Choosers of the Slain

2

Amanda Lee Garrett had long ago learned that she required a certain amount of time to herself. Given her chosen profession, however, such time was hard to come by. When a chance at a free afternoon had presented itself, the first in several weeks, she had set out to make the most of it.

She had lunched at one of Rio's finest churrascurias, the steak houses that served the spicy barbecued cuisine of Brazil's southeastern gaucho country, a pleasantly old-school establishment where the staff apparently still considered a woman dining alone to be a little scandalous, or at least a pity. She had lingered for a time over a second glass of the good but rough local wine and then moved on.

She had wandered along the warm, tree-lined streets of the Ipanema district and had browsed in the shops and boutiques of the Rua Visconete de Paraja, looking at everything yet seeking nothing in particular. Eventually, gravitating eastward, Amanda had found herself on the famed black and white tiled promenade overlooking the beach at Ipanema.

The pale sands and low surf called to her, making the decision of how she would spend the rest of her afternoon an easy one. She hadn't really planned or prepared for a day at the beach, but it would make a good excuse to buy a new swimsuit.

That, in turn, had led to this soft and shaded patch of sand at the foot of the seawall. It was midweek and the seaside wasn't excessively crowded, just enough so that the air was filled with a happy jumble of samba and New Swing coming from a few radios and CD players. Her clothes, bundled into a plastic shopping bag, made a comfortable pillow and she was content to drowse lazily and people-watch.

Likewise, she was content to be watched. Aware of the occasional appreciative glances that came her way, Amanda gave the white satin one-piece she had chosen a surreptitious smoothing tug. The suit was staid compared to the locally favored tangas and monokinis, but the form that it sheathed was a good one, a trimly compact dancer's body, firm-breasted and flat-stomached. Her features were good as well, strong yet feminine, framed by thick, cinnamon-colored hair and dominated by her large-and, as one past lover had described them, dangerously hazel-eyes.

Amanda Garrett was an attractive woman, not classically beautiful, but attractive. At age thirty-five, she was also wise enough to know it. She was neither vain nor shy about the fact. She simply accepted it as a minor but pleasant part of her being. So she was neither surprised nor displeased when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed another shadow flowing across the sand to merge with the patch of shade she was occupying.

"Hello, I really hope you speak English, because I think I'd like to get to know you."

Amanda came up onto her elbow a little faster than she had intended. Good Lord, this boy was beautiful!

"What would you do if I didn't?" she inquired curiously.

"Keep on trying, I guess." He shrugged and dropped down onto the sand a couple of feet away. "Things would be a little more complicated, but it'd still be worth it."

She would guess his age as being somewhere in the late twenties, but he had that kind of boyish grin that made her think of high-school-grad-going-on-college-freshman. On the other hand, he had obviously been around enough to be just a little bit bored with some of the more conventional male-female approach-and-contact rituals, much as she was.

"That was an interesting opening. Direct and with a minimum of cute."

"I've found that cute seldom works with the class acts of this world. Honest does."

Amanda nodded. "True."

He wasn't overly tall, not many inches over her own medium height, and he had a hard body. Not a muscle builder, but lean and whipcord wiry. Mediterranean dark, maybe with some Greek lineage in that black and curly hair. His eyes, though, were a particularly penetrating shade of blue.

Those eyes were also giving her a frank survey. Not an ogling that she found offensive, but more of a connoisseur's complimentary consideration. Amanda did suspect, however, that her new swimsuit had been mentally peeled off and tossed into the nearest trash can. Well, fair was fair. She'd had her own momentary visualization of slipping down those well-worn denim trunks to see if that wonderful tan went all over.

"Okay, then, we'll go with honest. My name's Vince."

"Amanda."

"Amanda… Let's see, that means 'worthy of being loved.' It suits you."

"And what does Vince mean?"

"Vince, a contraction of Vincent, which means 'invincible.'"

"Which has yet to be proven." Amanda smiled.

"That's what I get for memorizing those name derivations out of the back of the dictionary. Gah! How bad am I bleeding?"

She chuckled softly. "Not too badly."

He could make her laugh, that was important, and honesty did work well with her. He wasn't exactly what she had visualized as the man of her dreams, but there might be definite potential here for a playmate.

