whenever possible and used an elaborate ritual of code phrases and passwords to screen possible new members when they came aboard. The relief, the sheer joy just of knowing that there were others like him in this floating city was indescribable. Harold was one of his favorites. He'd had good sex with him on a number of occasions.
Last night, though, they'd met at their usual place, in a linen storage locker down on First Deck. Pellet had taken his pants off, but the two of them hadn't been doing anything, not really, when there'd been a rattling at the compartment door… and then the door had flown open and a first class boatswain's mate named Arbogast had walked in on them.
It had been awful. Turning sharply, Harold had slammed Pellet across the compartment with a sudden, backhanded smash. 'You faggot!' he'd bellowed, and then he'd advanced on Pellet like an avenging fury, fists clenched, face screwed up in hideous, black-cloud rage.
Arbogast had restrained him, telling him to settle down. Harold had claimed that Pellet had made a pass at him, which seemed pretty silly afterward. Pellet, after all, stood five-seven and weighed 148, while Harold was over six feet tall and as powerful as a body builder.
Screaming and red in the face, Harold had threatened to put him on report… for sexual harassment, no less. Arbogast had threatened to put them both on report for fighting. Stunned, Pellet had made his way back to his quarters, tried to sleep, and failed. If gays were no longer banned in the military, gay behavior was, just as it was against regs for Navy men and women to have sex with each other. He could get captain's mast… or a court-martial and a BCD. Damn it all, he liked the Navy! He didn't want to get thrown out!
But worst of all was the terrible, sick-in-the-stomach knowledge that Harold Reidel, his lover, had betrayed him.
'Pellet! Wake up, goddamn it!' Chief Carangelo was standing several feet behind him, bellowing in his ear.
'Uh… yeah, Chief.'
'I said CIWS to standby, damn it! Move your ass!'
'Yes, Chief!' His hand snapped out, grabbing the knob marked CIWS #1, twisting it hard from STBY to AUTO.
He didn't catch his mistake for another two tragic seconds.
The Phalanx CIWS is controlled by an extraordinarily sophisticated computer, one able to read the radar returns from a target that may be approaching at better than three times the speed of sound and the radar returns from the weapon's own bullets departing at one thousand feet per second, computing gun angle, direction, and trajectory to bring the two together. A completely self-contained system, the Phalanx can operate independently of any outside control, a necessity in modern warfare since computers and high-speed weapons can appear, close, and strike before a human could react. Phalanx is capable of opening fire within two seconds of acquiring a target.
But it is also vital for humans to maintain control of their high-tech war toys ? the so-called 'man in the loop' so often discussed in any debate over computer-controlled weapons.
Phalanx has two operational settings. On standby, it cannot fire without a direct command from a human operator in the ship's CIC; on automatic, it is controlled entirely by its computer, tracking and firing on any radar contact in range that it perceives as a threat.
The U.S.S. Dickinson was an Oliver Hazard Perry-class FFG, a guided-missile frigate. Four hundred forty-five feet long, with a full-load displacement of 3,650 tons, Perry-class frigates had originally been designed as merchant escorts charged with defending America's sea lines of communication, or SLOC. After budgetary cutbacks in other shipbuilding programs, however, they'd found an uncomfortable niche as replacement destroyers, providing ASW and anti-air protection for convoys, task forces, amphibious forces, and carrier battle groups. Lightly armed, lightly armored, and with only a single shaft driven by two gas turbines, Perry FFGs had struggled valiantly to fill their new budget-conscious roles. Four were currently assigned to CBG-14.
Detecting the cruise missiles coming in from the southeast on his vessel's SPS-49 air-search array, Dickinson's skipper, Commander Randolph Conde, had ordered flank speed, sending the frigate lunging ahead some 1,200 yards off Jefferson's starboard side. By putting Dickinson between the missiles and the Jefferson, by 'standing into harm's way' in the grandest tradition of the U.S. Navy, Conde hoped both to shield his vastly larger consort from sea-skimming missiles and to add his anti-air assets to the carrier's defense against any pop-up targets.
Dickinson had already begun loosing her Standard RIM-66C missiles at any targets within their range of about ninety miles and had scored several kills.
When the nearest oncoming cruise missile was within twelve miles, Dickinson's single Mark 75 gun, mounted amidships on the ship's superstructure, began banging away, hurling 76mm rounds at the rapidly approaching target at the rate of eighty-five per minute. Her single Phalanx CIWS, mounted aft atop her helicopter hangar, was set on standby and was ready to fire if a missile penetrated to within one mile.
As Dickinson passed less than eight tenths of a mile off Jefferson's starboard beam, Pellet, in the carrier's CIC, accidentally switched his CIWS from standby to auto. Under computer control, the six-barreled Gatling gun slewed sharply, tracking the frigate… then classified it as a friendly surface vessel.
An instant later, as three more missiles penetrated the CBG's ten-mile inner defense zone, Dickinson's skipper gave the order to fire the frigate's super-RBOC launchers.
Rapid-blooming off-board chaff, fired from tubes mounted on the superstructure just aft of the bridge, was packed into cylindrical cartridges.
Each was four feet long and designed to arc high into the air before exploding for maximum dispersal of their radar-confusing payloads.
Dickinson's port-side launcher fired three chaff canisters toward the Jefferson. The carrier's number-one CIWS, mounted to starboard on the flight deck, outboard of the island and just below and abaft of the bridge, detected the chaff containers and reacted with superhuman speed… exactly as it had been designed to react.
The Phalanx's six barrels, spinning with a high-pitched whine, slewed to the right, then fired, the burst sounding more like the scream of a chain saw than the firing of a gun. The first few rounds missed, but the gun, still tracking cartridge and bullets, corrected the aim in a fraction of a second, tearing the chaff container in two. The CIWS then slewed left, tracking a second cylinder as it approached the Jefferson, firing once… then again.
At that moment, the mistake had been detected in Jefferson's CIC, and the selector switch hastily set back to standby mode. The Phalanx abruptly fell silent with a dwindling moan… but the damage had already been done.
Dickinson had been squarely in the line of fire.
A similar incident had occurred during the Gulf War, when the FFG Jarret accidentally fired into the battleship Missouri. That time, there'd been no casualties and minimal damage. This time, however, the frigate was on the receiving end of the friendly fire. Each CIWS round was a depleted-uranium penetrator two and a half times denser than steel, shrouded in a discarding nylon sabot that imparted a stabilizing spin to the projectile. Fifty of those rounds, the salvo fired by Jefferson's Phalanx in just one second, smashed into Dickinson's port side, slashing through her superstructure like bullets through paper.
The frigate's vital spaces were protected by anti-fragmentation armor ? six millimeters of steel over her engineering compartments, nineteen millimeters of aluminum over her magazines, and nineteen millimeters of Kevlar over her command and electronics spaces ? but much of the ship was virtually unarmored. Four sailors were cut down in her galley by hurtling splinters of aluminum and uranium, and another was killed in a crew's quarters' head. Six rounds penetrated the helicopter hangar aft, punching through thin aluminum and tearing into the SH-2F helicopter parked there. Avgas in the helo's tanks spewed into the compartment; fumes came in contact with severed electrical leads…
The explosion tore the hangar wide open, vomiting a column of orange flame and oil-black smoke boiling hundreds of feet into the air. Flames and blast killed seven more men and wounded twenty-five; Dickinson's Phalanx was ripped from its mounting and hurled eighty feet aft into the sea. Wreckage spilled across the fantail helo deck as flames engulfed the aft part of the superstructure.
The U.S.S. Dickinson wallowed heavily as the fire began to go out of control.
