“Ready to drop,” Whitehorse said.
The high-bypass turbofans screamed like asthmatic banshees as he aimed for the datum.
Clunk.
“In the water. Ready for active.”
“Go,” said Collins.
Breeeet!
Every man on the submarine’s bridge heard the screech as the buoy went active. The former navigator froze, his mind blank.
“There is not another sub out here.” The second engineer sounded less positive than his words implied.
“Whoever that is knows where we are and that we’re leaving the exercise area. Battle stations!” the navigator said.
“It must be Americans from the exercise.”
“What are they doing over here?”
“Cheating. They’re famous for it.” The second engineer got down on the chart table.
Breeeet!
“It has to be an aircraft.”
Around them, sailors tumbled into their action stations, many of them looking sick and gray. The navigator still couldn’t focus his mind on the problem. No one had planned for detection this early.
“We have to shoot it down,” the second engineer said.
“What?”
“We have to shoot the American down.”
“What if he’s already passed on our location?”
“What if he has? It will be an hour before they can have another plane here. We’ll be long gone.”
The navigator hesitated and saw something he didn’t like in the second engineer.
“This is my decision.”
“Not if you endanger the mission.”
The navigator saw the gulf yawning at his feet. They were no longer part of a service with a hundred years of tradition. His whole view of himself and his place in the ordered universe shredded. He was alone, the captain of a ship of mutineers. And the second engineer was prepared to walk over his corpse if he didn’t act immediately.
“Surface!” he shouted. “Khuri, man the launcher. I want to hit him the moment the tower clears the water.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Petty Officer Khuri was one of the few men qualified to fire the rotary missile launcher in the conning tower, and it could be fired only when they were surfaced.
“Satisfied?” he snarled to the second engineer.
The younger man nodded and shrugged, as if to say that events were his masters, not his servants. It was a popular saying among the faithful.
The navigator wondered how they would maintain discipline.
He felt the bow incline sharply.
“They’re coming up!” Collins said.
“Jeez! Well, that’s sporting. Goldy, snap a photo for the cruise book. Hey, Collins, you don’t suck as much as I thought. Whitehorse, that was sweet.”
“Can I call the boat?”
“Get the photo first.”
Stevens took his time, banked the plane and climbed a little to get Goldy a better camera angle and pointed the nose back at the datum, just a mile ahead. He could see the disturbance in the water where her tower was cutting the surface. Mighty fast for an exercise, he thought. Then the tower was clear, a black square against the sun-dazzled sea.
A little click in the brain, as a neuron fired on some half remembered—
“What the fu—” Not sun dazzle. Missile launch. “FLARES!” Stevens bellowed.
Collins, busy enjoying his first operational success with a cup of coffee, took a precious second to toss it aside before reaching over his head for the flare toggle which, being a careful young man, he had set to a three-second burst pattern when he entered the plane.
Stevens had no altitude and very little airspeed, but he did what he could. He rammed the throttle past max to military and put the belly of the plane toward the launches. He thought they were real. It made no sense, but he believed it and acted. His response was almost enough.
The flare pods fired continuously as he turned. The first missile chased a flare that burned as hot as the sun and its warhead fired, taking a precious piece out of the vertical stabilizer because the flares hadn’t had time or speed to deploy far from the aircraft. Stevens felt the change in handling and compensated. He was that good.
The second missile followed an earlier flare and detonated just off the port wing, its steel-cable warhead just missing the port engine and slicing through the aft cockpit, beheading Whitehorse in his seat and taking the top off the aft canopy. Wind and sun filled the airplane.
Stevens felt the change and reached down to pull the master eject as two more missiles slammed into his port wing, which separated from the plane as shrapnel shredded Stevens’s body and tipped his ejection seat as it fired to incinerate LT Goldstein before her seat could compensate.
A piece of the port engine struck Collins a glancing blow that broke most of his ribs. Because the first missile had ripped the canopy off the back seat, and Stevens’s last piloting had oriented the plane at right angles to the water, his own ejection was clean, and his seat shot him sideways, parallel to the sea, unconscious and mutilated. His luck lay in his angle.
The fourth missile hit the tons of fuel in AG 702’s belly and she exploded, but her death hid Collins’s ejection from the shooter on the conning tower of the Nehru. By the time his chute deployed, the tower of the sub was clear for diving, and Collins’s limp and bleeding body settled into the warm water more than a mile beyond the quickly sinking wreckage of his plane. His life vest inflated as it felt the salt, and a transceiver in the shoulder began to radiate his distress.
Mahe Naval Base, India
“Sir—!”
The Indian commodore’s eyes, widened with anger, stared at Alan. “Take your hands off me!”
But Alan didn’t let go. The other man’s rank meant less to him right then than his touching the JOTS, which had worldwide connections and was as sacrosanct as any piece of classified hardware the Navy owned—the reason that Benvenuto was posted to ride herd on it. For this exercise, Indian monitoring personnel were allowed to look at it but most definitely not to insert data or play with the controls; when they wanted data or a change of view—there had been a briefing specifically about this—they were supposed to ask Benvenuto or Alan. They did not work the JOTS themselves.
“Sir!” Alan still had a grip on the brown hand, his own good hand closed over it just behind the knuckles so that whatever the commodore had inserted into the port was still locked into Alan’s fingers “I’m very sorry, sir, but—”
“Let me go! This is an order! I will protest—”
“Sir, our orders are clear—nobody—”
The hand squirmed within his grip and the arm tried to pull away. “This is an outrage—!” Heads turned toward them. The Indian lieutenant who had been staring at the clock looked shocked now, an expression that Alan caught in a fraction of a second’s glance and registered as fear. The commodore was pulling harder, putting his considerable weight