“I’ll check on him. Okay, sorry to interrupt your turnover.”
“No problem, sir.”
The F-5s angled west, and the antiair coordinator assigned them to Arleigh Burke for the live-fire exercise. One of the Turkish fighters would launch a drone target. But all units were warned to stay alert; a second wave was likely, and would probably strike from a different quarter. As Mills and Staurulakis started the turnover, Dan noticed the rumpled blond back of Donnie Wenck’s head at another console. He strolled over to stand behind him for a while, glancing back from time to time at the large displays. At last, he leaned over his shoulder. “What you running there, Donnie?”
“Diagnostic subroutine.”
“Did you ever check for that virus you mentioned?”
Wenck sighed. “Oh yeah. System’s clean. But it’s really clocking slow. I’m still not sure why. I was on that new high-side chat last night. We were getting deep into Linux. Good stuff. You know, we were always so isolated trying to fix things at sea, but now you can go brain to brain with the other FCs and really get to pick somebody’s neurons who’s maybe way out in PacFleet. I actually got to talk to the system supe aboard Monocacy, you know, our follow-on ship? That’s out there testing, out of Kwaj? And he says we’re due an upgrade.”
“Hardware, or—?”
“No sir, software.” Wenck explained that Savo Island’s system was baseline 7. NSWC Dahlgren had written a patch for the ballistic missile defense mission, called ALIS, which optimized long-range scan and took out speed and altitude stops that had been built in back when the system had first gone to sea. “That was a real dinosaur. Baseline 2.10. Rugged, but not a lot of computing power — eighty-megabyte ROM-based memory. Reel-to-reel tapes. Those old UH-3 disk packs.”
“I remember them from when I was with Joint Cruise Missiles. We used ’em for Tomahawk targeting.”
“Uh-huh. Well, they had to build in those stops back then, or the radar would be tracking the moon. But your Scuds and M-11s and such are operating in those regimes. Also, we got another slight problem. Or maybe not so slight. In fact, it could fuck us royal.”
Dan glanced at the vertical screen. Where the hell were the Turkish subs? “Okay, hit me. But, you know, Donnie, try to keep it…”
“Officer-comprehensible?”
“You got it.”
Wenck smoothed his cowlick, but it sprang up as soon as his palm left it. “It’s like, interoperability? You know we got Patriots in Israel. I was going over the defended-asset list. You know, what we’re assigned to cover?”
Dan lowered his voice. “Tel Aviv, primarily.”
“Right, but it gets more specific than that.” Wenck rattled the keyboard and a simplified map of Israel came up. He rattled again and a carpet of symbology overlaid the topography. “See this? Patriot battery at Ben Gurion Airport. Here’s their coverage arc. See how it underlies ours? Shorter range, but—”
“Patriot’s terminal defense. They don’t fire until the last minute or so before impact.”
“Right, but it starts earlier than that. We’re gonna get our—”
The air was growing very cold. Dan shivered and drifted a few steps away to rest a hand on Mills’s shoulder. “Check with Sonar, see if they have anything from TACTAS.”
“Just heard from them, sir. Still no joy,” the TAO murmured into his boom mike.
“Sorry, Donnie, go on. I’m listening.”
“I was saying, three ways to receive cuing. Either our own SPY-1, download from AWACs, or else from the satellite — infrared detection of the booster plume.”
“That’s the Obsidian Glint?”
“Right. Problem is, Patriot’s a semiactive tracker — the missile, like, navigates to impact listening to the radar emissions reflected off the incoming projectile.”
“So’re our Standards.”
“Right. Exactly! Their signals are from a phased-array radar not too different from ours. So, let’s say we pick up a cuing, and fire. And at the same time that radar at Ben Gurion’s out there scanning. Now suddenly there’s two missiles out there for them to home in on: the real target, and our Block 4. That’s what I’m leery of.”
“That it’ll shoot down our missile, you mean?”
“I guess it could, but we’d be at the ragged edge of its intercept envelope, and heading away by that time — it’d be trying to catch up on a tail chase — I ain’t no Patriot expert, you know? I’m more worried, there’s two birds active out there, we’ll decoy the Israelis off the real one. Then if we miss, everybody’s fucked. That Scud, or whatever it is, is gonna get through.”
Dan wondered how exactly to put this without sounding like, well, like an officer. “Uh, Donnie, I think that’s something to look into. But there’s three pieces to having us out here. A warfighting piece, a deterrence piece, and then there’s a political angle, too. Ideally we’d have all three in place — we can shoot the missile down, the other side knows we can, and the Israelis see we can.”
Wenck frowned. Just as Dan had figured he would. “You’re saying, we don’t actually have to have a P-sub-K of—”
“Yeah, yeah, we want to two-block that figure, but the point I’m making, if the guy who’s thinking about firing that missile figures we’ll just shoot it down, he might not hit the button. And even if he does, and we miss, and it hits an orphanage, at least we tried. We stood by our ally.”
The chief’s shoulders lifted, then sagged. Signifying either total lack of interest, or incomprehension. Dan waited, then went on. “Anyway, how do we fix it? This interoperability thing?”
“Like I said, I’m working it, and one of the guys thinks he can get a Patriot dude up on chat. There was an op-test called Coral Talon, but I haven’t been able to get an e-copy yet. What would really help is if we had, like, freqs from the Israelis. Or better yet, some way to talk to them direct, instead of going up through all the political bullshit architecture and then down again.” He pointed to a tall console farther down the aisle. “The EWs are picking up what they think’s the Ben Gurion battery, but it’s gonna freq-hop like crazy when it goes into battle mode.”
Dan glanced plotward again. Where the fuck were the Orange subs? Arleigh Burke had two lines of helo-laid sonobuoys out, but no contact. Could the “enemy” 209s already be inside the barrier? It seemed unlikely. But it was unsettling that they’d disappeared. Which of course was exactly what subs trained to do, but still … “Look, I’m gonna have to get back to this exercise, but keep working this, okay? Anything you need to get my signature on, or approve a message asking for that study or whatever, let me know. Okay?”
Wenck’s head was going up and down, but his attention was already a million miles away, back in the lines of code scrolling across the screen.
Dan was turning back for Sonar when the overhead speaker crackled to life. “Vampire, vampire, vampire! Bearing zero-eight-eight, range twenty, tracking left.”
Vampires were submarine-launched missiles. From the east. And close. He hurled himself toward his seat. On the display, the just-emerged missile was already hooked and blinking. It was crossing Savo’s beam, five miles off, at an extremely high angular velocity. Not an easy target, and headed directly for the carrier.
A second pip bloomed behind it. Then a third, from a different azimuth.
A coordinated attack. How had both subs evaded the screen? He grabbed for a handhold on the datalink console as the cruiser heeled, coming around to unmask batteries. He jammed on the headphones and his hand found the Fire button by feel as the engagement litany picked up velocity.