of my next demonstration will be your left testicle. If you lie to me, or if you refuse to answer my questions again, I crush your testicle just as thoroughly as I have crushed your finger. Do you understand?”

Sonam nodded again. “I…” His voice was a guttural croak. “I will… tell you… what you want to know…”

“Yes,” the little man said quietly. “I know you will.”

CHAPTER 4

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

UNITED STATES NAVAL STATION; YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

FRIDAY; 21 NOVEMBER

1321 hours (1:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

A heavy layer of clouds hung over Yokosuka harbor. The temperature hovered in the mid-fifties, but the wind blowing in from Tokyo Bay seemed much colder. True winter was still several weeks away, and the bite in the air was just a foreshadowing of things to come.

Silhouetted against the murky Japanese sky, the profile of the American destroyer was unusually angular. The ship’s phototropic camouflage had darkened to the color of slate, closely mimicking the gray monochrome of the waves that lapped against the vessel’s long steel hull.

Commander Katherine Silva stood on the fantail, and tried to imagine what the ship would look like two weeks from now, when the red carpets had been laid and the patriotic decorations had been hung. The lifelines would be draped with red, white and blue bunting. The American flag that now rustled fitfully at the end of the flag staff would be replaced by the oversized ‘holiday colors’ that were reserved for Sundays and special occasions.

The decorations and the holiday flag would be visual symbols of a ritual steeped in centuries of nautical tradition. USS Towers would undergo a change of command ceremony—the transfer of authority from one commanding officer to another.

That ceremony, just fourteen days in the future, would be the culmination of everything Silva had worked for. After the customary Navy pomp and flourishes, she would step to the podium and assume command of this vessel. With a brief exchange of protocol and hand salutes, her title would change from Commander to Captain. She would become commanding officer of one of the most advanced warships ever crafted by man.

And at that same moment, Captain Bowie would relinquish command of the ship. When their salutes were lowered, one era would come to an end and another would begin. Bowie would say final goodbyes to the men and women who had served under his command.

Some of the crew were new to the Towers, having received orders to the ship recently, like Silva herself. But others had been with Bowie on the last deployment, when the destroyer had gone head-to-head with a rogue nuclear missile sub under the Russian ice pack. A few had been with Bowie on the deployment before that, when the Towers had fought a running battle with a wolf pack of attack submarines, from one end of the Persian Gulf to the other.

They had fought for Captain Bowie, and bled for him. Some of the crew had even died for him. In return, Bowie had brought them victory. More importantly, he had given them the opportunity to save the lives of literally millions of their countrymen. He had made every member of the crew, from the most junior seaman to the most senior officer, feel like warriors. And now he was leaving.

Silva had seen it on the faces of the crew members over the last few days, as it gradually became real to them that their captain was leaving. The ship would have a new captain, of course. Silva would be captain. But their captain would be gone, and Katherine Silva would be trying to fill the shoes of the man who had made them heroes.

A raindrop struck the side of Silva’s face, and ran down her cheek like a tear. It was immediately joined by a hundred other drops, and then a thousand, as the bleak Japanese sky began pelting the harbor with rain.

Silva ran toward the nearest watertight door leading into the skin of the ship. She ducked into the aft passageway and took one last glance at the sky before the door slammed shut behind her. The gray clouds were growing darker and more menacing.

She hoped to God that it wasn’t an omen.

CHAPTER 5

MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE COMPOUND

AUGUST 1ST BUILDING

BEIJING, CHINA

FRIDAY; 21 NOVEMBER

7:53 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

There was a quiet tap on the door. Vice Premier Lu Shi didn’t look up from the stack of documents on his desk.

He had not been reading the documents. In fact, his eyes hadn’t really been focused on them at all. His mind was back in the hospital room in Lhasa, eyes locked on the pitiful wreck that had once been his son … seeing Lu Jianguo’s mangled body obscenely violated by the tubes and wires of those damnable machines.

The tap on the door was repeated, slightly louder this time. Lu Shi forced his mind back to the present. He blinked several times, trying to reorient himself to his chair, his desk, his office. “Enter.”

The door opened, and his personal assistant, Miao Yin, stepped into the room. She was a beautiful young woman in her mid twenties, her exquisite elfin features framed artfully by the straight-banged pageboy hairstyle that was so popular among female government workers. Her large dark eyes met Lu Shi’s gaze, and she nodded, her head tilting with the slightest suggestion of a bow. “Please forgive the intrusion, Comrade Vice Premier. Minister Shen requests a moment of your time. He does not have an appointment, but he assures me that he urgently needs to speak to you.”

Lu Shi stared blankly at his secretary. Unlike most senior government officials in China, he was not sleeping with any of his female underlings, but that didn’t keep him from appreciating Miao Yin’s loveliness. Ordinarily, the mere sight of her would be enough to lighten his mood.

But all such thoughts had been dimmed by the shadows that had descended upon Lu Shi’s heart. The presence of Miao Yin barely registered on his consciousness. He had no eye for her beauty, and no real memory of its existence. He had forgotten what beauty was.

His mind was drawn inexorably back to the hospital room. The cloying reek of medical disinfectant. The vaguely human shape under the green sheet. The face of his son, half swathed in bandages—one sightless eye pointed toward the ceiling.

“Comrade Vice Premier?” Miao Yin spoke softly, but her voice startled him.

“Yes?”

His secretary repeated her minimal bow. “Minister Shen… He is waiting in the outer office.”

Lu Shi rubbed his hand across his chin, feeling the scrape of stubble against his palm. He had forgotten to shave.

“Minister Shen,” he said. He cleared his throat, and sat up straight in his chair. “Yes, of course. Send him in.”

Miao Yin backed out of the door, and was replaced a few seconds later by the hulking form of Shen Tao, the Minister of Defense.

Shen paused in the doorway long enough to show proper respect, and then clumped into the room on his sturdy legs. At first glance, the man’s barrel-shaped physique could be mistaken for fat, but Shen’s round body was solidly muscular. His face was equally misleading. Behind his features and placidly oblivious facial expression, a quick mind was at work.

Lu Shi waved him to a chair.

Nodding his thanks, the Minister of Defense pulled the chair a half-meter forward, and shifted it a few centimeters to the right, before settling himself into the offered seat.

It was an unconscious gesture; Lu Shi was confident of that. It was also typical of the way Shen operated. He accepted everything, from hospitality, to orders, to challenges, on his own terms. Yes, I will take the chair that you have offered me, but I will move it to a place of my choosing.

On other days, Lu Shi admired this trait. Today, he had no patience for maneuverings of any sort. He also had no patience for polite apologies, or the niceties of official etiquette, both of which were going to come pouring out when Shen began to talk. Lu Shi preempted the pleasantries by speaking first.

“I understand that the terrorist has broken under questioning. What have you learned?”

‘Terrorist’ was Lu Shi’s label for the murderous young fool who had been captured after the destruction of the Qinghai train.

Shen nodded. “You are correct, Comrade Vice Premier. The subject is now quite responsive to our inquiries…”

Lu Shi felt a flush of cold anger. “He is not a subject. He is a terrorist, and a mass murderer. And he is not responsive to your inquiries. You have tortured him, and he has broken. Now, may we please stop wasting time with circumlocutions?”

He locked eyes with the Minister of Defense and repeated, “What have you learned?”

To his credit, Shen didn’t flinch or break eye contact, but his tone of voice was no longer self-assured. “The subject … the … ah … terrorist, is named Sonam Dawa. He is a member of a faction of rebel Tibetan criminals who call themselves Gingara, a word that seems to translate as ‘the Messenger.’ He was part of a three man raiding team, commanded by a man named Jampa Dorjee, also a member of this Gingara. And the third man…”

Lu Shi waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, yes. The third man was an old drokpa shepherd who calls himself Nima. I knew all of this several hours ago. What else have you learned? Where have these terrorists gone? What was their escape plan? Where are they now?”

Shen blinked. “Their plan was to … ah … escape through the Nathu La Pass, to the Indian side of the Himalayas.” He swallowed. “We have not yet located the other two members of the raiding team, but they have had three days since the attack to cross the border. They are probably safe on the Indian side of the mountains by now.”

“On the Indian side, perhaps,” said Lu Shi. “Whether or not they are safe, remains to be seen.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Do we know their final destination, Comrade Minister?”

Shen nodded. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier. This group, this Gingara, has based itself in a small village known as Geku, approximately forty kilometers on the Indian side of the border.” He paused. “Were you considering a covert operation? Sending a small team into India, to root out these terrorists?”

His words were nearly lost on Lu Shi, whose thoughts had drifted back to the hospital room in Lhasa. The half-human form of his beautiful son, under the green bed sheet…

He shook his head violently. “No! There will be no covert operation. We will not answer this cowardly raid with a raid of our own.”

Minister Shen’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t understand, Comrade Vice Premier. Are we not going to respond to this attack?”

Lu Shi felt his anger drain away, to be replaced by a clarity of purpose that was almost staggering. “We will respond,” he said. “We will destroy them completely.”

“The terrorists?”

“No,” Lu Shi said. “What was the name of the village? Geku? We will destroy them all. We will show them what it means to harbor the enemies of China.”

Shen’s face had gone from shock to incredulity. “Comrade Vice Premier… We can’t do that… The international community…”

“We can do it,” Lu Shi said. “And we will.”

He softened his voice. “Shen Tao, my old friend. Trust me. The international community will do nothing.”

“We can’t be certain of that,” Shen said.

“I am certain,” Lu Shi said. “Recent history has given us the perfect example. Think about it. Over the past decade, the United States has conducted so many missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan that such attacks barely make the international news.”

He leaned forward and rested his hands on his desk. “America has laid the pattern. We will simply follow it. We will use our missiles against a terrorist base on the Indian side of the mountains.”

He felt his voice harden again. “But we will not stop until that village is completely eradicated. Not a single building left standing. Not a house, or a hut, or anything left alive.”

“The Central Committee …” Shen said. “A military stroke of this magnitude will never be approved.”

“I don’t need the approval of the Central Committee,” Lu Shi said. “The Standing Committee has the power to authorize direct military action.”

Minister Shen did not reply. The Politburo Standing Committee was the most powerful decision-making body in China. Of the committee’s nine members, one was Vice Premier Lu Shi himself; another was Premier Xiao, whose failing health led him increasingly to defer to the recommendations of the Vice Premier. At least four of the remaining seven members owed their political souls to Lu Shi. It would not have been fair to say that Lu Shi controlled the Standing Committee, but Shen knew that the man wielded great influence over the committee’s deliberations.

Lu Shi looked down at his watch. “Tomorrow morning, I will call an emergency meeting of the Standing Committee.”

His eyes returned slowly to Shen’s face. “And this will be approved, Shen. I promise you that.”

He nodded toward the door. “Go now, and prepare your missile forces. You will receive your official orders some time tomorrow morning.”

The Minister of Defense stood up and walked toward the door in stunned silence. Before he reached it, Lu Shi spoke again.

“Remember, Comrade Minister… Not a hut will be left standing. No one in that village is to be left alive.”

CHAPTER 6

FINAL TRAJECTORY:

A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

Cruise missile… The term conjures up images of high-tech warfare, and the surgical precision of weapons launched with pinpoint accuracy against targets hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away. For many Americans, the first conscious awareness of cruise missiles occurred in the early 1990s, when the news media began carrying combat video footage from Operation Desert Storm, and the U.S. military’s first incursions into Iraq.

Beginning on January 16, 1991, millions of television viewers watched dramatic video of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles launched from the decks of American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Due to the obvious technical challenges in filming a submerged missile launch under actual warfare conditions, there was no accompanying video of submarine launched Tomahawks. Nevertheless, U.S. attack subs in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were involved in the cruise missile strikes against Iraq from the very first moments of the war.

Americans were captivated by the notion of a ‘smart’ weapon, intelligent enough to cruise the length of a city street above car level, hang a left turn at the proper intersection, and zigzag its way through a maze of urban businesses and dwellings to locate and destroy the designated target building, and no other.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, remarked that the Tomahawk missile was so precise that it was possible to pre-select exactly which window of a building that a weapon would fly through.

Post-mission battle damage assessment would ultimately prove that General Schwarzkopf’s words were not empty boasts. The BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile really was that effective.

Desert Storm was the first battlefield demonstration of the extraordinary power of smart weapons. The government and military of Iraq were completely unprepared for the accuracy and power of America’s latest tools of war.

As public awareness of these weapons spread, several new pieces of terminology began to filter into the common lexicon. Phrases like Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM), and Digital Scene-Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC)—while not exactly the stuff of everyday conversation—became generally recognizable components of the technical jargon surrounding next-generation military hardware.

In the years since Operation Desert Storm, the multitude of available media images—reinforced by animated television news diagrams and a sprinkling of explanatory terminology—may have given the average man on the street a false sense of comprehension for cruise missile technology. At the risk of sounding elitist, the core knowledge of many laymen might be summed up in three brief statements:

(1) Cruise missiles can be launched from a variety of vessels, vehicles, and aircraft at targets over 1,000 miles away.

(2) Due to their ground-hugging flight profiles and evasive maneuvering capabilities, cruise missiles are difficult to detect and track by radar, and even more difficult to intercept.

(3) These amazing weapons are the recent result of cutting-edge technological breakthroughs.

The first two of these assumptions are essentially correct. The third statement, as obvious and unassailable as it might seem, is false.

Although the cruise missile has inarguably benefited from refinements made possible by contemporary science, the core technology is not at all a recent development. In fact, the history of the cruise missile dates back at least as far as the First World War.

For all of its exceptional capability, this so-called next generation weapon of the modern age was a century in the making. And the tale of its gestation is almost as strangely compelling as the weapon itself.

CHAPTER 7

WESTERN YUNNAN PROVINCE, SOUTHERN CHINA

SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER

8:30 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

A micro switch clicked shut somewhere deep in the electronic belly of the launch computer, channeling power to the firing circuits. Approximately two milliseconds later, the protective membrane at the rear end of the missile launcher was incinerated by a white hot stream of exhaust gasses. With an ear-splitting roar, the missile blasted through the weatherproof cover at the forward end of the launch tube, casting a brief flare of harsh red light against the dark hillside as it hurled itself into the night sky.

For a moment, the big eight-wheeled launch vehicle was wreathed in the smoke left behind by the receding missile. The brisk mountain winds began to shove the smoke cloud aside, but not before the elevated launch tubes spat two more fiery missiles into the cold Chinese night.

The vehicle’s mission was complete now. All three of its launch tubes were empty. It had no more threat to offer, no more messengers of death to release into the darkness. But the vehicle was not alone.

There were thirty-five of them in all. Thirty-five Wanshan WS2400 transporter erector launchers, deployed in a staggered formation about a thousand meters west of the road. The matte colors of their camouflage paint schemes blended well with the scrub grasses of the local terrain, but any chance of concealment was stripped away by the roaring streaks of fire unleashed by these strange vehicles.

The launches came in rapid succession, missile after missile climbing away, and vanishing toward the west.

By the time the rising three-quarter moon broke over the foothills of the Himalayas, the area was deserted. The vehicles were gone, their passage marked only by scorched ground, and the tracks of their enormous tires.

Somewhere in the darkness, one hundred and five cruise missiles were hugging the torturous contours of the mountains, following carefully-plotted digital elevation maps toward their mutual target—a small village on the Indian side of the Himalayas.

CHAPTER 8

GEKU, NORTHERN INDIA

SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER

7:17 PM

TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’

Jampa stood in the open doorway of the shepherd’s house, the soft golden light of the oil lamps at his back, his face turned outward toward the crisp gloom of the evening. He knew that he should close the door; the heat from the little fireplace was escaping past him, into the night. But he stood for a moment longer, enjoying the sting of the cold air against his cheeks and admiring the soothing near-darkness of the moonlit street.

The village of Geku lay spread out before him, an almost haphazard scattering of small houses and buildings under the emerging stars. It was a beautiful place, this frigid little paradise carved into the mountains on the roof of the world. Harsh. Difficult. Sometimes brutal. But always beautiful.

Most of the inhabitants were already settling down for the evening. The people here led full, but uncomplicated lives. Jampa envied them.

Here, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, there was freedom. Not boundless liberty, but at least the locals could go about their daily lives without fear that their homes would be raided by truckloads of Chinese soldiers. Their schools and their temples would not be burned, or crushed under the boot heels of an occupying nation.

Jampa felt his eyes drawn toward the east, where his own country was hidden behind the rising peaks of the mountains. The Chinese called it the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was a typical trick of communist propaganda. There was no autonomy for the people of Jampa’s homeland. There was no freedom for them. Not for more than half a century, since the ironically-named People’s Liberation Army had surged across the Jinsha River in 1950, to seize control of Tibet.

It had taken the Chinese invaders only thirteen days to conquer the vastly-outnumbered Tibetan defenders. Thirteen days, for one of the most ancient sovereign nations on the earth to become just another oppressed province in the Chinese empire.

Of course, the Chinese were somewhat more subtle about things these days, at least to outward appearances. The brute force of China’s military occupation was giving way to something more devious. The Qinghai railway was hauling in trainloads of Han Chinese, to claim and settle the land, forcing the native people into an artificial minority. If no one stopped this unnatural migration, the Tibetan people could be squeezed out of existence in just a few decades.

The ghost of a smile crossed Jampa’s lips. He had stopped it, for a while at least. He, and Nima, and Sonam had stopped the accursed train. They had blown the mechanical beast right off its tracks.

The smile faded as Jampa remembered staring into the eyes of the young PLA soldier, just before pulling the trigger of the stolen Chinese rocket launcher. The scene flooded into his mind again, the roiling ball of flame, the black smoke, the shriek of rending metal as the wounded train tore itself apart.

Jampa hadn’t wanted to kill the young soldier. He hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. He had only wanted to destroy the train, to stop the never-ceasing influx of Chinese invaders.

He felt a stab of regret, but it was quickly driven out of his thoughts by the memory of another fire. The smoke rising from the ruins of his little school in Amchok Bora. The faces of Dukar, and Chopa, and his other young students as the villagers had pulled their charred forms from the burning wreck of the school.

Jampa had been a teacher, back then. An educated man. A man of science in a land where academic learning was far too rare.

The villagers in Amchok Bora had treated him with respect. He had been regarded as a man of wisdom and enlightenment.

Jampa did not feel enlightened now. He felt angry, and tired. If there truly had been any wisdom within him, it had long since fled, replaced by a single purpose—to free his land from the Chinese oppressors.

He wondered where Sonam was now. He felt guilty about leaving his wounded team member behind after the attack on the train. He hoped—for Sonam’s sake—that the young freedom fighter had died from his bullet wounds before the Chinese had gotten their hands on him.

Jampa had a brief image of what the ruthless bastards might do to make Sonam talk. His shudder was amplified by a shiver from the cold evening air.

The shiver was followed by a yawn, and then another one. Jampa tried to push all thoughts of Sonam’s capture from his mind. Nothing could be done to help Sonam now. Either the man was already dead, or the Chinese had him in one of their interrogation cells. Either way, coming to Sonam’s aid was far beyond the resources of Jampa, or anyone else in the Gingara organization.

Jampa yawned again, and made another attempt to force his thoughts away from the fate of Sonam. There was time for a bit of reading before bed. Tomorrow, perhaps he and Nima could begin planning their next strike against the oppressors.

He started to swing the door closed, and then paused with it still half open. What was that noise?

Jampa tilted his head, and struggled to concentrate on the sound that hovered at the lower edge of his hearing. The noise started softly, but grew louder rapidly. It reminded him of an odd combination of an arrow in flight, and the hissing of a kettle just coming to a boil.

The sound, strange as it was, did not seem completely unfamiliar. He had heard that sound before, or something very much like it.

The memory of the rocket attack on the Qinghai railway flickered through his brain again. He saw himself swing the fiberglass tube of the Chinese rocket launcher up onto his right shoulder. Felt the firing trigger retract under the pressure of his squeezing finger. Heard the whistling hiss of the exhaust gasses as the anti-tank rocket had leapt from the launch tube and streaked toward the side of the nearest railroad car.

The growing hiss in the air… It was almost exactly the same sound, but louder. Much louder. It was…

Jampa’s thought was interrupted by an enormous dark shape that flashed past the half-open doorway, hurtling down the street toward the center of the village. The air current from the big thing’s passage washed over Jampa with a warm chemical stench that reminded him somehow of burning kerosene.

The thing, whatever it was, flew about chest-high above the ground. In its wake trailed the strange whistling-hiss, the noise now grown to a painful volume.

Was it some kind of rocket? It couldn’t be. It was too large. Nearly the size of a telephone pole.

Jampa was thrown sideways as the unknown flying thing reached the center of the village and detonated, splitting the night air with fire and a growing circle of destruction.

Jampa lay on the floor, his half-stunned brain trying to process the idea that the impossibly large thing was some kind of rocket after all. His eardrums were ringing from the aftermath of the explosion, but he could still hear the roar of the fireball and the screams of people thrown out of their beds by this deadly and unexpected assault.

He could hear something else, too. More of the whistling-hisses. Not just one of them. Many.

That was crazy. Who would fire missiles at a tiny Indian village? Who would bother? Who would waste that kind of expensive military hardware on a little town that most people had never even heard of?

And suddenly, Jampa knew the answer. He understood it with a clarity born of his years as a teacher, and a man of science.

He climbed painfully to his feet, and staggered to the doorway. The door hung drunkenly from a single unbroken hinge.

Two more dark telephone pole shapes streaked past the little house, each followed a second or two later by more explosions and more screams.

This was his fault. Death was coming to the village of Geku, and it was all Jampa’s fault.

The idea had been so simple. So obvious. Strike at Chinese targets on the Tibetan side of the mountains, and then retreat across the border into India. The Chinese government wouldn’t dare follow a handful of insignificant insurgents into the legal territory of another major nation.

And many of the locals in the northern Indian provinces were sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan liberation. The Indian villagers would gladly give sanctuary to Jampa, and Nima, and their fellow brethren of Gingara.

The plan had always worked, until now. The Chinese counterstrikes had always stopped at the Indian border.

What was so different this time? Something had changed. Something major. Jampa had no idea what sort of political shift had occurred, but it was clear that the old rules were suddenly and irrevocably gone.

Whatever the cause of the change in tactics had been, this unfolding catastrophe was almost certainly in retaliation for Jampa’s rocket strike on that accursed train.

Another shockwave slammed Jampa against the doorframe. His head bounced off the wooden upright with a bone-jarring whack.

His knees buckled. He was sliding to the floor when the next Chinese cruise missile darted out of the gathering gloom, and crashed through the wall of the shepherd’s little house.

Jampa was less than two meters from the warhead when it erupted. He saw no more, heard no more, was no more.

And the man who had fired the first shot of the coming war was no longer there to witness the barrage of missiles that continued to fall from the sky.

CHAPTER 9

MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

SOUTH BLOCK SECRETARIAT BUILDING

NEW DELHI, INDIA

SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER

7:32 PM

TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’

Indian Defense Minister Sanjay Nehru was on the phone when the door to his office flew open. The heavy door swung rapidly on its well-oiled hinges, bounced off the burnished oak wainscoting, and nearly swung closed again before the unannounced visitor stopped it with an outstretched hand.

Nehru’s eyes jerked toward the door in surprise. He was not accustomed to having people barge into his office without invitation. When Nehru got a look at the intruder, his shock transformed instantly to annoyance. It was that junior captain assigned as an aide to General Singh. What was the young idiot’s name? Kumar? Katari? Something like that.

The young captain was breathing heavily, as though he had been running. He brought his palms together below his chin, and bowed his head quickly. “Namaste, Sri Minister. I apologize for the interruption, but General Singh requests your presence in the Operations Room as soon as possible, and we couldn’t reach you by telephone.”

Nehru had ignored the plaintive bleating of the phone’s call-waiting signal. It was well outside of working hours on Saturday evening, and after half a day of slogging through mind-numbing paperwork, he was trying to enjoy ten minutes of conversation with his favorite nephew.

He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with one hand. “Well don’t just stand there,” he snapped. “What is so bloody urgent?”

The young officer had to pause for a half second to catch his breath. “Reports are just coming in,” he said. “Missile strikes…”

Nehru hung up the phone, all thoughts of his nephew gone from his mind. “Missile strikes? Where? Are you trying to tell me that we’re under attack?”

The captain nodded. “Yes, Sri Minister. So far, the only known target is Geku, a small village in the Himalayas. Based on first-look analysis, approximately a hundred cruise missiles from an unidentified launch point in South Western China.”

Nehru was stunned. China? That made no sense at all. It was crazy.

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” he said. “Some sort of radar error, or a garbled report.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” the officer said. “We’ve got satellite imagery. It looks like the entire village has been destroyed. There are no signs of survivors.”

Defense Minister Nehru glared at the young officer. “Why would the Chinese attack a flyspeck of a village on our side of the mountains? Was there some kind of provocation?”

The captain shook his head. “No provocation that we’re aware of, sir. And nothing of strategic value in the area of the village, as far as we’ve been able to tell.”

“Then why are the Chinese attacking us?”

“I’m sorry, Minister,” the captain said. “We don’t know. General Singh requests…”

Nehru nodded quickly and gestured toward the door. “Yes. Fine. Tell General Singh I’m on my way. And inform him that I want a full defense staff briefing in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain said. He did an abrupt about-face and strode toward the door.

Nehru reached for the phone on his desk. He had to call the Prime Minister immediately. His fingers stopped before they touched the receiver. “Captain!”

The young officer paused in the doorway and looked over his shoulder. “Yes, Minister?”

“Tell General Singh to order a full military alert. Mobilize all air, sea, and ground forces. Maximum readiness.”

His voice became quieter, but it took on an edge of steel. “If what you are saying is true, the Chinese have committed an unprovoked act of war against Republic of India,” he said. “I don’t know what those fools are up to. But if they want a fight, they’re going to get one.”

CHAPTER 10

FLIGHT LEAD

INAS 303 SQUADRON — BLACK PANTHERS

BAY OF BENGAL (WEST OF ANDAMAN ISLANDS)

SUNDAY; 23 NOVEMBER

0512 hours (5:12 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

In hindsight, no one would ever know what made Lieutenant Ajit Chopra pull the trigger. The pilot’s motives, whatever they might have been, died with him when Chopra’s Indian Navy MiG-29K was blasted out of the sky over the Bay of Bengal.

In the days and weeks following the First Battle of Bengal, swarms of investigative journalists would try repeatedly to link Chopra’s actions with the previous evening’s missile strike on the village of Geku. Given the pilot’s relative youth and the legendarily all-eclipsing power of young hearts, more than one media pundit would speculate that Chopra had met and perhaps fallen in love with one of the young village women who had been killed in the barrage.

Internet rumors began to spring up, identifying Lieutenant Chopra’s lost beloved as a poor but beautiful girl named Mira. The tragic love story of Ajit and Mira would become the modern web’s equivalent of Romeo and Juliette, forwarded in thousands—and then hundreds of thousands—of heart-rending emails by uncounted numbers of breathless romantics.

Internet legends tend to grow in the telling, and the compelling tale of doomed young Indian lovers was no exception. Increasingly elaborate email threads offered careful descriptions of Mira’s death scene as a murderous Chinese missile shrieked down from the heavens to blow her family’s small (but well kept) home into oblivion. Similarly florid descriptions told of Agit’s exquisite emotional agony as he turned his Russian-built jet fighter toward a ship of the Chinese Navy, and wreaked teary-eyed revenge upon the godless warmongers who had slaughtered his beloved Mira.

Despite the polished elegance of many repeated tellings, not one shred of evidence would ever be found to support the story. No proof of Mira’s existence would ever be documented, and no verifiable link (emotional or otherwise) would ever be established between Lieutenant Ajit Chopra and the bombed-out village of Geku.

From post mission analysis and reconstruction, all that’s known for certain is this: on the morning of Sunday, 23 November, Lieutenant Chopra was flight lead for a group of four MiG-29s, operating from the Indian aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. At 5:12 AM (local time), apparently acting without orders, Chopra turned his fighter onto an approach vector toward the Chinese guided missile destroyer Zhuhai. Approximately ten seconds later, the young Indian pilot armed and launched two Kh-35U ‘Switchblade’ anti-ship cruise missiles toward the Chinese warship. Both missiles functioned perfectly, following subsonic flight paths all the way to their target.

The reaction of the Chinese crew was fast, but not fast enough. The Zhuhai’s Type 360S E/F-band Doppler radar identified the incoming missiles at approximately 17 kilometers, somewhere near the outer edge of the system’s threat detection envelope.

Like most of his shipmates, the senior weapons officer aboard the Zhuhai had spent much of his career training for combat engagements at sea. But, training and simulations aside, the Chinese officer had never actually participated in live combat actions. He had never fired weapons at a real enemy target, and he had certainly never been on the receiving end of such an attack. When the incoming missile warning appeared on his screen, the weapons officer hesitated for a quick handful of seconds while his brain came to grips with the completely unanticipated idea that this was not a simulation; someone was really trying to kill him.

The man shook his head sharply and then jabbed the button that directed the destroyer’s ZJK-4 Thomson-CSF combat management system to engage. The combat management system instantly activated the HQ-7 short-range air defense system, and the eight-cell missile launcher spun to starboard to point toward the inbound threat.

The Chinese weapons officer’s hesitation was brief. Given the circumstances, it was also completely understandable. He did not live to regret the error.

Nicknamed Harpoonskis for their similarity to the American AGM-84 Boeing Harpoon, the Switchblade cruise missiles skimmed above the wave tops at Mach 0.8, or roughly 274.6 meters per second. Each tipped with a 145 kilogram warhead in a shaped-charge configuration, the two missiles were moving at 80% of the speed of sound when they slammed into the starboard side of the Zhuhai.

Like the trick of a street conjurer, the Chinese destroyer vanished behind a wall of black smoke and fire. When the smoke had cleared, all that remained of the warship was a spreading oil slick, punctuated by scattered pieces of flaming wreckage.

What happened next might best be described as chaos.

*  *  *

The Indian Navy communications net was instantly flooded with radio chatter as every pilot, action officer, and comms officer in the area began talking at once, trying to find out what in the hell was going on. If Lieutenant Chopra’s voice was among the babble, it was lost amid the anger and confusion of his shipmates.

*  *  *

The Zhuhai’s escort vessels, the guided missile frigates Ma’anshan and Wenzhou, did not wait for an explanation. They opened fire on Lieutenant Ajit Chopra’s Mig-29K and the other three planes in his flight.

In a matter of seconds, the sky above the Bay of Bengal was a snarl of crisscrossing exhaust trails, as Chinese surface-to-air missiles climbed toward the Indian Navy MiGs, and the Indian pilots unleashed their own Switchblade anti-ship cruise missiles.

By the time the first missiles struck their targets, another flight of MiGs was launching from the deck of INS Vikrant.

The entire engagement lasted less than twenty minutes. When it was done, all three warships of the Chinese surface action group were on their way to the bottom of the bay. Seven aircraft of the Indian Navy were destroyed, and three others were able to limp back to their carrier with varying degrees of damage. The sea was littered with the bodies of dead and injured Sailors.

The First Battle of Bengal was over. The true carnage was yet to come.

CHAPTER 11

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER

6:21 PM EST

President Dalton Wainright trailed a Secret Service agent through the door into the Situation Room. As the president walked to his traditional seat at the head of the long mahogany table, the agent stepped deftly aside, taking up a position in the corner to the right of the door, where he could survey the entire length of the room without moving.

In the past, when the primary display screens had depended on ceiling-mounted LCD projectors, the Situation Room had been kept in semi-darkness. But the projector screens were gone now, replaced by six large flat screen televisions along the side walls, and an enormous flat screen master display covering the entire wall opposite the president’s chair. With the projectors gone, there was no reason to dim the lights, so the room was well lit.

Although President Wainright would not admit it to anyone—including himself—he would have preferred the semi-darkness of the old days. It wasn’t the mystique of the old lighting scheme that he missed; it was the anonymity, the false but reassuring sense of invisibility that sometimes comes from watching a movie in the cozy gloom of a public theater.

Dalton was not at all comfortable in his job. He was certainly not the first holder of the office to experience that particular feeling, but his own brand of discomfort didn’t stem from the traditional source. More than one politician had spent an entire career angling for the Oval Office, only to discover that the job was too large, too challenging, and too thankless to reward the effort.

That wasn’t the case for Dalton. Like most people who dabble in politics, he had sometimes flirted with dreams of the presidency, but those had been idle fantasies. He had never harbored any thought of trying to make them real, and he was not a bit surprised to find out that the presidency was completely out of his depth.

He had been quite happy as the Junior Senator from Maine, content in the belief that his political career had reached its peak. The invitation to join Frank Chandler’s dark horse bid for the presidency had come as a surprise. Dalton had accepted the role of vice-presidential running mate, not because he believed that Chandler could win the election, but because it seemed like a logical way to bring his career in politics to a close.

With the possible exception of Frank himself, no one had been more shocked than Dalton when their Republican opponent’s campaign had disintegrated in the wake of a well-publicized sex scandal. The resulting backlash in public opinion had propelled Frank Chandler into the Oval Office, with a rather dazed Dalton Wainright clinging to his coattails.

Now Frank was gone too, driven out of office by the public uproar after the fiasco in Kamchatka and the missile attack on Pearl Harbor. His departure had made Dalton Wainwright only the second vice-president in American history to ascend to the Oval Office through the resignation of a sitting president.

During his tenure in the Senate, a Washington Post reporter had once described Dalton as ‘competent and dedicated, but undistinguished.’ Under the undimmed lights of the White House Situation Room, Dalton wondered if even that scrap of left-handed praise might be an overstatement of his abilities. Despite his lack of flamboyance, he’d been qualified for his seat in the Senate. He’d known what he was doing, and he had been equal to the challenge.

The presidency was another matter. He could still lay claim to the words ‘dedicated’ and ‘undistinguished,’ but he had serious doubts that he was competent to hold the highest office in the land.

*  *  *

According to protocol, the half dozen people gathered around the long table were standing at attention. Dalton waved for them to take their seats, as he settled into his own chair.

The Sit Room Duty Officer, a hard-faced Air Force Colonel with steel-rimmed glasses, remained standing near the far end of the table. He nodded briskly toward his commander-in-chief. “Good evening, Mr. President.”

Dalton opened the blue-jacketed briefing folder on the table in front of him, and glanced up to meet the colonel’s eyes. He returned the man’s nod with an equally abrupt gesture. “Proceed.”

The Duty Officer pointed a slender remote toward the enormous screen opposite Dalton’s chair. The blue background and presidential seal vanished from the wall-sized display, replaced by a regional map of Asia, overlaid with hundreds of cryptic-looking tactical symbols. The six smaller flat screens along the walls were instantly populated with images of ships, fighter aircraft, submarines, helicopters, and missile systems.

The Sit Room Duty Officer turned toward the master display, and thumbed a button that turned the remote into a laser pointer. The red dot of the laser came to rest in the body of water to the east of India, the Bay of Bengal, where a jumble of colored symbols seemed to indicate a concentration of ships and aircraft.

“Mr. President,” the officer said, “the conflict between China and India is escalating rapidly. Both sides are mobilizing military assets across the board, and both countries have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to engage in direct combat action.”

Secretary of Defense Mary O’Neil-Broerman spoke up. “The situation over there is going to hell in a hand basket, sir.”

“I can see that,” Dalton said. “I want to know why.”

He instantly regretted the sharp tone in his voice. He had a tendency to become brusque when he was unsure of himself, and right now he was very unsure of himself.

Since the day he’d inherited the presidency, he’d begun every day with a simple prayer, or perhaps it was just a plea to the universe, since it wasn’t directed toward any particular deity. Please do not let anything happen today that I can’t handle.

So far, he’d managed to muddle through without disaster—largely because Frank Chandler had left him with a staff of capable people who were skilled at helping him navigate difficult situations. But he’d also been lucky. Fate had not yet thrown him a problem that was beyond the scope of his abilities.

Dalton’s string of good fortune couldn’t last forever. He knew that. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. He would run into some challenge or some catastrophe that was too big for him. Then the people of the United States would find out how horribly things can go wrong when the guy sitting in the big chair is not up to the job.

“Mr. President, we can only partially answer that question,” the Sit Room Duty Officer said. “The trigger seems to have been that train wreck in Tibet on Tuesday, the rocket attack on the Qinghai Railroad. The Chinese began calling it an act of terrorism before the smoke had even cleared. They apparently traced the terrorists to the Village of Geku, on the Indian side of the Himalayas. The People’s Liberation Army retaliated with a massive cruise missile strike that pretty much wiped the village off the map.”

“That can’t be right,” the president said. “The Chinese are not stupid, and that’s too much of an overreaction. You don’t retaliate for a localized act of terrorism by launching a large scale missile attack against another country.”

The Secretary of Defense leaned forward in her chair. “With all due respect, Mr. President, that’s not necessarily true. The U.S. has done it more than once. The first example that comes to mind is August of 1998, when President Clinton ordered the launch of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan. It was in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We simultaneously launched about 75 cruise missiles against countries on two different continents.”

The National Security Advisor, Gregory Brenthoven, shook his head. “Granted that your basic premise is true, but your example is not exactly parallel to the current mess in Asia.”

He turned his gaze toward the president. “When former President Clinton gave the order to launch, he knew that both Afghanistan and the Republic of Sudan were a nice comfortable distance from the United States. About six or seven thousand miles. President Clinton also knew that neither country had the firepower or the logistics to bring the fight back to American shores. In other words, the risk of escalating to all-out war was just about zero.”

Brenthoven gestured toward the big map of Asia on the master display. “That’s not the case with this China-India thing, sir. China didn’t launch their missiles against some third-world country on the other side of the planet. They provoked a major military competitor, a nuclear power no less, sitting right on their own southern border. And that doesn’t make any sense. As you said, Mr. President, the Chinese are not stupid. If somebody punches India in the nose, you can bet your last dollar that India is going to come out of the corner swinging with both fists. The Chinese know that. But they did it anyway.”

The president looked at the map. “Why would they do that? Why would they take such a stupid risk?”

“We don’t know yet, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “But right now, we’ve got a bigger question. What are we going to do about it?’

“I’ve spoken to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs about this,” the Secretary of Defense said. “He’s preparing a full tactical briefing now. He can go over the details then, but in broad strokes, he recommends that we get an aircraft carrier on scene up there as quickly as possible. The idea is to establish a presence, and—hopefully—to act as a stabilizing force in the region.”

The president nodded slowly. “Who’s in the best position?”

The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Robert Casey, cleared his throat. “Mr. President, that would be the USS Midway strike group, based out of Yokosuka, Japan.”

The president turned to look at the CNO. “And the Midway is ready to deploy?”

“Yes, sir,” the CNO said. “The Midway is our ready-carrier at the moment. She’s got a full complement of escorts, and they can be underway in a matter of hours.”

“Alright,” the president said. “Do it. Get those ships moving. We’ll figure out the details while they’re on the way.”

He stared at the wall-sized master display screen with its overwhelming array of strange symbols, and he began to wonder if this would be the day that everything came apart.

CHAPTER 12

BARKHOR SQUARE

LHASA, TIBET

SATURDAY; 23 NOVEMBER

9:24 AM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

No matter what the Chinese government or news services might say later, it was not a riot.

Reverend Bill McDonald watched from the window of his second story hotel room, as people began gathering in the square below. At first it was a small group of purple-robed monks, and he wondered if they had come to pray, or meditate, or simply to meet and talk near the gates of the famous Jokhang temple.

But the monks were soon joined by people dressed in street clothes, and more people were streaming into the square, appearing from alleys and side streets. The small group quickly grew to a large group; and the large group blossomed into a burgeoning crowd. Still, the flow of humanity showed no signs of diminishing. As the throng continued to swell, the red, blue, gold, white, and green colors of the Tibetan snow lion flag began to appear—sometimes held overhead as a banner, sometimes draped around someone’s shoulders like a cloak.

When the flags were revealed, McDonald knew that he was witnessing something unusual. The snow lion flag was a symbol of Tibetan independence and a rallying point for the separatist movements.

Introduced by the 13th Dalia Lama in 1912, the flag had remained the official banner of Tibet until the 14th Dalia Lama had escaped from the Chinese occupation in 1959, and fled to India. Now, more than a half-century later, the flag was an emblem of Tibetan sovereignty—a reminder of the days before the Chinese invasion, and a token of the freedom that might lie in the future.

The Chinese treated the Tibetan flag as an insignia of terrorism and anarchy. They had outlawed possession of the flag by anyone within the borders of Chinese-controlled territory, including all of Tibet. Public display of the flag was punishable by imprisonment, or worse.

But Bill McDonald could see at least fifty of the forbidden flags from his window. The crowd in Barkhor Square was openly defying the longstanding ban. This was turning into a major act of protest. There must be nearly a thousand people in the square by now, and still more were coming.

His window was closed, but he could hear the crowd now, hundreds of voices chanting in unison. Not ranting or screaming. Not shouting ultimatums. Chanting together in one voice, like an oddly disharmonic choir, all singing from the same sheet of music. It was eerie—mournful and powerful, but utterly peaceful.

McDonald’s presence in Tibet had nothing to do with politics or journalism. He had not come to document the conditions of the Tibetan people, or even to question the continuing Chinese occupation of the once-independent nation. Beyond expansion of his own consciousness, he had come with no agenda at all. He was here simply to study with the Buddhist monks, to learn how (and if) their path to enlightenment could shed any illumination on his own spiritual journey.

During the Vietnam War, he had served as a door gunner and Crew Chief in the U.S. Army’s 128th Assault Helicopter Company. He’d flown more combat missions than he could count, usually perched in the open door of a Huey gunship with an M-60 machine gun between his knees. He’d been shot down twice, wounded once by enemy fire, and—of greater importance than either—he had been transformed.

Bill McDonald had come out of Vietnam with a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star, fourteen Air Medals, and a Purple Heart. But on his flight back to the United States, he had carried something much more important than the medals stowed neatly in his Army duffle bag. He had carried a profound sense of his personal spirituality.

Amid the horror of war, he had discovered his own connections to the mystical forces of the universe. He had become what he liked to call a ‘spiritual warrior.’ He no longer thought in terms of victory over military enemies. Instead, he concentrated on mastering his own mind, and exploring his place within the spiritual realm.

The events unfolding outside his window were at least partly—if not mostly—political in nature. If he knew anything at all about the mindset of the Chinese government, the reaction of the local authorities would be both rapid and brutal.

He’d spent the last several decades trying to avoid politics and violence, and he now had an unwitting ringside seat to an event that threatened to hold both of these corruptive influences in large measure.

Part of him was tempted to turn away from the window, and not allow himself to be drawn into the coming clash, even as an onlooker. But another part of him knew that the search for enlightenment is also the search for truth. Whatever happened in Barkhor Square this morning, the Chinese government would apply its colossal influence to controlling public opinion after the fact.

Like it or not, Reverend William H. McDonald was about to become the witness of history. If any truth at all was going to emerge from today’s events, it would be up to him to draw it forth.

Bill fumbled with the window latch, and then spent several seconds wrestling the balky window open a few inches. As the gap widened, the chanting voices of the crowd became louder and easier to make out.

He found his cell phone, and scrolled through the icons until he located the one that activated the phone’s video camera. Even through the window panes, the images on the screen of his phone were sharp and clear. He wasn’t sure if the phone’s tiny built-in microphone was sensitive enough to record the sounds drifting up from the street below. He didn’t know how to check, or how to adjust the audio levels (if such a thing were possible).

He decided to add a bit of personal narration, to provide some context for the video, in case the audio was too low or muffled to be intelligible.

“My name is William H. McDonald,” he said. “It’s approximately nine-thirty in the morning, on Saturday the twenty-third of November. I’m standing at the window of my second story room, in a guest house overlooking Barkhor Square, in the Tibetan city of Lhasa.”

He panned the camera phone right and left, taking in as much of the crowd as he could manage. “As you can see, a large group of people—I’m guessing that it’s somewhere between several hundred and a thousand—are gathered in the square. They are chanting, but I only know a handful of Tibetan words, so I’m not sure what exactly they’re saying. But I want to make it perfectly clear that this is a peaceful gathering. There have been absolutely no signs of violence or unruly behavior. This is not a mob. If this is a rally or a protest, it’s calm and orderly.”

He paused for several seconds, trying to decide whether or not to add anything else.

“I don’t know if my camera is recording their voices,” he said. “I hope it is, because this chant, or song… whatever it might be… is beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

His voice fell silent again, but he continued to move his little camera around to cover the crowd from every angle he could get from his limited vantage. He thought about going down into the square, to capture some of this from street level, but he decided against it. He probably had a better view of the crowd from up here, and if the police showed up—when they showed up—they would take away his phone the instant they recognized it for what it was. If he stayed up here, out of the way, he thought he had a fairly good chance of getting his phone and the video recording out of the country intact.

The reaction forces were not long in coming, and McDonald was careful to record their arrival.

“I see three trucks converging on the square,” he said. “Each truck contains thirty—maybe fifty—armed men, dressed in what appears to be riot gear. I can’t tell if these are soldiers, or some kind of police tactical squads, but they are definitely loaded for bear.”

“They’re climbing out of the trucks now, deploying in three positions. Doesn’t look like they’re trying to form a perimeter, or surround the crowd.”

McDonald’s narration halted again. He listened for several seconds to the unbroken chanting of the crowd. The people in the square had seen the armed squads arrive and deploy, but there was no move to fight or escape.

The crowd seemed to huddle more tightly together, as if drawing courage and determination from one another. The pitch of the chanting seemed to waver, but it didn’t quite falter. The singsong cadence continued, regaining its strength.

McDonald was about to comment on this, when he heard the thumps of the first gas grenades. He saw several smoking canisters arc into the crowd, and watched the protesters recoil from the billowing clouds of white vapor.

Teargas. He had encountered it during chemical warfare defense training in Army boot camp, and he had seen it used several times in Nam. He recognized the retching, face-clutching motions as every person who caught even a whiff of the stuff tried to stagger blindly away from the source of their sudden pain. The orderly crowd disintegrated into a chaos of lurching, frightened individuals.

“They’re using gas,” McDonald said. “I’m guessing that it’s teargas. Whatever it is, it’s certainly doing the trick. I think…”

But he never recorded his next thoughts, whatever they were, because his attention was shattered by the sound of gunfire, followed instantly by screams of terror and pain.

He felt a flash of nausea as adrenaline surged into his veins, broadcasting and amplifying the ancient chemical reflex to flee from danger. He could feel his palms begin to sweat, and a strange ringing in his ears that had nothing to do with the after-echo of gunshots.

