Damage Control (3 page)

“Implement Shiva’s Spear,” he said. “Better look at the next two layers and have those brought up to readiness.” He thought. “Assemble an operator team at one of our office locations.”

“Which one?”

“Choose one at random.”

Ahead, his gleaming helicopter waited on its pad. Mohenjo Daro sat back and contemplated the end of the world of men.

Running feet sounded outside in the corridor, then shouts and shots.

Alan had made his decision. “We have a vehicle in the fleet-exercise car park. I have to get to it.”

“I will try, sir.”

“Plus I got three more people downstairs.” And he wasn’t leaving without them, for sure.

The sergeant licked his lips, chewed on the upper one as if trying to bite the small moustache there. “Okay, we try.”

“Benvenuto, you okay?”

The young man was rubbing his throat. “Little hoarse, sir.”

“We have to disable the JOTS.” Alan jerked his head. The terminal was critical hardware, its innards as highly classified as anything the Navy had. “Out the window. It’s two floors down to asphalt.”

Benvenuto’s mouth opened. He was being asked to go from being the JOTS’ mother hen to its terminator in one breath. “Ok-a-a-a-y, sir—”

They got two of the Indian EMs to help while one of the
Marines broke the unopenable window, and without ceremony they toppled the device over the sill. Alan leaned at the corner of the window and watched it smash on the pavement below. There was more shooting out there now, and when he raised his head he could see smoke billowing above a row of trees.

The sergeant was instructing the other Marines and the Indian personnel. Alan looked for the pistol he had tossed away but didn’t see it; he supposed that one of the Marines had kicked it out of the way. The sergeant was already by the door, bouncing up and down on his toes from tension. Alan got down low, spotted the pistol under a computer table, grabbed it, then looked around the ruined room, pausing for a bitter moment at Borgman.

“All right, let’s go.”

“Admiral on the bridge!” The sailor braced.

“Stand easy.” Rafe came off the starboard ladder and waved at the bridge crew. “You guys have coffee for an old man?” He turned to Rick Madje, his flag lieutenant, who was holding a phone out to him. Rafe raised his eyebrows.

“Captain Fraser on the
Picton.”
HMCS
Picton
was a Canadian frigate attached to his battle group, the ship Alan had complained about because Rafe had put it way down south as a radar picket with orders to stay in Emissions Control, or EMCON—the regulation of outgoing EM transmissions across the spectrum—until she had a chance to shoot.

“Captain Fraser?”

“Sorry to break EMCON, Admiral, and I’m on satcom to make us harder to track.”

“Sure, Alex, sure.”

“Sir, I’m calling to protest two inbound ‘missiles.’ I’ve called Exercise Control four times to note them as intercepted and they don’t respond.” The “missiles” would really be aircraft imitating missiles as part of the exercise.

“Roger, Alex. I hear you. We haven’t been able to raise ExCon since a few seconds after startex ourselves. Something’s gone down at their end.”

Rafe could hear the relief in the Canadian’s voice. “That’s
okay, then. But be aware that two Indian Air Force Jaguars went over my position about six minutes back and went into a missile profile.”

“Got it, Alex. I’ll pass that to Air Ops.”

“Out here, sir.”

“Stay alive, Alex. Keep up the good work.”

Rafe turned to Madje. “You get all that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get it through to Air Ops and Supplot.” Supplementary Plot was where electronic-warfare-intelligence information and various other sources were cross-indexed to update the carrier’s picture of the ocean around her. Rafe turned to the boat’s captain, a former F-18 pilot. His leather flight jacket’s patch said “Hank Rogers.” Only a score of old buddies like Rafe knew his name was really Reginald.

“Hank? Launch the alert five, okay? I have to put some teeth down there to cover the Canucks.”

“On the way,” Hank murmured, already on the phone to the air boss.

Lieutenant Evan Soleck’s had been the fourth plane to launch after the local Combat Air Patrol and he got it into the air without a hitch. He had no back end to worry about, because he was a mission tanker for a sea-strike package that would launch later in the event—twenty thousand pounds of fuel to give while airborne—but intellectual curiosity made him get the back end up from his pilot console so that he could run his passive electronic-surveillance antennas and follow the action.

His copilot, a nugget from Iowa called “Guppy” because of the facial expressions he generated while concentrating on his instruments, had his hands full merely following the checklists and couldn’t believe his pilot was wasting time on
backseater crap. “If the skipper wanted us doing that stuff, he’d have sent us up with guys in the back,” Guppy said in a put-upon tone.

Soleck watched him flail through the checklist.
That was me, last cruise,
he thought. And continued the ritualistic pattern of bringing the computers on line.
Oh, for the MARI we had at the det.
New computers, enhanced antennas, the works. Soleck had flown in a special det under Al Craik and it had spoiled him for these old planes and their antique systems.

