“And they launched a missile. And hit my ship.” A little life crept into Gaspert’s face, but it was ugly.
Stop right now. Let him believe that the Russians screwed up and attacked his ship. It’s something he can live with, and as a veteran, it’s something he can understand. No, he’ll never live easily with the memory of those people he lost, but at least he’ll know it was nothing he did.
“You were well outside the exercise area, way outside of it,” Coyote continued. “There was no reason to suspect you would be in danger.”
“I know that. I was on the bridge when it happened. We were opening the distance even more. But it sounds like a whole ocean wouldn’t have been far enough.”
“Once the Russians launched a missile at us, we activated our anti-air defense systems. The cruisers are quite different from the ones you remember. In full automatic mode, they can ripple off missiles almost as fast as you can fire a forty-five.”
“So they fired, then you launched and brought their missile down. And—” Gaspert’s voice broke off suddenly. The beginning of anger in his eyes was replaced by horror. “Oh dear god,” he whispered. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re saying that it might be your missile that struck rather than theirs.”
“It’s a possibility,” Coyote said gently. “And the reason that I’m telling you this is that the media will no doubt began to speculate on that. They have so many satellites of their own, so many. Weather satellites, communications — we aren’t the only ones watching this part of the ocean. And the resolution of some of the civilian satellites is even superior to our earlier ones. We use their information part of the time instead of our own.”
“And they’ll have people that know how to read those photos, too.”
Coyote nodded. “Exactly. So I wanted to talk to you before you began hearing about it on ACN.”
Gaspert’s face was blank. He sat impassively, not moving. His eyes were only half-open. Coyote considered calling Medical. Surely Gaspert had been under such a strain that he was beginning to crack.
Suddenly, Gaspert spoke. Fire blazed in his eyes. “You attacked me.” His voice was cold and implacable. “You killed my people, the passengers — you. You.” He looked around the admiral’s cabin as though he had forgotten where he was. Then he turned back to Coyote, and his voice cracked as he said, “I want my people off this ship. Now. I don’t care when the company is coming out, I don’t care about the investigation. I’ll never go to sea again anyway. But if you don’t arrange to get us off this ship within the next hour or two, what I agreed to on that piece of paper won’t mean shit. I will not be responsible for my actions, do you hear? I will not.” Gaspert’s voice was rising now, his fury evident. For a moment, Coyote thought the admiral might come across the desk at him.
“Of course,” Coyote said, making his voice brisk and professional. “Completely understandable. I will make the arrangements immediately. Now, is there anything else I can do for you or your passengers?”
Gaspert started for the door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Yes. You can all go fuck yourselves.”
Coyote stared at the door that Gaspert slammed behind him. There were moments when he felt the true, crushing weight of his responsibilities, and this was one of them. Men and women—civilian men and women — were dead. And there was a chance it was his fault.
No, dammit. It wasn’t our fault. It can’t be. And I’m going to prove it.
Coyote jabbed out the extension for CVIC. When a junior sailor answered, he said, “Tell Commander Busby I want to see him. Now.”
Coyote leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. There had to be an answer hidden somewhere in the mounds of data Jefferson collected. There had to be. And if anyone could find it, Lab Rat could.
FIFTEEN
Lab Rat and Lieutenant Strain divided up the data between them. Or, more correctly, they divided up the task of watching the experts, their enlisted people, go over the hours and hours of data. If the admiral was right, the answer to what had happened lay somewhere in the stream of raw data contained both on the disks and in the printouts.
The key, Coyote believed, was in the raw data. Not in the smooth tracks and histories displayed in Combat. Not in the correlation the computer assigned to a series of radar hits. Not in the final product displayed on the electronic warfare console. No, somewhere in the down and dirty was an anomaly, one that the computer had considered and then either discarded or merged with the wrong sequence of detections. It had to be that way, Coyote insisted, if one started with the premise that the American combat systems were inherently superior to the Russian ones. And nobody wanted to dispute that with him, did they?
