Gates Of Hades

Chapter Twenty-seven

Aboard the USS Carney (DDG 67)

Eastern Mediterranean

Ninety minutes later

PO 2d Class Shawana Davis had a tough choice to make: her enlistment would be up in three months, and the navy would provide a substantial sum for tuition to any of the three colleges to which she had been accepted. Conversely, she had come to like her life in the military. It was something very different from the endless flat fields of dusty clay where soybean field met soybean field, where being able to buy something you wanted depended on the harvests and excitement was defined by whatever movie was on HBO. The job offered a genuine chance of advancement, too, not some bogus showcase job where the occupant's chief value was to demonstrate the company's commitment to equal opportunity for women and minorities. Any promotion she got in the navy would be one she earned.

She liked that, relying on ability rather than her sex or race, to get ahead.

She also liked the prospect of being not only the first person in her family to graduate from high school, but the first from college, too.

Tough choice.

What if she There was a loud buzz that startled her before she realized the ship was receiving a message. Unusual for this time of day-must be important. As the sole person on duty in the communications room, she watched an incomprehensible series of letters and numbers march across the screen. In the old days-at least, according to the old war movies she loved-the message would have clattered through the printer louder than two skeletons making it on a tin roof. Now, only the buzzer alerted her to incoming traffic.

She waited for the characters to stop and then picked up a phone on the bulkhead next to her station just below the bridge. She waited a second or two before Lieutenant (J.G.) Wade, tonight's duty officer, picked up.

He must have been daydreaming, too. Woolgathering, her daddy would have called it. Easy enough to do when the only sounds were the rhythmic throbbing of the engines and swish of the hull parting a flat sea.

His voice sounded as though she had woken him up. "Wade."

He didn't have to identify himself. His drawl was right out of North Carolina's tobacco fields.

"Sir," Shawana said, "incoming message received."

"From battle group, fleet?"

Shawana frowned and held her head back from the screen as if that might answer the question. "Don't think so, no, sir. Copy to fleet and battle group, but the communication appears be code ten."

There was an audible intake of breath. "The navy department? Direct to the Carney?"

"Looks like it, sir."

Thank you, Davis. I'll be right down."

The immediate clang of hard leather on metal stairs made good on the promise. Less than fifteen seconds later, Lt. (J.G.) Robert Lee Wade was looking over her shoulder. From his breath, Shawana guessed the spaghetti sauce in the officers' mess had been heavy on the garlic.

"That's something I've never heard of," he said. "Why would Washington communicate directly with a guided missile destroyer instead of going through channels?"

"Maybe somebody's in a hurry," Shawana suggested. "Maybe you ought to get this to the captain on the double… sir."

"You may be right, Davis. I've never seen that particular cipher before."

Neither had she, but she said nothing as he ripped the page from the printer and bolted for the companionway.

It took Cmdr. Edward Simms a full ten minutes of playing with his encryption computer to decode the message, and another ten to confirm he had done it correctly the first time.

"Balls!" he said to no one in particular. "This makes no sense at all."

The other four men in the room, Wade and the three men who had been playing bridge with the ship's captain, looked at one another before one said, "It's from Washington. It doesn't have to make sense."

Old joke. More truth than humor.

Simms held the offending paper up to the light as though there might be a secret message in light-sensitive ink. "We're to program the specified target location into one of those experimental aircraft, launch, and recover it."

"But sir," one of the men protested, "We have no armament for the Thing, only dummy bombs to test its stability and accuracy."

"The Thing" was the nickname the Carney's crew had given the CRW (canard rotor/wing) X50A UAB (unmanned aircraft, bomber). The X designated the machine experimental. As one wag had noted, it looked like a helicopter and a Piper Cub had had sex with a resulting mis carriage. It had wings and propeller at the rear, but also rotor blades above. The aircraft had vertical takeoff and landing capacity, making it able to act as either an attack or observation vehicle. Its composite skin made it a poor radar target even if it should climb higher than the terrain- hugging altitude suggested by the bulbous radome at the front end. The only thing in general agreement was that it was the ugliest object in the military since, along with the front parts, the rear end of mules had been retired.

"I don't get it," someone else piped up. "Launch an experimental drone to drop phony bombs?"

"You don't have to get it," Simms said, studying the map posted on the bulkhead. "It's an order. Not ours to question who or why, et cetera. It is ours to confirm with fleet, however."

Simms knew too many horror stories where careers had been sunk by following unusual orders outside the chain of command, only to have some REMF (rear echelon motherfucker) deny issuing such orders when the excrement was being distributed by the ventilating device. Confirmed orders were undeniable orders. Undeniable orders covered one's ass nicely. He wasn't about to risk having his nineteen years end in front of a court-martial.

"Say," the captain continued, "look at these coordinates. We're conducting a phony strike on Italian territory, Sardinia, to be exact."

"Perhaps that's why Washington wants to use the Thing. Suppose it involves some sort of spook operation. The plane doesn't officially exist, being as how it's experimental. They could deny responsibility under adverse circumstances."

Simms glared at his junior officer. "Wade, you sound like a politician."

It was not a compliment.