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“You should get out more often, Commander. What you got for me?”
“I have startex minus six, and you have an S-3 way out of exercise start parameters, sir.” He trailed the mike cord so he could lean over the JOTS terminal—the Joint Operational Tactical System, which showed the entire exercise and could, if asked, show US and other forces all over the world—watching a lone S-3 Viking move at low altitude along the eastern edge of the Lakshadweep Islands. Paul Stevens, Alan thought to himself. Hotdogging. “I see him, Al. I guess he didn’t get the message.”
“I have to hold exercise start until that aircraft is within start parameters, sir.”
“Hey, Al, lighten up. I got my beach recon teams in the water now. I’ve got my decks full of guys waiting to launch and I can’t exactly call them off. My Combat Air Patrol is up and already needs fuel from the tankers on the deck. You know the drill, Al. Let’s just say I’ll ignore AG 702 for a while, okay? Can we get this thing underway?”
Alan ran the trackball over the American and Indian battle groups. The JOTS on Rafehausen’s carrier would show only the Fifth Fleet units, and the Indian admiral on board the Indian light carrier Vishnapatingham would see only his. It had taken weeks of computer work by the two nerds in Alan’s exercise detachment to make this mutual blindness happen, and now one pilot was screwing it all up. He wanted to argue, even to use his supposed power as umpire to stop the exercise, but the big point was to cooperate with India and make diplomatic points. Canceling would be really bad diplomacy.
Alan sighed. “Okay, we’ll go for startex. But you’re on your honor about reports from that S-3.” In fact, Rafe probably wouldn’t be forced to his honor; the S-3 was a long way south of the Indian battle group, and if Stevens turned on his radar before startex, he’d be admitting he was cheating.
The hell with it. Get it over with and go home. He was touchy because the umpire’s job had been wished on him only forty-eight hours ago. He had been supposed to honcho the intel side for the US and then go home, where right now he could be enjoying his wife’s birthday. For once.
“Four minutes to exercise start, then,” he said into his mike. Then Rafe, knowing Alan was angry, maybe feeling guilty, made small talk for forty seconds, and they ended the conversation as friends.
Alan turned to Benvenuto. “Three minutes to exercise. Start the message traffic feed.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Across the room, Indian ratings were feeding the scenario setup into the two comm nets.
Everything was going to be fine.
Aboard Indian Submarine Nehru, Arabian Sea
The communications officer coughed into his fist for the second time and read the message again. He couldn’t control his thoughts, which twisted and turned through his convictions and his fears faster than he could clutch at them.
The day.
Around him, the enlisted men on the comms station reacted to his all too visible nerves. Ram Vatek, his most senior technician, raised an eyebrow.
He knew Vatek as one of the faithful. He leaned back and coughed into his fist again, focusing on Vatek’s loyalty, using the man’s face as an anchor to reality. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“It’s a new day,” he murmured and watched Vatek’s usually confident expression turn to apprehension.
The comms shack became still. Every man on duty knew what the words meant. Many of them knew parts of the overall plan. Knowing the plan and facing the grim reality of the message were different beasts.
No one in the comm shack flinched, however. They opened an arms locker that should not have been there behind the central computer processor and took out pistols, Tokarevs loaded with special low-power ammunition.
He pressed the push-to-talk button on the main comms console and spoke to the whole ship.
“Today is a new day,” he said, his voice unsteady as he spoke.
On the bridge, the navigator reached under his chart table and drew a Makarov pistol from its holster, turned, and shot the captain in the face. Under the pressure of the moment, he shot him repeatedly, pulling the trigger until the slide clicked open and the noise and smoke filled the bridge.
In the engine room, the second engineer drove a screwdriver into the abdomen of the engineer and stood appalled at the amount of blood that pooled on the smooth gray deck as his superior writhed. A rating shot the dying man in the head and seemed to enjoy the act. The engineer had not been a popular officer.
The second engineer looked at the blood on his hands and uniform and wanted to scream. And he looked at the wild eyes of the rating with the smoking gun and wondered what they had unleashed.
In the weapons space forward, two of the faithful shot their way through with smuggled Uzi Combat Commanders, killing every crewman in the space and inadvertently wrecking one of the operational weapons stations. A lot of the weapons techs were Sikhs and other unrecruitable sectarians, so they had to be killed.
In ninety seconds, the mutineers had control of the ship. Every man they believed might not be loyal to their cause, including a few who had received the indoctrination, was herded into the mess deck and locked down. Many others were killed because the mutineers, once blooded, were vicious. On the bridge, the navigator settled into the newly cleaned command chair and tried to ignore the smell of blood and feces.
“Make revolutions for five knots. Dive to one hundred fifty meters. Helmsman, make the course zero eight nine.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The Kilo-class submarine turned to port and headed away from the exercise area and back toward the west coast of India.
