push himself up into a sitting position. White hot pain shot through his right hip, forcing a groan through his lips.
“Welcome back, sir.” The chief crouched down on the deck next him and placed a restraining hand on one shoulder. “Don’t move too fast, sir. I think you broke something in your right leg, or maybe just dislocated something. I don’t know for sure.”
“Where are we?” Forsythe asked, barely able to force words on past the white hot pain engulfing his leg.
“Just where you left us, sir. The torpedoes hit the transport. You surfaced just long enough to get a look at it, then you passed out.” The chief paused, considering him carefully. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt nothing to lie quiet for awhile, sir, so I took us down to the bottom and parked us. The men, they were worn out. Needed a couple of engineers, that’s all that’s awake right now. The rest of them are alseep on station.”
“Help me up.” Forsythe let his weight rest on the chief’s shoulders, as the chief dead lifted him to his feet. He could put no weight on his right leg, and for a moment he considered asking for the doctor. But, when he looked back to the place where the doctor had been handcuffed to a water pipe, there was no one there.
The chief saw his look and shrugged. “He took a pretty hard hit, sir. He came to, but he was fried. He’s under the chart table.”
“As best I can tell, she’s structurally sound. No leaks, and everything seems to work. We lost the sonar dome — came down a little rougher than I wanted — but we’re not going to have any trouble getting out of here, sir.
“Who knows we’re here?” Forsythe asked.
“Second Fleet, SouthCom. ELF has been ringing off the hook, but I figured it could wait. At least we know it’s all quiet overhead.”
“Anything happening?”
The chief shook his head. “Quiet as a tomb.”
“How long was I out?”
“About three hours.”
“Show me the ELF messages.”
The chief handed him a sheaf of papers and stood by silently while the ensign read them. Forsythe thumbed through them quickly, then stopped and reread a second one. He looked up, his face wondering. “We can surface any time now. You read this. Why haven’t you already taken her up?”
“Captain’s prerogative,” the chief said quietly. “I could have tried, but the crew wouldn’t have stood for it. She’s ready to surface, Captain. On your command.”
Forsythe stood, still feeling shaky but better than he had before. His leg would bear some weight, if not all of it.
“Chief, surface the ship,” Forsythe ordered.
TWENTY-THREE
Senior Chief Armstrong was unbuckling his flight harness before the helicopter even settled down on the concrete pad just to the west of the main facility. It was a small helo of the type normally used on the fishing boat. Not the best choice, not in this weather, but it had been immediately available and willing to help.
Armstrong ducked, although the rotors were still turning well over his head. It was an instinctive move, one that few could resist. He ran across the concrete apron and to the waiting delegation. Bill Carter grabbed him by the arm. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
Armstrong nodded. “If this works, I don’t think you’ll have any problem getting full operational funding for the prototype.” He shouted to be heard over the noise of the helicopter. It was already lifting off and heading away, headed back to Brunswick.
“Will it work?” Carter’s gaze searched his face, his eyes anxious. His face was drawn, intense, evidence that the realization of just how high the stakes were had finally hit him. This was more than an operational test or a first cut on next year’s budget — this was the real thing.
“It better,” Armstrong said. “God willing, we won’t have to use it — but if we need it, it better work.”
The two jogged the few hundred feet separating the landing area from the main operations building, and Armstrong shucked his heavy outer gear as he waited for the guard to admit them into the security area. Beside him, Carter was babbling on about something, about the test, the latest specs, but Armstrong wasn’t listening. It was as ready as Omicron could make it, and now Lady Luck came into play.
And that was the real bitch of it, he thought, as the door opened and admitted them. No matter how much you trained, how well you engineered something, there was always an element of luck in everything. Even in warfare. Clauswitz had called it the fog of war, but Armstrong knew better. It was luck, either good or bad.
He knew every person inside the facility, with the exception of one radar console operator, and introductions were quickly made. Armstrong took the supervisor’s seat, donned his headset, and leaned back to wait. Someone put a cup of coffee in his hand and his fingers closed around it reflexively, his gaze fixed on the screen.
In front of him, three large screen displays conveyed a variety of information. In the middle were real time detections from their own radar, the status bar across the bottom indicating the status of the laser targeting system. To the right, the system status and weapon status of each component was displayed, the numbers of the latest self-test results constantly shifting as a system continually self-tested. To the far left, the screen displayed the data link of the U.S. Navy. Right now, they were receiving via satellite the feed from the
Armstrong felt the sense of dislocation. The screen on the left showed just what he had been looking at not sixteen hours ago, with the exception of the ships moving around within their assigned boxes. And here he was, thousands of miles away, wearing jeans instead of his uniform, looking at the same picture.
The screen on the far right indicated that there had been no problems thus far, and that the information was streaming in a timely fashion. Now, it was a matter of waiting.
It happened without warning or fanfare. One moment a screen was basically as he had last seen it, and the next moment a cluster of symbols popped up around the island of Bermuda. Simultaneously, the speaker tuned to the battle group, high frequency tactical channel relayed voice communications from the scene.
The E-2 Hawkeye’s report came close on the heels of the first radar imagery. “Missile launch, we have missile launch. Number: ten. Classification: unknown. Initial trajectory indicates ballistic flight profile.” Seconds later, the Air Force AWACs chimed in with its own assessment, adding, “Confirm classification as medium-range ballistic missiles. Cheyenne reports probable targets are D.C. and Norfolk.”
Armstrong’s blood ran cold. Washington and Norfolk — he had spent too much time in both places not to be able to imagine just how a missile detonation would affect each one of them.
Perhaps three seconds elapsed from the initial launch detection until the time the first shot was fired. In rapid succession, the Aegis cruiser rippled off wave after wave of her antiair missiles, the ship clearly operating in full auto. Even the fast frigate attached to the battle group added her missiles to the flurry, although she could not fire at the same rate or with the same accuracy and range as the others.
One by one, the missile symbols disappeared from the screen. The Aegis kept count, the TAO transmitting the current number of kills over tactical, his voice growing stronger as he numbered off each one.
