Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (37 page)

His mess attendant, at his elbow. “Cap’n. Gonna want evening meal up here?”

Dan tried to work the tension out of his shoulders. Remembering how Singhe had massaged them. Wishing those soft yet strong hands could dig into his muscles once more. “Yeah, I guess. From now on until further notice, Longley.”

*   *   *

OVER
the next twelve hours, he slumped in the chair, or alternately paced the aisles as
Savo
pitched and rolled. The Indian spearheads advanced and the Pakistani defenses began to dent in, visible on the large-screen displays as a froth of low-level air contacts over the forward edge of the battle area. The high-side chat posted near-real-time inputs from DIA and play-by-play commentary by the Army. The Indians had also embedded TV crews in their forward elements, and now and then Donnie called to say he’d Tivo’d a clip from the front lines, rebroadcast over commercial TV. General Zhang had left Mumbai, flown out in a PLAF transport with escorts from both the Indian air force and the Chinese. Still alive, the bastard … the spy who’d orchestrated, years before, the systematic theft of U.S. military secrets, and ordered the murder of an innocent young woman.

Scattered cyberattacks and sabotage were crippling aircraft production facilities at General Dynamics and the two submarine shipyards left in production, Electric Boat and Newport News. Too late now to regret the paring away of the defense industrial base. If open war came, would he even be able to get ammunition?

0510, and a message from Fifth Fleet. The replenishment ship
Stuttgart
, en route to OpArea Endive, had been instructed by her national authorities to turn back toward the Arabian Sea. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Problem?” Mills said, beside him now in the TAO chair.

Dan blinked; when had Matt taken over from Dave? He was getting fuzzy. Weak, forgetful—the aftereffects of the crud. He tried to squeeze his tired brain back into something resembling alertness. “Uh, it’s
Stuttgart.
Our oiler’s been called off.”

“Fuck.” Mills rattled his keyboard, stared at the message.
“Fuck.”

“Let CHENG know. See if there’s anything he can do to cut consumption even more. And query
Mitscher,
see what their fuel percentages are. They’ve got to be just as hard up.”

He got up and paced again, hands locked in the small of his back. Stopped behind Terranova, who was worshiping at the Aegis console. Dr. Noblos snored a few feet away, the Johns Hopkins rider sleeping in a chair.
Savo
rolled, and Dan staggered before catching himself on a console.

Without
Stuttgart,
his situation was critical.
Savo
had an intel mission? Fine; the cryppies and the EWs were sending steady reports. But so far, neither the Pakistanis nor the Indians seemed to be taking the war to sea.

So where were his orders, and what was he still doing in a war zone so dangerous that the Germans refused to send a ship into it?

A hell of a lot of questions. But damn few answers. Or maybe one: with everything going down back in the States, they’d forgotten he was out here.

In which case, he’d better start thinking about when to pull up stakes and head for calmer waters. In both the literal and the figurative senses.

Pushing through the curtain into Sonar, he stood behind Carpenter and Zotcher as they scanned the amber pulsing patterns.
Mitscher,
streaming her low-frequency tail, would probably get the first indication of anyone bird-dogging them, a Pakistani Agosta or Daphne, or an Indian Kilo-class or Type 1500. But if one succeeded in getting in close, his own team, pinging active, could determine whether they lived or died.

He looked down at Carpenter’s skull, the pale scalp visible between gray thinning hairs. He couldn’t envision the old sailor dragging the wiry, athletic Colón into a fan room.

He closed his eyes and stood swaying to the roll. Remembering what Szerenci had said, and how the nations of Europe had been sucked, one after the other, into the maelstrom. Then took a deep breath, propelled himself back out into CIC, and seized Noblos’s shoulder. “Bill. Bill?”

The physicist jerked awake. “Christ! I was napping.”

“Sorry. A question. You said we’d up our P-sub-K the closer inshore we got.”

“Correct. Essentially.” Noblos rubbed his eyes.

“It’s a straight-line relationship? Or geometrical?”

“Uh … neither, but your first miles closer are going to up your probability of kill more than your last.” He coughed, and Dan remembered he too had had the crud. Earlier than the rest, though. “But that wasn’t my recommendation. The actual recommendation—”

“Was to leave station. I remember.”

