Eddington walked outside to light a cigar. He needn’t have troubled himself, he realized after a few puffs. The Saudis all smoked.
“Well, Nick?” Diggs asked, joining him.
“Beer’d be nice.”
“Just empty calories,” the general observed.
“Four-to-one odds, and they have the initiative. That’s if my people get their gear in time. This could get right interesting, Diggs.” Another puff. “Their deployments suck.” A phrase acquired from his students, his senior thought. “By the way, what are we calling this?”
“BUFORD, Operation BUFORD. Pick a moniker for your brigade, Nick?”
“How’s WOLFPACK grab you? It’s the wrong school, but TARHEEL just doesn’t sound right. This damned thing’s going pretty fast, General.”
“One lesson the other side must have learned from the last one: don’t give us time to build our forces up.”
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“True. Well, I have to see after my people.”
“Use my chopper,” Diggs told him. “I’ll be here a while.”
“Yes, sir.” Eddington turned, saluted, and started walking off. Then he turned. “Diggs?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe we’re not as well-trained as Hamm and his boys, but we’ll get it done, y’hear?” He saluted again, tossed his cigar, and walked off to the Black Hawk.
NOTHING MOVES AS quietly as a ship. An automobile moving at this speed, a fraction below thirty miles per hour, made noise one could hear for hundreds of yards on a silent night, but for a ship it was the high-frequency swish of steel hull cutting through what were at the moment calm seas, and that didn’t carry very far at all. Those aboard could feel the vibrations of the engine, or hear the deep sucking breath of the turbine engines, but that was all, and those sounds scarcely carried a hundred yards across the water at night. Just the swish, and behind every ship was a foaming wake, a ghostly shade of green in the water from tiny organisms upset by the pressure wave of their passage, and phosphorescing as some sort of biological protest to the disturbance. To those on the ships, it seemed hellishly bright. On every bridge, the lights were turned down, so that night vision wouldn’t be compromised. Navigation lights were turned off, a rules-of-the-road violation in these confined waters. Lookouts used conventional binoculars and light-amplification gear to scan forward. The formation was just now turning the corner, in the narrowest part of the passage.
In every combat information center, people hovered over scopes and charts, talking in whispers lest they somehow be heard. Those who smoked wished they could in the antiseptic spaces, and those who’d quit now wondered why. Something about a health hazard, they remembered as they contemplated surface-to-surface missiles mounted in emplacements about fifteen thousand yards away, each of them with a ton of explosives right behind the seeker-head.
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“Coming left, new course two-eight-five,” the officer of the deck reported on Anzio.
On the main plot, there were over forty “targets,” as radar contacts were called, each with a vector showing approximate course and speed. The number of inbounds and outbounds was about the same. Some of them were huge, the radar returns of supertankers being about that of a medium-sized island.
“Well, we’ve made it this far,” Weps said to Captain Kemper. “Maybe they’re asleep.”
“Maybe there really is a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Only navigation radars were turning now. The Iran-ian/UIR-ians had to have ESM gear over there, but if they were standing a patrol in the Strait of Hormuz, they hadn’t spotted it yet. There were unexplained targets. Fishing boats? Smugglers? Somebody in a pleasure craft? There was no telling. Probably the enemy was a little reticent about sending their vessels too far over the centerline of the strait. The Arabs were as territorial as everyone else, Kemper imagined.
The ships were all at battle stations. All combat systems were fully powered up, but on standby. If somebody turned toward them, they would first try to get a visual. If somebody lit them up with a targeting radar, then the ship on the clearest bearing would step up her alert level somewhat and make a few sweeps with the SPY radars to see if there might be an inbound track. But that would be tough. Those missiles all had independent seeker-heads, and the strait was crowded, and a missile just might acquire something unintended. The other side couldn’t be all that trigger-happy. They might even end up slaughtering a few thousand sheep, Kemper thought with a smile. As tense as this part of the mission was, the task for the other side wasn’t all that easy.
“Course change on track four-four, coming left,” a quartermaster said.
