“I wish Noah had gotten to school.”
“I agree, sir. Mr. Pardees strikes me as levelheaded. But he hasn’t had the training — as you said. Nor has Lt. Singhe. The only other alternative is Chief Slaughenhaupt. Our leading fire controlman. But we need him as combat systems officer of the watch.”
“Okay, you’re right — make it Branscombe. How about our OODs?”
Staurulakis proposed moving Mytsalo up to officer of the deck. Dan kept his voice low, in case the ensign was on the bridge with them. “Who else’ve we got? An ensign — I don’t know. Who’re our other JOODs?”
“Sir, the officer of the deck under way doesn’t have the responsibilities he used to. A lot of that’s been absorbed by the TAO.”
“I know that, yeah. But still—”
“The only other possibility’s the chief quartermaster.”
“Van Gogh?” Dan ping-ponged that around in his skull. It’d mollify the goat locker, seeing one of their own fleeted up. “I don’t have any problem with a chief standing OOD. Not the navigator, anyway. He’d certainly be on the stick as far as where we are relative to the basket.… Okay. Make it Van Gogh. But give him Mytsalo as JOOD, and tell Gene he’s gonna be next in line, soon’s he gets a little more seasoning.”
“Good thinking, sir.” The clipboard light winked out.
“What about this freakin’ snowfall, Cher? Will this degrade our beam numbers?”
She explained the main problem was side-lobe visibility. “The snow adds more background clutter. We have better discrimination with the D, but especially in the high-clutter near-shore environment, along with all this sea return this wind’s kicking up … yeah, the snow can degrade us … especially for something like a low-flying C-802. But Chief Wenck thinks he can combine pulses to build what he calls a ‘synthetic wideband image’ out of one of the side lobes.”
“You lost me, Cher.”
“I mean, along with the main beam, you get side lobes—”
“I know that. Any beam has side lobes. Like harmonics.”
“Well, normally that’s wasted power. But he’s trying to tinker with the signal processing to turn that into an extra radar. To give us a better look along the coastline, to alert us to any cruise missile launch.”
“That’s great, but I don’t want it tuned in such a way it degrades our ABM search function.”
“Noted, sir.”
“Have Donnie give me a call. I really don’t want to trade main mission for self-protection.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Will the cloud cover degrade satellite cuing?”
“Obsidian’s more of a sideways-looker. And it’s an infrared sensor. I’m not sure how much snow or cloud would degrade that.”
The STU-3 beeped. Dan flinched. The scarlet light above it was flashing so brightly it lit up this whole end of the pilothouse. The boatswain hurried over with masking tape. “Stand by, please, Ops,” Dan said, and got the phone to his ear. “Savo Island actual here.”
“This is Jen Roald. Over.”
“Commodore. Lenson here. Over.”
“Dan. I just got this. You had another fire?”
“More serious this time. In the aft VLS. Lost eight missiles to fire and flooding.” Staurulakis put her hand on the remote box; he nodded; she turned the speaker on.
“That’s not good. But it wasn’t the Block 4s? Are the rest of your cells back up? Over.”
“We’re running operability tests now. I’m hoping to get them back up shortly.”
“Message on the way. Things are moving faster than anyone expected. The Army’s crashing through the border defenses. Also, and this may be of interest to you, there are mutterings of support from Iran.”
“Meaning, their task group? Over.”
“They’ve announced their first port call. Syria.”
Dan shook his head. “Taken on board.”
“Good. We also have a warning order from EuCom. We want your total attention focused on the western part of Al-Anbar Province. CentCom’s trying to interdict the launchers with air and ground teams, but you’re the backstop.”
“Copy, over,” Dan said into the phone. “Map of Iraq,” he asided. The clipboard riffled. A moment later it was in his lap, with Staurulakis’s red penlight illuminating the area just east of the Jordanian border. From the topo, it looked like desert. Nearly unpopulated, and unroaded, too, from the absence of town or road symbology. He’d seen Saddam’s hulking Russian-supplied TELs — transporter, erector, launchers — with his own eyes, in a secret installation beneath Baghdad, during Signal Mirror. Obviously they weren’t in the capital anymore, and their eight all-terrain wheels, much taller than a man, meant they could go cross-country, hide in wadis or under overpasses. The intel said it took half an hour from parking to launch.
“Commodore, that’s where we’ve been looking. But can anyone neck it down a little more? The more localization we have, the narrower we can set the gate functions, and the more confident I’d feel about early detection. Over.”
“Stand by.”
A short pause, during which Dan shifted in his chair. When she came back on, Roald read off six-figure geocoordinates. Dan jotted them on the map’s margin, glanced at Staurulakis; she nodded. He read them back, slowly, enunciating in the exaggerated radio speech learned so many years before. “Thuh-ree. Zee-ro. Nine-er.”
“That’s correct. Not to limit your search to that area, but that’s what they’ve given us as what they’re calling the Western Complex. They operated from there during the Gulf War, too, and we had a hard time locating them then.
“What’s it like weather-wise on your end? I’m seeing this cold-air surge hitting you soon.”
He looked out the window but couldn’t see much in the darkness. “Correct, the front’s hitting now. We’re getting snow and six-foot seas.”
“What’s your Israeli friend doing?”
Dan craned down for the repeater but couldn’t quite reach it. The OOD came in from the darkness. He muttered, “Still out there, sir. Ten thousand one hundred yards.”
“Any other surface contacts?”
“No sir. Not for this whole watch.”
“He’s still with us, Jen. Like a bur. Any progress on that link to the Patriot battery at Ben Gurion? It would really help.”
“I knew there was something else. I think we’ve got you up at least on voice. I’ll get the freq to you. Watch your TAO chat.”
Roald signed off. As Dan socketed the handset he was suddenly racked with nausea. Up here, in the dark, the motion seemed to be getting worse. He envisioned his bunk with the hopeless yearning of unrequited love. Deep … slow … breaths. The sickness backed off and he fumbled for the reclining knob on the seat. Dropped it as far as it would go, and leaned back with a sigh. Closed his eyes, and listened to the regular whip-whip of the wipers. Whip-whip. Whip-whip.…
“Captain? You awake?”
“Uh … yeah.”
The dream had been so real, so detailed, waking was like coming back from another life.
He’d been much older. Gray. Bent. And, weirdly, he’d been some kind of pastor — Lutheran? It hadn’t been exactly clear. He’d been in a concentration camp, with barbed wire around it. Just before he’d been awakened, the guards had been herding a group of prisoners past. They were ragged, starved, in much worse shape than he. Though he was also an inmate, there was some deep difference between them. Some profound foreignness about their features, and the language they gabbled as their captors harried them along with bayoneted rifles.