Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“And at sea?”

“Their navy doesn’t have much out of port at the moment, but overheads show they’re lighting up their boilers alongside. I would expect them to surge some ships out. Expect them to stay close in, defensive posture, deployment just to keep their coast clear.”

Mancuso didn’t have to ask what he had out. Seventh Fleet was pretty much out to sea after the warnings from previous weeks. His carriers were heading west. He had a total of six submarines camped out on the Chinese coast, and his surface forces were spun up. If the People’s Liberation Army Navy wanted to play, they’d regret it.

“Orders?”

“Self-defense only at this point,” Lahr said.

“Okay, we’ll close to within two hundred fifty miles of their coast minimum for surface ships. Keep the carriers an additional hundred back for now. The submarines can close in and shadow any PLAN forces at will, but no shooting unless attacked, and I don’t want anyone counter-detected. The Chinese have that one reconsat up. I don’t want it to see anything painted gray.” Dodging a single reconnaissance satellite wasn’t all that difficult, since it was entirely predictable in course and speed. You could even keep out of the way of two. When the number got to three, things became difficult.

In the Navy, the day never starts because the day never ends, but that wasn’t true for a ship sitting in wooden blocks. Then things changed, if not to an eight-hour day, then at least to a semi-civilian job where most of the crew lived at home and drove in every morning (for the most part) to do their jobs. That was principally preventive maintenance, which is one of the U.S. Navy’s religions. It was the same for Al Gregory; in his case, he drove his rented car in from the Norfolk motel and blew a kiss at the rent-a-cop at the guard shack, who waved everyone in. Once there had been armed Marines at the gates, but they’d gone away when the Navy had been stripped of its tactical nuclear weapons. There were still some nukes at the Yorktown ordnance station, because the Trident warheads hadn’t yet all been disassembled out at Pantex in Texas, and some still occupied their mainly empty bunkers up on the York River, awaiting shipment west for final disposal. But not at Norfolk, and the ships that had guards mainly depended on sailors carrying Beretta M9 pistols which they might, or might not, know how to use properly. That was the case on USS Gettysburg, whose sailors recognized Gregory by sight and waved him aboard with a smile and a greeting.

“Hey, Doc,” Senior Chief Leek said, when the civilian came into CIC. He pointed to the coffee urn. The Navy’s real fuel was coffee, not distillate fuel, at least as far as the chiefs were concerned.

“So, anything good happening?”

“Well, they’re going to put a new wheel on today.”

“Wheel?”

“Propeller,” Leek explained. “Controllable pitch, reversible screw, made of high-grade manganese-bronze. They’re made up in Philadelphia, I think. It’s interesting to watch how they do it, long as they don’t drop the son of a bitch.”

“What about your toy shop?”

“Fully functional, Doc. The last replacement board went in twenty minutes ago, didn’t it, Mr. Olson?” The senior chief addressed his assistant CIC officer, who came wandering out of the darkness and into view. “Mr. Olson, this here’s Dr. Gregory from TRW.”

“Hello,” the young officer said, stretching his hand out. Gregory took it.

“Dartmouth, right?”

“Yep, physics and mathematics. You?”

“West Point and Stony Brook, math,” Gregory said.

“Hudson High?” Chief Leek asked. “You never told me that.”

“Hell, I even did Ranger School between second-and first-class years,” he told the surprised sailors. People looked at him and often thought “pussy.” He enjoyed surprising them. “Jump School, too. Did nineteen jumps, back when I was young and foolish.”

“Then you went into SDI, I gather,” Olson observed, getting himself some CIC coffee. The black-gang coffee, from the ship’s engineers, was traditionally the best on any ship, but this wasn’t bad.

“Yeah, spent a lot of years in that, but it all kinda fizzled out, and TRW hired me away before I made bird. When you were at Dartmouth, Bob Jastrow ran the department?”

“Yeah, he was involved in SDI, too, wasn’t he?”

Gregory nodded. “Yeah, Bob’s pretty smart.” In his lexicon, pretty smart meant doing the calculus in your head.

“What do you do at TRW?”

“I’m heading up the SAM project at the moment, from my SDI work, but they lend me out a lot to other stuff. I mainly do software and the theoretical engineering.”

“And you’re playing with our SM-2s now?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a software fix for one of the problems. Works on the ’puter, anyway, and the next job’s reprogramming the seeker heads on the Block IVs.”

“How you going to do that?”

“Come on over and I’ll show you,” Gregory said. He and Olson wandered to a desk, with the chief in tow. “The trick is fixing the way the laser nutates. Here’s how the software works …” This started an hour’s worth of discussion, and Senior Chief Leek got to watch a professional software geek explaining his craft to a gifted amateur. Next they’d have to sell all this to the Combat Systems Officer-“Weps”-before they could run the first computer simulations, but it looked to Leek as though Olson was pretty well sold already. Then they’d have to get the ship back in the water to see if all this bullshit actually worked.

T he sleep had worked, Bondarenko told himself. Thirteen hours, and he hadn’t even awakened to relieve his bladder-so, he must have really needed it. Then and there he decided that Colonel Aliyev would screen successfully for general’s stars.

He walked into his evening staff meeting feeling pretty good, until he saw the looks on their faces.

“Well?” he asked, taking his seat.

“Nothing new to report,” Colonel Tolkunov reported for the intelligence staff. “Our aerial photos show little, but we know they’re there, and they’re still not using their radios at all. Presumably they have a lot of phone lines laid. There are scattered reports of people with binoculars on the southern hilltops. That’s all. But they’re ready, and it could start at any time-oh, yes, just got this from Moscow,” the G-2 said. “The Federal Security Service arrested one K. I. Suvorov on suspicion of conspiring to assassinate President Grushavoy.”

“What?” Aliyev asked.

“Just a one-line dispatch with no elaboration. It could mean many things, none of them good,” the intelligence officer told them. “But nothing definite either.”

“An attempt to unsettle our political leadership? That’s an act of war,” Bondarenko said. He decided he had to call Sergey Golovko himself about that one!

“Operations?” he asked next.

“The 265th Motor Rifle is standing-to. Our air-defense radars are all up and operating. We have interceptor aircraft flying combat air patrol within twenty kilometers of the border. The border defenses are on full alert, and the reserve formation-”

“Have a name for it yet?” the commanding general asked.

“BOYAR,” Colonel Aliyev answered. “We have three companies of motorized infantry deployed to evacuate the border troops if necessary, the rest are out of their depot and working up north of Never. They’ve done gunnery all day.”

“And?”

“And for reservists they did acceptably,” Aliyev answered. Bondarenko didn’t ask what that meant, partly because he was afraid to.

“Anything else we can do? I want ideas, comrades,” General Bondarenko said. But all he saw were headshakes. “Very well. I’m going to get some dinner. If anything happens, I want to know about it. Anything at all, comrades.” This generated nods, and he walked back to his quarters. There he got on the phone.