Eagle Station

Dvorsky nodded. That must be the mystery aircraft the Scion special action unit had said was on its way. Whatever it was, it was moving like a bat out of hell for a manned aircraft… but even Mach three, nearly two thousand knots, was still as slow as an arthritic tortoise compared to the speed of those incoming missiles. “Combat, Bridge, understood. Weapons tight, acknowledge.”

“Bridge, Combat, weapons tight, aye,” the CIC repeated. The apprehension in his voice was real and apparent to everyone on the circuit.

“Get me Mustin,” she told the boatswain’s mate, took the handset he offered, and issued the same order. With that Scion aircraft moving into their engagement zone, she didn’t want to risk a “blue-on-blue” friendly fire incident.

“McCampbell, this is Mustin, weapons tight, aye,” she heard Mike Hayward, her fellow destroyer captain, confirm.

One side of Dvorsky’s mouth twitched upward for just a fraction of a second. She could almost swear that she had heard Hayward’s teeth grinding together over the VHF circuit. After their top secret briefing for this mission, Mustin’s commanding officer hadn’t bothered hiding his deep-seated reluctance to entrust the safety of his ship to “a bunch of fucking private-enterprise spooks and their crackerjack high-tech gizmos.”

To be honest, it was a feeling she shared — only partially alleviated by the willingness of those same Scion operatives to put their own lives on the line. Mentally, she crossed her fingers. Right now, the lives of everyone aboard her two destroyers, more than 760 officers and enlisted sailors, depended entirely on a handful of civilians, some of whom weren’t even American citizens. That was not a situation guaranteed to make any serving U.S. military officer comfortable.

“Bridge, Combat, we’ve got those inbound warheads on our own radar!” she heard her operations officer report urgently from the CIC. “Bearing three-five-four degrees. Altitude fifty-nine miles. Range is three-four-zero nautical miles. Inbounds are slowing a bit as they reenter the atmosphere. Time to impact now one hundred ten seconds.” There was a moment of appalled silence. And then, “Ma’am, those warheads are inside the upper atmosphere and maneuvering at hypersonic speeds! They’re zeroing in on our track.”

Dvorsky felt her pulse kick into even higher gear as adrenaline flooded her system. She swallowed hard against the sudden taste of bile. All along, this was what she had feared most. Images of DF-26 IRBMs had shown four finlike control surfaces around their nose sections. Now it was clear those weren’t just for show. Coupled with inertial guidance systems, their own onboard radars, and data links to China’s reconnaissance satellites, the four enemy warheads headed her way were far more accurate than earlier U.S. intelligence analysis had suggested. Instead of a CEP, circular error probable, measured in hundreds of feet — making a miss against a smaller moving target like a destroyer far more likely than a hit — the DF-26s were true precision weapons.

Which meant that she and everyone else aboard the USS McCampbell and USS Mustin were probably well and truly screwed… unless the Scion team’s equipment worked as advertised. Those warheads were coming in much too fast for her SM-2 missiles to successfully engage. Nor was last-second, evasive maneuvering likely to save her ships. With the kinetic energy imparted by such high speeds and a blast effect of up to four thousand pounds of high explosive, four times the amount carried by a Tomahawk cruise missile, even a near-miss could easily rip one of her destroyers in half.

Scion Special Action Unit

That Same Time

“Warning. Warning. Time to impact is forty seconds,” the threat analysis computer reported without emotion.

Brad McLanahan forced himself to ignore its persistent alerts. Right now, his task was to make sure his sensors captured every possible piece of data on those incoming DF-26 warheads for later analysis by Scion and Sky Masters technical experts. Since this was the first time China’s most advanced ship-killing ballistic missiles had been fired in earnest, his team was being handed a golden opportunity to ferret out their real operational characteristics under combat conditions.

Yeah, it’s all good right up to the point we screw up, his subconscious nagged. “Not going to let that happen,” he muttered to himself.

“Thirty seconds. Two warheads targeted on McCampbell. Two aimed at Mustin,” the computer said. “Closing speed now Mach ten. Range fifty-five nautical miles. Altitude one hundred thousand feet.”