"Stay and be welcome, Vincent, and let's see where doing some more honest gets us."

He returned her smile. They each understood the game they were beginning, and the beach at Rio on a late summer's afternoon was a wonderful place to play it.

With luck, they both could win.

As it was, though, they were allowed only a few minutes. Both became aware of a disturbance out on the water, a rumble of engines and a chorus of perturbed voices. Something about the sound of those engines made Amanda sit up abruptly.

A ship's boat, a navy-gray, semirigid Zodiac with a stern steering station, was nosing its way inshore, pushing a scattering bow wave of swimmers and waders ahead of it. It rode up onto the sand and a slender figure in khaki hopped over the inflated sidehull and trotted up the beach toward them.

"Damn, damn, damn!" Amanda muttered under her breath.

"Begging the Captain's pardon, but your presence is urgently required back aboard ship."

Commander Amanda Lee Garrett, United States Navy, sighed and got to her feet, brushing off the sand. Time to herself was over.

"Okay, Lieutenant, what's going on?"

Lieutenant Christine Rendino's inquisitive pixie features, normally expressive to the extreme, remained carefully neutral. "I really couldn't say, ma'am. The executive officer just dispatched me to locate you."

"I see. Very well, then, return to the gig and stand by to shove off. I'll be with you in a second."

Amanda knelt down to retrieve the bag that held her uniform. Her new acquaintance had come up on one knee, looking wary and a little unnerved.

"We all have to make a living somehow," she said wryly. "It was a very good pass. If it's any consolation, I think I might have gone out to intercept it."

Following an impish impulse, she leaned forward and lightly brushed her lips against his. Then, getting back to her feet, she started down to the waiting boat and her responsibilities.

The gig's twin outboards churned up a flurry of sandy foam as they backed off the beach. Slewing about, they went up on the plane and headed for Sugar Loaf Point and Rio's inner harbor.

Amanda rode one of the side benches while Christine Rendino stretched out comfortably on the deck, her back propped against the steering-station windscreen and her legs extended out ahead of her over the keel line. It was a rather casual stance in the presence of a superior officer, but then, that could sum up a great deal of Lieutenant Rendino's military career.

The lithe ash-blonde had entered the service via the University of California's NROTC. She had graduated with honors but had never quite managed to fit into the classic mold of "an officer and a lady." She survived and even prospered because of two things: one, that she was very good, if not brilliant, at her job, the other, the long-held belief within the naval community that intelligence officers were always just a little bit peculiar.

Beyond that, during the tour of duty she and Amanda had shared on the same Fleet staff in the Pacific, she had become a friend, comrade, and confidante. When Amanda had moved on to her own command, she had expended a considerable portion of her accumulated store of favors to ensure that Christine came along with her.

"All right, Chris. What's really going on?"

"Not sure, boss ma'am, but my sit-guess is that it's big, local, and we're being sent to do something about it."

Now that they had a degree of privacy, the intel had released the sober-faced control she had exhibited on the beach and was backsliding into her more usual state of casual frankness.

"Specifics?"

"Not many. A little over an hour ago we caught a rocket from high places. CINCLANT no less, Milstar, top priority. Commander Hiro took the call, then hit the Chinese fire drill button. Crisis one, find you. Crisis two, make all preparations for getting under way."

"Oh, glorious! Of all the days not to take my phone ashore with me. What else?"

"One other thing: my justification for thinking it's local. The Defense Intelligence Agency has asked for a download of all of our Sigint intercepts for the past forty-eight hours. We're dumping into the link now."

"Are they going to find anything interesting in there?"

Christine looked uncomfortable. "To tell you the truth, Captain, we haven't been breaking anything down since we anchored here in Rio. We didn't have any priorities on the threat board, so we've just been keeping the scanners and recorders running and storing the raw data. I've got my gang working on it now, and I'm sure we'll have something for you by the time you get back aboard."

"No need for explanations, Chris," Amanda replied, pulling her whites out of the shopping bag and shaking the wrinkles out of them. "We've all been keeping bankers' hours these last couple of days. Speaking of bankers' hours, how did you know where to find me? I didn't even know I was going to the beach when I left the ship."

