Tomahawk (8 page)

Far above, girders webbed the underside of light-admitting panels. The distant rattle of air-driven tools
merged with the whine of electric motors. He'd expected clamor, shouting, but the first thing he noticed was the quiet. He followed the group, then rejoined them as they spread themselves around something at the end of the line. He knew its dimensions by heart, yet somehow it was smaller than he'd expected.

The first assembled Tomahawk he'd ever seen was as long as a full-sized car, yet no bigger around than a woman's waist. As he trailed his fingertips over cool painted metal, over plastic inserts that faired rivets and accesses into air-cheating smoothness, a chill ran up his back.

“Beautiful,” said the guidance engineer, running her hand across the outer edge of the wing, and Dan thought, It isn't just a guy thing, then. This perception of beauty in an instrument of death. He'd felt it before, admiring the raked lines of a destroyer, the half-submerged deadliness of a submarine.

For a moment, he looked back through an endless hall lined with armor and floored with bloody straw, where warriors caroused as the bard howled the paean to destruction. How many weapons—swords, spears, guns, knives, aircraft, bombs—Man had made, and all but worshiped before. Now it was missiles; and someday soon, it would be lasers, burning through the atmosphere like lightning drawn with a ruler. And his weapons had made him, refashioned him from a frightened plains ape to master of the planet.

And here they stood, gathered around the newest idol to frighten the tribe in the next valley.

The cart whirred and moved past them, and another cart and another missile took its place.

He and Burdette drove Niles back to the airport after the meeting. The admiral didn't say anything, just stared out the window. Dan contemplated wiry black hair salt-and-peppered with gray. What went on in there? He didn't have a clue.

He'd had to face admirals before. But this was the first time he'd worked with one. It was true: They were different. As if those broad golden stripes lifted them to a
different plane of evolution. They seemed to think in a different way, knowing instantly and intuitively what junior officers had to grope toward. Did it happen suddenly, when they were selected? Or were those the ones the board anointed, bestowing on them only the acknowledgment they were superior beings? If it was the latter, he ought to have met people like that at the lower ranks. And he hadn't. He'd known effective leaders. But none of them had been guided by some perfectly isolated and frictionless internal gyro, like the man in front of him seemed to have.

When they got to the airport, he started to help Niles with his bag. The admiral grunted something and took it away from him. He headed off without a backward glance.

“Whew,” said Burdette. “Fun guy.”

“Yeah, a real teddy bear,” Dan said. “Well, you ready to head north?”

“Light the burners; let's launch.”

The Pacific Coast Highway took them past rugged cliffs, dramatic views out over the gleaming sea. He wished they could stop at San Juan Capistrano. Maybe next time…. The ocean spread below him out to the world's edge, charged with the silver waning light like high voltage. It looked different from the Atlantic—a dark, heatless, somehow threatening hue. The hydrography was abrupt here. The bottom plunged deep just offshore. One reason, of course, why the initial tests had been flown from the Pacific. A sub could launch only a few miles offshore; then the missile could head for the deserted fastnesses of the federal reservations in Southern California and Nevada.

He asked Burdette, “Hey, you been out here before, right?”

“Sure, back when we were launching from
Guitarro.
Postshot, we're en route to Mare Island when the impulse tank in the torpedo tube blows up. Shorts out a bank of batteries, then starts a fire in the torpedo room. We were all jumping through our grommets there for a while. Anyway…
this new engineer, he's gonna meet us at the ship, right?”

“He's supposed to've been there a couple days now. Name's Sakai. ME in electrical engineering out of Rensselaer. Dahlgren lent him to us for a year.”

“Sounds good. What you want to do about dinner? Want to pull off here, or wait till we get to Long Beach?”

The next morning, he stood looking up at one of the last four battleships on earth.

USS
New Jersey
lay in a dry dock huge enough to swallow a small town. Beneath its massive hull, the concrete floor was dotted with pools of water that reflected the clouds and the sky. He stared into the leveled gaze of sixteen-inch guns in slab-sided turrets. Above them poked out a bristle of five-inch dual-purpose batteries. Then bridge levels, more guns, directors, yet-more levels, yet more guns, a mountain range of steel tapering into heaven. At its crest, a lacework of radars and radio antennae fretted the air, as if the ship were an enormous plant, thrusting metal as high as possible toward the sun.

