Terminal Run

“We’relate and I’ve got orders for you both. Vie, you first, since we need to get you on the plane to Pearl before you’re missed. For the next six days, get ammunition loaded and put out rumors that there are a number of exercises coming, quick scramble-to-sea-type things. This is the hard part, because you have to have your ships ready to go without anyone thinking they’re being readied for an extended emergency deployment. Shut down any heavy maintenance your repair organization’s doing. Button up all the ships, and give the repair boys some excuse — a readiness inspection or an audit of their records and procedures. Then next Saturday night you’re to have one of your customary big all-hands parties. Invite all your fleet’s commanding officers and their executive officers, their wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends. Make damned sure everyone comes, get it catered, open bar, but get a slow waiter. Early in the evening get all the captains and XOs together in the basement, put on some music, give them each two of these handheld computers, a main unit and a spare. Brief them on the Red-Indian flap. Don’t release anything on the loss of security of the network — you can tell them we’redoing an exercise to see what happens if we use it for disinformation purposes, as a security exercise. Then, as another exercise, scramble the whole fleet to sea. Slowly. A few ships at a time. Go to sea by ship type, destroyers, then frigates, then cruisers, rather than as a coordinated battle group No one is to know the whole fleet is pulling out, it has to be a complete surprise to the men. You’ve got two weeks. In fourteen days I want the Nav ForcePac Fleet steaming at maximum revs for the Indian Ocean, fully loaded out with war shots and provisions for a long haul, but I don’t want any satellites to suspect, no pier side prostitutes reporting anything, no wives or husbands squawking, no word at all. It’s just another day playing in the

Pacific, and we need to see if our toys will work. That’s all. We’ll be back next Tuesday, honey, so pick up a few steaks and plan to put the kids to bed early. Get the picture?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Vie, your ships will not be sailing in formation. You’ll all be far over the horizon from each other, so any spy satellites just see one of you at a time. Meantime I will be mobilizing the mothballed fleet under robotic control, using NSA’s electronics instead of the command network, and the decoy ships will be sailing all points of the compass, so to anyone in orbit it will look like an exercise. You will be doing a zigzag on the way, so a photograph won’t show you always headed the same direction.”

“An eye-in-the-sky will see the preponderance of ships heading for the Indian Ocean, sir, on their base course.”

“We can’t help that. At the end of the day you still command surface ships. They’ll never be as stealthy as McKee’s boats, but the ocean is a very big place. And that’s all I have for you, Vie. Get back to Pearl Harbor. There’s a jumbo jet waiting for you topside. Takeoff before the sun rises, and get back to the golf course before the Reds or the Indians know you’ve been gone.”

Ericcson had risen from his seat, the briefing obviously over.

“Good hunting, my friend,” Patton said. “You’ll have the mixed blessing of a target-rich environment.”

“One last thing for you, sir,” Ericcson said. “Don’t bother about the demotion. With a mission this heavy, I might as well have the title as well as the headaches.”

The cigar was down to a soggy nub. Ericcson lit a second, his thoughts returning to the present. He squinted at his watch, frowning deeper as he realized he couldn’t see the face. He looked around the dim lights of the bridge, making sure no one was watching him, then sneaked out a pair of frameless reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to see the Rolex face reading 11:50 pm local time, which was 1750 GMT or 1250 pm on the U.S. East Coast. He quickly put the reading glasses away and called the officer of the deck over.

“Get the ops boss and the captain to flag plot in ten minutes,” he said quietly.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Ten minutes later, the Partagas was half smoked, and Ericcson left the bridge out the hatch to the ladder way below past air operations to flag plot, a full-island-width space filled with displays and land maps and ocean charts, the central table a map of the entire Indian Ocean in relief. Over on the port side the Gulf of Aden emptied into the Arabian Sea from the Red Sea north to the Suez Canal. A fleet marker showed the Royal Navy Fleet making its way in the eastern Med toward the Suez Canal. In the early hours of daylight Eastern Europe Time the fleet would make its approach to the canal. Their entrance into the Arabian Sea would happen fifty hours later at a speed of advance of thirty-five knots, but he gave them another eight for the speed restriction at the mouth of the canal. That put the Brits in-theater in sixty-two hours.