One of the worst of those had occurred in May of 1967, when the U.S. destroyer Walker cut in front of a Soviet vessel and sheered off, then sideswiped the destroyer Besslednyi, tearing loose a whaleboat and punching a hole in her side. The next day, unbelievably, the Walker had rammed a second Russian ship, holing her twice.
In 1972, in a little-publicized agreement signed during Nixon’s visit to Moscow, the U.S. and the USSR had agreed to hold yearly meetings, to exchange information and review charges arising from such incidents.
Called the Incidents at Sea Agreement, or INCSEA, it was designed to stop harassment on and over the high seas.
It had worked well for eight years. Unfortunately, by 1980 the political balance in Washington had become extremely precarious. Russian aggression in Afghanistan, communist support for the Sandanistas, the collapse of detente all had suggested a final breakdown of any dialogue with the Soviets. Certain factions in Congress, with political careers riding on SALT II and good relations with the Soviets, had hoped to reverse what seemed to be increasing intransigence on the part of Moscow. The ramming incident had appeared to be the Americans’ fault … or at least the fault of the admiral who had been aggressively hounding the Russian sub. By playing up the incident and doing some aggressive hounding of their own, they had hoped to prove the benevolence of U.S. intentions toward the Russians.
Too aggressive, the bastards had claimed. Even after being vindicated by the Navy board, there’d been little his supporters could do to shield him at the time. The Navy could not afford to antagonize the source of its yearly appropriations, and Vaughn, by fighting back, had made enemies on Capitol Hill.
So he’d been quietly shunted aside — out of sight, out of mind. In a Crippling turn of irony, another U.S. carrier, the Kitty Hawk, had collided with a Soviet Victor in 1984. The Russian had been running with no lights in the hours just before dawn, and the collision had left pieces of the sub’s propeller embedded in the Kitty Hawk’s hull. By that time, though, America’s military reawakening in the Reagan years had been well under way, and the men involved had suffered none of the probings or ostracism that Vaughn had suffered.
Vaughn understood the Navy’s reasoning — at least he tried to convince himself that he understood — but that didn’t change the bitter unfairness of it all. For twelve years he’d sat it out on the beach, his career at dead slow. His wife had left him four years earlier, a scandal in the tight circles of high-ranking Washington Navy society that had only added to his image as a has-been who’d never quite made the grade. He’d been ready to quit, to formally retire from the Navy, when the intervention of powerful friends in the Pentagon had opened up this new opportunity.
Command of CBG-14.
If he could carry out his orders … if Washington or the Russians didn’t screw him once again, he could still salvage his career, salvage his life. But the sinking of the Indian sub had raised the old specters once more. Biddle’s aggressive patrolling had triggered the incident … or at least, that was how Washington would interpret it.
And as COCBG, he was responsible for Biddle.
He climbed up the ladder into the Seahawk, accepting a cranial and life vest from the crew chief. “We’ll be a few minutes taking off, Admiral,” the enlisted man said as Bersticer scrambled up the ladder and took his seat at the admiral’s side. “That Russkie helo’s on its approach to the Vickie now. We want to give them plenty of room.”
Vaughn nodded as he strapped on the helmet. It figured. The Russians were always getting in his way! Well, God help the bastards if they ever got in his way again!
In Greek mythology the mirror-brilliant shield of Athena was Aegis. The hero Perseus used it in his battle with the gorgon Medusa, fighting her by watching her reflection in the shield.
It was a potent name for a potent modern air defense system. Linked by fifteen on-board computers and sophisticated electronics to the SPY-1 radar system, Aegis could track hundreds of targets simultaneously, could guide upgraded Navy Standard missiles, and could even coordinate fleet defense with other ships in the squadron. In the so-called “Armageddon mode,” Aegis could track and fire automatically, without any input at all from the crew beyond turning it on. Any target meeting certain criteria of speed, course, and altitude within ten miles of the ship would be fired on.
The vessel chosen to house Aegis was the end product of a long line of compromises. Originally designed as destroyers, the Ticonderoga-class cruisers had been intended as antiair warfare complements to a new type of ship, the nuclear strike cruisers (CSGN) that were to have been fitted with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Aegis was to have been fitted to both of them, creating an electronically interlocked AAW system. Then Congress refused to fund the CSGN program, and cost overruns threatened to torpedo the Ticonderogas and their high-tech Aegis system as well.
At the beginning of 1980, the Navy changed the Ticonderogas’ classification from destroyer to cruiser, a move that made the cost overruns look better on the Pentagon’s books and better reflected the vessels’ abilities. As Aegis cruisers, the Ticonderogas became a vital part of the Navy’s global strategy. A total of twenty-seven were planned, providing missile and air defense coordination for each Navy carrier battle group as well as the four battleship combat groups.
America’s Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers were widely regarded as the most capable antiair warships ever developed. U.S.S. Vicksburg, CG-66, was a recent addition to the class, having been laid down by Litton/Ingalls Shipbuilding, launched from the Ingalls floating dock in 1990, and formally commissioned early in 1991. Just over 532 feet long at the waterline, displacing 9,500 tons with a full load, Vicksburg’s hull was low and sleek with a sharply angled bow. Her superstructure was notoriously boxy, sandwiched between two massive gray cubes that faced fore and aft like gigantic bookends. Those cubes housed Vicksburg’s SPY-1B phased-array radars, which were visible on the slightly angled upper surfaces as flat hexagons, one aiming in each direction. The bridge was a flat line of windows planted atop the forward cube, dwarfed by the blunt steel mountain on which it rested.
Vicksburg’s complement was twenty-four officers and three hundred forty men. Through the tangle of antenna arrays, data links, and satcom dishes, she was a high-tech spider at the center of a vast, electronic web, able to receive and process data from any of the other, ships or aircraft in the squadron or, by satellite, to communicate with CINCPAC in Hawaii or the Joint Chiefs in Washington.
And the heart of the entire system was Vicksburg’s CIC, where the ship’s battle staff watched the electronic signatures moving within the reach of the ship’s senses and worked to piece together a strategy to deal with them. A seaborne analogue of the E-2C Hawkeye, Vicksburg could serve as a battle management system to coordinate the movements and responses of the entire fleet. Her SPY-1 was a marvel of computer-directed electronics, constantly searching for small, pop-up targets such as aircraft or missiles within forty-five nautical miles of the ship, while simultaneously scanning a much vaster area out to a range of two hundred miles for larger targets.
Captain Randolph Cunningham of the U.S.S. Vicksburg had just entered the CIC. The Combat Information Center was part of an operational complex called the Command and Control Suite. The room was large, larger than the fact that the ship was built on a Spruance-class destroyer’s hull would have suggested, and it was dominated by four Large Screen Displays, or LSDS, set side by side above a bank of computer consoles.