He looked around quickly, trying to identify the source of the shots. He spotted several members of the riot control squad with their rifles unslung. He jerked his cell phone camera around in time to catch at least a dozen of the uniformed men firing directly into the milling throng of civilians. Sharp staccato muzzle reports, in three-round bursts—assault rifles configured for combat shooting.

All thoughts of narration were gone from Bill McDonald’s brain. He saw some of the protestors—a lot of them—jerk and stagger under the impacts of bullets. Blood flew; people fell to the ground, all to the accompaniment of rapid gunshots and screaming voices. This wasn’t riot control. It was a massacre. But why was it happening?

Not all of the soldiers or policemen were firing. In fact, most of them weren’t. Did that mean that they’d been ordered to fire, but many of them had disobeyed the command? Or maybe they hadn’t been ordered to fire, and some of them had taken the decision into their own hands.

That didn’t make sense. Or did it?

McDonald remembered something in the news about an attack on a trainload of Chinese soldiers a few days ago. Was this some kind of retaliation for that? Official retribution? Or maybe spontaneous revenge… Angry Chinese soldiers, who found themselves with Tibetan protesters in their crosshairs.

The more Bill McDonald thought about it, the more likely this last idea seemed. This protest had been going on for less than an hour. That wasn’t a lot of time for senior Chinese decision-makers to consider and approve a plan to use deadly force against the crowd. Also, the assault, or intervention, or whatever had begun with teargas. That pretty much guaranteed that the crowd would break up quickly. If the plan had been to mow the protestors down, it would have been smarter to corral them together, to allow for greater concentration of firepower.

McDonald continued to sweep the square with his camera. It was nearly empty now, except for the people who were down, and not going anywhere. After the shooting had started, the riot force had made no attempt to stem the escape of fleeing protestors. That also seemed to support the idea that the shooting had been unplanned, carried out in the heat of anger and the flush of violence.

This was the thing he had turned away from in his own quest for enlightenment. The world’s problems could not be solved through the barrel of a gun, the bodies in the square below—maybe eighty or a hundred of them—were proof of that.

Even the soldiers looked stunned by what had happened. They milled around for nearly a minute before they began to shamble toward the downed protestors, to check for signs of life in the bloody unmoving bodies.

McDonald shut off his phone camera, and backed away from the window. In a very short time, maybe only a few seconds from now, the soldiers were going to shake off their disbelief and start looking around for any witnesses to the shooting. A foreigner with a digital video camera would not fare well if they happened to spot him.

He slipped the camera into his pocket, and left the hotel by an exit that opened on an alley opposite the square. Ten minutes later, he was six blocks away, poking through the wares of a shop that catered to tourists. He didn’t need or want any souvenirs, but it gave him plenty of separation from the scene of the incident, and he was determined to stay off the streets until the cleanup was completed and the riot force was long gone.

His hands were still shaking, so he shoved them into his pockets. The plastic form of the phone was smooth and warm against the back of his right hand. No one but him had any idea what was recorded on the phone’s memory card. He planned to be well and safely out of Chinese territory before he revealed the ugly little chunk of history stored on that flat wafer of digital circuitry.

His first instinct was to arrange the first possible flight out of this place, but that might not be a smart move. It was probably wiser to wait three days, and follow the itinerary he’d already established. If he changed his travel plans without warning, the Chinese authorities might wonder why this American tourist was suddenly in such a hurry to depart their sphere of influence. Better to be patient. Safer that way.

By the time he was back on friendly soil, the People’s Republic of China would have implemented their information-control strategy. Based on past history, it seemed likely that the Chinese government would try to cover up the incident completely, deny that this bloodbath had ever taken place. If they did admit that the shootings had occurred, they would probably try to minimize the size of the protest, and the number of casualties. They might claim that all reports of injuries and deaths were fabricated by untrustworthy dissidents. They might even try to blame everything on the protestors, falsely accusing them of acts of violence against police or military forces.

Whether they resorted to outright denial or spin control, it was a near certainty that the Chinese government would do everything within its power to hide the ugly truth of what had happened here today. The video recording on Bill’s phone was absolute proof. It would shatter their denials and evasions. If they found out about it, he had little doubt that they would go to extreme lengths to silence him.

His plans to distance himself from politics didn’t seem to be working out too well at the moment, but perhaps that was part of the greater plan of the universe. Perhaps—at this point in his existence—his purpose was not to set himself apart from the affairs of man. Possibly, it was his destiny to become the agent of truth.

He would mediate and pray on the matter. That would usually bring him clarity of thought and unity of purpose.

But even if prayer and meditation didn’t yield the answers, he had a strong feeling that the universe was about to let him know what it had in mind.

CHAPTER 13

FINAL TRAJECTORY:

A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

In 1915, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels established a small panel of inventors to help the United States military prepare for possible involvement in the Great War in Europe—what we now refer to as World War I. Daniels observed that the technologies of combat in the early 1900s were evolving at an unprecedented rate, and he was concerned that the U.S. military was not properly armed or trained for mechanized warfare.

The resulting organization, the Naval Consulting Board, was comprised of 24 inventors whose charter was to provide ‘machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive genius of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare.’ Floundering under this lofty but somewhat vague mission statement, the board had no legal status, no funding, and no staff for the first year of its existence. In August of 1916, Congress appropriated an operating budget of $25,000, and the Naval Consulting Board was finally in business.

Despite the high hopes of Josephus Daniels, the board accomplished very little of note beyond approving camouflage paint schemes for civilian ships. One of the more significant exceptions was the development of the so-called aerial torpedo.

The brainchild of Elmer Sperry, one of the pioneers of practical gyroscope applications, the aerial torpedo was intended as an unmanned flying bomb, capable of attacking distant targets without human guidance or intervention. Sperry was fascinated by the remarkable potential of such a weapon, and he hoped that such awesome destructive power might actually deter countries from starting wars.

It should be noted that Sperry’s attitude toward destructive deterrence, as naive as it may appear in hindsight, was relatively common among arms developers of the early twentieth-century. Sperry and his contemporaries believed that—if the frightfulness of warfare could be escalated far enough—human beings would have no choice but to abandon war. Sadly, two World Wars, countless smaller wars, and a global nuclear arms race have disproved that theory.

Elmer Sperry may have been wrong in predicting the end of armed conflict, but his vision for an autonomous flying weapon captured the attention of the Naval Consulting Board. In 1917, the board awarded the Sperry Gyroscope Company a $200,000 contract to develop an aerial torpedo.

Sperry began by developing a gyroscopic autopilot system, and installing it on a Curtiss N-9 biplane. He wanted to start by demonstrating that an aircraft could regulate itself in flight, without a human at the controls. The N-9 carried a pilot to handle take-off and landing procedures, but the intent was to eventually transition to fully automatic flying. In the meantime, the pilot was also tasked to observe the plane in flight, and report on its performance under control of the autopilot.

After a number of successful test flights, Sperry supervised the construction of a purpose-built aerial torpedo airframe, powered by a two-cylinder engine. The actual manufacturing and assembly of the torpedo airframe prototype was carried out by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.

The torpedo prototype was modified to carry a pilot, on the assumption that human observation and assistance would be helpful in identifying and ironing out bugs during the early developmental tests. Sperry’s son, Lawrence, became the test pilot. Although the exact number of test flights is no longer certain, it’s commonly accepted that the Sperry Aerial Torpedo crashed at least four times with Lawrence Sperry at the controls. Available technical data suggests that these incidents were caused by mechanical problems in the prototype, rather than error on the part of the pilot.

In spite of these challenges, Elmer Sperry eventually felt that his torpedo design was sufficiently mature to operate without human assistance. The first unmanned flight of the Sperry Aerial Torpedo took place on March 6, 1918, in what is now regarded as the first successful launch of a guided missile.

Operating completely under automatic control, the torpedo climbed from its launch position to a pre-designated altitude, and continued in smooth, stable flight until the autopilot’s distance control ended the test at a preset range of 1,000 yards.

The maiden test of the Sperry Aerial Torpedo was a success. Unfortunately, it was not to be repeated.

Future flights did not go well, as the unmanned aircraft failed to achieve stable flight, deviated from its intended flight path, or simply fell out of the air. Ultimately, Sperry engineers discarded the purpose-built torpedo airframe, and returned to the Curtiss N-9 test bed to re-examine their entire approach to the design.

*  *  *

While Sperry and Curtiss were struggling with numerous technical challenges, the United States Army Aircraft Board decided to undertake its own aerial torpedo project. The Army asked inventor-engineer Charles Kettering to design an unmanned flying bomb, capable of striking a target at a range of 40 miles or more.

Kettering, who had observed tests of Sperry’s aircraft autopilot in 1917, agreed to take on the challenge of developing an aerial torpedo. While he recognized the potential of Sperry’s earlier engineering in unmanned flight control, Kettering wanted a cheaper and less complicated design.

Working in consultation with Orville Wright and the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, Kettering developed a lightweight airframe with dihedral biplane wings and a tapered cylindrical fuselage constructed of wood laminates and papier-mâché. Powered by an air-cooled 40 horsepower De Palma engine, the unmanned craft was 12.5 feet long, weighed 530 pounds, and was designed to carry a 180 pound explosive warhead.

Its official title was the Kettering Aerial Torpedo, but people began referring to it as the Kettering Bug almost from the start, possibly in reference to its dragonfly-like silhouette.

Kettering designated independent engineering teams to handle various parts of the developmental research. One of these teams designed an inexpensive portable launch system, consisting of a four-wheeled cradle which rode on two parallel rails.

Although he had set out to develop an autopilot that was cheaper and simpler than the version used in Sperry’s earlier N-9 tests, Kettering was not able to produce a workable model of his own. Ultimately, he asked Elmer Sperry for assistance. Although they were technically competitors, Sperry agreed to help with the autopilot problem.

At last, with the preliminary engineering problems resolved, the Kettering Bug was ready for testing in September of 1918. After several preliminary ground trials, the first full test flight was conducted on 2 October.

The flight began with a smooth takeoff, but it did not go well after that. Instead of turning onto its assigned heading and leveling off, the Bug climbed too steeply until it stalled and then crashed.

Kettering Aerial Torpedo, Patent Application (1927)

The Kettering Aerial Torpedo was not off to an auspicious start, but a number of subsequent tests were more successful. The Army was encouraged enough to order 100 prototypes, but only about 45 were produced before the Armistice was signed and World War I was over.

Seeing no further immediate need for the technology, and frankly not entirely impressed with the results up to that point, the Federal Government decided to combine the Army and Navy aerial torpedo programs. Competitive test events were more favorable for the Sperry design, and the Kettering Bug was abandoned.

The U.S. military conducted limited experiments over the next two years, before cancelling the project entirely in 1920.

The War to End All Wars had come to a close, and so had the aerial torpedo program. Optimists predicted a future of global peace and prosperity, in which there would be no need for the tools of battle. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Mankind was not finished with war, and war was certainly not finished with mankind.

Another global conflict, even larger and more brutal than the first, was looming just over the horizon. And military leaders of that coming war would not forget the idea of an unpiloted aerial bomb that could destroy enemies at a distance.

The first generation of unmanned flying weapons had not carried out a single attack under actual conditions of battle. They had not destroyed a single target, or killed so much as one enemy soldier. But the second generation of such weapons would not be long in coming. And when they did arrive, they would change everything.

CHAPTER 14

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN; SOUTH OF JAPAN

SUNDAY; 23 NOVEMBER

1348 hours (1:48 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

Commander Silva opened the door to the wardroom, but before she could step inside, she heard the voices. They were muffled, but she didn’t have any trouble making out the words.

“Holy shit!” the first voice said. “We’re really going into battle? You’re not just fucking with me? We’re really gonna do it?”

“I don’t know if we’ll be fighting,” the second voice said. “The big dogs don’t exactly share their battle plans with junior enlisted types. But we’re hauling ass down to the Bay of Bengal, and that’s where all the shooting is. I know that much.”

Silva glanced through the open door. The wardroom was empty of people. The chairs were all pushed neatly up against the long table, and the blue linen table cloth was bare, except for a carefully aligned row of coffee cups, stacked upside down on white saucers.

She stepped through the door, and closed it quietly behind herself. She knew where the voices were coming from now. The small square serving window from the wardroom pantry was not completely closed. A stainless steel shutter could be pulled down to cover the serving window, isolating the pantry from the wardroom to give the ship’s officers privacy during meals or meetings. When the shutter was open, the mess attendants could pass food or dishes back and forth between the wardroom and the adjoining pantry as they were serving meals to the officers.

Usually, the shutter was either completely open or completely closed. But whoever had used it last hadn’t pulled it all the way down, leaving a gap of four or five inches at the bottom of the serving window. The voices of the two young mess attendants were coming through the opening.

“Yeah,” the first mess attendant said. “But the Indians and the Chinese are shooting at each other, right? We’re just going down there for like, diplomacy reasons, or something. We’re not really going to fight.”

“I don’t know,” said the second mess attendant. “Those crazy bastards are launching missiles all over the place. We could end up in the middle of a shit storm, no matter what the big plan is supposed to be.”

Silva felt a momentary urge to clear her throat, or make some sudden noise that would let the two young Sailors know that their soon-to-be-captain was in the wardroom. Not that she needed their help to get a cup of coffee. She was quite happy to pour for herself. But it seemed rude to eavesdrop on their conversation.

Still… It was never easy for a commanding officer—or a prospective commanding officer—to find out what the Sailors on the deck plate were truly thinking. Over time, a CO could develop a rapport with the crew that would bridge that communication gap, at least in part. But Silva was new to the Towers. She hadn’t yet had time to get a good feel for the men and women who would be her officers, much less the enlisted crew.

She would be assuming command soon, but she was a complete stranger to these people. And they were strangers to her. For the moment, any qualms she felt about listening in on a private conversation were outweighed by her desire to know what the junior Sailors were saying amongst themselves.

She picked up the nearest coffee cup, moving carefully to avoid making a noise. The mess attendants were still talking.

“You got that right,” the first mess attendant said. “This ship has a way of being at the center of the fucking crosshairs when the bombs and the bullets start flying.”

The second mess attendant snorted. “Dude, have you seen the pictures? Guys in my division have pics of the damage from that last shoot out, up in the Russian ice pack. The forward gun was totally blown away. Completely fucking gone. Nothing left but a crater in the deck.”

“I heard about that,” the other sailor said. “But I haven’t seen any pics.”

Silva had seen pictures of the damage from the last deployment, and pictures of the damage from the deployment before that. These kids might be a bit too free with the profanity, but they were right about one thing; the Towers did have a way of winding up in the thick of the fighting.

She lifted the coffee pot from its warmer, and poured herself a cup. The liquid was dark, and the odor was acrid. An old Sailor would call this good Navy java, but Silva didn’t care for coffee that had been on the burner too long. She could live with it though, and she didn’t want to interrupt her impromptu intelligence-gathering session to ask for a fresh pot.

She eyed the dark liquid dubiously, before deciding to double her usual dose of creamer to take the worst of the edge off of the carbon taste.

“I don’t know whether to be excited, or scared shitless,” the first attendant said.

The second attendant laughed. “I’m going for both.”

The first mess attendant didn’t join in the laugh. “I’m sure glad Captain Bowie is still the skipper. If this crap with the Chinese had happened two weeks from now, we’d be stuck with the new CO.”

“What have you got against Commander Silva?” the second attendant asked. “She seems okay to me.”

“I don’t have anything against her,” the first attendant said quietly. “I’m sure she’s fine, and I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. But if we’re going into battle, I’d rather have Captain Bowie in command.”

“I know what you mean,” the other Sailor said. “But we don’t get to make that choice. In a couple of weeks, she’s going to be the skipper. We’ve just got to hope she’s up to the job.”

“Yeah, but what if she isn’t up to it? Has she ever been in a real combat situation before? What if she doesn’t have what it takes when the shooting starts?”

The second mess attendant snorted again. “You need to stop worrying about that shit, and start worrying about these dishes. We’ve got to start getting ready for evening chow.”

Commander Silva set her cup down on the table. She didn’t feel like coffee anymore. She walked out of the wardroom, the untasted contents of her cup swirling gently as the door swung shut behind her.

CHAPTER 15

MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE COMPOUND

AUGUST 1ST BUILDING

BEIJING, CHINA

MONDAY; 24 NOVEMBER

9:11 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

Vice Premier Lu Shi sat at his desk, leafing slowly through the stack of photographs for the tenth or eleventh time. The photos varied in size, age, and quality. A few had been composed by professional photographers, and some were recent high-resolution digital images, printed on glossy card stock. Most were ordinary snapshots, taken at various times over a period of nearly three decades. There were even a half dozen Polaroids, alternately fading from exposure to sunlight, or merging into supersaturation by color emulsions that had continued to incrementally intensify with the passage of years.

Lu Shi had scavenged the pictures from every family photo album he’d been able to lay hands on. The collection depicted indoor scenes, outdoor scenes, close-ups, wide shots, group poses, and solo portraits. The images shared a single common element. Every one contained Lu Shi’s son, Lu Jianguo.

Here was Lu Jianguo at age six or seven, playing a pickup game of soccer with a gaggle of other boys on the grass in Chaoyang park. And here was plump baby Jianguo, swaddled in orange silk for the traditional red egg and ginger ceremony at which he had received his name. Fourteen year-old Lu Jianguo, wearing the red scarf of the Young Pioneers, marching in ranks with his comrades in Tiananmen Square. A snapshot of the boy at about age eight, sleeping stretched out on the back seat of a limousine, with his head resting on his father’s knee. A formal portrait of Lu Jianguo in a severely-tailored gray suit. He must have been about twenty-five in that shot. It had probably been taken shortly after he’d become a junior secretary in the Ministry of Public Security.

The phone on Lu Shi’s desk rang, but his brain registered the sound only vaguely. He continued to leaf through the stack of photographs, searching for something that he could neither name, nor fully imagine. Some indefinable sliver of information or fragment of insight that could make sense out of the senselessness that had seized control of his life.

How could Lu Jianguo—this beautiful boy, this bright young intellect, this brilliant communist—be gone? How was such a thing even possible? The very idea was wrong. Hideously wrong. Monstrously wrong.

At some point Lu Shi’s eyes ceased to register the photos as they passed through his fingers. The motions of his hands became mechanical repetition.

In the late nineteen-seventies, when Lu Shi had himself been a rising young star in the Communist Party, he had fought hard to bring China’s one-child policy into being. It hadn’t been a popular law in those days, and it wasn’t much more popular now. But it had been a necessary measure.

By 1976, China’s population had multiplied to nearly a billion, and the rate of growth had still been increasing. If the trend had been allowed to continue, the People’s Republic would ultimately have devolved into famine, and economic collapse.

The decision to limit each family to a single child had not been made lightly, and it had not been easy to enforce. As with any restrictive regulation, there were exemptions which could be exploited by the privileged elite. Several senior party members had taken full advantage of the loopholes. Lu Shi had not been one of them. The one-child policy was important to China’s future. Lu Shi could not very well espouse the benefits of the policy, while violating it himself.

So, he had obeyed the law which he had helped to create. He had fathered only one child. Now, that child was gone, and the future was gone with him.

CHAPTER 16

USS CALIFORNIA (SSN-781)

NORTHERN INDIAN OCEAN

TUESDAY; 25 NOVEMBER

1522 hours (3:22 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Captain James Patke scanned the tactical display on his command console, carefully studying the wide ring of icons that represented the frigates and destroyers encircling the Chinese aircraft carrier. Like most submarine commanders, Patke had an almost Zen-like level of patience when he was on the hunt, and the current mission was putting that patience to the test.

China was a latecomer to carrier warfare, but their defensive screening tactics were turning out to be surprisingly effective. It had taken Patke and his crew nearly two days of unhurried probing to find a weak spot in the aircraft carrier’s defensive perimeter. There had been opportunities to slip in more quickly, but Patke was determined to be even more cautious than usual.

The Chinese and Indian navies were both pretty damned trigger happy right now. If you made the mistake of spooking either one of them, you were likely to get your ass shot off.

Patke looked up from the display and glanced toward his Officer of the Deck. “Take us to periscope depth.”

The USS California was a Virginia class attack submarine, so she didn’t technically have a periscope. In place of the traditional Type 18 scopes used by other classes of U.S. attack subs, the Virginia class boats were each equipped with a pair of AN/BVS-1 photonics masts. The new fiber optic system was both technically and tactically superior to its predecessors, but no self-respecting submarine officer ever wanted to utter the phrase ‘photonic mast depth.’ As a result, much of the old periscope-related terminology remained in use, even though the periscope itself was no longer around.

The OOD nodded. “Sir, periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth one hundred twenty feet.”

The Diving Officer acknowledged the command and immediately relayed his own order to the Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth one-two-zero feet.”

The Planesman pulled back slowly on the control yoke, keeping his eyes glued to the plane angle indicator. “Sir, my bubble is up five degrees, coming to one-two-zero feet.”

The submarine began its slow and cautious ascent.

The OOD keyed the mike on his headset. “Sonar—Conn, coming shallow in preparation for going to periscope depth. Report all contacts.”

Captain Patke observed the smooth operation of his control room crew at work. This was a good team—confident, but not cocky. If any of them were nervous about penetrating the defensive screen of a foreign carrier strike group, it didn’t show.

Patke was actually a tad nervous, himself. This was not a simulation. If something went wrong here, things could turn ugly.

He wasn’t particularly concerned about the destroyers and frigates. He took pride in the superb acoustic silencing technology of his boat. The California was quiet enough to get fairly close to most surface ship sonars without being detected.

The Chief of the Boat, who held the traditional bubblehead’s opinion that all surface ships are targets, liked to claim that the California could sneak in close enough to piss on the hull numbers of any surface vessel in the world. Patke wasn’t ready to go quite that far, but the COB’s boast wasn’t completely off base.

But the PLA Navy’s antisubmarine warfare helicopters were no joke, and somewhere out there, a Type-93 attack sub was operating in support of the carrier group. Patke’s sonar team had maintained an intermittent track on the Chinese submarine for the last two days. At the moment, it was stationed on the far side of the carrier’s defensive envelope. If the California were detected, the Type-93 would come after her, and the sub would be a hell of a lot harder to shake off than the surface escorts.

*  *  *

The California reached periscope depth about fifteen minutes later, after a brief pause at 120 feet to check for shapes and shadows: the silhouettes caused by ships floating on the surface.

The sensor head of the California’s photonic mast rose slowly through the surface of the water. The narrow dome-shaped housing contained a color video camera, a high-resolution black and white camera, and a thermal imaging camera for infrared target detection and evaluation. All three cameras scanned continually as the sensor head rotated through a full 360 degree sweep.

The digital video feed from each camera was relayed down to the control room of the California in real-time, via high bandwidth fiber optic cables at the core of the photonic mast.

Seated at his command console, Patke jogged the pistol-grip joystick until the cameras spun around to cover the aircraft carrier. He thumbed a button to trigger the video recorders, and zoomed in for a tighter view.

The big Chinese warship had a strange history, and not much was known about her current configuration or capabilities. Built by the Soviet Union during the last years of the Cold War, she had been intended as the newest vessel of the Admiral Kuznetsov class. But the ship had been unfinished when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, and she had eventually been sold at auction to a Hong Kong-based travel agency, who supposedly intended to convert the ship into a floating hotel and gambling parlor.

The floating casino plan had never materialized, and the unfinished ex-Soviet carrier had somehow ended up in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The PLA Navy had re-christened the ship Liaoning, in honor of Liaoning Province in northeast China.

Captain Patke nodded to himself as he watched the crisp digital video feed on his command console. This was the closest look that anyone had managed of the Liaoning since the ship had gone into operation. The intel weenies were going to have a field day when they got their paws on these video recordings. They would scrutinize every frame of video, from every available angle—examining antenna placements, weapons fixtures, and even the routing of topside cables and pipes—searching for any and all clues to the ship’s capabilities or limitations.

The operational parameters of the original Russian design were well known. But the Chinese had made extensive modifications, and no one—with the possible exception of the PLA Navy—had a firm understanding of how those changes would impact the combat potential of the ship.

So Patke was nearly as busy as the video recorders, soaking up and evaluating every detail he could lay eyes on. They were facing the port side of the aircraft carrier, from about twenty degrees aft of the port beam. From this angle, Patke noted the squashed pepperbox silhouette of an FL-3000N missile launcher, and the vaguely robotic form of a Type 730 Close-In Weapon System. Judging from the placement of both systems, it was a fairly safe bet that each of them had a mirror-image counterpart on the opposite side of the ship.

Patke tilted the joystick forward, zooming in tighter, and beginning a slow pan down the length of the Chinese warship. “Alright, you sneaky bastards,” he said. “Let’s see what kind of surprises you’ve got up your sleeve.”

CHAPTER 17

--------------------------------------------------

From: <robert.monkman@navy.mil>

Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 4:31 PM

To: <b.haster@ucsd.edu>

Subject: Missing You

My Dearest Beth,

Just another happy day aboard the mighty USS Midway. At least I think this is the Midway. I’ve taken so many wrong turns that I might be on a different ship by now. Six weeks, and I still can’t find my way around this beast. I have to scatter a trail of breadcrumbs every time I leave my stateroom, or I’ll never make it back to my bunk.

Aside from the ever-present danger of getting lost on the way to the briefing room, things are going pretty well. The guys in my squadron are great. I catch the usual ration of bullshit for being a nugget, but I won’t always be the new kid on the block. What happens down here doesn’t matter all that much anyway. What really counts is what happens in the sky, and nobody can lay a hand on me up there.

Remember Chucky Barnes who reported to the squadron at the same time I did? He’s earned himself a new callsign, and he’s not real happy about it. He used to be Barnstormer, which isn’t too bad, if you ask me. But a couple of days ago, he lost his cookies all over the 0-5 level catwalk. Now everybody in the squadron is calling him ‘Upchuck,’ and it looks like it’s going to stick. (No pun intended.)

My lead, the infamous Poker, has been threatening to change my callsign to ‘Monkey Man,’ which is apparently the most creative thing that his limited imagination can do with the name Monkman. He’s been around so long that his first wingman was Wilbur Wright, so you can’t really expect much. But for now, I’m still Rob the ‘Monk’ Monkman, and I like that just fine. That’s me, baby – the Shaolin monk of the skies, kicking butt with my badass aerial Kung Fu.

Okay, enough of that hero-of-the-skies crap. So far, my aerial Kung Fu has been limited to simulators and unarmed practice engagements against other U.S. Navy flyboys. I look pretty damned good in training, but I’ve never flown against an actual threat. If I ever go up against the real deal, I’ll be happy if they don’t change my callsign to ‘Monkey Butt,’ or something equally flattering.

Speaking of the real deal, we’ll be entering our Op Area just in time for Thanksgiving. We’re only supposed to be doing the observe-protect-stabilize thing, but I’m still kind of nervous. The Chinese and Indian navies have traded shots several times now, and both sides are pretty jumpy. I just hope they remember that we’re not the enemy. I’d hate to get my butt shot off while I’m trying to get my turkey dinner on.

Just kidding, baby. I’m sure everything is going to be fine. We’ve got a full carrier strike group, with all the bells and whistles. We’re not here to fight, and nobody is going to be stupid enough to start any trouble with us.

I sure would love to be home tomorrow, helping you get the turkey ready for the oven. We really are going to have to try that one of these days. We can’t keep doing Thanksgiving at your Mom’s house forever. Or maybe we can… Her sweet potato pie is still the best I’ve ever tasted, and that bean casserole thing she does is amazing.

Speaking of amazing, I happen to think that your Mother’s only daughter is pretty fantastic, now that I mention it. That would be you, Miss Muffin. I wonder if your Mom knows that you do most of your cooking in only panties and my old Chargers jersey. Maybe I should save that piece of information for blackmail at some future date. Hmmm…

Okay, I shouldn’t have gone there. Now all I can think about is your cute little butt prancing around the kitchen in panties. Maybe I better go take a cold shower.

I love you, Beth. I miss you more with each second that passes.

Yours always,

Rob

LT(jg) Robert J. Monkman

VFA-228 Marauders

USS Midway (CVN-82)

--------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER 18

MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE COMPOUND

AUGUST 1ST BUILDING

BEIJING, CHINA

TUESDAY; 25 NOVEMBER

9:48 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

General Chen Caihou was the first to break the silence. “Comrades, the situation with India is getting out of control. We must act now, before it is too late.” His words were firm, but the tone of his voice was carefully neutral, pitched to avoid any trace of criticism or accusation. He allowed his gaze to take in each of the other eight men seated at the circular table.

Including himself, all nine statutory members of the Central Military Commission were present. When Chen’s eyes came to Lu Shi, they paused for an instant before moving on to the next man.

The table was circular, to symbolize the equality of the commission’s members. There was no bourgeois seat of honor here. Just dedicated communists, meeting on equal footing to debate and decide matters of military strategy.

At least that was the theory. In reality, the greatest concentration of authority in the room lay with Lu Shi. His power as Chairman of the Central Military Commission was technically nominal, but the man was also the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China.

Although Xiao still carried the formal title of Premier, the old leader had long since delegated all serious decisional authority to Lu Shi.

This made Lu a dangerous man to cross. It also put General Chen Caihou and his fellow members of the Central Military Commission in a very delicate position. If the present skirmishes with India continued to escalate, the People’s Republic could find itself in a full scale war with a major military adversary. General Chen had little doubt that China would emerge victorious from such a war, but the cost would likely be staggering, in both financial terms, and in terms of human life. The conflict needed to end before things deteriorated that far.

General Chen’s eyes circled the table again, his words still lingering unanswered in the air. He had discussed this issue with several other members of the commission in advance, and he had received agreement and promises of endorsement. Chen would flatly (but respectfully) raise the topic, and his covert allies would add their voices in support.

But he had spoken up, and the room was silent.

Lu Shi’s eyes also made the circle of the assembled faces. “Someone is letting you down, Comrade General,” he said softly. He let his gaze continue to wander until it came to center on General Chen.

“Who is it?” Lu asked. He raised one eyebrow slightly. “Which of our comrades are supposed to be flocking to your banner right now?”

General Chen sat for several seconds, before he turned to meet the Vice Premier’s scrutiny. “Comrade Lu, we share your grief over the loss of Lu Jianguo. He was a fine young man, and a true communist. His death was a great tragedy. But is that sufficient provocation for war?”

“This is not about my son,” Lu Shi said. His voice was low and hard. “This is about security and national sovereignty. Those who harbor the enemies of China are themselves the enemies of China.”

General Guo Jinping, Chief of General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, cleared his throat. “With all due respect, Comrade Lu… Is it wise to invite a major military confrontation in order to punish a handful of sewer rats who destroyed a train?”

Lu smiled sadly. “Xīng xīng zhī huǒ kě yǐ liáo yuán.” It was an ancient Chinese proverb which could be translated literally as ‘A single spark can burn the entire prairie.’ Contextually, it was a reminder that leaders must never underestimate the potential destructive power that an apparently minor problem can cause.

“The Qinghai railway is one of the greatest engineering accomplishments in history,” Lu said. “In places, the track elevation reaches more than 5,000 meters. Many aircraft don’t fly that high. When we brought in the Swiss to develop construction methods for laying rail across the permafrost, the Swiss engineers said it was impossible. The Western press called the entire project a five billion dollar boondoggle. They said it couldn’t be done. But we did it. Then, they predicted that the track would fail within a year. But the Qinghai railway carries 3,000 of our people to the Tibet Autonomous Region every single day.”

Lu’s eyes zeroed in on General Guo Jinping. “Comrade General, we can replace the train cars and the engines. We lost nearly two-hundred of your soldiers in the attack, but the PLA can recruit that many replacements in a single afternoon. Between the dead and wounded, there were more than 1,000 civilian casualties as well, but the People’s Republic can also cope with those losses. We can deal with the damaged equipment, and the human victims, and the financial cost. But we cannot permit a direct assault on our national prestige… Our national resolve and our political ideologies have been directly challenged. If we allow such a challenge to go unanswered, China becomes weak in the eyes of our enemies, and the eyes of the world.”

Air Force General Xu Zhiyuan, Commander of the PLA Air Force, nodded respectfully. “I believe we will all concede that there are significant political implications,” he said. “But is it wise to allow political issues to devolve into outright warfare?”

Lu turned toward the general. “I’m surprised that you would even ask such a question,” he said. “Have you forgotten the teachings of Chairman Mao? ‘Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.’”

General Xu nodded again. “Chairman Mao also said that, ‘Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.’ But he was speaking at a time when China was fighting for its very existence. Is that honestly the case now, Comrade Vice Premier? After decades of peaceful relations, have our Indian neighbors suddenly become a threat to our national survival? For that matter, would we be in conflict with them at all if we had not used a hundred cruise missiles to hammer an Indian village into dust?”

Before Lu Shi could respond, General Chen raised a hand. “How we got into this situation is no longer relevant. Regardless of motivation or intention, we did strike their village, and they have retaliated. So far, the skirmishes have been relatively isolated, but that’s rapidly changing. We are caught in a cycle of escalating retaliations. The question is; how do we break the cycle before it gets completely out of control?”

“I agree,” General Guo said. “If we are not careful, this could become to us what Vietnam was to the Americans. Or what Afghanistan was to the Soviet Union. A bloody quagmire, with no prospect of a graceful conclusion.”

“This is already our version of Vietnam!” Lu snapped. “Can none of you see that? Think about it… Vietnam was not a technical failure for the Americans. Nor was it a tactical failure. The American military was well equipped, well trained, well supplied, and well supported. By comparison, their adversaries were a pack of semi-literate monkeys squatting in rice paddies and swinging through the jungles. So, why did the Americans lose?”

“The communist ideal,” General Guo said tentatively. “The North Vietnamese were sustained by the superior teachings of Marx and Chairman Mao…”

Lu Shi slapped his open palm on the table. “Bái mù!” Literally, this could be translated as ‘white-eyed,’ or ‘blind.’ In this context it meant something like ‘you’re looking the wrong way, you idiot!’

Lu’s voice was still sharp. “The communist ideal had nothing to do with it,” he said. “If it were a matter of ideologies, the Soviets would have used their communist philosophies to triumph over the Afghanis. Instead, the mighty Russian military was vanquished by a few tribes of unwashed goatherds hiding in caves. So I ask you again… Why did the Americans lose in Vietnam? Why were the Soviets defeated in Afghanistan? How were two military superpowers both routed by inferior enemies? When you know the answer to that question, you’ll begin to understand what is at stake in our current conflict.”

The room was silent.

Lu Shi looked from one face to the next. “No one? The military brains of our nation are seated around this table, and not one of you can answer such a simple question?”

Still, no one spoke.

“Very well,” Lu Shi said. “I’ll answer the question for you… The Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan for the same reason that America lost in Vietnam. Because their national will was weak.”

“With all due respect, Comrade Lu, that may be a bit of an oversimplification,” General Chen said.

“It is not an oversimplification,” Lu said. “It is a basic statement of truth, and any serious examination of the facts will prove it.” He jabbed a finger toward General Guo. “Comrade General, how many military deaths did North Vietnam suffer during combat actions against the Americans?”

“Roughly a million or so,” the general said.

“Closer to 1.1 million,” Lu said. “And how many deaths among North Vietnamese civilians?”

“I’m not sure, Comrade Vice Premier,” said General Guo. “I’ve seen figures as low as 50,000 and as high as 300,000.”

“Fair enough,” Lu said. “The numbers vary significantly from one source to another. But let’s assume a number on the low end, somewhere around 100,000 civilian deaths. Combined, that puts the death toll for North Vietnam at somewhere around 1.2 million.”

Lu glanced around the table again. “Can any of you tell me how many American military personnel died in Vietnam?”

“I believe,” said General Chen, “that the final count was about 58,000 American dead.”

“That’s about right,” Lu said. He lifted both of his hands, and turned them palm up, shifting each slowly in a reciprocal up-and-down motion, as though they were the arms of a balance scale. “The North Vietnamese lost 1.2 million, and much of their national infrastructure was bombed out of existence. By contrast, the Americans lost fewer than 60,000 soldiers, and the national infrastructure of the United States was completely untouched.”

Lu dropped his hands. “America was winning on the battlefield. They were winning economically. Their ability to wage war was not even slightly impaired. So I ask you, comrades… How did the United States lose the Vietnam War?”

Again, no one in the room responded.

“Their weapons did not fail them,” Lu Shi said. “Their soldiers didn’t fail them. Their economy was not in danger of collapse. Only one thing failed them, but it was enough to send the indomitable American military slinking home like a beaten mongrel. Their national willpower failed. They lost the desire to win. And because of that, they allowed themselves to be defeated by an inferior enemy.”

Lu’s eyes blazed. “That’s what our current conflict is about. It’s not about trains. It’s not about 200 dead PLA soldiers. It’s not about some rat-bitten Indian village. And it’s not about my son. It’s about the strength of our national will. It’s about refusing to bow to a weaker adversary.”

“I… ah…” General Guo looked at the other faces gathered around the table, and swallowed. “How far do we go with this?”

“As far as it has to go,” Lu Shi said. “Until the Indian government backs down.”

“But what if they don’t back down?” General Guo asked.

“They will,” Lu said.

“But what if they don’t?” Guo repeated.

“They are an inferior adversary,” Lu Shi said. “If we raise the stakes far enough, they will have no choice but to back down. And if they don’t… Our Indian neighbors will discover that they do have a breaking point.”

CHAPTER 19

LHASA GONGGAR AIRPORT

SHANNAN REGION, TIBET

WEDNESDAY; 26 NOVEMBER

8:50 AM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

The wheels of the China Eastern Airbus A320 left the runway of Lhasa Gonggar Airport exactly on schedule, and Reverend Bill McDonald took his first easy breath in three days. He hadn’t slept more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time since the massacre in Barkhor Square. Now that he was finally in the air and leaving Chinese territory, he could relax.

His cell phone was safe in his pocket, and the memory card with the video recording was still intact. In three and a half hours, he’d be landing in Kathmandu. Then, after a four hour layover, he’d be on a Cathay Pacific flight to San Francisco International by way of Hong Kong.

He’d be home by tomorrow evening, in time for a late Thanksgiving dinner, but he still hadn’t decided what to do with the video recording. He needed to get it into the hands of the right people. That much was obvious. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure who the right people might be.

He’d considered going straight to CNN or one of the nationally-recognized newspapers, but he didn’t have any contacts in the world of journalism. The major news organizations probably got several thousand crackpot calls a day. If he cold-called the offices of any of the big papers or studios, they’d probably lump him in with the xenophobes and the conspiracy nuts. He’d never get a chance to present his video to anyone with the power to make the story public on a national scale. That pretty much ruled out the major media approach, unless he could figure out a way to get someone high up to take his story seriously.

He’d also thought about cutting out the middleman, and going public with the video on the internet. He could post it to the top dozen streaming video sites and wait for it to go viral, like so many of the video clips from the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. But there were hundreds of millions of videos on the web, maybe billions. Only a small fraction of them ever captured large scale public attention.

Bill didn’t have an established following on any of the popular video websites, and it might take him years to build enough of a reputation to attract a significant audience. He could upload the recording to a hundred websites, or a thousand, but it wouldn’t do any good if no one bothered to watch it.

He might get lucky and the video would spread through the internet like wildfire, until everyone was talking about it and politicians were arguing over it on network news. Or it might vanish into the great ocean of the web without creating a ripple.

The irony of the situation was not lost on him. Despite his personal aversion to violence and the machineries of politics, the video clip in his phone was the physical manifestation of both. He had flown to Tibet in search of one sort of truth, but the fates had selected him to become the witness and bearer of an entirely different sort of truth. One that could affect the lives of many people, and perhaps even the fates of nations. He quite literally carried the truth in his pocket, but he had no idea of what to do with it.

*  *  *

He was still puzzling over the problem when his plane touched down at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. And he hadn’t solved it four hours later, when his Cathay Pacific flight left the runway en route to Hong Kong.

He was so exhausted now that he was practically a zombie. He reclined his seat, closed his eyes and tried to surrender to sleep, but his brain remained stubbornly awake. His mind refused to let go of the problem, turning it over and over ceaselessly and uselessly.

He tried to meditate, to release the cares of the world, and allow himself to find his spiritual center. He controlled his breathing, and one-by-one, willed every muscle in his body to relax.

He was calm… He was focused… He was at peace…

He was… awake.

His eyes came open. It was no use. Sleep was impossible.

His weary hands fumbled through the seat pouch and came up with an in-flight magazine. He leafed through the pages, only half glancing at the photos, and ignoring the text entirely. His eyes were too tired to make reading seem very interesting. He was just hoping to distract his brain long enough to get some rest.

When he reached the end of the magazine, he started over at the beginning, the glossy pages becoming a repeating collage of random photographs and marketing logos. On the third or fourth trip through the half-seen pages, an image caught his eye. It was a group of paintings by a young Indonesian artist, who was apparently getting his first showing in some upscale New York art gallery.

Near the center of the page was a triptych: three rectangular paintings of the same scene, each from a slightly different angle. At the center of each panel was the portrait of an old man with strongly Asian features, shown alternately from the front, right, and left profiles. In all three paintings a circle of rusty barbed wire hovered in the air in front of the old man’s face, like a strangely offset halo or the bevel of an old fashioned cameo.

McDonald stared at the three paintings, focusing not on the old man’s face, but on the circles of barbed wire. They reminded him of something—a billboard, or an advertisement, or something that he had once seen on television.

He closed his burning eyes and tried to remember. Three circles of barbed wire, lined up in a row...

And then it came to him, a poster he hadn’t seen for years. For several weeks before the 2008 Winter Olympics in China, that poster had been everywhere. Five circles of barbed wire atop a chain link fence, silhouetted against an overcast yellow sky. Three of the circles had been on top and two on bottom, clearly mimicking the famous five-ring pattern of the international Olympic symbol. In the upper right-hand ring had been a simple but effective message: Beijing 2008. A ragged scrap of signboard hanging from the fence had enumerated the extensive human rights violations occurring in China as dissident citizens and social activists were rounded up and imprisoned to keep them out of public view during the Olympics.

Bill McDonald’s exhausted brain could somehow remember the poster perfectly, and he could still see the logo at the bottom of the signboard. Amnesty International.

That was it! As soon as those two words popped into his head, he knew he had found the solution to his problem. He might not be able to capture the attention of the major media, but a global human rights organization could. If they brought the video clip to the major media, they would be listened to. CNN and the other news networks wouldn’t dare to ignore a story this big, not if it came from Amnesty International. They wouldn’t risk being left out of what might turn out to be the biggest human rights story since Tiananmen Square.

Amnesty International. It was the obvious answer. So simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

The video clip in his pocket had dwindled from a massively insoluble problem to a series of easily accomplished steps. It shouldn’t take more than a few quick phone calls to arrange a meeting with someone who would listen—someone whose entire job was to look for exactly the kind of evidence that Bill McDonald carried, and bring it to the attention of the world.

He could probably get a contact number right off the Amnesty International website. And then he could…

Before he could formulate his next step, the Reverend William H. McDonald—former Soldier, spiritual warrior, and bearer of the truth—fell asleep in Seat #31B, somewhere over the South China Sea.

CHAPTER 20

BEIJING, CHINA

PREMIER’S RESIDENCE

WEDNESDAY; 26 NOVEMBER

1:35 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

As usual, Lu Shi’s guards were stopped at the front door, and he had to enter alone.

Lu didn’t like being forced to leave his guards behind. Not because he didn’t feel safe here; the Premier’s residence was one of the most secure buildings in China. Lu’s objection was of a more attitudinal nature. After a lifetime of careful and methodical maneuvering, he suddenly found that he was impatient with anything which resembled an obstacle.

Having his guards held up at the entrance was an unwelcome reminder that there were certain places and circumstances in which his desires were not the deciding factor.

He had to remind himself that he was still officially the number two man in the Chinese government. The fact that Lu effectively ran the country was an open secret, but the formal power belonged to Xiao Qishan, who was the Premier of China—at least in title.

Lu generally tried not to think of Xiao as a figurehead. Xiao was a good man, and in his day, he had served the party well. Nevertheless, the term figurehead was not entirely inaccurate. The old man’s political clout had dwindled away to practically nothing. His leverage was gone. He had no more favors to call in.

Xiao held office now, because Lu Shi permitted it. If Lu pulled his support, Xiao Qishan would not be sitting in the Premier’s chair a month later.

What’s more, the old man knew it. Although neither one of them ever spoke about it directly, there was an understanding between Lu Shi and Xiao Qishan. Xiao gave speeches and held press conferences, and Lu made the major policy decisions that kept the nation moving forward.

That made this meeting doubly annoying. Xiao Qishan had sent for him, as though Lu was a low-grade bureaucrat, or some minor political functionary. Lu Shi was not pleased. Not at all.

He’d been tempted to ignore the summons. He could have used the opportunity to remind Xiao of where the power in China really lay. But such a blatant show of strength wasn’t necessary, and it wouldn’t harm Lu to humor the old dragon.

Lu made a deliberate effort to smile when he was shown into Xiao’s office. The old man was seated at his desk, reading from a small book with a tattered red cover. Lu Shi recognized it instantly as hong baoshu, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, popularly known in the west as the ‘Little Red Book.’

Xiao looked up, and smiled.

Lu inclined his head—a gesture somewhere between a nod, and a minimal bow. “You sent for me, Comrade Premier?”

Xiao closed the book, using a finger to mark his place within the pages. “Ah, Comrade Lu. Thank you for coming, old friend.”

Lu Shi inclined his head again. “I am always at your service, Comrade Premier.” Not an accurate statement, but it sounded appropriately polite and respectful.

Xiao waved toward a chair. Lu pretended not to see the gesture. He remained standing.

A slight frown creased the Premiere’s brow, but he didn’t insist. “I would like to speak to you about this… situation… with our Indian neighbors. Some of our esteemed comrades on the Central Military Commission are… concerned…”

Lu Shi’s laugh contained more bitterness than humor. “Some of our esteemed comrades are timid old women.”

Xiao laid the red book on the desk top, his finger still marking the spot where he had been reading. “You are, of course, more familiar with our comrades on the commission than I am,” the old man said. “And perhaps some of them are overly cautious. But this seems to be an area in which caution may be prudent.”

Lu Shi resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. “I have no problem with caution,” he said. “And prudence is a virtue in leaders. But I’m not talking about caution or prudence. I’m talking about timidity. Fear. The lack of courage.”

