For Commander Alan Craik, Fleet Exercise Lord of Light was the culmination of six months of work, and, with six minutes to startex, he was angry because he, as umpire, could see that one side was already cheating — the US side. He looked around the large room that housed exercise planning and control — banks of computers, a central console that blocked his view of part of the room, ratings and a couple of officers in Indian naval khakis, and his own two US personnel.
“Sir?” Benvenuto was a skinny kid from the boonies of northern New York, a long way from home in this Indian naval headquarters. “Admiral Rafehausen’s on the net for you, sir.”
Craik walked around the big console. In front of him was a bank of encrypted radios that kept him linked to the US forces at sea, four hundred miles to the west. He grabbed a head mike with earphones. “Good morning, sir.”
“You’re late.” He knew Admiral Rafehausen’s voice — an old friend, pilot of the first aircraft he ever flew on. “You sleep in, Al? Leaving Rose for a nautch dancer?”
“I don’t think they even have nautch dancers anymore.”
“You should get out more often, Commander. What you got for me?”
“I have startex minus six, and you have an S-3 way out of exercise start parameters, sir.” He trailed the mike cord so he could lean over the JOTS terminal — the Joint Operational Tactical System, which showed the entire exercise and could, if asked, show US and other forces all over the world — watching a lone S-3 Viking move at low altitude along the eastern edge of the Lakshadweep Islands. Paul Stevens, Alan thought to himself. Hotdogging. “I see him, Al. I guess he didn’t get the message.”
“I have to hold exercise start until that aircraft is within start parameters, sir.”
“Hey, Al, lighten up. I got my beach recon teams in the water now. I’ve got my decks full of guys waiting to launch and I can’t exactly call them off. My Combat Air Patrol is up and already needs fuel from the tankers on the deck. You know the drill, Al. Let’s just say I’ll ignore AG 702 for a while, okay? Can we get this thing underway?”
Alan ran the trackball over the American and Indian battle groups. The JOTS on Rafehausen’s carrier would show only the Fifth Fleet units, and the Indian admiral on board the Indian light carrier Vishnapatingham would see only his. It had taken weeks of computer work by the two nerds in Alan’s exercise detachment to make this mutual blindness happen, and now one pilot was screwing it all up. He wanted to argue, even to use his supposed power as umpire to stop the exercise, but the big point was to cooperate with India and make diplomatic points. Canceling would be really bad diplomacy.
Alan sighed. “Okay, we’ll go for startex. But you’re on your honor about reports from that S-3.” In fact, Rafe probably wouldn’t be forced to his honor; the S-3 was a long way south of the Indian battle group, and if Stevens turned on his radar before startex, he’d be admitting he was cheating.
The hell with it. Get it over with and go home. He was touchy because the umpire’s job had been wished on him only forty-eight hours ago. He had been supposed to honcho the intel side for the US and then go home, where right now he could be enjoying his wife’s birthday. For once.
“Four minutes to exercise start, then,” he said into his mike. Then Rafe, knowing Alan was angry, maybe feeling guilty, made small talk for forty seconds, and they ended the conversation as friends.
Alan turned to Benvenuto. “Three minutes to exercise. Start the message traffic feed.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Across the room, Indian ratings were feeding the scenario setup into the two comm nets.
Everything was going to be fine.
The communications officer coughed into his fist for the second time and read the message again. He couldn’t control his thoughts, which twisted and turned through his convictions and his fears faster than he could clutch at them.
The day.
Around him, the enlisted men on the comms station reacted to his all too visible nerves. Ram Vatek, his most senior technician, raised an eyebrow.
He knew Vatek as one of the faithful. He leaned back and coughed into his fist again, focusing on Vatek’s loyalty, using the man’s face as an anchor to reality. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“It’s a new day,” he murmured and watched Vatek’s usually confident expression turn to apprehension.
The comms shack became still. Every man on duty knew what the words meant. Many of them knew parts of the overall plan. Knowing the plan and facing the grim reality of the message were different beasts.
No one in the comm shack flinched, however. They opened an arms locker that should not have been there behind the central computer processor and took out pistols, Tokarevs loaded with special low-power ammunition.
He pressed the push-to-talk button on the main comms console and spoke to the whole ship.
“Today is a new day,” he said, his voice unsteady as he spoke.
On the bridge, the navigator reached under his chart table and drew a Makarov pistol from its holster, turned, and shot the captain in the face. Under the pressure of the moment, he shot him repeatedly, pulling the trigger until the slide clicked open and the noise and smoke filled the bridge.
In the engine room, the second engineer drove a screwdriver into the abdomen of the engineer and stood appalled at the amount of blood that pooled on the smooth gray deck as his superior writhed. A rating shot the dying man in the head and seemed to enjoy the act. The engineer had not been a popular officer.
The second engineer looked at the blood on his hands and uniform and wanted to scream. And he looked at the wild eyes of the rating with the smoking gun and wondered what they had unleashed.
In the weapons space forward, two of the faithful shot their way through with smuggled Uzi Combat Commanders, killing every crewman in the space and inadvertently wrecking one of the operational weapons stations. A lot of the weapons techs were Sikhs and other unrecruitable sectarians, so they had to be killed.
In ninety seconds, the mutineers had control of the ship. Every man they believed might not be loyal to their cause, including a few who had received the indoctrination, was herded into the mess deck and locked down. Many others were killed because the mutineers, once blooded, were vicious. On the bridge, the navigator settled into the newly cleaned command chair and tried to ignore the smell of blood and feces.
“Make revolutions for five knots. Dive to one hundred fifty meters. Helmsman, make the course zero eight nine.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The Kilo-class submarine turned to port and headed away from the exercise area and back toward the west coast of India.
In the comms shack, the communications officer sent a coded message using the small golden egg he wore around his neck. The message went out through the VLF antenna and was received at West Fleet Headquarters, Mahe, where it was routed with other exercise traffic to its addressee at a small naval test facility in southern India — and to the Indian exercise-control officer at exercise headquarters, where Alan Craik waited.
Intel officers wait, Alan thought as he watched a digital clock tick down toward the beginning of the fleet exercise. Two minutes twenty to startex. And worry. He was standing by the JOTS repeater, staring at it as if memorizing the position of every ship in both fleets, but he was thinking about his wife, Rose, wanting to be with her. He tried to focus on the exercise. He called across to a female US rating, the only other American there besides him and Benvenuto. “Borgman, give me an update on my comms with the two fleet commands.”