In the windowed bubble below the
Jefferson
‘s bridge, the air boss was trying to launch forty aircraft for the opening reconnaissance of the exercise. Every F-18, every S-3, all the EA-6B Prowlers—it was a major launch, and it took his full concentration to keep the overcrowded flight deck from becoming a disaster. A sailor pushed a yellow sticky into his line of sight.
Launch the alert five AAW.

The air boss looked at the line waiting to get off cats three and four. The event had started, and he had planes five deep in the queue already.

“Tell the tower to hold three and four until the alert is launched.” The alert—an aircraft held on the shortest tether, ready to launch in five minutes—was sitting on cat two, with the second plane somewhere toward the stern. He held the note out to a spotter and motioned that they needed to get that second plane through the traffic jam and on the cat.

“Now launch the alert five AAW,” the air boss said into the ship’s 1MC. He cycled his comms from the Guard frequency that he monitored in his headset to the AAW net while trying to read the spidery writing on the launch board behind him.
Donitz. AG 203.

“Alpha Gulf 203, you ready?” he said.

“Green and green.”

Lieutenant-Commander Chris Donitz was already in the shuttle. The air boss watched the twin vertical stabilizers tremble in the heat distortion as Donitz moved the plane to full power, and then he was off, rotating just off the cat to clear the hull of the ship.

Alpha Whiskey, the air warfare commander off to starboard on the missile cruiser
Fort Klock,
came up before the air boss had toggled back to Guard, giving orders to Donitz as he roared away from the ship in his F-18. “Alpha Gulf 203, intercept two goblins inbound on the 090 radial at 9000.”

Somewhere above him, Donitz said, “Roger,” before the air boss had switched freqs and noted from his comm card that “goblins” were Indian Air Force Jaguars. He didn’t question why Indian Jaguars had to be intercepted; his job was down here. He watched a sailor put a check next to AG 203 on the launch board, then looked down at the deck and saw that AG 114 was next to launch for the alert five.

“Spot, you got 114 moving yet?”

“Trying to get the S-3 off cat three so I can move the E-2 and get him space.”

The air boss looked down at the deck again and saw the S-3 on cat three as the jet-blast deflector rose out of the deck to protect the planes waiting behind her from the backwash of her engines. “What’s that S-3 doing?” he said into his mike.

“Something about their shuttle.”

The air boss stifled his desire to say something savage. Out on the deck, a sweating kid was struggling with some bent piece of metal under the nose wheel of a plane older than he was, surrounded by fumes and jet blast and God knew what else. No amount of attitude from the air boss would make it happen any faster.

“Got it,” Soleck said, looking at a first harvest of ESM cuts from his S-3’s back end.

“You said we were in EMCON, Ev.”

“We
are
in EMCON. I’m not radiating anything; I’m looking at what other folks are radiating.”

Against his own inclination, Guppy leaned forward to look at the screen on his armrest.

“See? That’s the air-search radar on one of the Indian picket ships.” Soleck put his cursor over one of the signals so that Guppy could see it.

“You don’t
know
that.”

Soleck exhaled in frustration. “Yeah, Gup, I do. So would you if you learned your radar parameters. That’s not one of ours, and it’s too much in the air-search freq to be anything but one of theirs. Civilian ships don’t mount antennas like that, right? See the sweep? And anyway, that’s Owl Screech, a Russian targeting radar on one of their Russian-built ships.”

“And you just know all that.”

“Yeah. I also know that we’re off our altitude by a long shot and starting a long turn to the right because the copilot isn’t really paying attention.”

Guppy swung his eyes to the instruments and the plane snapped to attention. “You—”

Soleck thought
Yeah, I’m being unfair. Whatever.
He ran the cursor over the battle group and looked. He could read some low-power emissions from the flight deck, guys talking to the tower for launch at radio freqs. In full EMCON, they wouldn’t do even that. Otherwise, the battle group was pretty invisible. Looked tight. He kept widening his search ring, keeping one eye on his nugget’s flying and one ear on the launch of their strike package. He could hear the air boss berating 706, the other S-3, which had some kind of mechanical failure while in tension.

He got distracted by air-search radar off to the south,
followed almost immediately by a targeting radar. His stomach fluttered. He understood as soon as he got a second cut. That would be
Fort Klock,
probably engaging the first Indian strikes.
Cool.
Soleck liked to see what was going on, and he liked to figure things out. He intended to be an admiral himself, one day.

“706 is ready to launch,” Guppy said.

Soleck decided not to tell Guppy that he could listen to the radio, too. He got another cut way to the north, up near the Lakshadweep Islands, very weak. He played with it a little, got a second cut. The parameters were way up in the comms range and looked naggingly familiar.

