Tomahawk (57 page)

When he got to the Fleet Intelligence Center, Sparky was sitting at the mission-planning console. A Marine Corps major leaned over his shoulder, pointing out the best route to slide in under radars. Dan watched the pip move slowly down a valley east of the Algerian border. Then they looked up.

“Thanks for the shot at it, Major; this is my boss.” The marine returned to his seat while Dan folded himself down beside a table between the consoles. It was covered with binders, maps, references, an empty Krispy Kreme box.

“How's the planning going, Sparky?”

Sakai rubbed his eyes. “I called you in Germany. They said you left already.”

“I briefed, then got out of there. They still giving you flak over priority?”

“No. No, they pulled everybody off the nuke missions, got new Blackbird imagery; they're going balls-to-the-
wall, far as I can see. It's something else. DSMAC. The damn thing's not far from being completely hosed.”

That wasn't good news. The conventionally armed missile depended on the scene-matcher for the final bore-sighting the last mile or two to the target. He asked quietly, “Source or process?”

“Oh, it's process,” said Honners, setting down a mug with a Wang logo, a tea bag's string dangling over the lip. Her cheeks looked flabby; unwashed hair hung in her face. “We haven't run it all the way through before. Haven't had to. Unfortunately, the code keeps crashing.”

“What about the contractors?”

“First people we called. They're back there trying to get it running.”

Sakai said, “We're pouring brainpower on this thing. I think we're going to be able to hand-massage it to the point we get the missions out. But there's a steep learning curve and … The point I'm making is, they're gonna have to take some shortcuts to get this thing done in the time frame the Joint Chiefs gave us. That's gonna give us a lower-resolution digital image.”

“That could cause us problems with certain targets,” said Honners, watching Dan.

Sparky added, “Also, we got another stinky wrinkle: The Air Force wants out.”

Dan massaged his face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Call from Sixth Fleet last night. Verbal direction from Admiral Kidder, by request of Third Air Force. Delete all Tomahawk coverage of Air Force targets.”

“That's crazy. Did they say why?”

“The overt rationale is that this is still an untested system. If we go in before the F-one elevens arrive, and we don't take out the air defense, then it'll be alerted when the manned aircraft go over.”

Dan didn't respond right away. You couldn't impose tactics on the guys who had to fly the mission. But he knew the real reason. The same reason the Air Force had dragged at the traces ever since their shotgun marriage to JCM.

He understood, all right. He just hoped no one died because of it.

“You okay?”

“Sorry. Yeah, I'm okay, just tired…. There's nothing

we can do about that. Have you deleted those missions?”

“Started retargeting soon as that came through. Figured instead of fighting it, we'd use those extra warheads to beef up the Navy half of the strike.”

Powell came in. He looked as exhausted as the others. “You heard about DSMAC,” were his first words.

“I was just getting that; we're going to see a degradation.”

“Right.” Powell explained it using the analogy of a gradually grainier photograph. “At a certain level of granularity, you lose the ability to recognize individual faces; at a higher level, you can't tell if you're looking at a person or a mannequin; finally, you can't make sense of the image at all. On certain of these targets, that may not present a problem. Sidi Garib's basically located in flat desert; if nothing else, we can aim using an offset from the image centroid. But the ones with a lot of clutter around them, the missile's going to have trouble figuring out which is which. Especially at night.” He hesitated. “No possibility of making this a day mission?”

“Not a chance. The Air Force already pulled out because of the early-warning problem. If we ask for daylight, we're out of business.”

They stood around the console, looking down at western Libya. The major rolled the ball slowly, intent on the topo lines and the colored overlay showing radar and weapon coverage. Meter by meter, the pip crept onward.

Dan jerked awake, looked at his watch again. “Okay, so we reorient…. When do we have to download to the DTDs? You run any numbers on that, Sparky?”

Sakai pointed to a penciled time line taped to the wall. “I worked backward from H hour. It ain't set in concrete yet, but reading the traffic, I figure it's going to be sometime midnight to early morning on the nineteenth.”

“That's good, but set it up in terms of hours for each step. That way, we'll know we're in trouble early enough to do something about it.”

“Right,” said the engineer patiently. “That's what these numbers are here, along the bottom.”

“Good. How do we get it out there?”

Powell said, “I put my travel people on that. Commercial air's the fastest way to get to Rome. Sixth Fleet will need to set up a hop from Rome to Sigonella. Carrier onboard delivery from Sigonella to
America;
helo from
America
to
New Jersey.”

“Great, but don't forget the subs. That's gonna be half our load-out. Maybe helo the disks out to them, have them surface to pick them up.” Dan massaged his face again. “I'll call Friedman back. Get them stood up to distribute the mission updates once we get them to the carrier.” And ask him a couple of probing questions, he added to himself.

He got Friedman, but the captain said he couldn't talk long. They were getting ready to brief the pilots from
Coral Sea
and
America.
Dan asked him first to confirm that the Air Force was out of the picture as far as Tomahawk was concerned. Friedman confirmed that. “They want no strikes in their half of the theater. Nothing in Tripoli, nothing on Al Azziziyeh. That's a definite.”

“Any idea what's behind it, sir?”

“I don't have grounds .to speculate.”

“Okay, my guys here are shifting those rounds to Benghazi. Have you got an update on your hit list?”

“First priority: The five command and comm centers. Second: the SA-five batteries. Third, the Tall King, Fan Song, and Long Track radar sites.”

