Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (15 page)

“Okay,” he murmured. “Let’s get to it.”

*   *   *

THEY
gathered over a chart laid out on the dead-reckoning tracer, in the antisubmarine plot area back of Combat. Staurulakis, Mills, Chief Van Gogh, and Bart Danenhower. Exec, operations, navigation, engineering. Maybe he should have invited Wenck, Singhe, and the ship’s senior cryppie, but he’d always felt the smaller a meeting was, the better. He shuddered in the frigid air and leaned over the paper chart with its soft blues and tans, sea and desert. “I want to hit our most exposed position no later than eleven hundred. I need daylight in the Knuckle, and through the hundred-mile transit.” He waved a hand over the deep Gulf of Oman, their current position; then swept it westward, into the Gulf.

Heading in, the Strait of Hormuz kinked left around the Omani Peninsula. The International Maritime Organization had set up two transit lanes, each a mile wide. The southern lane was for outbound ships, the northern for those inbound to the refineries and terminals of the Gulf. The Knuckle was only twenty miles wide, with the Iranian-garrisoned Qeshm Island to the north and the (more or less) friendly Oman to the south. Then it bent southwest toward Dubai.

Dan had navigated here before. It was another labyrinth, a twisting, obstacle-littered gut of shallow sea dotted with production facilities, pumping stations, onload facilities, desert islands, barely awash reefs, and abandoned, cut-down drill platforms that stuck up to within a few feet of the surface … not to mention a ship every six minutes heading in as a like number exited. Just navigating would be a challenge. Doing so at full alert would test crew and sensors to their limits.

He turned to Van Gogh. “Chief, first thing, make sure we have all the Notices to Mariners entered. Matt, I need the boundaries the Iranians promulgated for—what are they calling it?”

Mills said, “There are actually two exercises. The regular navy maneuvers are announced from the strait to the quote ‘northern part of Indian Ocean.’ Missile live fires and ASW free play. No geographic limits promulgated yet.”

“And the Pasdaran?” Staurulakis asked.

“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced the ‘Velayat-e’ Exercises in the southern part of the Gulf. Here.” Mills straight-edged it in.

Dan leaned in. A rough rectangle about twenty miles wide by thirty in depth. But not at the Knuckle. Instead, lodged deep inside the strait, like a pebble in a windpipe. It began at the thirty-meter line off the Forur Shoal and extended seaward, cornered by four islands, all Iranian or Iranian-claimed: Forur, Sirri, Abu Musa, and Kuchek.

Dan swallowed. He knew these desolate sandy islands all too well.

“Right across the shipping lanes,” Van Gogh observed.

The operations officer said, “And they advise commercial traffic to stand clear.”

“Which effectively closes the strait.” Dan straightened, set his palms to his back, and stretched. “All right, that makes it simple. Plot us a course right through the square. We won’t be alone, with dedicated F/A-18 coverage from the carriers. Now … battle orders. This is the last chance we’ll have to look over them. So let’s make sure there are absolutely no holes.”

*   *   *

HE
didn’t get much sleep that night. Traffic was heavy coming out, as if eager to beat a deadline. Tankers by the dozen, containerships, oceangoing tugs plodding along with rigs in tow, liquid natural gas tankers with bulbous white tanks, like floating bombs. He’d left word to be awakened when they passed 26 degrees north. But when the call came, he was already up and dressed, showered and shaved.

He met his own gaze in the mirror of the sea cabin. Whether he felt up to it or not, men and women would depend on him today. He’d have to make the right decisions. Reach beyond what he felt he could do, and then do even more.

He stared into tired gray eyes mitered by wrinkles. Then closed them, and asked for help.

*   *   *

0500
.
He stood flipping through the morning traffic on the bridge. Van Gogh had calculated local dawn at 0532, but already the east was brightening and the temperature rising. The swells were gentling as they moved in between the ramparts of land.
Mitscher
was on station four hundred yards ahead. Oman was off to port, the terrifyingly vertiginous cliffs of the northern peninsula and islands jumping straight up out of the sea. One headland behind the other, they were still dark, but shortly would illuminate in hues of rose and ocher.

The 21MC announced,
“Stand by for on top.”
A growing roar drew him out on the bridge wing. Two black arrow shapes howled over, no more than three hundred yards up, tail cones glowing bright orange in the half light, and dwindled, peeling off toward the strait.