Alpha Whiskey came up on the air command freq and passed a vector to an F-18 just launching. Soleck smiled when he heard Chris Donitz responding in his Minnesota voice. Donitz—“Donuts” to everybody who flew—had just made lieutenant-commander. Donitz was being told to intercept a couple of Indian Jaguars.
Old aircraft, no match for the F-18,
Soleck thought,
probably simulating missiles. Get ‘em, Donuts!

“Where the hell is Al Craik?” Rafe barked at his flag lieutenant.

“Nothing on any of our freqs. Nothing on satcom. It’s like the whole of Mahe has gone off the air.”

“Fuck me.” Rafe realized that he had uttered the words and regretted them. Admirals were encouraged to avoid the foul language so normal at every other level. Hank flashed him a smile, as if he was glad that Rafe was still one of the boys.

“Skipper?” a sailor behind the captain said. “CAG on two. He has a plane missing.”

Rafe looked at Hank while he took the call. “Yeah,” was all he said, and a few seconds later “yeah” again. Then, to Rafe, “AG 702 hasn’t been up on link or radar for ten minutes
and CAG is worried.” AG 702 was the S-3 that Rafe had allowed to go out early.

“Stevens is lying low out there.” Rafe was staring at the mess around cat three. “He’s in EMCON, too.”

“Yeah,” said Hank.

“Tell CAG that once the E-2 is airborne, we’ll get a squeak out of 702.”

“Yeah.” The captain murmured into his headset. “He says thanks.”

Rafe thought that the CAG was a nervous ninny who had been promoted above his level of competence, but he kept that view strictly to himself. So far, the worst thing about being a battle group commander was finding that many of the people he liked as drinking buddies were not up to the challenges of big command. Right now, for example, he was ready to kill Alan Craik, whose silence was ruining his day.

“Alpha Whiskey for you, sir.”

“Admiral, 203 is a minute from intercept with those goblins and they won’t respond to radio calls. 203 wants to know how you want to play it.”

This was the gray area where exercise and reality and pride and pilot envy could all get messed up. Rafe didn’t want the Indians to even have an argument that their “missiles” had hit his ship. He worried, too, that the Indian “missiles” would turn back into airplanes when they spotted 203 and prompt an engagement that would waste fuel. He wanted them to admit that they were exercise-dead—and stay that way.

“Tell 203 to get them up on exercise guard and tell them they’re dead from surface-to-air-missiles back before their launch point. If they ignore him, he’s to engage.”

Even while he spoke, the S-3 on catapult three rolled forward into the shuttle at long last, dipped her nose as she went under tension, and leaped like a fat old cat into the air. That S-3 had cost his ship five minutes of launch time, and he could imagine the mayhem it had wreaked down in
Air Ops, with pilots aloft clamoring for gas and pilots on the deck eager to launch.
He
was hot even in the air-conditioned comfort of the flag bridge. Rafe looked at the flag JOTS repeater and waved to one of his staff. “Can you raise Commander Craik on the JOTS?” Even if all of Mahe was down, Al’s JOTS should still function.
Why isn’t he thinking this shit?
Rafe thought irritably. He took a swallow of coffee.
Cold. Ugh.

On the screen of the JOTS, Rafe saw 203 intercept the two Indian Jaguars. One of them turned away at once and headed back for the coast, changing his flight speed and course as prescribed in the exercise book to show that he was exercise-dead.
Score one for the good guys.

But the other kept coming.

“Goblin Two will not respond to calls and is inbound toward the missile engagement zone,” Alpha Whiskey said.

The ship’s captain called from his big chair on the port side. “I want to turn to starboard to unmask my aft CIWS.” The Close-In Weapons System was a cannon capable of incredible bursts of very accurate fire to hit missiles at close range.

Rafe wanted to ignore the “dead” Jaguar and continue the launch of aircraft, but he understood that exercises were to train
everybody
and that ship handling mattered, too. Faced with real missiles, the captain would try to get every defense system on target.
Broadside on, just like the age of Nelson.

“Do it.”

Hank leaned over his mike. “Execute,” he said.

Instantly the noise of the ship changed and she rolled to starboard as her helm was put over. It was one of the fastest turns he’d experienced on a carrier.

Madje caught his eye and pointed at the JOTS, shaking his head. “Mahe master terminal is off the air,” he said.

Rafe felt a little chill in his gut.

The ship leaned harder to starboard. The whole deck was
vibrating. Rafe saw Hank’s grin, realized that Hank had planned this maneuver and was on the ball. It was well executed, too, and he saw the helmsman beaming.

Good for them,
he thought.
Glad I let him.
Somewhere in the back of his mind where he kept score, Hank Rogers got a little plus sign on a future fitrep.

Down a level, the air boss was putting the whole deck on hold as they heeled sharply. He’d had less than a minute’s warning about what the captain intended. The flight deck was still jammed, but the respite was giving the spotters time to get the second alert five up to cat two and the E-2 command plane up to cat three, despite the cant to the deck.