The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel by David Poyer Page B

Internet and e-mail. I’ll move heaven and earth to get you that chassis. That will be my staff’s number one priority. In return, keeping a lid on your problems is yours. Over.”
    “I need to notify Sixth Fleet. And TF 60. Over.”
    “ No you don’t. I’ll call Admiral Ogawa myself. Tell me what else you need, if your techs find more shortfalls. Stay on it, Dan. And get down to Point Hotel as soon as you can .”
    “Copy all,” Dan said. His gaze met Mills’s. They both looked away. He said, “Over,” and waited.
    But heard only the hiss of a circuit with no one on the other end.

6
    Strait of Messina
    “ UNIDENTIFED sonar contact, bearing one-one-zero, range eighteen thousand yards. Suspected Kilo-class submarine.”
    “Hard right rudder, steady course zero nine zero. Engines ahead one-third. Bo’s’un, set antisubmarine condition two.”
    Dan sat kneading his forehead in CIC, listening to two circuits at once and watching the symbology pulsing across the displays: circles for friendly, squares for unknown, triangles for enemy. He knew this geography, a narrow, island-littered passage, all too fucking well, thank you. So far this afternoon, fighter aircraft had suddenly broken out of a commercial air route, and been queried, warned, then destroyed. He’d also fought off a short-range attack from what had appeared to be a small fishing trawler carrying a battery of Silkworm-type cruise missiles.
    He’d managed to knock the missiles out of the sky and sink the trawler. Now, though, to judge by the submarine contact, plus the pop-up of more small, fast air contacts over the landmass to the east, it looked as if he was going to have to deal with simultaneous air and subsurface threats.
    To his right the tactical action officer, Cheryl Staurulakis, spoke rapidly into her boom mike, the words coming through his headphones too. “TAO, all stations: Commence area defense detect-to-engage. OOD: Bare steerageway. Come to course zero nine zero to maximize non-battleshort-enabled illuminator coverage. Disable all doctrine statements.”
    “CSC: Doctrine disabled.”
    “CIC, Bridge: Steady on zero nine zero. Standing by to comb torpedo track.”
    “TAO, Air: Vampire, vampire, vampire! Fifty nautical miles, altitude sixty feet, speed six hundred knots, inbound to own ship.”
    “Vampire” was the proword and warning an antiship missile was on its way. Staurulakis leaned forward, sneezing suddenly into a fist.
    “TAO, RSC: New track, 0034, bearing one eight five, range forty-eight nautical miles. IFF negative. Unknown, assumed enemy . ”
    “Very well. Correlates, sir,” Staurulakis told him, without unlocking her gaze from the displays. “Recommend we ID as hostile.”
    Dan nodded. “Concur.”
    “All stations, TAO: ID’ing track 0034 as hostile.” She hooked the contact, and the symbol on the big screen changed to a vertical red caret.
    Dan rubbed his mouth, evaluating the scramble of tracks and callouts that Beth Terranova, with Donnie Wenck sitting close behind her, was putting online. In the center pulsed the blue cross-in-a-circle that meant Own Ship. Surrounding it, nearly obliterating the landmasses that crowded in, glowed the arcane tracery of dozens of friendlies and passing merchants … and hidden among them, fast-moving enemy boats that could change in seconds from innocent transients to mortal threats. Aegis had been designed for the open ocean. For the U.S. Navy, gutter-fighting in crowded, narrow waters was like forcing a falcon to fight a rat in a cage too small to spread its wings in.
    “Track 0034, range thirty nautical miles, six hundred and fifty knots, inbound.”
    “TAO, MSS: Manually engage when firm track is established.”
    “TAO, ASWO: Subsurface contact classified hostile bears one eight seven, range seventeen thousand yards.”
    “TAO, EW: Track 0034 correlates to emission spectrum of DM-3B mono pulse radar, Iranian Noor antiship sea skimmer.”
    “Permission to engage