They watched, but ALIS would act. Human beings could not react quickly enough. The software would evaluate the threat parameters through to engagement orders. Yet still, with human eyes and brains tracking the process. “I retain release authority,” he told the space at large. “If I’m disabled, authority passes to the TAO.” He nodded at Branscombe.
He checked the boards above the displays once more: in the green, except the aft VLS was still down. Their effective-weapons count was half of what it had been before the fire. He reached for the Hydra, then instead leaned past Branscombe along the command table. “Chief?” Slaughenhaupt lifted shaggy eyebrows. “Can you get on the horn, see if Quincoches is making any progress aft? This’d be a good time to get that ordnance back on the ready board.”
“Will do, Captain.”
Okay, time to shift focus. Dan cleared his throat and picked up the Navy Red phone. In four crisp sentences, he brought the duty officer at CTF 60 up-to-date. The foundering liner. The jamming. And now, radar illumination. He requested air support, if available. Then signed off. Branscombe’s keyboard was machine-gunning; the same update was going out over the high-side chat. Putting it out to the world, or at least, the whole U.S. Navy.
When he resocketed the handset the space was quiet for a second. Then another. The AC hissed on endlessly. A shiver harrowed his spine. Either the temperature in here had dropped ten degrees, or he was getting chills. He scratched a flake of gray paint off the circular worn spot around the black rubber trackball inset in front of him.
A trilclass="underline" his Hydra. The helo detachment commander, Wilker. “Strafer, can you get the bird in the air in these conditions?” Dan asked.
“The guys are still overhauling from the evening patrol. But I can tell them to button up. That what you want, Skipper?”
“This wind’s not too strong? Snow’s not a problem?”
“We can eat the snow. We launch on instruments anyway, at night. It’s deck motion that defines the launch limits.”
“Eight degrees, right? We gotta be close to that. On this course anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fucking borderline, Skipper. You might have to back down to take us back aboard, if this wind blows any harder. But if you need us, we’ll go.”
Dan updated him on the jamming, the threat emitters. “I don’t think you’ll need weapons, so don’t delay if they’re not on the pylons. But load heavy with IR flares and decoys. I want you out there ASAP. Between us and the Syrian coast.”
Wilker rogered and said he’d launch as soon as possible. Dan rogered back and clicked off. Too late, he wondered if Strafer had been joking about backing down. From the guy’s tone, he couldn’t tell.
What else? He couldn’t think of anything.
He hated to sit and wait. Hardly anything was drilled into a naval officer more thoroughly from day one than a bias toward action, even if it was the wrong action; you never just steamed ahead on the same course, fat, dumb, and happy. That guaranteed the next enemy salvo would land on top of you. Unfortunately, with the SPY-1 in BMD mode, he kept having that tickle at the nape of his neck, the sense that someone was creeping around behind him. As if, sooner or later, some shadowy menace would wind up like a baseball batter and take off the back of his head.
Ammermann said, “Captain, I don’t understand. What about this cruise missile that’s threatening us? Can you take it out? Or get air from the carrier to do it?”
Dan took a deep breath, not looking at the civilian. “Can I? I could. We’re in Tomahawk range. But Sixth Fleet rules of engagement are clear, Adam. We can’t fire on a nonbelligerent. Not until he fires first. And an air strike on Syria would take presidential approval.”
“I don’t think we need to wait, necessarily.” He lowered his voice. “I can assure you now, preempting the threat will not be looked at askance.”
“Then that direction should have been in an addendum to my ROE,” Dan said. “I don’t have time now to discuss my chain of command. But I’m not going to short-circuit it. There’s a reason it’s there.”
He spared one microsecond to reflect sourly on how Nick Niles would probably fall out of his chair laughing, to hear Dan Lenson say that. But he wasn’t about to accept orders from Ammermann.
He snapped his attention back to the screens, tuning everything and everyone else out. From now on, each passing second would call for a decision, while he kept a hundred variables in mind. They were like a basketball team, following the ball around the court. Right now that basketball, called the initiative, was in the enemy’s hands. But at some point he’d fumble, and whoever recovered it would win the battle that was nearly upon them.
At the same time, he, at the little end of the funnel for all this information, had to rise above it, stay both focused and open, both engaged and aloft at ten thousand feet, seeing the big picture.
His legs ached, as they usually did when he went without sleep too long. He wished he could unlace his boots and prop stockinged feet on the command table. In front of them all. He’d known captains who wouldn’t have hesitated. Instead, he felt in his coverall pocket and located a lint-coated Aleve. Swallowed it with a gulp of tepid coffee.
Then leaned back, the chair creaking, and closed his eyes.
He opened them some time later to the TAO tapping his arm. “Sir, we’re getting intel feed,” Branscombe said. “Coming in Zircon chat. Lat-long of a suspected launch site.”
“Uh … put it on the screen.” Dan shook his head and scooted himself up in the chair. He looked around for the coffee cup. Where the hell had it gone? “Amy, you getting this?”
“On it, sir. Coming up now.”
On the center screen, the geo plot of Iraq and Jordan, two trapezoids of the same shape, but different sizes — of course, the displays were at different scales — winked on. Their borders flashed alternately orange and bright blue, cycling five times a second. The effect was nauseating, but it popped. The boxes were ninety miles due east of the Jordanian border, deep in Al-Anbar Province. What intel had called the Western Missile Sites.
Dan massaged the orbits of his eyes with the heels of his palms, pressing so hard that black-and-white digital-looking patterns rastered his retinas. Then he went to his keyboard. He located the chat but couldn’t make sense of the source code. A low-flying A-10, scouting for TELs. Or a Special Ops team, buried under some dune with infrared scopes, freq-hopping satellite uplinks. Brave men, deep in a hostile land. He flashed back on his own mission into Iraq. Stumbling across the desert. Discovered, once, by a shepherd. A dirty-faced kid with a harelip, and something brown stuck between his teeth, and long dark lashes like a girl’s. Dan could still recall his frightened, hopeless eyes.
“They’ve identified a mobile erector,” Branscombe said, obviously ahead of him reading the brief, cryptic tweets that floated upward, one after the other, as new transmissions joined the queue. How strange war felt when you could follow it moment by moment, like a video game, as tankers, airmen, staffers, each added his or her own glimpse of unfolding reality. Of course this specific chat was the highest of high-side discussions, limited to the ballistic-missile hunt west of Baghdad. But he could skip from one room to the next and sample war as it fractaled like a nuclear reaction going supercritical.
“All right.” Dan sensed a strange, mystical coldness descending like a liquid nitrogen — chilled Pyrex cylinder coming down between him and everything else. If it was time, it was time.