“If there's any last-minute intel from overflights, sir, we need to have that expedited to Norfolk. Especially imagery.”

Friedman said he'd clean it up and put it on the wire. The next question he asked put Dan on the spot. “I'm getting questions from our guys, too. Which targets they can count on you to take out. Also, do we need to schedule backup Shrike and HARM strikes on them. I have to know that within the next five hours. We've got two hundred and ten identified radars in the strike area. We're making final decisions on which ones we jam, which ones
we hit, and which ones we're gonna leave to Tomahawk.”

Sweating, Dan committed himself formally to destroy five targets in the Benghazi area and to put at least five missiles on Sidi Garib. Friedman said, “Now let's talk timing. We're planning H at midnight Greenwich, oh-two hundred Tripoli local. We've got to have an absolute guarantee your rounds will cross the coastline between H minus ten and H minus five, and that no, repeat
no,
TLAMs will be in the air after H hour.”

“That's an awful narrow window, sir. It's gonna be hard to get salvos off that fast. And is that a firm time on H?”

“Firm as Jell-O. They're running the fly/no fly decision straight out of the White House. That window's all you're going to get. The whole key to success in this gorilla is going to be surprise. We've already lost strategic surprise, thanks to our friends in the press. We've got to achieve tactical surprise or we're going to be folding a lot of flags. It's gonna be one pass, haul ass. A lot of metal trying to occupy the same airspace. I don't want fratricide on your missiles. Guarantee me that, Commander, or I'm going to recommend we drop you from the Navy plan, too.”

The fist was out of the pocket. Dan said tightly, “I hear you. No missiles in the air after H hour. Except the ones going south—right? There're not gonna be any U.S. planes down there.”

Friedman agreed there wouldn't, and on that note, Dan started to sign off, until he remembered the original reason he'd called. He passed his requirements: dedicated flight from Rome to Sicily, carrier onboard delivery from Si-gonella, helos from there to
New Jersey
and the submarines.

When he got back to the mission-planning area, Hon-ners and the pilots were back at it. Slowly etching in miniature the routes that would take tons of ordnance hurtling across ocean and desert. In the back room, Sparky briefed him on how he and the contractors and photo intel people were going to grind out digital images from a system that wasn't supposed to be operational for six months yet. There wasn't much talk back there, just a lot of slack faces, blinking eyes, smoldering cigarettes. Screens and
circuit diagrams, fault isolation logic, system manuals. A lot of glancing at the clock.

He looked at it himself. Oh-two hundred Tripoli time? That was less than seventy hours away.

He got himself another cup of coffee, and joined them.

37

 

 

 

Two days later he pushed his way down the aisle of a 747, muttering, “Excuse me” and “Sorry” to annoyed passengers. He wore a polo shirt, chino trousers, and running shoes; he carried his uniform in a hanging bag. Dragging down his right hand was a huge green footlocker. Sakai trailed him, manhandling another.

He checked his tickets, making sure they had the right seats. Four across, all theirs. He took the left-hand one, Sakai the right. The boxes each got their own, snuggled between them. Behind them, Alix and a commander from the sub-launched side of the program escorted two more. Each DTD held all the missions they'd generated, plus the new Track Control Group software. One for each launching unit, and one spare.

He belted his in and collapsed with a sigh. The woman across the aisle glanced up from a paperback, then did a double take. Dan followed her look. The stenciling on the box read ORGAN TRANSPLANT MATERIAL, DO NOT X-RAY.

He reclined his seat and tried to relax as the passengers bustled about, stuffing twice as much baggage into the overhead bins as they were designed to hold.

Honners and the other mission planners had plotted ten routes. Two flight paths to Sidi Garib, and eight to various targets in the Benghazi area. One of them, unfortunately, was still the intelligence agency building.

He shoved that out of his mind—he'd have one more opportunity to get it changed—and closed his eyes, one hand resting on the case. A moment later, he was asleep.

Twelve hours later he was in Rome. He slung the carry-on over his shoulder and lugged the case down the jetway.

A trio of Italian police troops in tan fatigues waited in the terminal, submachine guns slung. A U.S. Army colonel and two MPs stood with them. “Lenson?” the colonel said. Dan nodded. “Follow us.”

“Hold up, more coming.”

When they were assembled, the colonel led them through a separate aisle, bypassing customs. A uniformed man asked him something in Italian; he held up a pass; they were waved through.

Outside, the sun glared down. He no longer had any idea what the local time was, nor did he care. All he knew was that they had sixteen hours to H. The troops and MPs escorted them across the tarmac to a high-winged prop plane, AERO SICILIA, the side markings read. Ten minutes' wait for takeoff, and then they were in the air, rocking in updrafts, heading out over the blue Tyrrhenian Sea in a great vulture wheel that turned slowly south.

The carrier onboard delivery aircraft was a C-2, the ugliest, stubbiest little plane he'd ever seen. Lashed down inside were shipping containers, orange nylon mail sacks, sonobuoy containers. The crew trussed the passengers in so tightly Dan could only suck shallow breaths. Then they were briefed on how to get out in a crash. They sat facing backward in the padded, cramped passenger compartment for half an hour, baking in the Sicilian sun, waiting for another priority delivery to arrive. At last the rear ramp came up and locked. The plane accelerated down the runway, the huge blades on the turboprops humming like a runaway elevator, and lifted into the late-afternoon light. When he lifted the padding, he discovered a tiny port, through which he made out the crater of Aetna and, across the strait, the jagged violet mountains of Calabria.