That one was a surface contact just inside UIR-ian waters, seven miles away and passing aft. Kemper leaned forward. A computer command showed the contact’s course-track for the last twenty minutes. It had been mov-
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ing along at mere steerage speed, about five knots. It was now doing ten, and had turned . . . toward the trailing decoy group. That data was linked to USS O’Bannon, whose captain was the senior officer for the group. The range between the two ships was 16,000 yards and closing.
Things got more interesting. Normandy’s helicopter closed on the track from behind, keeping low. The pilots saw a green-white bloom as the unknown craft increased power, stirring the water and disturbing more of the organisms which somehow survived all the pollution here. A sudden burst of power meant. . .
“That’s a gunboat,” the pilot reported over the data link. “He just goosed it. Target has just increased power.”
Kemper grimaced. He had a choice now. Do nothing, and maybe nothing would happen. Do nothing, and maybe give the gun/missile boat the first shot at O’Bannon and her group. Do something, and risk alerting the other side. But if the enemy craft shot first, the enemy would know something anyway, right? Maybe. Maybe not. It was a complex set of data for five seconds. He waited five more.
“Target is a missile boat, I see two launchers, target steadying down on course.”
“He’s got a direct line to O’Bannon, sir,” Weps reported.
“Radio chatter, I have radio chatter on UHF, bearing zero-one-five.”
“Take the shot,” Kemper said instantly.
“Shoot!” Weps said over the voice channel to the helo.
“Roger, engaging!”
“Combat, lookout, sir, I have a flash like a missile launch on the port quarter–make that two, sir,” a speaker announced.
“Give it a sweep–”
“Two more launches, sir.”
Shit, Kemper thought. The helo carried only two Penguin antiship missiles. The enemy had gotten the first two off. And he couldn’t do anything now. The decoy group was fulfilling its function. It was getting shot at.
“Two vampires inbound–target destroyed,” the pilot added, announcing the destruction of the missile boat–
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confirmed a moment later by the topside lookout. “Say again, two vampires inbound O’Bannon.”
“Silkworms are big targets,” Weps said.
They watched the mini-battle imperfectly. The navigation-radar display showed O’Bannon changing course to port. That would be to unmask her point-defense missile system, located far aft. It would also provide a huge radar target to the inbound missiles. The destroyer did not fire off her decoys for fear that spoofing the in-bounds would only divert them to the replenishment ships she was guarding. An automatic decision? Kemper wondered. A considered one? Ballsy either way. The destroyer’s illumination radar came on. That meant she was firing her missiles, but the navigation radar couldn’t tell. Then at least one of the frigates joined in.
“All kinda flashes aft,” the topside lookout said next. ” Wow, that was a big one! There goes another!” Then five seconds of silence.
“O’Bannon to group, we’re okay,” a voice reported.
For now, Kemper thought.
THE PREDATORS WERE up, three of them, one each for the three corps encamped southwest of Baghdad, motoring through the air at only twice the speed of a tank. None of them got as far as planned. Thirty miles short of their objectives, their look-down thermal cameras showed the glowing shapes of armored vehicles. The Army of God was moving. The feed to STORM TRACK was instantly cross-loaded to KKMC, and from there all over the world.
“Another couple of days would have been nice,” Ben Goodley thought aloud.
“How ready are our people?” Ryan turned to the J-3.
“The 1 Oth’s ready to rock. The 11 th needs at least a day. The other brigade doesn’t even have its equipment yet,” Jackson replied.
“How long before contact?” the President asked next.
“At least twelve hours, maybe eighteen. Depends on where they’re going, exactly.”
Jack nodded. “Arnie, has Gallic been briefed in on all this?”
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“No, not at all.”
“Then let’s get that done. I have a speech to make.”
ALAHAD MUST HAVE gotten bored running a business with no customers, Loomis thought. He left early, walked to where his car was parked, and drove off. Tailing him on such empty streets would probably be fairly easy. A few minutes later, the subject was observed to park his car and enter his apartment building. Then she and Selig walked out of the unit they’d been in, crossed the street, and walked around the back. There were two locks on the door, which caused the junior agent to take ten minutes to defeat them, much to his own annoyance. Then came the alarm system, but that was more easily accomplished. It was an old one with a socket key and a very simple disarming code. Inside they found a few more photos, one, probably, of his son. They checked the Rolodex first, and there was the card for J. Sloan, with the number 536-4040, but no address.