Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (2 page)

“No. Anyway, what’re you getting at?”

“I don’t begrudge you what you want to do, Dan, but we’ve had this conversation before. I thought once you had a plan, for life outside the Navy. They already offered you a medical retirement. Because of your lungs, right?”

“My lungs are fine.” He coughed into a fist, wheezing dramatically.

She rolled her eyes. “Very funny. But I’m not the government-issue service wife you seem to need, Dan.”

“No, you’re much higher powered.”

“Don’t flatter me. I’ve spent a lot of time around generals’ wives. They’re usually the reason their husbands became generals. Shrewd, hardworking women, behind the scenes. We need to think about where we’re going.” She looked away. Then added, in a lower voice, “If we stay together.”

He halted in the near darkness. “What does that mean?”

“Just that I’m coming up on some decision points of my own. If this campaign fails—”

“You’re not going to lose. Not with Checkie pulling for you. And all his wealthy buddies.” He looked back along the corridor, dark behind them, even darker ahead. “Crap … I don’t think this is part of the regular route.”

As they retraced their steps she murmured, “There are more voters in Maryland than my stepdad’s friends. And the other side’s going to put a bargeload of money against us.”

“Uh-huh … Did we go right here, or left? I don’t remember.”

“Right, I think … There’s a banking bill coming up. We’ve got to regulate the financial market more tightly, or there’ll be hell to pay. For the whole economy.”

“But aren’t you taking contributions from the bankers?”

“I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, Dan. But I don’t like your tone.”

He lifted his head, suddenly realizing that the dust they were walking on was unmarked, save for the curving arabesques of the lizards. “We never came this way. No tracks.”

“We should’ve turned left back there, I guess.”

“Maybe.”

She laughed, a low, throaty sound. “Lost in the Labyrinth. Without even a lousy spool of thread to guide us out.”

“At least we’re together.”

“Ariadne and Theseus?”

He pulled her close. “At least we’re together,” he said again, this time into the familiar scent of her hair, blinking back the sting of incipient tears. Holding her in the musty, close dark, breathing the dust of millennia. What had she meant,
if
? He couldn’t ask again. She evaded questions she didn’t want to answer. Was she talking about another man? He didn’t think so. But he’d been wrong before, about women. About a lot, actually.

All things came to dust in the end. The fine silt beneath their feet had dreamed too, fought, hated, loved. Again and again, wearing different faces.

Someone was calling, from above. The guide sounded worried. “We’re down here,” Dan shouted up through a gap in the stone. And shortly thereafter they were trudging up time-hollowed stone steps, back into the blazing sun.

*   *   *

THE
ship lay at the end of a finger pier, the green and buff mountains rising beyond. It reared above them like a falling tower as Dan pulled into the space with the welded steel sign that read
COMMANDING OFFICER USS SAVO ISLAND
.

When he turned off the engine he could hear the steady roar of blowers and machinery, could smell the mingled scents of turbine generator exhaust and fuel and fresh paint and overcooked food. Below him seamen on a float wielded rollers on long poles. Fresh haze gray gleamed on the sheer. As he held the door for Blair, a welding arc sputtered halfway up the overlofty, top-heavy-looking superstructure. Flat squarish panels with truncated corners, not quite octagons, were set like breast badges just below the bridge.

The panels were SPY-1 antenna arrays. The Ticonderogas had been designed around them, mating a Spruance-class hull and propulsion to the most powerful radars ever put to sea. Within a radius of three hundred miles, an Aegis cruiser could detect and track over a hundred possible targets simultaneously, and reach out with scores of missiles to destroy enemy aircraft threatening the massive carriers that centerpieced U.S. or NATO battle groups.

The bells announcing his arrival bonged out.
“Savo Island, arriving,”
the 1MC said, the topside loudspeakers strident and metallic. The absentee pennant floated down.

The autumn before, Dan had stood by the window of the vice CNO’s temporary office, looking out toward the Pentagon. He and Niles had staggered out together on 9/11, through burning fuel and collapsing ceilings, over torn-apart bodies.

“So, Lenson,” Admiral Niles had rumbled, slapping his desk, “I keep my promises. Still want a ship?”

