“Lock on.”
“Ready to fire. Select—”
“Holy shit, they’re really firing!” Mills yelled. Dan tensed, before the lieutenant continued, “Uh, sorry, belay that … my mistake. Exercise-generated imagery. Sorry. Won’t happen again. Sorry, Captain, sorry.”
Dan eased out a breath. “Eye on the ball, Matt. It’s only an exercise. Knock them down. They’re homing on the carrier. EW?”
“Jamming,” came over the phone circuit from the SLQ-32 console. “No visible effect.”
Before they could fire, the dry voice of the anti-air warfare controller crackled over the net, assigning the inbound vampires to a destroyer in the inner screen. Dan cursed; Savo had missed her chance. She heeled again, this time reorienting to take on the subs. Voices rose from Sonar and the tracking table as they lined up for a shot. Dan toggled the ASW display on the leftmost screen, squinting. The screen flickered. Then he saw.
“Range, thirty-eight thousand, bearing zero eight zero. Stand by to fire Asroc.”
“Negative!” Dan shouted. “Check fire, check fire! He’s too close to the fucking dog box.”
Putting a torpedo in the water there would endanger one of the Blue subs, the friendlies, scouting out ahead of the force. Apparently, due to layer depth, or whatever low cunning the Turkish sub commander had employed, the Blue sub hadn’t detected him.
However he’d done it, the Orange sub was using the Blue one like a hostage shield, leaving Dan unable to attack. He keyed the 21MC, then let up on the lever as Mills passed the command he’d been about to give. “Bridge, TAO; come left—”
“Remember you have the tail streamed,” Dan put in.
“Yes sir. — Come left, no greater rudder than fifteen degrees; steady three two zero; go to flank.” He was repositioning Savo, placing the cruiser, as a shield between the enemy and the carrier. Blocking the next missile salvo. The hum of the turbines rose to a whooshing scream. The superstructure began to vibrate. A deckplate buzzed like a cicada.
Dan pressed his mike switch. “Sonar, CO: Do you have a solid contact?”
“Bridge, Sonar: Contact tracking one eight five, speed nineteen. CO, Sonar, did you copy?”
“Copy,” Dan snapped. Nineteen knots: top speed for a submerged 209, and not one its batteries could maintain long. One boat was sprinting south. Attempting an end run? Or trying to seduce them off its partner? “Source of that datum?”
“TACTAS, sir. Mainly flow noise, sounds like.”
“Keep an eye on that bearing,” Dan told Mills. “As soon as they clear the dog box, I want an Asroc in the air.”
“TAO aye.” Mills switched to the ASW circuit, and Dan half overheard his side of the conversation as they made ready to fire. He switched back and forth on his headset, watching chat click up his desktop screen, seeing Arleigh Burke’s Standard splash the drone fifteen miles from Theodore Roosevelt, the exercise opening like a flower on the big flat-panel displays. He switched and keyed. “Aegis, CO: Keep an eye peeled up toward Antalya. They could launch a second strike out of there.”
Terranova’s Jersey-accented soprano: “Aegis aye.”
He switched back just in time to catch “TAO, Sonar: Lost contact.”
“What the fuck is going on back there?” Mills muttered. “Sonar, TAO: What do you need to regain?… Okay … okay, but we’re right at the edge.… Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. Bridge, TAO: Left turn, steady up on one eight zero and drop to ten—”
Longley, at his elbow. “Coffee, Captain? And we got, hey, we got oatmeal cookies tonight. Really good.”
Dan blew out, trying to keep his temper. He didn’t want more coffee … but he needed more … so fucking tired … but his stomach churned. He grabbed a cookie and wolfed it. Typical big, chewy U.S. Navy mess deck cookie. Not much you could find fault with, actually. He chased it with a slug of coffee that turned out to be so scalding he would have spat it back into the cup if both Mills and the steward hadn’t been watching him. “Holy smoke, Longley, did you brew this with a blowtorch?”
“Ran that straight up from the galley, Captain. Know you like it hot.”
His tongue felt flayed. Dan clicked back to the antisubmarine circuit, wondering why he wasn’t hearing anything from Zotcher. But then snapped the dial back to antiair when another voice said, “TAO, Sonar: Regained contact. Range twenty thousand. Bearing one zero five.”
“Christ, at last,” the CIC officer muttered, on Mills’s other hand.
The exercise lulled. Dan stretched, tried to fight his eyelids up again. Shivered, and resolved to bring a sweater the next time he came up here. Checked his watch: 0413. Considered calling Almarshadi to take it, but didn’t. The XO needed sleep too.
Finally he stood, and stretched again, touching the overhead with the tips of his fingers. He bent and snagged his toes a couple of times, just to get the blood moving again. Something popped in his back. He glanced over at the Aegis display. Past Wenck and Terranova, their heads together, the electronic warfare consoles flickered a weird graveyard green. It might not just be that the Patriot battery could mistake Savo’s SM-2 for the incoming Scud. Could there also be mutual interference, from the Patriot’s and Aegis’s own radar guidance? Had anyone ever thought to deconflict the spectra between the Army’s antimissile system and the Navy’s? They freq-shifted, sure. But would the bands they swept overlap? It sounded all too much like the kind of thing no one in either service had bothered to check out, and that you’d find out too late. He’d have to ask Noblos. Investigate—
“Datum: Bearing two seven three, nine thousand yards.”
The red diamond of a hostile sub ignited on the screen. At the same instant, the cool tones of the exercise coordinator murmured in Dan’s headphones, “Simulated Orange Vampire launch, two seven zero, nine thousand.”
“Vampire, Vampire, Vampire!”
On the chat screen: SJC TAKE TRACK 7895
Frozen, Dan watched as USS San Jacinto veered left to place herself in front of the carrier, locking on the rapidly nearing sub-launched missile. “The fucking sub’s in the inner screen,” Mills said, incredulous. “His little buddy went south to fox us. We had him all the way. But how in the hell did the other bastard sneak past us?”
Dan slammed down his headset and stormed back through Combat. Savo slanted, hard, as she slewed around again. If the sea had been pavement, rubber would have been smoking. He slammed his shin into the steel frame of a chair and ripped the blue Sonar curtain aside.
In here the darkness was almost total; the only lamps were the wavering orange curtains on the screens, a Northern Lights cat’s-cradle that wound the gaze seamlessly into them. He put a hand out to avoid any stray stanchions. “What the hell’s going on back here? We can’t track a nineteen-knot sub at nine miles’ range?”
No one answered, though one of the sonarmen flinched. The other was just as hypnotized as before. To Dan’s astonishment, though, Zotcher’s head was back against his headrest at an awkward angle. And … he was snoring.
When he seized the man’s shoulder and shook it, he might have been rougher than he meant to be. Zotcher’s head snapped forward and back. His eyes jerked open; he blinked groggily, sniffling. “Goddamn it, Chief! What the hell do you think you’re doing!”