"Heck, this is Rio. Someone with your sea and sand fixation would be bound to end up on the beach sooner or later. When Mr. Hiro put me in charge of the 'For Crissake, find the Skipper detail,' I just borrowed your gig and coxun and a good pair of binoculars and I cruised offshore, checking off redheads until I spotted you."

"Good thinking and good work," Amanda replied, buttoning her blouse on over her swimsuit.

Rendino delicately cleared her throat. "If I may be so bold as to say so, my captain was doing some pretty good work back there herself."

"No, Lieutenant, you may not say so. Not if you intend to hang on to those bars on your collar."

"I'll be the soul of discretion."

"Not likely," Amanda snorted, sliding back into her tailored skirt. "You'll have me taking part in a beachfront orgy five minutes after you hit the wardroom."

She tugged up the side zip and slipped her feet into her pumps. Glancing sideways, she cocked an eyebrow at her intel. "On the other hand, it might do certain mopheads around here some good to know that The Lady' still has a few moves left in her."

"Fa' sure, Skipper, fa' sure." Christine laughed, a hint of her old Valley Girl lilt coming back into her voice.

As the gig swept around the point, Rio's port district came into view, as did the ships lying off in the deepwater anchorage. Two of them were United States men-of-war. The more distant of the two was a FRAM-updated Perry-class frigate, a diving barge snuggled against its stern quarter. The closer and larger of the pair was Amanda's ship, DDG-79, the USS Cunningham.

Amanda moved in her seat to get a better view. She was new enough into her captaincy to still feel a surge of excitement and pride at the sight of her command. Likewise, she was not long enough into it to realize that those feelings would always be there.

A navy man of the old school, circa the Second World War through the 1960s, would have been somewhat puzzled by the same view. For one, he wouldn't have considered a ship of the Cunningham's size to be a destroyer.

Measuring 580 feet from her radically raked clipper bow to her short well deck aft, she was the length of a treaty-vintage heavy cruiser. She also would have displaced nearly as much, were it not for the extensive use of aluminum alloy and high-strength composite materials in her construction.

The blocky, angular superstructure and cluttered upper-works that had been the hallmark of American naval architecture for three-quarters of a century were gone. Instead, just aft of the midships line, there was a single, low, slope-sided deckhouse, like the flattened sail of a nuclear submarine. Inset in the curve of its upper forward facing was the transparent strip of the bridge windscreen, and belted around it were the rectangular planar antennae of the destroyer's SPY 2-A Augmented Aegis system.

Gone, too, were the tripod masts. Supplanting them was a freestanding mast array, a towering finlike structure similar to the vertically mounted swept wing of a jet airliner. Fared into the aft end of the deckhouse, its conformal radiating and receptor panels and "smart skin" segments replaced the old open-girder Christmas tree with its tangle of radar dishes and bedspring aerials.

The overall impression was that of uncluttered, Art Deco sleekness, like something off the cover of a 1940s science-fiction magazine. Even the usual deck fittings either retracted into or were fared into the hull. A closer examination would have revealed that there were almost no absolutely flat surfaces or abrupt right-angle joinings anywhere above the waterline. All structural edges and corners had been carefully coved or rounded. Even the weather decks had a very slight turtleback to them.

This had little to do with streamlining in the conventional sense. It had everything to do with electromagnetic propagation, for the "Duke" was the world's first blue-water stealth warship. Her radical hull design eliminated all of the clean reflective surfaces and "wave traps" that could return a clear radar echo. That hull was also sheathed in the latest generation of RAM (Radar-Absorbent Material) and contained almost a quarter of a billion dollars' worth of the most sophisticated electronic countermeasures technology available to military science.

The Cunningham's stealth capacities extended into the visual spectrum as well. The traditional navy-gray paint job had given way to a duller, lower-visibility gray similar to that used on U.S. carrier aircraft. Also stolen from carrier aviation had been the use of outline "phantom" lettering for her name and identity numbers.

In addition, wavering sooty bands of a darker shade striped her sides from railing to waterline, vertically down the length of her hull and horizontally up the height of the mast array. The veteran of the Second World War would have approvingly recognized this as a variant of his era's "dazzle" camouflage.