He nodded toward the red book. “Comrade Premier, you are more dedicated to the words and spirit of Chairman Mao than any man I’ve ever met.”

That much was certainly true. As Xiao’s once-formidable power bloc continued to erode, the old dragon’s thoughts were becoming increasingly buried in the past. He spent his days studying the speeches and writings of Mao, in the forlorn belief that such studies made him a wiser leader. In the process, he somehow managed to ignore the fact that his leadership was now mostly imaginary.

But Lu Shi was not above delving into the words of Mao, in order to bring the conversation around to a more favorable angle.

He reached for the red book, and lifted it gently from the old man’s fingers. “Do you remember what Chairman Mao had to say about communists who are too timid to make difficult decisions?”

Xiao nodded. “Of course…”

Lu returned the nod. “And I’m certain, Comrade Premier, that you remember what Chairman Mao wrote about those who protect the enemies of the communist revolution?”

The old man nodded again. “I remember…”

Lu Shi held the unopened book between his palms. “In his wisdom, Chairman Mao cautioned us to unite with our real friends, in order to attack our real enemies. He reminded us that leaders must always follow this principle, in order to avoid leading the masses astray.”

“March, nineteen-twenty-six,” Xiao said. “The chairman was speaking about the analysis of the classes in Chinese society…”

“Yes,” said Lu Shi. “But was Mao speaking metaphorically? Or did he mean for future leaders to put his ideas into action?”

“He meant for us to act,” Xiao said. “He meant always for us to act.”

“I agree,” said Lu. “If we apply Mao’s teachings to our current situation, should we consider our Indian neighbors to be enemies, or friends?”

Xiao hesitated. “I’m not sure we have enough information to make such a stark distinction.”

“They are deliberately sheltering known enemies of China,” Lu said. “Enemies who have destroyed billions of Yuan in property, massacred our soldiers without provocation, and killed hundreds of our citizens. Yet, our Indian neighbors welcome these terror mongers, and treat them as honored guests. Protect them from extradition, and punishment, even while they’re plotting further acts of destruction and murder.”

Lu Shi returned the red book to the desk top, laying it next to Xiao Qishan’s hand.

“According to our law,” Lu said, “if a man gives shelter and assistance to a criminal, that man is also a criminal. So, what must we call a man who gives shelter and assistance to our enemies?”

This time, Xiao’s hesitation was much longer. When he finally spoke, his voice was not much more than a whisper. “Such a man must also be our enemy…”

Lu stared into the old man’s eyes. “And, do we hold nations to a lower standard than we hold men?”

Xiao shook his head, slowly.

“Then, we must ask ourselves a very simple question,” Lu Shi said. “What did Chairman Mao tell us we must do to the enemies of China?”

CHAPTER 21

CIA HEADQUARTERS

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER

8:26 AM EST

Kurt Gray yawned heavily as he worked through the multi-step process for bringing his computer on line. He slid his electronic key card into the card reader next to his monitor, and waited for the red LED on the fingerprint scanner to light up.

Between digital tokens, biometrics, and seventeen-digit complex pass phrases, his system was encrypted about nine different ways. In recent years, the Agency had taken information security to levels of obsession approaching pathological mania. Kurt and his fellow analysts agreed that the access protocols would eventually be expanded to include DNA samples and rectal examinations.

That was only half-funny, as there was every sign that the CIA’s cyber paranoia was continuing to escalate. Kurt yawned again as he typed in the first of his pass phrases. It probably wasn’t fair to think of it as paranoia, because there really were people trying to get their grubby little cybernetic fingers on the Agency’s databases. A lot of people. Hostile governments, foreign militaries, criminals, conspiracy theorists, nut cases, garden variety hackers, and even a few friendly governments. For that matter, there were plenty of people in the U.S. government who’d pay good money for an inside look at the CIA’s information stash.

When the red light came on, Kurt gave the fingerprint reader the obligatory peek at his right index finger, and then punched in his second-level password. The machine responded with a satisfied bleat, and Kurt sat back in his chair while his computer shuffled its way through whatever technical voodoo it used to decrypt his local hard drive.

He reached for his ever-handy cup of Starbucks, and took a healthy swig of hot rich coffee. Pumpkin spice latte, one of the specialty flavors that only show up around the holidays.

Kurt lowered the warm cardboard cup from his lips, and tilted it toward the flat screen monitor in a mock toast. “Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Computer. Hope you don’t mind working on Turkey Day, ‘cause I’m not real fucking happy about it myself.”

He took another swallow of coffee as the report queue opened on his monitor and began populating itself with a column of filenames. The process took more than a minute. The list wasn’t short. Kurt scrolled down the line of document titles and groaned.

The operating model of the Directorate of Intelligence had been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, before the internet—when email and search engines were unheard of, and rotating-drum fax machines were the cutting-edge of electronic information transfer. There had been no cell phone frequencies to intercept in those days, no web-servers to hack, and no flash drives for stockpiling and transporting gigabytes (or terabytes) of stolen documents. Back then, intelligence analysts had labored to piece together tiny snippets of useful intelligence, in a climate of extreme information scarcity.

Now the Directorate of Intelligence struggled with the opposite problem: information overload. The so-called ‘information superhighway’ had become a tsunami of ever-growing and ever-mutating data. Add in video feeds from unmanned surveillance drones, signal intercepts, and actual reports from field agents, and the average intelligence analyst was inundated with more incoming files than any human could possibly assimilate. Unfortunately, about 98% of the flood was worthless, from a national security and foreign policy perspective. The trick was to reach into that ocean of crap, and pull out the 2% that actually meant something.

That was Kurt’s job, and while it was frequently tedious and frustrating, he was good at it. He paged back to the top of his incoming file list, and began to sort.

He had been hoping for a light load today, but he wasn’t going to get it. Still, it might not be all that bad. He could tell from the filenames that many of the documents were regional intelligence summaries. Some of those would be recaps of the previous day’s summaries. He could skip those, and he could get by with skimming most of the remaining summaries.

“Okay,” he said softly to himself. “Let’s see what’s shaking in the far off and exotic land of India…”

Kurt had been attached to the CIA’s South Asia Desk for three years, the last two of which he had been assigned specifically to Bhārat Gaṇarājya, the Republic of India. He could read Hindi like a native, and speak it somewhat less fluently, but his facility with the language was less useful than it might have been in other regions, as more than half of the documents coming out of India were written in English.

Since the days of the British Raj, English had been the default language of politics and major business in India. There had been several moves to shift officially to Hindi after the country had gained its independence in 1947, but the cultural inertia of a century of British rule had left an indelible mark on the Indian government.

As was his custom, Kurt dragged a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it briskly into the air. Heads, he would plow into the Hindi files first. Tails, he would start with the English files.

The quarter landed on his desk top, bounced, wobbled, and came to rest with George Washington’s shining profile facing up. “Hindi it is,” he said, and he opened the first document.

*  *  *

Two hours later, and getting a bit bleary-eyed, Kurt called up one of the last files in the Hindi list. A few more, and he’d be ready to wade through the English pile.

The document was slow in opening. When it finally appeared on the monitor, Kurt could see why. It contained at least a dozen imbedded graphics.

Kurt glanced at the first of these, and then double-clicked it to enlarge the image. The result was a black and white architectural diagram of a large rectilinear structure, like a bridge, or maybe a train trestle. Judging from the associated scale legends, the structure had to be enormous—kilometers long, and about 200 meters high.

Kurt increased the magnification of the image, and began trying to read the associated text boxes. The printed text was rendered in some form of Asian-looking characters that Kurt couldn’t decipher. Chinese, or maybe Japanese, or Korean. Something like that. But there were handwritten notations at various spots around the diagram, and these Kurt could read, because they were in Hindi. Several of the Hindi notes were accompanied by hand-drawn arrows and arcing lines that converged, diverged, and crossed at what appeared to be strategic points on the architectural structure.

It took Kurt about thirty seconds to realize that the huge rectangular construction was not a bridge or a trestle; it was a dam. A gigantic hydroelectric dam, dotted by more sluice gates than he had ever seen.

Kurt minimized the diagram, and worked quickly through the remaining images in the document with a growing sense of both excitement and dread. An idea was beginning to take shape in his mind, and it was not a pleasant thought at all.

He stared at the monitor for several minutes, hoping for the first time in his professional career that he had not found something interesting.

“Not good,” he said to himself as he reached for the phone. “This is definitely not good.”

CHAPTER 22

FINAL TRAJECTORY:

A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

The outbreak of World War II brought renewed interest to the search for unmanned aerial weapons.

In 1940, British engineer Frederick George Miles proposed the development of a remotely piloted lightweight aircraft, capable of carrying a 1,000 pound bomb. Designated the Miles Hoop-la, this design was not intended as a single use weapon. Instead, it would drop a bomb payload on a designated target, and then return to its home field to be refueled and rearmed for future attacks. The airspeed of the Hoop-la was estimated at over 300 MPH, but this was never verified, as the project was cancelled shortly after it reached the mock-up stage.

In 1941, the German ReichluftMinisterium (Air Ministry) began to investigate designs for ‘composite’ aircraft, i.e. multiple aircraft which are physically connected together and flown as a single unit. Nazi interest in this concept may have derived from Soviet studies in the 1930s, in which fighter planes were attached to the fuselages or wings of large bombers, ready to launch whenever the host-bombers were threatened.

One German scheme involved using an attached fighter plane to guide an explosive-packed unmanned Junkers Ju-88 bomber to a target. Upon reaching the designated site, the fighter pilot would aim the drone bomber toward its final objective, detach his own plane, and depart the area as the Junkers dove into the target and detonated.

The concept met with initial resistance among senior Luftwaffe leadership, but the ReichluftMinisterium ultimately authorized project Beethoven, to build a composite flying bomb under the codename Mistel (mistletoe).

The first operational test of a Mistel occurred in July of 1943. The control plane was a Messerschmitt Mf-109E fighter, mounted to the top of an unmanned Ju-88A bomber, and wired directly into the larger aircraft’s throttles and flight controls. The fighter pilot made a smooth takeoff, and flew the composite aircraft directly toward the target area. At the appropriate range, he detached his Messerschmitt from the bomber, allowing the Ju-88A to make its final approach on autopilot. The accuracy of the attack could not have been better, and the explosives aboard the bomber utterly destroyed the target.

US Soldiers Inspect a Captured Mistel

The Mistel did not much resemble the Sperry Aerial Torpedo, or the Kettering Bug of the previous world war, but this new German design was the direct descendent of those earlier flying weapons. In the space of a single test flight, the Mistel had proven that the concept of an unmanned aerial bomb was both valid, and deadly.

The officers of the Luftwaffe high command forgot their reservations, and became instantly enthusiastic about the Mistel. They quickly began planning ways to improve the Mistel design, and push the weapon into production and use.

The Mistel went into operation in June of 1944, almost exactly a year after the first test flight. The final configuration utilized a Focke-Wulf Fw-190A fighter atop a Junkers Ju-88A-4. The nose and crew cabin of the bomber were removed, and replaced by a 7,720 pound hollow-charge warhead.

Tests demonstrated that the enormous Mistel warhead could penetrate virtually any thickness of reinforced concrete. A trial attack against an old French battleship wrought astonishing damage to the target vessel, revealing the Mistel’s potential as an anti-ship weapon. This potential was to be tested quickly, as several Mistels were used to conduct attacks against Allied ships during the weapon’s first month of operational service.

The Nazi high command began planning a massive coordinated Mistel campaign against the Allies, codenamed Operation Eisenhammer (Iron Hammer). Over 250 Mistels were built, but Operation Eisenhammer never took place. The accumulated Mistels were expended in numerous smaller attacks, mostly directed against bridges in the path of the Allied advance.

The Luftwaffe developed a number of minor variants to the Mistel, incorporating modifications and/or aircraft substitutions to accommodate various mission profiles. A jet-powered model was considered, to be built around the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, but the concept was never implemented. Still more variants were proposed, some of which were far-fetched, even by the standards of the Mistel program. Most of the more drastic ideas did not ever progress beyond the drawing board.

*  *  *

While Germany was developing and deploying its new pilotless killing machine, on the far side of the Atlantic, the United States was once again pursuing the idea of the aerial torpedo.

During a visit to England in 1936, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William H. Standley witnessed a live firing exercise against a British Queen Bee training aircraft (a radio-controlled version of the de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, configured as an unmanned flying target). Impressed by the Queen Bee’s performance, the CNO contacted Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, the head of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and directed him to research options for developing remote-controlled aircraft for the U.S. Navy.

At the CNO’s suggestion, Rear Admiral King chose Lieutenant Commander Delmar S. Fahrney to lead the project. A veteran pilot with a masters degree in aeronautical engineering, Fahrney was experienced and technically skilled. He was also a visionary.

Working in cooperation with the Naval Aircraft Factory, Fahrney supervised the modification of two Curtiss biplanes and two Stearman biplanes into “drones.” (It’s fairly certain that Fahrney was the first person to use the term “drone” in the context of unmanned aircraft. This was probably intended as a friendly acknowledgement of the British Queen Bee from which the U.S. Navy program had taken its inspiration.)

By 1937, Fahrney’s team was conducting flight tests of these unmanned drones. A year later, the team’s drones were utilized for anti-aircraft firing tests against gun crews aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. The drones turned out to be difficult targets, surviving barrage after barrage during simulated attack runs against the warship.

The success of the drones, and the ship’s failure to knock them out of the sky, forced a sweeping reevaluation of anti-aircraft capabilities throughout the fleet. The tests with USS Ranger also convinced Fahrney that radio-controlled aircraft could be used as offensive weapons, conducting direct bomb or torpedo attacks against enemy ships.

Fahrney quickly arranged an operational test, sending an “assault drone” armed with a dummy warhead against the battleship USS Utah. Unfortunately for Fahrney, the gunners aboard the Utah were better shots than their shipmates on the Ranger. As the drone was commencing its dive bombing run, a burst of flak made a direct hit on the unmanned aircraft. The drone crashed into the sea, ending the simulated attack.

Fahrney was not discouraged. His demonstration had been cut short by a lucky shot, but he had no doubt that the underlying concept was both practical and achievable. A remote-controlled drone could attack an enemy warship, without risking the life of a pilot.

While investigating options for improving his assault drone, Fahrney encountered Dr. Vladimir Zworykin, a brilliant immigrant from Russia who had become the chief scientist for the Radio Corporation of America (better known as RCA). Zworykin, who would eventually hold key patents for the technology behind both the television and the electron microscope, had been trying for years to interest the U.S. Navy in the idea of a flying torpedo guided by an electric eye. Navy leaders had regarded Dr. Zworykin’s concept as unnecessary, expensive, and—in all likelihood—impossible.

Fahrney took one look at the proposal, and disregarded all previous evaluations of its potential. He quickly arranged a contract with RCA to develop a series of experimental television systems for use aboard Navy aircraft.

Because Zworykin had been tinkering with the idea for years, he had a functional prototype ready in only a few months. The first model weighed 340 pounds, far too heavy for a relatively small drone, but light enough for testing aboard a manned aircraft. The initial tests were successful, proving that video signals from one airplane could be seen and interpreted from another plane up to 20 miles away.

While the prototype tests were underway, Zworykin’s team at RCA was working on a new and smaller model. Dubbed ‘Block-1’ because of its rectangular shape, the new model weighed only 97 pounds, and fit into an 8x8x24 inch box (i.e. the block).

Before the Block-1 prototype could be installed on an airframe for testing, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted its now infamous bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, inflicting unprecedented damage on the U.S. Pacific fleet. The American aircraft carriers and some light escort ships emerged unscathed, because they were absent from Pearl Harbor during the raid, but the majority of the fleet was devastated.

The U.S. Navy was thrown into chaos. The battleships, the primary might of the fleet at that time, had been mauled. Some of the damaged hulls would be salvaged and returned to service, but—with the Japanese Imperial Navy rampaging through the Pacific—the United States could not sit idle and wait for the battleships to be repaired. The American Navy needed to be combat-ready immediately.

The aircraft carriers were a major part of the solution. They represented a radical departure from the big guns and heavy armor of dreadnought warfare. In the coming months, the carriers would clearly establish themselves as the future of naval power projection, but in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, their reliability and capability had not yet been proven. In this climate of uncertainty, Fahrney’s television-guided assault drone suddenly seemed like a very promising idea.

In February of 1942, the Navy issued a top secret directive known as Project Option, making the assault drone a national defense priority. Fahrney and Zworykin didn’t even have a functional prototype ready, when they abruptly found themselves with a full-scale development program under the leadership of Commodore Oscar Smith.

Only two months after the program’s inception, the Project Option team launched a successful test attack against the USS Aaron Ward, a destroyer moving at 15 knots with full evasive maneuvering. The unmanned assault drone, which had been converted from an existing torpedo plane, was guided from remote control by the pilot of a plane circling 8 miles away—completely out of sight of the destroyer under attack.

Watching the remote video feed from a television camera in the nose of the assault drone, the pilot had no trouble guiding the drone into a perfect attack run. The torpedo ran straight under the hull of the wildly evading destroyer. If the weapon had been armed with a live warhead, USS Aaron Ward would have been blasted out of the water.

Senior political officials and upper echelon military leaders were stunned by the motion picture films of the test attack. Few people who watched the films had any doubt that they were witnessing a major shift in the nature of warfare.

Admiral King, who had recently been promoted by President Roosevelt to Chief of Naval Operations, ordered Commodore Smith to proceed with the production of 5,000 assault drones. King also directed Commodore Smith to create eighteen drone squadrons, to serve under the command of a new Special Air Task Force.

Although Project Option had support at the highest level, the program was not by any means universally popular. Ironically, the fiercest opposition came from Rear Admiral John H. Towers, who had replaced Admiral King as head of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Admiral Towers insisted that it was unwise to commit valuable resources to an unproven weapon system. (His opposition seems doubly ironic in view of the struggle that Towers himself had endured in the 1920s and 30s, while attempting to gather support for naval aviation over the objections of leaders who openly doubted the effectiveness of aircraft carriers and airplanes in a world dominated by cruisers and battleships.)

While Fahrney clearly believed in the assault drone concept, he recognized the need to give the program’s detractors as little justification for criticism as possible. He decided that the full-production model torpedo drones should be manufactured using the smallest feasible quantities of war-critical resources. As a result, the first generation of torpedo drones, designated TDN-1, were constructed almost entirely of wood.

TDN-1 Torpedo Assault Drone

With a high wing and small twin engines, the TDN-1 could carry a torpedo or 2,000 pound bomb under its fuselage, at an average airspeed of 175 MPH. The drone was light, inexpensive, and it required a bare minimum of critical materials. Unfortunately, the TDN design was not well-suited for mass production. Only about 114 units were built, nearly all of which were used for evaluation, or expended as unmanned flying targets. None of the TDN-1 drones saw actual combat.

Official enthusiasm for the assault drone concept was beginning to decline, in part due to continuing derision from Admiral Towers and other vocal critics of the program. Commodore Smith and Commander Fahrney were undiscouraged. The Project Option team immediately moved forward with production of the TDR-1 series, a second generation of assault drones that were more suited to rapid manufacturing.

In May of 1944, after intense lobbying on the part of Commodore Smith and Commander Fahrney, Special Task Air Group One (STAG-1) deployed to the South Pacific for combat against the Japanese.

The TDR-1 drones of STAG-1 were controlled by specially-modified Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers, outfitted with radio control systems and television reception antennas. The drone flight controls included a joystick for use by the Avenger pilot, and a telephone dial connected by radio to the TDR-1’s autopilot system to manage flight patterns and the arming and dropping of torpedoes or bombs. The control system was only equipped with four radio channels, limiting each Avenger aircrew to controlling a maximum of four drones at a time.

The first live TDR-1 attack occurred on July 30, 1944, against an abandoned Japanese freighter that had run aground near the island of Guadalcanal. Six TDR-1s were committed to the mission: four designated for the attack, and two standing by as backups. All six drones were armed with 2,000 pound bombs.

It was not to be an auspicious beginning. Two of the drones cracked up during takeoff. Two others hit the target, but their bombs turned out to be duds. The remaining two drones conducted successful attacks, and their bombs destroyed the target ship.

The film footage of the exploding Japanese freighter was impressive, but the popularity of the assault drone concept had fallen so low that Commodore Smith had to lobby intensely to prevent immediate cancellation of the program.

Approximately eight weeks later, STAG-1 embarked on an intensive series of drone strikes against Japanese installations on the island of Bougainville. The attacks began on September 27th and ended on October 26th. A total of 46 TDR-1s were expended, 37 of which penetrated Japanese antiaircraft coverage and successfully reached their assigned target areas. At least 21 of these struck their intended targets.

The Japanese were stunned by the fury of the drone strikes, believing that the American Navy had taken up aerial suicide attacks—a tactic that Imperial Japan had embraced only weeks earlier.

While the results of the Bougainville attacks were encouraging, they were not dramatic enough to prevent the cancellation of the assault drone program. The officers and men of Project Option were understandably disappointed, but by late 1944, it was clear that the war in the Pacific was going to be won without the help of STAG-1’s strange flying bombs. The TDR-1, which had once seemed like a crucial technological breakthrough, was no longer regarded as a significant factor in the outcome of the war.

The next generation of drones, the TDR-3, was already under development when the program was cancelled. A number of photographs of the TDR-3 still exist, but it’s no longer clear if this was a functional prototype, or merely a mockup of the airframe. Either way, the Navy’s quest for an unmanned aerial assault drone, was effectively dead.

*  *  *

Running roughly parallel to the Navy efforts, the U.S. Army Air Force was engaged in its own attempts to develop an unmanned flying bomb. The A-1 program centered around a radio-controlled monoplane that could carry a 500 pound warhead to targets over 400 miles away. A handful of A-1s were built before the effort was terminated in 1943.

Under a program codenamed Project Aphrodite, the USAAF worked jointly with the Navy in developing a series of aerial torpedo designs with the cryptic designation of ‘BQ’. One of the most ambitious examples was the BQ-7 concept, in which aging B-17 Fortress bombers were modified for radio control, and packed with 20,000 pounds of explosives for use as unmanned assault drones.

Each BQ-7 was manned by a human pilot and copilot during takeoff. The roof of the cockpit was cut away, allowing the crew to bail out and parachute to earth after the plane was airborne. In theory, the BQ-7 would then continue to its target under radio control.

About 25 BQ-7s were built. Most were earmarked for use against hardened military installations in Germany, under a plan known as Project Perilous. Regrettably, the codename turned out to be accurate.

There were a number of attempts to use the BQ-7 in combat, none of which were notably successful, and several of which were nearly disastrous. In one reported case, a BQ-7 lost radio lock and circled repeatedly over an English city before the terrified controllers were able to reestablish a radio link and divert the malfunctioning bomber to a safe area. In another case, a BQ-7 failed to respond to radio control signals and crashed in the English countryside, leaving a massive crater to mark the site of the explosion. Project Perilous was abandoned before more serious mishaps could occur.

A follow-on effort, codenamed Project Anvil, utilized converted B-24 bombers in a new (and supposedly improved) BQ-8 configuration. But the BQ-8s were not destined to fare any better than the BQ-7 series had done.

The first Anvil mission took place on August 12, 1944. The modified bomber exploded in flight, while the two crewmen were still aboard. The pilot and copilot, Navy Lieutenants Wilford J. Willy and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., were both killed instantly.

It’s of historical note that Lieutenant Kennedy was the eldest son of prominent businessman and political figure Joseph Kennedy Sr. At the time of his death, Joseph Junior was being groomed for the American presidency. His younger brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would later go on to become the 35th President of the United States.

The second Anvil mission was launched on September 3, 1944. This time, the BQ-8 missed its assigned target due to spotty television reception, but managed to inflict some damage on an unrelated German facility.

The BQ series was subsequently cancelled, due to lackluster—and sometimes dangerous—performance.

Like the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army Air Force was out of the flying bomb business, at least in the short term. Nearly three decades had passed since the first efforts of Elmer Sperry and Charles Kettering, and the United States military had still not managed to produce an operationally reliable unmanned aerial weapon.

Unfortunately for the inhabitants of England, the Germans had finally cracked the problem wide open.

The citizens of London were about to find out the hard way just how deadly such weapons can be.

CHAPTER 23

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER

10:34 AM EST

President Dalton Wainright ignored the blue-jacketed briefing folder on the table, and nodded toward the image on the wall-sized Situation Room display screen. “Okay, gentlemen, what am I looking at here?”

The Sit Room Duty Officer was a Navy Captain with a hawk nose and gray at his temples. “Sorry to interrupt your Thanksgiving morning, Mr. President,” he said. “This is an architectural diagram of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, in the People’s Republic of China.”

He allowed the image to linger on the display for a few seconds, and then pointed a remote at the screen. The architectural drawing was replaced by an aerial photograph of what was presumably the retaining wall of the dam, with the expansive spread of its attendant reservoir lake.

“This is the largest hydroelectric project ever built, sir,” the Duty Officer said. “It’s also one of the largest manmade structures in the world, second only to the Great Wall of China. The site reached full operational capacity in 2011, and now it produces approximately 85 terawatt-hours of electrical power per year. That’s slightly more than twice the annual output of China’s entire nuclear power industry.”

“Impressive,” the president said. “I assume there’s a reason that you’re bringing this to my attention?”

The Duty Officer nodded. “Yes, sir. A few hours ago, we received preliminary intelligence that the Indian military may be planning to destroy the Three Gorges Dam.”

“Destroy it? How? That thing is a monster!”

The National Security Advisor, Gregory Brenthoven nodded. “It is a monster, Mr. President. But the Indians are apparently planning to bring it down with a coordinated cruise missile strike: seven Nirbhay missiles armed with advanced hard target penetrator warheads.”

President Wainright raised a hand. “Two questions, Greg… First, what’s our source for this information? Second, will it work?”

He looked back toward the screen. “That thing really is a beast. Unless they’re planning to nuke it, I can’t see cruise missiles bringing it down.”

The National Security Advisor fished a small leather-bound notebook from his pocket. “The source was HUMINT,” he said. “A CIA field operative in New Delhi, with contacts in the Indian Ministry of Defense. He, or she—I don’t know which—managed to lay hands on a copy of the engineering analysis and targeting plan for the strike. The operative’s report was forwarded to the South Asia desk at Langley, and the analyst who received it was smart enough to flag it for immediate high-level attention.”

The president nodded. “So we’re relatively sure that this information is legit?”

Brenthoven flipped open his notebook and scanned a few lines of text. “The confidence level is listed as ‘moderate.’ That basically means that the information is plausible and the source is considered credible, but there isn’t enough external corroboration to support a higher level of confidence.”

“Then I assume that we’re going after corroboration,” the president said.

“Of course, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “We’ve got CIA, DIA, and ONI all searching for confirmation. But if the plan is locked down tight enough, we may not find a corroborating source. Our current source may be all we have to go on.”

The president paused for a few seconds, and then nodded. “Understood. Let’s move on to my second question. What are the odds that a few cruise missiles can knock out a structure as massive as the Three Gorges Dam?”

“Sir, we’ve got the Office of Naval Research running simulations on that right now,” Brenthoven said, “but our quick-look analysis suggests that it might be feasible, if the missiles carried the correct kinds of warheads.”

“Do the Indians have the right kind?” the president asked.

Secretary of Defense Mary O’Neil-Broerman leaned forward in her chair. “We think they do,” she said. “The Indian military inventory has an indigenously-produced hard target penetrator that might well be powerful enough to crack that dam wide open.”

The president turned to stare at his Secretary of Defense. “You’re telling me that the Indian military developed a highly-specialized missile warhead, on the off chance that they might one day have to bomb a giant Chinese hydroelectric site?”

SECDEF shook her head. “No, sir. Ironically enough, they developed the warhead for the Air Force. Our Air Force.”

President Wainwright rubbed the back of his neck. “Tell me you’re kidding, Mary.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not kidding, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The warhead was developed by India’s Defense Research and Development Organization to capture a U.S. Air Force contract for a Next Generation Penetrator. What the Air Force calls an NGP. The Indian defense industry apparently decided that a major Air Force R&D project would be a great way to get their foot in the door for future U.S. defense programs. Their design didn’t make it through the down-select, but they decided to move ahead with developing their own Next Generation Penetrator. They call it the Rudrasya khaḍgaḥ. From what we understand, it’s incredibly effective.”

The president frowned. “What was that name again? The Rud…”

“Rudrasya khaḍgaḥ,” the Secretary of Defense said. “Apparently that’s Sanskrit for ‘Sword of Shiva.’

The president’s eyebrows went up. “Shiva? The Hindu god?”

“Yes, sir,” SECDEF said. “Shiva is the Hindu god of creation and destruction. But when he manifests in his Rudra aspect, he is specifically the god of storm, wind, destruction, and death.”

President Wainwright raised one corner of his mouth in a humorless half-smile. “Well, that sounds promising, doesn’t it? What other good news have you got for me?”

“We’re still looking at preliminary assessments, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “But if the Rudra—the Sword of Shiva warhead—turns out to be as effective as the initial simulations suggest, then seven missiles may be overkill. It’s feasible that four would be enough to bring down the dam, with proper placement and timing, of course.”

“Of course,” the president said. “Okay, the intelligence on this plan is reasonably credible, and it’s possible that this kind of missile strike could punch a hole in the dam. It sounds like one hell of a mess for the People’s Republic, but how does that add up to a national security problem for us?”

The Sit Room Duty Officer spoke up. “The Indians aren’t just planning to knock holes in the dam, sir. Their apparent goal is to cause a complete failure of the retaining wall. This will trigger catastrophic flooding of the entire Yangtze River basin, all the way from the site of the Three Gorges Dam to the East China Sea.”

The Duty Officer keyed his remote, and the Sit Room master display changed to a topographic map of eastern central China. The meandering blue line of the Yangtze river cut across the middle of the map, dividing the northern and southern halves of the visible landmass. The black dots of three cities hugged the wandering curves of the river: Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai.

“The Yangtze River runs right through the heart of China’s largest concentration of human population,” said the Situation Room Duty Officer. “Approximately 400 million people live within the boundaries of the Yangtze River basin. That’s nearly a third of the total population of China.”

He gestured toward the screen. “If the Three Gorges Dam should fail, three of the largest and most heavily-populated cities in China will be directly in the path of destruction.”

The National Security Advisor nodded. “The combined populations of Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan are closely equivalent to the collective populations of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. And these three cities form the backbone of China’s industrial and financial base. The loss of any one of these cities would seriously damage the Chinese economy. The loss of all three of them…” Brenthoven allowed his voice to trail off.

“We’re talking a nightmare scenario for China,” the president said. “Millions of short term casualties, and massive damage to their national infrastructure, followed by a crippling economic aftermath.”

“That’s correct, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “Not quite a doomsday scenario for the Chinese, but pretty damned close.”

President Wainwright shook his head. “Then why in God’s name did they even build the thing? The Chinese are many things, but they’re not stupid. Why would they put so many of their own people at risk?”

“They probably thought they had factored out the serious risks,” the Secretary of Defense said. “From a structural standpoint, the Three Gorges Dam is significantly over-built. They designed in more than enough safety margin to compensate for earthquakes and other natural disasters, and—short of a nuclear attack—there frankly aren’t very many bombs or missiles in the world that could put a serious dent in that thing. The Chinese politburo probably felt like they had all the important angles covered.”

“But they didn’t count on this new Indian warhead,” the president said.

“Apparently not, sir,” said Brenthoven.

President Wainwright stared at the wall-sized display screen for several seconds. “How will the Chinese government react, if India manages to carry out this plan?”

“That’s the big question,” the National Security Advisor said. “How would you react in that situation, Mr. President? Suppose the U.S. was engaged in hostilities with some hypothetical enemy, and suddenly—without warning—our adversary wiped out New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, killing about a third of our national population in the process. How would you retaliate, sir?”

“I like to think of myself as a man of peace,” the president said. “But if someone hit us with an attack that vicious and that massive, I’d go after them with every weapon at my disposal. I’d do my damnedest to turn their entire country into a parking lot.”

The Secretary of Defense sighed heavily. “I hate to say it, sir, but I would too. Any leader with the power and ability to strike back would retaliate just as strongly. When somebody slams you that hard, you don’t trade punches. You crush them.”

“That, I’m afraid, is our answer,” Brenthoven said. “If India really does this… If they bring down the Three Gorges Dam, China is going to hit them with everything…”

His last word hung in the air, and no one had any doubt at all what ‘everything’ meant in this context.

President Wainwright sat back in his chair. “We’re missing something here,” he said.

“We’re in the early discovery phase on this, sir,” Brenthoven said. “We’re still missing a lot of things. It may take the intelligence agencies a while to develop corroborating sources, and assemble the critical details.”

“I’m not talking about details,” said the president. “And I’m not talking about independent confirmation of the facts.”

He looked at the enormous aerial view of the Three Gorges Dam on the display screen. “We’re missing a critical piece in the chain of logic.”

“I don’t think I’m following you, sir,” Brenthoven said.

“Mary just summed it up perfectly,” the president said. “You don’t sit around trading punches when somebody slams you that hard. You crush them. Right?”

Brenthoven nodded, but didn’t speak.

“I don’t claim to understand the mindset of the Indian government,” the president said. “But they can’t possibly be too blind to know what will happen if they cripple China with an assault of this magnitude. This entire plan is practically begging for nuclear retaliation. So why in the hell are they even thinking about it?”

No one offered an answer.

“We’re missing something here,” the president said again. “Some vital piece of logical thinking.”

The Chief of Naval Operations drummed the fingertips of his left hand lightly on the table top. “What if it’s not logical?” he asked. “Before that nutcase, Zhukov, bombed Pearl Harbor, I would have said that nobody is fanatical enough to do something that idiotic. But these days, Mr. President, I’m not quite as quick to underestimate the power of stupid and crazy.”

President Wainwright grimaced. “You’ve got a point there, Admiral” he said. “But—crazy or not—our friends in India have got something up their sleeve. And we had damned well better find out what it is…”

CHAPTER 24

EMBASSY OF INDIA

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER

5:15 PM EST

Gita Shankar, the Republic of India’s Ambassador to the United States, rose from her seat as the American National Security Advisor was ushered into her office. She came around her desk to meet him, and extended her hand to be shaken as he crossed the last few meters of carpet.

The ambassador wore a dark blue sari of raw silk, over a simple gray blouse and a pleated business skirt. The broad strip of rich fabric wound around her waist, and crossed her upper body diagonally, allowing the loose end to drape over her left shoulder in a businesslike approximation of the traditional fashion. Around her neck was a single strand of pearls, and her short black hair was drawn back to reveal matching earrings.

Ambassador Shankar smiled as her visitor accepted her proffered hand and shook it. “Welcome, Mr. Brenthoven,” she said. “It appears that we have coordinated our colors today.”

Gregory Brenthoven glanced down at the sleeve of his suit. It was almost exactly the same shade of gray as the ambassador’s blouse, and his blue Salvatore Ferragamo necktie was a surprisingly close match for the color of her sari.

Brenthoven smiled. “I phoned ahead, Madam Ambassador, to find out what you were wearing. Then I dashed home and dressed myself to match.”

The ambassador laughed, and then motioned him to a pair of sofas rendered in the British Colonial style that remained popular among representatives of the Indian government.

“Please,” the ambassador said. “Make yourself comfortable, and then tell me what takes you away from your family on such an important American holiday.”

Brenthoven seated himself on one sofa, and the ambassador chose a seat across from him, on the other sofa.

Brenthoven’s eyes made a quick sweep around the elegantly-appointed office. “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, Madam Ambassador, but is this room secure?”

This brought a raised eyebrow from the ambassador. “It should be reasonably secure,” she said. “My office is swept daily for electronic eavesdropping devices, and my security staff employs certain technical measures to disrupt remote surveillance by other means. I’m sure you’re accustomed to similar precautions in your own government buildings.”

“Of course,” Brenthoven said.

“And I’m equally sure,” the ambassador said, “you realize that such defenses only reduce the threat of hostile surveillance. They do not guarantee privacy.”

The American National Security Advisor hesitated. He was not a representative of the State Department, and he had no diplomatic credentials. He was also not a trusted confidant of the Indian government, which meant that the rules of protocol would not allow him to request the use of the embassy’s ‘bubble.’

Like nearly every other embassy in the world, the Indian chancery building was equipped with an acoustically-isolated Plexiglas security chamber with specialized coatings to repel electromagnetic radiation. In diplo-speak, such a chamber was commonly referred to as a bubble. Theoretically, a properly-designed bubble was immune to external surveillance devices, and virtually impossible to bug internally. In reality, the ceaseless evolution of technology meant that any room—no matter how carefully protected—was potentially vulnerable to eavesdropping. Even so, a properly maintained bubble was as close to absolute security as it was possible to come.

Ambassador Shankar had not missed Brenthoven’s not-too-casual visual sweep of her office, and she had no doubt that he was fishing for an invitation to use her embassy’s bubble. But he had asked for this appointment on very short notice, and had circumvented many of the political niceties in the process. He had also not offered any hints about the topic he intended to discuss, which gave the ambassador and her deputy chief of mission no opportunity to prepare an official position on whatever it was that he wanted to talk about.

In view of these diplomatic lapses—minor as they were—she was not inclined to grant the man any immediate favors. When he revealed the mysterious topic of this meeting, she might change her mind and suggest a recess to the bubble, if she judged that such a precaution was necessary. Until then, it wouldn’t kill the man to deal with a bit of discomfort.

“I’m afraid that I don’t speak Sanskrit,” Brenthoven said, “so I must ask you to forgive my poor pronunciation.”

The ambassador smiled and waved a hand dismissively. “Of course.”

Brenthoven gave a final glance around the office and paused again before speaking. “Madam Ambassador, have you ever heard of a missile warhead with the codename ‘Rudrasya khaḍgaḥ’?”

Ambassador Shankar frowned slightly. “I don’t believe so.”

“It’s my understanding,” Brenthoven said, “that the phrase refers to a sword owned by the Hindu god, Shiva, when he manifests himself as Rudra—the bringer of storms, death, and destruction.”

“That sounds like a reasonable translation,” the ambassador said. “But I’m not aware of any missile with such a codename.”

“It’s a Next Generation Penetrator,” Brenthoven said. “It was developed by your country’s Defense Research and Development Organization, to attack and breach exceptionally-hardened targets, such as massively-reinforced underground bunkers, or armored concrete missile silos.”

The ambassador shifted slightly in her seat. She didn’t know where this conversation was going, but she was already becoming uncomfortable with the tone. “I will take your word for that,” she said. “I believe I have a solid fundamental grasp of my country’s military capabilities, but I can’t claim to know every detail of every weapon system under development.”

Her voice grew a fraction sharper. “Is the United States suddenly concerned that this warhead you speak of is somehow in violation of international laws or treaties?”

“Not at all,” Brenthoven said. “It’s my understanding that the Rudrasya khaḍgaḥ warhead design is perfectly legal under all existing agreements.”

The ambassador relaxed back into the sofa cushions. “Then, may I ask what the problem is? It must be something serious, for you to show such concern regarding the security of this conversation.”

“It is serious, Madam Ambassador,” Brenthoven said. “We have received credible indications that your military is planning to use a number of these advanced penetrator warheads to force a catastrophic failure of the Chinese Three Gorges Dam.”

“I have not been briefed on any such plan,” the ambassador said. “But my country is engaged in defensive combat operations against an unprovoked aggressor. India was not the instigator of the current hostilities, Mr. Brenthoven, as I’m sure you are aware. So—given your own admission that the proposed weapons are not prohibited by treaty or law, and also given the fact that we are reacting to the slaughter of an entire village of unarmed civilians—I’m curious to know why my country’s military intentions have suddenly attracted the attention of the United States Government. I don’t mean to sound abrupt, but how does this qualify as your business?”

“We’ve done some initial assessments of the potential consequences if the Three Gorges Dam should suffer catastrophic failure,” Brenthoven said. “Our analysts estimate that the death toll in China could go as high as 350 million. It’s also likely that three of China’s most prosperous cities will be completely wiped out, crippling the Chinese economy for several decades.”

“I haven’t seen any such projections,” the ambassador said, “but that sounds like a bit of an exaggeration to me.”

“We don’t think so,” Brenthoven said. “In fact, our early calculations may actually turn out to be optimistic.”

Ambassador Shankar said nothing. All of this really was a surprise to her. She had no idea how much of it—if any—might be true.

Brenthoven closed his little notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. “Madam Ambassador, if this attack on the Three Gorges Dam takes place, we believe there’s a very strong chance that the People’s Republic of China will retaliate with a major nuclear strike.”

“That’s absurd!” the ambassador said.

“We don’t think so,” Brenthoven said. “If you hit the PRC that hard, we think they’ll strike back even harder.”

The ambassador found her own eyes travelling around her office. “We shouldn’t talk about this here,” she said. “We should move this discussion to the bubble.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Gregory Brenthoven said. “Why don’t we do that?”

CHAPTER 25

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

FRIDAY; 28 NOVEMBER

1924 hours (7:24 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Tactical Action Officer, Lieutenant Ben Lambert, kept an eye on the giant Aegis display screens that dominated the central section of Combat Information Center. On the tactical display, four unknown-aircraft symbols were moving rapidly toward the perimeter of the USS Midway’s defensive ring of surface ships.

Lambert pressed the electronic soft-key that patched his comm headset into the ship’s telephone system, and he punched the three-digit phone number for the captain’s stateroom. “Captain, this is the TAO. Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we’ve got four Bogies inbound from the west. No modes, no codes, and no IFF.”

“Thank you,” Captain Bowie said. “I’m on my way. Do me a favor, and give Commander Silva a call. I’m sure she’ll want to be in on this.”

“Will do, sir,” the TAO said.

*  *  *

Less than three minutes later, Captain Bowie and Commander Silva were standing behind the TAO, looking over his shoulder at the tactical display.

“Whose tracks are we seeing, here?” Bowie asked.

USS Towers was running quiet and dark—taking full advantage of her cutting-edge stealth capabilities to hide from the sensors of other ships and aircraft. The odd angles of the destroyer’s hull and superstructure had been meticulously calculated to deflect incoming radar, robbing potential enemies of the return signals needed to detect and track the ship. This advanced geometry design was enhanced by the radar absorbent polymerized carbon fiber tiles and phototropic camouflage that covered the majority of the ship’s exposed surfaces.

Coupled with acoustic masking and thermal suppression systems, these technologies did an astoundingly effective job of concealing a 9,800 ton warship on the open sea. But no amount of crafty engineering could disguise the transmissions of the ship’s own radar systems. If the Towers energized her radars, they would light up the electromagnetic spectrum like the proverbial Christmas tree. Any chance of concealment would be instantly gone.

The only way to achieve effective stealth was to shut down all radars and transmitters, and depend on sensor feeds from other U.S. Navy assets in the area.

That’s what the Towers was doing now, sliding quietly through the night, guided only by tactical data inputs from the ships and aircraft in the USS Midway strike group.

“These tracks are coming in from Hawkeye,” the TAO said.

‘Hawkeye,’ referred to one of the E-2D Airborne Early Warning planes providing long-range radar surveillance coverage for the aircraft carrier and the air wing.

Commander Silva nodded. “Doesn’t look like they’re going to overfly us directly,” she said.

The TAO checked his console for amplified target motion data on the four unknown aircraft. “Good eye, ma’am. The Bogies won’t overfly us. Unless their flight profile changes, they’ll CPA us about ten miles to the north, in roughly eight minutes.”

“They’re going after the Midway,” Silva said.

“Looks that way to me,” the TAO said. “They’re flying low and fast, with their radars shut down. I think they’re trying to give our carrier a little goose.”

“That sounds like a pretty fair assessment,” said Captain Bowie.

His eyes stayed fixed on the four aircraft symbols. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re looking at J-15s from the Chinese carrier group. Two flights of two.”

“Could be,” the TAO said. “Do we let them pass, or do we challenge?”

“We could let them go,” Bowie said. “That Hawkeye has got them nailed. Our Bogies will have F-18s crawling all over them before they get close to the carrier.”

“True,” the TAO said. There was a wistful note in his voice, as though he’d been hoping for something a bit more exciting out of his first real-world encounter with a potential air threat.

Bowie smiled. “On the other hand, our current EMCON status is self-imposed. We’re running dark and quiet for the practice, not because we have orders to maintain emission control.”

The TAO grinned. “Think we should rattle their cage, sir?”

The captain returned his grin. “Why not? No fire control radars. It’s okay to spook these guys, but let’s not give them an excuse to shoot.”

The TAO keyed his mike. “All Stations—TAO, now set Modified EMCON Delta. Unrestricted emissions except for fire control, effective immediately. Maximum safe power levels. I say again, all transmitters on line immediately at maximum safe power levels. Break. Air—TAO, I want a high-power SPY sweep of sector two-niner-zero to three-five-zero.”

The AN/SPY-1D(V)2 phased-array radar was the backbone of the ship’s Aegis integrated sensor and weapons suite. With a power output of over four million watts, SPY could confuse or even damage the sensitive avionics in most aircraft.

The TAO was still grinning. Those Chinese pilots were about to get the surprise of their lives. One second, they’re sneaking along in the dark, hugging the waves and trying to be invisible. Everything is nice and quiet—no sign of anything at all between them and their objective. The next second, bam! A U.S. Navy destroyer right in their faces, pumping out four megawatts of microwave power, making their warning buzzers scream and their instruments go haywire.

The Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Air. SPY is on line and transmitting. Full power sweep of sector two-niner-zero to three-five-zero in progress.”

“And here we go…” the TAO said.

On the Aegis tactical display, the four unknown aircraft symbols swung hard to the left, sheering away from the Towers and the Midway.

A half-second later, the Air Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “TAO—Air, Bogies are bugging out. Looks like they’re running home to the barn.”

The TAO keyed up. “Roger, Air. Keep an eye on them anyway. We don’t want them sneaking back around to return the surprise.”

“That was easy,” Commander Silva said.

The Tactical Action Officer nodded. “Just a friendly gesture, to let our Chinese buddies know that the United States Navy is in the neighborhood. Sort of like the Welcome Wagon.”

Silva shook her head. “We were early,” she said. “We should have waited, and done that next month.”

The TAO looked at her. “I’m not sure what you mean, Commander…”

“Thanksgiving is over,” Silva said. “And we just gave those guys their Christmas goose a whole month ahead of time.”

The TAO grinned again. “I think they’ll forgive us, ma’am.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Captain Bowie said. “I hope you’re right.”