“Yes sir,” he’d murmured. Someone had engineered his promotion, even after he’d been officially passed over. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but there’d been “irregularities.”

“You made captain. Sure you don’t want to cash in your chips, go make some real money?”

He didn’t answer, and Niles had slammed the desk again. “You might actually be a good fit … But you won’t have long. She’s out there on a national-level mission. If this ship doesn’t turn around, and I mean on a dime, I’ve got another O-6 with his bags packed. And tread light this time, Lenson. No more
Gaddis
es. No more
Horn
s
.
”

He winced now, inwardly, as he saluted the flag, then turned to face his officer of the deck. Blair stood at attention, hand over her heart. A small woman with a pointed face, chunky hips under dark blue shipboard coveralls, and blond hair smoothed back under her fore-and-aft cap stepped out onto the main deck and saluted. Staurulakis had been fleeted up from operations officer at Dan’s recommendation when the previous exec had self-destructed. “Good evening, Captain. Mrs. Lenson. Hope you had a good trip.”

“You remember Cheryl Staurulakis, Blair. Acting exec.”

The two women shook hands. “Nice to see you again, Cheryl. But it’s Ms. Titus, not Mrs. Lenson.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” Staurulakis said to Dan, “We’re about to begin reloading the after magazine, Captain.”

“What’s going in first?”

“I asked if they could load the 4As first.”

The Standard Block 4As were new, still-experimental antimissile rounds. The autumn before, just before this deployment,
Savo Island
had gone from a baseline Aegis 7 to a new mission: theater ballistic missile defense. The Navy’s go-to antiaircraft missile had been grown with a higher-energy booster and a lighter proximity-kill warhead to gain the range and altitude needed to intercept a reentry body. This was its first deployment, and most of the experts said it was too early. Not only that, but when she was operating in antimissile mode, the ship was practically blind to other threats. He nodded. “And they said?”

“They wanted to load in a specified order given the cell layout. Said it might not get the 4As in first, but it’d be faster overall. I gave them the okay.”

“All right, we’ll let that stand.” He checked the TAG Heuer Blair had given him as a wedding gift. “We set up for dinner? Got the word, the commodore’ll be here?”

“Yessir, they’re setting up in the unit commander’s cabin.”

“That’s the suite?” Blair asked.

Staurulakis nodded. Dan told her, “Make sure the bed gets made up. The commodore will probably stay over.”

*   *   *

AS
dusk fell the First Division rigged floodlights and the Tiger Team worked on. After he got Blair settled with a cup of coffee and the CNN feed in his in-port cabin, and scanned his e-mail, he went aft to check on the rearming.

The vertical launch system magazines had no launcher. Or, rather, each cell was its own, with the missile boosting vertically until it cleared the ship, then arching over to its departure azimuth. The upside was that a launcher casualty didn’t put you out of business at a ticklish time. The downside was that rearming was slower than with the older systems, and required a crane, which meant you couldn’t rearm at sea. Each of the square gray stenciled canisters that housed the missiles had to be poised above its cell, cables connected, connections tested, then lowered, very carefully, so as not to bend the loading rails.

He crossed the afterdeck to the open module. The coveralled, hard-hatted civilian technicians nodded. He waved back and looked down as gulls circled, crying out in the failing light. Forty feet, two levels down, nearly to the bilge. A narrow catwalk halfway down gave the gunners’ mates access to the canisters. A stench of burned insulation and propellant welled up. When a missile had shorted out and lit off, he’d had to flood an entire eight-round module, ruining a few million dollars’ worth of weapons. But if the others engines had ignited—or, worse yet, the blazing-hot exhaust flame had set off their high-energy warheads—there wouldn’t have been much left of USS
Savo Island
.

Chief Angel Quincoches saw him and ambled over. In charge of the VLS, he’d been first to go in after the fire. Dan returned his salute. “Chief.”

“Captain.”

“These guys on the ball?”

“We checked behind them as they got the new cables and control units in. One set of control units had to be replaced again. Defective from the factory, far’s we could tell.” The chief petty officer checked his watch. “Been problems with the crane, too. A bent sheave.”

“Fixed now?”

“That’s what they tell me. Sir.”

“Keep ’em moving. The commodore’s coming aboard tonight. We might get orders. Are we checking the hatches, the hatch components, gaskets?” They were one of the biggest failure items.