The overall effect was strikingly similar to the markings of a tiger shark. They served much the same purpose, breaking up the ship's silhouette and rendering her harder to see and identify under adverse weather and lighting conditions.

There would have been one further point of puzzlement for the hypothetical old navy observer. For a ship of her size, the Cunningham would appear to be very lightly armed. The only obvious weaponry were two small, single-mount gun turrets, one just forward of the deckhouse, the other aft on the well deck.

Appearances were deceiving. The Duke was hypothetically capable of sinking a small fleet, downing a small air force, or leveling a small city. If the "neither confirmed nor denied" option was taken, she could incinerate a small nation.

As the gig tucked in alongside the gangway, the ship's bell sounded its four clear notes and the topside MC-1 speakers replied tinnily, "Cunningham, arriving." Reaching the quarterdeck, Amanda faced aft and gave the traditional salute to the colors. As had many generations of captains before her, she used that moment to run a quick inventory of her ship's condition.

There was a faint vibration coming from deep within the hull, and a soft, rushing roar whispered down from the stubby, side-by-side exhaust stacks atop the superstructure. Engineering had one of the mains spooled up, hopefully testing that portside anti-infrared system.

Deck Division was busy striking painting and maintenance gear below, while back aft they were doing a hurried fix on the tricky weather seal around the helipad elevator. Make a note on the to-catch-hell list, Amanda thought to herself. That piece of work has been put off to the last minute once too often.

She dropped the salute and was facing forward again when her executive officer emerged from a deckhouse hatchway. Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Hiro was a fourth-generation Japanese-American and the kind of XO captains pray for. He was an organizational animal, one who considered ship-operations management an all-absorbing challenge. Increase the load on him and the challenge just became that much more absorbing.

Now, as he approached her, he wore the headset of a mobile ship's interphone over his short-trimmed black hair and carried a computer pad tucked under one arm.

"Good afternoon, Captain. Sorry to wreck your day ashore. Just a second. I'll be right with you."

He leaned over the PVC-and-nylon-strap deck railing and yelled down into the gig waiting below. "Hey, De Lancy, get inshore and check in at the passenger pier. Start shuttling the liberty parties back aboard."

Hiro straightened and cast an approving look at Christine Rendino, who had joined them at the head of the gangway. "Good job, Lieutenant. You not only found the Skipper but you got back in time to save us from having to strike another boat topside."

"Our Christine is a very capable young officer who should go far, granted she's not hanged first," Amanda commented. "Okay, Ken, what are you doing to my ship and why are you doing it?"

"As the Lieutenant informed you, we've received orders to sortie under a potential theater-conflict alert. Beyond that, my only other instructions were to locate you as rapidly as possible."

"I'm located. Ship's status?"

"All in-port maintenance and service programs have been terminated and are securing for sea. Engineering reports that the problem with the intermix blowers of the portside Black Hole System has been corrected. They're buttoning things up now. Weapons Division was running a series of combat simulations on the secondary fire-control suites, but they should have the training programs dumped and the primaries rebooted within the next few minutes."

"What about the liberty parties?"

"I've got search details ashore and I've requested the assistance of the Brazilian Navy shore patrol."

Amanda considered for a moment whether Hiro had left any preliminary bases uncovered. She wasn't surprised to find that he hadn't.

"Very good, Ken. Buzz communications for me and have them stand by with a Milstar channel to CINCLANT in… ten minutes. I'll take it in my quarters."

"Aye, aye, ma'am."

"Chris, you get down to Raven's Roost and see if your people have picked up on anything. I suspect this will be a hot briefing, and I do not want to go into it blind."

"Aye, aye," the younger woman called back over her shoulder as she started for the hatchway.

"Ken, one other thing. Did the Boone catch the same sortie order we did?"

"No, Captain, they didn't. They aren't going to, either. I talked with her exec this afternoon. The divers confirmed that vibration was coming from a cracked propeller blade. They're out of it."

"Thank heavens for small favors. Going tactical with a Perry would have been like trying to dance Swan Lake with a bucket stuck on my foot."

