Hellfire

move in. This was good news. The Montego Bay lacked the advanced stabilizers of more modern hulls, and although she rode the seas well, she could not provide the rock-steady deck that many passengers seemed to expect under all conditions. “We’d hate to interfere with shuffleboard, wouldn’t we?”

There was nothing more of particular interest in Gaspert’s morning brief. A few emergencies involving the passengers. One now in sick bay for a possible heart attack. A twisted ankle, a few cases of seasickness — and how was that possible, in this most gentle of seas? One case of what looked like the flu. The ordinary run of accidents and illnesses expected on any trip.

Captain Gaspert followed his usual sequence of dealing with paperwork, approving engineering and maintenance requests, making his rounds among the passengers, seeing and being seen and providing a sense of presence that reassured the most nervous of them. By the time he went below to tour the ship’s engineering plant, he had every reason to feel confident that the voyage would proceed uneventfully.

USS Jefferson

0800 local (GMT-9)

The morning brief on board the carrier was proceeding according to plan. Each department head ran through the status report of the areas under his or her responsibility, the remarks backed up by slides projected from a computer onto a large screen. Engineering, operations, intelligence, and so forth, each one bringing Coyote current on what had transpired since the previous evening brief.

The very last department to report was always the oceanographer, who also served as the meteorologist. Coyote had decreed the order of the briefers, saying the weather and the ocean environment were of critical importance to every department on the ship. Privately, Lab Rat suspected that the admiral had scheduled it as a show closer because the presentation was always boring enough to convince even the most gung-ho brown-noser present that it was time for the brief to wrap up.

“Another four days of this weather,” Lieutenant Commander Mason Wyatt said, entirely too chattily for Lab Rat’s taste. Whenever Wyatt briefed, Lab Rat got the distinct impression that he was auditioning for a spot on the Weather Channel. “Looks like terrific weather for the steel beach planned for the Fourth of July.” Wyatt beamed as though personally guaranteeing good weather for the gigantic cookout and celebration planned on the flight deck, the steel beach.

He proceeded to run through a number of graphs depicting the sound velocity profile of the ocean, the major weather fronts and high- and low-pressure areas across the Pacific, maintaining the same informal, breezy tone so at odds with the no-nonsense seriousness of every other department. Still, Lab Rat reflected, Mason was a hell of a meteorologist. If he said they were in for good weather, there would be good weather. Personally, Lab Rat thought that the Jefferson was due for some decent weather just to make up for the rest of the cruise.

Jefferson, along with her escorts, had departed San Diego six weeks ago. They were supposedly deployed to participate in a major war game staged for the Pacific theater, known as Kernel Blitz. At least, that was the story put out to all but a few with the need to know.

Lab Rat was one of those with a need to know.

It wasn’t as if it were a complete cover-up. There was an exercise named Kernel Blitz under way, and Jefferson was in the data link with units around the world, as was the Naval War College. Most of the ship’s crew was frantically planning and executing theoretical strikes and amphibious landings as well as other evolutions designed to ensure that every part of the battle group had a chance to practice the skills they’d need in actual war.

But a small group located in the bowels of Lab Rat’s department was engaged in something far more critical to the nation’s defense: the operational test of a new theater ballistic missile defense system.

Lab Rat had been chosen to head up the operation on board Jefferson, partly because he possessed the necessary clearances and it fell within his areas of responsibility as intelligence officer for the ship. Additionally, he was all too familiar with lasers and ballistic missile defense. During the last cruise, Senior Chief Armstrong, Lab Rat’s right-hand man, had showed him just how potent a land-based defense system could be. Only three weeks before, the senior chief had retired from the Navy and left Jefferson to begin his new civilian career with Omicron, the defense contractor with the primary contract for the TBMD laser.

To complicate matters, a Russian battle group centered around the Admiral Kurashov, what the Russians called an amphibious transport but what was really an aircraft carrier, was located thirty miles to the east. The laser blast arrowing up into the sky last night had caught them all off guard. The low-level intelligence reports said that they were there to monitor Kernel Blitz. But Lab Rat suspected that somewhere in the bowels of the organization would be a group similar to his, watching the TBMD tests and evaluating the impact of a success on the balance of power. Because, when you got right down to it, nothing was ever as secret as you thought it was.

There was, however, one primary problem with any land-based system: no matter how secret, no matter how covert, its location eventually became known. And once known, it was immediately targeted by America’s enemies.

The same reasoning that had led the United States to base a third of its nuclear triad on silent nuclear submarines had also spurred the development of sea-based ballistic missile defense systems. Omicron was again the lead contractor, as they had been for the land-based system, although this time through one of its wholly owned subsidiaries. Judging from the message traffic Lab Rat had seen that morning, Senior Chief Armstrong would soon be back aboard Jefferson, but this time as a very senior project manager whose equivalent military grade was several grades higher than Lab Rat’s rank.

“Finally,” Mason said, still holding his genial smile and staring at his audience while tapping the chart with his pointer — and just how did he do that, Lab Rat wondered, manage to nail exactly the correct spot without looking at it—“meteorologists all over the world are saying a fond farewell to a satellite known as Betty Lou. Last night, at approximately 0230, one final transmission was received from Betty Lou. After that, she no longer responded to control commands.”

“Okay, anything else?” Coyote asked briskly, tapping his number two pencil on the legal pad in front of him. Everyone on his staff knew that this was a sign that the admiral’s attention span had just been exceeded. Mason was the only one who never seemed to understand that, and to Coyote’s dismay, Mason continued.

“Odd circumstances, too,” he went on blithely. “In fact, Commander Busby, some of your folks are looking into it now. Just before Betty Lou passed away, she detected a — well, we don’t know exactly what it is. It’s being correlated with other intelligence sources now, I suppose. But it looked like a bolt of lightning.”

Shit. We’re supposed to be keeping a lid on this. Maybe he’ll take the hint if I blow it off. Coyote had talked to the midwatch TFCC crew and made sure that they all knew the laser incident was strictly hush-hush. If the lookouts kept their mouths shut, they might just pull off the secrecy bit for a while longer.

“Lightning?” Coyote queried. “In space? Right.”

“A sharp, short blast of light. Probably an internal short circuit of some sort that created an artifact, Admiral.” Mason was positively gloating over the fact that Coyote had shown enough interest to comment. Most of the time, his questions came from the destroyer squadron, or DESRON, who maintained an intense and somewhat anal interest in the intricate temperature profiles within the ocean.

“Well,” Coyote said, clearly a dismissal. “Unless there are any questions.” His tone of voice made it clear that none were expected. “Commander Busby, I’ll see you in CDC in ten minutes.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Lab Rat replied.

They’re testing their systems.

Of course, it could be one of those odd coincidences that keeps popping up around the world, and making a hash of the best intelligence estimates that money could buy. Lady Luck always had her hand in the works. But losing a satellite to something that looked like lightning just when Jefferson was testing out her systems and Russians were watching — or maybe even testing their own — well, that was just a little bit too much, wasn’t it?

Well, significant or not, it would have to wait. Lab Rat had eight minutes before he was supposed to meet the admiral in CDC to go over the final details for the test of their own system tonight. Sure, it was bad news that the Russians were testing their own version, not only from a correlation-of-forces point of view but simply as a matter