CHAPTER 26

FINAL TRAJECTORY:

A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

With the V-1 rocket, the Luftwaffe’s flying bomb effort made a complete break from the propeller-driven airframes and remote control systems of previous designs. The new German weapon was a self-controlling robot, utilizing automatic onboard guidance mechanisms in place of a remote human operator. The new design eliminated propeller-driven engines, in favor of a rudimentary (but effective) pulse jet engine that was little more than a tube-shaped fuel combustion chamber.

The weapon was formally designated as the Fiesler Fi-103, but the Nazi propaganda corps began referring to it as the Vergeltungswaffe Einz (Vengeance Weapon 1), a title that was quickly shortened to V-1 in common usage.

Unlike prior generations of drones and aerial torpedoes, the V-1 did not resemble conventional aircraft of the day. Its sheet-steel fuselage was streamlined and severely tapered, giving it a profile similar to a throwing dart. The weapon’s abrupt cruciform wings were skinned with plywood, to reduce weight and minimize cost, and the narrow stovepipe engine at its tail was like nothing before seen outside of the fictional stories of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Indeed, the entire look of the V-1 was more like something out of a space opera adventure story than real life. But the V-1 was not a figment of creative fantasy. It was very real, and it was lethal.

Until that point, three decades of effort and expense had yielded only a few hundred unmanned flying weapons. Not one of those programs had met with more than marginal success under actual wartime conditions. By contrast, the Nazis manufactured nearly 30,000 V-1 rockets, thousands of which were used in combat, with brutal effectiveness.

German V-1 Rocket and Launch Rail

(Photo courtesy of Peter Garwood, of the Balloon Barrage Reunion Club)

With an operational range of about 155 miles, the V-1 could not fly directly from Germany to England. The Luftwaffe compensated for this shortcoming by building 96 launch sites in occupied Northern France, well within range of London.

The first V-1 attack was launched on June 13, 1944, one week after the Allied D-Day invasion of Europe. The rocket reached the end of its flight path, and dropped out of the sky near a railway bridge in the East End of London. Eight civilians were killed in the blast.

A handful of additional V-1 attacks were launched over the next day and a half, before the first serious barrage began. Between the afternoon of June 15th and midnight of June 16th, the German Flakregiment 155 launched 244 V-1s toward London. Approximately 90 of these failed to cross into British territory, due to problems during (or shortly after) launch. Roughly 50 impacted in uninhabited areas south of the target city, and another 22 were shot down by British antiaircraft fire. The remaining 73 weapons struck targets in London, causing significant structural damage and killing hundreds of people, most of whom were civilians.

The strange throbbing cadence of the V-1’s pulse jet engine reminded many witnesses of the buzzing of an insect. This characteristic droning sound led to diminutive nicknames like doodlebug, and buzz bomb. But—odd noises and funny nicknames aside—there was nothing comical about the V-1 weapon itself. The people of England would soon come to associate the insectoid buzzing sound with destruction, and death.

Controlled by a gyro-magnetic autopilot, a vane anemometer to calculate elapsed distance, and a weighted pendulum mechanism for attitude adjustment, the V-1 guidance system lacked the precision to strike small targets. Its simple guidance system was accurate enough to strike a city-sized target, and that was good enough to satisfy the tactical employment needs of the Luftwaffe.

According to a report written by American General Clayton Bissell, Germany launched an estimated 8,025 V-1s at targets in England during a single nine-week period in 1944. More than a million houses and other buildings were damaged or destroyed, and tens of thousands of people were killed.

Although England was the primary target of the program, the Belgian city of Antwerp was hammered by nearly 2,500 V-1 attacks.

In March of 1945, the last V-1 launch sites in France were overrun by the advancing Allied armies, just five and a half weeks before the collapse and surrender of the Nazi Third Reich. Hitler’s infamous Vengeance Weapon #1 would no longer darken the skies over England or Belgium. The deadly reign of the buzz-bomb was over, but its legacy was only beginning.

Captured German V-1 sites, including hundreds of unfired weapons, fell into the hands of the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. All three countries began reverse-engineering the V-1 design, and producing their own versions of the robotic flying weapon.

Many military historians now consider the German V-1 rocket to be the first true cruise missile. There are points of argument to support this assertion, and (perhaps) an equal number which challenge it. Regardless of the accuracy of the label, it’s obvious that the V-1 program became a catalyst for the future development of cruise missile technology.

The concept had been proven with brutal effectiveness. An unmanned aerial weapon could locate and strike a distant city, with no human intervention whatsoever. In the years following the Second World War, research and development teams all over the planet rushed to duplicate—and then exceed—the Nazis’ success with the V-1.

The age of the cruise missile had arrived. The future of warfare would be changed forever.

CHAPTER 27

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY; 28 NOVEMBER

8:30 PM EST

President Wainright shook the Indian Ambassador’s hand, and gestured for her to take a seat in one of the nine wingback chairs that formed the meeting area of the Oval Office. “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Madam Ambassador. I apologize for the late hour.”

Ambassador Shankar took the offered seat and smiled pleasantly. “Please do not trouble yourself, Mr. President. It is my duty and my pleasure to answer your summons, whenever it may come.”

The president took his traditional position at the head of the circle of chairs, his back to the famous presidential desk—crafted from the timbers of the nineteenth-century British sailing barque, HMS Resolute.

The ambassador’s chair was to his right, and the chair to his left was taken by National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven.

“I appreciate your indulgence,” the president said. He made a loop in the air with one finger to encompass the nearly empty circle of chairs. “As you can see, we are dispensing with the usual trappings of protocol, in the interests of both speed and privacy.”

The customary staff of diplomats and advisors was missing. Ordinarily, a direct meeting between the president and a foreign ambassador would include his chief of staff, the Secretary of State, the Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asian Affairs, the National Security Advisor, and a scribe from the National Security Council. Except for the National Security Advisor, everyone on that list was now absent.

“I understand,” the ambassador said. If she was uncomfortable with the departure from established White House protocol, she didn’t show it. And this was a departure. Apart from the lack of the usual participants, it was rare for the president to meet directly with an ambassador, and even more unusual for such a meeting to occur in the Oval Office.

Ambassadors almost always dealt with representatives of the State Department, and the meetings would typically take place in the Roosevelt Room, or—if the ambassador happened to be in ill favor—the West Wing Lobby. For Ambassador Shankar, the current meeting was contrary to all expectations: face-to-face with the president, in the Oval Office, with no diplomatic support team.

“I’m glad to hear that,” the president said. “I hope you will forgive me if I skip past the polite small talk, and go directly to the matter at hand.”

“Of course,” said the ambassador.

“Good,” the president said. “Because I would like to know whether or not your country intends to carry out an attack on the Three Gorges Dam.”

He nodded toward Brenthoven. “It’s my understanding that Greg… that is to say my National Security Advisor… has relayed our concerns to you regarding the potential consequences of such an attack. Have you had an opportunity to discuss this issue with your government?”

“I have been fully briefed on my government’s intentions in this matter,” the ambassador said. “Officially, there is no plan to attack the Three Gorges Dam.”

“What about unofficially?” the president asked.

“The unofficial answer, I’m afraid,” said the ambassador, “is somewhat different. Unofficially, I have been authorized to inform you—in strictest confidence—that the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam is considered a valid and necessary military option, if hostilities with the People’s Republic of China continue to escalate.”

President Wainwright rubbed the back of his neck. “I see. Your government is aware that China will almost certainly regard such an attack as a direct strategic assault against their critical national infrastructure? And is your government also aware that such a devastating blow will likely result in nuclear reprisals?”

“My government has been advised of your concerns,” the Indian Ambassador said. “But we do not agree with your assessment of the PRC’s response. My government does not believe that the Chinese politburo will resort to nuclear retaliation.”

“What if your projections are wrong?” the president asked. “Why would you even risk the possibility?”

The ambassador folded her hands in her lap. “Mr. President, China is not my country’s only concern. As your satellites have no doubt revealed to you, our Pakistani neighbors have begun massing troops near our eastern border, in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Even as we speak, Pak Faza’ya—Pakistan’s Air Force—is carrying out a campaign of intensive air patrols just within the boundaries of Pakistani airspace. Although these measures technically do not qualify as military action against my country, the armed forces of Pakistan are moving to an aggressive footing. The Pakistani government is clearly preparing to take advantage of India’s current discomfort.”

She raised her eyebrows. “To use an American idiom, the sharks are circling, Mr. President. Both to our north, and to our east. We cannot allow them to smell blood in the water.”

“I understand your concerns,” the president said.

Before he could continue, Ambassador Shankar spoke again. “With all due respect, Mr. President, you do not understand our concerns. If the United States truly understood the cultural and political tensions in our portion of the world, you would not be so quick to sell weapons to Pakistan, or to back up the regime of terrorists who sit in power in Islamabad. Nor do you understand our concerns about China. I turn your attention to the so-called Sino-Indian War of the early 1960s. My people know what it is like to have the People’s Liberation Army come crashing across our borders. Your country, I am pleased to say, has never had such an experience.”

“For us, this is not an exercise in foreign policy,” she said. “It is not political theory. We are faced on two sides by enemies who have historically demonstrated their will to destroy India, and are currently taking actions which are directly hostile to my country. We will not show weakness. And if that means that the Three Gorges Dam must be destroyed, then such is the price China will pay for massacring our villages without warning or provocation.”

The president shook his head. “Madam Ambassador, I beg you not to do this.”

Ambassador Shankar sat for several seconds before speaking. “Can you offer us an alternative? Will you align your military power directly with ours, and signal to China and Pakistan that to fight India is to fight the United States of America?”

The president said nothing.

The ambassador smiled sadly. “There is your answer, Mr. President. If you will not stand with us, then we will defend ourselves without your help. And we will use whatever means are at our disposal.”

“What if your projections are wrong?” the president asked again. “What if China retaliates with nuclear weapons?”

Ambassador Shankar sighed. “Then they will discover that India also has such weapons, and—if we must—we are not afraid to take the war to our enemy’s doorstep.”

CHAPTER 28

CNN CENTER

190 MARIETTA STREET

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

SATURDAY; 29 NOVEMBER

10:19 AM EST

The video came to an end, and Irene Schick immediately hit the play button again. She had watched the clip five times in a row, and she still couldn’t believe it. She fast-forwarded to the point where the assault rifles started firing into the crowd, and the bodies began hitting the ground.

The audio was muffled and nearly unintelligible, but the video footage was amazing… Chinese troops gunning down peaceful protestors with no visible provocation of any kind. Blood. Raw panic. The terrified crowd stampeding like cattle.

Tibetan activists had been accusing China of similar atrocities since the 2008 riots, but the evidence—what little there was—had nearly always been lacking in quality or persuasiveness.

But the scene unfolding on her computer monitor was the real deal. As tactless as the cliché sounded in this context, this footage looked like the proverbial smoking gun. Not just one or two rioters fired at under questionable conditions, but a hundred people dead or injured. Maybe more. She’d have to assign a crew to analyze the video frame-by-frame, count the bodies, and pull up subtle details that might be overlooked without meticulous study.

According to Byron Maxwell at Amnesty, the recording had been shot from a cell phone. Judging from the quality of the video, it must have been a good one. Even when expanded to full size on Irene’s 25 inch LCD monitor, the images were clear and well-defined. Far short of professional quality, but more than good enough for broadcast.

The video would lose some detail and pick up some digital artifacts when it was enlarged for A-roll, but that would only add to the drama, and confirm the authenticity in the minds of the viewers.

They could get the tourist guy who shot it into a local affiliate studio in California, or maybe just do a voice interview while his video ran in the background. They’d also have to let one of the Amnesty International spokespeople sneak in some air time, as payback for the tip and the video. Irene was already starting to plan the first segment in her head. This was going to be the lead story for days. She could already feel it.

She picked up her phone, punched a number, and started talking as soon as the call was picked up on the other end. “Roger, this is Irene. How long will it take to get Tom Gwinn or Kelly Spencer into Tibet with a full crew?”

There was a half second pause before Senior Producer Roger Calloway spoke. “Are you serious?”

“Damned right I’m serious,” Irene said. “We’re going to need one of the headliners on the ground in Tibet fast.”

She looked at the slaughter playing out on her computer screen. “Hang on to your ass, Roger. I’m about to drop a stick of dynamite in your lap.”

CHAPTER 29

USS CALIFORNIA (SSN-781)

NORTHERN BAY OF BENGAL

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

1824 hours (6:24 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net, “Conn—Sonar. Sierra One Five bears zero-three-niner. Contact shows slow right bearing drift.”

Captain Patke touched his Officer of the Deck on the shoulder. “Let’s come a couple of degrees to starboard, and keep as close to the center of his baffles as we can.”

The OOD nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.” He began issuing quiet orders to the helmsman.

Sierra One Five was the current sonar tracking designator for a Chinese Shang class nuclear attack submarine. USS California had been trailing the Chinese sub for nearly twenty-hours, and now they were about to follow it past the perimeter ships of the Indian aircraft carrier strike group.

Patke and his crew had performed a similar operation five days earlier, when they had slipped past the defensive ring of ships surrounding the Chinese aircraft carrier, near the southern end of the Bay of Bengal. Then, they had received orders to break off their surveillance, to locate and trail this Chinese attack submarine. And here they were at the northern end of the bay, following the sub as it tried the exact same maneuver against the Indians.

There was a good chance they would succeed, too. The Chinese sub skipper was skillful and cautious, and his boat was reasonably quiet. As quiet as Chinese submarines ever got, at any rate.

Captain Patke glanced at the master dive clock. It was coming up on 1830 hours. Above the surface, the world would be experiencing that strange period of illumination known as nautical twilight, when the sun was below the horizon, but its rays continued to light up the sky. The surface of the sea would be too dark to make out visual details, and the still illuminated sky would be too bright to allow the human eye to properly acclimate to the darkness.

This was the time of day when aircrews and shipboard lookouts would have the hardest time spotting the silhouette of a submerged submarine, or the feather of an exposed periscope.

Patke nodded. The Chinese sub commander was doing it right. If the noise of his boat’s reactor plant didn’t give away his position, he would make it past the defensive ring of Indian destroyers and frigates, and into the heart of the aircraft carrier’s screen.

*  *  *

A half-hour later, it was clear that the skipper of Sierra One Five had succeeded in his objective. His boat was well inside the screen of the Indian aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. Patke’s own boat, the California was still trailing silently behind, using the screw noise and reactor plant noise from the Chinese sub as a mask against detection.

Contact Sierra One Five, the Shang, was one of China’s second-generation subs, and its acoustic signatures were significantly reduced from the older Han class boats. But there was a world of difference between less noisy, and silent. Despite the skill of her commander, Sierra One Five might be just a smidge too noisy to escape detection by the sonar operators in the Indian battle group. And given the close trailing-distance, that would probably mean detection of the California as well.

Patke pulled off his wire rimmed glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose before returning his glasses to their usual perch. Following close on the ass of a potentially hostile submarine was risky on the best of days. Doodling around inside the defensive perimeter of another navy’s aircraft carrier brought an entirely different order of risk. Now, the California was suddenly doing both at once. If anything went wrong at all, it would take about three seconds for this entire situation to go straight down the frigging toilet.

Patke took at last look at the tactical plot, and then strolled over to the accordion door that led to Sonar Control. He leaned against the door jam, and stared into the dim interior of the sonar compartment. The boat’s leading Sonar Technician, Chief Petty Officer Lanier Philips, was the Sonar Supervisor on duty.

Captain Patke caught the eye of the sonar man. “How’s it looking, chief?”

The sonar chief looked up, his African American features intense with concentration. He shifted his headset far enough to the side to expose his right ear, and used his left palm to press the remaining earphone tighter against his other ear. “We’ve got a solid track on this guy, captain. You know that weird little low frequency flutter that the Han class boats make in their second-stage heat exchangers? Looks like the Shang class has a similar design. The dB level is a lot lower on these boats, but the tonal is still there.”

The chief turned back to the array of sonar screens. “If you keep us in his baffles, sir, we can track this guy until the fat lady sings.”

Captain Patke nodded. “How about our Indian friends up above? Are their sonars good enough to sniff this guy out?”

The Sonar Chief frowned at the screen, and answered over his shoulder. “Hard to say for sure, skipper, but I doubt it. The primary tonal we’re tracking is not all that loud. We detected it, but we’re sticking to this contact’s butt like a barnacle. Also the contact is running below the layer, and so are we. We’re in the same water with him, which makes it easier for us to track him.”

The layer (also referred to as the sonic layer) was a barrier to sound energy caused by the transition from virtually constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, to the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. This abrupt shift in temperature could reflect much of a submarine’s acoustic signal away from the hull-mounted sonar sensors of surface warships. This did not make submarines acoustically invisible to ships on the surface, but it created a tactical edge that all good sub commanders knew how to exploit.

Patke nodded again. If Chief Philips was right, contact Sierra One Five’s presence might go unnoticed by the Indian Navy ships above.

Patke was about to walk away when the Sonar Chief spoke again.

“That’s weird…”

Patke turned back. “What have you got, Chief?”

Chief Philips tilted his head to the side, and stared at one of the sonar waterfall displays. “Got a transient… It sounds like…”

The sonar man straightened up suddenly and keyed his headset’s microphone. “Conn—Sonar. Sierra One Five is flooding his tubes! I say again, contact is flooding his tubes!”

“Holy shit!” someone in the control room said. “He’s gonna shoot!”

Patke sprinted the half dozen steps back to the OOD platform. The unidentified author of that comment was correct. Sierra One Five was getting ready to launch weapons.

Damn! Patke had been sure that the Chinese sub had come on a mission of surveillance. He had not expected the crazy bastards to start shooting.

He raised his voice. “All stations, this is the captain. I have the Conn, belay your reports. Helm, right full rudder, new course one-niner-zero! Diving Officer, take us down! Make your new depth six hundred feet.”

He didn’t wait for acknowledgements before belting out his next set of orders. “Weapons Control, prep torpedo tubes one, three, and five. Do not flood tubes until I give the order. Countermeasures, stand by to launch decoys.”

The deck tilted under his feet as the California nosed down and heeled to starboard in response to the boat’s changing course and depth.

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “Conn—Sonar. Sierra One Five is opening his outer doors.”

“Not yet,” Patke said softly. “Don’t shoot yet, you stupid son of a bitch. Just hang onto your torpedoes a little while longer…”

The California needed distance now, to separate herself as much as possible from the bearing of Sierra One Five before the Chinese sub started pumping out torpedoes. Because about thirty seconds after the launches were detected, the Indians were going to pounce on this stretch of water with every antisubmarine warfare asset they could scare up. The area would be swarming with frigates, helicopters, and those new Kamorta class ASW corvettes that the Indian Navy was so proud of. Every one of them would be firing torpedoes at anything bigger than a tuna. And the Chinese sub, Sierra One Five, would probably pump out a few reactionary weapons as it struggled to escape.

“Passing three hundred feet,” the Diving Officer said.

“Very well,” Patke said. Not deep enough yet, but there wasn’t any more time. If the California was going to get out of this alive, she needed speed. He would just have to accept the increased risk of detection. “Helm, all ahead full.”

The helmsman’s response was immediate. “All ahead full, aye!”

There were about ninety seconds of relative calm before the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “Conn—Sonar. Torpedoes in the water, bearing zero-four-zero! Looks like a pair of wake homers, headed for the Indian carrier.”

Patke glanced at the tactical display screen. The range to contact Sierra One Five was opening quickly, but not quickly enough.

“This is going to be just like when I was a kid,” the Officer of the Deck said softly.

“How do you figure?” Patke asked. He couldn’t imagine how anyone’s childhood could be at all similar to the situation unfolding now.

“My little brother would steal cookies from the cookie jar,” the OOD said. “But I was always the one who got in trouble for it. He ate the cookies, and I got the ass whuppin’.”

The OOD nodded toward the tactical display. “I recon that’s what’s happening right here, sir. Our Chinese pals reached into the Indian cookie jar and grabbed themselves a big handful of snickerdoodles. We didn’t touch those damned cookies, but we’re about to get our asses whupped for it, just the same.”

Patke looked at the continually-opening range on the tactical display. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.”

Four or five minutes later, sonar began reporting torpedoes in the water, but subsequent evaluation located them all at a safe distance to the northeast.

The control room crew began to breathe easier.

“Well, we didn’t get any cookies,” Captain Patke said. “But at least we didn’t get an ass whipping that we don’t deserve.”

Perhaps it was the tempting of fate. Perhaps it was purest coincidence. Or perhaps it was simple bad luck. But the Sonar Supervisor’s next report came over the net less than ten seconds later. “Conn—Sonar. We have just been over-flown by a multi-engine turboprop aircraft. We have multiple active sonobouys in the water!”

“Launch two static noisemakers,” Patke said.

The Officer of the Deck turned to the Countermeasures Control Panel. “Aye-aye, sir. Launching static noisemakers now.”

A pair of pneumatic hisses and two muffled thumps announced the ejection of the countermeasures.

“That’ll give our friends upstairs something to ping on,” he said. “Now, let’s get a little bearing separation. Left standard rudder, come to new course one-five-zero.”

The helmsman acknowledged the command, and turned the control yoke to the left, beginning the California’s slow turn.

Patke looked up at the overhead of the control room, as though he could see through the intervening steel and seawater to the Indian ASW aircraft circling in the night sky above. “Give us a break here, guys. We didn’t shoot at your carrier, and we didn’t come to steal your fucking cookies.”

CHAPTER 30

21ST SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER

ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

0430 hours (4:30 AM)

TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’

Technical Sergeant Jennifer Thaxton touched a soft-key to silence the alert on her SAWS console. The Satellite Analyst Workstation was monitoring real-time telemetry from GEO-3, a U.S. Air Force infrared detection and tracking satellite currently passing over northern China. The satellite had just triggered an alert, signaling a significant thermal bloom near the Chinese end of the Gobi desert.

Thaxton called up a GPS grid and superimposed it over the site of the bloom. She was ninety-percent sure that she knew the location of the sudden heat source, but she wanted to be absolutely certain. She ordered the software to fix a cursor point at the center of the infrared hot spot, and then read off the accompanying latitude and longitude. Yep. She’d been right.

A flurry of taps on the keyboard summoned up a schedule of known activities for the facility in question. Thaxton scanned it rapidly, and then called up yet another screen—pulling in ballistic tracking data from two Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites belonging to the Air Force, and an Onyx bird from the National Reconnaissance Office.

After a few seconds spent cross-referencing their respective readouts, Sergeant Thaxton swung the microphone boom of her comm-set to a position near her mouth and keyed the circuit. “Watch Officer, this is Operator Fourteen. GEO-3 has detected an unscheduled launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the southern Gobi Desert. Rapid assessment of the trajectory looks like a low orbit insertion.”

The Watch Officer, Major Saunders, acknowledged the report. He was standing at Thaxton’s elbow almost before she had released the mike button. “What’s your analysis, Sergeant?”

“Too early in the launch to know for sure, sir, but it’s definitely not a weapons trajectory. If I had to take a wild stab at it, I’d say the Chinese are fielding a low orbit surveillance satellite.”

She touched the display screen, and followed an arcing green line with her fingertip. When she reached the end of the arc, she continued moving her finger, extending the curve with her best mental projection of the arc’s final shape. “Could be they’re getting ready to hang an eye in the sky over their little trouble spot in the Bay of Bengal.”

The Watch Officer nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said. “I’m going to forward your assessment up the chain, along with the tracking data.”

“Wait a second, sir,” Thaxton said. “That’s just a guess on my part. It could be completely out to lunch.”

“Understood,” the Watch Officer said. “But it’s a good guess. And personally, I think you’re dead on the money.”

CHAPTER 31

USS MIDWAY (CVN-82)

BAY OF BENGAL

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

2025 hours (8:25 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Admiral Richard Zimmerman sat in his raised command chair, facing the five large-screen tactical displays that covered the forward bulkhead of Flag Plot. Each of the six-foot–square screens was peppered with arcane tactical symbols representing the aircraft, submarines, and ships within the carrier’s area of responsibility.

The symbols were color-coded: blue for friendly, and white for neutral or unknown. A third available color-code (red for hostile) was not currently in use, as the USS Midway strike group was only in the area to serve as a stabilizing force. Theoretically, the U.S. Navy was a disinterested party, which meant that there were no hostile units in the area. At least not as far as the good old USN was concerned.

The admiral’s eyes locked onto the blue half-circle symbol that represented the submarine, USS California. Those guys had nearly gotten their asses shot off by the “neutral” Indian ASW assets screening the INS Vikrant, only an hour or so earlier. This little act of theoretical non-aggression had occurred after a Chinese attack submarine—also “neutral”—had blown the Vikrant’s doors off.

Now the Vikrant was burning and trying not to sink, somewhere up at the northern end of the bay, while the Indians were pounding the hell out of anything that moved up near that end of the pond. Only God knew how the skipper of the California had managed to get his boat out of that mess in one piece.

“Neutral my ass,” the admiral said. “If it gets any more ‘neutral’ around here, we’ll all be going home in body bags.”

Not that he could blame the Indian Navy. They hadn’t been trying to shoot at the California. They’d been going after the Chinese attack sub that had punched holes in their carrier, and they’d gotten a bit too quick on the trigger.

Admiral Zimmerman gripped the arm of his chair. If somebody blasted a couple of flaming craters in his aircraft carrier, he might just do what the Indians were doing… Hammer the living shit out of everything within reach.

His eyes swept the dimly lit compartment. Flag Plot was packed with electronic displays and support equipment. The outer bulkheads were festooned with radio comm panels, digital status boards, radar repeaters, and computer workstations—all dedicated to supplying the admiral and his staff with the information needed to command an aircraft carrier and its strike group.

As always when the carrier was deployed, Flag Plot was alive with activity, but quiet. The system operators and radio talkers spoke in hushed voices, through hands-free comm headsets. The collective murmur of their conversations was not much louder than the cooling fans that served the electronic equipment.

“If you have a moment, sir…”

The voice came from the left side of the admiral’s chair, about six inches from his elbow. It was that new Flag Lieutenant, the creepy one: Muller, or Moyer… something like that. The one who always seemed to appear out of thin air.

The admiral had watched the man enter and leave rooms, so he knew it wasn’t magic or teleportation. You could keep an eye on his movements, if you tried. But if you weren’t watching for him, the man had a way of showing up out of nowhere, always with that damned clipboard in his hand.

The lieutenant held out the clipboard. “If you have a moment, sir,” he said again.

Admiral Zimmerman accepted the clipboard, resisting the urge to snatch it out of the young officer’s hands. The cover sheet was white with a red border and red text, signaling that the document beneath was classified at the Secret level.

The admiral flipped up the cover sheet to reveal a hardcopy of a radio message. He began to read.

//SSSSSSSSSS//

//SECRET//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//301332Z NOV//

FM      COMPACFLT//

TO      COMCARSTRKGRU FIVE//

USS MIDWAY//

USS TOWERS//

USS FRANK W FENNO//

USS DONALD GERRARD//

INFO      COMSEVENTHFLT//

CTF SEVEN ZERO//

SUBJ/SATELLITE LAUNCH WARNING//

REF/A/RMG/SPACEOPCEN AF/301241Z NOV//

NARR/REF A IS LAUNCH WARNING AND INITIAL TACTICAL SUMMARY FROM U.S. AIR FORCE 21ST SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER, DETAILING SUSPECTED PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA) SATELLITE LAUNCH ON THIS DATE//

1. (SECR) REF A ANNOUNCED THE UNSCHEDULED LAUNCH OF A LOW ORBIT SPACE VEHICLE FROM THE PLA’S JIUQUAN SATELLITE LAUNCH CENTER IN THE SOUTHERN GOBI DESERT APPROXIMATELY ONE HOUR AGO.

2. (CONF) TRAJECTORY AND ORBITAL PROFILE ARE NOT CONSISTENT WITH MANNED SPACE LAUNCH OR ANY KNOWN WEAPON OR WEAPONS PLATFORM.

3. (SECR) INITIAL AIR FORCE EVALUATION IS HAIYANG HY-2F OR HY-3 SERIES SATELLITE, DEDICATED TO OPTICAL, RADAR, AND MULTISPECTRAL SURVEILLANCE OF BAY OF BENGAL OPERATING AREA.

4. (SECR) SATELLITE TRANSIT SPEED HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY REDUCED IN ORDER TO APPROXIMATE GEOSTATIONARY POSITIONING FROM LOW EARTH ORBIT. 21ST SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER ADVISES THAT ORBITAL PROFILE IS NOT STABLE, AND WILL DECAY WITHIN TEN DAYS.

5. (SECR) FOR PLANNING AND COMMUNICATIONS PURPOSES, THIS SATELLITE HAS BEEN DESIGNATED AS REDBIRD ONE.

6. (SECR) DUE TO PREVIOUS OPERATIONAL PATTERNS AND NATIONAL INTERESTS, THE EXISTING INVENTORY OF DEPLOYED PLA SATELLITES PROVIDES COVERAGE OF THE BAY OF BENGAL OPERATING AREA ONLY APPROXIMATELY SIX HOURS OUT OF EVERY TWENTY-FOUR. DURING ITS PROJECTED LIFECYCLE, REDBIRD ONE WILL PROVIDE THE PLA WITH FULL-TIME SURVEILLANCE OF THE OPERATING AREA.

7. (SECR) ALL UNITS ARE ADVISED THAT THE FULL CAPABILITIES OF THE HY-2F AND HY-3 SERIES SATELLITES ARE UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME. REDBIRD ONE MAY PROVIDE HIGH-RESOLUTION IDENTIFICATION AND TRACKING OF ALL SURFACE AND AIR ASSETS IN THE AREA. RECOMMEND THAT YOU ASSUME THAT THE PLA HAS FULL VISIBILITY OF YOUR OPERATIONS UNTIL ORBITAL DECAY AND SUBSEQUENT FAILURE OF REDBIRD ONE HAS BEEN CONFIRMED, APPROXIMATELY TEN DAYS FROM THIS DATE.

8. (UNCL) GOOD LUCK AND STAY SHARP! ADMIRAL STANFORD SENDS.

//301332Z NOV//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//RBT 2034539//

//SECRET//

//SSSSSSSSSS//

The admiral read through the message twice before he scribbled his initials at the top and handed the clipboard back to Lieutenant Creepy. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said.

The lieutenant tucked the clipboard under one arm. “Excuse me, sir?”

“Nothing,” the admiral growled. He waved for the strange little man to go away.

When the admiral looked around a few seconds later, the Flag Lieutenant was nowhere to be seen. The admiral hadn’t heard the watertight door open or close, but the lieutenant was no longer in Flag Plot. How in the hell did he do that?

The admiral’s eyes went back to the tactical display screens. Redbird One would be spying on every move the strike group made, every aircraft sortie, and every course and speed change made by the escorts, or by the Midway herself. But there was nothing in Pac Fleet’s message which designated the satellite as hostile, which meant that Zimmerman had no authorization to take the damned thing out.

This new Chinese surveillance tool was officially neutral. There was that word again…

The admiral leaned back in his chair. Neutral. He was starting to hate that fucking word.

CHAPTER 32

CNN CENTER

190 MARIETTA STREET

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

SUNDAY; 01 DECEMBER

9:22 AM EST

Despite Irene Schick’s prediction, the video of the killings in Lhasa did not run as the lead story. She was still convinced that the massacre was going to dominate the news cycle for several days, but the news director, Lloyd Neilson didn’t agree.

Neilson was damned good at his job, and he and Irene rarely butted heads. But he didn’t agree with Irene’s evaluation of the story’s importance or potential. China and India were escalating toward what could become the first all-out war between nuclear powers. Against a backdrop of that scale, Neilson judged that the shooting of some demonstrators in Tibet would get lost in the shuffle.

He had overruled Irene on both the placement and timing of the piece. Irene had wanted to break the story as a headliner on Saturday evening, with full trumpets, and delivery by one of the big league anchors. Instead, the Tibet piece had been shoved into an also-ran spot on Sunday morning, twenty-two minutes after the lead stories had aired at the top of the hour.

For a lot of news pieces, that would have been the death knell. But not this story. As Irene had told Nielson repeatedly, the Tibet thing was not going to disappear quietly.

She had no inkling of how right her prediction would turn out to be.

CHAPTER 33

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

2147 hours (9:47 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

There was a light rap on Commander Silva’s door, and then a polite pause before it opened. Captain Bowie stood in the entryway. “Good evening, Kat. Mind if I come in?”

Silva looked up from the stack of paperwork on the tiny fold-down desk of her temporary stateroom. She was still plowing through a mountain of minor administrative details, in preparation for the change of command on Friday.

She had been planning to hit the hay in a few minutes, so she was dressed in her customary shipboard sleeping attire: sweatpants and tee-shirt. Tonight’s sweats were standard gray workout pants, and the tee was dark blue with a gold silkscreen image of the surface warfare officer emblem across the shoulders. At home, she preferred to sleep in socks and underwear, but aboard ship she might be called out of bed at any moment of the night. Informal as they were, her tee-shirt and sweats allowed her to respond to drills and emergencies fully clothed.

She leaned back in her chair. “Evening, Jim. Come on in.”

Bowie stepped into the stateroom, closing the door behind himself. He held out a routing folder. “I wasn’t sure if you’d seen the latest message traffic. I thought you might want to look it over before you hit the rack.”

Silva gestured toward the papers on her desk. “The one about the Chinese surveillance satellite? I’ve seen it. I’ve got a copy right here.”

Captain Bowie shook his head and held out the folder. “Not that one. A new message, from the Bureau of Personnel.”

Silva accepted the routing folder, flipped it open, and read the one-page message inside.

//UUUUUUUUUU//

//UNCLASSIFIED//

//PRIORITY//PRIORITY//PRIORITY//

//301355Z NOV//

FM      BUPERS//

TO      USS TOWERS//

INFO      COMCARSTRKGRU FIVE

COMDESRON ONE FIVE//

SUBJ/USS TOWERS CHANGE OF COMMAND//

1. (UNCL) BUPERS NOTES THAT USS TOWERS IS CURRENTLY DEPLOYED TO THE BAY OF BENGAL PURSUANT TO OPERATIONAL ORDERS NOT DISCUSSED IN THIS TRAFFIC.

2. (UNCL) IN VIEW OF UNANTICIPATED DEPLOYMENT, SUBJ CHANGE OF COMMAND IS HEREBY POSTPONED UNTIL COMPLETION OF CURRENT OPERATIONS.

3. (UNCL) CAPTAIN SAMUEL HARLAND BOWIE IS DIRECTED TO REMAIN ABOARD USS TOWERS AS COMMANDING OFFICER FOR THE DURATION OF CURRENT OPERATIONS, OR UNTIL USS TOWERS IS ROTATED OUT OF THE OPERATING AREA.

4. (UNCL) COMMANDER DESTROYER SQUADRON ONE FIVE IS HEREBY NOTIFIED THAT CAPTAIN BOWIE’S DETACHMENT FROM USS TOWERS WILL BE DELAYED. NEW DATES TO FOLLOW.

5. (UNCL) COMMANDER KATHERINE ELIZABETH SILVA IS DIRECTED TO REMAIN ABOARD USS TOWERS AS PROSPECTIVE COMMANDING OFFICER FOR THE DURATION OF CURRENT OPERATIONS, OR UNTIL USS TOWERS IS ROTATED OUT OF THE OPERATING AREA. COMMANDER SILVA IS ADVISED TO UTILIZE THIS ADDITIONAL TIME TO CONTINUE PREPARING FOR ASSUMPTION OF COMMAND, SUCH PREPARATIONS NOT TO INTERFERE WITH SHIP’S MISSION REQUIREMENTS.

6. (UNCL) FURTHER DETAILS WILL BE ISSUED VIA SEPCOR.

//301355Z NOV//

//PRIORITY//PRIORITY//PRIORITY//

//UNCLASSIFIED//

//UUUUUUUUUU//

Silva closed the folder and laid it on her desk. “I’ve actually been expecting this for a while,” she said.

“So have I,” said Bowie. “But I know how frustrating this must be. I was ready to turn over the keys in five days.”

He smiled weakly. “Okay, maybe not ready. I don’t think anyone is ever ready to turn over command of a warship, but I was prepared to do it.”

Silva sighed heavily. “I know you were, Jim, and I appreciate that. And I understand why the Bureau is doing this. You don’t change jockeys in the middle of a race. But I can’t pretend that I’m not disappointed.”

“I understand,” Bowie said. “If I were in your shoes right now, I’d be peeling the paint off the bulkheads.”

“I’m tempted to do that, myself,” said Silva. “But they’re not my bulkheads yet, so I guess I’d better leave the paint intact.”

Bowie patted the bulkhead next to the door. “They will be yours soon,” he said. “Before you know it.”

Silva looked back down at the closed routing folder on her desk. “Yeah,” she said. The disappointment in her voice was audible. “Soon.”

CHAPTER 34

--------------------------------------------------

From: <katherine.silva@navy.mil>

Sent: Sunday, November 30, 11:52 PM

To: <harry.silva@nauticalcomposites.com>

Subject: Change In Plans

Dear Dad,

Got a little bad news a couple of hours ago. The Bureau of Personnel has issued orders delaying my change of command until this operational deployment is over. So, Jim Bowie gets to sit in the hot seat a while longer, while your loving daughter cools her heels and waits her turn. (How’s that for mixing up the old metaphors?)

I guess I really don’t have anything to complain about. Jim is an excellent skipper, and a great guy. He couldn’t possibly be any more helpful or thoughtful, and the crew worships him. Needless to say, I’m not happy about the delay, but if I have to warm the bench for a while, it’s nice to know that the man playing in my spot is an A-list player.

Before you get started, Jim is not my type, so don’t even go there. He has a long-term girlfriend, or a fiancé, or something. I don’t know the details, and I’m not going to ask. Whenever I get serious about a relationship, it won’t be with a Navy man. Don’t get me wrong, I like men in uniform, but I figure one Captain Ahab is enough for any family. Besides, I intend to be married to this ship for a couple of years.

This situation does have an up-side. I’m getting a chance to see my new ship and crew perform under pressure before I take command. We’ve got an Indian battle group on one side of us, and a Chinese battle group on the other, and that’s a little like being between the hammer and the anvil. We’re not in combat, and (God willing) we’re not going to be, but the situation is tense. The crew is performing beautifully. I’m already proud of every man and woman on this ship, and I’ll be proud to lead them when the time comes.

Give Mom a kiss for me, and stop feeding scraps of food to Snickers under the table. Twelve years is getting up there for a pug, and they’re prone to heart problems at that age. Scratch him behind the ears instead, and tell him it’s from me.

Love,

Kat

CDR Katherine E. Silva

USS Towers (DDG-103)

--------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER 35

U STREET CAFE

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

6:30 PM EST

Gregory Brenthoven found an open table near the rear of the café. He chose a seat facing away from the entrance, so he could enjoy the brightly-colored Joel Bergner mural that enlivened the entire back wall.

Brenthoven pulled the lid from his cappuccino, and emptied two packets of raw sugar onto the thick layer of steamed milk at the top. The heavy brown crystals sank quickly through the foam, leaving an irregular tunnel down to the dark liquid below. He gave the mixture a few quick turns with a wooden stir stick and replaced the cover.

The aroma rising from the cup was heavenly. There were plenty of fancier coffee shops in the District, but his long career in Washington had not revealed a single place that served up a finer cup of cappuccino.

He’d bought a sandwich too, grilled chicken and avocado on a brioche roll, but he left that untouched on the table while his eyes feasted on the mural.

Bergner’s whimsical rendering of the historic U Street corridor was framed on the left by portraits of jazz legends Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, and on the right by a throng of revelers, celebrating in the streets on the night of the 2008 election, when the race barrier of the American Presidency had finally been shattered. Between the two ends of the painting lay a curving section of road, with a 1920s era convertible cruising past the façade of the old Roosevelt Theater.

The color pallet of the mural was weighted heavily toward oranges and yellows, giving it a false impression of antiquity, counterbalanced by the strange mingling of resignation and optimism on the faces of the people depicted.

Brenthoven lifted his cup and took a sip of cappuccino. Still a bit too hot, but damn it was good.

His eyes danced back and forth across the mural, not focusing on any particular section. He’d seen that painting at least a hundred times since Bergner had created it in 2009, and he still wasn’t quite sure why it affected him so profoundly. There was something there, below the surface, some subtly encrypted message of hope and despair. A subliminal acknowledgement that the world could be a much better place… should be a much better place… but even in the midst of oppression and injustice, there was still reason to look forward to a brighter tomorrow.

Brenthoven took another swallow of his cappuccino, and started to think about unwrapping the sandwich.

Of course, he could be completely wrong about the intended message of the mural. He had never met with Joel Bergner, and he had never bothered to research the deliberate symbolism (if any) that the artist had attempted to convey. But that was what the painting said to Brenthoven, and—from his perspective—that was the only symbolism that really mattered.

“Good evening, Mr. Brenthoven,” said a voice behind him.

Brenthoven glanced over his shoulder. He was surprised to be addressed by name, but even more surprised when he saw who had spoken. It was Gita Shankar, the Ambassador for India.

She held up a paper cup with the café’s logo. “May I join you?”

Still a bit put off by the unexpected encounter, Brenthoven took a couple of seconds to respond. “Of course. Yes, please do.”

The ambassador took the chair opposite his own, and pulled the lid from her cup.

Brenthoven nodded toward it. “Coffee?”

“Tea, actually,” the Ambassador said. “With milk. Apparently it is the closest thing to chai that this establishment can make, unless I want to try something called a smoothie.”

“If you’re not familiar with smoothies, you’re probably safer with the tea,” Brenthoven said.

He tipped his cup slightly in the ambassador’s direction in a toasting gesture, and then took a drink. When he set the cup down, he looked the Indian woman in the eyes. “I have a strong hunch that you are not a frequent customer of this café.”

Ambassador Shankar toyed with the lid of her cup. “You are quite correct, of course. I have never been here before.”

Brenthoven nodded. “Then, may I ask what brings you here this evening?”

“Surely, you must know the answer to that,” the ambassador said. “I am here because you are here.”

Brenthoven nodded again. “You had me followed?”

The ambassador grimaced. “Only with the best of intentions, I assure you.”

Brenthoven met her grimace with a frown of his own. Apparently he was becoming careless. He’d never needed Secret Service protection before, but if his movements were that easy to track, it might be time to think about better options for his personal security.

He looked at his unexpected visitor. “You’ve obviously found me, and I can promise that you have my undivided attention, Madam Ambassador.”

“Please,” she said. “Call me Gita.”

“And you can call me Gregory,” he said. “But I’d still like to know why you took the trouble to have me followed here. I assume you want to discuss something outside of the traditional channels. As I said, you have my attention.”

The Indian ambassador raised her cup, and then lowered it without drinking. “You’re quite correct, of course. I wish to speak to you informally, and outside of normal channels.”

Brenthoven took another swallow of cappuccino. “About what?”

“About the hydroelectric site that we have been discussing. And my country’s possible intentions regarding the disposition of that site in the near future.”

“I see,” Brenthoven said. The ambassador obviously didn’t want to name the Three Gorges Dam in this public setting, and any discussion about India’s plan to destroy it would apparently be couched in indirect terms. That was okay. Brenthoven knew how to talk around a subject as well as any government official.

“Is there something specific you wanted to tell me about your country’s intentions regarding the hydroelectric facility in question?”

“Yes,” the ambassador said. “Unofficially, I have been authorized to tell you that our planned actions will occur in two days.”

She looked at her watch. “Approximately forty-eight hours from now.”

Brenthoven sat up. “Forty-eight hours? Are you serious?”

“I am quite serious,” said Ambassador Shankar. “That timeline is given to you in strict confidence. We expect you to protect this information as you would defend the military secrets of a close ally. If it should leak to the wrong people, any trust between my government and yours would be irreparably damaged.”

“I understand,” Brenthoven said. “But I don’t understand why you are sharing this with us. If this information is so sensitive, and I agree that it is, why not restrict the knowledge to your own inner circles?”

“Because there is still time for your government to convince my leaders to divert from the plan,” the ambassador said.

Brenthoven stared at her. “How? What do we have to do to convince your government not to go through with this plan?”

Ambassador Shankar smiled. “We have already discussed that. You can enter the conflict on the side of my country, and help us force the People’s Republic of China to end their acts of aggression, without resorting to unthinkable strategic options.”

“We can’t do that,” Brenthoven said. “The PRC has done nothing to provoke the United States. We have no justification for entering into direct military confrontation.”

The ambassador looked surprised. “Shooting down your military aircraft was not sufficient provocation?”

Brenthoven felt a knot form in his chest. “Madam Ambassador, what are you talking about?”

“Ah,” said the ambassador. “I assumed that you knew…”

The knot in Brenthoven’s chest tightened. “Knew what?”

“About the air battle that took place roughly an hour ago,” she said. “Two of your carrier-based F-18 aircraft were attacked by two flights of Chinese warplanes. I’m not sure about casualties on the Chinese side, but I know that one of your planes was destroyed. I believe the other was damaged, but I haven’t yet been briefed on the details.”

Brenthoven shook his head. “That’s impossible, Madam Ambassador… Gita. I would have been contacted.”

He reached for his cell phone, and fished it out of his pocket. It was off. The battery had died, or the software had recycled itself, or something else. It didn’t matter why it had happened. What mattered was that the damned thing had powered itself down.

How long had it been off? How long had he been completely out of touch? There was probably a chase team at his townhouse now, and they had no doubt tried his home phone fifty times already. They’d called his cell phone too, of course, but the goddamned thing had been sitting silent in his pocket, like a lump of fucking lead.

He punched the power button, and the phone began its boot-up routine. He didn’t have to wait to know what he would find. At least twenty voicemails, and an equal number of waiting text messages.

Damn. Damn. Damn!

He stood up. “I’m sorry, Gita. I have to go.”

The ambassador stood up as well. “Of course, Gregory. You have business to attend to.”

Her voice hardened. “But don’t forget what I said. Forty-eight hours.”

CHAPTER 36

COMBAT AIR PATROL

VFA-228 — MARAUDERS

BAY OF BENGAL

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

0626 hours (6:26 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Rob “Monk” Monkman eased his crippled Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet into a slow right turn and tried to ignore the growing vibrations that rattled his fighter. The carrier was only a little more than 60 miles away now. Almost home. Almost home…

He didn’t feel much like the Monk at the moment. His Shaolin fighter-jock machismo seemed to be on vacation. Right now, he felt like plain old Robby Monkman, and he was just about scared enough to piss his pants.

