“Was to leave station. I remember.”
“And we should, Captain. We really should. This isn’t our war. And your chances, if you attempt to intervene, are not good.”
Dan started to reply, something about not always being so negative, but bit it back. He needed Noblos. Didn’t have to like him, but needed him. “Well, goddamn it, I’m going to close the range. Just in case.”
“You’re accepting additional risk.”
“I understand that,” Dan said. Keeping the lid on his temper. He strolled back to the command desk. “Matt! Tell the OOD, come to zero-four-zero. Let’s get in a little closer.”
“Um… yessir… how much closer?”
“Not you too, Matt. Just get us in there. Thirty miles?”
The tall lieutenant’s voice was reluctant. But he said, “Thirty miles from shore. Aye aye, sir. I’ll pass that to the bridge.”
0530. The ship leaned and creaked, differently now, with the seas nearly dead astern. In the aft camera, up on the leftmost screen, waves towered black in the foreglow of dawn. He stood watching for minutes, mind blank, leaning over the shoulder of the surface warfare coordinator at his console back near Sonar.
At last, reluctantly, he disengaged his attention from the endless parade of swells. Went back to his command chair, but hesitated before sitting again. His butt ached like a dying tooth. His brain felt as if it had been removed, frozen for ten thousand years, then reinstalled. Half an hour until the mess line opened. He muttered, “Matt, I’m fading. You got it. I’m gonna lie down for twenty, in my sea cabin. Then—”
A digitally generated double chime bonged from the Aegis area. “Launch cuing,” Terranova announced, almost primly.
Dan wheeled. “From where?”
“Link 16, from Rainbow.” The Saudi-based AWACS.
“We need LPE, impact point, area of uncertainty,” Dan rapped out. “Get the geo plot up.”
The middle panel blanked, then relit. Eastern Pakistan. Western India. Launch point, impact-point prediction, area of uncertainty. The last two he could ignore for a few more minutes. They were only guesses, until first-stage burnout and weapon pitchover. ALIS didn’t have a detect yet. Just the heads-up from the Air Force bird, orbiting hundreds of miles to the west.
Suddenly he didn’t feel sleepy. But everything inside his head still seemed to be running more slowly, like a computer with too many programs open. He breathed deep, pinched his cheek. Didn’t seem to help.
The alert-script buzzer went off. “Profile plot, designate Meteor Alfa,” Terranova murmured. “Meteor” was shorthand for a ballistic missile in the air. “Rapid climb rate, but not as fast as a solid-fueled rocket. Size and acceleration profile consistent with Ghauri type. Passing angels fifty. Identify as TBM. ID as hostile. Stand by… ALIS has track… computing trajectory and IPP.”
Beside him Mills murmured, “Ghauri’s a liquid-fueled single-stage. Derived from a North Korean design. Transporter-erector launched. Nuke capable, but no one knows if it actually has a nuclear warhead. Spins early in the transonic regime, to increase accuracy.”
“Very well.” Dan turned the seat and sank into it, riveted to the screen. They wouldn’t get an intercept angle until they had a firm impact prediction. But he was constrained, not just by geometry, but by range. If the target was north of Jodhpur, or the Indian air force base at Phalodi, no chance of an intercept. If it was south of there, he just might have a good enough probability of kill to take a shot.
If he decided to. But the decision wasn’t just technical. After all, the U.S. hadn’t taken sides. But he had no more than six or, at the outside, eight minutes to decide.
He glanced at the red Launch Enable switch near his right hand. Not really a “fire” switch, in the classic gunnery sense. The magazines were authorized and enabled via the command console. The Fire Inhibit/Enable key just allowed the command to go to the magazine. The Canister Safe Enable switch, on the bottom of the canisters, was another safety interlock. The gunner’s mates held those keys, so no rogue CO or TAO could launch on his own.
But once all the keys were turned by human beings, ALIS herself ran through a built-in system test, calculated the chances of a successful intercept, matched parameters, and sent the fire signal.
He had to keep his inventory in mind too. Better than the last time Savo had engaged, but still limited. Twelve Standard Block 4A theater missile defense missiles. Once those cells were empty, Savo was no longer a national-level asset.
And they’d had only a 50 percent kill record last time.
The display jerked, then jumped forward, as if the camera was falling straight down from space. It was nauseating, and he blinked, keeping his fingers clear of the switch.
A white dot welled up, like a whale rising from deep beneath the sea. It pulsed on the center screen. The “gate,” the vibrating bright green hook of the radar’s acquisition function, zoomed in, corrected, and centered.
“ALIS locked on,” Terranova announced. “This is a big mother.”
“Very well. Manually engage when track is established.”
The bracket convulsed, as if blown by a stiff gust, and strayed off the dot. The petty officer cursed. Caught it, guided it back. It circled, then locked on. The white dot grew rapidly. Not a visual picture, though it resembled one, but the digital representation of the radar data the SPY-1 was feeding back ten times a second.
Beside him Mills had begun the prefiring litany. Alerting VLS, the bridge, Mitscher, and Higher to what was happening. “Bring up GCCS on the other screen,” Dan murmured.
But the screen was blank. Someone behind them said, “GCCS, no data.”
“What?… Try again. There’s got to be data.” The center screen was still raw video from ALIS. But the left showed only a blinking caret. “Where’s the goddamned big picture?” he muttered.
The voice called, “Geeks is down. No response to repeated queries.”
“Oh, this isn’t good,” Mills murmured. Dan blew out. Without the Global Command and Control System, he was limited to what Savo’s and Mitscher’s organic sensors — Aegis, EW, sonar — could see, and, of course, what he could eavesdrop on in high-side chat and Indian television.
Tunnel vision. The classic danger for every commander in combat.
“Meteor Alfa, gathering horizontal velocity,” Donnie Wenck called, and Noblos’s voice added, “Pitchover.”
Dan flinched, winching himself back to the large-screen displays. “Okay, get that info out. Now! Flash voice, ComFifthFleet and CentCom.” Alfa’s elevation callout, in angels, passed six hundred and was still climbing. But the white dot, gripped by the brackets, which up to now had been stationary relative to the geo plot, began to drift. Eastward, toward India. Burnout and pitchover, into the long ballistic trajectory that would end at its target.
At some point he’d missed, Wenck or Terranova had put the predicted point of impact up on the rightmost screen. The area of uncertainty overlay shrank, expanded, elongated, and shrank again, shivering like Jell-O as ALIS continually recalculated. But in general, it was a vaguely oval-shaped darkness in western India, hundreds of miles inland from where Savo steamed.
He leaned forward in his seat, squinting. Fifty miles in length, forty in width, it seemed to be centered west of one of the Indian airfields the air strikes had risen from… supporting the ground attack that was crashing through the shattered Pakistani defenses. “How confident are we on that IPP, Terror?”