Damage Control Read online

  —and saw a hand emerging from a uniform sleeve with a commodore’s broad stripe on it, holding something glittering and brassy to the input port of the JOTS repeater.

  “Hey—!” Alan started to say, grabbing, without thinking, at the hand. Then, too late, he said, “Sir—!” but the commodore’s enraged eyes had already locked into his.

  AG 702, 20 NM WSW of the Lakshadweep Islands

  In AG 702, the cheating S-3 that Alan Craik had seen on the JOTS and complained about to Rafehausen, Commander Paul Stevens was enjoying his nugget TACCO’s nerves. “Hey, Collins, you got that back end sweet yet?” Stevens tried not to lose an opportunity to give the kid the gears. In fact, as far as Stevens could tell, the “back end”—the big bank of antiquated computers that drove the airplane’s sonar-receiving and tactical displays—was functioning as well as it ever did, but the new LTjg didn’t know that.

  “It’s, uh, it’s up, sir. I mean—”

  “Jeez, Collins, either it’s up or it ain’t. I’m the pilot, not the TACCO. Which way do you want it?”

  “It’s up.” Collins’s voice rose so that the response sounded more like a question than an answer.

  Stevens hit his intercom so that only his copilot could hear him. “Kids ought to be out of diapers before they leave the RAG.”

  “Give him a rest,” she muttered. Lisa “Goldy” Goldstein had fought her way out of the girl jobs in naval aviation and she had plenty of spine to stand up to Stevens, who was a great pilot and an okay squadron CO, but sometimes a total asshole as a human being. “Skipper, you blow that kid’s confidence, we still have to live with him the whole cruise.”

  Stevens smiled. He liked Goldstein, and he liked that she stood up to him. “I can hear the snot in his nose every time he talks.”

  “Yeah, skipper, and I can see the dust when you fart. Can we get this show on the road?”

  Stevens grinned. “Roger that.” He cycled the intercom to the back end. “Collins, if you’ve got us a working computer, you and Whitehorse better start thinking of your sonobuoy pattern.”

  Bobby Whitehorse, the enlisted SENSO Officer, or SENSO, was a shy, silent Indian kid from a reserve in the Dakotas. He listened, said nothing, and started to enter his projected pattern into the computer in front of him. As his facial expression rarely changed, it was difficult for the other troops in the squadron to figure out whether he was sullen-silent or shy-silent.

  Stevens saw the little symbols on his pilot’s display. “Way over there?” he said. “You guys in back trying to run us out of fuel?”

  “That’s where the ASW module told us to go, skipper,” Goldy said.

  “Yeah, yeah. I came out this way to keep that big island between us and their radar.” Stevens was holding the plane about ninety feet off the waves beneath them, flying with one hand and turning his head to Goldy when he talked. One bad twitch and they’d have a wing in the water, but Stevens always flew this way and his crews got used to it. And they had to be under the opposing force’s radar horizon, because they were cheating—flying to a target before startex.

  Stevens pushed the throttle forward and banked to the left, heading for the entry point to the pattern the SENSO had marked twenty nautical miles to the west.

  “I have an ESM cut just beyond the island. Russian airsweep radar, second generation.” Collins sounded less nervous. He was better with the radar detection than with the sonar. “I’m putting it on screen. Second cut. Got a triangulation. See it, skipper?”

  Stevens flicked his eyes from his instrument scan to the little screen on his console and winced. The Indians had at least a radar picket, maybe more, much closer to him than he had expected. This is where he and Rafe and the crotchety bastards in the anti-submarine warfare module had guessed they’d find the Indian sub early in the exercise. Rafe wanted it found and tagged from the get-go. And here the Indians were, with a radar picket right at the edge of the start area, looking out for someone like—

  “Looks like we’re all cheating together,” Goldy said.

  “Jeez, Craik might have warned us the Indians were this far south.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Stevens saw the flash off her visor as Goldy turned her head and looked at him. Clearly she didn’t agree with his views on cheating, either.

  “Got another cut, skipper. Another air-search radar.”