He ignored the collage of red tattletales blinking on his up-front control display. The touch-sensitive LCD screen was designed to give him fingertip control and status indications for nearly all of the plane’s onboard systems, but he had lost track of the ever-shifting jumble of warning readouts. His Hornet was hurt bad, he knew that much. He also knew he didn’t have a prayer of sorting out the cascading alert messages to figure out exactly how bad things were.

The Super Hornet’s digital flight control system was supposed to detect battle damage and make real-time corrections to compensate. It must be doing its job, because Monk’s plane had taken the missile hit more than an hour ago, and he was still in the air.

The starboard engine was fodded out and he’d lost a shitload of fuel, but the quadruplex fly-by-wire controls were still responding to his commands if he didn’t push his injured bird too hard. When he’d gone through initial Hornet flight training at NAS Lemoore and the advanced pipeline at NAS Fallon, everybody had talked about how tough the Super Hornet was. Well, the aircraft was definitely living up to its reputation for being able to take a punch.

But rugged airframe construction and multiply-redundant systems hadn’t been enough to save Poker. Rob had seen the Chinese air-to-air missile punch right through the canopy of Poker’s Hornet, blasting the entire cockpit section of the plane into titanium shrapnel. And Rob had reefed his own Hornet back around quickly enough to watch the remains of his flight leader’s aircraft cartwheel into the sea.

No ejection. No chute. Not that he’d expected one. He’d known from the instant of the missile impact that Owen ‘Poker’ Dowell was dead.

But any thoughts of grief had vanished from Rob’s consciousness almost as quickly as they had appeared. He had turned his attention—and his fury—on the Chinese bastards who had just blown his mentor and friend out of the sky.

Rob had no idea why the Chinese pilots had opened fire. It had been a routine intercept, two Navy F-18’s turning back two pairs of Bogies at the edge of the 300 mile defensive Combat Air Patrol perimeter.

They’d gotten close enough to eyeball the inbound aircraft, and identified them as Chinese J-15’s, confirming the classification provided by the E-2D Hawkeye flying Airborne Early Warning support for the Midway air wing.

There had been at least a dozen similar intercepts over the past week or so, as the Chinese probed the edges of the USS Midway’s air defense envelope. But the Chinese Bogies had always turned back, and there had never been any sign of real trouble.

And then they had blasted Owen Dowell without warning. There had been no radar spikes, no fire control acquisition alerts. Just a sudden fireball as Poker took a missile right in the lips. Probably that made the Chinese missile some kind of infrared homer, or something else which didn’t require an active seeker that would have alerted the sensors in the Super Hornets.

Rob didn’t give a damn about any of the technical details. He had concentrated on going after the treacherous fucks who had just killed Poker.

*  *  *

Now, as he made his approach toward the Midway, Rob could no longer remember much about the engagement. He knew that he had shot down two of the Bogies, and damaged a third. He knew that he had taken a hit somewhere in the mêlée.

He knew that his wings were bare of weapons, and his 20mm gun was completely out of rounds. Most of the details of the dogfight had faded with his anger, but he had definitely emptied the full magazine on the bastards.

He checked his range to the carrier. It was time to call in, so he keyed his radio circuit. “Strike—Two Zero Nine at fifty-two. Single engine, state four point three.”

His report, as short and cryptic as it might have seemed to non-aviators, told Strike Command everything they needed to know. Monk was 52 miles away from the carrier, coming in on one engine, and he was down to only 4,300 pounds of fuel.

Strike responded immediately. “Roger, Two Zero Nine. Flash Ident.”

Monk toggled the switch that gave his aircraft’s IFF transponder an extra burst of transmit power. This would cause the symbol for his plane to flash briefly on the aircraft carrier’s tracking display, verifying his identity, and making it easier to spot him among the cluttered radar signatures of the busy air pattern.

He checked his fuel again. He’d be cutting it close. A healthy Super Hornet burned about 1,100 pounds of gas during a routine landing pass. Monk didn’t know what his current burn rate was, but his aircraft was definitely not healthy, and his fuel usage was bound to be higher than normal.

He had survived the dogfight, and limped most of the way home. Was he going to get this close to the carrier, and then run out of fuel before he could land? Wouldn’t that be some fucking irony?

There was no way for him to know how badly his airframe was damaged, or whether or not the canopy would open if he had to punch out. If the canopy was jammed shut, the ejection seat’s solid fuel rocket would slam him into the underside of the acrylic bubble at about 12g’s. As Poker used to say, hamburger all over the highway.

He gave his head a quick jerk to clear his mind. It was time to stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong. He needed to concentrate on keeping his plane in the air. Aviate, navigate, communicate. That was all he needed to do. Aviate, navigate, communicate. Forget about all the shit that could kill him.

*  *  *

His Squadron Rep’s voice came over the radio. “Two Zero Nine—Barnstormer. Alright buddy, let’s work the list.”

Back on the carrier, Chuck ‘Barnstormer’ Barnes was armed with a copy of the NATOPS systems handbook and checklists for the F/A-18E aircraft. Like all Navy pilots, Monk carried a pocket version of the checklist in his cockpit, but the content of the short list was pared down to a bare minimum, for rapid and easy use. Flying a jet aircraft didn’t leave time for reading lengthy technical write-ups, so multiple-failure situations were not covered. Major emergencies called for the full NATOPS manual, and Chuck Barnes was ready to talk Monk through the list of in-flight checks and emergency procedures.

By the time they had done all they could do with the checklist, Monk was coming up on the 25 mile mark. It was time to check in with the carrier’s Air Traffic Control Center.

He keyed the radio again. “Marshal—Two Zero Nine at twenty-five. Single engine, three point seven.”

“Roger single engine,” Marshal replied. “We’re going to bring you straight in.”

That was a comforting, if obvious decision. Monk was being given clearance to bypass the air traffic control pattern (the stack), and proceed directly in for a landing approach.

He didn’t have enough fuel to wait his turn in the stack, even if he hadn’t been flying on one engine. As usual, there was a tanker orbiting the carrier at 3,000 feet. The standard procedure would be to rendezvous with the tanker, take on some gas, and make his final approach with a comfortable fuel margin. But one of the many flashing red tattletales on Monk’s up-front control display told him that several components of the Super Hornet’s fuel system—including the extendible fuel probe—were failing real-time function checks. The decision not to risk an in-flight refueling had been made way above his pay grade.

*  *  *

Monk was down to 3,200 pounds of fuel by the time he was five miles out, and it was becoming clear that he would need to trap on the first try. If he missed the wire on the first pass, he might have enough gas to make it back around for a second attempt. They’d definitely rig the barricade if he had to make a second approach.

No Navy pilot ever wanted to land that way, his plane caught in a giant nylon net like a fly trapped in a spider web. Not a good way to land, but it was better than ejecting.

The carrier was visible now, a small dark shape in the distance.

Monk spotted the ‘ball’ about three-quarters of a mile out, the colored lights of the Fresnel lens optical landing system. The orange meatball showed slightly below the green horizontal datum lights. He was a little low, but his lineup looked good.

He added power to his one good engine and keyed the radio. “Marauder Two Zero Nine, Super Hornet ball, two point eight, single engine.”

The Landing Signal Officer responded. “Roger ball.”

The aircraft carrier that had looked so tiny just a few minutes earlier was growing rapidly, but Monk concentrated on the meatball, his lineup, and angle of attack. Meatball, lineup, angle of attack. Nothing else. Just like in training. Meatball… Lineup… Angle of attack…

The LSO’s voice came over the radio. “Little power.”

Monk edged the throttle forward on his good engine and his flight path shallowed a fraction. A few seconds later, his wheels slammed into the deck. He instantly shoved the throttle forward, his lone engine shrieking to full power in case he missed the wires and boltered.

His tailhook caught the number two wire. Not a perfect landing, but good enough. His body surged forward against his restraint straps as the arresting cable decelerated his aircraft, and brought it to a stop.

He was down.

A yellow shirt ran toward him, giving the throttle-down signal. Monk brought the port engine back to idle, and the voice of the Air Boss boomed over the radio. “Two Zero Nine—Boss. We’re gonna shut you down right there.”

Monk acknowledged the order, acknowledged the yellow shirt’s ‘chocks-in’ signal, and powered down his port engine. The silence in the cockpit was almost deafening.

The flight deck crew was already moving toward his plane, bringing the tractor to tow Monk’s injured aircraft to its designated landing spot.

And then, with his plane safely on deck, Monk’s bladder cut loose and he pissed in his flight suit.

Great… He would hear about that for the rest of his fucking career. No one would ever talk about the two Bogies he had downed, or the third that he’d shot holes in, or how he had kept a severely damaged plane in the sky for 300 miles, and then managed a difficult trap.

All he’d ever hear about was how he had wet his fucking diaper.

But no one ever mentioned the urine soaked flight suit. No one ribbed him about losing control of his bladder. No one even hinted at changing his callsign to Potty Boy or Diaper Man. If Rob’s temporary lapse of continence was discussed by anyone, he never heard a word of it.

And no one ever called him Nugget again.

CHAPTER 37

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

8:33 PM EST

President Wainright strode into the Situation Room, accompanied by a Secret Service Agent. The agent took his usual station in the corner as the president dropped into his chair. “Would someone kindly tell me just what in the hell happened?”

The Sit Room Duty Officer opened his mouth, but Admiral Casey, the Chief of Naval Operations, responded first. “It was an aerial combat engagement in the Bay of Bengal, Mr. President. Two F/A-18 Super Hornets off the USS Midway were vectored in to warn off four Chinese J-15 strike fighter aircraft from the aircraft carrier Liaoning. Planes off the Midway have conducted ten or twelve similar intercepts over the last week or so. Until now, they’ve always ended peacefully, with the Chinese fighters heading for home after the Hornets show up.”

“We’re not sure why it went differently this time,” he said. “All we know for certain is that the J-15s opened fire on our Hornets, and an air battle ensued. One of our Hornets went down and the other one took some damage, but made it back safely. At least two of the Chinese planes were destroyed. A third Chinese aircraft was damaged, but it was still in the air when it passed out of our radar coverage, so that one probably wasn’t a kill.”

The president stared at the CNO. “We are positive that our pilots didn’t shoot first?”

The Secretary of Defense, Mary O’Neil-Broerman, answered. “Absolutely positive,” she said. “We have the report from the Hornet pilot who survived, and his account is confirmed by the recovered sensor data from his onboard computers. It’s further corroborated by the mission tapes from the E-2D Hawkeye that was providing Airborne Early Warning for the carrier at the time. I haven’t seen the data myself yet, sir, but we have it directly from Admiral Zimmerman that the Hawkeye’s radar tracks show conclusively that the Chinese aircraft attacked without warning or provocation. One of our Super Hornets was destroyed by the first missile hit. The other Hornet engaged the Chinese fighters and sent them packing.”

The president raised an eyebrow. “Our pilot was outnumbered four to one, and he managed to get the upper hand?”

SECDEF nodded. “Yes, sir. I have it on good authority that he pretty much kicked their collective asses, Mr. President.”

“Well, it certainly sounds like it,” the president said. His voice was calmer now.

“Okay, what are we doing about it?” he asked.

This time, it was the CNO who spoke. “For the moment, Mr. President, USS Midway is doubling her Combat Air Patrols, and extending her defensive air perimeter by an additional twenty miles. Also, the screening ships in the strike group are on full alert, with Rules of Engagement that allow them to engage any potentially hostile air targets that ignore radio warnings and attempt to penetrate the carrier’s screen.”

No one at the table remarked on the fact that the word “targets” had just entered the conversation for the first time.

“I see,” the president said. “Are these additional measures enough to protect our carrier?”

“Frankly, Mr. President, they’re probably not adequate,” the CNO said. “But that’s about as far as we can go without putting our forces on a more aggressive footing.”

The president turned to face him. “What do you suggest, Admiral?”

The admiral pursed his lips. “With all due respect, sir, our people are flapping in the breeze right now. If they’re going to fight, we should take them off the leash and let them carry the battle to the other guys. If they’re not going to fight, we should pull them out of the area before any more of them get killed by so-called neutral forces. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, we need to fish or cut bait, Mr. President. You can’t win by waiting for the other guy to shoot you in the head, and then deciding whether or not you want to shoot back.”

“This is not meant to be a combat operation,” the president said. “We put the Midway strike group in the Bay of Bengal to act as a stabilizing influence.”

“Then I think we can safely say that it’s not working, sir,” the admiral said. “The Midway’s presence didn’t stop the Chinese from blasting the hell out of the Indian aircraft carrier. It didn’t stop them from trying to penetrate our carrier’s airspace. And it didn’t stop them from shooting at our defensive air patrols. I don’t know what we’re accomplishing over there, but we’re definitely not stabilizing the situation.”

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Horace Gilmore, adjusted his eyeglasses. “I have to agree, Mr. President. The Chinese don’t seem to be interested in stability. They’ve taken shots at our Navy and the Indian Navy. And now they’ve got a dedicated surveillance satellite sitting right over the operating area, watching every move we make. Every time we launch a helicopter or refuel a ship, they see it. If you ask me, sir, they’re tooling up for major combat operations.”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” the president said. “Right now, that’s just speculation.”

“You’re right, sir,” SECDEF said. “We don’t know it for a fact. But we probably won’t get ironclad confirmation until it’s too late. What the CNO said is true, Mr. President. If you wait for the other guy to shoot you between the eyes, you may not be alive long enough to get off a shot of your own.”

The president shook his head. “I’m not letting anybody buffalo me into making a hasty decision on this.”

The National Security Advisor spoke up. “Sir, it’s not my place to make military policy, and I don’t want to buffalo you into anything. But this is one of those cases where we don’t get to choose the timetable.”

The president looked at him. “What do you mean, Greg?”

Brenthoven looked at his watch. “I remind you, sir, that the Indian government intends to carry out their Shiva attack on the Three Gorges Dam in just about forty-five hours. If the Chinese response is anywhere close to what we think it will be, we may be looking at a significant nuclear exchange in southern and eastern Asia.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” the president snapped. “I’m just trying to focus on one crisis at a time.”

“Understandable,” Brenthoven said. “But I don’t think we can really separate one problem from the other. Anything we do for, with, or against China will impact India. Anything we do for, with, or against India will impact China. And if we try to maintain the status quo, India will press forward with their plans to devastate Central China.”

Brenthoven lifted a hand with all five fingers extended. “As I see it, we have five possible courses of action here…”

He folded down a finger. “One—we do nothing, and hope that India is bluffing about the Three Gorges attack. Of course, if it turns out that they’re not bluffing, the USS Midway strike group will be fairly close to ground zero when the nukes start flying.”

He folded down a second finger. “Two—we actively try to stop India’s attack on the Three Gorges site. This essentially means taking direct military action against India. It also means aligning the United States with China, who happens to be the aggressor in this whole bloody mess.”

A third finger went down. “Three—we leak the plan for the Three Gorges attack to the Chinese government, and trust to China to protect the dam. This is risky for several reasons, one of which being that the Indian government will pretty much know that we did it. This falls short of actually attacking India, but they will definitely move the United States over to their ‘enemies’ category.”

He folded the fourth finger. “Four—we agree to India’s terms, and throw in on the side of the Indian military. This means direct military action against China, but at least we wouldn’t be siding with the aggressor. Also, as China has attacked our forces and India has not, it makes more sense from a political and foreign policy standpoint.”

The last finger went down. “Five—we pull our forces out of the region immediately, and hope that there aren’t mushroom clouds all over Asia by this time next week.”

Brenthoven lowered his fist. “I hate to say it Mr. President, but General Gilmore, Admiral Casey, and Madam Secretary are right. It’s time to either take decisive action, or get the hell out of there and cross our fingers.”

President Wainright massaged his temples. “You’re saying that I’ve backed myself into a corner, and I don’t have any viable options?”

The Secretary of Defense shook her head. “Not at all, Mr. President. We’re saying that circumstances have backed us all into a corner, and we don’t have any attractive options. We’ve got choices, sir. You have choices. Unfortunately, they just don’t happen to be the particular choices we want right now.”

“It comes down to the same thing,” the president said.

General Gilmore frowned. “We don’t always get to choose the battlefield,” he said. “But we do get to choose how we fight, and who we fight against. That doesn’t mean we can force someone to become our ally, but it does mean that we can make them regret becoming our enemy.”

The president made a dismissive gesture. “Alright. Enough with the saber rattling. I take it your recommendation is that we throw in with India.”

“Yes, sir,” the general said. “Either that, or pull out of the region, and keep our heads down until the Indians and the Chinese sort it out for themselves.”

The president sat without speaking for several minutes. Finally, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the conference table. “I’m not ready to decide yet. I need to think about this.”

“We don’t have a lot of time, sir,” the CNO said.

“I realize that,” the president said. “You’ve all made that point abundantly clear. But this is an enormous decision, with far-reaching repercussions. I’m not going to make it on the spur of the moment.”

“Understood,” the Secretary of Defense said. “But I have a recommendation while you’re thinking it over.”

“What’s that?” the president asked.

“I think we should authorize the Navy to take out that Chinese satellite,” SECDEF said. “If you decide to pull out of the region, it will make repositioning our forces a lot safer. And if you decide to fight, we sure as hell aren’t going to want that thing hanging over the battlespace.”

President Wainwright glanced around, taking a silent census of everyone at the table. Every head nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “Do it. Shoot the damned thing down.”

CHAPTER 38

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

1127 hours (11:27 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Lieutenant Lambert, the ship’s Combat Systems Officer, walked into CIC and headed straight for the spot where Captain Bowie and Commander Silva were standing.

“Looking good, Skipper,” Lambert said. “The patch is loaded, and SPY is back up and tracking.”

The ‘patch’ was a software application that modified the operating parameters of the ship’s AN/SPY-1D(V)2 radar system, to allow it to track targets at altitudes above 200,000 feet. With an output power level of over four megawatts, managed by a high–data-rate multi-function computer control system, SPY was quite capable of detecting objects from the surface of the earth all the way up to low orbit. In addition to near-earth satellites, the system could (and would) track any piece of space junk large enough to provide a detectable radar return. As there were an estimated ten-million pieces of manmade debris left in orbit by more than a half-century of manned and unmanned space launches, this could easily flood the radar’s display screens with useless false contacts.

To prevent this irrelevant data from overwhelming the system operators, the SPY software had a built-in subroutine that forced the radar to disregard all contacts above 200,000 feet during normal operations. On those rare occasions where it was tactically desirable to track objects in space, there was the patch: a small packet of uploadable program code that removed SPY’s electronic muzzle, and allowed the radar to see to the very edge of its power radius.

The Combat Systems Officer’s report confirmed that this task had just been completed. The patch had been uploaded. SPY had been unmuzzled, and the radar was now capable of tracking targets in space.

Captain Bowie nodded. “Good work. How long will it take us to get a track on Redbird One?”

“Shouldn’t be long,” the Lieutenant said. “SPY has probably already latched on to it, but it’ll take our operators fifteen minutes or so to sort out the sheep from the goats, and get solid identification on the target.”

*  *  *

It took eight minutes for the Air Search operators to identify the particular radar reflection that corresponded to the Chinese surveillance satellite, and another twelve minutes for them to cross-check the contact’s position and motion against the orbital tracking data provided by the Air Force.

Finally, the Air Supervisor’s voice came over the tactical net. “TAO—Air. We have a high-confidence track on Redbird One. This contact designated as Track Zero Zero One.”

The Tactical Action Officer keyed his mike. “TAO, aye.”

The TAO turned to Captain Bowie. “Locked on and tracking, Captain. Request batteries released.”

The captain smiled. “You’re absolutely totally completely positive that we’re tracking the right satellite? Because if I give the order and we accidentally take out the Disney Channel, I’m never going to be able to show my face in the O-Club again. Not to mention the NEX or the commissary.”

The Tactical Action Officer answered with an exaggerated shrug. “I can’t say that I’m absolutely totally completely positive that we’re tracking the right satellite. But I’m absolutely totally mostly positive. Is that good enough?”

“I guess it’ll have to be,” Bowie said. “Very well. You have batteries released.”

The TAO grinned and spoke into his headset. “Weapons Control—TAO. Engage Zero Zero One with missiles.”

“TAO—Weapons Control. Engage Zero Zero One with missiles, aye.”

*  *  *

An armored hatch flipped open on the destroyer’s aft missile deck, exposing the weatherproof fly-through cover that sealed the upper end of a vertical launch missile cell. A half millisecond later, the fly-through cover was blown to shreds as an SM-3 Block II missile roared out of its launch cell and shot into the sky on a ribbon of fire and exhaust gasses.

*  *  *

In Combat Information Center, the Weapons Control Officer keyed the microphone of his headset. “TAO—Weapons Control. Bird away, no apparent casualties.” The thunder of the departing missile was already fading as he spoke.

*  *  *

SM-3 Missile:

The first stage booster fired for six seconds before it burned out and dropped away, to tumble back into the ocean. By the time the Dual Thrust Rocket Motor of the second stage ignited, the missile was above the troposphere and climbing past 70,000 feet, where the blue of the sky began to darken.

The initial high-velocity pulse of the second stage burn lasted seven seconds, and then the missile coasted for nearly a half minute without thrust, passing out of the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. The sky was fully black now and the apparent flatness of the earth had given way to the curvature of its true spherical shape.

Temporarily deprived of thrust, the weapon lost only a fraction of its speed, due to a combination of inertia, the reduction in mass caused by the ejection of the first stage, and the rapid decline in atmospheric drag. Although the tenuous wisps of the ionosphere extended out to an altitude of about 700 miles, the majority of the planet’s atmosphere—more than 99% of its molecular gas content—had been left behind.

The second stage reignited for a thirty-five second sustainment burn before its fuel reserve was consumed, and the empty hulk of the expended booster was ejected. Nearly three-quarters of the missile’s mass had now been used up and jettisoned.

The guidance section of the missile took a GPS fix, and made minor corrections to the burn vector of the third stage rocket motor. This stage was also designed for two firings, the first at high-thrust, and the second at lower-thrust with lateral corrections to refine the trajectory in the terminal phase.

The third stage did not immediately detach when its final boost was complete. Instead, the onboard computer triggered the third stage attitude thrusters and pitched the nose of the weapon downward, away from the direction of the flight path. A ring of tiny explosive blocks detonated simultaneously, fracturing the locking collar that held the nosecone of the missile in place. In the near-vacuum of space, the protective aerodynamic shell was no longer required. It fell toward the atmosphere, where it would burn up on reentry.

This final task complete, the third stage attitude thrusters fired again, swinging the weapon back up to the proper angle for the intercept. With the nosecone removed, the odd elongated torus shape of the Lightweight Exo-Atmospheric Projectile was exposed.

The LEAP weighed only twenty pounds, and it carried no explosive charge. It didn’t need one. The kinetic warhead was moving more than 5,900 miles per hour. Combined with the orbital speed of the target satellite, this yielded a closing velocity of 22,783 miles per hour.

Thirty seconds prior to impact, the LEAP detached itself from the third stage booster. Its onboard sensors acquired the target without difficulty, took a final GPS fix, and utilized a series of rapid pulses from its maneuvering thrusters to refine the angle of approach.

*  *  *

The Chinese Haiyang HY-3 satellite was hardened against shock damage. It was designed to withstand micro meteor impacts, and collisions with manmade space debris. It was not designed to survive 96,000,000 foot-pounds of brute mechanical force from a twenty pound projectile with a combined impact velocity of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

Exactly 297.352 seconds after launch, the LEAP warhead obliterated Redbird One with 130 megajoules of thermo-kinetic energy. A human observer, had any been present, would have been instantly and permanently blinded by the fierce intensity of the resulting flash.

But the only human witnesses were 130 miles below, watching the engagement from their radar screens. Their sensors and display systems would recognize and record the fact of the satellite’s destruction, but they would carry no sense of the raw power that had just been unleashed on their command.

USS Towers:

“TAO—Air. We have confirmed intercept on Track Zero Zero One. We are picking up a growing debris field downrange from the projected impact point.”

The Tactical Action Officer turned toward the captain. “I’d call that a kill, Skipper.”

Bowie acknowledge the report, and looked around CIC until he spotted OS2 Kenfield. The beefy Operations Specialist was huddled over an electronic plotting table.

Captain Bowie caught the man’s eye, and nodded. “Hey, Big Country… Give us a song.”

The big Sailor grinned. “Is that an order, sir?”

“You bet your ass it is,” Bowie said.

The Sailor nodded. “Aye-aye, Captain!” He cleared his throat and took a very deep breath.

Commander Silva was now familiar enough with OS2 Kenfield’s musical repertoire to know what was coming next. She suppressed an urge to cover her ears.

If anything, Big Country’s rebel yell was even louder than the last one. It seemed to rattle the very air, and—as before—it was instantly joined by the yells of every man and woman in Combat Information Center.

Bowie smiled in approval and appreciation.

As the collective bellow trailed off into silence, Commander Silva leaned closer to Bowie. “Before we get too carried away with the celebration, somebody better make sure that the Disney Channel is still on the air. If we just whacked the wrong satellite, we’re all going to have to change our names and move to Cleveland.”

CHAPTER 39

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

1:09 AM EST

President Dalton Wainright sat alone in the Oval Office, hunched over his desk. His forehead rested on the polished wooden surface that had once been the hull timbers of HMS Resolute. With the exceptions of Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, every U.S. president since 1880 had used the Resolute desk, either in the Oval Office, the presidential office that had preceded the oval, or president’s study in the White House residence.

Wainwright wished that he could somehow use the desk to mentally summon the wisdom of his predecessors. Perhaps if he concentrated deeply enough, their collective knowledge and insight would well up from the russet-colored wood and seep into his brain.

In 1899, William McKinley had signed the treaty with Spain from the Resolute desk, bringing a formal end to the Spanish-American War. Nearly a half-century later, the modesty panel had been installed to cover the kneehole, because Franklin D. Roosevelt preferred to keep his leg braces out of public view. Roosevelt had died before the modification was completed, leaving both the desk and the closing chapters of World War II in the hands of Harry Truman.

Truman had sat at the desk while agonizing over whether or not to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Japan. John F. Kennedy had coped with Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis from this spot, managing to drag the world back from the edge of nuclear war, despite Nikita Khrushchev’s promise that the Soviet Union would ‘bury’ the United States of America.

So much history had been made at this desk. So many bills had been signed into law or vetoed here. The futures of nations had been decided from the very place where Dalton Wainwright now sat.

But if there was such a thing as genius loci, Wainwright could not tap into it. For all its impressive legacy, the desk was not a talisman. It contained no power and conferred no special insight.

He raised his head about two inches and then let it drop back to the wooden surface with a dull thud.

“I’ve told you before, Dal” a voice said, “you’re not going to get anywhere by banging your head on the desk.”

Wainwright sat up. No one entered the Oval Office without an invitation, especially not at one in the morning.

Standing in the doorway of the presidential secretary’s office was former president Frank Chandler, Wainwright’s old boss, and the man who had dumped the presidency in his lap.

Wainwright stood up. “How the hell did you get in here? Did somebody forget to take your key when they booted you out of the building?”

Chandler grinned. “Nah. I left a window open so I can sneak back in whenever I want.”

The two men walked toward each other. They met near the middle of the room and shook hands.

“Damn, it’s good to see you, Frank,” the president said. “But seriously, how did you get in here? Am I going to have to fire the Secret Service or something?”

Frank Chandler shook his head. “Nope. I’m here as the personal guest of your Chief of Staff. He called and told me that you were banging your head on the furniture again, so naturally I came right over.”

“Ratted out by my own people,” Wainwright said in mock disgust. “Where is my faithful Chief of Staff, anyway? I want to kick his ass for hauling you in here without talking to me first.”

“I think he’s skulking in his office,” Chandler said. “Probably hoping that you won’t kick his ass for hauling me in here.”

“I’ll fire the little traitor tomorrow,” Wainwright said. “Or maybe I’ll have him shot.”

Chandler glanced toward the Resolute desk. “That thing is a national treasure, Dal. If you’ve got to thump your skull on the furnishings, we can get you something from IKEA, so you don’t go damaging presidential heirlooms.”

Both men laughed. They found seats in the big circle of chairs, and settled in comfortably. And suddenly, the humor was gone from the room.

“I wouldn’t have called you,” Wainwright said. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

Chandler loosened his necktie. “Well, you know the old saying… I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

Wainwright stared at his former chief executive for a few seconds, but there was no trace of irony in the other man’s voice.

“I’m in over my head,” he said finally. “I mean, I knew that I was out of my fighting weight the moment you asked me to be your running mate. But I didn’t really think we could win the election, and a vice-presidential bid seemed like a nice way to finish out my political career.”

Chandler shrugged. “I didn’t expect to win either,” he said. “I think you knew that when I invited you on to my ticket. But here we are…”

President Wainwright nodded. “Here we are… Or at least, here I am. Because you left me holding the bag, Frank.”

The former president shrugged again. “My political career was dead after Kamchatka. You know that, Dal. I was the first president to order a nuclear attack since Harry Truman. And unlike Harry, I hadn’t just accepted the surrender of the Nazi powers.”

Chandler sighed. “If I hadn’t resigned, I would have been impeached. Either way, you were going to end up sitting in the big chair. So I decided to go gracefully, while that was still an option.”

“I know you didn’t have much of a choice,” Wainwright said. “And I know you played the best hand you could with the cards you were dealt. But what I don’t know, is what I’m supposed to do now…”

Frank Chandler leaned back in his chair. “Oh… That’s simple. Listen to your people, but think for yourself. And try to make the best decisions you can.”

He wiped his hands briskly, as though brushing off the dust at the end of a job well done. “If that’s all you need to know, I’m going to get back on the plane and head home.”

“I’m not joking,” the president said. “I’ve got serious problems here.”

“I’m not joking either,” Chandler said. “And that was a serious answer. It may seem trite, but I just told you everything you need to know to handle this job.”

Wainwright snorted. “Look, I’m not sure how much you know about the situation in Asia, but the whole damned continent is getting ready to implode.”

He looked at his watch. “A little over an hour ago, we shot down a Chinese surveillance satellite over the Bay of Bengal. About forty-one hours from now, the Republic of India is going to conduct a crippling attack against the national infrastructure of the People’s Republic of China. Unless my military advisors and the entire intelligence community are completely out to lunch, China is probably going to respond with a strategic nuclear strike. And the only way I can get the Indian government to back down, is to step into the fight and help them take on the Chinese military.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “No matter what I do, the shit is going to hit the fan.”

“You’re probably right,” Frank Chandler said. “But you can’t let that stop you.”

The president opened his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“It sounds to me like you’re trying not to screw up.”

“Of course I’m trying not to screw up,” the president snapped. “If I handle this the wrong way, a lot of people are going to get killed over there.”

Chandler turned his hands palm-up. “Well, I don’t exactly get Sit Room briefings any more, but from what I’ve seen on CNN, people are getting killed over there already. Tibetan protestors. A whole village full of Indian civilians. Chinese sailors. Indian sailors. Some of our own fighter pilots. And it’s only going to get worse as this situation drags on.”

The president stared at him. “What’s your point?”

“My point is this,” Chandler said, “you can’t lead by trying to avoid trouble.”

He smiled. “Let me share a piece of genuine wisdom with you. Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in trying not to do the wrong thing that we forget to do the right thing.”

“That sounds familiar,” the president said.

Chandler nodded. “It should sound familiar. You said it to me about six hours after my first inauguration.”

Wainwright waved a dismissive hand. “I was babbling. As I recall, we went to nine or ten different inauguration parties that night. The champagne was getting to my head.”

Chandler shook his head. “Pardon me for saying so, Mr. President, but that’s pure unadulterated horseshit. You were as sober as a judge. And that turned out to be a damned useful piece of advice. It kept me moving forward every time I found myself with a tough choice that I didn’t want to make.”

He smiled again. “So, now I’m handing your own advice back to you. Stop trying not to screw up. That’s a recipe for permanent indecision. Forget about it, and concentrate on doing what you believe is right. There might be consequences. Hell, there almost certainly will be consequences. That’s the nature of the game.”

He stood up. “Listen to your people, but make your own decisions. It’s all you can do. That’s all anyone has ever managed, including the men who sat in this office before us. And now, Mr. President… It’s your turn to do it.”

Without another word, Frank Chandler walked to the door and was gone.

*  *  *

The president sat for several minutes after the former commander-in-chief had left the room.

Finally, he stood up, walked to his desk and picked up the phone. He punched the number for the Situation Room Duty Officer.

“This is the president,” he said. “Start waking people up. I want the full battle staff in the Sit Room in an hour.”

He hung up the phone. It was time to get to work.

CHAPTER 40

FOX NEWS CHANNEL STUDIOS

1211 AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

5:30 AM EST

The screen filled with an establishing shot of a computer-generated globe, circled continually by a swarm of CG satellites, each casting a translucent ring of simulated coverage on the rotating earth below. Superimposed over the lower left hand corner of the screen was the red, white, and blue logo of the Fox News Channel.

The voice of early morning news anchor, Ted Norrow, cut in—providing background narration for the animatic.

“This is low earth orbit, where approximately thirty-eight-hundred manmade satellites are circling the world at any given time, providing telephone communications, television broadcasts, GPS navigation signals, weather tracking, internet access, and many other services that are indispensible to modern civilization.”

The view cut to a close-up of Ted Norrow’s handsome face, staring into the camera with a charmingly somber expression. After two beats, the camera pulled back to a medium shot of the Fox News studio desk, with the satellite animatic reduced to a cameo window over Norrow’s left shoulder.

A teaser bar at the bottom of the screen flared with the Fox logo and a wireframe graphic of a satellite bracketed by an artist’s conception of targeting crosshairs. The words ‘Breaking News’ appeared in simulated chrome lettering below the graphics.

“Approximately seventy percent of the satellites in low earth orbit are commercially owned and operated,” the news anchor said. “The other thirty percent belong to the militaries and intelligence services of the United States, and other countries.”

The animatic changed to a close-up of a satellite hanging in the blackness of space.

“According to unconfirmed reports,” Norrow said, “approximately five hours ago, a U.S. Navy warship engaged and destroyed a Chinese military surveillance satellite in orbit over the Bay of Bengal.”

“Again,” Norrow said, “I have to emphasize that these reports have not yet been confirmed. We’re expecting a statement from the Department of Defense shortly, but for the moment, we do not have corroboration from a reliable source.”

The scene cut to a moving helicopter shot of the Pentagon. Ted Norrow continued in voiceover. “In view of the escalating hostilities between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China, the downing of a Chinese satellite could have serious international repercussions.”

Another cut revealed a pair of side-by-side video windows, each containing a head-and-shoulders shot of a man in a suit. The man on the left was middle aged, with an immaculately tailored charcoal jacket and a maroon necktie bearing the Harvard crest. His political opposite in the window on the right was younger and more casually dressed, in a rumpled tweed sport coat and an open necked shirt.

The news caster’s voiceover continued. “From our Fox affiliate studios in Arlington, Virginia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we have Dr. Martin Crane from the National Institute for Strategic Analysis, and Jason Walsh from the Center for Global Progress. Gentlemen, thank you both for joining us at this early hour.”

The older man nodded. “It’s a pleasure to be here, Ted.”

The younger man smiled and nodded as well. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“Dr. Crane, let’s start with you,” Norrow said. “If this report is true, and the U.S. Navy has—in fact—downed a Chinese military satellite, what are the most likely implications for the current conflict? And, perhaps more importantly, could this be the beginning of an escalating cycle of satellite warfare?”

The man in the left hand window straightened his necktie. “First, let me say that it’s a little early to be jumping to conclusions. We don’t have any reliable information about the engagement, if—indeed—it even took place. Second, if we assume—for the sake of discussion—that the U.S. Navy has destroyed a Communist spy satellite, then we can’t judge the wisdom or the implications of that action until we understand the circumstances in which it was supposedly carried out.”

The screen cut to a three-shot, with Ted Norrow shown in profile at the anchor desk, facing the video windows containing his interview subjects.

The anchor man nodded. “Can you expound on that?”

Before Dr. Crane could respond, the other interviewee laughed. “That’s a silly question, Ted. You should know by now that our learned doctor can expound on anything, whether he understands it or not.”

Crane ignored the barb. “We have to look at the situation in the Bay of Bengal,” he said, “beginning with China’s unprovoked attack on two U.S. Navy aircraft, and the death of an American pilot in the hours leading up to the satellite incident. And even before that, when the Chinese crippled the Indian aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. What Mr. Walsh doesn’t seem to understand—”

The other interviewee cut him off. “I’ll tell you what I don’t understand, Dr. Crane. I don’t understand why we’re getting involved in yet another military confrontation that doesn’t concern us. I don’t understand why we’re still trying to play policeman to the entire world. Didn’t we learn anything at all from Iraq and Afghanistan?”

Ted Norrow raised a hand. “Just a second… Are you suggesting that the stability of Asia is not a legitimate concern of the United States?”

Walsh shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all. But why do we keep assuming that military intervention is an effective tool for regional stabilization? When has that ever been the case?”

“What about World War Two?” Dr. Crane asked. “Do you honestly believe that Hirohito would have relinquished his stranglehold on the Pacific if we had sent him a letter of complaint? And how about Adolf Hitler? If the Allies hadn’t thrown their combined strength at the Third Reich, most of Europe and Africa—if not the entire world—would be living under the iron boot heels of the Nazis at this very moment. Except for the Jews, of course, because they’d be completely exterminated by now.”

Walsh rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go with Hitler again. Whenever you need a boogieman to justify your military expansionist theories, you always trot out the Nazis. I hate to break it to you, doctor, but that was nearly three-quarters of a century ago. How is any of that relevant to the current political situation in Asia?”

“We’re wandering off the topic here,” the news anchor said.

“No,” said Dr. Crane. “We’re not off topic. Because, apart from Mr. Walsh’s inability to learn from history, there’s a strong correlation between World War Two and the present conflict with China.”

Ted Norrow lifted his right hand in a gesture of invitation. “Can I ask you to explain that?”

“Yes, please,” Walsh said. “Enlighten us. Dispel our ignorance.”

“I can sum it up in a single word,” Dr. Crane said. “Isolationism.”

He punctuated this one-word proclamation with a sardonic smile. “In the late nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties, the isolationist movement in America was powerful enough to keep our troops at home,” he said. “We sat on our hands while Germany and Japan were carving up the rest of the earth, and massacring millions of people. Back then, the isolationists were singing the same tune that Mr. Walsh and his buddies are singing today. Stay out of foreign problems. It’s not our business. We’re not the policemen of the entire planet. But where would the world be right now, if the isolationists had gotten the final word?”

Walsh snorted. “Once again, Dr. Crane is oversimplifying my position. I didn’t say that U.S. military intervention is never necessary. Of course it’s necessary in some situations. I’ll go a step farther, and say that—in certain cases—American military action is not just the best answer, it’s the only answer. But does that make it the solution to every foreign conflict that occurs? Are our options always so limited that we have to reach for our guns every time there’s a crisis somewhere in the world?”

Crane opened his mouth to respond, but Ted Norrow raised a hand to forestall further comment.

“I’m going to have to interrupt,” the newscaster said. “My producer informs me that Fox News has just received a statement from the Pentagon, confirming that the USS Towers did indeed shoot down a Chinese surveillance satellite over the Bay of Bengal. We’re expecting additional details in the next few minutes, but for now, we can confirm that the initial reports were accurate.”

“So much for our supposed role as impartial peacekeepers,” Walsh said in a sarcastic tone. “Just remember, whatever happens next, we brought it on ourselves.”

CHAPTER 41

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

1721 hours (5:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Captain Bowie was alone in the wardroom when Commander Silva arrived. An American Forces Network news broadcast was playing on the television, but Bowie had the sound muted while he jotted down a few changes that he wanted to make to the ship’s night orders.

He looked up when Silva walked in. “How’s it going, Kat?”

She headed straight for the coffee maker. “Pretty good,” she said. “But I’d wrestle a medium-sized alligator for a cup of Starbucks right now.”

She peered into the interior of the pot, bent to sniff the aroma, and decided that it was fresh enough to drink. She poured herself a cup, and then looked up at Bowie. “You want one while I’m pouring?”

“Sounds good,” Bowie said. “I’ll have my usual… a Grande Caramel Macchiato and a blueberry scone.”

“Coming right up,” Silva said. She poured him a cup of the plain black Navy coffee. “Will that be credit, or debit?”

She handed Bowie his coffee, and dropped into a chair from which she could see the television.

On the screen, a throng of demonstrators was waving handmade signs and banners, across the street from a high-walled enclosure. The protestors were visibly agitated, but they appeared to be respecting the line of police barricades that kept them from approaching the walls. Many of them were clearly shouting, but no sound came from the muted television speakers.

The image cut to another crowd scene. The people were dressed differently and the architecture and color of the walls were not the same, but the anger of the picketers was just as palpable.

The news feed cut to yet another crowd, and this one seemed on the verge of riot. Some of the demonstrators were hurling rocks and bottles over the top of the wall. Occasionally, one of the bottles would smash into a wall and shatter, splattering the stone façade with what must have been red paint. In the background, trucks were disgorging squads of helmeted riot police.

The scene cut again. Another crowd, this one lighting red flags on fire, and dropping them in the street to burn.

Silva looked at Bowie. “What the hell’s going on?”

Bowie glanced up at the screen. “I was watching that earlier,” he said. “From what I can tell, Chinese troops gunned down about a hundred protestors in Tibet last week. The PRC kept a lid on the story until a video popped up on CNN. Some American tourist—McDowell, or McDonald, or something like that—witnessed the whole thing from his hotel window. He recorded the whole thing on his cell phone, and gave the recording to the media. This is the backlash. Tibetans and Tibetan sympathizers are protesting outside of Chinese embassies and consulates all over the world.”

“Some of those demonstrations don’t exactly look peaceful,” Silva said.

“Yeah,” said Bowie. “And the Chinese government is blaming this on the U.S.”

Silva stared at him. “What?”

Bowie set down his pen. “A politburo spokesman was on a little while ago, reading a statement. They’re saying that this tourist guy, McDonald, was some kind of CIA plant, sent into Tibet to stir up unrest. They’re also claiming that the American news networks are operating on instructions from the federal government, and the United States is deliberately trying to turn global opinion against the People’s Republic.”

Silva raised an eyebrow. “The media taking orders from the U.S. government? They obviously don’t understand how that whole freedom-of-the-press thing works.”

“They understand,” Bowie said. “But they’ve gotten themselves into one hell of a mess with India, and they’re trying not to come off like the bad guys—at least in the minds of their own population.”

He rotated his cup on the table, causing the coffee to swirl within its porcelain confines. “If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, we’re going to see some action pretty soon. China is pretty pissed at us about this Tibet thing, and shooting down their satellite probably hasn’t done anything to improve their mood.”

Silva was about to respond when the wardroom door opened and the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Matthews, walked in with a routing folder in his hand.

The XO nodded to each of the other officers. “Good evening, Captain. Evening, Commander. I apologize for interrupting.”

He strode across the room and held out the folder to the captain.

Bowie accepted the folder and flipped it open. “What’s up, Brian?”

“A change in ROE,” the XO said. “Our Chinese pals have just been officially designated as hostile.”

Bowie gritted his teeth, and scanned the message rapidly.

//SSSSSSSSSS//

//SECRET//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//011027Z DEC//

FM      COMPACFLT//

TO      COMCARSTRKGRU FIVE//

COMDESRON ONE FIVE//

USS MIDWAY//

USS TOWERS//

USS FRANK W FENNO//

USS DONALD GERRARD//

INFO COMSEVENTHFLT//

CTF SEVEN ZERO//

SUBJ/RULES OF ENGAGEMENT SUPPLEMENT//

REF/A/DIR/CJCSI 3121.01F/

REF/B/RMG/COMPACFLT/210114Z NOV//

NARR/REF A IS THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS STANDING RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (ROE) FOR U.S. MILITARY FORCES//

NARR/REF B IS THE PREVIOUS RULES OF ENGAGEMENT SUPPLEMENT, ISSUED TO U.S. NAVY UNITS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN AND BAY OF BENGAL OPERATING AREAS//

1. (SECR) REF B IS HEREBY CANCELLED. YOUR ROE ARE AMENDED AS FOLLOWS:

2. (SECR) PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA) MILITARY ASSETS WITHIN YOUR AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY ARE NOW REGARDED AS HOSTILE. YOU ARE DIRECTED TO ENGAGE AND DESTROY PLA MILITARY FORCES TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT POSSIBLE, CONSISTENT WITH LAWS OF ARMED CONFLICT.

3. (SECR) MILITARY ASSETS OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA ARE TO BE CONSIDERED FRIENDLY. ALTHOUGH NO JOINT U.S./INDIAN OPERATIONS ARE CURRENTLY PLANNED, YOU ARE DIRECTED TO AVOID INTERFERENCE WITH INDIAN MILITARY ACTIONS TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT POSSIBLE, CONSISTENT WITH LAWS OF ARMED CONFLICT.

4. (SECR) THERE ARE TIME-CRITICAL GEOPOLITICAL FACTORS WHICH NECESSITATE A QUICK AND DECISIVE END TO THIS CONFLICT. THOSE FACTORS CANNOT BE DISCUSSED AT THIS LEVEL, BUT SECNAV CAUTIONS ALL RECIPIENTS THAT FAILURE TO ACHIEVE RAPID MILITARY DOMINANCE IN YOUR REGION MAY HAVE FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES TO NATIONAL SECURITY AND GLOBAL STABILITY.

5. (UNCL) MOVE FAST. STRIKE FAST. STRIKE WELL. GOOD LUCK AND GOOD HUNTING! ADMIRAL STANFORD SENDS.

//011027Z DEC//

//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//

//RBT 2034539//

//SECRET//

//SSSSSSSSSS//

Bowie finished reading the message, and passed it to Commander Silva.

She had only read the first few lines when a sharp electronic klaxon came blasting out of the ship’s 1-MC speakers.

The alarm was quickly 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 in Combat Information Center.”

Captain Bowie was out of his chair and headed for the door before the GQ alarm cut in again. “Coming, Kat? Looks like it’s going to hit the fan a little sooner than I thought.”

CHAPTER 42

--------------------------------------------------

From: <robert.monkman@navy.mil>

Sent: Monday, December 1, 5:34 PM

To: <b.haster@ucsd.edu>

Subject: Poker

My Dearest Beth,

I have to tell you that I’m still pretty screwed up over what happened to Poker. I mean, one second, he was right there on my starboard wing, and the next second his 18 was going down in flames.

