Ammermann said sure, absolutely, whatever Dan said. A crewman hustled over carrying an expensive-looking leather suitcase and a hanging bag. Dan drew Chief Toan aside. “Take him to the unit commander’s suite, and put somebody you trust on the door. I don’t want this dude wandering around. We still don’t really know who he is.”
“Gotcha, sir.”
“Be courteous. Get him coffee, put a movie on for him, but don’t let him roam unescorted. In fact, don’t let him out of the stateroom.” The chief nodded, and Dan forced an Official Smile at Ammermann, who was standing by his luggage. The staffer kept glancing from the suitcase to the chief. Only when it was perfectly obvious that no one else was going to pick it up did he make a little quirk of the mouth and bend for it. As he did so pens and a smart phone fell out of his jacket, bouncing away over the nonskid. The crew chief was on it in an instant, yelling, “FOD alert! Get this shit off the deck, ASAP!” and slamming a boot down on the phone as Ammermann winced and plastic cracked.
Dan almost smiled. But not quite. Then he was out of there, mind snapping to the next item on the day’s agenda.
They assembled in his in-port stateroom. Longley had coffee and doughnuts ready and Dan gestured everyone — Noblos and Wenck and Mills, Singhe and Terranova and Staurulakis, the major players in his Aegis team — to seats. Dr. Noblos looked worn and held a handkerchief to his nose; he sniffled. Terranova smiled down at the table with that inwardness, that passivity, he’d noted before, and grabbed for a doughnut. Wenck was humming to himself, some inaudible ditty that bounced his head back and forth as he plugged in a power supply and set up a notebook. Not for the first time, Dan wondered if there might be a touch of autism, Asperger’s or something like that, there. Mills blinked into space. He’d just come off watch and looked as if his head were still in Combat. Staurulakis sat pale, calm, composed, compact, ready for anything. While Singhe, perfectly pressed, perfectly coiffed, smiled at him, deep brown eyes seeming to convey more than any whisper could. Sandalwood perfume drifted across the table. The strike officer wasn’t really part of the TBMD team. But maybe the more brainpower they poured on this, the better.
He cleared his throat. “All right, I asked everyone here to iron out any hard spots now that the watch is set in ABM mode. I guess I’ll ask Chief Wenck … or, maybe better, Dr. Noblos to start the recap.”
The physicist coughed. He said in a hoarse voice, “I assume you’re calling this to check our timelines and geometry?”
“Maybe start with an overview, Doctor.”
Noblos smiled tightly. “I’ll make it as … simple as I can, then.
“Savo Island’s mission is to maintain station once hostilities begin, in surveillance and track mode, ready to intercept any ballistic missile fired within a radius of three hundred miles. The obvious enemy is Iraq, the extended-range Scud they call the Al-Husayn, though Iran’s also on the threat axis and within range. If the firing point is from western Iraq, we’ll have a near zero angle of attack on the incoming missile from here.
“We’ll probably acquire either via handoff from AWACS or cuing from Obsidian Glint. Aegis will develop a track, compute intercept trajectory, and initialize. We have a limited inventory. Four Block 4A Theater Defense rounds. The missile will perform a built-in system test, match parameters, and fire itself. This must occur no later than eight minutes after the target launch.”
The scientist coughed. “After firing and in flight, the SM-2 establishes communication with the ship. The booster will burn out, and separate. The solid-fuel dual-thrust motor will ignite. Aegis keeps transmitting midcourse guidance through the third-stage motor burn, taking the warhead above the atmosphere. The kill vehicle will apogee three hundred twenty-five kilometers up at approximately fifteen thousand miles an hour. Terminal long-wave infrared guidance will take it to final impact.
“If, that is, all goes as planned.” Noblos blinked bloodshot orbs at the overhead. “Limiting factors are the low round loadout, marginal crew training, marginal software function, and limited backup amplifier and power-out equipment. I have to be honest. The best possible outcome would be if we never have to fire. Because I don’t think you’re ready to detect, track, and discriminate well enough to achieve mission success.”
Dan said as evenly as he could, “Thanks for the recap, Doctor, and for keeping it … comprehensible. Matt, what can you add?”
Mills spoke through his hands, which were clamped over his face. “Well, Dr. Noblos has pointed out most of the hard spots. But the cooling system and the calibration are question marks too. I have more confidence in Donnie and the Terror’s tracking team than the Doc seems to. But the geometry’s going to govern everything, and it’s the one variable we can maybe get some more traction on. So I printed this out.”
He passed out pages, and Dan studied his copy. A map of the Levantine, with a blurry infinity or sideways figure-eight pattern overlaid between the east Med and western Iraq. The left lobe of the lazy eight was much smaller than the right.
Mills said, “Over here to the left is our assigned box. You can see we have a pretty small footprint to jockey around in. We’re going to have to watch the intel very closely. If we get launch indications farther south in Iraq”—he rocked his fingers in a seesaw—“we’ll want to move north. And vice versa. The more we can minimize the sideways velocity vectors, the bigger the error basket we give ourselves.”
“Bigger, or smaller?” Dan asked. “I’m not sure I—”
Staurulakis said, “Think of it as a funnel, Skipper. The narrow end’s what we have to get the missile into. That’s the error basket. The kill vehicle has its own little steering thrusters, once the infrared seeker locks on. That’s the open end of the funnel. But there’s only a limited amount of maneuverability after burnout.”
Mills added, “Don’t forget, it’s going two miles a second by then. We have to get our bird into that funnel, as Cheryl calls it, so the seeker can track and discriminate for a hit-to-kill. The closer to a nose-on meeting we can manage, the bigger that basket will be, and the better chance we’ll hit it.”
Dan said, “Okay, let’s assume we hit the, uh, the error basket. What’s P-sub-K after that? Probability of kill?”
Noblos took that one. “For the warhead itself, if it gets out there and is positioned right, and the target’s within its maneuverability envelope, P-sub-K will be around .8. Or so. But that’s to impact. Actual PK on an incoming warhead also depends on what kind of target we get, unitary or separating. If the airframe detaches from the warhead, for example, as reentry starts, you get two targets and possibly other debris as well. There’s some discrimination built into the seeker, but it’s not foolproof.”
“Overall?” Dan asked quietly.
“Probably about .5.”
He sucked air. Even odds were not so good when you had only four missiles. They could look, shoot, look, shoot, but at a closing rate of fifteen thousand miles an hour they’d have no time for a second try. “Can we fire two-round salvos?”
“Depends on the geometry.” Noblos’s grin was diabolical, until he grabbed a napkin and sneezed.
Nobody else said anything, and after a moment Dan nodded to Wenck. “Okay, Donnie, you’re coming in at this pretty much from the outside. What’re you seeing that we’ve all missed?”
The newly minted chief had been riffing on his keyboard all through the discussion. Now he rotated it to display a chart of the eastern Med. A sea-tinted teardrop faced its blunt end toward Damascus. The tapered tail extended far to the west, almost to Greece. He drawled, “A little different take on what Mr. Mills just presented. This blue patch is our defended area, against a missile from western Iraq.” He pivoted the screen so all could see in turn.