The senior enlisted nodded, short, as if Dan shouldn’t have had to ask.

“What are we ending up with, loadout-wise?” He knew the numbers by heart, having thrashed it out in midnight sessions with the exec and the strike and weapons officers, with input from the squadron weapons officer, the type commander, and the COMNAVSURFLANT Ballistic Missile Defense Readiness Office. But it never hurt to make sure you were getting what you expected. Especially the way tensions were running up with Iran and Pakistan, and China now, too. There’d been something on CNN moments ago, about massive capital outflows from that country.

“New totals aft are twenty-four of the new RIM-162s, four Tomahawks, and four regular SM-2 Standards. Twelve new Block 4A rounds total: two in the forward cells, ten aft.”

Dan nodded. They’d left the States with only four of the experimental rounds, which he’d expended in two engagements. The Combat Systems Weapon Inventory screen in CIC loomed in his nightmares, counting down as whatever dream-battle he was fighting progressed. Until he was left with zeros, and cruise missiles incoming, and he’d wake shaking and sweating.

He didn’t need imagination to guess what would happen then. He’d seen it, aboard USS
Horn,
and
Reynolds Ryan,
and
Turner Van Zandt
.

He didn’t want his name associated with another disaster. Not because of his career. That was over, after this tour. Especially after what Blair had said about congressional interest. He just didn’t want more corpses on his conscience.

The chief corpsman, “Doc” Grissett, was leaning against the bulkhead in the passageway outside the unit commander’s cabin. “You asked for a report on our cleanup, Skipper. We replaced all the air filters and disinfected all the ventilation ducts we could reach.”

“Is that going to solve our problem?”
Savo
had been plagued by a flulike illness among the crew, especially in forward weapons berthing, though there’d been cases throughout the ship. One seaman had died in his bunk. They’d shipped the body back to Bethesda, but the cultures had been inconclusive.

“Hope so, sir. Scrubbed out with bleach.”

The 1MC bonged. One, two; three, four; five, six bells. That would be Jenn Roald. He spun on his heel and headed for the quarterdeck, conscious, too late, that he was still in civvies.

*   *   *

THE
unit commander’s stateroom was actually a small suite, first a large room with desk, terminal, and table, then a smaller bedroom, with a compact head and shower aft of that. On the rare occasions when an officer senior to the commanding officer was aboard, he operated out of here.

Or she, as was the case tonight. Fine-boned, thin-faced, Jennifer Roald held a cup of punch at the table, which was spread with white linen. To his relief, she was in civilian clothes too, a dark pantsuit that looked both dressy and as if she could inspect an engine room in it. He and Roald dated back to the West Wing, where she’d run the Situation Room. Now she commanded the squadron that
Savo
was, however loosely, attached to.

This was the first time he’d seen the silver service laid out. The old metal glowed with a soft light. The dishes were finer china than the heavy, thick wardroom settings. The food, though, would be straight from the crew’s mess—jerk chicken, steamed green beans, brown rice, butterscotch ice cream—laid out by CSSN Longley. Dan’s culinary specialist stood half at attention by the galley door, in a white jacket for once without food stains. The evening’s guests were Blair, in a green sequined one-shoulder sheath that sparkled as she moved; Cheryl Staurulakis; Commodore Roald; and Dr. William Noblos, the acerbic, nay-saying rider from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Also, the commanding officer of Naval Station Souda Bay, Captain Nichols Blomqvist, and his opposite number on the Greek side, Captain Photios Stergiou, Hellenic Navy. They were in service dress blue. Stergiou handed over a bottle of wine with a smirk. Knowing, no doubt, that U.S. ships were dry. Dan thanked him and set it aside.

Circulating, he got involved in a discussion of the cracks in the superstructure with Blomqvist and Roald. Ticonderogas were aluminum from the main deck up, for lightness, but the whole class had been subject to cracks. His inspection had located two. “My welders tell me you’ll be ready to go in a day or two, Commodore, Captain,” the shipyard commander assured them. “Do you have sailing orders yet?”

Dan deferred to Roald, who murmured, “Expecting them any day.”

“Back to the protection-of-Israel mission?”