I can’t even understand how it happened. He was a good pilot. A great pilot. For all my bragging, he was a hell of a lot better than me. But he’s dead now, and somehow I’m still alive.

I wish I could take back all the stupid shit I said to him. His first two initials were O. W., and I used to tell everybody that they stood for Orville Wright. All I ever talked about was how ancient he was, and how it was time for him to get his crotchety old ass into a retirement home and make room for some real pilots.

Poker was a good guy. A good officer and a good man. He looked out for his people. He looked out for me. He taught me, and guided me, and kept me out of trouble. I would have never gotten my night landing quals if Poker hadn’t been covering my six.

How did I thank him? I sat back like an idiot while those Chinese fuckers blew him right out of the sky. Now he’s gone, and I’ll never be able to tell him how much he meant to me.

I’m sorry. I know I keep droning on and on about this, but it’s killing me. Everybody keeps treating me like some kind of badass because I shot down two J-15s, and blasted the shit out of another one. But if I’m such a badass, where the hell was I when Poker needed me?

I’m back in the patrol rotation, but I’m not sure I should be. What kind of a wingman lets his lead go down in flames? What if it happens again? What if I’m some kind of jinx, and anybody who flies with me gets iced?

I don’t know, Beth. I don’t know anything anymore. I wish I could talk to you right now. I wish I could hear your voice, and talk this through with you until it starts to make some kind of sense.

I wish…

Hang on. The GQ alarm is going off. Got to get to my battle station.

Love you!

More later,

Rob

LT(jg) Robert J. Monkman

VFA-228 Marauders

USS Midway (CVN-82)

--------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER 43

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

1734 hours (5:34 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Tactical Action Officer pointed to the Aegis display screens. “Raid warning, Captain. Twenty Bogies coming in high from the southwest. No modes, no codes, no IFF. Threat axis is about two-one-four. Looks like they’re lining up for an air strike against the Midway.”

Bowie nodded. “What does Hawkeye say?”

“Hawkeye concurs that this is a probable strike against the carrier, sir. They’re vectoring in three flights of Combat Air Patrol for mop up work, in case any leakers get past us.”

Bowie looked at the cluster of hostile air symbols. Twenty red inverted v-shapes were moving toward the Towers, and toward the aircraft carrier on the other side of the destroyer’s protective missile envelope.

It took him a couple of seconds to realize that something didn’t look quite right about the geometry of target motion playing out on the big display screen. The hostile air symbols were approaching steadily, but the rate of closure didn’t seem high enough.

“How fast are those Bogies moving?” he asked.

The TAO checked a digital readout on his console. “Airspeed around four hundred knots.”

Bowie frowned. “Four hundred knots? That’s a little slow for a strike approach, isn’t it?”

“It’s definitely not typical,” the TAO said. “But we’ve never actually seen the Chinese navy carry out a strike mission against a carrier. Nobody knows exactly what their tactical doctrine looks like for this kind of thing.”

“You’re right about that,” Commander Silva said quietly, “but four hundred knots is still awfully damned slow for a strike approach.”

Before the TAO could respond, a report came over the tactical net from the Electronics Warfare module. “TAO—EW. The Bogies just lit up! I am tracking twenty—that is two-zero—active X-band emitters. Pulse-doppler signature indicates KLJ-10 fire control radars. First cut looks like Chinese J-10 strike fighters.”

The TAO keyed his microphone. “EW—TAO. Copy all. Stand by on jamming and chaff.”

He released the mike button and turned to his commanding officer. “Captain, request batteries released on inbound Bogies.”

Bowie hesitated. Something wasn’t quite right about the way the Bogies were acting. The EW emissions and angle of approach added up to a large raid of strike fighters from the Chinese aircraft carrier, but the relatively low airspeed of the raid was puzzling.

Two-thirds the speed of sound wasn’t exactly poking along, but the J-10 was capable of better than Mach 2. Why weren’t they taking advantage of the aircraft’s speed? It didn’t make sense.

Or rather, it didn’t make sense to Bowie. It obviously made sense to whoever had planned the raid. There was definitely a reason for the departure from accepted aerial tactics. Of course, there was little or no chance that Bowie was going to spontaneously guess what that reason might be within the next few seconds. Low airspeed or not, the hostile planes were heading toward the American aircraft carrier. It was up to the Towers to ensure that they never got close enough to launch their missiles at the Midway.

That made the decision a no-brainer. Bowie made eye contact with his TAO. “Do it,” he said. “You have batteries released.”

The Tactical Action Officer keyed the net again immediately. “Weapons Control—TAO. Engage air tracks Zero Zero One through Zero Two Zero with missiles.”

“TAO—Weapons Control. Engage air tracks Zero Zero One through Zero Two Zero with missiles, aye. Stand by…”

A series of rapid shudders propagated down the length of the warship’s hull, accompanied by a sequence of muffled roars as nearly two dozen SM-3 missiles streaked into the sky.

The Weapons Officer’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Weapons Control. Twenty birds away. No apparent casualties.”

They appeared on the Aegis display within a couple of seconds: the blue shapes of twenty friendly missile symbols, closing rapidly on the hostile air symbols.

Bowie watched the converging symbology for several heartbeats before he reached for a communications headset and punched into the ship’s 1-MC system. When he spoke, his voice came from every speaker within the skin of the ship.

“All hands, this is the Captain. We’re currently launching missiles against a large raid of hostile aircraft. This is the real thing, people. This is what you’ve been training for, and I know you’re ready. Stay sharp. Stay tough. And be prepared for anything.”

He released the mike button and spoke under his breath. “Good luck. To all of us.”

*  *  *

Xianglong:

With its top-mounted jet engine and v-configured tail wings, the Xianglong Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was similar in appearance to the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk that had drawn so much media attention during U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite its physical resemblance to the American UAV, the capabilities of the Xianglong were still largely a mystery to the analysts and engineers of the United States.

Its name could be translated loosely into English as ‘flying lizard,’ but the UAV’s builders preferred the more auspicious translation of ‘soaring dragon.’

Western analysts were correct in believing that the Xianglong’s primary purpose was long-range, high-altitude strategic reconnaissance. But the mission modules currently attached to the UAV’s wings had a quite different purpose.

The module under the port wing was an electronic blip enhancer, designed to amplify and retransmit incoming radar signals, to make the 7.5 ton UAV seem much larger to enemy sensors. For this mission the drone’s apparent radar cross-section had been effectively doubled, giving the slender Xianglong a radar profile that closely mimicked the 16 ton airframe of a Chinese J-10 fighter.

The module under the starboard wing was a microwave transmitter, and it was busily broadcasting X-band signals that were virtually indistinguishable from the pulse-doppler emissions of the Chengdu KLJ-10 fire control radar carried by J-10 aircraft.

The decoy modules and electronic emulators of the deceptive mission package did an extraordinary job of simulating a J-10 fighter jet. The primary flaw in the deception was the drone’s lack of speed.

The jet-powered Xianglong was one of the fastest UAVs on the planet, more than 100 knots faster than the American MQ-9 Reaper. But—as impressive as the Xianglong’s top speed was for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—it was not fast enough to accurately simulate the airspeed of a real J-10.

The Soaring Dragon was not perfect bait, but it was very good bait, and its lack of absolute perfection was offset by numbers. The UAV was not operating alone. It was surrounded by nineteen other drones of the exact same design and capability. Their collective spoofery was intended to make them such attractive targets that minor details like airspeed would be overlooked.

And the deceptive mission packages had not yet exhausted all the tactical cheats at their disposal. They still had a few tricks left to play.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“TAO—Air, Bogies are launching chaff and going evasive!”

“TAO, aye!”

The maneuvers were quickly visible on the Aegis display screens, as the enemy aircraft dodged and weaved to avoid the missiles bearing down on them.

Bowie’s eyes stayed locked on the dancing blue and red symbols. It still didn’t feel right. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the problem, but he couldn’t shake the idea that there was something wrong with the way the Bogies were maneuvering.

Then, it hit him. He tapped the TAO on the shoulder. “Check their airspeed now. How fast are the Bogies moving?”

The Tactical Action Officer punched a quick series of keys on his console. “Looks like… about four hundred knots. Give or take.”

The TAO looked up at his commanding officer. “That’s not right…”

“No,” Bowie said. “It isn’t. Those Bogies are jinking and jiving like crazy, but not a single one of them has kicked in the afterburners to get away from our missiles.”

“They’re some kind of decoys,” the TAO said.

Bowie nodded. “They’ve got to be.”

He reached into the overhead, jerked the red handset of the Navy Red terminal out of its cradle, and shoved it against his right ear. He keyed the mike, and waited a half-second for the crypto burst—a rapid string of warbling tones that the UHF transmitter used to synchronize its encryption signal with the secure communications satellite. “Alpha Whiskey, this is Towers. Hostile strike raid from my bearing two-one-four, is evaluated as a ruse. I say again, Bogies bearing two-one-four are probable decoys! My unit will continue to engage and monitor, but expect additional attacks from other vectors, over!”

The Air Warfare Coordinator on the aircraft carrier responded within ten seconds. “Towers, this is Alpha Whiskey. Roger all, and concur. We have rapid pop-ups on multiple inbound Vipers, threat axis zero-seven-five. Keep your head down. Alpha Whiskey, out!”

*  *  *

Vipers (mid-flight):

They came in very low, and very fast—forty 3M-54E2 anti-ship missiles, flying three and a half meters above the waves at Mach 0.8.

By official NATO designation, they belonged to the family of SSN-27 cruise missiles lumped together under the code name Sizzler. The Chinese variants of this missile class had been alternately over-hyped and under-hyped by the U.S. Department of Defense for more than a decade.

The western press had taken to referring to the 3M-54E2 as China’s Carrier Killer. That assertion had never been demonstrated under battle conditions. Until now.

Each missile had its radar seeker turned off during this phase of its trajectory, following a pre-programmed flight path, adjusted by periodic updates from the Beidou navigation positioning satellites that comprised China’s indigenous version of the Global Positioning System.

The missiles were flying blind, but their nose-on radar cross-sections were relatively low. Coupled with their lack of active emissions and wave-hugging flight profiles, this made them difficult to detect and track.

That would change in a few hundred milliseconds, when the missiles would all energize their target acquisition radars at the same instant. All forty missiles would instantly become visible to the sensors of the American ships and aircraft, but the missiles would compensate for the lack of stealth by accelerating to Mach 2.2 for the terminal phase of the attack.

This supersonic ‘sprint’ would give potential interceptors only seconds to identify the threat and react. Theoretically, the window of opportunity for defensive engagement would be too narrow for the target ship to exploit.

That theory was about to be tested.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

The drama played itself out on the tactical display screens in two acts, separated by both time and distance. To the southwest, the First Act had nearly resolved itself. Evasive maneuvering aside, the ship’s SM-3 missiles were shredding the inbound Bogies, which—Bowie was now certain—must be decoys.

The Second Act was playing out to the east. Forty hostile missile symbols had appeared, and were closing on the Midway at incredible speed.

Two elements of Combat Air Patrol were vectoring in to intercept the Vipers, but—like everyone else in the strike group—they’d been caught looking the wrong way. Even on afterburner, by the time the F/A-18s arrived on station, the engagement would be over.

The Midway had air defenses of her own: a pair of Rolling Airframe Missile launchers, a trio of Sea Sparrow missile launchers, and four Close-In Weapon Systems—the 20mm defensive Gatling guns known to the fleet as Phalanx. The carrier could protect herself against a reasonable number of subsonic cruise missiles. But the number of inbound Vipers was not at all reasonable, and they were moving at supersonic speeds.

The only thing between the carrier and destruction was the USS Frank W. Fenno, the Arliegh-Burke class guided missile destroyer assigned to the eastern perimeter of the strike group’s screen.

As Bowie and his CIC crew watched the tactical displays, the Fenno began launching clouds of SM-3 missiles. The friendly missile symbols overlapped and obscured each other for several seconds, and then they began to diverge as the interceptor missiles homed in on individual targets.

They were too many to count visually in the limited time before intercept, but the Aegis tracking software provided the total. Eighty missiles. The Frank W. Fenno was following a shoot-shoot-look-shoot doctrine. Fire two missiles at each incoming Viper, scan with radar to see how many have been destroyed, and then fire again at any Vipers that survived the first salvo.

Bowie’s first instinct was to call that a mistake, but maybe it wasn’t. He didn’t know the other destroyer’s exact weapons load out, but it probably wasn’t much different from what the Towers was carrying. The Fenno had something like ninety SM-3s aboard, give or take a few for minor variations in mission loads. Which meant that the Fenno’s skipper had just launched about ninety percent of his SAMs in his initial salvo. Ordinarily not the kind of choice that a smart destroyer captain would make. But the Vipers were coming in too fast. The Fenno wasn’t going to get off a second salvo. Whatever they missed the first time around, was going to hit the carrier.

Bowie slammed the Navy Red handset back into its cradle. “Goddamn it! Is there any way we can help the Fenno intercept those Vipers?”

The Tactical Action Officer shook his head. “Not a chance, Captain. Even if we had a clear field of fire, they’re too far away. By the time our birds get over there, it’ll be too late.”

“There’s nothing you can do right now,” Silva said softly.

Bowie turned, and she was standing at his elbow. He exhaled heavily. “I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

He turned his eyes back to the Aegis display screens. “Damn it!” he said. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”

*  *  *

The engagement unfolded on the big displays. Two friendly missile symbols converged on a hostile missile symbol as the first of Fenno’s interceptors destroyed their assigned Viper. Then the interplay of tactical symbols seemed to shift into overdrive, red and blue icons stuttering, intersecting, vanishing, and rearranging themselves in indecipherable patterns.

When it was over, nine hostile missiles remained on the screen, streaking toward the bright blue circle that represented the American aircraft carrier.

*  *  *

USS Midway:

Admiral Zimmerman gripped the arms of his chair and watched the onrushing missile symbols on the large-screen tactical displays. He had already double-checked his seat belt. He had no intention of getting tossed around Flag Plot like a rag doll when those damned missiles hit.

He heard the muted growls of outbound RAMs and Sea Sparrows, punctuated several times by the harsh metallic zipper sound of the CIWS guns firing. Friendly missile symbols flickered briefly on the tactical displays, and hostile symbols winked out of existence. They were getting some of the Vipers. How many, he didn’t know, but there were two or three left on the screen when the first of the enemy missiles slammed into the starboard side of the superstructure.

The admiral was thrown against his seatbelt so hard that he felt like someone had pounded him in the stomach with a Louisville slugger. The lighting flickered, but the power seemed to be holding, at least in Flag Plot.

His ears rang and his eyes didn’t want to focus properly. He could smell smoke, and he could hear someone shouting what sounded like orders, but the words didn’t make any sense to him.

He lifted his head and his eyes found the big tactical screens. Four of them were dark, but the screen on the far right still showed the weaving ballet of colorful icons. An odd red emblem bore straight for the heart of a bright blue circle.

The symbols touched, and the admiral felt himself thrown violently against his seatbelt again.

The lights went out.

CHAPTER 44

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

9:48 AM EST

President Wainright flipped open the blue-jacketed folder and began to scan the top page of the briefing package it contained. After skimming the material for nearly two minutes, he looked up. “Okay, I’ve seen the charts and figures. Now, I want somebody to translate it into English for me.”

He closed the folder and dropped it on the table. “How bad is it?”

Admiral Casey, the Chief of Naval Operations, stood up. “It’s not good, Mr. President.”

He pointed a remote toward the wall-sized Situation Room display screen. The presidential seal was replaced by a series of still pictures of the aircraft carrier, USS Midway. The ship was listing fifteen or twenty degrees to starboard, and several of the images showed smoke billowing from a hole in the superstructure and another (larger) hole in the lower hull. Close-up photos of the two damaged areas had apparently been taken at a later time, after the fires had been extinguished.

“We’re looking at the impact points of two anti-ship cruise missiles,” the CNO said. “Based on flight profiles, electronic emissions, and battle damage assessment, we believe that both missiles were Chinese air-launched variants of the SSN-27 Sizzler.”

The display screen sequenced through a dozen more close-up images, taken from a variety of angles. From this range, the impact points looked like craters. The edges of the blast holes were blackened and irregular, the steel and aluminum structures of the enormous ship broken, charred, and twisted into ragged shapes of chaos.

Admiral Casey halted the march of images with another flick of the remote. The screen showed a medium distance shot of the wounded ship, apparently taken from a helicopter. The angle of the carrier’s list seemed to be even more evident than in the earlier shots.

“As you can see,” the admiral said, “one of the missiles impacted right at the waterline, causing damage above and below the water, and opening the hull to major flooding. This has resulted in a pronounced list to starboard, which was further increased by firefighting water pumped in to extinguish the fires.”

The CNO laid the remote on the conference table. “Given the severity of the damage, personnel casualties have been relatively light. Six dead, and nineteen injured. Three of the wounded are in critical condition, and some or all of them may not make it.”

The president sighed heavily. “How much do we know about the attack?”

The Secretary of Defense closed her own briefing folder and stood up. “Well, Mr. President—not to put too fine a point on it—we got suckered.”

She reached for the remote, and Admiral Casey handed it to her.

SECDEF thumbed several buttons, and the image of the damaged aircraft carrier was replaced by a map of the Bay of Bengal. The blue iconic silhouettes of three Navy destroyers formed a loose triangle, with the silhouette of an aircraft carrier at the center.

“The raid took place in two waves,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The first wave was detected at approximately 1728 hours, that is 5:28 PM local time.”

She keyed the remote, and a cluster of red aircraft shapes appeared to the left and slightly below the strike group. “Twenty jet aircraft, inbound from the southwest. We don’t know exactly which kind of hardware was used, but it seems likely that the entire wave consisted of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, equipped with advanced electronic deception systems. We suspect they were launched from the Chinese carrier, but that’s only an assumption at this point. They were able to closely simulate a group of Chinese J-10 aircraft. And, due to their angle of approach and radar characteristics, they were misidentified as an actual raid against the Midway.”

She keyed the remote again, and a group of red missile silhouettes appeared to the right of the strike group. “The second wave appeared from the east, approximately ten minutes later, as the carrier’s escorts and aircraft were engaging the decoys of the first wave. The second wave consisted of forty anti-ship cruise missiles, all targeted on the aircraft carrier.”

She nodded toward the CNO. “As Admiral Casey pointed out, these missiles were probably a Chinese air-launched variant of the SSN-27 Sizzler. The launching platforms were not detected, leading us to assume that the attacking aircraft stayed extremely low to the water, and fired from close to the maximum range of the SSN-27. Roughly 160 nautical miles. The missiles remained undetected until they switched on their radars for the terminal phase, and accelerated to Mach 2.”

SECDEF pressed another key on the remote, and the easternmost of the blue destroyer silhouettes was highlighted on the display. “The only shooter in a position to intercept was USS Frank W. Fenno. The targeting window was extremely narrow, but the Fenno successfully killed thirty-one of the inbound missiles. The Midway’s defensive weapons managed to knock out seven of the remaining nine.”

The Secretary of Defense sat down. “The last two missiles made it all the way through to the Midway. And we’ve just seen the results of that.”

President Wainwright looked at the map on the big screen. “So the second wave, the planes that launched the attack, came from the Chinese aircraft carrier as well?”

The CNO shook his head. “Probably not, Mr. President. To stay outside the radar coverage of our strike group, aircraft from the Liaoning would have had to divert east, past the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; turn north and fly up the long axis of the Andaman Sea; and then turn west, back into the Bay of Bengal. Even with several aerial refuelings, that’s beyond the capacity of Chinese carrier-based aircraft. And then, they’d have to turn around and do it all in reverse, on the return leg.”

“Okay,” the president said, “where the hell did they come from?”

“We don’t know for certain,” the Secretary of Defense said, “but our best guess is Myanmar. They share a border with China, and the PRC is a close ally of the Burmese, as well as one of their top economic trading partners. We don’t think the Burmese military actually launched the attack, but they may have permitted their airbases to be used as a staging area for Chinese strike planes.”

The president suppressed a grimace. The Republic of Myanmar had no particular love for the United States. The U.S. had been imposing economic sanctions against the country since the late 1990s, to penalize the government for decades of continually worsening human rights violations.

During his days in the Senate, Wainwright himself had led a multinational initiative to convince the European Union to tighten their economic sanctions against Myanmar. The Burmese government didn’t have the military or economic muscle to stand directly against the United States, but they might welcome the opportunity to help their Chinese buddies poke America in the eye.

“Alright,” the president said. “What are our options?”

No one spoke for several seconds.

Finally, the Chief of Naval Operations leaned forward. The lined skin of his tanned face gave his features the weather beaten gravitas of that famous Gloucester Fisherman painting by Joseph Margulies. “Frankly, Mr. President, I think it’s time for us to turn up the heat. Just before the strike on the Midway, we issued new Rules of Engagement to our naval forces in the area. Since the attack, we’ve been on a defensive footing. I say we continue with the plan, and go after the Chinese carrier, and every PRC military unit in the region.”

The president shook his head. “How in the name of God did we end up in a shooting match with the Chinese Navy?”

Admiral Casey’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a rhetorical question, Mr. President?”

“Hell no, it’s not rhetorical,” the president said. “When my alarm clock went off this morning, I did not expect to be at war with the People’s Republic of China by lunch time.”

“Mr. President, we’re not at war,” the Secretary of Defense said. “Hostilities have escalated farther than we were expecting, but this is still a regionalized conflict, with a limited scope of operations. We are not at war with the PRC.”

The president looked in her direction. “But the situation doesn’t show any signs of stabilizing, does it? It’s escalating, as you just pointed out. Can you guarantee that this conflict won’t keep spreading until we are at war with China?”

“No, sir,” SECDEF said. “I can’t give you any guarantees. All I can offer is my best counsel. And I solemnly believe that if we back away now, there will be war.”

Admiral Casey nodded in agreement. “Mr. President, we got into this dogfight to prevent India from destroying the Three Gorges site. If we walk away now, the Indians are going to carry out their attack, as planned. And you remember what happens after that... Catastrophic flooding of the Yangtze River basin. Three major cities wiped out, and half of China’s industrial base washed out to sea. A death toll in the tens of millions—possibly hundreds of millions. When the Chinese retaliate, and they will retaliate, they’re going to hammer India into the Stone Age.”

“I agree,” the Secretary of Defense said. “We could be looking at a full-scale nuclear exchange between China and India. But even if the reprisals don’t go nuclear, the casualty rate could easily dwarf the entire body-count from the Second World War.”

“And there’s another aspect to this,” Admiral Casey said. “If we get a bloody nose, and then back down from the fight, our national deterrence goes down the toilet. We signal to the entire world that China is the dominant military power on this planet. We will be effectively handing them the reins.”

The president sat in silence for several seconds. Finally, he nodded slowly. “Okay. We stay in the fight. It looks like every other alternative leads to more bloodshed in the long run.”

He turned toward the admiral. “Are we ready for this? Our primary means of force projection is damaged. Possibly crippled. It looks to me like we might not have the horsepower to do the job.”

“We’ll have to shift some additional assets into the operating area,” Admiral Casey said. “But our first step should be to get the message out to our forces in the region. Go after the bad guys, and do it now.”

President Wainwright rubbed the back of his neck. “Can they do it?”

The CNO nodded gravely. “If we give them the word, Mr. President, I promise you they’ll get the job done.”

CHAPTER 45

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

0317 hours (3:17 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Katherine Silva was dreaming of Savannah when the call came. Random snatches of her childhood, strung together in no particular order.

The cobblestones of River Street damp and glistening after an evening rain. Ripples in the dark river tossing back wobbly reflections of the restaurant marquis lights and shop windows. The wind carried the bright salt aroma of the ocean and the hint of cities, countries, and entire continents hiding somewhere below the curve of the horizon.

Kat was eight years old, her father a tall comforting silhouette under the golden aura of the faux colonial street lamps. The world was out there. She knew that. Had known it the first time she had seen the river, and its broad mouth opening to the ocean just a few miles downstream from where she now stood. For her, the world was not here, on the bank of the river—at least not the important parts. It was out there, where the sky bent down to touch the sea.

“I’m going to be a pirate,” she said in a solemn voice.

Her father didn’t laugh. “I thought you wanted to be a shrimp boat captain,” he said.

“Or a pirate,” Kat said. “Or just build my own boat, and sail around the world.”

She threw her arms wide, to encompass the river and the ocean somewhere at the end of it. “I want to be out there,” she said.

Her father nodded. “I know.” And he did know.

*  *  *

Kat was twelve years old, standing on the uneven plank deck of her homemade raft, gripping the mast as the unstable vessel bobbed and rolled in the waves. Built from a pair of wooden shipping pallets nailed together with scraps of lumber, the raft was kept afloat by three truck inner tubes and two dozen empty plastic milk jugs, all tied beneath the pallets with carefully-knotted binder twine.

She had christened her raft the Spray, after the famous sloop of Joshua Slocum: the first man to sail around the world solo.

This was the maiden voyage of the Spray, and Kat had intended it as a brief excursion. Just a quick loop in the Wilmington River, using her bed sheet sail to tack upstream, and then ride the current back to her launch point in an easy glide.

But Kat had not yet equipped her vessel with a centerboard or a keel—a refinement that was apparently more necessary than she had assumed. No matter how she trimmed her sail or which way she turned the plywood rudder, the raft followed the current. She’d been out here several hours now, trying to edge her way back toward the bank as she drifted farther and farther downstream.

She knew that she had a vicious sunburn going, and she had long since guzzled down the bottle of 7-Up that had been her only provisions for the voyage. Out in the channel, a sleek-looking cabin cruiser with a turquoise hull was motoring effortlessly upriver.

Kat thought about trying to wave the boat down, but she was too proud to ask for rescue. She wasn’t hurt, and her raft was seaworthy, despite its lack of controlled steerage. She would bring the Spray back to port. As captain, that was her job.

She shielded her eyes from the sun, and studied the landmarks along the shore. She’d be sliding past the shrimp boat piers in Thunderbolt pretty soon, and she figured she could get close enough in to snag the end of one of the docks.

*  *  *

Kat was five years old, sitting cross-legged under a moss-draped oak tree near the edge of Daffin Park pond. Half a loaf of stale white bread lay on her lap. She was intent on her task, carefully tearing each bread slice into a dozen or so pieces, and flinging the crumbly treats toward a flock of grateful ducks.

The ducks paddled in circles and flapped their wings, darting their heads to scoop up the bread scraps as they landed in the water—occasionally snatching a piece right out of the air. They quacked, loudly and appreciatively. Kat laughed with delight, and reached for another crust of bread.

*  *  *

Then the telephone rang, and the dream was gone, like the popping of a soap bubble.

Kat Silva opened one eye, and groped for the phone beside her bed. She pulled the receiver out of its restraining clip, and held it to her ear. “Commander Silva speaking.”

The voice on the other end was brisk and alert. “Commander, this is the XO. Captain Bowie is calling a strategy meeting with all senior officers in the wardroom in fifteen minutes. He’d like for you to sit in.”

Silva looked at the clock and forced her eyes to focus on the lighted numerals. “Got it,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

She fumbled for the light switch, flicked it on, and rolled out of bed. She was half-tempted to climb back in and go to sleep. Not that she particularly needed the rest. She was used to getting up at all hours, and she had long ago learned to come instantly awake and respond to the needs of the job.

The problem was that she didn’t have a job. The Chinese air strike had proven that. Bowie had commanded the ship through the entire engagement sequence, receiving reports, evaluating the situation, and issuing orders. Kat had stood around with her hands in her pockets. She had probably spoken no more than a half dozen words the whole time, none of them particularly helpful or insightful.

She’d come to the Towers to assume command. Instead, she was facing real combat for the first time in her life, and she was just along for the ride.

It wasn’t Jim Bowie’s fault. It was strictly an accident of timing. If the fracas between India and China had started a couple of weeks later, she would have been in command when the Towers deployed. It was the luck of the draw—nothing more.

Jim was certainly trying to make the situation bearable for her. He was careful to include her in the inner workings of the ship’s upper command structure, and she appreciated that. But the situation was frustrating. This wasn’t how things were supposed to work.

She reached for a set of freshly-pressed coveralls. There was enough time to wash her face and run a brush through her hair before she had to head up to the meeting.

*  *  *

Silva arrived in the wardroom about five seconds ahead of the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Matthews. As Silva was taking a seat, the XO did a quick visual inventory of the officers gathered around the table. The ship’s department heads were all present. The Operations Officer, Lieutenant Sue Meyer, was in her usual chair across from the door—flanked on the left by the Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Ben Lambert, and on the right by the Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Bronson, and the Supply Officer, Lieutenant Pat Connelly.

The XO picked up the phone and punched three digits. “We’re ready, sir.”

Captain Bowie arrived about four minutes later. He nodded in greeting to the assembled officers, and then poured himself a cup of coffee before taking his seat at the head of the table.

“I apologize for the lateness of the hour and for the short notice,” he said. “I know that some of you haven’t had much sleep.”

Lieutenant Meyer nearly responded by reflex, but she caught herself in time. She was a hard-charger who didn’t allow herself a lot of rest. Her favorite comment on the subject of sleep was blunt, politically incorrect, and sexually suggestive. Sleep is for pussies. As it was her commanding officer speaking, she decided to keep that particular opinion to herself this time.

Bowie continued without interruption. “Our tactical situation has changed, and we need to make some decisions. In view of the damage sustained during the air attack yesterday evening, Admiral Zimmerman has decided to move the Midway out of the Bay of Bengal.”

The XO looked surprised. “We’re pulling out of the op area?”

Bowie smiled. “That depends on how you define the word ‘we.’ The carrier is definitely pulling out, but the admiral is thinking about detaching two of the destroyers for independent ops. That’s why I called this meeting at oh-my-God-o’clock. The admiral has ordered us to come up with a plan for taking out the Chinese carrier’s escorts. He wants to see at least a rough outline by 0600.”

Captain Bowie looked at the clock. “That gives us about two and a half hours to hammer out a basic plan of attack.”

Lieutenant Meyer pursed her lips. “Why bother with the escort ships? The biggest threat is the Chinese air wing. We should be going after the carrier.”

“Admiral Zimmerman has a plan for that,” Bowie said. “He’s going to use the Midway’s air power to knock out the Liaoning. Our job is to soften up the Chinese battle group in preparation for the main attack.”

“I thought the Midway was out of action,” the XO said. “How is she supposed to launch aircraft?”

“I’ve been told not to worry about that,” Bowie said. “Admiral Zimmerman has a plan. We’re supposed to concentrate on wiping out the escorts.”

The Combat Systems Officer raised an eyebrow. “Wiping them out?”

“Yes,” Bowie said. “We’re not just supposed to take them out of the fight. Our orders are to sink them. Every escort ship in the Chinese battle group.”

Captain Bowie paused to let the assembled officers absorb his words. Not damage the Chinese ships. Not defeat them. Sink them. Destroy them completely.

After several seconds of silence, Commander Silva spoke up. “What about the Chinese submarines? Do we go after them? Or do we try to avoid them?”

“USS California will be assigned to handle the hostile subs,” Bowie said. “If we happen to encounter one, we can engage it. But we’re not supposed to seek ASW opportunities.”

The Combat Systems Officer raised a finger. “I assume that we’ll be operating with the Donald Gerrard…”

“That’s correct,” Bowie said. “The Fenno has already expended 80 missiles—the majority of her inventory—so she’ll be sticking with the Midway to provide cover. That leaves the Towers and the Gerrard to stick around and do the dirty work.”

He took a swallow of coffee and set his cup down. “That pretty much defines our mission parameters. Now all we need is a plan for carrying it out.”

No one spoke for several minutes as everyone mulled over the problem and searched for a workable tactical approach.

Again, it was Commander Silva who broke the silence. “I think we should run like hell,” she said. “The Midway is pulling out, and we should go too. Full retreat. Admit that we got our asses kicked, and run home.”

Three or four people started to respond, but Bowie held up a hand. “Go on…”

Silva looked at the shocked and puzzled faces around the table. She didn’t speak immediately, enjoying the moment of incredulous silence.

“I was just thinking about Sun Tzu,” she said finally. “That famous piece from The Art of War, where he talks about all warfare being based on deception… Attacking when you appear to be unable, and making yourself seem far away when you’re near. I never bothered to memorize that passage, but the concept applies pretty well to our current situation.”

No one responded, so she continued. “The Chinese blasted the hell out of the INS Vikrant. The Indian navy responded by pulling their carrier battle group all the way up the northern end of the bay, where it can draw on their coastal defenses and shore-based air cover. That’s a reasonable response. When you get your fingers burned, you pull your hand away from the fire. Well… The Chinese have blasted the hell out of our carrier too, and they know that we haven’t lost an aircraft carrier in combat since World War II. They also know how important carriers are to our national deterrence. If we circle the wagons and escort our carrier out of the danger zone, I’m betting they’ll interpret that as a reasonable response too.”

Bowie nodded. “Continue…”

“So,” Commander Silva said, “we maintain our places in the defensive screen, and cover the Midway’s retreat from the Bay of Bengal, until…”

The XO slapped his palm on the table. “Until we reach the passage through the Nicobar Islands. Then, the Midway continues through into the Andaman Sea, while we break off and haul ass down the coast—using the sea traffic and the radar clutter of the island chain to mask our run to the south.”

Silva smiled. “You catch on fast, Brian.”

The other officers began exchanging interested glances.

Bowie nodded appreciatively. “We could make our final approach after sunset tomorrow evening. Go in dark and quiet—full EMCON, and full stealth mode.”

“Exactly,” Silva said. “If we do it right, we can get all the way inside their defensive perimeter. Then, we open up and blow their doors off.”

Lieutenant Meyer grinned. “I like the way you think, ma’am. You’re one sneaky bitch.”

The executive officer shot her a look. “Lieutenant…”

The Operations Officer raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, XO, but I couldn’t think of what else to say. Sneaky bastard didn’t seem to fit, and son-of-a-bitch just isn’t right…”

The XO pounded the table. “That’s enough, Lieutenant!”

The Ops Officer grimaced. “Sorry, XO. It won’t happen again, sir.” She turned toward Commander Silva. “No disrespect intended, ma’am.”

The XO looked like he was going to say something further, but Captain Bowie spoke up again. ‘I think it’s an excellent plan, Commander Silva. Let’s work out the details, and then I’ll take it to the admiral.”

The tactical discussion began in earnest.

About ten minutes into it, the exchange with Lieutenant Meyer popped into Silva’s head again, and she had to suppress a grin. Sneaky bitch… She could live with that.

CHAPTER 46

HONG’QI-12 MISSILE DEFENSE BATTERY

ZIGONG, CHINA

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

11:58 AM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

The flashing amber light caught Chao Péng’s attention immediately. He tapped the button to acknowledge the alert, pre-empting the alarm buzzer that was programmed to sound if the warning went unanswered for more than five seconds.

Chao’s rank was Xia Shi, the Chinese equivalent to the rank of technical sergeant. He was good at his job, and proud of it. He had been a radar intercept operator for three years, and the alarm had never once sounded while he was on watch. The computer had never caught him napping, and he was determined that it never would.

With a brief flurry of keystrokes, Chao summoned up the system alert queue and scrolled through the flight characteristics of the new target. The data glowed bright red on the screen of his console.

Parked at the center of a circle of six mobile KS-1A missile launchers, the H-200 passively-scanned electronic array was a highly-effective radar sensor. The slab-shaped phased-array antenna was capable of detecting, identifying, and tracking three simultaneous air targets, and it could launch and control up to six interceptor missiles.

The H-200’s sensitivity was both a blessing and a curse. It made the radar very difficult to hide from, but it also resulted in a high number of false target alerts. The system latched on to commercial airliners and private aircraft with almost monotonous regularity.

Chao had little doubt that this latest inbound target alert would turn out to be yet another passenger jet. But he was too skilled and too dedicated to deviate from proper procedure. His keen eyes scanned rapidly down the columns of alpha-numeric target data, and then his pulse began to race.

This was not a single airliner straying out of the commercial air corridors; it was ten fast-moving targets, all traveling at altitudes of less than 200 meters. Chao reacted automatically, his right palm shooting up to slam the threat warning alarm.

As the klaxon began its harsh repetitive cry, Chao was swiveling the microphone of his communications headset to a position in front of his lips. He keyed the circuit. “Watch Officer, this is the Radar Intercept Operator. I am tracking ten confirmed inbound targets, converging on this position. Flight profiles are consistent with land-attack cruise missiles. Request permission to arm the missile batteries.”

The Watch Officer’s voice sounded startled and confused. “Wait! You are certain? This could not be a system malfunction? Or a simulation?”

Chao cursed under his breath and then keyed the circuit again. “Sir, this is not a malfunction. It is not a simulation. This site is under attack, and the inbound missiles are closing at high speed. There is no time to discuss this, Lieutenant. I request permission to arm the missile batteries.”

“If you are certain…” the Watch Officer said vaguely. “I mean, yes! You have permission to arm the missile batteries! Engage the inbound targets!”

Chao’s hands were already moving over his keyboard. “Yes, sir. Arming missile batteries now.”

The circular formation of twin-armed missile launchers came to life. All six batteries pivoted to different angles as the H-200 radar assigned a target to each launcher. A few seconds later, the first missile leapt off the rail, followed in rapid succession by five others.

The radar array was mounted to the front chassis section of a heavy duty ten-wheeled military vehicle. Chao sat in the H-200’s operations cabin, a box-like steel structure which occupied the rear section of the vehicle’s chassis, a few meters behind the huge rectangular radar sensor.

Despite the vehicle’s heavy shock absorbers, he felt the rumbling vibration of the launching missiles propagate through the soles of his boots and into his feet. On the tracking screen, each of the interceptor missiles arced toward one of the incoming cruise missiles.

Chao Péng’s mathematical and spatial orientation skills were much higher than average. He wasn’t a genius by any accepted definition of the word, but he had an intuitive gift for solving problems of geometry and mathematics that would challenge or defeat the majority of the common population.

Early in his military training, a PLA captain had recognized Chao’s ability to accurately estimate the terminus of a ballistic arc without calculating tools, or even scratch paper. Chao had an instinctive understanding of how objects moved through three-dimensional space, and how influences like gravity and wind resistance could affect their vectors.

His eyes were locked on the tracking screen. He didn’t need any of those advanced skills right now to know that he was seconds away from death.

Between them, the twin-armed missile launchers carried twelve missiles: two per launcher. But the H-200 could only control six of those missiles at a time. The other six would have to wait for the second salvo, after the radar’s fire control channels had been freed up by the failure or success of the first six missiles. But there wasn’t going to be time for a second salvo.

That made the math both simple, and inescapable. There were ten inbound cruise missiles, only six of which had interceptors assigned to them. The other four inbounds were going to get a free ride to the target. As Chao Péng happened to be sitting at the precise center of the target area, that meant he was about to be obliterated.

For a quarter of a second, he considered throwing open the door of the operator cabin and running (literally) for his life. But there was no time to run. There was only time for the briefest possible flare of panic.

The enemy missiles were here.

He didn’t hear the impact of the first cruise missile. He had a brief sensation of increasing weight as the heavy chassis of the radar vehicle left the ground on the rising crest of the shockwave. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the thick steel floor plate bending beneath his feet. Suddenly, the world seemed to come apart, with a sound and a fury that Chao Péng had never imagined.

And then there was nothing.

CHAPTER 47

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

7:30 AM EST

The president took his chair at the head of the table. “Okay, tell me about this missile strike.”

The Situation Room Duty Officer pointed a remote at the master display screen, and three high-resolution satellite photos appeared, enlarged to show detail. In each photo, a roughly circular pattern of blast craters was visible. Pieces of mangled machinery lay in and around the craters, blackened and twisted scraps of metal that gave little clue as to their original forms.

The Duty Officer looked at the president. ‘Sir, we’re looking at the remains of three PLA defensive missile sites, located—respectively—in the Chinese cities of Zigong, Chengdu, and Chongqing.”

He thumbed the remote and a map of mainland China appeared, with the named cities circled in red. The three circles formed an almost perfect right triangle, rotated about ten degrees to the west, making the base roughly parallel to the nearby Yangtze river.

“According to NRO’s reconstruction, all three sites were hit simultaneously by multiple long range weapons, fired from mobile launch vehicles in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Estimated flight speed of the weapons was Mach 0.7, and the transit range to each target was between 800 and 900 kilometers. Based on performance parameters and the relatively long standoff distance, we believe that the strike weapons may have been Nirbhay series land attack cruise missiles.”

President Wainwright nodded. “What do we know about the target sites? Do these three cities have some military or political significance that would lead the Indians to select them as targets?”

The Secretary of Defense spoke up. “Not the cities themselves, sir,” she said. “But the geographic locations of the three missile sites may be important.”

The president gestured for her to continue.

The secretary took a laser pointer from the conference table, clicked it on, and swung the beam toward the master display screen. The laser dot hovered on the map, near the eastern end of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. “This is the approximate launch site of the cruise missile strike,” the secretary said.

She moved her hand, and the laser dot shifted to the east. “This is the location of the Three Gorges Dam, situated on the Yangtze River, near the town of Sandouping.”

She began moving the laser pointer back and forth. On the master display, the laser dot traced and retraced a line from eastern India to the location of the Three Gorges Dam. On every pass, the line went right through the middle of the triangle formed by Zigong, Chengdu, and Chongqing.

The president looked at her. “You’re saying that the Indians are clearing the flight path for a cruise missile strike against the Three Gorges Dam?”

SECDEF switched off the laser pointer and returned it to the table. “It looks that way, Mr. President. Assuming that they intend to launch from Arunachal Pradesh, they’d need to take out those three Chinese missile sites to get a clear shot at the target.”

The president sighed. “So we’re still stuck with this damned Shiva thing? I thought the Indians were supposed to call off the dogs when we agreed to help them take on the Chinese carrier group.”

The National Security Advisor spoke up. “Sir, I’ve got an appointment with Ambassador Shankar at ten o’clock. That’s obviously going to be the main topic of our conversation.”

The president nodded. “But…”

“But I pretty much know what she’s going to say,” Brenthoven said. “They appreciate our help and our show of solidarity, but our contributions to the fight haven’t stopped Chinese aggression.”

The president said back in his chair. “So, the clock is still ticking.”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. President,” the National Security Advisor said. He glanced at his watch. “And we now only have about eleven hours before the Indians move forward with their plan.”

CHAPTER 48

GREAT HALL OF THE PEOPLE

TIANANMEN SQUARE

BEIJING, CHINA

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

8:49 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

Jia Bangguo stood with his hands on the lacquered teak surface of the conference table. His eyes made a rapid circuit of the assembled leaders, taking in the other eight men who formed the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party.

“Comrades,” he said, “there is very little time. We must begin an emergency drawdown of the Three Gorges reservoir, and the entire Yangtze River Valley will have to be evacuated.”

In nearly any other forum within the People’s Republic, Jia’s words would have brought a flurry of assents, followed by immediate action. As Second Vice Premier and Party Secretary of the National People’s Congress, he was nominally the third most powerful man in China.

If this had been a meeting of the full politburo, he could have leveraged enough votes and proxies to challenge virtually any rival. But among the limited constituency of the Standing Committee, he had no ranks of ministers to flock to his banner. Here, at the heart of China’s innermost-circle of leadership, he had only his own persuasiveness to draw on.

“There is very little time,” he said again. “If we give the order at once, we can have the water in the Three Gorges catchment down to flood-control levels within two days. Then, if the dam is attacked, the flooding downstream will be a nuisance, not a disaster.”

“Completely out of the question!” Ma Yong snapped. “Ludicrous! The hydroelectric turbines from Three Gorges serve almost fifteen percent of our nationwide power needs. If we lower the reservoir to flood-control levels, it will impact our industrial base, food production, transportation, communications… I can’t even begin to calculate how badly our national economy would suffer.”

Ma was Party Secretary of the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs. His first, last, and only concern was the strength of the Chinese economy. This made him an instant opponent of any person or agency which threatened China’s financial bottom line.

“Then I suggest a different calculation,” Jia said. “Try calculating how badly our transportation and industry will be damaged when half the railroad bridges and road bridges in China are wiped out by catastrophic flooding. And while you are playing with numbers, you should try to estimate how long it will take your precious economy to recover when 400 million of our comrades are killed.”

“Where is your proof?” Ma asked in an acid tone. “How do you know that the Indians will attack Three Gorges? Have they shared their secret plans with you? Or do you have your own intelligence sources, operating within the Indian government?”

“Of course not,” Jia said. “But I can read a map. By eliminating our defensive missile sites at Chengdu, Zigong, and Chongqing, they have cleared a path for a cruise missile strike against the dam. I tell you, comrades—the Indians are planning to attack Three Gorges.”

This brought low murmurs around the table.

First Vice Premier Lu Shi raised a hand and all conversation ceased. “Comrade Jia,” he said slowly. “I do not doubt your sincerity, and your concerns are worthy of serious consideration. But there is such a thing as too much caution. As Comrade Ma has pointed out, we have no real evidence that our neighbors to the south are planning to destroy Three Gorges. Such an attack would constitute a direct and crippling strike against our national infrastructure. The Indian government understands that we would be forced to resort to strategic options.”

That last phrase seemed to leave a breath of chill on the air. Among the senior elite of the Communist Party, the word ‘strategic’ was an accepted euphemism for ‘nuclear.’

Wei Jintao, Party Secretary of the State Council, brought his fingertips together. “Perhaps it would be wise to deescalate the situation, before it becomes necessary to consider… ah… strategic options.”

He looked toward Lu Shi. “If our goal was to punish India for harboring enemies of China, surely we have accomplished that. If our goal was to demonstrate military dominance in the region, we have accomplished that as well. I’m not sure what we can expect to gain by continuing this altercation with India.”

Before Lu could respond, Jia spoke again. “Why are we speaking in circumlocutions? We’re the top echelon of leadership in this country. If we cannot talk plainly here, how will we make the straightforward decisions that need to be made? If we are talking about nuclear weapons, we should not disguise that fact by referring to them as ‘strategic options.’ And we should stop pretending that this is some kind of ‘altercation.’ Everyone in this room knows that we have gone beyond that. When we strip away the ambiguous language, we are discussing the possibility of nuclear war with India.”

He tapped a finger sharply on the table top. “Yes. I say the words openly. Nuclear war. We all need to think about those words, and we need to think about what they mean. Because we’re stumbling blindly in that direction, and no one at this table wants to admit it.”

Several of the committee members looked as if they wanted to agree, but none of them spoke.