“I’ll be in Combat,” he told the pilothouse at large. As the door slammed behind him the boatswain announced, “Captain’s off the bridge.” Then the 1MC, also in Nuckols’s voice but much louder, said all over the ship,
“Flight quarters, flight quarters! All hands man your flight quarters stations. Remove all covers topside. The smoking lamp is out on all weather decks. Muster the crash and salvage team with the team leader in the helo hangar. Now flight quarters.”

*   *   *

COMBAT
was frigid, as usual. But this time, anticipating hours in the chair, he’d brought his foul-weather jacket and a pair of uniform gloves. Donnie Wenck waved; Petty Officer Terranova barely glanced up from her SPY-1 console. The rest of the stations were manned, and a murmuration of voices and a rattle of keyboards underlay the constant hiss of the ventilation.

He settled into his seat with a sigh, booted up, and ran through the priority traffic while keeping half an eye on Red Hawk’s launch, clicking to follow comms with the helo through his headset. Aegis was already tracking eighty contacts in the strait area, but he wanted the SH-60B out ahead. The Seahawk had night vision, onboard electronic eavesdropping, and a data link, extending his radar, and ESM horizon, and giving him the option of visual checks on any contacts that seemed threatening. He gave permission for a green deck.

“Helo away,”
announced the 1MC.
“All hands secure from flight quarters.”

“Clear, coming to zero zero zero,”
“Strafer” Wilker drawled, reporting to the air control supervisor eight consoles behind Dan.
“Man, it’s just paved with fuckin’ ships out here.”
“Storm” Differey was the copilot, with two crewmen. Four souls he had to remember, if things got dicey.
“Okay, got a little trouble here … red light on number one DLA.”
Wilker and the controller discussed it, concluding that since the forward data link antenna had just gone tango uniform, Strafer would have to keep the nose pointed away from the ship for the data link to work at ranges over thirty miles.

Dan filed that away too. The helo also had some strike capability, with machine guns and laser-guided Hellfires, but it would be dangerous to pit it against anything with a real air defense. Dan planned to keep him in the air for three hours, recover for refuel and rest, and have him aloft again as they approached the IRGC exercise area.

A silent Longley placed a covered tray and carafe on the table. Dan acknowledged with a nod, focusing now on the large-screen displays. The F-18s were just outside Iranian territorial waters, angling west at five hundred knots. Loitering speed, for them. He was noting the commercial air corridors, prominently displayed on the LSDs, when two threat symbols lit. Wilker called in, the display locating him over the entrance to the Knuckle.
“Two gatekeepers hanging out here. Look like Combattante fast attack. I’m gonna moon you so you can—”

Dan cut in: “Red Hawk, this is Matador Actual. Don’t let your data link positioning affect your tactics. Just make voice reports. Over.”

La Combattantes, or Kama/Sina–class missile patrol boats, were regular Iranian Navy units. They were fast, displaced about three hundred tons, and were armed with automatic guns and antiship missiles. But they were deficient in sensors and not data-linked. A threat at close range, but with the fighters streaking overhead, Dan figured, they’d stand clear. At least while he and
Mitscher
went in. Coming out, with magazines depleted, maybe damaged and low on fuel, might be a different story. So far, he didn’t have a port of call inside the Gulf. Manama was apparently leaving that up in the air, seeing which way the cat would jump.

To his right at the command desk was the general quarters TAO, Matt Mills, in the seat Cheryl had used to occupy. Now, as exec, she’d be Dan’s alternate, and supervise on the bridge . Past him Wenck was at the OS chief’s station. Donnie could turn in his chair and talk to the Terror, at the Aegis console behind him. Dan’s antisubmarine staff was behind him to his left; his surface strike team, headed by Amy Singhe, directly behind; to his right, the air control people and his electronic warfare sensor operators.

All in all, almost thirty people in CIC and four more in Sonar, next door through the traditional black canvas curtain.

Dan pulled the napkin off the tray. French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon. He made himself take ten bites, chew, and swallow, to keep the blood sugar up.

