Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (41 page)

“This is
Savo
. Affirmative.”

“The latest on that. Hasn’t hit the open media yet. But the Chinese announced they’re not recognizing it. Over.”

Dan hesitated, then clicked Transmit
.
“This is
Savo
. Not sure I got that right. Not ‘recognizing’ it? Over.”

“That a blockade is illegal under international law. So they’ll break it, quote, by any means necessary, unquote.”
A pause, during which the sync hissed, then,
“Zhang says he’s only supporting Pakistan, but … Any means necessary. So, you can understand—a lot of our plans are in flux right now.”
A pause.
“How copy? Over.”

He took a deep breath, fighting a sense of doom. Most of China’s energy, oil and liquefied natural gas, moved through the Indian Ocean. The Indians had threatened to sever that pipeline. And the Chinese had just announced they’d fight to defend it. “
Savo.
Copy all. Do you know where they intend to send us? Over.”

“This is CentCom. It is possible satcomm has been compromised. Minimize transmissions on this net. Over.”

Dan lowered the handset, shocked. If voice satellite communications were no longer secure, all fleet comms were endangered. He wanted to ask why they suspected compromise, but the other wouldn’t say, even if he knew. Not on a no-longer-trustworthy circuit. “This is
Savo.
Roger all, but we have no orders to leave oparea. Over.”

“This is CentCom. Check message traffic and comply ASAP. Minimize voice comms. We’re also seeing crashes on GCCS and the SIPRNET. Check your redundancy. Request confirmation via another channel if you receive orders that seem doubtful. Confirm. Over.”

Dan’s mouth was suddenly dry. The Navy ran on communications as much as on distillate fuel. If something, no,
someone,
was corrupting encrypted voice and GCCS, and even SIPRNET was no longer secure, the effect would be devastating. He muttered, “This is
Savo
Actual. I confirm. Over.”

“This is CentCom, roger, out.”

He reclipped the handset and met Mytsalo’s gaze. The ensign looked shaken. “Did you copy all that, Max?”

“I—I think so. That’s not good. Sir.”

“No, it isn’t.” Dan blinked past him, then remembered what he hadn’t seen when he’d looked out over the forecastle. “Where’s
Mitscher
?”

“Off the port quarter, sir. In a squall.”

Right, they were still in the monsoon season. Which explained the everlasting overcast, the eternal wind
.
And the never-ending seas, stiff and jagged, breaking and toppling as they cannonballed past.

“Captain?”

The radioman chief this time, instead of the messenger. But the same clipboard. Dan swallowed sudden nausea. Now what? He took it reluctantly. Ran his eye down it, disbelieving, then stared at the last line.

CO USS SAVO ISLAND REPORT NONRESPONSE TO ORDERS, REF A. INTERROGATIVE WHY SAVO TASK GROUP NOT EN ROUTE TASK FORCE POSIT. REPLY ASAP VIA MULTIPLE COMM PATHS.

He snapped, “What the hell’s this about? What’s Ref A?”

The radioman chief’s Adam’s apple pumped. “Captain, we have no record of that date time group.”

“I don’t understand. No
record
?”

“No sir. I mean, that’s right, sir. We never received a message with that date time group.”

This was baffling. Higher was referencing a message that, so far as
Savo
’s always-competent communicators were concerned, didn’t exist. “Did you check with
Mitscher
? Do they hold it?”

“Yessir, first thing. They don’t have it either. We requested a retransmit. Still waiting for that.”

Dan stood turning it over in a foggy, slow brain. A voice transmission that said, “Don’t trust voice messages.” That expected him to leave station, citing a broadcast message that didn’t seem to exist, or that, at least, they’d never gotten. Then a message reproaching him for being on station, and referencing a previous message that he didn’t hold. He muttered doggedly, “There’s got to be a record. A way you can check what you have and haven’t received.”

The chief consulted his wrist, which Dan saw wore two watches. “That’s the daily date time group summary message, Captain. Comes in at midnight Zulu. We’re in Echo.”

“Okay, but we can request a retransmit, can’t we? Since we have the date time group of the missing message … the one they referenced. Have you done that?”

The chief looked ill at ease. “Soon as it came in, Captain. I, uh, I already told you we did that. Asked for a retransmit. Which we’re waiting for.”