Lab Rat’s leading chief petty, Chief Abbyssian, Senior Chief Armstrong’s replacement, had assigned his two best people to lead the reviews. The new chief had already gotten a good feel for his people’s capabilities. He gave a thick sheaf of computer printouts to one petty officer, and the analog records to another. Then, with a couple of quiet suggestions, he arranged for Strain to work with the digital data and his commander to review the analog data. His reasoning was that he paired each officer’s strength with the weakness of his technician. Then, the chief suggested, after each team had completed its review, they would swap data. The chief himself would review a CD that ran a scroll of numerical data next to its analog equivalent.
“I’m not sure what we’re looking for,” the chief said.
“Neither am I,” Lab Rat answered. “But there’s got to be something there — something. We don’t know what happened out there, but whatever it was, it left traces in the electromagnetic spectrum. We’ve got gear sensitive enough to record the noise a gnat makes farting a hundred miles away. Whatever happened, we’ve got a record of it.”
“That’s the thing, sir,” the chief said. “We’ve got too much data — tons of it. Pulling out the significant events from all the noise is going to take some time. Not to say we can’t do it,” he added, seeing Lab Rat’s expression cloud up. “But you know what I mean.”
Lab Rat sighed. He did, indeed. That was the problem with recording absolutely everything that happened at every frequency. It was not recorded as a set of discrete frequencies. This backup record was raw data, a complex waveform that would have to be broken down by the computer into its component frequencies. Okay, sure, it went pretty quickly. And in reality, there was only about five minutes of data that they needed to focus on.
But the broader question was what had led up to the fatal exchange of missiles. Why had the Russians fired? What had they seen in the hours preceding the launch that had convinced them they were under attack?
And finally, whose missile was where? The signal data would have to be matched with the radar pictures, another task that the computers could handle but one that introduced considerable ambiguity. The computer program had parameters for sampling data, smoothing it to discard erroneous detections and then integrating it with a recursive formula. While it was normally reliable and accurate, everyone understood that the process could introduce errors, false interpretations, and incorrect correlation of contacts that could easily provide widely different results. So they were going back to the raw data, to the individual radar hits, and performing their own correlation as well.
“Of course, as soon as we get the data to NSA, they will run it as well.” The chief shook his head admiringly. “The power they’ve got in their system — well, we don’t even come close.”
“I know.” Lab Rat had been on several tours of the NSA facilities himself. “But we’ve got something they don’t — motivation. It’s our asses that are on the line.”
They pored over the data for hours, comparing notes as digital and analog pictures revealed amplitude peaks that might or might not be significant. As their eyes grew strained, the pictures and the columns of numbers began to blur. Finally, the chief suggested that they call a halt to it, at least for a couple of hours.
“Everybody, get something to eat,” Lab Rat ordered. “Be back here in an hour. I think we’re closing in on it.”
And indeed he did. The Russians claimed that a fire control radar had illuminated them. Under the current rules of engagement, that was strictly forbidden by the INCOS agreement. Additionally, under most circumstances, training fire control radar on another military unit was considered a hostile act, an act of war. Immediate and appropriate response was clearly authorized. Waiting to demand an explanation or file protests meant taking the chance that you would be hit by missile.
“If the Russians are telling the truth, we’re at least partially responsible for this,” the chief said after the other sailors left the compartment.
“I know, I know. But we’ve got to know what really happened,” Lab Rat answered. “Everybody knows better than to illuminate the Russians with fire control radar.”
A strangely uneasy expression crossed the chief’s face. He looked away as though engrossed in studying imperfections in the paint job on a nearby bulkhead. Without looking at Lab Rat, he said, “Yes, sir. Everybody on the ship knows better than to spike the Russians with fire control radar. But there were a lot of people on the cruiser, sir. Contractors, technicians—”
Lab Rat interrupted him. “They all know better, too. They build the damn stuff.”
“—and the VIPs, sir,” the chief continued. “They were in Combat when this happened.” The chief nodded as he saw the look of horror on Lab Rat’s face. “Yes, sir. I checked. There were ten civilians in Combat at the time. Two of them were sitting at data consoles, getting a full brief by the watchstanders.”
“Live consoles?” Lab Rat asked, horror in his voice.
“They weren’t supposed to be,” the chief said. “But maybe somebody screwed up. Maybe one of them was capable of transmitting that fire control radar pulse.”