Over the next hour they closed the Knuckle. Traffic was light going in, but outgoing was bumper to bumper, ships spaced every mile. Red Hawk gave the Combattantes a wide berth, then orbited over the great sweeping bend in the waterway, relaying back radar that showed small boats maneuvering deeper in the strait. Dan and Mills discussed the enemy order of battle, trying to work out who was where. Dan kept
Mitscher
and
Savo
in the middle of the incoming lane, so no one could accuse them of violating territorial boundaries.

Electronic warfare data started coming in, both from Red Hawk and from
Savo
’s and
Mitscher
’s own eavesdropping. Aegis correlated them with radar and cross-bearings to show where the Pasdaran was gathering. C-802 batteries were lighting up on Larak Island, and on the Iranian mainland behind it.

Chin propped on his fists, Dan mused on the murky history of the C-802. The missile had originally been a Chinese design, but the Iranians had reverse-engineered it with North Korean help. They were near-supersonic sea-skimmers with a pop-up maneuver at the end of their flight profiles. Dangerous, but his EW team had trained for hundreds of hours to jam them. And when they’d faced Syrian 802s in the Med, Wenck and Dr. Noblos had come up with a way to hijack the missiles’ link to their launching point, and reprogram their targeting. “Backseat Driver” had proven its worth off Israel. And if jamming, spoofing, and chaff didn’t work, he could shoot them down.

But if they overwhelmed him, in dozens stagger-fired from different locations to converge with a single time-on-target …

Lounging in his seat, shivering, he wondered if
Savo
had been sent in as a deliberate provocation. After all, they’d nearly sunk an Iranian frigate last winter. And Dan personally had tangled with Iran several times.

Or was that paranoia, megalomania, persecution complex? Surely no one cared.

On the other hand, it could be just enough to convince the other side they were being deliberately goaded.

*   *   *

AS
he’d expected, the Combattantes stood off as the U.S. warships passed. Red Hawk reported that the small contacts spaced along the northern boundary of the international strait were dhows. Dan suspected these were transmitting targeting data to the missile batteries, which remained locked on. Wenck asked if they should do some decoying drills, but Dan put a foot down. This was no time for simulations. The potential for misunderstanding, or simple fuckup, was too great. He maintained a steady twenty knots, covering ground while not burning too much fuel.

Unfortunately, after the task group had passed, the missile boats drifted south, then fell in astern, following them in. Staying in their wake, but maintaining a standoff of about ten miles.

If they were the gatekeepers, the gates were swinging shut.

By the time the clock above the LSDs read 0700 he was exiting the Knuckle, passing south of Larak Island with four antiship missile radars locked on
Savo Island
. The exterior cameras were picturing a gentling sea, a blood-scarlet, cloudy horizon beneath the risen sun, when Lieutenant Singhe leaned on the back of Dan’s chair. “Sir. A word.”

“Shoot. I mean—guess I shouldn’t say that just now.”

She didn’t crack the slightest smile. Just leaned in, dropping her voice. “You wanted us to spin up Tomahawks on every C-802 battery we identified. How about a warning shot?”

This was a surprise.
Savo
could do limited land-attack mission planning onboard. But he couldn’t “spin up,” or prelaunch program, a TLAM without Fifth Fleet authorization. Still, he
had
ordered Mills and Singhe to do engagement planning. “Uh … you’re not really spinning up, are you?”

“Well, no. Just building the missions.”

“That’s better. But, you’re proposing a first strike? On the Iranian mainland? I don’t think so, Amy.”

“They’re illuminating us in firing mode. That’s a hostile act, according to our rules of engagement.”

Dan cleared his throat. “There’s something you have to learn about ROEs, Amy. There’s the ‘ought to be’ and ‘what they say it is,’ and then there’s ‘how it’s interpreted.’ And after all that, there’s ‘what we do anyway.’”

“I’m beginning to see that, sir.”

“But regardless of any and all of the above, I’m not out here to kick off a war.”

“Sir, with all due respect, that’s idiotic. As soon as we detect one launch, we should pull the trigger on every site we have localized.”

Dan tensed, suddenly angry.
Idiotic?
“I’m not disagreeing with you, Amy, but I don’t have that authority. I could release an overwater strike, on a surface unit. But a strike on the mainland, no way. I appreciate your aggressiveness, but you need to stand down. And reread your battle orders.”