Amanda turned and started for her cabin. "Advise all division heads that there will be an O group in the wardroom as soon as I've gotten the word."

The captain's quarters of a Cunningham-class DDG were a compromise that satisfied no one, especially the generation of naval officers who would occupy them. The intent had been to consolidate the traditional in-port and at-sea cabins into a single convenient suite. Accordingly, they were located one level below and directly underneath the bridge, leaving the sleeper totally at the mercy of a heavy-footed night watch.

Divided into equally minute office, sleeping quarters, and head, the forward bulkhead of the cabin followed the curve of the superstructure faring, rendering almost impossible the efficient and comfortable use of what space there was. Finally, the waste heat radiating in from the surrounding systems bays overwhelmed the air-conditioning, making the cabin stuffy in anything short of a North Atlantic blizzard.

Perspiration and a few missed grains of sand began to prickle under Amanda's clothing almost as soon as she had entered. For a moment, she wondered if the security of Western civilization could be left hanging in the balance long enough for her to take a quick duck under the shower. In the end, she compromised by undoing the top button of her blouse as she squeezed in behind the combination desk and workstation. Even as she did so, the interphone trilled.

"Captain here."

"This is Chris, down in Raven's Roost. My guys are starting to produce. I can confirm we have something big, local, and quiet, including or centering around Argentina."

"Particulars?"

"We've just finished rough-graphing the local military communications traffic, and there's a definite upsurge on the standard Argy bands. It's not a general mobilization, but the load is building."

"Anything from the Brits down at Mount Pleasant?"

"Negative, Skipper, that's beyond our effective monitoring arc. This stuff is signal intelligence coming in from the northern Argentine bases and the sidelobe off of their comsat links. We haven't interrogated any of our Elint sats yet.

"That's another thing, though, we're getting a whole shitpot full of orbital traffic pattern updates down here. It's all across the board: Air Force, Navy, National Security Agency, Elint, recon, weather, and communications. It looks like they're optimizing for Southern Hemispheric coverage. You just don't retask satellite assets like this unless something pretty important is going down."

"How about the other locals?"

"No load-pattern changes noted on the Uruguayan or Brazilian nets. All quiet."

"How about the global media? Are they showing anything?"

"Nope, nothing on the local or international wires. Whatever it is, the lid's still on."

"Could it be the Falklands again?" Amanda inquired.

"Possibly, or something related. The only other thing showing on the graphs is that the civil sideband channels used by the United States Antarctic Research Program and the British Antarctic Survey threw one heck of a spike yesterday morning. Then they seem to have dropped off almost into radio silence. I don't know if this is significant or not. I'll be able to say better when we actually start listening to some of this stuff."

"Okay, stay on it, Chris. I'll see you at the O group."

Dropping the phone back into its cradle, Amanda tilted her chair back the few inches that it would go. She bit her lower lip as she reflected on what she knew of recent events in these waters and what role her ship might conceivably have in them. A faint shiver rippled down her spine, like the promise of an encounter with a new lover, half excitement, half fear.

She let the chair rock forward and reached for the phone again. "Communications, this is the Captain. I'm ready for that channel to CINCLANT."

She waited for the access tone, then spoke slowly and deliberately. "This is Commander Amanda Lee Garrett, authenticator Sweetwater-Tango-zero-three-five."

Her words were carried by an optical fiber link down to the radio room, and from there back up to a gyrostabilized laser projector at the crest of the Duke's antenna array. Via a modulated beam of coherent light, they were fired up to a Milstar B communications satellite holding in synchronous orbit high above the South Atlantic and then across to a sister sat hovering over the Northern Hemisphere. From there, they were aimed down to a receptor on the roof of a certain building within the vast United States naval operations complex at Norfolk, Virginia.

As they were received, a security monitoring system matched Amanda's words against her digitized voiceprint held in a computer file along with similar prints from every other active and reserve naval and marine officer in federal service. A single glowing word appeared on a terminal: "Verified."

The reply began its return journey.

"Acknowledged. This is Vice Admiral Elliot MacIntyre. Authenticator, Iron Fist-November-zero-two-one.

"Good afternoon, Captain Garrett. We have a job for you…."