its own style as the terror of the people in the small boat. To die, or to be responsible for others’ deaths?
She knew which was worse.
It was like watching the O. J. Simpson car chase, with the white Bronco rolling slowly down vacant interstates. Minutes passed, and if it had not been for the impending tragedy, it would have been almost as boring.
Finally, the inevitable. Jefferson’s clean-cut bow rolled over the midsection of the small boat, cutting it cleanly in half. The damage drove the small ship underwater immediately, dumping the horde of passengers into the sea. She could see a few of them churning up, tiny white flecks next to the skin of the ship; then those too disappeared.
It was over just seconds after it began.
The aide punched the stop button, freezing the video on the last scene.
There was no evidence of the encounter in the curling water around Jefferson’s hull, in the gentle arc of the bow waves that rolled off her steel sides.
“You wish to see it again?” Santana asked. The aide began to rewind the tape.
She shook her head. “When did this happen?” she asked, grasping for details to avoid acknowledging the horror of what she’d just seen.
“Where?”
“Just north of our coast. And the time? About two hours ago, I think.
Maybe more.” He regarded her sardonically, evil cruelty in his look.
“Is that timely enough to be newsworthy for you. Miss Drake? I assure you, there is no other network in the world that will have firsthand coverage of this event. And the United States Navy’s own message traffic will support the occurrence of the actual event. If you would like to wait for that, for some other network to attend a stateside briefing and scoop you on this matter, we will be glad to oblige. We had just thought …” He let his voice trail off delicately.
“No. I want it. It’s something it’s something the American public needs to see.” Already the words were taking shape in her mind, the damning indictment of Tombstone’s old ship callously running down a group of people seeking freedom. She would get three minutes, maybe even four the lead story, at any rate. Excerpts from the videotape, along with her narrated coverage, would be replayed hourly at the top of the hour until some other critical world event bumped it off the schedule.
Some small part of her mind kept insisting there was more to the story than this. The American ship must have tried to avoid the small boat; she’d seen that from the way the angle on the bow changed in the course of those few minutes. Tried, but hadn’t been able to.
She knew from Tombstone’s long discourses on operations at sea that small craft were difficult to detect, even harder sometimes to pick out from the ocean by visual observation. That was why the rules of the road gave the larger, less maneuverable ship the right-of-way in most circumstances.
The truth, but a rotten story. Atrocities sell better than tragedies.
She’d learned that lesson years ago in Bosnia, in Desert Storm, in a thousand other combat venues around the world. No, even if she didn’t report it this way, her competitors would. And their ratings would outstrip hers in a New York minute.
“Who took this video?” she said suddenly. Santana smiled. Her gut churned as she considered the full implications of the matter. Not only had Jefferson plowed over the ship, but Santana had been somewhere within observation range, watching, and doing nothing to warn either the carrier or the small boat containing his countrymen of the danger.
She wondered whether the story she would report could ever begin to match the horror of the reality.
She took a deep breath. “Get my cameraman.”
“Incoming signal,” the operations specialist snapped. He kept his eyes glued on the screen and repeated the information over the secondary channel. “Captain, it’s a firing order.”
Seated in his tactical action officer chair, the captain stared at the display in front of him. It shivered, shifted, then resolved itself into a mirror image of the display in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A red pip targeting indicator popped into view next to the missile site the carrier SEALs had found.
“Helluva thing, not having control over your own missiles,” the chief petty officer of the watch said, his voice tight with disgust. “We’re no better than a goddamned bunch of monkeys to them.”
The captain turned. “Let’s keep that quiet. Chief. We’ve done our job, getting weapons into the firing basket. If Washington wants to control the weaponeering themselves, we’ll let them. It’s not like we have a choice.”
The chief pursed his lips and scowled. “Helluva way to run a war.”
“Weather deck secure,” the OOD reported over the bitch box. “Standing by to enable launching circuits.”
“Enable the circuits,” the captain echoed, nodding at the tactical action officer.
The TAO nodded, reached across the console, and gave his key one quick twist to the right. The captain did the same on his console. He sat back in his chair, sighed, and waited for the shot.
Moments later, he felt the dark rumble start down in the bowels of the ship, creep its way up the girders and strakes that made up the hull, and vibrate underneath his feet. The ship was ready; he could tell even without the weapons status indicators flashing warnings in front of him. The first shot fired by the Arsenal in anger, and it wouldn’t even be at his command.
Suddenly, the hatches centered in the video camera popped open. Within seconds, a ripple of Tomahawk cruise missiles heaved themselves out of their vertical launch slots, seemed to hesitate above the deck in midair, then blasted the nonskid with fire. They gained altitude quickly after that, the noise and smoke from their propulsion systems blackening the deck and obscuring the picture on the camera.
Even deep inside Combat, he could hear the missiles scream away from the ship and toward their target.
“That’s it, folks,” he announced as the noise finally faded.
“Weapons away.”
He saw the crew glance around at each other, puzzled looks on their faces. They’d all come from different ships, had been used to the routine of firing missiles, acquiring bomb damage assessments, and firing again. Many of them had served on the potent Aegis ships, working in Combat with a vast array of weapons under their direct control.
There was something unnatural about this, giving up control of their very essence to someone they couldn’t see, touch, or even be certain existed.
Yet, this was the very mission for which the Arsenal ship had been constructed. The captain stood and walked back out on the bridge to reclaim his coffee cup. As much as he might understand that, he didn’t have to like it.
A thin, high-pitched whine cut through the air like a buzz saw, at first barely audible, then quickly increasing in pitch and volume until it dominated the entire world.
Pamela shrank back against the cement wall, panic overriding her trained reporter instincts, desperately wishing that she were anywhere in the world other than at ground zero for this attack. How many times had she been near military actions?
Hunkering under bushes, darting around ruined buildings, following other freedom fighters on perilous missions against opposing forces whose ideologies seemed not too much different from that of the men she watched kill their relatives. Yet, never under any other combat conditions had she felt she was in imminent danger of dying. Why, oh why had she let her ego, her determination to get the best story before anyone else, lead her into this situation?
A Mach 2 missile gives its intended recipients barely enough time to appreciate the danger they’re in. The precision guided munitions flashed into view, barely discernible gray-white streaks on the horizon, then became clearly visible almost before her terror could reach its peak.
They moved too quickly for the eye to follow, streaking in over the gently rolling terrain to find their targets.
