Lieutenant Commander Carl Thomson surfaced from Main Engine Control for the first time in over forty-eight hours. The Duke's chief engineer had been living on station ever since the first Argentine attack, alternating long stretches in front of the master console with short naps taken on the deck plates beside it.
Eventually, though, even he had to get away from the incessant whining song of the turbogenerators.
"Anybody get the word on the playoffs?" he asked, coming through the wardroom door.
"Vegas over Philly by eight points," Christine Rendino murmured in reply. The intel was stretched limply out on the couch, her eyes closed and her deck shoes kicked off. Across from her, Frank McKelsie sprawled in an easy chair, eyes open but staring off into nowhere in particular. The wardroom itself was being haunted by sea poltergeists. The edges of the cloth covering the central table swayed in a slow rhythm, cabinets creaked, and the cup rack clinked in time to the movement of the ship.
"Somebody must have bribed the damn referees."
"Tell me about it."
Thomson went over and selected a battle ration from the box sitting on the serving counter. Drawing a cup of coffee from the urn, he sat down at the table and investigated the "bat rat." Little more than a sack lunch run up by the galley for distribution when the ship was holding at battle stations, Thomson tore into the processed chicken sandwich with more relish than it probably deserved. The coffee was good, though, the minute difference in flavor between the engine room and wardroom percolators being a welcome change.
"Feels like she's slacking off a little," he commented.
"Uh-huh," Christine replied, "we're getting out of the worst of it. Be nice to have the deck quit walking around for a while."
"Just as long as the Captain doesn't decide to go sunbathing again," McKelsie grunted.
"What's that supposed to mean?" the intelligence officer demanded.
"Hell, Rendino. We were caught way out of position by that first Argentine strike. The Captain left us wide open for that one."
"In case nobody bothered to mention it before, that was a surprise attack, McKelsie. Nobody expected the Argentines to pull a totally off-the-wall stunt like that. Not even the Captain… or me."
"She violated basic stealth doctrine. She let herself get caught outside of weather cover. She damn near got us all blown away, and if you weren't so busy kissing up after her, you'd admit it."
Christine opened one cold, blue-gray eye. "McKelsie, fa' sure medical science has discovered cures for cholera, clap, and the black plague. What are you still doing here?"
"That's enough," Thomson said. "Lieutenant McKelsie, I believe that you'll discover that bad-mouthing your superior officers is not a sound way to get ahead in this man's Navy."
"Shit, Chief! I'm stating a fact! The Captain made a mistake out there the other day."
"Maybe she did," Thomson agreed, rummaging around in the bat-rat sack again. "I've served under a lot of captains, under a lot of different circumstances. Sooner or later, every one of them made some kind of mistake or other. How they reacted to it, and corrected it, marked the difference between a good skipper and a bad one."
The engineer removed a doughnut from the sack and deliberately gestured toward McKelsie with it. "This tells me that the Lady is good."
"How's that supposed to work, Chief?"
"Simple. This tin can has fought its way through three major engagements in two days, and I am sitting here eating this doughnut and some damn fish isn't. That, sonny boy, counts for a whole lot in this trade."
35
Amanda stirred restlessly in the lounge chair. Looking out into the darkened and deserted wardroom, she wearily recalled a rather pompous lecture she had sat through back at the Academy. It had concerned an officer's need to draw up a "sleep schedule" that would guarantee them an adequate amount of rest under all circumstances.
It was a reasonable concept. However, the lecturer never quite got around to explaining how you were supposed to keep to this schedule during a developing tactical situation. Or how you were supposed to shut your mind off during those scraps of downtime that you might find.
Recurling herself more tightly in the lounger, she suppressed a shiver. She couldn't seem to shake the aftereffects of her brush with hypothermia, and no place seemed warm. Finally her eyes grew heavy, and she began to close out the world.
"Captain to the Combat Information Center, please."
She was through the hatchway and halfway down the ladder to the CIC before she was fully awake again.
Christine Rendino and the current OOD, Frank McKelsie, were waiting for her by the center consoles. They both looked about as burned out as she probably did, and they also looked worried. Amanda shot a glance past them to the tactical displays.
Some of the secondary monitors had been dialed to exterior view on low-light television and infrared. It was still dark out there, the clock readout indicating that they had some ninety minutes to go before first light. There was nothing to be seen but rolling, oily-backed swells and a low, broken overcast. They were still at full EMCON and the primary Aegis systems were down, the Alpha Screen currently showing a computer-generated signal intelligence display.
A flickering red air-target hack showed the position of a possible hostile some eighty miles to the northeast. Four additional air targets, each surrounded by a pinkish circle indicating an indefinite position fix on the contact, appeared to be running in line abreast ahead of it.
"What do we have, Mr. McKelsie?"
"We're not sure, Captain. We think the Argys might be cooking up something new."
"Specifics."
"Rendino's got the dope. Her gang's putting most of it together."
"We've got multiple aircraft contacts on the Sigint monitors and they are acting in a totally wacko manner." Christine took over, nodding toward the big screen. "Target Alpha came over our horizon about fifteen minutes ago. He's at twenty-five thousand feet, cruising at three hundred knots. However, he's weaving so his actual speed-overground is about one hundred and seventy. He's conducting a continuous air search with a fairly low-powered multi-mode radar. I'm pretty sure he's one of those converted 737s the Argentines use as a kind of half-assed AW ACS."
"Yeah," McKelsie added, "nothing we have to worry about at this range."
"The thing is," the intel continued, "that bird seems to be acting as a command-and-control node for some other kind of setup. According to my people over in Raven's Roost, he's got data downlinks going with at least four other systems in that immediate area. We're also getting a lot of voice traffic, mostly station-keeping stuff and intermittent UAF reflections off him from multiple sources below our horizon. I think probably they're Atlantique ANGs."
"It looks like they might be running a very tight antisubmarine sweep," Amanda commented. "Maybe they think we have underwater reinforcements."
"It looks like it, but I don't think it is. The leakage we've been able to read off their data-link sidelobe doesn't look like any sonar sweep I've ever seen. Matter of fact, it doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before, period."
"Yeah, Captain," McKelsie added. "Rendino and I are both tight on this. The Argys have something new going and they're going to hit us with it."
Interesting, Amanda thought, put a load on these two and they dropped their bristling antagonism for each other and became a pretty good team.
"Okay, Mr. McKelsie. What are you doing about it?"
"The Argys are sweeping from east to west, so I figured our best bet was to get out of their immediate line of advance. I've brought the ship around to a hundred eighty degrees true and increased speed to twenty-five knots to open the range. I haven't gone to full general quarters, but helm control has been shifted to CIC and both the bridge and CIC duty watches have been put on alert. Maintaining full EMCON and full stealth and all passive sensors are up full."