In the comms shack, the communications officer sent a coded message using the small golden egg he wore around his neck. The message went out through the VLF antenna and was received at West Fleet Headquarters, Mahe, where it was routed with other exercise traffic to its addressee at a small naval test facility in southern India—and to the Indian exercise-control officer at exercise headquarters, where Alan Craik waited.
West Fleet HQ, Mahe, India
Intel officers wait, Alan thought as he watched a digital clock tick down toward the beginning of the fleet exercise. Two minutes twenty to startex. And worry. He was standing by the JOTS repeater, staring at it as if memorizing the position of every ship in both fleets, but he was thinking about his wife, Rose, wanting to be with her. He tried to focus on the exercise. He called across to a female US rating, the only other American there besides him and Benvenuto. “Borgman, give me an update on my comms with the two fleet commands.”
“Good to go, sir.” Borgman was a heavy-bodied woman with an almost childishly pretty face, a plodder who got things done with tenacity rather than brilliance.
He nodded and went back to the JOTS terminal and the glowing blobs that represented the American and Indian ships. Nothing had changed. He looked up and let his eyes swing over the room. An Indian rating named Mehta looked up and let their glances meet as if to say, We’re doing the best we can here.
A little more than a minute to go. Alan raised his eyebrows at Benvenuto.
“Good to go, sir,” Benvenuto said. He was looking at something over Alan’s shoulder as he said, “Data’s streaming—”
Aware then of somebody behind him, Alan turned, saw an Indian officer standing there, registered the single star on the collar, produced a name without having to look at the man’s tag—Commodore Chanda, the Indian exercise-control officer. Alan smiled, guessed that the answering scowl was prestart nervousness.
“Sir,” Alan said.
The commodore was watching the clock, must have been watching it when Alan turned around. Across the room, a nervous Indian lieutenant was also staring at the orange numerals.
The commodore was standing too close. Alan wanted to elbow him out of the way, of course couldn’t. He bent over the terminal, pretending to study the location of the American flagship. The commodore was right behind him. Well, he’s a commodore; he can stand where he—
The crease in the commodore’s trousers brushed the back of Alan’s right thigh; Alan shifted left to make room for the more senior man, shifted his eyes for a fraction of a second off the terminal, catching a whiff of some scent the Indian officer used, then flashed back to the terminal as it—inexplicably, surprisingly—darkened and lost its picture, like an eye blinking. He caught movement below him—
—and saw a hand emerging from a uniform sleeve with a commodore’s broad stripe on it, holding something glittering and brassy to the input port of the JOTS repeater.
“Hey—!” Alan started to say, grabbing, without thinking, at the hand. Then, too late, he said, “Sir—!” but the commodore’s enraged eyes had already locked into his.
AG 702, 20 NM WSW of the Lakshadweep Islands
In AG 702, the cheating S-3 that Alan Craik had seen on the JOTS and complained about to Rafehausen, Commander Paul Stevens was enjoying his nugget TACCO’s nerves. “Hey, Collins, you got that back end sweet yet?” Stevens tried not to lose an opportunity to give the kid the gears. In fact, as far as Stevens could tell, the “back end”—the big bank of antiquated computers that drove the airplane’s sonar-receiving and tactical displays—was functioning as well as it ever did, but the new LTjg didn’t know that.
“It’s, uh, it’s up, sir. I mean—”
“Jeez, Collins, either it’s up or it ain’t. I’m the pilot, not the TACCO. Which way do you want it?”
“It’s up.” Collins’s voice rose so that the response sounded more like a question than an answer.
Stevens hit his intercom so that only his copilot could hear him. “Kids ought to be out of diapers before they leave the RAG.”
“Give him a rest,” she muttered. Lisa “Goldy” Goldstein had fought her way out of the girl jobs in naval aviation and she had plenty of spine to stand up to Stevens, who was a great pilot and an okay squadron CO, but sometimes a total asshole as a human being. “Skipper, you blow that kid’s confidence, we still have to live with him the whole cruise.”
Stevens smiled. He liked Goldstein, and he liked that she stood up to him. “I can hear the snot in his nose every time he talks.”
“Yeah, skipper, and I can see the dust when you fart. Can we get this show on the road?”
Stevens grinned. “Roger that.” He cycled the intercom to the back end. “Collins, if you’ve got us a working computer, you and Whitehorse better start thinking of your sonobuoy pattern.”
Bobby Whitehorse, the enlisted SENSO Officer, or SENSO, was a shy, silent Indian kid from a reserve in the Dakotas. He listened, said nothing, and started to enter his projected pattern into the computer in front of him. As his facial expression rarely changed, it was difficult for the other troops in the squadron to figure out whether he was sullen-silent or shy-silent.