Lu Shi regarded Jia coolly, but his voice remained level. “Again, Comrade Jia, I concede your sincerity, and I don’t wish to make light of your concerns. But I think you are overreacting. We have vanquished the Indian aircraft carrier. We have shown the American Navy that they cannot interfere in the affairs of China without consequences. The major engagements are now over. There may be a few skirmishes to deal with, but the remaining tasks will be primarily political, not military.”

Wei Jintao raised an eyebrow. “May we ask you to clarify that, Comrade Lu?”

Lu Shi didn’t answer. Instead, Premiere Xiao Qishan cleared his throat. Every eye turned instantly in his direction.

Since the Premiere’s triple bypass surgery the year before, there had been one overt attempt to force the old dragon out of office, and several behind-the-scenes maneuvers to nudge him into retirement. But Lu Shi had battled tirelessly to keep Xiao in power.

It was widely understood that Lu Shi would succeed Xiao Qishan as Premiere, which made his continued support of the aging leader something of a mystery. No one could understand why Lu Shi would deliberately postpone his own assent to ultimate power. Could it be something as simple as loyalty to the Premiere? Was Lu following a timetable which made the delay necessary, or desirable? Was it something else entirely? Although there was considerable speculation, no one seemed to have an answer.

Lu’s motive for continuing to support Xiao Qishan was not clear, but the result was no secret at all. The Premiere repaid that support in-kind, by putting his own power and influence at the disposal of Lu Shi.

Xiao went through the motions of thoughtful deliberation and personal objectivity, but—when the rhetoric was sifted out and his actions were evaluated—the old leader backed Lu Shi’s decisions every time.

Premiere Xiao cleared his throat again, more softly this time. Several of the faces turned in his direction had an expectant quality about them, as though some of the committee members were hoping that the gravity of the situation would force Xiao to break with Lu Shi, and reassert the firm hand of leadership. Pull them collectively back from what might be the edge of catastrophe.

If so, they were destined to be disappointed.

“The People’s Republic of China is no longer a nation of peasants,” Xiao said. “We are a global economic power, and the People’s Liberation Army is rapidly becoming the preeminent military force on the planet. The other nations of the world must learn that we can no longer be backed into a corner.”

Jia Bangguo and Wei Jintao exchanged glances across the table. The words coming from Xiao’s mouth had clearly been scripted by Lu Shi.

The Premiere continued speaking. “I have transmitted instructions to our ambassadors in the United States and India, detailing our demands to the governments of both countries. If India wishes to return to normal relations with China, they must cease harboring our enemies, including the terrorists who continue to incite violence in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. As a gesture of good faith, they must begin by extraditing the criminal agitator, the Dalai Lama. By similar token, the United States is placed on notice… The days of the American military hegemony are ended. If they attempt to intrude in the affairs of the People’s Republic, they will discover that their dwindling power is no longer a match for ours.”

Lu Shi nodded. “Well said, Comrade Premier.”

He pointed his fierce gaze at each of the other committee members. “This is our moment,” he said. “The star of the West is falling, even as ours is ascending. If our will remains strong, we will own this century.”

His voice grew quiet. “This is China’s hour. We must not throw it away.”

*  *  *

Ten minutes after the meeting adjourned, Jia Bangguo caught up with Wei Jintao on his way out of the building. Side by side, the two committee members strolled down the stone steps that led from the Great Hall of the People onto the flat expanse of Tiananmen Square. Both men had limousines idling at the curb, but they signaled for their drivers to wait, and they walked out past the security barriers to stand in the cold night air.

The seven determinative stars of Bei Fang Xuan Wu, the Black Warrior of the North, burned bright in the dark curtain of heaven. The ancient Chinese constellation was also known as the Black Tortoise. It was a symbol of winter, and the story of its creation dealt with terror, and death, and the unintended consequences of rash actions by men who were supposedly wise.

“I don’t think he cares what happens,” Jia said.

Wei Jintao said nothing.

“Lu Shi,” Jia said. “I don’t think he cares anymore. He is angry, and hurt, and he wants to punish someone for his grief. He destroyed the men who killed his son, along with the entire village where they were hiding. But that wasn’t enough.”

Wei looked at Jia. “What are you saying, Comrade?”

Jia Bangguo was starting to feel the bite of the winter air now. He flipped up the collar of his coat. “I’m saying that our Vice Premier is looking for an enemy to destroy, and he doesn’t really care who it is. But worse than that, I think he has stopped caring about the consequences.”

“That’s crazy,” Wei Jintao said. “I may not agree with many of his decisions, but Comrade Lu would never do anything to endanger the future of China. He loves this country more than he loves his own life.”

“That’s my point,” Jia said. “I don’t think he loves his life anymore. I don’t think he cares about living at all.”

Jia tilted his face up to the stars, his eyes tracing the outlines of the Black Tortoise. “If we don’t do something quickly, I’m not sure that China will have a future.”

CHAPTER 49

USS MIDWAY (CVN-82)

ANDAMAN SEA (EAST OF THE NICOBAR ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

1924 hours (7:24 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Captain Anthony Romano, commanding officer of USS Midway, watched the green-shaded areas continue to grow on the integrated damage control display. The screen showed a three-dimensional representation of the ship’s interior construction—the decks, bulkheads, and hull fittings sketched out in ghostly shades of translucent gray, to allow the viewer to look through structural features in the foreground to see the compartments and passageways beyond.

The green shading represented sea water. Five of the compartments on the starboard side of the virtual ship image were filled with green from deck to overhead. Those were the parts of the ship that had flooded when the Chinese cruise missiles had punched through the ship’s hull.

Thanks to automated damage control systems, good watertight integrity, and fast action by Romano’s crew, the flooding had been contained to the smallest possible area. Now, after fighting hard to keep the seawater out, they were intentionally letting it in. On the damage control display, compartments on the port side of the ship were rapidly filling with green shading, as tons of water were pumped into sections of the ship that had previously been dry.

The technique was known as counter-flooding. It was an accepted method for restoring the trim of a warship when she had taken on enough flooding water to endanger her stability.

Romano had known about the concept since his very first course in shipboard damage control at Annapolis. As an intellectual exercise in the comfort of an academy classroom, counter-flooding had sounded like a logical way to cope with shipboard stability problems. But this was not the Naval Academy, and the thousands of gallons of seawater pouring into his ship were not at all theoretical.

This bright idea had come from Admiral Zimmerman himself. Just let in a little water on the port side, level the flight deck, and then they could launch aircraft.

Except that it wasn’t a little water. It was a hell of a whole lot of water, and it wasn’t going into bare compartments. It was going into two electronics spaces, an auxiliary equipment room, an air conditioning skid, and a fan room. Romano’s technicians and engineers had spent several frantic hours trying to unbolt, disconnect, and remove as much equipment as possible from the compartments selected for counter-flooding, but their simply hadn’t been time to relocate even a third of the hardware. And now, generators, power supplies, computers, hydraulic pumps, blower motors, and server racks were being immersed in corrosive salt water.

When the mission was over, the additional water could be pumped back out of the ship, but a lot of the equipment wouldn’t be worth salvaging by then. The upcoming battle had not even started yet, and the Midway had already taken millions of dollars of additional damage. Maybe tens of millions.

Romano shook his head and suppressed a curse. The strike group was under Admiral Zimmerman’s command, but the ship herself was Romano’s responsibility. More than that, he loved the giant metal monstrosity with a fervor that he reserved for few human beings. He cherished every weld, every rivet, and every inch of deck plate from bow to stern. Midway was his girl, and he was not disposed to be friendly to anyone or anything that caused her harm.

He understood the reasoning behind the decision to do this, and he even agreed with it. But he damned well didn’t have to be happy about it, and he wasn’t.

The green shading on the damage control display had reached the overheads of the designated flooding spaces.

Captain Romano turned to his Damage Control Assistant. “What do you think, Steve?”

Lieutenant Steve Cohen checked the readouts on two adjacent computer screens. Then, he glanced up at the bubble inclinometer mounted on a transverse beam in the overhead. He nodded. “Looks like we’re back in trim, Captain. The flight deck should be nice and level.”

He tapped a few keys and checked a third display. “All that extra water has given us some additional draft, and we’re going to lose some speed hauling it around.”

“Hopefully, that won’t be a problem,” Romano said. “The Air Boss assures me that we can offset the loss in wind speed across the deck by cranking up the acceleration and release curve on EMALS. At least that’s the idea. We won’t know for certain until we try.”

EMALS was short for Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, the next-generation flight deck technology that was replacing steam catapults on the newer classes of U.S. carriers. The new all-electric system was lighter, faster, and significantly more efficient than the mechanical steam systems which had preceded it. More importantly, EMALS provided an entirely new degree of precision control, allowing the system to safely launch everything from lightweight UAVs, to aircraft far beyond the weight limits of previous catapults.

In theory, an aircraft carrier equipped with EMALS could launch planes with less than 10 knots of relative wind across the flight deck. That was a far cry from the 30+ knots of relative wind required by carriers with old-style catapult systems.

They were about to find out if the theory was true.

Romano picked up a phone and punched the number for Flag Plot. “Admiral? This is Captain Romano. I’m on my way up to the bridge. We can set flight quarters any time you’re ready, sir.”

He listened for a couple of seconds, ended the call with a quick final courtesy, and then hung up the phone and headed for the door.

“This had better work,” he said to himself. “This had better fucking work.”

CHAPTER 50

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

2356 hours (11:56 PM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Towers moved through the night like a shadow, her phototropic camouflage seeming to wrap the long angular profile of the ship in an even deeper shade of darkness. A little more than 250 miles to the west—on the far side of the Chinese battle group—cruised her sister ship, USS Donald Gerrard. Both ships were running dark and quiet—all active sensors and transmitters shut down—their respective headings and speeds calculated to present the smallest possible cross-section to enemy radars.

Even the moonlight had been taken into account. According to the nautical almanacs, official moonset was still five minutes away, but the lower half of the silvery orb was already disappearing below the western horizon. By one minute after midnight, the last of the moon would be hidden behind the curve of the earth. Under simple starlight, the reactive camouflage that coated both ships would make them difficult to detect visually—either by human eye, or by optical sensors.

An adaptive infrared suppression system kept each ship’s thermal footprint within half a degree of the ambient air temperature, and the ships’ acoustic signatures had been minimized by seventh-generation silencing, active noise-control modules, and acoustically-isolated engineering plants.

Despite the rumors that floated around the internet, this cunning array of technologies did not render the American warships invisible. If there was a way to make 9,800 tons of steel vanish entirely, the engineers of the U.S. defense industry had not yet stumbled across the secret. Even in full stealth mode, USS Towers and USS Donald Gerrard were not undetectable. They were simply less detectable.

*  *  *

The distinction between those two states—undetectable, and less detectable—was very much on the mind of Commander Katherine Silva as she stood next to Captain Bowie in CIC and watched the Aegis tactical display. Under other conditions, the theoretical gap between a low detection threshold and a zero detection threshold might have been the subject of a stimulating technical debate. But under the current circumstances, that narrow theoretical gap could easily mean the difference between life and death.

On the screen, the blue symbols representing the Towers and the Gerrard were sliding into the red colored areas which depicted the radar coverage zones of the nearest Chinese warships. The zones were color-coded by estimated probability of detection: lighter shades of red for low probability, darker shades for high probability. Out at the fringes of the enemy’s radar coverage, the color was a red so light that it verged on pink. Closer to the Chinese aircraft carrier, the reds deepened to the shade of blood.

The American ships were on nearly reciprocal courses, the Towers moving west and the Gerrard moving east, both converging slowly on the formation of Chinese warships that lay between them. At some point, the two U.S. Navy destroyers would pass some indefinable boundary, where microwave-deflecting hull geometries and radar-absorbent tiles could no longer hide them from the sensors of their enemies. The goal was to begin the attack before crossing that invisible threshold.

If all went according to plan, the Chinese wouldn’t suspect the presence of the American ships until they detected incoming missiles. And then it would be too late.

Silva’s eyes stayed locked on the display screen. Adjacent to the symbol for the Towers was a highlighted data-field containing the current calculated probability of detection, expressed as two sets of numerals separated by a slash: 62.0 / 7.8. The first set of digits—provided for purposes of comparison—was calibrated to the radar cross-section of a standard Arliegh Burke class destroyer. The second set of digits was adjusted for the minimized radar signature of a modified Flight III Arliegh Burke class ship.

Based on received signal strength at the ship’s current position, the Aegis command and decision computer predicted a 62% chance that an unmodified Arliegh Burke destroyer would be detected by the Chinese radar, and a 7.8% chance that the same Chinese radar sensors would detect the Towers.

While Silva watched, the readout changed to 68.2 / 9.1, as USS Towers edged closer to the defensive screen of the Chinese aircraft carrier.

From an intellectual perspective, Silva acknowledged that nine percent didn’t seem like bad odds, especially compared to the nearly seventy percent that a less stealthy ship would be facing right now. But for all the cutting-edge technology, there was nearly a one-in-ten chance that a Chinese radar operator would peer into the clutter of random sea returns on his scope, and spot a tiny smudge of pixels that represented USS Towers.

Silva tore her gaze away from the probability of detection readout, and took in the overall tactical situation. The enemy aircraft carrier was screened by four surface combatants: a pair of Type 054A (Jiangkai II class) multi-role frigates to the northwest and southwest, and a pair of Type 51C (Luzhou class) air-defense destroyers to the northeast and southeast. This put both of the Chinese destroyers on the eastern side of the formation—closest to the Towers—presumably to provide air coverage against the retreating Midway strike group.

The symbols for the Chinese ships were enclosed by ellipsoids of dotted lines, representing calculated areas of uncertainty. The enemy ships were estimated to be somewhere within those areas of uncertainty, but their exact positions were unknown.

With their own radar transmitters shut down, Towers and Gerrard were relying on tracking information from their AN/SLQ-32(V)3 electronic warfare systems. The SLQ-32 (or Slick-32, as the system’s operators preferred to call it) was capable of detecting, identifying, and tracking virtually every search, targeting, or navigation radar devised by man. But for all its adaptability and processing power, the Slick-32 was a passive sensor. It could determine the direction of an enemy radar source; but it had no ability to measure how far away the hostile emitter might be. This bearing-only data was sufficient for targeting Harpoon missiles, but lacked the range information critical to most other weapon systems.

If the Towers and Gerrard had not been operating under strict emission control, they could have exchanged lines-of-bearing through the tactical net, establishing and maintaining cross-fixes for the enemy radars, neatly pinpointing each of the Chinese warships on a continual basis. Instead, they were making due with periodic data feeds from a NightEagle III unmanned aerial vehicle flying slow surveillance passes over the enemy formation at 20,000 feet.

Constructed from radar-transparent composites, the UAV was small, lightweight, and relatively stealthy. Every fifteen minutes or so, it pointed an ultraviolet diode laser to the heavens, and squirted a packet of digital information toward one of eleven Fleet SATCOM communications satellites in orbit. The satellite promptly encoded the UAV’s targeting data, and transmitted it back toward the earth as an encrypted UHF radio signal, where it was received and decrypted by the two American destroyers.

During these periodic updates, the area of uncertainty for each Chinese ship shrank to a discrete point, and the Towers and Gerrard knew the exact position of every enemy vessel. But as the minutes ticked away and the Chinese ships maneuvered within their formation, the American Slick-32 systems could only track bearings. The estimations of target range became progressively less reliable, and the ellipsoid areas of uncertainty began to grow again.

The NightEagle III was capable of maintaining continuous uplink with the satellites, providing constant position updates for the enemy warships, but the UAV had been programmed to avoid detection. There were at least three flights of J-15 fighter jets circling over the area, providing air cover for the Chinese carrier. The UAV’s laser communication link was covert, but it was not completely invisible.

Again, it came down to the difference between undetectable, and less detectable. The success or failure of this mission—life or death—depended on keeping the UAV and both American warships below the threshold of detection.

Any one of those Chinese planes might bounce a lucky radar echo off the Towers or the Gerrard at any time. One of the pilots might glance up (or down) at just the right angle, and catch a glimpse of a strange black shape against the waves, or a small winged silhouette against the night sky.

Silva knew she shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts, but this was the part she hated. The waiting. The proverbial calm before the proverbial goddamned storm. That frozen eternity of inaction, where every second seemed to draw itself out to an edge as keen as a razor, and there was nothing to do but dwell on the endless list of things that could go wrong.

On the tactical display, the symbols for Towers and Gerrard were well into the deepening reds of the Chinese radar coverage now. The probability of detection readout said 88.1 / 17.6. There was nearly a one-in-five chance they’d be spotted, and the numbers were still climbing.

Splitting the difference between best-case and worst-case for the areas of uncertainty, the Chinese destroyers were a little over 40 nautical miles away. They were well within Harpoon range, but Silva knew from the pre-mission briefing that Captain Bowie intended to close another three miles before launching the strike.

Like most American surface combatants, the Towers carried only eight Harpoon anti-ship missiles. The USS Donald Gerrard carried eight as well. That only allowed four Harpoons per target, and the Chinese warships were supposed to have good anti-missile defenses.

Bowie wanted to be close enough to press the attack with naval gunfire, in case the limited inventory of Harpoons was not enough to guarantee a kill.

Even a year earlier, a gun attack from 37 miles would have been impossible. Against surface targets, the effective range of a standard 5-inch naval artillery shell was less than 20 nautical miles—a little better than half what was needed for Bowie’s plan. But that had been before Vulcano.

Over the past several decades, there had been several attempts to develop rocket-assisted projectiles with enhanced ranges, but none of the U.S. efforts had ever panned out. The two most promising projects—the Ballistic Trajectory Extended Range Munition (BTERM), and the Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM)—had been cancelled, due to budget overruns and lingering technical challenges.

The U.S. Navy had finally sidestepped the issue by procuring Vulcano rounds from the Italian arms firm, OTO-Melara. The Italian defense industry had succeeded where the American military-industrial complex had failed. OTO-Melara’s 127mm Vulcano projectiles were fully compatible with the 5-inch guns aboard U.S. warships, and their maximum range was 40 nautical miles.

The gun crews aboard the Towers and Gerrard had been trained on the Vulcano rounds, and they’d racked up an impressive number of attack simulations using the new ammunition. But even the most accurate training simulators have practical limitations, and actual hands-on experience with the new projectiles had been limited to a handful of live firing exercises.

In view of this, and in light of the knowledge that the U.S. Navy had never employed Vulcano munitions under real-world combat conditions, Bowie had decided to edge a little nearer to the targets before launching the attack.

Silva agreed completely with the captain’s reasoning. It made sense not to push their luck by relying on textbook assessments of a new weapon’s capabilities. Better to build in a little safety margin, in case the textbooks turned out to be wrong.

But the probability of detection readout was still climbing. As Silva watched, it changed to 91.6 / 22.9. In another few minutes, the chance of getting caught would reach 30%. Definitely too high for comfort.

Silva looked around and met Bowie’s gaze.

He raised one eyebrow slightly. “This must be what it feels like to be a submarine commander,” he said.

He turned back to the master tactical display. “Trying to sneak into your enemy’s sensor envelope without being detected. Knowing that the only things keeping you alive are silence, and luck.”

Commander Silva nodded, but didn’t say anything. Her eyes drifted back and forth between the estimated range to target, and the probability of detection. Two sets of numbers—one decreasing, and the other increasing. Silence and luck. Silence… and luck. Silence…

A burst of encrypted UHF came in on the downlink from Fleet SATCOM, carrying the latest targeting fixes from the NightEagle III. On the Aegis display screen, the areas of uncertainty for the Chinese ships shrank instantly to distinct points.

Captain Bowie looked over the target geometry, judging angles and distances against whatever image of the battle plan he carried in his head. He nodded, cleared his throat, and spoke loudly. “Let’s do it.”

And suddenly, it was time.

CHAPTER 51

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

0013 hours (12:13 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Tactical Action Officer keyed the net. “Weapons Control—TAO. You have batteries released. Kill Surface Contact Zero One and Surface Contact Zero Two with Harpoons.”

The acknowledgement came immediately. “Weapons Control, aye.”

A handful of seconds later, the steel deck vibrated with the syncopated rumble of anti-ship cruise missiles blasting free of their launch tubes.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Four birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two-each on the hostile surface contacts.”

Commander Silva watched four friendly weapons symbols blink into existence on the tactical display, and race toward a set of programmed navigational waypoints on the far side of the targets. “How long until the second salvo?”

“About three minutes,” Captain Bowie said.

The plan was to launch the attack in two stages. The first salvo of missiles would fly past the enemy warships, remaining below the radar horizon for the Chinese sensors. When the Harpoons had covered half the distance to their respective waypoints, the second salvo of missiles would be launched toward their own waypoints, on the near side of the targets.

The timing of the launches was calculated to bring all of the Harpoons to their final navigational waypoints at the exact same instant. Then, the missiles would simultaneously turn toward the targets and shift into terminal attack phase, their radar seekers going active as they homed in for the kill.

On the western side of the battle group, the USS Donald Gerrard would be carrying out a mirror image of the attack against the two frigates on her edge of the enemy formation.

The tactic was called simultaneous time-on-target. If it was executed properly, each Chinese escort ship would suddenly find itself with four incoming Harpoon missiles, all converging from different points of the compass.

The Jiangkai II multi-role frigates and the Luzhou air-defense destroyers were known to carry strong anti-ship cruise missile defenses. Faced with one (or even several) Harpoons coming in from the same general direction, there was an excellent chance that the Chinese ships could intercept most or all of them. But the odds that they could simultaneously engage four hostile missiles from widely-separated bearings were much lower.

If the latest tactical assessments were accurate, a simultaneous time-on-target attack should yield one or two successful hits on each of the enemy destroyers and frigates.

For Silva, time had somehow shifted into overdrive. The three minutes between missile salvos seemed to flash by in a few seconds, and then the deck was vibrating with the launch of the second set of Harpoons. Four new friendly weapons symbols popped up on the Aegis display screen, and instantly began vectoring toward their assigned waypoints.

The missiles had been in flight less than a minute when a report from the Electronic Warfare module broke over the net. “TAO—EW. I have two X-band emitters, bearing two-eight-zero. Signal characteristics and pulse repetition frequencies are consistent with fire control radars for Chengdu J-15 fighter aircraft.”

Before anyone had time to react to this message, it was followed by a report from the Air Warfare Supervisor. “TAO—Air. The data stream from NightEagle III just chopped off in mid-transmission.”

The TAO keyed his mike. “Air—TAO. Clarify your report. Have you lost the satellite downlink?”

“TAO—Air. That’s a negative, sir. We’ve still got a good latch on SATCOM 7, but the satellite has lost comms with the drone.”

Silva made eye contact with Bowie. “Captain, unless I miss my guess, a Chinese air patrol just blasted our UAV out of the sky.”

Her assessment was confirmed by the Officer of the Deck about two seconds later. “TAO—Bridge. Lookouts are reporting a fireball bearing two-seven-five. Position angle fifty-one.”

Bowie turned toward the TAO. “Stand by to go active on SPY. Our Chinese friends have just figured out that we’re in the neighborhood. I want to be ready to shift to full Aegis combat mode on a second’s notice.”

He raised his voice so that the entire CIC crew could hear him. “Listen up, people. It’s about to get hot around here. Let’s stay sharp, and be ready for anything.”

On the Aegis display, the Harpoon missile symbols were reaching their final waypoints and turning toward the enemy warships. The missiles were sea skimmers, hugging the wave tops to remain below the radar coverage of the target vessels until the last possible instant. In another ninety seconds or so, they would become visible to the Chinese radar operators.

Bowie had no intention of giving the enemy ships time to react properly to the incoming missiles. He nodded to the TAO. “Nail ‘em with the gun.”

The Tactical Action Officer relayed the order to Weapons Control, and the ship jerked as the 5-inch deck gun loosed its first round. The muzzle report reverberated through CIC like a clap of thunder, only partially muffled by the steel bulkheads and insulated lagging that separated the compartment from the gun deck.

The gun cycled into its auto-load sequence, pumping out another projectile every three seconds, with bone-jarring booms. When the first five rounds were in the air, the gun swung its aim toward the second Chinese destroyer, and pumped out another five shells. Then the gun shifted its attention back to the first destroyer, and fired another five-round salvo.

*  *  *

Vulcano Round:

Moving at a half mile per second, the first round took just under 74 seconds to close the distance to the target. As the projectile neared the end of its trajectory, the canard control module near the nose took a fix from GPS and compared the result to the position estimate from its own inertial measurement unit. The control module adjusted the angle of the stubby canard fins, and the Vulcano round pitched over into its terminal descent phase.

The infrared sensor locked onto the largest heat source within its field of view. The canard control module made a final angular correction, and the self-guided artillery shell streaked down toward the target like a meteor.

The Luzhou class destroyer was powered by two steam turbines of indigenous Chinese design. When the first round of the artillery barrage began falling from the sky, the strongest thermal signature was a plume of superheated gas rising from the forward exhaust stack.

The first Vulcano round punched through the hottest part of the exhaust trail about six feet above the stack, missing the destroyer cleanly, striking the water about fifteen yards off the ship’s port quarter. It exploded on impact, sending out a shower of shrapnel that either fell into the sea or pinged harmlessly off the metal flanks of the warship.

Three seconds later, the next Vulcano round missed the Chinese vessel by an even wider margin. Then, the third shell arrived.

*  *  *

PLA Navy Ship Shijiazhuang (Luzhou class destroyer #116):

Junior Lieutenant Dong Jie swung his binoculars to the right, and frantically scanned the sky to the starboard side of the ship. The Watch Officer and Tactical Lookout were gathered at the port side bridge windows, trying to get a look at the points of impact for the two explosions that had occurred so suddenly off the port side of the ship.

But they were looking the wrong way. The rockets, or artillery shells, or whatever they were, had come from the east. Dong had heard them distinctly, a strange whistling noise so high-pitched that his ears could barely detect it. What was that sound? What was causing the explosions?

And then he was hearing the whistling noise again, coming from the east, just like the last two times. He turned toward the Watch Officer, and said, “ting!” (Listen!) But the Watch Officer wasn’t listening.

Dong moved swiftly to the watertight door at the starboard side of the bridge. He yanked up the dogging handle, pulled the door open, and stepped out onto the starboard catwalk under the stars. The cold night air hit him like a blow from a hammer, but he had to know where that sound was coming from.

Whatever it was must be too small to see on radar, because the scopes on the bridge were clear of any incoming contacts, and the radar operators were not reporting anything out of the ordinary.

He lifted his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the darkened sky. He saw nothing up there but stars. Who could be doing this? The Indians? The Americans? But they were all gone. Defeated, and chased from the field of battle...

Through the open bridge wing door, Dong could hear the buzz of the telephone. That would be the captain, demanding a report on the source of the unidentified explosions.

The whistling noise was increasing in volume. Dong thought he caught a glimpse of something for a fraction of an instant—a blurred flicker of motion as some small dark shape arced down from the black face of the heavens.

And then he was blinded by an impossibly bright flash of light. His feet left the deck as the shockwave and shrapnel of the detonating shell tore into his body, hurling him back through the open doorway into the bridge.

There were reports coming over the speakers now, the excited voice of the radar Officer jabbering about the sudden appearance of four incoming missiles, all closing from different bearings. Shouted orders to defensive weapons systems.

But Dong Jie’s stunned ears were filled with the distant rhythm of his own pulse. Fast at first, but then slowing… Slowing…

He closed his eyes, and then opened them again. The view didn’t change. Whether his eyelids were open or shut, he could see nothing but the searing white afterimage of the explosion.

His brain didn’t register the chainsaw snarl of the Gatling guns spewing bursts of 30mm slugs into the night. He didn’t see the two fireballs erupt in the darkness as the twin streams of high-velocity bullets shredded two of the incoming missiles. He didn’t see the Gatling guns swing toward their next targets.

And he didn’t see the last of the American Harpoons slip in past the fusillade of defensive fire, and dart in for the kill.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“TAO—Weapons Control. Harpoons on top, now!”

Bowie didn’t hesitate. “Go active on SPY!”

A few seconds later, the giant Aegis display screens began populating with hostile contact information: five hostile surface ship symbols, and four pairs of hostile aircraft symbols.

For a brief instant, sixteen friendly missile symbols were superimposed—in groups of four—on top of the symbols for the Chinese frigates and destroyers. Then the blue missile icons vanished from the display, leaving behind the symbols representing the enemy warships.

Commander Silva watched the Harpoon symbols wink out. How many of the missiles had gotten through, and how many had been destroyed before they could reach their targets? More importantly, how many of the Chinese carrier’s escort ships were still in the fight?

With the UAV gone, there was no way to get real-time battle-damage assessment. It might take several minutes to sort out which ships were capable of maneuvering and firing, and which were not. But the out-numbered American destroyers couldn’t wait around to find out.

“Keep hitting them with the gun,” Bowie said. ‘Five rounds, shift targets—five rounds, and shift back.”

Every three seconds, the big deck gun barked again, and another Vulcano round began its long flight toward one of the Luzhou class destroyers.

Somewhere on the far side of the Chinese aircraft carrier, the USS Donald Gerrard was dishing out similar punishment to the frigates on the western perimeter of the enemy formation.

So far, the attack had gone according to plan. The surprise had worked perfectly, but the cat was most definitely out of the bag now. With their SPY radars pumping several million watts of microwave power into the atmosphere, the Towers and the Gerrard had lost all semblance of stealth.

The enemy fighters knew where they were now. The time for skulking was over.

This was proven about ten seconds later, as the Air Warfare Supervisor’s voice came over the net. “TAO—Air. Four Bogies inbound. Two flights of two. Looks like the other four are going after the Gerrard!”

“TAO, aye. Stand by.”

The Tactical Action Officer looked toward Bowie. “Captain, request batteries released on hostile air contacts.”

Bowie nodded. “Granted.”

The Tactical Action Officer turned back toward his console and keyed his mike. “Weapons Control—TAO, you have batteries released. Engage and destroy all Bogies within our engagement envelope!”

On the Aegis display screen, two pairs of red hostile aircraft symbols were converging on the Towers.

There was another clap of thunder as the 5-inch gun pounded out another Vulcano round toward one of the enemy surface ships. The sound was instantly followed by the roar of launching missiles.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Four birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one each on the inbound Bogies.”

The TAO was reaching for his mike button when another report broke over the net. “TAO—Air. Bogies are launching. I count eight missiles inbound.”

The Tactical Action Officer keyed into the circuit. “All Stations—TAO, we have in-bound Vipers! I say again, we have missiles in-bound! Weapons Control, shift to Aegis ready-auto. Set CIWS to auto-engage. Break. EW, stand by to launch chaff!”

The Electronics Warfare Technician’s response came a split-second later. “TAO—EW, standing by on chaff. I’m tracking eight active H-band seekers, consistent with SSN-27 Sizzlers. Request permission to initiate jamming.”

“EW—TAO. Permission granted. Jam at-will.”

A prolonged series of rumbles announced the launch of multiple SM-3 missiles, followed by the voice of the Air Warfare Supervisor. “TAO—Air. Sixteen birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two-each on the inbound Vipers.”

The Aegis computers were following a shoot-shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine: fire two interceptor missiles at each incoming cruise missile, evaluate with radar to see which ones had been destroyed, and then fire two more missiles at any Vipers that survived the first salvo. Unless overridden by human intervention, Aegis would continue to follow this pattern until Towers expended fifty percent of her available SM-3 missiles. Then the computers would automatically throttle back to a shoot-look-shoot-shoot doctrine.

The Aegis display screen had become a bewildering swarm of cryptic red and blue icons. Silva’s eyes darted from symbol to symbol, trying to make sense of the rapidly-evolving tactical situation. The complexity of the battle picture had increased beyond the integration capacity of the human mind. The fight had shifted into the realm of man-machine symbiosis, where the human operators were completely dependent on the processing and correlation capabilities of the computers, and the computers were equally dependent on the humans for intuitive decisions and periodic flashes of tactical brilliance.

The left third of the display screen, corresponding to the western side of the Chinese battle group, was every bit as complex. The Gerrard was neck-deep in her own fight, and the missiles—both incoming and outgoing—were flying fast and furious.

Amidst the chaos of iconography, the red symbol for Surface Contact Zero Two flashed, and was replaced by a last-known-position marker. The warship had disappeared from radar. Either it had been sunk, or it had been blasted into pieces too small to present a radar return. Either way, it was gone.

Silva tapped Bowie on the shoulder and pointed toward the screen. “Captain, we just got a hard kill on one of our surface targets.”

Bowie shifted his attention from the air-battle to the surface symbols, just as the Surface Warfare Coordinator was reporting the destruction of the enemy ship.

The captain gave Silva a nod. “You’ve got a quick eye.” He keyed his mike. “TAO—Captain. Shift all 5-inch gunfire to Surface Contact Zero One.”

On the screen, hostile and friendly missile symbols began merging. “TAO—Air. Splash three Vipers. We have five remaining inbounds.”

“TAO, aye. Break. EW—TAO. Launch chaff.”

The Electronic Warfare operator acknowledged the order. “Launch chaff, aye.”

His report was punctuated by a rapid series of muffled thumps. “Six away.”

Out in the darkness, a half dozen blunt-nosed projectiles rocketed out of the forward Super-RBOC launchers. The Super Rapid-Blooming Overboard Chaff canisters flew through the air to explode at pre-determined points, scattering metallic confetti and clouds of aluminum dust to attract the radar seekers of incoming weapons.

There was another rumble, as the Aegis computers fired another set of SM-3 interceptor missiles.

“TAO—Air. Ten birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted two-each on the remaining inbound Vipers.”

On the tactical display, the four SM-3 missiles that had been fired toward the Chinese fighter planes were now reaching their targets. One of the enemy aircraft flashed and vanished from the screen, replaced by a last-known-position marker.

“TAO—Air. Splash one Bogie. The remaining Bogies are turning south.”

The Tactical Action Officer nodded. “The SSN-27 is a heavy weapon. They might not be carrying more than two.”

“Maybe,” Bowie said. “But let’s not count on that.”

The ten outbound interceptor missiles merged with the five incoming Vipers. When the jumble of symbols sorted themselves out, three of the hostile missiles were still closing.

Bowie grimaced. “We’re always hearing about how tough it is to intercept the SSN-27, but Jesus… What does it take to shoot those damned things down? Kryptonite?”

One of the hostile missile symbols veered abruptly to the side, and then vanished.

“TAO—Air. One taker on chaff. No takers on jamming.”

The remaining two Vipers were practically touching the Towers symbol on the screen.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Two of the Vipers got through. They’ve kicked into terminal homing phase, and they’re too close to re-engage with missiles. Forward CIWS mount is engaging.”

The air throbbed with the staccato growl of the Close-In Weapon System as it sprayed a burst of 20mm tungsten rounds toward one of the incoming cruise missiles. There was a deafening boom as the Viper exploded just a few hundred yards away from the ship.

The CIWS mount spun toward the next target and began firing. It was almost in time.

*  *  *

SSN-27:

A half-second before impact, the nose section of the missile was hammered into fragments by a hail of tungsten penetrator rounds, shattering the radar seeker head and the guidance mechanism. If the weapon had been even fifty meters away from its target, the damage might have been enough to send it spiraling into the sea. But the SSN-27 was moving at more than twice the speed of sound, and the resulting inertia carried the blinded missile the last few meters to its destination.

The SSN-27 struck the port side of the American warship, about four meters below the main deck. All of the weapon’s sophisticated proximity sensors and influence triggers had been pulverized by CIWS, but the brute simplicity of the contact detonator had survived.

In the microsecond of contact, the mechanical force of the impact propagated down the length of the missile, compressing a simple cylindrical rod of nickel ferrite mounted at the core of a short magnetic coil. Through the physical principle of magnetostriction, the deformation of the nickel rod created a tiny but distinct magnetic pulse, which expanded over the windings of the coil, generating an electrical signal. This signal was calibrated to satisfy the triggering threshold of the primer mechanism buried in the missile’s warhead.

Two-hundred kilograms of Cyclotri-methylene Trinitramine flashed into a shaped cone of raw force that punched through the hull of the warship with the power of a runaway locomotive. Steel plating buckled like paper. Reinforced steel beams shrieked and gave way before the unstoppable onslaught of heat and atmospheric overpressure. A flaming torrent of shrapnel and destruction lanced deep into the heart of the ship through the widening hole.

And then there came chaos and death.

CHAPTER 52

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

BAY OF BENGAL

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

0029 hours (12:29 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

There was a strangely-eternal moment when everything seemed to be playing out in slow motion. Silva could hear the Officer of the Deck’s voice over the ship’s 1-MC speakers, instructing the crew to brace for shock. Someone was requesting an update on the status of the remaining Viper. On the Aegis display screen, the red shape of a hostile missile symbol could be seen merging with the blue circle that represented USS Towers.

Silva was standing next to Captain Bowie, a few feet behind the Tactical Action Officer’s chair, and there wasn’t much within easy reach to grab on to.

Bowie took a grip on a crossbeam above his head, and Silva turned toward a stanchion to her right: a steel support column that ran from the deck to the overhead. She got her hands wrapped around the pole, lowered her head, and bent her knees slightly—trying to mimic the brace-for-shock posture that every Sailor learns, but few expect to ever actually need.

And then the long second ended, and the passage of time jumped from its impossibly languorous stupor, to the speed of sheer pandemonium.

The shockwave tore through Combat Information Center like a hurricane, and the air was suddenly filled with flying debris, body parts, and the screams of the injured and the dying. Every loose article in the compartment, every grease pencil, and clipboard, and coffee mug was instantly airborne, and accelerating away from the point of impact with the speed of the expanding wave front.

The SLQ-32 stations in the EW Module and the radar consoles in tracker alley absorbed and deflected some of the force of the blast. Several of the consoles were ripped from their mounts, display screens exploding into showers of glass, the fragments driving deep into the faces and bodies of the human operators.

Silva’s grip was jerked away from the stanchion. She was thrown against a status board hard enough to crack the shatterproof window of Plexiglas. The impact knocked all breath out of her, and the side of her head smacked into the metal frame of the status board. She crumpled to the deck in a senseless heap.

Cooling water sprayed from ruptured pipes, and severed electrical cables arced and shorted, tripping circuit breakers. The overhead lighting went out, and the next half-second of carnage and confusion took place in total darkness.

Then the battle lanterns kicked on, illuminating the devastated compartment in the dim red glow of battery-powered emergency lighting.

The giant Aegis display screens were dark. Red and amber tattletales blinked fitfully on most of the remaining consoles, signaling various degrees of physical and electronic damage.

Silva lay on her back, watching the strange interplay of lights and shadows on the overhead—the glow of the battle lanterns, muted and twisted by tendrils of smoke from the explosion, the pulsing flicker of warning lights, and the dimly-perceived silhouettes of people stumbling around in the semi-darkness. The air was heavy with the acrid odor of burnt chemicals, melted electrical insulation, and scorched flesh.

It seemed likely that fires were burning somewhere nearby, but the possibility didn’t seem very important to Silva’s addled brain. At some point, she realized that the lower left sleeve of her coveralls was smoldering. The fabric was supposed to be flame-retardant, and apparently it was. Otherwise, her sleeve would probably be blazing merrily right now.

It gradually dawned on her that she was supposed to get up off the deck. There were things she needed to be doing. She just couldn’t remember what they were.

Her ears were still ringing from the blast, but she could hear frantic voices coming from the overhead speakers. Reports. Damage inquiries. Requests for orders. No one seemed to be paying attention to any of them.

Her head lolled to the left, and she found herself looking at a man lying on his side, in a spreading pool of blood. His face was familiar. She had seen him somewhere. Maybe she had met him, or something...

No. That wasn’t right. She knew him. It was Bowie. Captain Bowie.

That single coherent thought—that simple and basic act of identification—became the spark that restarted Silva’s conscious mind. She began to take in and process information again. The world slid back into focus, and with it came pain, in her head, her ribs, and her left wrist. More bruises than she could count, and she was bleeding from the area of her left temple, but nothing seemed to be broken.

She tried to lever herself up to a sitting position, and immediately revised her assessment as a wave of stomach-churning pain radiated from her left arm. Okay, maybe the wrist was broken.

Silva rolled to her right, coming up on her knees and her good right arm. There were fires burning near the port side of CIC, and that area of the compartment was hazy with smoke. As Silva watched, three or four Sailors converged on the flames with CO2 fire extinguishers, smothering the blaze with white clouds of carbon dioxide gas.

Silva was steeling herself to get to her feet when a flicker of motion caught her eye. Bowie was motioning to her, the index finger of his right beckoning feebly.

She got a better look at him. The deck matting around him was slick with dark liquid. His left hand was pulled in tight to his chest, palm pressing flat against a spot near his sternum. The fabric of his coveralls was peppered with small ragged holes, and—judging from the blood that coursed between his fingers—there was a much larger hole under his hand.

His eyes were locked on Silva’s. She could tell that, even under the weak red glow of the battle lanterns.

She scuttled over to him as quickly as she could, knees slipping on the slick deck matting. When she was close enough, she reached out with her good hand, and tried to help him maintain pressure on the chest wound.

She tried to call out, but her voice seemed to stick in her throat. She swallowed, and tried again. “Corpsman! I need a corpsman over here!”

She didn’t look up from Bowie’s chest wound, trying to help him slow the bleeding.

She shouted again, and her voice was startlingly loud. “The captain is down! Somebody get a corpsman over here, right fucking NOW!”

She began glancing around, trying to spot something she could use as an emergency dressing. Anything to staunch the wound until real medical help arrived.

Something touched her shoulder. She looked down in time to see Bowie’s right hand slide off her arm and fall to the deck. His lips were moving.

Silva gave him what she hoped was a reassuring look. “Don’t talk now, Jim. Just rest a minute. The corpsman will be here any second.”

Bowie grunted, and a rivulet of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Closer…”

Silva leaned in until her face was just a few inches from his.

Bowies eyelids slid shut. When they reopened, they moved slowly, as though even the act of opening his eyes took a supreme effort of will.

“She’s yours now…” he said. “She’s…”

Then someone was kneeling on Bowie’s other side. Fast, competent hands searching the captain’s body for other injuries.

“Keep the pressure on, ma’am,” a voice said. “I’ll have a dressing ready in a second.”

Silva kept her eyes on Bowie’s, so she didn’t see the face of the corpsman.

The man yelled, “I need a litter over here, and two bearers! Stat!”

His hands were rummaging through a green canvas zipper bag, fishing out packets of bandages, wrapped in brown sterile paper pouches. “Almost ready,” he said. “Just another couple of seconds.”

Bowie groaned and then blinked slowly. “She’s yours, Kat,” he whispered. “You’re…”

He coughed wetly, and took a painful breath. “You’re the captain, now…”

Silva shook her head. “No, Jim. You’re going to be fine. “You’re going to…”

“No!” Bowie snapped. His voice was something between a moan and a growl. His eyes blazed with a ferocity that Silva had never seen in him.

The corpsman’s fingers were pulling Silva’s hand away, working quickly to slide a thick stack of gauze onto the wet hole in the captain’s chest.

“This is… my… last… order…” Bowie rasped. “Take command! Take…”

His words trailed off into silence, and he let out a long slow breath. He didn’t draw another one.

The corpsman shouted, “Litter bearer! Over here! I need some help!”

And then someone else was kneeling, squeezing in next to Silva on the blood-slick deck.

The corpsman made eye contact with Silva. “Captain? We need a little room here, okay, ma’am?”

Silva nodded, and backed away, shuffling on her knees until she had enough clear deck space to stumble to her feet.

Her head throbbed with the too-rapid motion, and she staggered for a second or two before she found her footing. Her vision was blurry, partly from the rush of pain, and partly from the tears that were suddenly running down her cheeks.

She blinked them away, and took a half dozen unsteady steps to the TAO’s station. “Are your comms working?”

The TAO nodded dumbly.

Silva reached for his headset. “Patch me into the 1-MC.”

The Tactical Action Officer looked at her, glanced down at the spot where the corpsmen were working feverishly over their downed captain. Then, he looked back to Silva. He punched three keys in succession, and handed over the comm set.

Silva didn’t bother with the ear pieces. She raised the microphone to her mouth, and keyed the circuit. When she spoke, her voice came from public address speakers all over the ship.

“All hands, this is Commander Katherine Elizabeth Silva. It is my sad duty to inform you that Captain Bowie is down. He…” She stopped for a second, trying to figure out how to phrase her next words.

She keyed the mike again. “In accordance with my formal written orders from Commander Chief of Naval Personnel, and in accordance with my verbal orders from Captain Bowie, I have now assumed command of this vessel.”

She took a breath and continued. “This battle is not over yet, and we are not out of the action. I have every confidence in this ship, and in every man and woman of her crew. Now… Let’s get back on our feet and get back into the fight!”

She released the mike button, and scanned the compartment. Every face in CIC was turned in her direction.

She spotted the face she was looking for, and nodded in OS2 Kenfield’s direction. “Hey, Big Country… Give us a song.”

The big Sailor’s face was bruised and bloodied, but his lips parted slowly, in a hesitant grin. “Is that an order, ma’am?”

“You bet your ass it is,” Silva said.

The Sailor stood up straighter, and squared his shoulders. “Aye-aye, Captain!” He cleared his throat, sucked a deep lungful of air, and cut loose with his customary rebel yell.

The ship was wounded. Many of the people in CIC were dead or injured. Small sporadic fires were burning in various places around the compartment, and the beloved and heroic Captain Bowie was being carried out the door on a stretcher. But every able person within earshot joined in Big Country’s song. The rebel yell seemed to shake the very air, becoming the vocal personification of determination, courage, and defiance.

It was unprofessional. It was silly. It was magnificent.

Captain Silva wiped the last of the tears from her eyes with her uninjured right hand. “Alright people,” she said. “Let’s go kick some ass!”

CHAPTER 53

USS CALIFORNIA (SSN-781)

BAY OF BENGAL

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

0048 hours (12:48 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net, “Conn—Sonar. Sierra One Seven is flooding his tubes! Looks like he’s going in for the kill, sir!”

Captain Patke scanned the unfolding geometry on the tactical display screen. Contact Sierra One Seven, the Shang, was setting up for a torpedo attack against one of the American warships. If the surface plot was accurate, the target would be the destroyer, USS Towers. But it didn’t really matter which of the ships had fallen into the crosshairs of the Shang. What mattered was that a Chinese nuclear attack submarine was about to sink a U.S. Navy vessel. That—in spite of Patke’s personal opinions about the shortcomings of the skimmer navy—was not a satisfactory arrangement.