“And we
should,
Captain. We really should. This isn’t our war. And your chances, if you attempt to intervene, are not good.”

Dan started to reply, something about not always being so negative, but bit it back. He needed Noblos. Didn’t have to like him, but needed him. “Well, goddamn it, I’m going to close the range. Just in case.”

“You’re accepting additional risk.”

“I understand that,” Dan said. Keeping the lid on his temper. He strolled back to the command desk. “Matt! Tell the OOD, come to zero-four-zero. Let’s get in a little closer.”

“Um … yessir … how much closer?”

“Not you too, Matt. Just get us in there. Thirty miles?”

The tall lieutenant’s voice was reluctant. But he said, “Thirty miles from shore. Aye aye, sir. I’ll pass that to the bridge.”

*   *   *

0530
.
The ship leaned and creaked, differently now, with the seas nearly dead astern. In the aft camera, up on the leftmost screen, waves towered black in the foreglow of dawn. He stood watching for minutes, mind blank, leaning over the shoulder of the surface warfare coordinator at his console back near Sonar.

At last, reluctantly, he disengaged his attention from the endless parade of swells. Went back to his command chair, but hesitated before sitting again. His butt ached like a dying tooth. His brain felt as if it had been removed, frozen for ten thousand years, then reinstalled. Half an hour until the mess line opened. He muttered, “Matt, I’m fading. You got it. I’m gonna lie down for twenty, in my sea cabin. Then—”

A digitally generated double chime bonged from the Aegis area. “Launch cuing,” Terranova announced, almost primly.

Dan wheeled. “From where?”

“Link 16, from Rainbow.” The Saudi-based AWACS.

“We need LPE, impact point, area of uncertainty,” Dan rapped out. “Get the geo plot up.”

The middle panel blanked, then relit. Eastern Pakistan. Western India. Launch point, impact-point prediction, area of uncertainty. The last two he could ignore for a few more minutes. They were only guesses, until first-stage burnout and weapon pitchover. ALIS didn’t have a detect yet. Just the heads-up from the Air Force bird, orbiting hundreds of miles to the west.

Suddenly he didn’t feel sleepy. But everything inside his head still seemed to be running more slowly, like a computer with too many programs open. He breathed deep, pinched his cheek. Didn’t seem to help.

The alert-script buzzer went off. “Profile plot, designate Meteor Alfa,” Terranova murmured. “Meteor” was shorthand for a ballistic missile in the air. “Rapid climb rate, but not as fast as a solid-fueled rocket. Size and acceleration profile consistent with Ghauri type. Passing angels fifty. Identify as TBM. ID as hostile. Stand by … ALIS has track … computing trajectory and IPP.”

Beside him Mills murmured, “Ghauri’s a liquid-fueled single-stage. Derived from a North Korean design. Transporter-erector launched. Nuke capable, but no one knows if it actually has a nuclear warhead. Spins early in the transonic regime, to increase accuracy.”

“Very well.” Dan turned the seat and sank into it, riveted to the screen. They wouldn’t get an intercept angle until they had a firm impact prediction. But he was constrained, not just by geometry, but by range. If the target was north of Jodhpur, or the Indian air force base at Phalodi, no chance of an intercept. If it was south of there, he just might have a good enough probability of kill to take a shot.

If he
decided
to. But the decision wasn’t just technical. After all, the U.S. hadn’t taken sides. But he had no more than six or, at the outside, eight minutes to decide.

He glanced at the red Launch Enable switch near his right hand. Not really a “fire” switch, in the classic gunnery sense. The magazines were authorized and enabled via the command console. The Fire Inhibit/Enable key just allowed the command to go to the magazine. The Canister Safe Enable switch, on the bottom of the canisters, was another safety interlock. The gunner’s mates held those keys, so no rogue CO or TAO could launch on his own.

But once all the keys were turned by human beings, ALIS herself ran through a built-in system test, calculated the chances of a successful intercept, matched parameters, and sent the fire signal.

He had to keep his inventory in mind too. Better than the last time
Savo
had engaged, but still limited. Twelve Standard Block 4A theater missile defense missiles. Once those cells were empty,
Savo
was no longer a national-level asset.

And they’d had only a 50 percent kill record last time.

