Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 8

  Deckmann nodded. So far, everything had run like a well-oiled machine. He'd spent the last hour or so of daylight on the flag bridge, watching the sun sink into red haze over the distant dark line of the East African coast, checking and rechecking the last details of the operations planning. If there was a flaw in it, it wasn't one he could find.

  Zero one fifty-nine.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Tell Seversky we're on our way.”

  “Yes, sir.” The officer turned back to his console. Dull sounds overhead told of planes being moved into position at the forward catapults.

  Zero two hundred.

  The roar of the first catapult launch boomed through the TFCC. As the sound faded, a muffled rushing announced the first round of Tomahawk cruise missiles on their way to their targets. Thirty seconds later, a second catapult fired, sending another plane into the air.

  Like a well-oiled machine, Deckmann repeated to himself. I hope it stays that way.

  24 July 2029: Xian satellite monitor and control center, Shaanxi Province

  The duty officer turned in his seat. “Colonel.”

  “Yes?” Footsteps echoed in the hush of the half-darkened room. “Ah. I see.”

  The screens showed infrared images from three different spy satellites high above the western Indian Ocean. The enemy ships were clearly visible against the cool ocean waters. The shapes that caught the colonel's attention at once, though, were smaller and brighter: the distinctive flares of cruise missiles taking off, and the longer, redder streak as jet aircraft left the deck of a carrier.

  The colonel crossed to another desk, where technicians were calculating the paths of the missiles and planes. After a brief, murmured consultation, he went to a third desk, picked up the telephone. “General? The Americans have launched their attack.” A moment later: “Yes.” A moment later still: “Yes, sir. I will give the order at once.”

  He nodded to the duty officer, who turned to his keyboard and typed rapidly for a few moments, then hit enter twice.

  PART TWO

  NEMESIS

  SEVEN

  23 July 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  President Weed came into the White House situation room, glanced around. The big screens on the walls showed data and images from the Tanzanian operation. Every detail of Operation Blazing Torch was right there in real time. Gurney and Ellen Harbin were already in their seats, and Stedman was standing on the other side of the room, watching the whole process with a disapproving frown.

  “Sir.” The duty officer snapped to attention.

  Weed waved him back to his place. “Everything going according to plan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The screens agreed with him. One in night-vision green showed the flight deck of the Ronald Reagan; F/A-18s were being flung into the air one by one with the sudden jerk of a steam catapult. Another, fed with data rather than imagery, tracked Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the fleet. Over the next few minutes, Weed knew, the Army and Air Force would be getting into the act, and with a little good luck the whole thing would be over in a couple of days.

  The door behind him opened, let in Greg Barnett. The CIA director shook Weed's hand. “So far, so good?”

  “So far,” Weed said; it was a private joke between them, going back to the days when the two of them were both freshmen in the House. “Let's see what the—”

  “What the fuck?” It was Gurney's voice, and Weed and Barnett both turned to look. Two of the screens showing images from the fleet had gone blank. Before anyone else had time to respond, the other image feeds did the same thing, and warning texts started popping up on the screens: DATA TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.

  Weed left the videoconference space and went into the watch area next door. The duty officer was already on the phone as the situation room staff pounded on their keyboards and tried to get a response. He set the phone down, came over to Weed. “Sir,” he said, “something's gone wrong with the data downlink from the satellites. I've got technicians on it here and at SPACECOM—they ought to have it working again in a few minutes.”

  Weed nodded and thanked the man. Down in his gut, though, was the hard cold feeling that something had just gone very wrong.

  24 July 2029: Tanga, Tanzania

  The cell phone rang. One of the Chinese technicians caught it before it could sound a second time, tapped the screen, listened. The others, watching saw his face tense.

  He tapped the screen again, put the cell phone down. “Lushoto's just been hit.” Lushoto was the easternmost of the Tanzanian air defense stations, the logical first target for the Americans to strike, and thus the tripwire for Plan Qilin. “Our turn.”

