The Bear and the Dragon

Ryan and I helped steal a whole Russian submarine, yeah-and if you repeat that to anyone, I’ll have one of my Marines shoot your ass. Sink some of their ships, yeah, splash a few of their airplanes, sure, but ‘trailing our coat’ in sight of land? Jesus.”

“It’ll shake them up some.”

“If they don’t sink some of my ships in the attempt.”

Hey, Tony,” the voice on the phone said. It took Bretano a second to recognize it.

“Where are you now, Al?” the Secretary of Defense asked.

“Norfolk. Didn’t you know? I’m on USS Gettysburg upgrading their SAMs. It was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose it was,” Tony Bretano agreed, thinking back.

“You must have seen this Chinese thing coming a long way off, man.”

“As a matter of fact, we-” The SecDef paused for a second. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if the ChiComms loft an ICBM at us, this Aegis system does give us something to fall back on, if the computer simulations are right. They ought to be. I wrote most of the software,” Gregory went on.

Secretary Bretano didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t really thought about that eventuality. Thinking things through was one of the things he was paid for, after all. “How ready are you?”

“The electronics stuff is okay, but we don’t have any SAMs aboard. They’re stashed at some depot or something, up on the York River, I think they said. When they load them aboard, I can upgrade the software on the seeker heads. The only missiles aboard, the ones I’ve been playing with, they’re blue ones, exercise missiles, not shooters, I just found out. You know, the Navy’s a little weird. The ship’s in a floating dry dock. They’re going to lower us back in the water in a few hours.” He couldn’t see his former boss’s face at the moment. If he could, he would have recognized the oh, shit expression on his Italian face.

“So, you’re confident in your systems?”

“A full-up test would be nice, but if we can loft three or four SAMs at the inbound, yeah, I think it oughta work.”

“Okay, thanks, Al.”

“So, how’s this war going? All I see on TV is how the Air Force is kicking some ass.”

“They are, the TV’s got that right, but the rest-can’t talk about it over the phone. Al, let me get back to you, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

In his office, Bretano switched buttons. “Ask Admiral Seaton to come in to see me.” That didn’t take very long.

“You rang, Mr. Secretary,” the CNO said when he came in.

“Admiral, there’s a former employee of mine from TRW in Norfolk right now. I set him up to look at upgrading the Aegis missile system to engage ballistic targets.”

“I heard a little about that. How’s his project going?” Dave Seaton asked.

“He says he’s ready for a full-up test. But, Admiral, what if the Chinese launch one of their CSS-4s at us?”

“It wouldn’t be good,” Seaton replied.

“Then how about we take our Aegis ships and put them close to the likely targets?”

“Well, sir, the system’s not certified for ballistic targets yet, and we haven’t really run a test, and-”

“Is it better than nothing?” the SecDef asked, cutting him off.

“A little, I suppose.”

“Then let’s make that happen, and make it happen right now.”

Seaton straightened up. “Aye aye, sir.”

“Gettysburg first. Have her load up what missiles she needs, and bring her right here,” Bretano ordered.

“I’ll call SACLANT right now.”

It was the strangest damned thing, Gregory thought. This ship-not an especially big ship, smaller than the one he and Candi had taken a cruise on the previous winter, but still an oceangoing ship-was in an elevator. That’s what a floating dry dock was. They were flooding it now, to make it go down, back into the water to see if the new propeller worked. Sailors who worked on the dry dock were watching from their perches on-whatever the hell you called the walls of the damned thing.

“Weird, ain’t it, sir?”

Gregory smelled the smoke. It had to be Senior Chief Leek. He turned. It was.

“Never seen this sort of thing before.”

“Nobody does real often, ’cept’n those guys over there who operate this thing. Did you take the chance to walk under the ship?”

“Walk under ten thousand tons of metal?” Gregory responded. “I don’t think so.”

“You was a soldier, wasn’t you?”

“Told you, didn’t I? West Point, jump school, ranger school, back when I was young and foolish.”

“Well, Doc, it’s no big deal. Kinda interesting to see how she’s put together, ‘specially the sonar dome up forward. If I wasn’t a radar guy, I probably woulda been a sonar guy, ’cept there’s nothing for them to do anymore.”

Gregory looked down. Water was creeping across the gray metal floor-deck? he wondered-of the dry dock.

“Attention on deck!” a voice called. Sailors turned and saluted, including Chief Leek.

It was Captain Bob Blandy, Gettysburg’s CO. Gregory had met him only once, and then just to say hello.

“Dr. Gregory.”

“Captain.” They shook hands.

“How’s your project been going?”

“Well, the simulations look good. I’d like to try it against a live target.”

“You got sent to us by the SecDef?”

“Not exactly, but he called me in from California to look at the technical aspects of the problem. I worked for him when he was head of TRW.”

“You’re an SDI guy, right?”

“That and SAMs, yes, sir. Other things. I’m one of the world’s experts on adaptive optics, from my SDI days.”

“What’s that?” Captain Blandy asked.

“The rubber mirror, we called it. You use computer-controlled actuators to warp the mirror to compensate for atmospheric distortions. The idea was to use that to focus the energy beam from a free-electron laser. But it didn’t work out. The rubber mirror worked just fine, but for some reason we never figured out, the damned lasers didn’t scale up the way we hoped they would. Didn’t come up to the power requirements to smoke a missile body.” Gregory looked down in the dry dock again. It certainly took its time, but they probably didn’t want to drop anything this valuable. “I wasn’t directly involved in that, but I kibitzed some. It turned out to be a monster of a technical problem. We just kept bashing our heads against the wall until we got tired of the squishy sound.”

“I know mechanical engineering, some electrical, but not the high-energy stuff. So, what do you think of our Aegis system?”

“I love the radar. Just like the Cobra Dane the Air Force has up at Shemya in the Aleutians. A little more advanced, even. You could probably bounce a signal off the moon if you wanted to.”

“That’s a little out of our range gate,” Blandy observed. “Chief Leek here been taking good care of you?”

“When he leaves the Navy, we might have a place for him at TRW. We’re part of the ongoing SAM project.”

“And Lieutenant Olson, too?” the skipper asked.