Tomahawk (59 page)

launch order and time will come in via a Topaz message. The window's super-narrow. You're gonna have to do minimal interval launch. Let's see, which of your launchers are nuke cert?”

“Just the middle deck.”

“Then you're set. Just empty out each ABL, then go to the next. How, exactly, did you load? It's been awhile, but I remember you didn't mix and match.”

Kyriakou said, “We've got three ABLS full of Cs. The rest are either TASMs or Ns.”

“Or empty,” said Foster.

“Yes, sir. With the dummy capsules.”

Foster got up and went inside the armored conning tower. A flash, then the smell of pipe tobacco. When he came out, he said to Dan, “You'll be helping us out?”

“You don't need me down there, sir. Perry and his crew're perfectly capable of—”

“You were combat systems on
Barrett.”

“Yessir.”

“I heard about that. Probably not the whole story, but no doubt more than I should have. And you've bird-dogged this from the get-go. I've all the confidence in the world in my guys. But I'd feel even better if I had you and Sparky looking over their shoulders.” Foster trailed the scent of burley the width of the bridge, then said, “I'm gonna go back to the spook room, see if they're picking up anything useful on the coastal radars. Want to come?”

Dan muttered an assent, though more than anything he wanted to lie down. He kept a hand out to steady himself as he followed the skipper aft and down to the little intel compartment. And after a few minutes there, begged off and headed, back to Kyriakou's stateroom, where he fell into the lower bunk. The air was hot as the inside of a toaster oven.

Then, paradoxically, he couldn't sleep. He lay awake, listening to voices speak indistinguishable words on the far side of the bulkhead. Someone was hammering, far away, but the sound came clearly through steel, conducted to his ear.

Unbidden, resisted, he thought of others sleeping tonight. Innocent men and women. Children. Dark-haired little girls … like his own. He remembered how Nan's hair had smelled when he bent to kiss her good night. A smell like shampoo and bubble gum and a hard day of play…. They were dreaming now, secure in their beds.
In their families' apartments. A few hundred feet from where his warheads were aimed—with their hastily programmed, degraded terminal guidance.

He gripped his face in the dark, horror and shame closing his throat. Telling himself he'd done the best he could. He'd protested to Stahl and then to Kidder. True, he didn't know everything. Terrorist strikes might have been plotted out of that building. There were probably valid reasons for it to be on the target list. But that wasn't the point.

No, that wasn't the point, and it didn't stop the voice in his head that kept telling him he hadn't done enough. He hadn't briefed clearly. He'd been so exhausted. He hadn't said enough about the difficulty of hitting a low-contrast target. Hadn't explained the granularity problem, the degradation they'd had to accept at the price of producing a timely mission at all.

For a few minutes, he thought of going to Foster, having one more try at it. But then he thought, And what's
he
going to do? It was unfair to ask him to overrule a total of nine stars.

Lying in the dark, shuddering, he understood at last that he couldn't off-load the responsibility on Stahl, on Kidder, on anyone else.

He was the only one who understood all the capabilities and faults of the system. He'd helped develop it, had sped it on its way to an early deployment. Without him, it wouldn't be aboard this great ship, preparing now to visit death on unsuspecting civilians.

For whose death, it followed, he and he alone would be responsible.

No,
Christi
Hadn't he learned anything from the disaster aboard
Ryan,
from Syria, Cuba, Kerry's death, everything that had happened in his life? He wasn't responsible for everything. That was egomania. He was nothing more than a gear in the machine, a link in the chain.

But without the gearwheel, how could the machine run?

Without the link, how could the chain hold?

He lay in the darkness, staring up. Then the moisture
sprang into his mouth, and he got up quickly and bent over the stainless-steel sink.

He was back in the bunk, gut purged and mind drifting, in a strange place where his brain seemed to have given up at last the habit and sickness of thought, when a tap came at the door.

“Mr. Lenson?” a hushed voice whispered from the passageway.

When he cracked the door, it was a face he recognized. A second-class, one of the guys from
New Jersey's
Tomahawk crew. “Yeah,” he muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Sir, we got us a major glitch. Mr. Kyriakou wondered if you could come down and give it a look.”

“A glitch? What's wrong?”

‘The RASS. It won't download. We can't get a single byte of data out of it.”

“Great.” He actually had a moment of relief, till he remembered the pilots depending on the strike to take out radars, missile batteries. Along with the sour aftertaste of stomach acid, he tasted the bitterness of duty. “Yeah— wait a minute. Let me get my shirt on.”

He remembered when this compartment had been empty, bare wires dangling from the old incandescent fixtures, bulkheads stripped to bare metal. Now it was inhabited, with the little touches men gave their work spaces. A sticker on one of the AN/SYK-19 control consoles read BATTLESHIP SAILORS DO IT WITH 16-INCHERS. A hand-lettered sign on the wall gave TEN REASONS WHY TOMAHAWKS ARE BETTER THAN F/A-18 PILOTS.

The clock on the bulkhead had a z drawn in Magic Marker on its face. The hands showed 2105.

Less than three hours to II hour. Less than two to launch.

Kyriakou, Sakai, the leading fire control technician, and a couple of the other senior enlisted were in the computer room. Dan said from behind them, “What's the problem?”

“Great, all the experts are here,” said Kyriakou. He had dark half-moons under his eyes.

“I don't know how expert we are, but I'll take a look. Sparky, what have we got?”

“A possible showstopper, boss. The heads are jammed. They're not even going around.”

“What stage are we at in the launch sequence?”

“We got the engagement order. The skipper verified it. He and the tactical action officer signed off on it. We went to system warm-up and started to load the missions. Then it froze on us.”