  “They shouldn’t be seeing us yet,” Stevens said, banking sharply to keep the bulk of the forty-mile-long island between his plane and the radar pickets on the other coast.

  “Startex in one minute,” Goldy said. “I think we may be the first casualties in this thing.”

  “Not if I can help it. Whitehorse, put a long pattern down here.”

  Collins cut in. “We’re still seven miles from the drop—”

  “Let’s put the first line in here and we’ll sneak up the coast low, drop a few more, and see what we get.”

  Collins mumbled something about how far the Indian sub would have to be from her start position to be caught this far west.

  “You got something to say, Mister Collins?”

  “No, sir.”

  Clunk. Each sonobuoy had the passive systems to listen for an enemy sub within a thousand yards or so, and a tiny radio transceiver to broadcast the digital data back to the plane. When the sonobuoy survived the drop to the water and the transceivers worked, it was a great system.

  “Number one in the water and I have a signal.” Whitehorse had a flat, nasal voice.

  Stevens thought it might have been the longest sentence he’d heard out of the boy.

  Clunk.

  “Number two in the water and—live. She’s good.”

  Collins came in again. “Look at the salinity, Whitehorse. Where’s the layer?”

  Stevens cut the nerd babble from the rear seats. He didn’t expect they’d find the sub, but it was an exercise and he didn’t want to be remembered as the first casualty.

  Clunk.

  “Startex,” Goldy said. The game was live; if anyone had seen them, they’d be called with an imaginary missile shot over the radio. Stevens looked at the digital readout on the encrypted comms without thinking, fearing the worst. Nothing came, and he smiled. He looked down where the live buoys from Whitehorse’s drops were matched up with the projected pattern and prepared to turn west toward the island after the next drop. At this altitude, even at low speed, every turn was exciting.

  Clunk.

  “I—uh, skipper? We—shit, there it is again. Maybe a sub?” Collins, from the back seat, with nerves making him sound like a girl.

  Stevens made the turn to put the next buoy in the pattern.

  “Whitehorse? You concur?”

  “It’s a sub,” Whitehorse said. Flat and confident. “Diesel running about five knots.”

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to know they’re cheating harder than we are,” Goldy said. “He’s at least a few miles off his start line.”

  “I got him on two buoys. I got a fix.” Collins’s voice rose an octave. “Hey! There he is!”

  Goldy tapped her helmet and cut out the back seats. “Want me to call him in to the boat?”

  “No. Let’s drop an active on him so he’s dead and then call him in. Those pickets are right over there; we may be under their radar horizon but they’ll be on a broadcast like white on rice.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Whitehorse, you ready with an active drop?”

  “Roger.” Whitehorse sounded interested.

  “Collins, you ready? You going to fuck this up?”

  “No—ah, yes. Sir. No.”

  Goldy reached over and slapped Stevens on the helmet. Stevens gave her a smile that said, Yeah, I’m an asshole. Then he got the plane right down on the wave tops at the lowest speed he could manage and aimed for the datum, the little mark on his computer screen that told him where the sub was, one hundred and fifty meters down.

  “Ready to drop,” Whitehorse said.

  The high-bypass turbofa
ns screamed like asthmatic banshees as he aimed for the datum.

  Clunk.

  “In the water. Ready for active.”

  “Go,” said Collins.

  Breeeet!

  Every man on the submarine’s bridge heard the screech as the buoy went active. The former navigator froze, his mind blank.

  “There is not another sub out here.” The second engineer sounded less positive than his words implied.

  “Whoever that is knows where we are and that we’re leaving the exercise area. Battle stations!” the navigator said.

  “It must be Americans from the exercise.”

  “What are they doing over here?”

  “Cheating. They’re famous for it.” The second engineer got down on the chart table.

  Breeeet!

  “It has to be an aircraft.”

  Around them, sailors tumbled into their action stations, many of them looking sick and gray. The navigator still couldn’t focus his mind on the problem. No one had planned for detection this early.

  “We have to shoot it down,” the second engineer said.

  “What?”

