Dan frowned. “But we’ve got two arrays forward. Port and starboard. Are you saying we can only operate one?”
The chief said patiently, “No, sir, you don’t pulse both arrays at the same time. We shoot one beam at a time from one array at a time.”
“So we’re, basically, down a sixth of our radar capacity. How about the cooling system? How do we run without that?”
The chief said they had redundant cooling, too. “I’m telling you, sir, we can run degraded. Everything’s got a backup.”
“Well, maybe for air detect-to-engage. What about BMD?” He caught uncertainty in the other’s eyes, and pressed in. “Let’s say we get degradation in one of the other predrivers. Can we detect-to-engage on an incomer? Out to three hundred miles? Or will our power-out not be enough?”
A hesitation told him all he needed to know. He turned to find Almarshadi teetering a step above on the ladder. “Commander? Can you shed some light?”
The little XO looked uncertain. “Who we really need is Terranova. What do—”
Dan cut in: “Have you been listening, Exec? How much degradation is losing one of our predriver groups going to inflict on us? How much capability can we lose before we’re out of the missile defense business? And what kind of maintenance lets a coolant hose, a coolant hose, get so loose a fifty-degree angle makes it let go? Those are the first questions I’d like to have answered. If you have the time, that is.”
“I … believe I’ll have to get back to you on that, Captain.”
“Good, do that. Within an hour.” Dan nodded once, to them all. He didn’t need to make his expression any harder than it probably already was. And he was already sorry he’d unloaded on Almarshadi. He almost added a word of apology, then thought savagely: Let him take it. He’d certainly had to, when he’d been Jimmy Packer’s second in command. “Where’s Lieutenant Mills?”
“CIC, Captain.”
“I want him in my inport cabin too. No later than 1400.”
As he was powering up his computer in the large bare captain’s suite down on the main deck level, someone knocked. “Come in,” Dan yelled.
“Lieutenant Mills, sir.”
“Come on in, Matt. Get a look at the equipment room?”
“Yessir. CASREP’s on the LAN. You should have it.”
“Is Hermelinda coming?” The supply officer. Mills nodded. Dan said to the screen, “We need to make some decisions. Higher needs to know our capability’s degraded.” He glanced at Mills, unsure if the newly arrived officer would be able to help with what really concerned him. Namely, how could they go to war with a system that wasn’t just experimental, but now significantly degraded vis-à-vis their primary mission. “My question is: How badly? I’m getting conflicting opinions.”
Another knock, and they filed in: Almarshadi, looking even more apprehensive than usual; Donnie Wenck; the supply officer, Garfinkle-Henriques; and the chubby-cheeked petty officer from New Jersey, Terranova. Wenck was still in a first class’s dress blues. Dan was pointing to chairs when his Hydra clicked. “CO, Bridge.”
He unclipped it. “CO.”
“Sir, Lieutenant Staurulakis.”
“What’cha got, Cheryl?”
“The chief engineer reports full power and rudder trials completed satisfactorily.”
The 1MC said, “All masters-at-arms muster in the mess decks with the executive officer.” That would be the shipwide search beginning for the missing pistol. His Hydra said, “We need to know where to head from here, Captain.”
“You have the course plotted.”
“The course for the eastern Med, yes sir. We’re still executing that—?”
“Until further notice,” Dan said. “I’m going to report the radar casualty and see what kind of parts support we can finagle.”
The Ops officer said she understood and signed off. He clicked off too and looked around the table. “Okay, we’re down one DPD. That leaves one spare, aft. What’s next? Repair? Replace? Terranova?”
The pudgy-cheeked little FC twisted her braid, not meeting his eyes. He still couldn’t believe she was his senior tech for the most advanced radar in the Navy. “Sir, we have eight different kinds of microwave power tubes and CFAs and TWTs in the DPD. We have spares for all of them and Petty Officer — I mean, Chief — Wenck brought us some more. But our real problem’s the chassis. It’s burnt, melted, the solder joints are gone, all the cooling channels are distorted. The simplest thing to do would be to strip it down to parade rest, test the TWTs and Mark 99s and SDRs, keep the ones that are in spec and survey the others. Then plug in all the components into a totally new chassis.”
Dan nodded. “Okay, how fast can we do that?”
Mills said, “We can start pulling tubes as soon as the space cools down. Though some of them have radioactive components. So we’d need to do a survey before we send people in. Problem is, we don’t carry spare chassis … chassis-es.”
Dan raised his eyebrows at the supply officer. “Hermelinda?”
“Matt’s right, sir. Unfortunately, they’re custom-fabricated for each ship set. So they’re not in the supply system.”
“You checked that?”
“Wouldn’t say so if I hadn’t, Captain.”
“Okay, good. That’s what I like to hear.”
“I have a message out to the original equipment manufacturer, seeing if they have any in inventory. But I wouldn’t expect it.”
“How about Dahlgren? They’re the Aegis capital, right? Would they have a chassis set, maybe even a complete driver-predriver, that they could let us have?”
“I’ll get a message out,” Mills said.
“Make it immediate priority. But a caveat. Everything that goes out of here about this is classified top secret,” Dan said.
That stopped them. Garfinkle-Henriques especially looked puzzled. “Top secret,” Dan repeated, before they could ask why. “All right, let’s get to it. Matt, you stay. Oh, and Hermelinda, is there a stock number for the chassis?”
The supply officer said patiently, “If it was in the supply system, it would have a stock number, sir. But since it isn’t—”
“Okay, okay, I get it.” He looked at his LAN screen. “I’ve got your CASREP. But before I put it in, I’m going to make a call.”
He’d thought about doing this via the new high-side chat function. But he distrusted chat. There was no paper trail. There wasn’t even, if he understood it correctly, really an electronic trail, or at least one he trusted to be secure.
Because he didn’t want this to get out. It was bad enough they were degraded. To let it become public knowledge would mean they didn’t even have a deterrent value. Like letting another boxer, your opponent, know you had a broken right hand. There was no paper trail on the red phone, either, but at least it was a secure circuit.
He’d have to make three calls, though. To Commodore Roald, first. Then to Sixth Fleet, and to the commander of TF 60, the task force he’d be joining, at least temporarily, on his way to his ultimate station. Or should he depend on the message traffic to keep them in the picture? He’d ask Jen. She’d know.
A few minutes later he had her on the red phone, and everyone had left except Mills. The STU-3 was warm in his hand. Roald sounded the same as she had when he’d called her once from Korea. Deliberate. Cool. Almost remote. “You’re still operational, though. Correct?” she said.
“Affirmative … but without the reserve DPD. Over.”
“How was your effectiveness before that?”
Dan recalled Dr. Noblos’s sour assessment. Where was Noblos anyway? He hadn’t seen the civvie rider since they’d put to sea. “I’d have to say … the jury’s still out on that. Uh, over.”