At that moment a digitally generated double chime sounded, one he’d never heard before, from the Aegis area. “Launch cuing incoming, Link 16,” Wenck yelled.
Link 16 was the primary path for long-range cuing information, a digital 25-kilohertz military satellite channel. There were a number of possible inputs for detection information, but the most likely would be either AWACS, orbiting far to the east over the Gulf, or the down-looking sensors of the geostationary Obsidian Glint, twenty-five thousand miles up.
He pulled over his notebook and called up a little program he’d written. It modeled the engagement geometry in the form of an oblate spherical triangle, with the apexes at the LPE, the launch point, the DOA, the defended area, and their own ship position. It was a simplistic algorithm, but he felt better having an independent check on what ALIS was putting out. The firing point was from western Iraq. That was good; their angle on the incoming missile might be okay.
“We need LPE, IPP, AOU!” he yelled. “Call ’em out and put ’em on the screen.”
“Coming through now.”
“Put it up! Put it up!” Amy Singhe was yelling. The leftmost panel flickered, then came back. “It’s up,” she said, voice pitching high.
Dan sat hunched, staring up, fingers poised over the notebook’s keyboard as the preformatted TADIL message displayed on the leftmost screen. Of course ALIS had already ingested this data. It was developing a track, computing the intercept trajectory, and initializing the Standards. The human eyes and brains reading the formatted message were already seconds behind.
But there it was. Launch point, impact-point prediction, area of uncertainty. The second two numbers he could ignore for now. Even the satellite was only guessing until booster burnout and pitchover. He typed in bearing and launch point. They wouldn’t get an intercept angle until they had the impact-point prediction, but he was hoping for no more than five to seven degrees. That would make the basket, that imaginary, suspended circle their interceptor had to go through, as wide as possible.
Above all, he had to keep his limited inventory in mind. Four rounds total, and at the moment, only two available Standard Block 4A theater missile defense missiles. Once he flipped that red Launch Enable switch inches from his right hand, the weapon would run through a built-in system test, match parameters, and fire itself.
To intercept, it had to clear the tube no later than eight minutes after its target had launched. Thirty seconds had already ticked away.…
The Aegis display jerked, then jumped forward, as if they were falling toward the desert at some unimaginable velocity straight down from space. The effect was sickening, but he kept his gaze nailed to it, gripping his armrests, as they hurtled down, down.…
Toward an infinitesimal white dot. The “gate,” a rapidly throbbing bright green bracket, the automatic hook of the radar’s acquisition function, curved in from the right. It overshot, corrected, locked on. It vibrated, but the white dot, growing inside the bracket, remained centered, as in a fighter plane’s reflex gunsight, or as in some arcade game, where the meteor threatening your spaceship has to be blasted to bits with the photon torpedoes.
No photon torpedoes here. For all her technology, Savo Island wasn’t the starship Enterprise. They might be at the cutting edge of technology, but it was a brittle, fragile blade.
Meanwhile the litany had gone on. When it paused he said more or less by rote, “Concur. Manually engage when track’s established.”
A stir beside him. Staurulakis slid into Branscombe’s seat. She tilted her head, fitting the headset to her ears, and began speaking urgently, cluing the bridge into what was going on. At the same time her fingers blurred on the keys. The leftmost screen, the TADIL feed, toggled off. In place of western Iraq she brought up the GCCS plot, zoomed down to central Israel. The right screen was still raw video from ALIS. “We actually need four screens for the TBM mission,” she murmured.
“Save that for the lessons learned,” Dan told her. Adding, but not aloud: If we’re around to file one.
Yeah, that was all they needed to hear from the CO.
The alert-script buzzer went off, a little bit behind the action. “Profile plot, Meteor Alfa,” Terranova’s soft voice announced. “Meteor” was the new proword for an incoming ballistic missile. “Elevation thirty thousand … forty thousand … fifty thousand. Very fast climb. Identified as hostile TBM. ID as hostile.” She called out lat and long on the launch point. Dan jotted it into his notebook as it came in, and checked it against the LPE from the TADIL.
And … they didn’t match. “What the fuck,” he muttered.
He was about to ask for confirmation when the double note chimed again, and a foresense of doom oppressed him. “Second launch cuing,” Wenck said, and the same dire note was in his voice too.
Two launches, within seconds. One detected by whoever was out in the desert and relayed through the alert network; the second observed by the infrared plume generated by its booster, noted by the camera twenty-five thousand miles up.
Then the buzzer again, from the Terror’s console. “Profile alert, Meteor Bravo…”
The soft chime again … then the buzzer. Yet a third. He didn’t catch the source this time. Could the three reports be of the same launch, recorded by different sensors? No, then they’d have the same launch-point estimate. And the LPE was different for each. Only by a few miles — they were all coming from Al-Ansar — but with enough geoseparation, and different time markers, too. Clearly not the same event.
Three hostile missiles on the way. And just two antimissile rounds to take them on with.
“Meteor Charlie. System lock-on.”
“Coordinated launches,” Branscombe breathed. Dan didn’t answer, or move; eyes narrowed, laptop forgotten, he was riveted on the rightmost screen.
Which jumped from one burning-white dot to the next in abrupt disorienting lurches. As Terranova, or maybe ALIS, switched attention from one contact to the next, the data beside each vibrating bracket laddered upward faster than the flickering numbers on a gas pump.
ALIS settled on the first missile. Its elevation callout, in angels, or thousands of feet, passed five hundred. That number kept climbing, but the white dot, gripped by the pulsating brackets, which up to now had seemed stationary relative to the ground return around it, began to drift. It oozed slowly, but with a steady increment of acceleration, to the left.
The display jerked, shifting to the second missile. Then the third.
A shuddering roar penetrated the armor around them. Dan tensed, then recognized it.
“Combat, Helo Control.”
He pressed the lever on the 21MC. “Go, Control.”
“Red Hawk wheels up. Request initial vector.”
Had he given them a green deck? Maybe he had. “Between us and the coast. Execute skimmer barrier. Get vectors from your controller. We’re busy here.” He signed off, then hit the lever again and said rapidly, “Pass to Strafer, I want him to conserve fuel. I may not be able to come to a recovery course for a while.”
They rogered and he exhaled. At least one minute gone of their allotted eight. Maybe more. But he didn’t feel quite as blind with the helo between them and the shore. The SH-60’s armament was useless against a sea-skimming C-802. But the onboard radar would give a heads-up, and the aircraft could provide decoy coverage. Actually, he had more confidence in the decoys than in anything else, though Sea Whiz, their last-ditch defense, was a robust system. The last barrier any missile had to make it through was its nearly solid storm of 20mm depleted-uranium slugs, fired so fast it sounded like a continuous note from a very loud bass viol.