Stevens saw the little symbols on his pilot’s display. “Way over there?” he said. “You guys in back trying to run us out of fuel?”
“That’s where the ASW module told us to go, skipper,” Goldy said.
“Yeah, yeah. I came out this way to keep that big island between us and their radar.” Stevens was holding the plane about ninety feet off the waves beneath them, flying with one hand and turning his head to Goldy when he talked. One bad twitch and they’d have a wing in the water, but Stevens always flew this way and his crews got used to it. And they had to be under the opposing force’s radar horizon, because they were cheating—flying to a target before startex.
Stevens pushed the throttle forward and banked to the left, heading for the entry point to the pattern the SENSO had marked twenty nautical miles to the west.
“I have an ESM cut just beyond the island. Russian airsweep radar, second generation.” Collins sounded less nervous. He was better with the radar detection than with the sonar. “I’m putting it on screen. Second cut. Got a triangulation. See it, skipper?”
Stevens flicked his eyes from his instrument scan to the little screen on his console and winced. The Indians had at least a radar picket, maybe more, much closer to him than he had expected. This is where he and Rafe and the crotchety bastards in the anti-submarine warfare module had guessed they’d find the Indian sub early in the exercise. Rafe wanted it found and tagged from the get-go. And here the Indians were, with a radar picket right at the edge of the start area, looking out for someone like—
“Looks like we’re all cheating together,” Goldy said.
“Jeez, Craik might have warned us the Indians were this far south.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Stevens saw the flash off her visor as Goldy turned her head and looked at him. Clearly she didn’t agree with his views on cheating, either.
“Got another cut, skipper. Another air-search radar.”
“They shouldn’t be seeing us yet,” Stevens said, banking sharply to keep the bulk of the forty-mile-long island between his plane and the radar pickets on the other coast.
“Startex in one minute,” Goldy said. “I think we may be the first casualties in this thing.”
“Not if I can help it. Whitehorse, put a long pattern down here.”
Collins cut in. “We’re still seven miles from the drop—”
“Let’s put the first line in here and we’ll sneak up the coast low, drop a few more, and see what we get.”
Collins mumbled something about how far the Indian sub would have to be from her start position to be caught this far west.
“You got something to say, Mister Collins?”
“No, sir.”
Clunk. Each sonobuoy had the passive systems to listen for an enemy sub within a thousand yards or so, and a tiny radio transceiver to broadcast the digital data back to the plane. When the sonobuoy survived the drop to the water and the transceivers worked, it was a great system.
“Number one in the water and I have a signal.” Whitehorse had a flat, nasal voice.
Stevens thought it might have been the longest sentence he’d heard out of the boy.
Clunk.
“Number two in the water and—live. She’s good.”
Collins came in again. “Look at the salinity, Whitehorse. Where’s the layer?”
Stevens cut the nerd babble from the rear seats. He didn’t expect they’d find the sub, but it was an exercise and he didn’t want to be remembered as the first casualty.
Clunk.
“Startex,” Goldy said. The game was live; if anyone had seen them, they’d be called with an imaginary missile shot over the radio. Stevens looked at the digital readout on the encrypted comms without thinking, fearing the worst. Nothing came, and he smiled. He looked down where the live buoys from Whitehorse’s drops were matched up with the projected pattern and prepared to turn west toward the island after the next drop. At this altitude, even at low speed, every turn was exciting.
Clunk.
“I—uh, skipper? We—shit, there it is again. Maybe a sub?” Collins, from the back seat, with nerves making him sound like a girl.
Stevens made the turn to put the next buoy in the pattern.
“Whitehorse? You concur?”
“It’s a sub,” Whitehorse said. Flat and confident. “Diesel running about five knots.”
“Well, it’s a pleasure to know they’re cheating harder than we are,” Goldy said. “He’s at least a few miles off his start line.”
“I got him on two buoys. I got a fix.” Collins’s voice rose an octave. “Hey! There he is!”
Goldy tapped her helmet and cut out the back seats. “Want me to call him in to the boat?”
“No. Let’s drop an active on him so he’s dead and then call him in. Those pickets are right over there; we may be under their radar horizon but they’ll be on a broadcast like white on rice.”
“Roger that.”
“Whitehorse, you ready with an active drop?”
“Roger.” Whitehorse sounded interested.
“Collins, you ready? You going to fuck this up?”
“No—ah, yes. Sir. No.”
Goldy reached over and slapped Stevens on the helmet. Stevens gave her a smile that said, Yeah, I’m an asshole. Then he got the plane right down on the wave tops at the lowest speed he could manage and aimed for the datum, the little mark on his computer screen that told him where the sub was, one hundred and fifty meters down.
“Ready to drop,” Whitehorse said.
The high-bypass turbofans screamed like asthmatic banshees as he aimed for the datum.
Clunk.
