sonar room, adding, “Reload another ADCAP.”
Pennsylvania shuddered again as the newest version of the venerable
Mark 48 torpedo entered the sea, turning northeast and controlled by an in-
sulated wire that streamed out from its tailfin.
This was like an exercise, the sonarman thought, but easier.
“Additional contacts?” the skipper asked, behind him again.
“Not a thing, sir.” The enlisted man waved at his scopes. Only random
noise showed, and an additional scope was running diagnostic checks every
ten minutes to show that the systems were all functioning properly. It was
quite a payoff: alter nearly forty years of missile-boat operations, and close-
to fifty of nuclear-sub ops, the first American sub kill since World War II
would come from a boomer supposedly on her way to the scrapyard.
Traveling far more rapidly, the ADCAP torpedo popped over the layer
somewhat aft of the contact. It immediately started radiating from its own
ultrasonic sonar and fed the picture back along the wire to Pennsylvania.
“Hard contact, range three thousand and close to the surface. Lookin’
good,” sonar said. The same diagnosis came from the weapons petty officer
with her identical readout.
‘ ‘Eat shit and die,” the male member of the team whispered, watching the
two contact lines close on the display. Sierra Ten went instantly to full
speed, diving at first below the layer, but his batteries were probably a little
low, and he didn’t make more than fifteen knots, while the ADCAP was
doing over sixty. The one-sided chase lasted a total of three and a half min-
utes and ended with a bright splotch on the screen and a noise in the head-
phones that stung his ears. The rest was epilogue, concluding with a ripping
screech of steel being crushed by water pressure.
“That’s a kill, sir. I copy a definite kill.” Two minutes later, a distant
low-frequency to the north suggested that West Virginia had achieved the
same goal.
“Christopher Cook?” Murray asked.
“That’s right.”
It was a very nice house, the Deputy Assistant Director thought as he
pulled out his identification folder. “FBI. We’d like to talk to you about
your conversations with Seiji Nagumo. Could you get a coat?”
The sun had a few more hours to go when the Lancers taxied out. Angered
by the loss of one of their number not so long before, the crews deemed
themselves to be in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, but nobody had
troubled himself to ask their opinion, and their job was written down. Their
bomb bays taken up with fuel tanks, one by one the bombers raced down the
runway and lifted off, turning and climbing to their assembly altitude of
twenty thousand feet for the cruise northeast.
It was another goddamned demonstration, Dubro thought, and he wondered
how the hell somebody like Robby Jackson could have thought it up, but he,
too, had orders, and each of his carriers turned into the wind, fifty miles apart
to launch forty aircraft each, and though these were all armed, they were not
to take action unless provoked.
46
Detachment
“We’re almost empty,” the copilot said in a neutral voice, checking the
manifest as part of the preflight ritual.
“What is the matter with these people?” Captain Sato growled, looking
over the flight plan and checking the weather. That was a short task. It would
be cool and clear all the way down, with a huge high-pressure area taking
charge of the Western Pacific. Except for some high winds in the vicinity of
the Home Islands, it would make for a glassy-smooth ride all the way to
Saipan, for the thirty-four passengers on the flight. Thirty-four! he raged. In
an aircraft built for over three hundred!
“Captain, we will be leaving those islands soon. You know that.” It was
clear enough, wusn’i it? The people, the average men and women on the
street, were no longer so much confused as frightened-or maybe even that
wasn’t the proper word. He hadn’t seen anything like it. They felt-be-
trayed? The first newspaper editorials had come out to question the course
their country had taken, and though the questions asked were mild, the im-
port of them was not. It had all been an illusion. His country had not been
prepared for war in a psychological sense any more than a physical one, and
the people were suddenly reali/.ing what was actually going on. The whis-
pered reports of the murder-what else could one call it?-of some promi-
nent zaibatsu had left the government in a turmoil. Prime Minister Goto was
doing little, not even giving speeches, not even making appearances, lest he
have to face questions for which he had no answers. But the faith of his
captain, the copilot saw, had not yet been shaken.
“No, we will not! How can you say mat? Those islands are ours.”
“Time will tell,” the copilot observed, returning to his work and letting it
go at thai. He did have his job to do, rechecking fuel and winds and other
technical data necessary for the successful flight of a commercial airliner, all
the things the passengers never saw, assuming that the flight crew just
showed up and turned it on as though it were a taxicab.
”Enjoy your sleep?”
“You bet, Captain. I dreamed of a hot day and a hot woman.” Richter
stood up, and his movements belied his supposed comfort. / really am too
old for this shit, the chief warrant officer thought. It was just fate and luck-
if you could call it that-that had put him on the mission. No one else had as
much time on the Comanche as he and his fellow warrants did, and some-
body had decided that they had the brains to do it, without some goddamned
colonel around to screw things up. And now he could boogie on out of here.
He looked up to see a clear sky. Well, could be better. For getting in and
getting out, better to have clouds.
“Tanks are topped off.”
“Some coffee would be nice,” he thought aloud.
“Here you go, Mr. Richter.” It was Vega, the first sergeant. “Nice iced
coffee, like they serve in the best Florida hotels.”
“Oh, thanks loads, man.” Richter took the metal cup with a chuckle.
“Anything new on the way out?”
This was not good, Claggett thought. The Aegis line had broken up, and now
he had one of the goddamned things ten miles away. Worse still, there had
been a helicopter in the air not long before, according to his ESM mast,
which he’d briefly risked despite the presence of the world’s best surveil-
lance radar. But three Army helicopters were depending on him to be here,
and that was that. Nobody had ever told him that harm’s way was a safe
place. Not for him. Not for them, either.
“And our other friend?” he asked his sonar chief. The substantive reply
was a shake of the head. The words merely confirmed it.
“Off the scope again.”
There were thirty knots of surface wind, which was whipping up the
waves somewhat and interfering with sonar performance. Even holding the
destroyer was becoming difficult now that it was slowed to a patrol speed of
no more than fifteen knots. The submarine off to the north was gone again.
Maybe really gone, but it was dangerous to bank on that. Claggett checked
his watch. He’d have to decide what to do in less than an hour.
They would be going in blind, but that was an awkward necessity. Ordinar-
ily they’d gather information with snooper aircraft, but the real effort here
WHS in achieve surprise, aiul they couldn’t compromise that. The carrier task
force hail avoided commercial air lanes, hidden under clouds, and generally
worked very hard to make itself scarce for several days. Jackson felt confi-
dent that his presence was a secret, but maintaining it meant depending on
spotty submarine reports of electronic activity on the islands, and all these
did was to confirm that the enemy had several E-2C aircraft operating, plus a
monster air-defense radar. It would be an encounter battle aloft. Well, they’d
been training for that over the past two weeks.
“Okay, last check,” Oreza heard over the phone. “Kobler is exclusively
military aircraft?”
“That is correct, sir. Since the first couple of days, we haven’t seen any
commercial birds on that runway.” He really wanted to ask what the ques-
tions were all about, but knew it was a waste of time. Well, maybe an
oblique question: “You want us to stay awake tonight?”
“Up to you, Master Chief. Now, can I talk to your guests?”
‘ ‘John? Phone,” Portagee announced, then was struck nearly dumb by the
normality of what he’d just said.
“Clark,” Kelly said, taking it. “Yes, sir … Yes, sir. Will do. Anything
else? Okay, out.” He hit the kill button. “Whose idea was this friggin’ um-
brella?”
“Mine,” Burroughs said, looking up from the card table. “It works,