The display jerked, then jumped forward, as if the camera was falling straight down from space. It was nauseating, and he blinked, keeping his fingers clear of the switch.

A white dot welled up, like a whale rising from deep beneath the sea. It pulsed on the center screen. The “gate,” the vibrating bright green hook of the radar’s acquisition function, zoomed in, corrected, and centered.

“ALIS locked on,” Terranova announced. “This is a big mother.”

“Very well. Manually engage when track is established.”

The bracket convulsed, as if blown by a stiff gust, and strayed off the dot. The petty officer cursed. Caught it, guided it back. It circled, then locked on. The white dot grew rapidly. Not a visual picture, though it resembled one, but the digital representation of the radar data the SPY-1 was feeding back ten times a second.

Beside him Mills had begun the prefiring litany. Alerting VLS, the bridge,
Mitscher,
and Higher to what was happening. “Bring up GCCS on the other screen,” Dan murmured.

But the screen was blank. Someone behind them said, “GCCS, no data.”

“What?… Try again. There’s got to be data.” The center screen was still raw video from ALIS. But the left showed only a blinking caret. “Where’s the goddamned big picture?” he muttered.

The voice called, “Geeks is down. No response to repeated queries.”

“Oh, this isn’t good,” Mills murmured. Dan blew out. Without the Global Command and Control System, he was limited to what
Savo
’s and
Mitscher
’s organic sensors—Aegis, EW, sonar—could see, and, of course, what he could eavesdrop on in high-side chat and Indian television.

Tunnel vision. The classic danger for every commander in combat.

“Meteor Alfa, gathering horizontal velocity,” Donnie Wenck called, and Noblos’s voice added, “Pitchover.”

Dan flinched, winching himself back to the large-screen displays. “Okay, get that info out. Now! Flash voice, ComFifthFleet and CentCom.” Alfa’s elevation callout, in angels, passed six hundred and was still climbing. But the white dot, gripped by the brackets, which up to now had been stationary relative to the geo plot, began to drift. Eastward, toward India. Burnout and pitchover, into the long ballistic trajectory that would end at its target.

At some point he’d missed, Wenck or Terranova had put the predicted point of impact up on the rightmost screen. The area of uncertainty overlay shrank, expanded, elongated, and shrank again, shivering like Jell-O as ALIS continually recalculated. But in general, it was a vaguely oval-shaped darkness in western India, hundreds of miles inland from where
Savo
steamed.

He leaned forward in his seat, squinting. Fifty miles in length, forty in width, it seemed to be centered west of one of the Indian airfields the air strikes had risen from … supporting the ground attack that was crashing through the shattered Pakistani defenses. “How confident are we on that IPP, Terror?”

“Sir, hard to say. Should be narrowing down pretty quick, though, once it’s free of the atmosphere. Like I said, a humongous big return. Solid track.”

Dan sat back, casting his consciousness outside the box ALIS kept trying to cram it into. Should he have Red Hawk aloft? A glance at the gyro told him they were still headed for the coast. No,
Mitscher
’s bird would provide a sensor package between them and the coast. Both the Pakistani and Indian naval air forces would be on strip alert, if not already aloft in the land strike role. Diverting to hit
Savo
and
Mitscher
would offer their opponent an opening. He couldn’t let his guard down to seaward. A sub coming in from patrol, and finding a U.S. task group between it and a widening war, might not even need specific orders to attack. He clicked the IC selector to ASW and monitored. Should he prod them? He decided not to.

He looked back up at the center screen, and straightened in his chair.

The AOU was still vibrating, still shrinking with each succeeding recomputation. But with each quiver, the impact point crept west, leaving the airfield behind. “What the
hell
are they aiming at?” he murmured.

Mills cleared his throat. “Right now, looks like … Jodhpur.”

“The city? The population center?”

“I’m showing the city center west of the strip.”

Dan smoothed back his hair, glancing at the clock. His scalp was wet, which wasn’t surprising. Two minutes since detection. They were locked on, but it was still too soon to fire. Standards had limited range. With a crossing engagement, far inland, their window would be very narrow. If he fired too soon, the Block 4 would run out of kinetic and maneuvering energy, fall back into the atmosphere, and self-destruct. But if he fired too late, the incoming warhead would reach its target ahead of its pursuer.