'Conn, aye.' Lieutenant Ken Shaw had the midwatch.
'Possihle sonar contact hearing zero-six-zero…probably a submerged contact. It's very faint, sir,' the sonar chief reported.
The drill was automatic after all the practice they'd undergone on the trips from Bremerton and Pearl. The fire-control-tracking party immediately started a plot. A tech on the ray-path analyzer took data directly from the sonar instruments and from that tried to determine the probable range to the target The computer required only a second. 'That's a direct-path signal, sir. Range is under twenty thousand yards.'
Dutch Claggett hadn't really been asleep. In the way of captains, he'd been lying in his bunk, eyes closed, even dreaming something meaningless and confusing about a day fishing on the beach with the fish behind him on the sand and creeping closer to his back, when the call had gone out from sonar. Somehow he'd come completely awake, and was now in the attack center, standing barefoot in his underwear. He checked the room to determine depth, course, and speed, then headed into sonar to get his own look at the instruments.
'Talk to me, Chief.'
'Right here on the sixty-hertz line.' The chief tapped the screen with his grease pencil. It came and went and came and went, but kept coming back, just a series of dots trickling down the screen, all on the same frequency line. The bearing was changing slowly right to left.
'They've been at sea for more than three weeks…' Claggett thought aloud.
'Long time for a diesel boat,' the chief agreed. 'Maybe heading back in for refueling?'
Claggett leaned in closer, as though proximity to the screen would make a difference. 'Could be. Or maybe he's just changing position. Makes sense that they'd have a patrol line offshore. Keep me posted.'
'Aye, Cap'n.'
'Well?' Claggett asked the tracking party.
'First cut on range is fourteen thousand yards, base course is westerly, speed about six knots.'
The contact was easily within range of his ADCAP torpedoes, Claggett saw. But the mission didn't allow him to do anything about it.
'Let's get two weapons warmed up,' the Captain said. 'When we have a good track on our friend, we evade to the south. If he closes on us, we try to keep out of his way, and we can shoot only if there's no choice.' He didn't even have to look around to know what his crewmen thought of that. He could hear the change in how they breathed.
'What do you think?' Mary Pat Foley asked.
'Interesting,' Jack said after a moment's contemplation of the fax from Langley.
'It's a long-ball opportunity.' This was the voice of Ed Foley. 'But it's one hell of a gamble.'
'They're not even sure he's there,' Ryan said, rereading the signal. It had all the marks of something from John Clark. Honest. Decisive. Positive. The man knew how to think on his feet, and though often a guy at the bottom of the food chain, he tended to see the big picture very clearly from down there. 'I have to go upstairs with this one, guys.'
'Don't trip on the way,' MP advised with a smile he could almost hear. She was still a cowgirl on field operations. 'I recommend a Go-Mission on this one.'
'And you, Ed?' Jack asked.
'It's a risk, but sometimes you go with what the guy in the field says. If we want a political resolution for this situation, well, then we have to have a tame political figure to lean on. We need the guy, and this might be our only way to get him out alive.' The National Security Advisor could hear the gritted teeth on the other end of the STU-6 circuit. Both the Foleys were true in form. More importantly, they were in agreement.
'I'll be back to you in twenty minutes.' Ryan switched over to his regular phone. 'I need to see the Boss right now,' he told the President's executive secretary.
The sun was rising for yet another hot, windless day. Admiral Dubro realized that he was losing weight. The waistband on his khaki trousers was looser than usual, and he had to reef in his belt a little more. His two carriers were now in regular contact with the Indians. Sometimes they came close enough for a visual, though more often some Harrier's look-down radar just look a snapshot from fifty or so miles away. Worse, his orders were to let them see his ships. Why the hell wasn't he heading east for the Straits of Malacca? There was a real war to fight. He'd come to regard the possible Indian invasion of Sri Lanka as a personal insult, but Sri Lanka wasn't U.S. territory, and the Marianas were, and his were the only carriers Dave Seaton had.
Okay, so the approach wouldn't exactly be covert. He had to pass through one of several straits to reenter the Pacific Ocean, all of them about as busy as Times Square at noon. There was even the off-chance of a sub there, but he had ASW ships, and he could pounce on any submarine that tried to hinder his passage. But his orders were to remain in the IO, and to be visible doing so.
The word was out among the crew, of course. He hadn't made even a token effort to keep things quiet. It would never have worked in any case. And his people had a right to know what was going on, in anticipation of entering the fray. They needed to know, to get their backs up, to generate an extra determination before shifting from a peacetime mentality to that of a shooting war—but once you were ready, you had to do it. And they weren't.
The result was the same for him as for every other man or woman in the battle force: searing frustration, short temper, and a building rage. The day before, one of his Tomcat drivers had blown between two Indian Harriers, with perhaps ten feet of separation, just to show them who knew how to fly and who didn't, and while that had probably put the fear of God into the visitors, it wasn't terribly professional…even though Mike Dubro could remember what it was like to be a lieutenant, junior grade, and could also imagine himself doing the same thing. That hadn't made the personal dressing-down any easier. He'd had to do it, and had also known afterward that the flight crew in question would go back to their quarters muttering about the dumb old fart on the flag bridge who didn't know what it was like to drive fighter planes, 'cause the Spads he'd grown up with had probably used windup keys to get off the boat…
'If they take the first shot, we're going to get hurt,' Commander Hamson observed after announcing that their dawn patrol had shown up right on schedule.
'If they put an Exocet into us, we'll pipe 'Sweepers, man your brooms,' Ed.' It was a lame attempt at humor, but Dubro didn't feel very humorous at the moment.
'Not if they get lucky and catch a JP bunker.' Now his operations officer was turning pessimistic.
A few moments later the screening ships lit off their fire-control radars and locked on to the Indian intruders. Through his binoculars Dubro could see that the nearest Aegis cruiser had white missiles sitting in her launch rails, and then they trained out, as did the target-illumination radars. The message was clear:
He could have ordered another wrathful dispatch to Pearl Harbor, but Dave Seaton had enough on his plate, and the real decisions were being made in Washington by people who didn't understand the problem.
'Is it worth doing?'
'Yes, sir,' Ryan replied, having come to his own conclusion on the walk to the President's office. It meant putting two friends at additional risk, but that was their job, and making the decision was his-partly anyway. It was easy to say such things, even knowing that because of them he'd sleep badly if at all. 'The reasons are obvious.'
'And if it fails?'
'Two of our people are in grave danger, but—'
'But that's what they're for?' Durling asked, not entirely kindly.
'They're both friends of mine, Mr. President. If you think I like the idea of—'
'Settle down,' the President said. 'We have a lot of people at risk, and you know what? Not knowing who they are makes it harder instead of easier. I've learned that one the hard way.' Roger Durling looked down at his desk, at all the administrative briefing papers and other matters that didn't have the first connection to the crisis in the Pacific but had to be handled nonetheless. The government of the United States of America was a huge business, and he couldn't ignore any of it, no matter how important some area might have suddenly become.
Jack saw the papers, too. He didn't have to know what they were, exactly. None had classified cover sheets on them. They were the ordinary day-to-day crap that the man had to deal with. The Boss had to time-share his
