He’d come to visualize this as a circle hovering sixty miles above and slightly north of Amman. Ezekiel saw that wheel, way up in the middle of the air.… Donnie and Mills were down trying to improve the numbers on the other array. If they couldn’t get it above 80 percent, he’d have to head west rather than north. Which would gradually open the range, and thus reduce their probability of kill.
Stuck to them like a tick, the bright pip of Lahav rode five miles off. During the night the Israeli corvette had repositioned to the north. Staurulakis had interpreted that positively. “He’s clearing our downrange bearing. Letting us do what we’re here for,” she’d murmured, typing rapidly. She was monitoring the chat from the U.S. and British ships that had slammed open the doors of Iraq’s defenses with salvos of Tomahawks from the Gulf and the Red Sea. “There won’t be a long air campaign before the land assault this time. The Army and Marines are already crossing the Kuwaiti border.”
“They’ll burn the oil fields again,” Dan said. Remembering the stench of burning hydrocarbons that had hung over that land, like smoke over Mordor, during the last war.
“Maybe not, if we can take them down fast enough. SpecOps are mounting an amphibious assault on Basra. It’s going to hang on what happens when the Army hits the Republican Guard.”
“Good luck to ’em,” Dan said. When it came to war, the football-field enmity, always half a joke anyway, vanished, and the services rolled as one.
Terranova came out of the darkness holding a thermos and a plate. “Coffee, Captain? And they sent us up some cinnamon buns. Special, for the tracking team.”
“Nice. Thanks, Beth.” He took two; his mirror had been telling him he could afford some empty calories. He winced as the fresh charge of java burned his tongue. The buns were drizzled with crystallizing frosting; he wolfed one and half the second. Sucking the sticky sweetness off his fingers, he repositioned his keyboard and switched from one camera to the next. Damn, it was dark out there. Even in the infrared. He cranked up the magnification and searched the horizon, then guiltily switched it off. The gunners on the ROC consoles on the bridge were scanning, backed up by the CIWS watch team. He needed to stay up at angels one hundred. Keep his mind clear, his head on the main mission.
ALIS — the acronym dated from the LEAP Intercept program, but specifically, now, meant only the software patch in Aegis that drove the TBMD programming — was up. On the right-hand display, the spokes clicked back and forth with metronomic regularity. They’d turned off everything from 0 to 0.5 degrees elevation and put all the system resources into above-horizon search. He stretched his arms until tendons cracked. “Okay, where are we, Cher?”
“A reminder on the high side to watch for indications of missiles being fueled. Any intel will be forwarded to us Flash precedence, but we’ll probably hear it over chat first. Increased threats from enemy leadership—”
“Double-check on that.” So if the satellite chat went down, they’d lose time on getting the warning order. He had to talk to Branscombe, make sure their cybersecurity was up and they had backup receivers standing by on the satellite downlink. If they couldn’t get alerts fast, Savo was nothing but a fat target out here.
“Correct. Weapons posture to TBMD — check.” She tapped the keyboard, and dawn came up on the middle screen. Seen through the camera from the port 25mm, the horizon seesawed, rising and falling, since the gun’s gyros were in standby. A gradually brightening patch, far off, a cast-iron sky over a sooty sea.
Dan squinted. Leaned into it. “What’s that?” Tiny specks dotted on the screen, seemingly on the lens itself.
Staurulakis murmured, “Snow.”
“Crap,” he muttered. They really didn’t need the blizzard that Fleet Weather had said for days was coming down from Europe. He didn’t mind degraded visibility. If a small boat or an explosive-laden trawler was out here trying to find them, reduced viz would be a plus. But heavy snow could degrade the tightly focused SPY-1 beam, searching like the flaming Eye of Sauron far out over Palestine and Jordan and the Iraqi desert. Searching for that ascending spark that meant missile.
From that first instant, assuming they picked it up as it cleared the radar horizon, he’d have roughly fourteen seconds to lock, track, evaluate, and launch. They might get a few seconds more if the Obsidian Glint, far overhead, caught the heat plume from the booster. But he wasn’t confident about the handoff from the Defense Support Program satellites. No one had tested the cuing procedure, and he wasn’t getting actual video, just text from the ground station. The Army had space-based imagery in real time, but the Space and Missile Defense Command Operations Center hadn’t responded to Dan’s request that Savo be placed on distribution too. Not that he had the intel capability to interpret photos, but access would be nice. AWACS, orbiting over Saudi Arabia, might also pick up the ascending weapon.
But all in all, his response time was disappearingly meager.
A cough, a sniffle from over by the Aegis area. When he looked that way Noblos was wiping his prominent schnoz, bent over, staring blearily at the screen. “Doctor.” Dan raised his voice. “Bill!”
Noblos looked his way. “How you feeling?” Dan called.
“Recovering. I believe.”
“Good.”
“I wish I could say the same for your system.”
Dan motioned to a seat. Noblos pulled it out and settled. He coughed and muttered, “I was out, but not idle. I read up on what type of warheads we might be intercepting.”
“Scud-type missiles. Right?”
“Those would be our most likely targets. True. But did you read the DIA report?”
“Which one? I read one that said they believed Saddam had both bulk chemical and biological weapons.” What he didn’t add was that the report had referenced the report of the Signal Mirror team — which, by the way, he’d written — to indicate the possibility of weaponized biological submunitions. Lower on the list, but not ruled out, was the possibility of what the report called a “baseline fission weapon,” defined as a fifteen-kiloton, single-warhead design.
Blinking at the GCCS screen, Noblos muttered, “Here’s what I wonder. Why make Tel Aviv the target? They only have a few missiles. We’re scouring the desert, blowing away any we find. But why not use them against the Coalition forces? The amphib landings at Basra? That’d be a more rewarding target set.”
“The Army will be shielding those,” Dan said. “They’ve got THAAD and Patriot. We’re holding the back door while the Army and Marines are going in the front.”
“The point I’m making is, we keep assuming they’re using countervalue targeting. What if they start with counterforce?”
“Countervalue” was strategic shorthand for striking enemy population centers and political targets. “Counterforce” meant targeting the enemy’s armed forces, particularly his strategic missiles, command, control, and air defenses. Dan frowned. “You mean — what? The task force? They’re out of range of a Scud. Even with that uprated booster they’re supposed to have developed. The, uh, the Al-Husayn.”
“Right.” Noblos coughed, covering his mouth. “But we’re not.”
Dan leaned back, nodding as he tumbled to where the scientist was going. “You’re saying, the first couple could be aimed at us? Well … maybe. But nothing I’ve seen argues they’ve achieved that level of accuracy. We’re a damn small bull’s-eye. And we’re not moving that fast, but we are moving.”