  “We have to shoot the American down.”

  “What if he’s already passed on our location?”

  “What if he has? It will be an hour before they can have another plane here. We’ll be long gone.”

  The navigator hesitated and saw something he didn’t like in the second engineer.

  “This is my decision.”

  “Not if you endanger the mission.”

  The navigator saw the gulf yawning at his feet. They were no longer part of a service with a hundred years of tradition. His whole view of himself and his place in the ordered universe shredded. He was alone, the captain of a ship of mutineers. And the second engineer was prepared to walk over his corpse if he didn’t act immediately.

  “Surface!” he shouted. “Khuri, man the launcher. I want to hit him the moment the tower clears the water.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Petty Officer Khuri was one of the few men qualified to fire the rotary missile launcher in the conning tower, and it could be fired only when they were surfaced.

  “Satisfied?” he snarled to the second engineer.

  The younger man nodded and shrugged, as if to say that events were his masters, not his servants. It was a popular saying among the faithful.

  The navigator wondered how they would maintain discipline.

  He felt the bow incline sharply.

  “They’re coming up!” Collins said.

  “Jeez! Well, that’s sporting. Goldy, snap a photo for the cruise book. Hey, Collins, you don’t suck as much as I thought. Whitehorse, that was sweet.”

  “Can I call the boat?”

  “Get the photo first.”

  Stevens took his time, banked the plane and climbed a little to get Goldy a better camera angle and pointed the nose back at the datum, just a mile ahead. He could see the disturbance in the water where her tower was cutting the surface. Mighty fast for an exercise, he thought. Then the tower was clear, a black square against the sun-dazzled sea.

  A little click in the brain, as a neuron fired on some half remembered—

  “What the fu—” Not sun dazzle. Missile launch. “FLARES!” Stevens bellowed.

  Collins, busy enjoying his first operational success with a cup of coffee, took a precious second to toss it aside before reaching over his head for the flare toggle which, being a careful young man, he had set to a three-second burst pattern when he entered the plane.

  Stevens had no altitude and very little airspeed, but he did what he could. He rammed the throttle past max to military and put the belly of the plane toward the launches. He thought they were real. It made no sense, but he believed it and acted. His response was almost enough.

  The flare pods fired continuously as he turned. The first missile chased a flare that burned as hot as the sun and its warhead fired, taking a precious piece out of the vertical stabilizer because the flares hadn’t had time or speed to deploy far from the aircraft. Stevens felt the change in handling and compensated. He was that good.

  The second missile followed an earlier flare and detonated just off the port wing, its steel-cable warhead just missing the port engine and slicing through the aft cockpit, beheading Whitehorse in his seat and taking the top off the aft canopy. Wind and sun filled the airplane.

  Stevens felt the change and reached down to pull the master eject as two more missiles slammed into his port wing, which separated from the plane as shrapnel shredded Stevens’s body and tipped his ejection seat as it fired to incinerate LT Goldstein before her seat could compensate.

  A piece of the port engine struck Collins a glancing blow that broke most of his ribs. Because the first missile had ripped the canopy off the back seat, and Stevens’s last piloting had oriented the plane at right angles to the water, his own ejection was clean, and his seat shot him sideways, parallel to the sea, unconscious and mutilated. His luck lay in his angle.

  The fourth missile hit the tons of fuel in AG 702’s belly and she exploded, but her death hid Collins’s ejection from the shooter on the conning tower of the Nehru. By the time his chute deployed, the tower of the sub was clear for diving, and Collins’s limp and bleeding body settled into the warm water more than a mile beyond the quickly sinking wreckage of his plane. His life vest inflated as it felt the salt, and a transceiver in the shoulder began to radiate his distress.

  2

  Mahe Naval Base, India

  “Sir—!”

  The Indian commodore’s eyes, widened with anger, stared at Alan. “Take your hands off me!”