  It took an instant for the words to register, but then everyone was sprinting to their stations. Lights went down, leaving only a bare minimum of task lighting, and the doors of the warehouse rolled open. Outside, the night was as quiet as a brawling port city like Tanga ever got. Somewhere in the distance, a radio was playing a popular song; closer, traffic murmured.

  One of the crews wheeled a long metal shape out into the parking lot in front of the warehouse, hauled on the levers that cranked the launch tube up to the right angle.

  “Go,” said the chief technician.

  The roar of a jet engine cut through the night sounds, and a long lean shape flung itself out of the tube, stubby wings snapping open as it went airborne. It stayed just over the rooftops until it got over the ocean and then dropped to wavetop level. By then another was in the air, and a third was about to follow.

  “Hurry!” the chief technician shouted. “They could be here in minutes.”

  No one had to ask what he meant. The American fleet and the air base near Narok were both too close for comfort, and everyone knew that the first explosion from an American bomb or missile would be all the warning they could expect.

  Twenty-seven minutes after the doors rolled open, the last of the cruise missiles based at Tanga was on its way. “Remember your orders,” the chief technician shouted over the roar of the rocket. “Stay off the main roads, and watch for planes.” Then he was running for his car, a few steps ahead of the others.

  24 July 2029: Pangani, Tanzania

  McGaffney blinked awake. The hotel room was silent, barring the soft breathing of the girl lying next to him. He lay there staring up into the darkness, feeling the edge of adrenaline, wondering what had woken him.

  Then he heard it again: the sudden rush of a jet engine firing, loud at first, then fading with distance. Another followed it, another, more.

  He was out of the bed and on his feet a moment later, threw on a bathrobe, headed for the balcony. Not that many hours before, he and the girl had been standing there, watching evening close in above the ocean. The view this time was different: a night sky full of stars, and beneath them lean dark shapes accelerating out of sight, a few meters above the waves, the flare from their engines the only thing he could see clearly. They were coming from somewhere in the warehouse district, moving at blinding speed, heading north and east—

  Toward the American fleet. He knew that at once, knew also that the little war he was there to cover had just turned into something much more serious.

  Movement behind him, a sudden indrawn breath: the girl was watching, too. “What are they?” she asked in Swahili.

  He glanced back at her. “Cruise missiles,” he said in the same language. “Somebody's about to get a really ugly surprise.” Then: “Once the Americans figure out where those are coming from, this whole town's going to take it. D'you have people somewhere else?”

  She stammered a village name he recognized, maybe an hour inland. As good as anyplace else, McGaffney decided. “Get your clothes on,” he told her. “I've got a scooter downstairs. It might be fast enough.”

  24 July 2029: on board the USS Ronald Reagan, CVN-76

  “Sir, we've lost the satellite uplink,” one of the officers in the TFCC said.

  “What?” Admiral Deckmann turned toward him.
“Go to backup.”

  A clattering of keys, then: “Sir, that's not responding either.”

  Another officer, on the other side of the room, turned toward the admiral. “Sir, GPS has stopped transmitting.”

  Deckmann stared for a moment, then ordered, “Check every satellite service we've got—and make sure it's not our systems while you're at it.”

  “Yes, sir.” A minute later: “Our systems are working fine, sir. It's the satellite network. The whole thing's down.”

  “Get a link—” He stopped himself, remembering that the intership data channels used satellite uplinks as well. Fortunately the Navy had been smart enough, or stubborn enough, to leave the old radio system in place as a backup. “Contact the rest of the task force by radio and find out if they're in the same fix.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the man was repeating the words into a microphone, Deckmann turned to another officer. “Get me Sam.” A moment later he was handed a phone handset. “Sam? You've heard about the satellites?”

  Captain Samuel McCloskey, the skipper of the Ronald Reagan, answered at once. “Yes, sir. I'm assuming it's a technical screwup.”

