“Good to go, sir.” Borgman was a heavy-bodied woman with an almost childishly pretty face, a plodder who got things done with tenacity rather than brilliance.
He nodded and went back to the JOTS terminal and the glowing blobs that represented the American and Indian ships. Nothing had changed. He looked up and let his eyes swing over the room. An Indian rating named Mehta looked up and let their glances meet as if to say, We’re doing the best we can here.
A little more than a minute to go. Alan raised his eyebrows at Benvenuto.
“Good to go, sir,” Benvenuto said. He was looking at something over Alan’s shoulder as he said, “Data’s streaming—”
Aware then of somebody behind him, Alan turned, saw an Indian officer standing there, registered the single star on the collar, produced a name without having to look at the man’s tag — Commodore Chanda, the Indian exercise-control officer. Alan smiled, guessed that the answering scowl was prestart nervousness.
“Sir,” Alan said.
The commodore was watching the clock, must have been watching it when Alan turned around. Across the room, a nervous Indian lieutenant was also staring at the orange numerals.
The commodore was standing too close. Alan wanted to elbow him out of the way, of course couldn’t. He bent over the terminal, pretending to study the location of the American flagship. The commodore was right behind him. Well, he’s a commodore; he can stand where he—
The crease in the commodore’s trousers brushed the back of Alan’s right thigh; Alan shifted left to make room for the more senior man, shifted his eyes for a fraction of a second off the terminal, catching a whiff of some scent the Indian officer used, then flashed back to the terminal as it — inexplicably, surprisingly — darkened and lost its picture, like an eye blinking. He caught movement below him—
— and saw a hand emerging from a uniform sleeve with a commodore’s broad stripe on it, holding something glittering and brassy to the input port of the JOTS repeater.
“Hey—!” Alan started to say, grabbing, without thinking, at the hand. Then, too late, he said, “Sir—!” but the commodore’s enraged eyes had already locked into his.
In AG 702, the cheating S-3 that Alan Craik had seen on the JOTS and complained about to Rafehausen, Commander Paul Stevens was enjoying his nugget TACCO’s nerves. “Hey, Collins, you got that back end sweet yet?” Stevens tried not to lose an opportunity to give the kid the gears. In fact, as far as Stevens could tell, the “back end”—the big bank of antiquated computers that drove the airplane’s sonar-receiving and tactical displays — was functioning as well as it ever did, but the new LTjg didn’t know that.
“It’s, uh, it’s up, sir. I mean—”
“Jeez, Collins, either it’s up or it ain’t. I’m the pilot, not the TACCO. Which way do you want it?”
“It’s up.” Collins’s voice rose so that the response sounded more like a question than an answer.
Stevens hit his intercom so that only his copilot could hear him. “Kids ought to be out of diapers before they leave the RAG.”
“Give him a rest,” she muttered. Lisa “Goldy” Goldstein had fought her way out of the girl jobs in naval aviation and she had plenty of spine to stand up to Stevens, who was a great pilot and an okay squadron CO, but sometimes a total asshole as a human being. “Skipper, you blow that kid’s confidence, we still have to live with him the whole cruise.”
Stevens smiled. He liked Goldstein, and he liked that she stood up to him. “I can hear the snot in his nose every time he talks.”
“Yeah, skipper, and I can see the dust when you fart. Can we get this show on the road?”
Stevens grinned. “Roger that.” He cycled the intercom to the back end. “Collins, if you’ve got us a working computer, you and Whitehorse better start thinking of your sonobuoy pattern.”
Bobby Whitehorse, the enlisted SENSO Officer, or SENSO, was a shy, silent Indian kid from a reserve in the Dakotas. He listened, said nothing, and started to enter his projected pattern into the computer in front of him. As his facial expression rarely changed, it was difficult for the other troops in the squadron to figure out whether he was sullen-silent or shy-silent.
Stevens saw the little symbols on his pilot’s display. “Way over there?” he said. “You guys in back trying to run us out of fuel?”
“That’s where the ASW module told us to go, skipper,” Goldy said.
“Yeah, yeah. I came out this way to keep that big island between us and their radar.” Stevens was holding the plane about ninety feet off the waves beneath them, flying with one hand and turning his head to Goldy when he talked. One bad twitch and they’d have a wing in the water, but Stevens always flew this way and his crews got used to it. And they had to be under the opposing force’s radar horizon, because they were cheating — flying to a target before startex.
Stevens pushed the throttle forward and banked to the left, heading for the entry point to the pattern the SENSO had marked twenty nautical miles to the west.
“I have an ESM cut just beyond the island. Russian airsweep radar, second generation.” Collins sounded less nervous. He was better with the radar detection than with the sonar. “I’m putting it on screen. Second cut. Got a triangulation. See it, skipper?”
Stevens flicked his eyes from his instrument scan to the little screen on his console and winced. The Indians had at least a radar picket, maybe more, much closer to him than he had expected. This is where he and Rafe and the crotchety bastards in the anti-submarine warfare module had guessed they’d find the Indian sub early in the exercise. Rafe wanted it found and tagged from the get-go. And here the Indians were, with a radar picket right at the edge of the start area, looking out for someone like—
“Looks like we’re all cheating together,” Goldy said.
“Jeez, Craik might have warned us the Indians were this far south.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Stevens saw the flash off her visor as Goldy turned her head and looked at him. Clearly she didn’t agree with his views on cheating, either.
“Got another cut, skipper. Another air-search radar.”
“They shouldn’t be seeing us yet,” Stevens said, banking sharply to keep the bulk of the forty-mile-long island between his plane and the radar pickets on the other coast.
“Startex in one minute,” Goldy said. “I think we may be the first casualties in this thing.”
“Not if I can help it. Whitehorse, put a long pattern down here.”
Collins cut in. “We’re still seven miles from the drop—”
“Let’s put the first line in here and we’ll sneak up the coast low, drop a few more, and see what we get.”
Collins mumbled something about how far the Indian sub would have to be from her start position to be caught this far west.
“You got something to say, Mister Collins?”
“No, sir.”
Clunk. Each sonobuoy had the passive systems to listen for an enemy sub within a thousand yards or so, and a tiny radio transceiver to broadcast the digital data back to the plane. When the sonobuoy survived the drop to the water and the transceivers worked, it was a great system.
“Number one in the water and I have a signal.” Whitehorse had a flat, nasal voice.
Stevens thought it might have been the longest sentence he’d heard out of the boy.