  But Alan didn’t let go. The other man’s rank meant less to him right then than his touching the JOTS, which had worldwide connections and was as sacrosanct as any piece of classified hardware the Navy owned—the reason that Benvenuto was posted to ride herd on it. For this exercise, Indian monitoring personnel were allowed to look at it but most definitely not to insert data or play with the controls; when they wanted data or a change of view—there had been a briefing specifically about this—they were supposed to ask Benvenuto or Alan. They did not work the JOTS themselves.

  “Sir!” Alan still had a grip on the brown hand, his own good hand closed over it just behind the knuckles so that whatever the commodore had inserted into the port was still locked into Alan’s fingers “I’m very sorry, sir, but—”

  “Let me go! This is an order! I will protest—”

  “Sir, our orders are clear—nobody—”

  The hand squirmed within his grip and the arm tried to pull away. “This is an outrage—!” Heads turned toward them. The Indian lieutenant who had been staring at the clock looked shocked now, an expression that Alan caught in a fraction of a second’s glance and registered as fear. The commodore was pulling harder, putting his considerable weight behind his effort, and his hand backed four inches away from the JOTS and then jerked, and Alan’s fingers, gripping harder still, slid down the long brown fingers and caught on something hard and smooth, and a gold chain attached to the glittering thing snapped and the commodore’s hand pulled free.

  And Alan found himself holding a shell-like, golden object with a protrusion made to fit a USB port.

  The commodore made a grab for it. Alan pulled away. “Benvenuto—!” The JOTS tender, frozen at the sound-powered phone, launched himself at the terminal. At the same time, the commodore, face flushed a muddy red, was bellowing across the space at the Indian lieutenant, the Hindi words lost to Alan. He closed the golden shell inside his hand and rapped out, “Benvenuto, do not let this officer approach the JOTS terminal! That’s an order!”

  The hand came down and hovered near a sidearm. Alan took it in—the distorted face, the weapon, the rage—and wheeled to shout across the space to his communications specialist, “Borgman! Get Fifth Fleet HQ on Priority now! We have a situation here.” He whirled back to confront the Indian commodore. “Sir—please back off! You’re violating the terms of the agre
ement that set up this exercise. At once, sir!”

  The commodore was shorter than Alan, trim, late forties. He hesitated long enough to meet Alan’s eyes and make some inner calculation, and he shouted again at the lieutenant.

  And the lieutenant unsnapped his own holster with his left hand and drew an automatic pistol with his right and put it almost against Petty Officer Borgman’s head as she tried to raise Bahrain on the radio, and he pulled the trigger.

  “No-o-o—!” Alan screamed. He would have gone after the lieutenant then, but he heard Benvenuto shout, and he turned and saw that the commodore had drawn his own weapon and was aiming it at him. Benvenuto caught the man’s arm and the gun roared, and Alan crossed the space between them in a stride and kicked the commodore in the groin, and then all hell broke loose.

  The lieutenant took two shots at Alan and Benvenuto, and Alan hit the deck, pulling Benvenuto down with him. Somebody was screaming from the other side of the room. The commodore was on his knees, bent forward almost over Benvenuto’s legs; as Alan looked, he vomited.

  “Holy shit—!” Benvenuto groaned. Alan leaned across the sailor to punch the side of the commodore’s head; the man lurched to Alan’s right, revealing the gun he still held in his right hand. Alan hit him again and grabbed the gun.

  The lieutenant’s pistol barked and was met by a scream of pain from the doorway and a rattle of automatic-weapons fire; when Alan rolled back, he saw an Indian Marine sagging down the side of the entrance door, his hands closed over the front of a uniform blouse that was oozing blood. Another Marine, seen only as the forward half of an assault rifle and a pair of hands, was firing into the room, and another arm appeared and the hand grabbed the wounded man and pulled him out the door. Alan could look along the floor and see people lying flat around the room’s periphery, except for the lieutenant, who showed as a pair of legs protected from the doorway by the central console. Then another pistol started to fire, the source hidden from Alan by the console—one of the other Indian ratings, the only people over there. Jesus, they brought weapons and were waiting for their moment. But what the hell was all that with the golden thing and the JOTS? And then, belatedly, You don’t kill people so you can win an exercise—