  “Might be,” said Deckmann. “One way or another, it's going to mess us over good and proper—none of the GPS-guided weapons are going to be worth crap until it gets fixed, and I don't even want to think about trying to coordinate with the ground forces without uplinks.”

  “We'll have to—” Then, suddenly, silence.

  “Sam?”

  “It's not technical.” The captain's voice was tight. “We've got incoming.”

  Moments later Deckmann was staring into a screen full of data from an E-2C Hawkeye high overhead. To the southwest, the ocean was alive with radar blips, moving low and fast toward the task force. “I can't identify them by type,” said the technician, “but it's a cruise missile signal and they're coming in an evasive pattern at well over Mach 2.”

  “How many?”

  “Heck of a good question, sir. The blips are behaving like radar ghosts, not real missiles—they don't look exactly like the radar spoofing our missiles use, but it's the same sort of thing.” He tapped an onscreen button, and the screen shifted to a graphical data analysis. “The blips are up here. All this down here—” He pointed to low uneven lines at the bottom of the screen, like badly mown grass. “—is reflection from waves and spray. The actual missiles are probably in there; they've got radar countermeasures good enough that we can't follow them when they're belly to the waves.”

  “Any better luck with infrared?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn. That's technology on a par with ours.” Deckmann leaned forward. “I want to know where they're coming from.”

  “North Tanzanian coast,” said one of the other officers. “We've got radar sign from ten positions there—probable launches.”

  “Get one of the F-18 squadrons down there now,” Deckmann ordered. “I want those hit, and hit hard.” The admiral looked around; without data from the satellite uplinks, the TFCC was more than half blind, and he'd never gotten used to the changes in naval design that put flag officers belowdecks in a fight. “How long do we have until those things get in range?”

  “Under twenty minutes, sir.”

  “Long enough.” He raised his voice so that everyone could hear him. “We're moving operations to the flag bridge. I'll be damned if I'm going to sit down here in a hole with next to no data to go on. Rashid, get Mombasa by radio and tell ’em what's happening, and then follow. George, let ’em know we're coming.”

  He was on the flag bridge moments later. By then the flag bridge crew had all the data there was on the screens: input from the Hawkeye and the carrier's own radar systems, and not much else. The links that coordinated radar signals and targeting data between every ship in the task force were down, along with everything else that used satellites. Down below in the radio room, technicians old enough to remember how it was done before satellite links were busy jury-rigging a data net over radio frequencies, but that wouldn't handle more than a small fraction of the flow of information that naval warfare demanded these days.

  Night pressed hard against the glass of the windows, broken only by the afterburners of planes hurtling off the flight deck. After a short time, flares of light in the middle distance pushed the darkness back: SM-2 antimissile missiles launching from the cruisers and destroyers. The attacking cruise missiles were in combat range.

  A long moment passed and then flashes lit up the horizon: SM-2 warheads exploding. Three of the four Aegis-equipped ships—the Gettysburg, the Mahan, and the Gridley—had moved southwest of the rest of the task force, leaving the Anzio as a final defensive screen for the carrier, the transports and the amphibious-warfare ships. Deckmann could see all three of them silhouetted against the glare, bows southwest to minimize target area, as more SM-2s and short-range Sea Sparrows surged toward the cruise missiles, and muzzle flares from the onboard Phalanx batteries, the last line of defense, blinked in the darkness.

  For decades, strategists and planners had argued back and forth about what would happen if a carrier group came under attack by a swarm of cruise missiles. Deckmann had taken part in war games, and those had never gone well unless the assumptions were stacked in favor of the carrier group. Still, that was all theory. Maybe, he thought. If the damn antimissile systems do their job—

  All at once, a fireball burst from one flank of Mahan. One had gotten through.

  The hardest part was the waiting. Deckmann had learned that back in his first command, a rustbucket of a minesweeper that worked the Strait of Hormuz, chugging back and forth under the watchful eyes and itchy trigger fingers of the Iranians. He'd been lucky, then and later, but it was always hard to stand there on the bridge and wonder if this was the time his luck would run out. As the first damage reports came in from Mahan—she was holed at the waterline and struggling to keep the engine room from flooding—Deckmann's hands clenched on the window ledge in front of him. He took in the reports, gave what orders he could; with the limited data net, each ship's skipper had to do most of the fighting on his own.