He lowered his eyes again, noticing this time huge canvas screens and construction staging. Only then did his eye pick up human figures, clambering tiny as gnats about the immense fabric as compressors and paint strippers buzzed and clattered. He eased his breath out. She was from another world, another time, and encountering her here amid the hissing steam and grinding of engines was like coming suddenly upon a live tyrannosaur in its lair.

As they stepped off the steel-ringing brow, Dan looked around for the quarterdeck watch, lifting his hand to salute, then remembered she wasn't in commission yet. “There's our escort,” Burdette said. “Hey! Dan, this is Perry Kyriakou, the prospective Tomahawk officer. Perry, Dan Lenson. There a guy named Sakai here?”

“Yeah, he's down tracing hydraulics. We're gonna all meet in the captain's in-poft cabin. Want to come with me, I'll show you the spaces.”

The passageways were hot and close and filled with noise, cables, paint chips, welding fumes, dirt, sparks, sailors, and yard workers in hard hats and coveralls. Dan
asked Kyriakou how long she'd been in mothballs. “Twelve years this time,” the lieutenant said. “Actually, she hasn't spent that long on active duty. They broke her out for Korea, then Vietnam. But what makes a ship old is steaming and shooting, and she's still got a lot of hours left on her.” He thumped solid steel. “The only thing that was ever wrong with these, they couldn't hit a target at really long range. And that's what we're gonna add. Okay, this is gonna be the Tomahawk equipment room.”

Dan looked around the gutted compartment, then took his diagrams out. He measured everything, checked everything, traced ventilation and power. Finally, the lieutenant looked at his watch. “We better get on up. I'll call the chief, see if he can find your guy Sakai.”

They had half an hour with Captain Foster. The commanding officer fiddled with an unlit corncob pipe as he filled them in on the reactivation program. Then he told Dan something he hadn't realized about the Tomahawk spaces: that when Adm. Bill Halsey had commanded Third Fleet and Task Force 38 in 1944, those had been his flag spaces and his personal mess. Glancing at Sakai, Foster ruminated about how Halsey had let Jisaburo Ozawa sucker him away with a decoy force at Leyte Gulf. “My dad was on the
Samuel B. Roberts,
and he's never forgiven Halsey for leaving the San Bernardino Strait unprotected off Samar. This ship could have done what she was designed for—slugged it out with Kurita's, battle line to battle line. Four U.S. battlewagons against four Japanese. And one of those was
Yamato.
Eighteen-inch guns … Think about that.”

But at last, Foster hoisted himself from his chair, apologizing. He had to leave, but he insisted they use his cabin for their conference. He invited them back for the commissioning ceremony.

Dan, Burdette, Sakai, Kyriakou, and the Naval Sea Systems Command representative spent the day going over the master arrangement drawings. Everything seemed okay on the command and control arrangements, but they ran into a shoal on ABL siting. Specifically, the location between the stacks, with a clear area outboard to
allow for the missile-loading platforms to be set up. Sakai set the tone when, looking at the diagram, he said, “Uh, guys, this ain't gonna fly.”

Dan looked at his new engineer. This was the first time he'd met him; he'd gone through résumés on the Internet and pulled him sight unseen out of the Navy weapons lab at Dahlgren with a Brickbat personnel request. Sakai looked to be about eighteen, though he was actually in his late twenties. He had long black hair and a flowing mustache, with close-set eyes behind Navy-issue birth-control frames. He had on green coveralls and brand-new half Wellingtons. He didn't want to be called by his first name, which was Yoshiyuki, and Dan was happy to go along. “What ain't, Sparky?”

“This siting plan. How hardwired is this thing?”

The NAVSEA rep said the weight and moment calculations had been done, the Surface Combatant Design Office had signed off on it, and that was that. Dan said, “Why can't we go as designed?”

“See this? Look at how close the ends of the ABLs are to the blast shields. Five buys you ten you're gonna exceed overpressure during launch.”

“These clamshells are armored against fire and impact.”

