“But the point is, the unknowns can overwhelm us, and the ferocious consequences of a major critical decision, if the result goes wrong, can paralyze the decision-maker. That’s where decision theory comes in. It starts with the exact description of the decision to be made — we already know that in this case. It goes on to describe all the foreseeable possible outcomes — and you just recited those quite nicely. It then goes on to list the unknowns by category. The known unknowns — where is this Yasen-M? What’s he armed with? And the unknown unknowns — what is his intent? What will his tactics be? What do his bosses want? And after all the dust settles from exploring the universe of unknowns, we list out the goals surrounding the decision. In our case, it’s simple. Mission first — steal the Panther and get her safely to AUTEC. If need be, take down an opposition force trying to interfere with that mission. Then the secondary goals — such as protecting the Vermont.
“So we’ve started, Captain. Now, conventional wisdom would say to map possible decisions with probabilities of outcomes and the consequences — sometimes the unintended consequences — of those outcomes, but doing that causes paralysis. In other words, the decision is just too scary to make, and people end up delaying making a decision, and you know what they say, the absence of a decision is a decision, yeah?”
“I’m with you, XO. That seems to be a good description of where we stand right now. So what’s the answer? Roll dice?”
“You’d be surprised, sir, how much better doing that is than stewing over a decision, but no, that’s not the remedy. The cure, Captain, is bias.”
“Bias, XO?”
“Bias, Captain. There are several distinct biases you could have right now. One of them is the fear of doing something wrong and getting yelled at. That seems to be your bias, if you don’t mind my criticizing you, sir.”
Seagraves crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on, XO.”
“Look at history, sir. General Patton — he used to get his ass chewed weekly, yeah? And Lord Admiral Nelson? He got reprimands that were epic. Your Admirals Chester Nimitz and Bull Halsey, and Captain John Paul Jones — you honestly think that they didn’t regularly get ear-piercing ass-chewings? But did that stop them? Do you think Patton gave one single shit about getting in trouble with the bosses when he was getting ready to tear across Nazi Germany?”
Seagraves stroked his chin, thinking.
“So let’s look at another possible bias. For lack of a better word, let’s call it bloodthirstiness. Imagine being furious at the Russians, like you would be if you were out for revenge. As if this were personal. As if that Yasen-M had killed the dearest thing in your life. How would you approach this then? Would you care about an ass-chewing then? No, Captain, you’d be spinning up the Tomahawk SubRocs in tubes eight and nine and calling for battlestations right now. Another way to examine bias is to imagine that someone else, someone with a different personality, is making the decision. What would he do? Think of young Lipstick Pacino. What would that fooker do right now? I’ll tell you what he’d be doing at this very moment, Captain. He’d be launching not one but two SubRocs at that Russian, gift wrapped with a nice note. Does any of this make sense to you, sir?”
Seagraves frowned and reached for the phone and buzzed the conn. The engineer answered. “Officer of the Deck.” Seagraves said, “Man silent battlestations and spin up the SubRocs in tubes eight and nine and make vertical launch system two ready in all respects for tactical launch.”
Lewinsky’s answer came back loud enough for Quinnivan to hear. “Yes, sir!”
28
The Arabian Sea was quiet this far from the shipping lanes. The sky was an uninterrupted cloudless blue, the intense sunlight blazing down on the seascape, the slight calm waves barely half a foot tall in the windless calm. There were no ships in sight, only a ruler-straight line marking where the sea ended and the sky began. Overall, there was the silence — not even the cry of a seagull could be heard, making this corner of the world one of the quietest places on the planet.
Pin-drop quiet, that is, until the sea suddenly erupted in an explosion of foam and spray, and a cylindrical white canister twenty-one inches in diameter suddenly burst out of the sea, rising four feet, then sinking back down again, bobbing in the sea, only the top eighteen inches of it protruding from the ocean’s surface, and then the scene calmed down once again. And as before the canister appeared, the silence returned, and the sea was as it was, quiet and calm.
Time passed. It could have been five minutes, or it could have been an hour. Time had little meaning here, except perhaps for the elevation of the sun in the sky. But after that uncertain interval of time, something happened. The top of the canister made an earsplitting BANG like a gunshot, and the lid of the canister blew high up into the atmosphere, the lid slowly and gracefully tumbling end-over-end back toward the sea, each of the twenty-four explosive bolts that had blown it clear of the canister still smoking. Then, from the maw of the canister, a green rocket suddenly flew vertically out into the sky, the canister sinking below, a solid rocket stage igniting into an orange and white fury, the sound more ear-splitting than the canister lid blowing off. Faster than a human eye could track it, the shape rocketed to the sky, leaving behind it a gray and white flame trail as it climbed to an altitude of 1300 feet, where the rocket motor stage separated under the action of its own explosive bolts, the used-up cylinder of aluminum tumbling back to the sea.
The missile had extended a ram-air suction scoop into the airflow on the underbelly, and extended small winglets forward on the mid-body. The airflow had windmilled a vaned axial compressor, until the compressor’s discharge into the six combustion chambers caused the air there to reach ten atmospheres of pressure, and at that moment the six fuel injectors actuated and blew atomized JP-5 fuel into the chambers and six spark plugs lit the mixture. The air in the chambers skyrocketed in pressure and temperature, its only escape to the suction box of the small turbine, through its vanes and out into the exhaust nozzle, which constricted the high-pressure flow and changed it into an ultra-high velocity flow. The missile had successfully morphed from a rocket to a jet.
The missile, at its highest point, rotated the winglets to guide it into a steep dive to the surface of the sea below. By the time it reached an altitude a hundred feet over the waves, the jet engine had reached full thrust and the missile sped up to near sonic velocity. The winglets rotated and the missile pulled out of its dive and roared eastward at an altitude of thirty feet over the waves.
In the first two minutes of its 480-knot travel, it flew over a second white canister that had also floated on the surface. As the missile continued onward on its journey, far behind it, a second missile blew out of the sea from the second canister, flew to its peak height and dived for the sea, starting its jet engine. The two missiles, several miles apart, flew on eastward, the seascape roaring past them in a mad blue blur. Their flight continued on for nineteen minutes, until it was time.