“Okay, sorry. You did. But this isn’t reassuring, that messages seem to be slipping past us. I don’t want to get down in your pants, but could we be out of timing? Missing parts of the scrambled broadcast?”

The chief seemed to be starting to protest, then quelled himself. “That used to happen, yessir. With the old KW-37s. They got out of timing. But with the 46s, it’s pretty much impossible.”

“So what’s wrong?”

The ITman hesitated. “I’m just not sure, sir.”

“Well, get to the bottom of it! Our satellite voice comms are degrading, Chief. We have to be able to depend on broadcast.”

The chief said yes sir, waited a moment, then saluted and turned away. Leaving Dan leaning on his chair, still too weak to get up into it.

So he checked the nav console. Took a range and bearing to the nearest land. A queerly shaped, low-lying peninsula poked out toward them, shaped like a flaccid, drooping penis. It didn’t seem to have a name, at least that the software knew.

The own-ship symbol glowed at the inner edge of his oparea, which the console was displaying outlined in yellow. The area he should have already left behind. All right, if he was supposed to rejoin the task group … He recalled the last GCCS picture, estimated a course. “Officer of the deck.”

“Yessir, Captain.” Mytsalo straightened. “OOD, aye.”

“Come to one-nine-zero. Tell Main Control, secure low-fuel-consumption maneuvering regime. When they’re ready, increase to fifteen knots.” He slewed the cursor, guesstimated their time to rendezvous at the most economical speed. “And have Mr. Danenhower contact me.” He’d need to make sure he actually had enough fuel to get there, maneuver, wait in line, and get a drink off the tanker.
A lot of our plans are in flux right now.
“Pass that to TAO. Secure from condition three ABM. Set condition three self-defense. Have Sonar continue maintaining a sharp watch. And let
Mitscher
know, so she can follow us around. I’ll call their CO in a minute, bring him up to speed.”

He sagged into the console, coughing from deep in his chest while the bullnose dipped, rolled, and precessed around to the new course. Maybe Higher was right. Nothing more for USS
Savo Island
to do here. In his eagerness to help, he might even have made things worse. Helped trigger what the world had hoped never to see: a nuclear war.

He’d tried his best. But hadn’t all the diplomats, generals, kings, and prime ministers done theirs, too? In August of 1914.

The leaden seas surged in. The cruiser headed into them, pitching until sharp crackles and bangs crepitated aft, ghostlike and unsettling. Far off on a shrouded horizon the silhouette of a Burke-class destroyer,
Mitscher,
mirrored their turn.

Leaving it all behind. But taking it along, too.

Well, he had his orders.
Let it burn out
.

He only hoped it would.

V

AUGUST 1914

18

Carrier Strike Group One: The Eastern Indian Ocean

TWO
days later he stood with lids clamped tight, fists buried in the pockets of his coveralls, swaying as the deck beneath his boots rose and fell. Spray cooled his uplifted face, and from his lips he licked the salty kiss of the sea.

He opened his eyes to a bright sky. The monsoon ceiling was wearing thin as
Savo
charged eastward, revealing blue above it, and here and there high wind-strained cirrus like shredding gauze. Her turbines sang at full power. Her intakes susurrated a continuous rush of intaken breath. Her wake tumbled and burbled like bluegreen and white wildflowers blooming on a heaving heath.

The fantail was cramped with equipment. Mount 52 in the middle, with the Harpoon launchers to port. The HF receive antennas nodded over the wake like tuna sticks. On the missile deck, the gunners’ mates were doing lift checks on the aft module hatch and plenum covers. Fresh paint gleamed glossy, spray-beaded. Looped cables snagged sliding sheets of moisture in tidal pools.

After an economical-speed transit, they’d joined the battle group at dawn. After
Savo
’s deep, satisfying drink from the tanker, with Cheryl in the driver’s seat while he got some much-needed kip, orders had come in. After replenishing, take station as directed by the ISIC—immediate superior in command, in this case, the rear admiral commanding the
Carl Vinson
battle group—and accompany it east. Their track lay past Sri Lanka, for the Malacca Strait. No one had yet mentioned a destination, but it was self-evident.

The South China Sea.