Lieutenant Strain broke in with “Yes, sir, but is that really going to be an issue? I mean,” he added hastily, “there’s no excuse for it, of course. If we provoked them somehow, we provoked them. But what’s really going to matter is who hit Montego Bay. Once that’s decided, everything else just falls by the wayside, doesn’t it?”
Lab Rat grunted. The lieutenant had a point. The cruiser may have inadvertently provoked the Russians. But no matter what had gone wrong, the Russians had targeted the cruise ship. As ghoulish as it might seem, that’s what they now had to focus on.
“Okay, back at it in an hour,” Lab Rat said. “In the meantime, we’ll let the computer run its correlation and analysis on its own for a while. Compare that with what we come up with and see if there are any clues.”
Just then, they heard, “Flight quarters, flight quarters. Now set flight quarters. Reason for flight quarters: launch of Greyhound COD.”
Lab Rat breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone would be a lot happier with Cary Winston off the ship. Maybe now they could get some work done without looking over their collective shoulders.
Lab Rat shuffled hastily through his in box. There were several CDs, each in its own jewel case, a computer label with date and time stuck in the middle of the lid. He collected them by the simple expedient of holding up the papers and letting the heavier CDs fall to his desk. He stacked them together, then began leafing through them to find the one he wanted. The disk covering the time and date in question was the third one down.
Lab Rat pulled it out, popped it open, and went to his CD drive. His computer was already running the data analysis program. He slid the CD into the drive holder, then shot that home.
The usual noises accompanied the drive pulling up the information. Lab Rat waited, growing more anxious by the moment. Finally, the screen displayed the data selection prompt. Lab Rat typed in a span of twelve minutes covering the missile launches and the beginning of the end for Montego Bay. Moments later, columns of numbers scrolled down the screen.
“Yell if you see something,” he said. He hit the printout button and simultaneously began scanning the data. It was detailed and rich. Every signal that pulsed through the electromagnetic spectrum was captured, recorded, broken down into its constituent parts, and then analyzed for threat characteristics. A minimum number of hits by the detector were required before the computer would decide that a signal was a valid waveform and not a bit of spurious noise. Only those signals meeting certain criteria were displayed. But this, the raw data, contained everything the sensors had seen during the time period, valid or not.
Coyote strode into the room, anger on his face. “Anything yet?”
Lab Rat glanced over at Lieutenant Strain, who shook his head. “No, Admiral. Not yet.”
Coyote swore quietly. “I need to know what happened, and I need to know right now. I just got a call from Third Fleet. The shit’s starting to roll downhill.”
“Sir?” Lab Rat asked, his stomach tightening up. He’d seen Coyote like this before, and it was never good news.
“They’re claiming we’re at fault. They say they’ve got proof and they are inviting every reporter in the world on board to see it. And, unless we ante up with an apology, they’re saying — I’m translating this from the diplomatic double talk — there’s going to be hell to pay.” Coyote looked suddenly weary. “We’re on the verge of a full-out shooting war, Lab Rat, unless we can come up with proof that they’re responsible. This has spun up some sort of internal Russian issue we don’t understand all that well, and it’s escalating faster than the diplomats can jaw it out.”
“The Russians have always seen this program as a threat,” Strain said quietly. “So has a lot of Europe.”
“I know, I know. But that’s way above our paygrades — mine included,” Coyote said. There were a few moments of silence, broken only by a slight click as the CD continued spilling its guts on Lab Rat’s screen.
“Stop,” the chief said suddenly. “Scroll back up, sir.”
“What is it?” Coyote demanded.
“I don’t know yet, Admiral,” the chief said. “I thought I saw somthing.”
Lab Rat scrolled up, going slowly line by line. He hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but he wasn’t the specialist. If the chief thought he saw something, then it was worth checking out.
“Right there,” the chief said, pointing out a line on the screen. He swore quietly, ran out of the compartment, and returned moments later with a manual in his hand. “Line 870, Commander. No doubt about it. If I saw that, I’d panic, too.”
“Talk,” Coyote ordered.
“What is it?” Lab Rat demanded. “Was someone targeting the Russians?”
“Yes, sir,” the chief said. A grim expression settled on his face. “Lake Champlain was.”