“Sure, but only if they're closed. I bet that's how they designed it, one open to fire, all the others closed. But that's not gonna be your typical tactical employment. Let's say you're gonna do a two-ABL launch, get eight missiles in the air. That means you got the clamshells open on number one when number two fires. Not only that, you're gonna be dumping a hell of a lot of toxic exhaust right on the centerline.”

“What do you suggest, Sparky?”

“Split them up. Put half between the stacks here and the rest down on the lower deck, pointed forward. The way the Soviets do it on the
Sovremennys.
Or, you don't like that, turn them end for end.” He shook cigarettes out of a pack and demonstrated as the steward came out with fresh coffee.

“They fire across the ship?” Dan said doubtfully. “Left to right, right to left?”

“Sure. Why not? That way, the blast and the exhaust goes outboard instead of inboard. Your loading equipment goes in the center. Which is better, too—you get more wind and spray protection.”

“You'd need two blast shields instead of one,” the rep pointed out.

“But each can be lower. Who cares how much blast you dump outboard?”

“How about these Phalanxes? What's the arc of fire on them when the clamshells are open? And what are we going to do about the ship's boats?”

Dan said, “Look, we don't have all day. Will Systems Command take on the redesign? If we can come up with an improved siting plan?”

The NAVSEA rep said no, that would delay delivery.

They went around for two hours on how to resite the boxes and add additional structure to reposition the Phalanx to fire over them. Dan tried to reason with the guy, but he wouldn't even negotiate handrail locations. Finally, he pointed to the phone on the bulkhead. “Is that connected?”

“I believe so.”

“I want you to do a mod to the design, grouping four launchers on the oh three level, firing over one another, and the other four aft on either side of the sixteen-inch director, facing forward and outboard forty-five degrees. Listen up now, because this is your big chance to make a speed bump out of yourself. Your boss is Admiral Obuszewski. You tell me no can do one more time, and I'm going to pick up that phone and call Admiral Niles. Niles has got Admiral Willis shitting in his in-box every day because SECNAV's shitting in his. Then Willis can call Obuszewski and we can let two three-stars do our jobs for us. Or does that sound like a bad idea?”

The rep sat mute, scowling. Finally, he muttered, “We'll redesign it.” But the look he got told Dan he wasn't ever going to get anything else out of NAVSEA again.

He couldn't leave—this was essential stuff—and he realized late in the morning that they weren't going to make
it to Point Mugu that day. He called over to get word to the contractors that the meeting was postponed until tomorrow. He asked the site rep to let them in to see the launcher, and help them get whatever measurements they needed.

The next morning dawned misty. Sakai put the headlights on as they headed down toward the sea. Dan asked him about what he'd been doing at Dahlgren, and he got an evasive answer, something about an electromagnetic gun. Whatever it was, he sounded anxious to get back to it. “Not that I don't want to help you guys,” he said. “Just that stuff stops getting interesting for me when the theory's cold and you're just down to twisting wires together.” Dan and Burdette exchanged eye rolls.

What everybody called Point Mugu was officially the Pacific Missile Test Center. It was on a peninsula fifty-some miles north of Los Angeles. Low buildings squatted between bluffs overlooking the ocean. Sakai said he knew his way around, but Dan tried to keep oriented as their security escort took them to what he called “the blockhouse.” When they found it, not far from the beach, a group of men in civvies were standing near the doorway.

“Lenson, I presume? Project Office?”

“Dan Lenson. This is Sparky Sakai, Vic Burdette.”

“J. J. Slater, Convair. I built this beast.”

“Nice to meet you.” They shook hands; Slater introduced the others, from FMC, Unidynamics, and Vimy. Dan asked if they'd gotten the bid package. “Yeah, we did. Thanks,” the man from Vimy said. He looked tough, with a sun-seared Irish face.

“Sorry I got held up. You fellas had a chance to look it over?”

“There was a launch crew here drilling yesterday. We got to see some of the loading.”

“That's good. I haven't. J. J., want to give me the tour?”

The prototype was about the size of a tractor-trailer container, painted haze gray. The welded seams were un-ground. Slater gave them a walkaround, pointing out the exterior connections and power and hydraulics requirements. “Stand clear,” he yelled, then hit a button.