“This is a pretty unforgiving system at best, sir,” the FT chief muttered. “Like, up in CEC, you're sitting at the terminal, and if somebody reaches over you to change the display before you save the plan, it's gone. Negates the whole launch sequence. Same-same if you hit two touch entry areas at the same time—it crashes. But right now, we can't get to the data you brought at all.”

Dan looked at it. The AN/SYK-6A track data storage control center was housed in a standard equipment enclosure, a gray chest-high cabinet. It held the controllers, disk electronics, power supply, and a control panel. The door was hinged open. Two random-access storage sets, essentially big disk drives, were mounted one above the other. The bottom RASS was loaded with the operational program. The upper held the mission data. It was sort of like a personal computer, with the boot disk in the bottom drive and the data disk in the top. The disks, of course, were the DTDs.

He reached for the control panel, then checked his hand; the FTs would already have tried the normal casualty recovery procedures. “You're sure it's the heads?”

“It's locked up solid.”

“Are the platters spinning?”

“No.”

He stared at it, then closed the access door. He crossed the compartment to the engagement-planning console and stood looking at the screen. One of the men had sound-powered phones on. Dan asked him, “Ask your track control guy to try his touch panel.”

“Doesn't respond, sir. The display's frozen.”

Sakai said, “It's probably vibration. All that lugging around. Hand-carrying it through customs.”

Kyriakou: “We don't have any backup.”

“No. I sent the extra disk out to the subs.”

The leading FT suggested, “We can try swapping it into the top drive. See if that makes any difference.”

“It won't. The heads'll still be locked up,” Dan told him.

But he was remembering a trailer, in Canada. A freezing wind blustering outside, an Air Force officer explaining a procedure that wasn't in the field manual.

It might work. It might not. But if it did … it might be a way to do something else, too.

He felt his legs begin to tremble. It couldn't be coincidence. Coincidence didn't work this way. It was something else. What had Melville said? … Something about us being turned round and round in this world like a windlass, and Fate the handspike.

He sat down. His hands trembled on his knees. He curled them into fists, conscious of their eyes on him.

“Got an idea?” said Kyriakou.

“Clear the room.”

“What?”

“Clear the room, Perry. This isn't a standard procedure.”

They looked doubtful, but he glanced at his watch to remind them they didn't have time to discuss it. Finally Kyriakou ordered his men into the passageway. He hesitated at the door, looking back; Dan just sat, arms folded.

When the door was dogged behind them, he looked at Sakai. “You better shove off too Sparky.”

“What you got in mind?” said the engineer softly.

“Something you don't need to know about.”

Sakai sucked a tooth. Finally, he said, “I'll stay.”

Dan didn't argue with him. If he was going to do this, he had to do it now, before he thought much more about it. He went over it in his head again, then said, “Help me with that lower DTD.”

Sakai caught his breath as Dan pulled the plastic box out, held it a foot above the deck, and let it go. He caught
it on the bounce and slid it back in. “Reboot and see if that did any good.”

“Still locked up.”

Sweating, Dan pulled it out again. This time it hit the deck so hard they both flinched.

“You better take it easy; you're gonna crack the case.”

“If we don't get it working, it doesn't matter how pretty the case looks. Try it again.”

A moment later, Sakai said, “That did it. It's spinning.”

Dan got on the console and called up the system status display. The screen unlocked and came up. His finger left a hazy dot of moisture on the touch-sensitive entry pad.

The screen blinked, changed, and came up covered with letters and numbers.

Across the top, a line gave him TLAM ENGAGEMENT PLAN. Some of the data elements were blank. Kyriakou's guys still had to enter ship position, initial launch direction, and prelandfall way points. But the ID number in the upper left told him which mission was which.

“Give me that message board,” he told Sakai.

Sparky handed him the board. He watched as Dan scanned down it, found the right mission, and called up that screen.

“That intelligence building?” Sakai asked.

“You're reading my mind.”

“It ain't that hard to read.”

“This is your last chance to pull out,” Dan told the engineer without turning. “You don't want to be part of this. It'll just land you in front of the green table with me.

“I don't think I better, Commander. You ain't exactly a shit-hot programmer in Unix, as I recall.”

At the mission screen he hesitated, unsure which way to proceed. Maybe the best thing was just to erase the flight data.

“The hell you trying to do?” Sakai said. “You're gonna dick this up. Believe me. You better let me do this.”

Dan hesitated, then got up. Sakai took his seat, did something with the keyboard that he didn't follow.

Suddenly the screen was filled with lines of computer code. Short, sure fingers skipped lines, then tapped in
code. Skipped more lines, then suddenly ripped across the keyboard like a pianist doing a glissando.

“Jeez, look at that. Wonder how that garbage got in here,” Sakai said. “Can't use this programming. Throw away two million bucks' worth of missile for nothing.” He hit several more keys, then went back to the display of the engagement plan.

Minutes later, he got up, still staring at the screen. “You can call ‘em back in now,” he said. “They still got a lot of work to do, and only about an hour to do it in.”

Dan swallowed. His throat didn't work the way it was supposed to. He put his hand on the engineer's shoulder. “Thanks, Sparky.”

“I been watching you try to make up your mind.”

“I'm sorry you had to get involved.”

“You gave me the chance to say no. But one thing I've learned…”

“What's that?”

“You can't eat half of a jelly doughnut.”

Dan started to say thanks again, but it seemed so inadequate that finally he just nodded.

When he undogged the door, the others were leaning against bulkheads, squatting on the green tile deck. He stared at their faces, still hardly able to believe he'd done what he'd just done. Wondering if it was the right choice. Then realizing he'd probably never know.

“Okay, we got it running. Come on in, and let's get this show on the road.”

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