Terminal Run

Satisfied, Dixon ordered himself returned to the anti surface display. If a submarine contact appeared, the olive floor of the anti surface display would become translucent, allowing him to see down into the antisubmarine display, so that he could fight in both environments simultaneously. It took some time for the old-timers like Dixon to get used to the new firecontrol displays, the odd three-dimensional reality at first causing motion sickness, but the junior officers walked aboard experts at it, most of them having spent hours playing video games in displays much more challenging than this virtual world. The display so far had been completely clean; Dixon decided to allow it to become more busy, ordering Cyclops to put up ship system status reports, navigation boundaries superimposed on the bowl walls, and calling for the antiair display, a ceiling above the anti surface display that would show bearing and range to an aircraft above. The ceiling met the bowl wall ten nautical miles away, a distant airplane showing up on the same bowl surface as a surface ship. The weapon status display came up, surrounding Dixon with the four torpedo tubes showing the weapons loaded aboard, two of them dark, two lit up with the glow of applied power, but each with no target solution. The upper tubes’ outer doors were open, preparing for the attack. The twelve vertical launch tubes were likewise displayed, with four Javelin antiship cruise missiles and eight Vortex Mod Delta missiles. Then the torpedo room status came up in the display, showing the number and rack status of each torpedo.

With more orders from Dixon the faces of his firecontrol team were displayed, the fisheye lenses in the helmets distorting the view, but the expressions conveying more information than their voices alone. With the faces up, he could select one person with his glove cursor and talk to him without the rest of the battle stations crew hearing, which sub crews had named the KITA circuit, for when the captain needed to deliver a kick in the ass to a particular member of the firecontrol party. By the time Dixon was finished arranging his display, his virtual world was filled with symbols and indicators.

“Predator position,” Dixon said to Cyclops. Far up on the bowl wall, on the north direction marker, a faint pulsing blue light moved, at a distance of sixty nautical miles. It was just after 0300 local time, so the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle they’d launched an hour before flew in complete darkness, using its infrared scan to search for the targets, the Red Chinese Battlegroup One. The battle group was expected to come into Predator range in a few moments.

“Cyclops, display convoy target solution.” Dixon’s order would take the information on the battle group last speed and course and distance, gained the last time they’d slowed, and put it on the virtual battle space A pulsing red diamond appeared far up the pink wall of the bowl on the north bearing line at a distance of eighty miles. Dixon was tempted to order the Predator to fly farther north and determine the exact position of the incoming battle group but that would be a risky order. To give orders to the Predator he would need to be at periscope depth with the BRA-44 antenna extended, a damned large-diameter catch-me-fuck-me telephone pole waving in the breeze for the Chinese polarized anti periscope radars to find, giving away his position. If his position were given away the Reds would disperse their formation, evacuating in different directions with zigzag courses, and he’d never connect with a single torpedo, and worse, they’d vector in the damned Julang class SSN. Even though the Reds had probably built a clanging bucket of bolts that sounded like a train wreck, with a defined datum on the Leopard, the Julang could pump out enough East Wind Dong Feng torpedoes to make life very difficult. And if the periscope or BRA-44 didn’t attract attention, the advancing Predator flying directly at the convoy would. If the Predator kept flying long sweeps east, then west, it would present a minimal threat to the task force’s air search radars, and if the gods were with them, the stealth anti radar construction of the UAV would not return a radar ping that the Chinese could see.

The other reason it would be foolish to climb to periscope depth was that it would take Leopard above the layer depth. With the summer weather, the top two hundred feet of the East China Sea was stirred by the waves and broiled by the sun, and was warm. At 210 feet, the water became frigid. The layer created a shallow sound channel, which would allow a longer range of detection of the battle group but make them blind to the approach of the Julang. With the Red SSN inbound, Dixon would have to attack the surface force from the depths. His weapons would hit them far over the horizon anyway, he thought. There would be nothing to see at PD, not even the distant smoke of their explosions. The telemetry from the