Boots braced against the heavy roll of a beam sea, he couldn’t help remembering other fleets that had deep-graven this same route toward the sunrise. Rozdhestvensky’s Baltic Sea fleet, the Russians doomed to annihilation at Tsushima.
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
pride of the Royal Navy, the great battleships foredoomed to destruction by Japanese naval air.

He shivered. Not reassuring. So many empires had set out to conquer, and fallen in the dust.

But his orders didn’t spell out things like that. They were markedly more laconic than in what he was already starting to think of, almost nostalgically, as peacetime. Only where to go, and how fast to get there.

Beyond that, he had no need to know.

In the night past, the group had threaded the Nine Degree Channel, the choke point near Cardamom Island, and bent their course south, to clear the subcontinent.
Savo Island
’s station was on the left flank, farther out than the usual antiair screening station. The high-side chats, even the battle group nets, had gone silent, and most of the screen had their radars off, leaving
Savo
and
San Jacinto
to maintain the air and surface pictures.

He wondered, too, why no one had yet called to ask “what the fuck?” about his shootdowns. He’d sent the reports, a formatted message for every round expended, to Navsea, AmmoLant, Jenn Roald, Strike Group One, Dahlgren, and practically everyone else with a routing indicator. But heard nothing back.

“Captain?”

He sucked a brine-laden lungful and returned the salute of Angel Quincoches, the chief in charge of the VLS. Back in the Med, the swarthy, bowlegged E-7 had charged in while a rocket engine was still burning, ignited in its cell for a hot run. Along with Tausengelt and Slaughenhaupt, Quincoches had pushed back against Amy Singhe’s “leveling management” initiative. Which had put Dan in the position of trying to balance his most innovative and aggressive junior officer against his Goat Locker. Not that they deserved equal consideration; when you came down to it, it was the senior enlisted who got the blueshirts working in the holes when you were prepping for an inspection—or a war, for that matter. Piss them off, and
Savo
would fall apart. But he also didn’t want to step on someone who was only trying to improve things, as she saw it.

Or was he paying her extra slack because of those dark eyes, those unexpected, yet so welcome, shoulder massages?

“They come out with a helluva big plume, the Block 4s,” Quincoches was saying.

Dan tuned back in. “Sorry?”

The chief pointed at the fresh paint. “Hell of a big plume. Scorch the hell out of the paint. Sometimes, detemper the lift springs in the hatch.”

“That’s the high-thrust booster. You checked ’em? We don’t want a hatch not to open.”

“No spares,” Quincoches said gloomily. “Deleted ’em from our onboard allowance. That’s the problem with this just-in-time shit. They keep cutting onboard repair parts, but out here, by the time it’s just in time, it’s way too late. We better hope one of the controllers doesn’t crap out.” He looked off to where
Mitscher
still accompanied them. They would pick up
Tippecanoe
again as they passed the Maldives, giving them both an oiler and an ammunition ship. “Shed any light on where we’re headed, Captain?”

“Don’t know a hell of a lot more than you do, Chief. Just that we’re steaming east with the strike group.”

The chief shaded his eyes and peered ostentatiously around the horizon. “Ain’t seen ’em. Who we got with us? Sir?”

Dan explained that the
Carl Vinson
battle group comprised
Savo
and
San Jacinto,
the two Tico-class cruisers, along with
Mitscher, Oscar Austin, Donald Cook, Briscoe
,
Hawes,
and
Rentz.
“And two subs,
Pittsburgh
and
Montpelier
. Loggies from
Tippecanoe
and
Kanawha,
and maybe pick up some more en route.”

“I heard
Franklin Roosevelt
sailed early. From the West Coast.”

“I’m not sure how you got that, but it’s possible.
George Washington
and
Nimitz
are already out here. In WestPac, I mean.”

“Who we gonna fight? Bets in the Chief’s Mess are on China.”

Dan forced a painful half smile. “I’m hoping it doesn’t go that way.”

“The Paks and Indians still going at it?”

“Far as I know, they’re still fighting.” In fact the Indian navy was at full wartime mobilization, with units deploying to cover the
Wuhan
task group, at the western end of the vast ocean, and others heading to the Malacca Strait.

In the same direction as the
Vinson
group, in other words. But the IO was vast; they’d most likely never come in sight of each other.