Beyond that, nothing happened. The nimbus of ionized gas kept growing. The incoming warhead was plunging fast now, deep into the terminal phase. The blocks of a city stretched below it, dimly limned ghosts in Aegis’s omniscient vision. That city lay helpless except for the twin beams, one Savo’s, the other the Patriot battery’s, that tracked the weapons meant for it. Dan clutched the arms of his seat. Had they waited too long? Had the two radars, locked on the same object, spoofed each other? Or had the Block 4 homer simply malfunctioned? A near miss, a close pass, wouldn’t be enough.
One side of the comet-nimbus began to swell. It grew, very slowly, while the other side shrank.
The whole glowing mass, reflecting Aegis’s beamed power as if it were one huge solid object, began to pulse. Slowly at first, then to a steadily accelerating beat.
“Launch from Ben Gurion,” Terranova called. The screen shifted, and the brackets searched before locking on to a new contact. Its callouts spun upward, the numbers blurring as it ascended at an incredible pace, far faster than either the Al-Husayns or Savo’s Standards. A Patriot, rocketing up in a last-ditch intercept. Dan opened his mouth to remind Terror to drop track, so as not to confuse their own missile, then remembered: The Standards were on their own; in the homing phase, they were full-active; their seekers could care less what their mother ship did, miles behind them.
The screen flickered again. When it steadied this time Bravo looked so different he had to check the callout to make sure of what he was looking at. With a huge silent burst of ionized gas, it had come apart into dozens of tumbling pieces, each surrounded by its own coruscating nimbus, each diverging from the original track. Like a fissioning nucleus, first wobbling as it went unstable, then splitting all at once into protons, neutrons, gamma particles, bursts of pure radiant energy.
The whoops and rebel yells from the consoles died away as the screen switched back and forth between Bravo, still disintegrating, to Meteor Charlie, a few seconds away from intercept. Dan leaned back and passed a shaky hand over his hair. Two down. One to go. Could it be possible, they might meet this challenge? Thrust into action too soon, with patched software, marginally trained operators, and too little ordnance, could they actually succeed? He glanced at Staurulakis; she was rapt over the keyboard, frowning at the screens; the manicured fingernails rested on the keys, motionless.
He zoomed his attention back so the big picture opened out again. Lahav was lagging to the south. Opening the bearing in case, Dan fired again, and getting a better angle if one of those threatening shore radar sites unleashed an 802. This would be the perfect time, with his attention welded to the incoming warheads. He hoped the Syrians and Hezbollah continued to opt for caution over solidarity. The surface search radar showed nothing else within forty miles. The air search, too, showed vacant space. “Time to bingo, Red Hawk?” he called. At all costs, he had to be able to come to a recovery course; the only alternative would be to divert them to some shore airfield. But that would not be good. Even money whether the diplomats would let Savo’s SH-60 take off again.
“Twenty-five minutes to bingo fuel, sir.”
Singhe’s velvety voice came again, over the creak of steel in a seaway. “There’s the Patriot, targeted on Meteor Charlie. Looks like intercept … now.”
CIC went silent again as the screen showed no change in the contact. None Dan saw anyway. Singhe said, after a pause, “Stand by for Block 4A intercept, Meteor Charlie … stand by.… Mark. Intercept.”
“Shit,” somebody murmured.
The rocketing comet, wrapped in its blurring shroud of ionized gas, just kept growing. It didn’t wobble, or lurch, or split apart.
“I believe we have a miss,” Noblos said, too loud.
“Petty Officer Terranova? Chief Wenck?”
“Don’t see terminal effects, sir.”
Dan sucked a deep breath. Nothing more he could do. “Patriot?”
“Ku-band still radiating.”
“They’re not refiring?”
The rightmost screen was suddenly empty. The last bracket winked out. The amber spokes clicked back and forth over an empty sky.
“Meteor Charlie off the radar,” Terranova said, voice falling. Staurulakis shook herself and began typing again. Dan massaged his cheeks. The bristly stubble felt greasy. How long had he been here? It felt like days. And why was it getting warmer? Oh yeah — he’d secured the ventilation. He told the TAO, “Okay, Cher, get Red Hawk back aboard. Come to optimal recovery course, regardless of the array angle — nothing we can do now anyway. Tell Lahav firing is complete. Remain at Condition III, but we can relax Circle William now.”
Her fingers lifted. “Aye, sir. What shall I report to CTF?”
“What happened. What else? One reentry body breakup in terminal phase, one successful intercept, one miss.” He shoved himself to his feet. “Going to take a leak. Stay on it, we’re not done with this yet.”
But instead of making for the little head just outside CIC, he went up a deck and let himself into his sea cabin. Splashed water on his face, bent over the stainless sink. Considered vomiting into it, but didn’t quite need to.
Eyes closed, he sagged into the bulkhead. Gripping an exposed pipe, he pounded his head lightly against it. The blows felt good. “Why couldn’t we have hit them both?” he muttered. “Was that too much to ask?”
But a 50 percent kill rate was as much as they could have expected, given the Block 4’s record. Even a bit better. If he’d been able to throw a four-missile salvo …
But excuses didn’t matter. He should have gotten them all.
An hour later, he was still in CIC, drinking his millionth cup of Sonar coffee, when the news came in. A high-explosive warhead had hit a shelter in a suburb of Tel Aviv. They were still digging out bodies, but the first estimates were 190 dead.
17
Under gray but now snowless skies, Savo rolled south again. The seas surged in, crests breaking into white patches that heaved here and there across the empty sea.
Dan sprawled in his command chair, boots propped on a binocular box as a spatter of rain blew across the windows and was instantly smeared by the wipers. A clipboard lay checked off on his lap, but he hadn’t handed it back yet to the messenger, who was chatting in a murmur with BM2 Nuckols. The bridge team seemed subdued this morning. Over two hundred dead was the latest report. Civilians. Women. Children. Blasted apart and suffocated in a bunker under Hayarkon Park, a suburb north of the city center.
Yeah, he knew … he hadn’t killed them. Someone else had designed, and built, and launched the uprated Scud called the Al-Husayn. But Savo hadn’t prevented it. You could give reasons why. But the ultimate responsibility was his.
And now and then he wondered, because he too had designed missiles, and tested them, and more than once launched them: Was this really how human beings were destined to live? What curse of Cain, what original sin, had been laid against them, to condemn them not just to kill each other, but to revel in doing so?
He knew by now there wasn’t any answer. Through each century Mars still marched, wrecking economies, empires, and individual lives by the millions.
Rid yourself of all illusion. That’s what one of his old teachers had said.
Men’s hearts, it seemed, were not going to change.
“Done with that, sir?”
“Yeah.” He waggled his head, sketched a routing on the topmost sheet, and scribbled his initials.