He keyed his headset. “Conn, aye. Any sign that Sierra One Seven is alerted to our presence?”

“Conn—Sonar. Negative, sir. Sierra One Seven has shown no reaction to us at all.”

Patke checked the bearing to the Chinese submarine, and thought about coming a few degrees to port, to improve his firing angle on the enemy boat. He decided against the maneuver. No sense in polishing the cannonball.

He glanced over toward the combat control module. “Weapons Control, how’s your plot?”

The Fire Control Technician of the Watch looked over his shoulder and gave a thumbs-up gesture. “In the groove, Captain. I have a firm firing solution on contact Sierra One Seven.”

Patke nodded. “Very well. Flood tubes one and three. Assign presets, and spin up the weapons.”

The Fire Control Tech turned back to his console and began punching soft-keys. “Aye-aye, sir. Flooding tubes one and three. Prepping both weapons for launch.”

Patke pulled off his wire rimmed spectacles and polished them with a fold of his dark blue coveralls. His outward demeanor was calm and his voice was even, but he could feel the adrenaline burning at the back of his throat.

This was not a drill. In a few seconds, he was going to give an order that would kill other human beings. Not empty target ships. Not blips on a screen. Not computer simulations. Real living, breathing people, who would neither be living nor breathing after his order had been carried out.

With his eyeglasses off, Patke’s vision beyond arm’s-length was a blur of indistinct shapes. But he didn’t need his eyes to know what was going on. The men and women of his control room crew were moving quickly and proficiently, performing their assigned duties with quiet competence.

They were trained. They were skilled. They were ready. Or, as ready as anyone could ever be for this sort of thing.

He gave the lenses of his glasses a final polish, and returned them to their customary spot on the bridge of his nose. “Open outer doors on tubes one and three. Firing point procedures.”

As the orders were being acknowledged and carried out, someone to his left muttered something nearly inaudible.

Patke turned to see the Officer of the Deck. “Say again. I didn’t catch that.”

The OOD looked surprised. “Oh. Sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

Patke raised an eyebrow. “If you’ve got something to say, son… Now is the time.”

The OOD gave him an expression that was half-grimace, and half-embarrassed grin. “I was just saying ‘snickerdoodles,’ sir.”

Patke frowned. “Snickerdoodles?”

“Yes, sir,” the OOD said. “Like we were talking about last time. Almost getting an ass-whuppin’ when somebody else stole the cookies. But we’re stealing the cookies this time, aren’t we, sir?”

“You’re right about that,” Patke said softly. “We are definitely going to steal the cookies this time.”

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “Conn—Sonar. Torpedo in the water! Sierra One Seven has a weapon in the water! He’s going after the destroyer, sir!”

Patke raised his voice. “Weapons Control, this is the Captain. Match generated bearings, and shoot!”

*  *  *

USS Towers:

The giant display screens flashed, strobed with random bars of color for several seconds, and then snapped suddenly into focus.

The Tactical Action Officer turned toward Silva. “Aegis is back on line, Captain.”

The screens began populating with symbols. First, the Towers and the Gerrard appeared, followed quickly by the two remaining hostile surface ships: the carrier and one of the Chinese destroyers. Then, the hostile aircraft symbols began appearing, and—for a few seconds—Silva wondered if the Aegis computers were malfunctioning. As new enemy air symbols continued to pop up on the screen, she began to hope that it was a malfunction.

She whistled softly through her teeth. “Jesus… How many planes are those guys going to launch?”

The TAO gave her a half-hearted smile. “Looks like all of them, ma’am.”

The sheer absurdity of the situation hit her then. She had been in command for all of ten minutes. Half of her CIC consoles were out of action. She had no idea how many of her crewmembers were dead or dying. There was a hole in the side of her ship big enough to drive a minivan through. And China’s shiny new aircraft carrier was about to shove its entire air wing down her throat.

It was like being twelve years old again. Standing on the uneven planks of her homemade raft, being swept down the river by forces beyond her control. Powerless to fight the current. Her plastic milk jugs and inner tubes bobbing helplessly on the waves.

She felt her jaws tighten. The river had been stronger than she was. Her raft, the Spray, had been tiny and frail. But she had gotten her homemade vessel back to shore. She had brought her ship safely home. And she was damned well going to do it again.

She made eye contact with the TAO. “We need to go after that destroyer.”

“The gun is still off line, ma’am,” the Tactical Action Officer said. “And we’re all out of Harpoons.”

‘Understood,” Silva said. “Is VLS back on line?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Then hit that contact with SM-3s.”

The TAO opened his mouth to speak.

Silva gestured him into silence. “I already know the next half dozen things you’re going to say, so you can save your breath. I know that the SM-3 missile is not an anti-ship weapon, and I know that any effect it has will be marginal, at best. I also know that our orders are to kill that ship. Unless you’ve got a better plan, we’re going to hit that destroyer with the only weapons we have left. Do I make myself clear, Lieutenant?”

The TAO nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

He swallowed, and keyed the net. “Weapons Control—TAO. Kill Surface Contact Zero One with SM-3 missiles.”

There was a pause before the reply came. “TAO—Weapons Control. Say again, sir?”

The TAO keyed the net again. ‘Weapons Control—TAO. You have your orders. Kill Surface Contact Zero One with SM-3 missiles. Now!”

“Ah… Weapons Control, aye.”

The deck rattled with the growl of anti-air missiles, tearing into the sky on a mission they had never been designed for. The tumult of the launches was much louder than usual, the sound reverberating freely through the open wound in the side of the ship.

“TAO—Weapons Control. Six birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted on Surface Contact Zero One.”

“TAO, aye. Keep hitting that surface track. Don’t let up until there’s nothing left but a hole in the water.”

Silva nodded her approval. She was about to issue amplifying instructions when the Sonar Supervisor’s voice blared from the 29-MC speakers.

“All Stations—Sonar has hydrophone effects off the port quarter! Bearing zero-niner-eight. Initial classification: incoming torpedo!”

Silva’s eyes darted to the tactical display screen, where a blinking torpedo symbol had appeared. “Come on,” she said. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

She looked around sharply. The Undersea Warfare Evaluator had surrendered his console to a radar operator, and the Computerized Dead-Reckoning Tracer hadn’t been restored after the missile hit.

In the heat of an air and surface fight, anti-submarine warfare assets had been pushed to the bottom of the priority list. Some of the sonar systems were apparently on line, and the sonar team was obviously still doing its job, but CIC was completely unprepared to handle a submarine threat right now.

Where the hell had the sub come from, anyway? There was no time to think about that.

Silva saw the Undersea Warfare Evaluator snatch a comm-set from a dead console, and jack the connector into an overhead panel.

He keyed his mike. “Crack the whip! Bridge—USWE. We have an in-bound torpedo. I say again—crack the whip!”

The reply was instant. “Crack the whip! Bridge, aye!”

The Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the 1-MC. “All hands stand by for heavy rolls while performing high-speed evasive maneuvers.”

In the background came the rising wail of the gas turbine engines as they spun up to maximum rpm. The ship would need flank speed to carry out the crack-the-whip anti-torpedo maneuver.

The deck heeled sharply to port as the Towers began the first in a series of high-speed hairpin turns. If executed properly, the maneuver would create numerous propeller wakes at narrow intervals. The incoming torpedo would have to sort through a convolution of crisscrossing wakes, as well as a chaotic zone of acoustic interference caused by uncontrolled cavitation from the ship’s screws.

According to the tactical manuals, the crack-the-whip maneuver was nearly seventy percent effective, providing it was used in conjunction with the towed acoustic decoy system called Nixie. Unfortunately, neither of the ship’s two Nixie units were deployed, and there wasn’t time to get one of them in the water.

The cant of the deck grew steeper as the ship accelerated into the turn. Silva grabbed the back of the TAO’s chair to steady herself against inertia, and the increasing incline of the deck.

She couldn’t remember how effective the maneuver was supposed to be without the Nixie decoys, but it was less than seventy percent. A lot less.

But this was not the time to get tunnel-vision about problems beyond her control. Given the current situation, the USWE had employed the only available defense against the torpedo. It would either work, or it wouldn’t. There was nothing else she could do to cope with the submarine threat, so it was time to focus on issues that she could control.

She shifted her attention to the missile symbols tracking toward the remaining Chinese destroyer. The six blue missile icons were packed so tightly together that they overlapped each other on the screen.

The SM-3 missiles were intended for use against other missiles, aircraft, and—occasionally—satellites. Their warheads were not designed to attack hardened warship targets, but they were fast. Their top speed was more than ten times as fast as the Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles they were now pinch-hitting for.

Moving at nearly 5,200 knots, they covered the distance to the target in under half a minute. The six missile symbols converged on the symbol for the Chinese destroyer, and then disappeared. The icon for Surface Contact Zero One remained on the screen.

There was no way to evaluate how badly the enemy ship had been damaged by the multiple missile strikes. The Aegis computer system could not apply advanced reasoning, so it substituted simple binary logic. The target was still visible on radar, therefore the target still existed, ergo—it was time to hit the target again.

Another grumbling reverberation went through the ship, followed by an announcement over the tactical net. “TAO—Weapons Control. Six more birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted on Surface Contact Zero One.”

The Tactical Action Officer was reaching to key his mike when the next report came in.

“TAO—Air. Four Bogies inbound. Two flights of two.”

The next wave of the air assault had begun.

The deck righted itself and then began tilting in the other direction as the ship went hard-to-starboard in its next evasion turn.

Silva spotted the four hostile aircraft closing on the tactical display. And she felt herself start to grin.

This was it. This was her Kobayashi Maru. This was her unwinnable scenario. A torpedo in the water, too many hostile aircraft to count, an unfinished shootout with a Chinese destroyer, and an enemy submarine. All happening at once.

Again, there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing, but keep fighting, and try to ride out the storm.

The TAO caught her eye. “Captain, request permission to engage inbound hostile air contacts.”

Silva nodded. “Permission granted. Hit ‘em! But do not let up on that surface contact.”

The TAO issued orders to Weapons Control, and eight more SM-3 missiles leapt into the fray.

And then the number of air contacts on the Aegis display began to multiply rapidly.

Silva’s grin grew wider. There were at least twenty new air tracks on the screen—more aircraft than she had ever seen, in even the most exaggerated training simulation. But the new symbols were not the warning red color of hostile forces. They were blue.

CHAPTER 54

STRIKE FLIGHT

VFA-228 — MARAUDERS

BAY OF BENGAL

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

0054 hours (12:54 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

The Air Controller’s voice was low, but distinct in the headphones of Rob Monkman’s flight helmet. “Hammer, Bandits three-one-zero, for eighty, Angels two-zero.”

For all its Spartan brevity, the communication was packed with information. The Air Controller had just informed the leader of Hammer Flight that hostile aircraft had been detected eighty nautical miles from Hammer’s position, bearing three-one-zero, flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet.

The lack of the modifiers ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ indicated that the enemy planes were not directly approaching, or running away from Hammer. The absence of other modifiers relegated the message to a simple update, for purposes of situational awareness. No action required, but keep your eyes open for the bad guys.

The flight lead’s response was even shorter. “Hammer.” Translation: This is Hammer Flight Leader. I hear and understand.

Monk checked his AN/APG-79 radar for any sign of the enemy aircraft. The green-on-green monochromatic display seemed to glow under the image intensification of his night vision goggles, but the screen was clear of hostile contacts. His plane’s radar hadn’t acquired the targets yet. Not really a surprise, considering the range.

He lifted his head and went back to scanning the sky through the false green brightness of his night vision gear. The APG-79 was excellent for aerial combat, but it didn’t have nearly the range of the massive APS-145 radar array carried by the E-2D Hawkeye.

Per standard operating procedure, the E-2D was hanging back outside of the engagement area, supplying Airborne Early Warning coverage for the fighters. With its superior radar sensors and crew of air controllers, the Hawkeye could provide real-time target-cueing and tactical instructions to the American fighter pilots, allowing them to coordinate with a speed and precision that most nations could not even approximate.

Hammer Flight was one of three divisions assigned to the fighter sweep for this mission. Each division was composed of four F/A-18E Super Hornets, which could fight as a single coordinated unit, or split off into two independent sections to engage separate forces.

Monk was wingman to Lieutenant Dan Coffee (callsign Grinder), the division lead of Hammer Flight. His job was to keep Grinder in sight, follow the senior pilot’s orders, and shut the hell up until his input was asked for.

Monk didn’t mind. They’d be getting the order to engage any minute now, and then it would be time to give some Chinese pilots a taste of what they’d given Poker.

Somewhere, about a hundred miles back, was the strike package: a mixed-bag of Hornets and Super Hornets, tooled up for anti-surface action. Their mission was to take out the Chinese carrier with Harpoons and Mavericks.

Monk wasn’t thinking about the strike package. He wasn’t really thinking about the mission at all. He kept seeing the Chinese air-to-air missile blast through Poker’s canopy. No warning. No provocation. Just a shot in the face, and the smoking wreckage of Poker’s plane tumbling into the ocean.

The Air Controller’s voice came over Monk’s headphones again. “Hammer, Bandits three-zero-five, for sixty, Angels two-zero.”

Grinder’s single word acknowledgement came a second or so later. “Hammer.”

Monk glanced at his radar again. Still no enemy contacts, but the screen now showed eight hostile air symbols, being fed to his system from CED, the cooperative engagement data-link transmitter aboard the Hawkeye.

Monk’s knuckles tightened on the stick. It wouldn’t be long now.

He felt his lips move, and heard the low repetitive murmur of his own voice, but it took him a few seconds to realize that he was actually speaking. It was nearly a chant. “Payback time. Payback time. Payback time. Payback time…”

He chopped it off short, and went back to scanning the night sky for visual contacts. Within a few seconds, the chant started again, apparently of its own accord. “Payback time. Payback time…”

“Hammer, Bandits three-zero-zero, for forty, Angels two-two, hot. Commit!”

Monk grinned. That was the magic word—commit. The keys to the kingdom. Go after your assigned targets, and kill them.

Grinder’s response was as laconic as ever. “Hammer.”

A half-second later, Grinder turned left out of the formation, and began closing on the Bandits, trailed by the other three pilots of Hammer Flight: Chuck ‘Barnstormer’ Barnes, Sheila ‘Redeye’ Lewis, and Monk.

Grinder’s voice came over the ‘back’ radio, the circuit assigned to Hammer Flight for internal comms. “Hammers, sort by desig.”

Target designators appeared on Monk’s head-up display, bracketing two of the hostile aircraft symbols, identifying the enemy planes he was assigned to kill.

Monk keyed his mike. “Two, sorted.”

This was followed immediately by acknowledgements from Barnstormer and Redeye.

“Three, sorted.”

“Four, sorted.”

Using the old radio-only method, the target sorting process could have taken two or three minutes. With the help of the CED data-link, it was finished in three seconds. Everyone knew who their targets were. Now, it was just a matter of closing to missile engagement range.

Grinder climbed to 35,000 feet and poured on power, gaining speed and altitude for the coming engagement.

Monk adjusted his own speed and altitude to maintain position off Grinder’s starboard wing. “Payback time. Payback time…”

At 34 nautical miles, an electronic chime told Monk that his APG-79 had acquired radar contact. He glanced down at the display to confirm that both of his targets were now on the screen. They were.

He selected two AIM-120 AMRAAMs, designated one for each of his assigned Bandits, and allowed the fire control computer to give them their first look at the targets.

The Normalized In-Range Display—better known as the NIRD circle—appeared on his head-up display. One of his Bandits was sliding into the engagement envelope, but the second hostile was still slightly out of range. He held fire until the range bar for the second Bandit slipped past the six-o’clock position on the NIRD.

Both targets began to sheer off. Shit! Their threat-receivers had detected his radar lock! The range bars for both Bandits scrolled to the left, rapidly approaching the maximum range caret. He had maybe a second and a half before they slipped out of the envelope.

Shoot now? Or wait for a better opportunity?

It wasn’t a conscious decision. He thumbed the weapon selector, shut his eyes, and jammed the trigger twice.

“Fox Three! Fox Three!”

That was the code phrase for launch of an active radar guided missile.

Through his eyelids, Monk could see two green flashes as the missiles tore away into the night. The image processor circuits in his goggles were programmed to keep the output of the light intensification algorithms from harming his eyes, but there was no sense in spoiling his night vision.

The AMRAAMs blew through Mach 2 within seconds, and began gobbling up the distance to the Bandits. The 13,000 foot altitude advantage put the missiles into a dive, gravity and inertia giving them still more speed as they streaked toward the turning Chinese warplanes.

Off Monk’s port wing, Grinder pumped out two AMRAAMs of his own, and executed a tight left turn to bring his flight into a lag pursuit behind the J-15s.

Monk nudged his throttle and banked left to maintain his position on the lead plane.

The Bandits dropped chaff, jinked and jived impressively in their attempt to break missile-lock, but the AIM-120 missiles were too close, and moving too fast. A pair of fireballs in the distance told Monk that both of his birds had found their targets.

Grinder’s AMRAAMs caught up with their Bandits a couple of seconds later, and two more explosions illuminated the night sky.

Then Monk’s own radar warning receiver was shrieking. Somebody had radar lock on him.

A flashing arrow on the HUD told him that the threat was four-o’clock low. He keyed his radio. “Two, spiked, four-o’clock low! Breaking right.”

Without waiting for a reply, he broke hard to the right, trading speed and altitude for a violently-sudden change in position. His g-suit clamped down on him like a python as the leg and abdominal modules constricted to keep the blood from pooling in his lower body. He grunted repeatedly through the turn, using voluntary muscle contraction to force blood pressure into his upper torso and brain. His cone of vision narrowed, but he knew where his physical limits were, and he didn’t come close to graying out.

The tone was silent when he rolled back into level flight. He had slipped out of the radar lock, for the moment at least.

The adrenaline in his veins screamed for him to go after the threat, find and kill whichever bad guy had locked onto his plane. But that was not his job.

He brought his nose back around to the left, and began to look for Grinder. He keyed his radio. “Two, naked and blind.” This is Hammer-Two. I have broken free from enemy radar lock, but I cannot see my flight lead.

Grinder’s reply came quickly. “One, blind. Furball.” This is Hammer-One. I can’t see you either. This fight is turning into a free-for-all.

Monk acknowledged the transmission. “Two.”

Grinder was right, this was a furball. The sky had become a seething cluster-fuck of shooting-dodging aircraft.

Monk checked his radar and then did a quick visual sweep. He spotted his next target, and began angling in for the kill.

*  *  *

USS Towers:

“All Stations—Sonar. Hostile torpedo has broken acquisition.”

On the Aegis display, Captain Silva watched the symbol for the enemy torpedo swerve away from the Towers. Finally, something was going right.

She was about to issue another order when the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again.

“All Stations—Sonar has multiple hydrophone effects off the port beam! Bearings one-zero-three, and one-zero-seven. Initial classification: friendly torpedoes!”

Friendly? That got everyone’s attention.

The Undersea Warfare Evaluator punched into the circuit. “Sonar—USWE. Say again the classification of the new torpedoes.”

“USWE—Sonar. They’re friendly, sir. U.S.-built Mark-48s, and they’re locked onto a new broadband contact, bearing zero-niner-zero.”

“Sonar—USWE. What’s the classification of your new contact?”

“USWE—Sonar. Classification unknown, sir. I’ve got plenty of blade noise and lots of broadband, but narrowband is too chaotic to get a read. Whoever he is, he just kicked it up to flank speed to get away from those 48s.”

Silva keyed her headset. “Sonar, this is the captain. Any sign of the sub that launched the Mark-48s?”

“Ah… Negative, Captain. Whoever our friend is out there, he’s running slick and silent. We’re not getting a peep out of him.”

“He can be as quiet as he wants,” the TAO said. “As long as he keeps that bad guy off our back.”

Silva nodded. “You’ve got that right.”

On the tactical display, two blue torpedo symbols were racing toward a hostile submarine symbol.

Silva raise an eyebrow. “If I ever find out who’s in command of that friendly sub, I’m going to kiss him on the lips.”

A junior Operations Specialist spoke up before he could stop himself. “Even if it’s a girl, Captain?”

Silva gave the young Sailor a mock glare. “Seaman, is that an indirect way of asking about my orientation?”

The Sailor’s ears turned bright red. “No, sir! I mean, no, ma’am!”

Silva turned back to the Aegis screen. “If our guardian angel turns out to be female, I’ll shake her hand and buy her a beer.”

“Sounds like a plan to me, Captain,” the Operations Specialist said.

Silva scanned the tactical display. “TAO, why did we stop hitting that surface contact?”

The Tactical Action Officer cleared his throat. “It’s not there anymore, Captain. SPY isn’t picking up anything big enough to make a radar return.”

“Okay,” Silva said. “Then our job is done. We’ll wait until the fighter boys have finished mopping up the enemy air cover, and then we move in and pick up survivors.”

This pronouncement was met with silence.

Silva examined the faces of the men and women around her. “I know what some of you are probably thinking,” she said. “But if we’re supposed to be the good guys, we damned well have to act like the good guys. When the fight is over, we’re not leaving any sailors in the water. I don’t care what color uniform they’re wearing.”

The TAO nodded slowly. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

Silva inhaled deeply, and let out a long breath. “Maybe this isn’t the kind of order Captain Bowie would have given. But it’s my order. And it is not subject to debate.”

The corners of the Tactical Action Officer’s mouth curled up in the barest suggestion of a smile. “You misunderstand us, ma’am. This is exactly the kind of order Captain Bowie would have given.”

There were silent nods of agreement around the compartment.

From somewhere in the semi-darkness, an unidentified voice spoke. “Alright, people. You heard the Skipper. Let’s get to it.”

*  *  *

Hammer-Two:

Monk watched his third kill of the night come apart in midair, scorched fragments of wreckage sifting down toward the dark ocean like flaming confetti. Counting the two J-15s he had nailed during his last mix-up with the Chinese, he now had five confirmed kills. Monk had just officially become an ace, but nothing in the world could have been further from his mind.

He didn’t care about honors, or awards, or bragging rights. He was looking for another Bandit to kill.

The mission had gone according to plan. The fighter sweep had cleared away enough of the hostile air cover to allow the strike package to get in and do its job. After ten or twelve air-launched Harpoon strikes, the Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning, wallowed powerless on the wave tops.

Through his night vision goggles, Monk could see the crippled ship low in the water, listing heavily to starboard, flames rising from her flight deck in several places.

Monk tore his eyes away from the burning ship, and went back to scanning the sky for another enemy aircraft. Three or four seconds later, he found one. Or rather, it found him.

The incoming missile must have been a heat seeker, because Monk’s threat warning receiver never detected any sign of enemy radar emissions. He was cruising low and fast when the missile struck. The shock was as hard and abrupt as a head-on car crash.

His helmet ricocheted off the inside of the canopy with brain-numbing force, and tattletales began flashing all over his instrument panel. The Super Hornet—lithe and nimble just a few seconds before—was suddenly a shuddering and dying beast.

The cockpit was filling with smoke, and his port engine was on fire. He was losing power and altitude quickly, and the black sea was rushing up to meet him.

He keyed his radio. “This is Hammer-Two. I am hit and going down. This is Hammer-Two. I am hit and going down.”

He released the mike and started to reach for the ejection handle between his legs. Then he caught sight of the Chinese aircraft carrier again, the flames billowing green through the lenses of his night goggles.

Maybe there was time to put his dying F-18 through one final maneuver. Nothing fancy: just a simple turn and a change of altitude.

The controls were nearly unresponsive now, and he was almost out of time. He fought the stick to bring his nose around to the left, and then pitched over into a shallow dive with the stricken enemy warship framed squarely within the window of his HUD.

Another nighttime approach on an aircraft carrier, but this time there would be no landing. No surge of deceleration as the arresting gear brought his plane to a straining halt. No coffee and friendly banter in the debriefing room. This was not going to be that kind of landing.

The burning form of the aircraft carrier was growing larger. The moment of impact hurtling closer.

He could do this. He could ride his Hornet all the way down, plunge his sword directly into the heart of the enemy. Bring it all to an end, in a furious cataclysm of fire.

Later, he would never remember reaching for the eject handle. But the yellow and black loop was suddenly in his hand. He wrapped his fingers around it, and pulled.

The canopy blasted clear, and the acceleration hit him in the lower spine as the ejection seat rocketed him out of his plane, and into the night sky. His universe became a maelstrom of darkness and rushing wind.

And then the drogue deployed, pulling his chute open, and he was floating down toward the ocean under an unseen dome of taut nylon.

Monk wanted to see the impact. He needed to see it. He prayed that he would be facing the right way when it happened.

Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was fate. Or maybe it was just the wind. But his parachute turned slowly as he descended, and the enemy ship swung into view as the instant of collision occurred.

His wounded Hornet rammed into the superstructure of the Chinese aircraft carrier at several hundred knots. Kinetic energy, the plane’s fuel load, and the remaining munitions synergized into an expanding sphere of flame and destruction.

It might not have been the death blow. Perhaps the missile hits had already done that job. But to Monk, it felt like the killing shot. The sight had all the brutal majesty of the stone that felled Goliath, or a stake pounded through the heart of some mythical monster.

For the first time since Poker’s death, Monk felt himself begin to smile.

“Okay, assholes,” he said quietly. “Now we’re even.”

CHAPTER 55

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY; 02 DECEMBER

5:08 PM EST

The telephone on President Wainwright’s desk buzzed. He lifted the receiver.

“Mr. President, you have Premiere Xiao on the line. Your translator is patched in and standing by.”

“Thank you, Margie,” the president said. “Put me through.”

There was a brief silence, and then the light on the phone blinked from amber to green.

The president resisted the urge to clear his throat. He’d been mentally rehearsing this call for an hour, and he still hadn’t figured out how to say what needed to be said.

Everything was riding on this call. If it went well, maybe he could get China and India to back away from each other before this thing escalated out of control. If it didn’t go well…

He heard Xiao’s ancient voice, speaking in Mandarin. A couple of seconds later, the State Department translator repeated the Chinese leader’s words in English. “Good morning, President Wainright. I assume you are calling to apologize for the attack on our aircraft carrier.”

The president felt an instant surge of annoyance. They were three seconds into the call, and already the accusations were starting to come out. At least a half dozen responses popped into his head, none of which would help to calm the waters. He needed something firm, but not accusatory.

“The loss of the Liaoning was unfortunate,” he said. “And so was the attack on the USS Midway, which—you may recall—occurred two days before the incident with the Liaoning.”

Another pause before the State Department translator relayed Xiao’s words. “We made no move against your USS Midway until after you destroyed a satellite that was the sovereign property of the People’s Republic.”

The president’s annoyance ratcheted up another notch. So much for his hopes of a calm diplomatic dialogue. Fine. If Xiao wanted to play tit-for-tat, he’d discover that Dalton Wainright’s years in the Senate had given him certain skills in the shame-and-blame game. And then, maybe after they had bludgeoned each other senseless with blunt rhetoric for a while, they might actually get around to having a productive discussion.

“Premiere Xiao,” he said, “your people are apparently not giving you accurate information. I did not authorize the downing of your satellite until two days after your warplanes carried out an unprovoked attack against a pair of American aircraft on defensive patrol. Your planes shot first, killing one of our pilots, and destroying an F/A-18 jet. American naval forces in the region had done nothing to justify such an act of aggression.”

“You sided with our enemies—”

“We did not side with your enemies,” the president snapped. “I ordered USS Midway into the Bay of Bengal as a stabilizing force. I had hoped that our ships and aircraft could serve as a buffer between Chinese and Indian forces in the region. To give both of your countries a chance to cool off, and seek more peaceful solutions.”

The Premier’s translated words came a few seconds later. “Mr. President, I find it strange that you speak of peace. You have just destroyed every ship and aircraft in the Liaoning battle group. You did not damage our ships and planes. You eradicated them. You have struck directly at my country’s vital strategic assets. You have dealt a serious blow to China’s international military deterrence. Now, you wish to cast yourself as a peacemaker?”

Dalton felt his fingers tighten on the telephone receiver. He struggled to keep his voice even. “How this happened is no longer important,” he said. “What matters now, is what we do next. Do we continue down the road that we’re on? Or do we work together to find a solution to this crisis?”

“You cannot have it both ways,” Xiao said through the translator. “Your country’s John Adams spoke of holding the sword in one hand, and the olive branch in the other. But we both know, President Wainright, that you are no John Adams. And if we are to speak frankly, you are not even his lesser son, John Quincy Adams.”

The words did not just sting. They burned like acid. Because they were true.

If they had come from a different man, they might not have wounded so deeply. Coming from some middleweight bureaucrat, Dalton could have written them off as ill-spirited bluster. But Xiao Qishan was not a middleweight bureaucrat. He was old now, and in the waning days of his political career, but what an extraordinary career it had been.

Xiao had done more to drag China into the twenty-first century than any other man, living or dead. He had earned his place in history. He would be remembered as a great leader. A forward-thinking man of action and results.

Dalton Wainright had no illusions about his own place in history. He was not a great leader. In the future, when he was remembered at all, he would appear as a footnote to the careers of greater men. He knew that, and the knowledge was not pleasant.

Still, he struggled to keep the anger and hurt out of his voice. “I am no John Adams,” he said into the phone. “As you have so graciously pointed out, I am not even John Quincy Adams. I am a small man, sitting in a chair that is too large for me. But make no mistake, Premier Xiao, I am sitting in this chair. I don’t pretend to lead my country with wisdom and greatness, but I do lead it.”

His fingers were painfully tight around the handset of the phone. “For all of my shortcomings, I intend to discharge my duties. I will not accept threats to the security of my country. And I will not accept unprovoked attacks against allies of the United States of America.”

The translation of Premiere Xiao’s response came a few seconds later. “Are you suggesting that China is not an ally of the United States?”

“That is entirely up to you,” the president said. “But if you want to be treated as our ally, it’s about time that you begin to act like our ally.”

There was a long delay before Xiao’s words came back through the translator. “Is that the sound of your saber rattling, Mr. President? What are you suggesting? Are you hoping to intimidate me with veiled hints?”

Dalton’s fist came down on the polished timbers of the Resolute desk. “Goddamn it! I’m not hinting at anything. I’m not suggesting anything. I am outright saying it. The People’s Republic of China is dangerously close to being at war with the United States of America. Is that clear enough for you, Premier Xiao? War.”

He could hear his voice rising, assuming a strength and assurance that he had not felt since taking the oath of office. He waited for the translator to repeat his words in Mandarin, and then he continued before the Chinese leader could respond.

“There will be no more skirmishes,” the president said. “There will be no more diplomatic intimidation. If Chinese forces throw so much as a snowball toward any US person or asset, military or otherwise, we will answer with war. If you continue to press your attacks against the Republic of India, we stand by our allies, and we will bring the fight to your door. So you need to decide right now… Are you prepared to go to war against the United States?”

There was a long silence, and Dalton could hear his pulse hammering in his ears.

Then, Xiao’s aged voice spilled a torrent of Mandarin. “I will not be spoken to this way! You will not—”

President Wainright hung up the phone, slamming the receiver back into its cradle without waiting for the rest of the translation.

He took several deep, slow breaths. When he thought his heart rate was a bit closer to normal, he lifted the receiver and punched the number for the Situation Room Duty Officer.

“This is the president,” he said. “Round up the Secretary of Defense, and get the National Military Command Center on line. I want the full battle staff in the Situation Room in half an hour.”

He lowered the receiver again, and then glanced at the nineteenth-century John and Thomas Seymour clock near the east door. A little over an hour left before India launched the attack against the Three Gorges Dam, and then this thing was really going to get ugly.

CHAPTER 56

GREAT HALL OF THE PEOPLE

TIANANMEN SQUARE

BEIJING, CHINA

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

6:31 AM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

First Vice Premier Lu Shi pushed his chair back from the conference table and got to his feet. “The loss of the Liaoning cannot go unpunished. We will crush them!”

Jia Bangguo raised a hand. “We will crush who, Comrade Lu? The Americans? Are you saying that we will crush the United States?”

“The Americans have gone too far,” Lu Shi said. “They have crippled a major strategic asset, and damaged the credibility of our naval forces. We must show the world that China does not kowtow to any foreign power. We do not back down from India. We do not back down from America. We do not back down from anyone. And any nation that challenges the People’s Republic does so at its own peril.”

Ma Yong, Party Secretary of the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, nodded toward Lu Shi. “Comrade Vice Premier, I know very little of military affairs, and I know even less about the intricacies of international strategic deterrence. But I do know that the United States and India collectively consume more than thirty-five percent of our manufactured trade goods. America is by-far our best customer, and India is also one of our largest trading partners. Have you considered what will happen to our national economy when a third of our export market suddenly evaporates?”

Lu glared at him. “Comrade Ma, you know that I have always considered you a wise counselor. But you are overestimating the resolve of your adversaries. America is an undisciplined consumer culture, and India is not much better. They cannot live without their toys. If the average American is forced to choose between his political convictions and his iPhone, he will take the iPhone every time.”

Ma Yong started to speak, but Lu Shi cut him off. “If you examine the true nature of your customers, you will see that there is no real danger of economic reprisals. There will certainly be a few economic sanctions—boycotts of Chinese trade goods, perhaps some short-lived tariffs—to demonstrate America’s financial independence and the strength of American character. But any such measures will be short in duration, and they will not significantly impact the flow of our manufactured goods. Because, regardless of their misguided pride, American resolve is weak, and their economy is inextricably tied to ours. If they attempt to cut financial ties with China, they will be cutting their own throats.”

“Perhaps you are right about that,” said Party Secretary Wei Jintao. “But you are talking about fighting two tigers at the same time.”

“Yes,” Lu Shi said. “But both tigers have more whiskers than teeth. These are not real tigers. They are make-believe tigers. They will growl and thrash their tails, but India is no match for us, and we will pull America’s fangs before they can do much in the way of biting.”

Ma Yong raised an eyebrow. “How do you propose to accomplish this? How exactly will we pull the fangs of the United States?”

“Unrestricted cyber warfare,” Lu Shi said. “We have been probing strategic elements of their critical infrastructure for years, and their cyber defenses are not capable of withstanding a determined assault. We will take down their national power grids. We will infect their computer networks with military-grade viruses, interrupt their cellular telephone communications, disrupt their air traffic control systems, and paralyze their commercial banking architecture. Within forty-eight hours, the average American won’t be able to buy a slice of bread or a liter of water. Bank accounts will be frozen. Planes will be grounded. Telephones will be useless. And the vaunted U.S. military will have its hands full quelling riots, and trying to keep the peace within its own borders.”

“An ambitious undertaking,” said Jia Bangguo. “But what if your plans for hobbling America are not as successful as you hope? What if you have overestimated the effectiveness of your proposed cyber attacks? Or if you have underestimated the resilience of the Americans?”

“I’m not wrong,” Lu Shi said.

“Possibly,” Jia said. “But before we commit ourselves to such drastic measures, we must consider all possibilities. So I ask again, what happens if you are wrong?”

Lu Shi’s voice rose to a shout. “I am NOT wrong!”

He turned hard eyes on every face gathered around the table. “Look at yourselves,” he sneered. “You are supposed to be leaders. You are supposed to be men. But you sit around whining like a gaggle of old women. Where is your heart? Where is your spirit?”

His gaze was an open challenge to every man at the long table. “This will happen,” he said. “It will happen. And when it does, I will remember everyone who opposed me. I have the complete backing of Premiere Xiao on this—”

“No!” said a voice from the far end of the room.

Every head turned toward the newcomer. The wizened form of Xiao Qishan stood in the doorway, flanked by two young and hard-looking PLA officers.

“You do not have my backing,” Xiao said. He began to hobble toward his chair.

“I don’t understand,” Lu said. “You were going to speak to the American president. You were going to—”

“I have spoken to the president,” Xiao said. The old leader was wheezing slightly, as though the act of walking to his chair had used up a significant fraction of his strength reserves. “I am no longer in favor or following your plan.”

The expression on Lu Shi’s face was one of utter shock. “But Comrade Premiere, you know that President Wainright is weak. We can do this. It is our time to do this.”

Xiao lowered himself carefully into his chair and shook his head. “Wainright is stronger than you think he is. In fact, I suspect that he’s stronger than he thinks he is.”

Xiao was wracked by a series of painful coughs, and when he spoke again, his voice was even feebler than usual. “We will not move against the Americans. I have already called the Indian President. We will cease all hostilities with India, and make immediate efforts to normalize diplomatic relations.”

He gave his Vice Premiere a long and patient look. “Comrade Lu, the time for anger is past. Now is the time for healing, and moving forward.”

All color drained from Lu Shi’s face. “You’re too weak for this job, old man. You no longer have the courage to make the hard decisions. It’s time for you to retire, and totter off somewhere to die quietly. You’re finished here.”

The old Premier gave him a thin smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You will be retiring today, my friend. Not me.”

He motioned to the pair of PLA officers, and they closed in rapidly on Lu Shi. Before Lu had time to react each man had a firm grip on one of his arms. They began to lead him firmly from the room.

“The Americans are weak!” Lu shouted over his shoulder. “The Indians are weak! We can crush them…”

“Perhaps,” Premier Xiao said softly. “But let’s see if we can live with them instead.”

CHAPTER 57

THREE GORGES DAM

SANDOUPING, CHINA

WEDNESDAY; 03 DECEMBER

7:29 AM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

The reservoir extended nearly 700 kilometers upstream from the catchment wall, more than 39 billion cubic meters of water held in check by a concrete edifice that was half as tall as America’s landmark Empire State Building.

The wall’s internal reinforcements included 463,000 metric tons of steel, enough to fabricate 63 copies of the Eiffel Tower. The entire structure had been designed to withstand accidents, massive seasonal over-flooding, and earthquakes of 7.0 on the Richter scale. But the architects and engineers hadn’t known about the Next Generation Penetrator warhead that the Indians called Rudrasya khaḍgaḥ, the Sword of Shiva, and they certainly hadn’t known that regional turmoil might push their neighbors to actually utilize such a weapon.

The 370 on-site personnel knew nothing of the Indian plan to destroy the dam. The workers went about their daily routines, maintaining and operating the thirty-two house-sized hydroelectric turbines, and the power distribution plant in its adjacent underground facility.

The inhabitants of the Yangtze River basin were beginning to stir under the first rays of the morning sun. The cities of Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai were gearing up for another busy day of buying, selling, making, and consuming.

Not one person within the footprint of pending destruction knew that India’s 48 hour deadline was only a minute away. Not one of the potential victims knew about the seven cruise missiles targeted on the dam, or the meticulous care with which the impact sites had been selected.

The final 60 seconds ticked away, one after another. Forty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten.

And then, the deadline expired, and the appointed moment arrived.

No missiles fell from the sky. No warheads pierced the hardened concrete of the catchment wall. Downstream from the dam, the brown waters of the Yangtze River continued their slow rolling journey to the sea.

The cataclysm had been averted by a phone call, an act of reason, and the extension of a human hand in the age-old gesture of peace.

The hour of doom had come and gone. And 400 million Chinese citizens went about their morning business, unaware that death had brushed past them in the clear early sunlight.

EPILOGUE

FORT SAM HOUSTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

SAN ANTONIO, TX

TUESDAY; 11 FEBRUARY

1:45 PM EST

Kat Silva walked down the long row of grave markers until she came to a headstone that was visibly newer than most of the others. The marble was crisply white, and brilliantly clean, having only been exposed to the elements for a few weeks. The inscription read: SAMUEL HARLAND BOWIE, Capt. USN, followed by the dates of birth and death.

Silva sighed, and nodded toward the stone. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to make it around to see you, Jim. But you know how it goes when your ship is in the yards. The Towers is going to be just fine, by the way. When the yard birds are finished sprucing her up, you won’t even be able to tell where the missile hit.”

Silva felt a yawn coming on, and covered her mouth. “Sorry about that. Fourteen hours in the air, not counting layovers, and I never sleep worth a damn on airplanes.”

She glanced up and down the rows of white markers. “I see there are a bunch of old-time Indian fighters buried here. Scouts, cavalry soldiers, maybe even some of the boys from the Alamo. You should look them up. I’ll bet some of those guys are relatives of yours. The hero streak in you runs pretty deep, so it’s probably in your bloodline.”

Silva reached into her pocket and fished out a folded sheet of paper. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t bring flowers. You never struck me as the kind of guy who goes for floral arrangements. But if I’m wrong about that, you let me know, and I’ll get you some begonias, or something.”

She unfolded the sheet of paper and spent a few seconds smoothing out the creases. “I did bring you something, though. Maybe you’ll like it better than a bunch of daffodils. I’ll just read it for you, and you can decide for yourself.”

She cleared her throat softly. “From: Department of Defense Public Affairs, Washington, DC Naval News Service. Secretary of the Navy Alexander Fields announced today that the Navy’s next Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer will be named USS Bowie, in honor of Navy Captain Samuel Harland Bowie who was killed during last year’s naval combat action in the Bay of Bengal. The USS Bowie will be the first ship to bear the name…”

Silva folded the paper. “There are four or five more paragraphs, but the rest is mostly about the capabilities of the modified Arleigh Burke class, and you probably know more about that than just about anyone. There’s also a section about your military career, and the heroic actions of the Towers on her last three deployments, but—again—none of that is news to you.”

The folded slip of paper went back into her pocket. “The keel laying ceremony is in May at Bath Iron Works. The Navy is inviting everyone who ever served under your command, so it’ll be a much bigger dog and pony show than usual. Under the circumstances, I doubt they’ll send you a direct invitation. I thought I’d tell you myself, in case you decide to swing by and watch the fun.”

Silva’s voice took on a more serious tone. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Jim. I don’t know if you’re in heaven, or floating in some ethereal afterlife, or even if there is an afterlife. Maybe you’re just gone now, and I’m talking to myself. But whether you can hear me or not, there’s something I have to say to you.

“The world will probably never understand how much it owes to you, and to the men and women who fought under your command. The average person on the street has no idea that you dragged America—and maybe the entire planet—back from the brink of catastrophe at least three times. Most people will never know how much you did for this country, and how much you sacrificed to give us all a second chance.”

She was surprised to find that her eyes were beginning to get misty. “But some of us know. We remember what you did, and we know the price you paid. And we’re grateful, Jim. I can’t even begin to tell you how much.”

Silva tried to continue, but her voice had gone husky with unexpected emotion. “I guess that’s really all I came to say.”

She came to attention, and her right hand performed a slow, deliberate salute. “Thank you.”

Her hand came back down to her side. She executed a precise about-face and walked away, leaving the headstone to stand among the ranks of its brothers and sisters under the gray Texas sky.

THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Anyone with an understanding of orbital mechanics (or a working knowledge of physics) will spot the fact that I’ve taken some literary license with the orbit of the Chinese surveillance satellite known as Redbird One. The flight path I’ve described for the satellite is at too low an altitude, and too far from the famous “Clarke belt” to support a geostationary orbit. I haven’t attempted to calculate what the duration of such an orbit might be in the real world, but it’s a safe bet that it would not remain stable for the ten days predicted in the story.

I could attempt to justify my departure from Keplerian motion by pointing out that Redbird One could be an experimental statite (static satellite), a hypothetical satellite which employs a solar sail to modify its orbit. Theoretically, a properly-configured statite could hold itself in a geostationary “orbit” at much lower altitudes and with inclinations far different from the traditional equatorial orbits used for geostationary positioning. I could make such a claim, but I won’t. The simple fact is, the story called for a satellite at a lower altitude, and well out of the geostationary belt, and I followed the needs of the plot.

Purists and aficionados of space technology are advised that my criminal misuse of orbital mechanics was premeditated, and carried out with malice-aforethought. In other words, it wasn’t an oversight. I done it on purpose.

— Jeff Edwards

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in making this book a reality:

Rear Admiral John J. Waickwicz, USN (Retired), former Commander Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, for his excellent technical and editorial advice; Lieutenant Commander Loren “Alien” DeShon, USNR (retired), for technical advice about Navy F/A-18s, aircraft carrier landing procedures, and fighter combat tactics; Commander Cliff “Poker” Driskill, USNR (retired)/former Top Gun instructor, for patiently explaining (and then re-explaining) the intricacies of aerial combat maneuvering; Peter Garwood of the Balloon Barrage Reunion Club (www.bbrclub.org), for permission to use his excellent photograph of a Nazi V1 Rocket on its launch rail; Brenda Collins, for her superb research and editorial assistance; FTG2(SS) Bill Blanchard for talking me through anti-submarine warfare and anti-surface warfare engagements from a submariner’s point of view; and my crew of advance readers, for catching many (many) of my blunders before they reached the final page.

I’d also like to thank the contributors who are not named here, either by their own choice, or through accident on my part. The information I received from these people was consistently excellent. Any inaccuracies in this book are either the result of deliberate artistic license, or my own mistakes. Such errors are in no way the fault of my contributors.

As always, I would like to thank my editor, Don Gerrard, for more than a decade of guidance, sterling advice, and true friendship.

I hope you enjoyed reading these books as much as I enjoyed writing them. Whether you loved the books or hated them, I’d sincerely appreciate your feedback. Please take a moment to leave a review on Amazon.com.

If you’d like to be notified when my next book is released, you can sign up by clicking here.

YOU KNOW WHAT’S COMING NEXT…

This isn’t the first time you’ve finished a book, so you already know what comes next: teasers for more books, right? Nothing unusual about that. It’s pretty much standard practice in the publishing industry.

Let me tell you what’s different here. The books and authors on the following pages weren’t chosen according to a corporate advertising strategy. They’re not part of some carefully-optimized marketing campaign. They weren’t selected by an algorithmic database that monitors your purchasing preferences. They were hand-chosen by me. These are my personal recommendations.

When I first read John Monteith’s ROGUE AVENGER, I paid the book my highest compliment by saying that I wished I had written it. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I still harbor that wish.) I had a similar thought when I read A SWORD INTO DARKNESS, by Thomas A. Mays. It is, quite simply, the best space combat novel I have ever read. THE GODS OF WAR, by Graham Brown and Spencer Andrews is one of the few books I have ever read twice back-to-back. And Kevin Miller’s RAVEN ONE put me in the cockpit of a U.S. Navy fighter with a visceral human realism that I haven’t felt since my first viewing of the movie TOP GUN. I also think rather highly of some of my own books, so you might see a few mentions of my work.

You get the picture. This isn’t a random marketing blitz. These are the kinds of books that I recommend to my friends. I sincerely hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Author and Fellow Book Junkie,

Jeff Edwards

Table of Contents

Sea of Shadows

The Seventh Angel

Sword of Shiva