  A streak of light shot by, maybe a quarter mile ahead of the carrier. It was moving so fast that Deckmann was only sure he'd seen it when it was already well past, a zigzag of blue flame showing the cruise missile's evasive maneuvers as it closed. By then Anzio's and Ronald Reagan's Phalanx batteries were firing, but the cruise missile sped by and slammed into USNS Charlton, one of the COMPSRON-2 supply ships. The first fireball was followed by another, much bigger—Charlton was full of ammunition. More detonations followed, until what was left of Charlton vanished into the dark waters.

  By then the news from the data net was getting worse; more of the task force ships had been hit. Mahan took a second missile a little ahead of the first, and started to sink; the order to abandon ship went out before Charlton was gone. Gettysburg was hit close to the bow, and Saipan, the big amphibious helicopter carrier, was struggling to control fires amidships. The harsh mathematics of naval combat were coming into play: each ship damaged or sunk meant one less ship capable of launching missiles to keep other ships from being damaged or sunk, and the cruise missiles were still coming.

  The first one to reach Ronald Reagan hit just aft of center, above the waterline. Deckmann felt the jolt as the missile struck at twice the speed of sound, and then a second, bigger jolt as the warhead went off. Sirens screamed and the carrier's intercom barked orders; Deckmann forced himself to ignore them, and concentrate on his job.

  Aft of the carrier, a missile slammed into SS Peterson, the COMPSRON-2 tanker. Full of fuel, it dissolved in a huge bubble of flame. One hit Anzio a few minutes later, and just afterwards, another fireball burst from Gettysburg, and then another. With brutal slowness, Gettysburg broke in half and sank. Aghast, Deckmann barely noticed when a second missile hit the bow of the carrier.

  The minutes just after that were the worst of all. With three of the four Aegis ships sunk or dam
aged and antimissile munitions running low, there was little to stop the last of the cruise missiles from finding targets. Ronald Reagan took two more missiles in that time, one far enough aft that it did little damage, the other forward and high enough to leave the flight deck heaved up and twisted. In a darkness lit only by fireballs from missile impacts and flames from burning oil slicks, it was impossible to see what was happening to the other ships in the task force, and the flag bridge lost electricity after the third missile hit. Deckmann stood at the window, waiting. For the moment, there was nothing else he could do.

  The minutes slipped past. After a certain number of them—how many, Deckmann could never be sure afterwards—he realized that the fireballs had stopped. A few more, and the lights in the flag bridge flickered back on; officers lunged for their consoles, began hammering on keyboards. When the first data came back from the Hawkeye, still circling high above what was left of the task force, the sea was clear of cruise missiles.

  A little later still, the door to the flag bridge opened for a young officer in a uniform stained with smoke and fire suppressant. He saluted Deckmann, said, “Commander Johnston, sir. As far as I know I'm in charge of this ship.”

  Deckmann nodded after a moment. “What's her status?”

  “Hull seems to be intact below the waterline, we've got the fires mostly contained, and Engineering says they can probably get 50 percent power to one of the prop shafts—the other one's junk. Let me know what you want her to do, sir, and we'll do our level best to do it.”

  “Good,” Deckmann said. “And—Captain McCloskey?”

  Johnston's gaze fell. “I've got people searching, but the CIC got ripped to shreds by that last missile—everything in that part of the boat did. Good thing you came up here, sir; the TFCC is still on fire.”

  24 July 2029: Camp Pumbaa, Kenya

  “It's a mess,” said Mahoney. “No bomb damage assessment, no photo intelligence—”

  “Can you get something from your planes?” Seversky asked. They were sitting in Seversky's office in the HQ building. Outside, the scream of jets taking off and landing shredded the African night.