Dan sucked a breath. “Chief, I gotta cut this short and get back on satcomm. If you say he’s a suspect, he’s a suspect. Don’t rule him out based on my say-so. But you’ve got to bring me more than some old snapshots. Has anyone checked out Peeples? The guy who was flipping off his female petty officer, before she died?”
“We’ve checked Peeples out. There doesn’t seem any reason to—”
“Captain, sorry to interrupt,” Branscombe put in. “You might want to look at CentCom chat.”
Dan excused himself, and Toan left. He logged in on the command desk terminal and scrolled up and down, gleaning, pausing to speed-read an appreciation by an Army colonel on the CentCom staff.
The ground invasion had started. Exercise Divine Weapon had left Indian armored forces already in forward positions. The orders to advance had come shortly after the first casualties were carried out of the Renaissance Mumbai.
To the colonel, it looked like the deep offensive Indian planners had practiced over and over: a blitzkrieg-type combined-arms assault that counted on surprise, air strikes, and massive conventional firepower to overwhelm the Pakistani army. Two gigantic armored spearheads were racing west, spring-loaded from their exercise positions. He thought the Indians would most likely try to reach the Indus River, at which point they would hook left and right to encircle and destroy the surrounded Pakistanis. The seized territory would be used to bargain for action against the militant groups that had attacked Mumbai. Meanwhile, air strikes would attempt to decapitate Pakistani command, control, and communications, in a replay of U.S. “shock and awe” on Baghdad.
The Indians envision it as a limited incursion for limited goals, the colonel concluded. But Islamabad may not see it that way.
Dan rubbed his face, and surfed. A SEAL team had recovered a Special Forces soldier held hostage in Afghanistan, but aside from that, the news from home was all bad. Wall Street trading was still closed. The crash had expanded to the banks. The president had closed them, a step not taken since 1933, and called an emergency meeting of the Federal Reserve.
Another cyberattack had corrupted the four central servers that processed transactions for the self-service automatic pumps at gas stations, halting truck and delivery service across the country. And a major fire had shut down a smokeless propellant plant in St. Marks, Florida, one of only two in the country and the one that supplied over 90 percent of the Army’s needs. St. Marks made not just powder for small-arms ammunition, but propellants for mortars, artillery, naval guns, and gas generators — like the ones in automobile air bags or, as it happened, in Savo’s missiles.
He sat motionless in the whirring, humming chill air as the hinges of the doors of Mars creaked and began to swing open. It wasn’t clear yet, with whom. But the United States, no less than India and Pakistan, was at war. It would be waged in the shadows, before flaring into open conflict.
His mess attendant, at his elbow. “Cap’n. Gonna want evening meal up here?”
Dan tried to work the tension out of his shoulders. Remembering how Singhe had massaged them. Wishing those soft yet strong hands could dig into his muscles once more. “Yeah, I guess. From now on until further notice, Longley.”
Over the next twelve hours, he slumped in the chair, or alternately paced the aisles as Savo pitched and rolled. The Indian spearheads advanced and the Pakistani defenses began to dent in, visible on the large-screen displays as a froth of low-level air contacts over the forward edge of the battle area. The high-side chat posted near-real-time inputs from DIA and play-by-play commentary by the Army. The Indians had also embedded TV crews in their forward elements, and now and then Donnie called to say he’d Tivo’d a clip from the front lines, rebroadcast over commercial TV. General Zhang had left Mumbai, flown out in a PLAF transport with escorts from both the Indian air force and the Chinese. Still alive, the bastard… the spy who’d orchestrated, years before, the systematic theft of U.S. military secrets, and ordered the murder of an innocent young woman.
Scattered cyberattacks and sabotage were crippling aircraft production facilities at General Dynamics and the two submarine shipyards left in production, Electric Boat and Newport News. Too late now to regret the paring away of the defense industrial base. If open war came, would he even be able to get ammunition?
0510, and a message from Fifth Fleet. The replenishment ship Stuttgart, en route to OpArea Endive, had been instructed by her national authorities to turn back toward the Arabian Sea. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Problem?” Mills said, beside him now in the TAO chair.
Dan blinked; when had Matt taken over from Dave? He was getting fuzzy. Weak, forgetful — the aftereffects of the crud. He tried to squeeze his tired brain back into something resembling alertness. “Uh, it’s Stuttgart. Our oiler’s been called off.”
“Fuck.” Mills rattled his keyboard, stared at the message. “Fuck.”
“Let CHENG know. See if there’s anything he can do to cut consumption even more. And query Mitscher, see what their fuel percentages are. They’ve got to be just as hard up.”
He got up and paced again, hands locked in the small of his back. Stopped behind Terranova, who was worshiping at the Aegis console. Dr. Noblos snored a few feet away, the Johns Hopkins rider sleeping in a chair. Savo rolled, and Dan staggered before catching himself on a console.
Without Stuttgart, his situation was critical. Savo had an intel mission? Fine; the cryppies and the EWs were sending steady reports. But so far, neither the Pakistanis nor the Indians seemed to be taking the war to sea.
So where were his orders, and what was he still doing in a war zone so dangerous that the Germans refused to send a ship into it?
A hell of a lot of questions. But damn few answers. Or maybe one: with everything going down back in the States, they’d forgotten he was out here.
In which case, he’d better start thinking about when to pull up stakes and head for calmer waters. In both the literal and the figurative senses.
Pushing through the curtain into Sonar, he stood behind Carpenter and Zotcher as they scanned the amber pulsing patterns. Mitscher, streaming her low-frequency tail, would probably get the first indication of anyone bird-dogging them, a Pakistani Agosta or Daphne, or an Indian Kilo-class or Type 1500. But if one succeeded in getting in close, his own team, pinging active, could determine whether they lived or died.
He looked down at Carpenter’s skull, the pale scalp visible between gray thinning hairs. He couldn’t envision the old sailor dragging the wiry, athletic Colón into a fan room.
He closed his eyes and stood swaying to the roll. Remembering what Szerenci had said, and how the nations of Europe had been sucked, one after the other, into the maelstrom. Then took a deep breath, propelled himself back out into CIC, and seized Noblos’s shoulder. “Bill. Bill?”
The physicist jerked awake. “Christ! I was napping.”
“Sorry. A question. You said we’d up our P-sub-K the closer inshore we got.”
“Correct. Essentially.” Noblos rubbed his eyes.
“It’s a straight-line relationship? Or geometrical?”
“Uh… neither, but your first miles closer are going to up your probability of kill more than your last.” He coughed, and Dan remembered he too had had the crud. Earlier than the rest, though. “But that wasn’t my recommendation. The actual recommendation—”