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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  I: The Calm

  1. Mina’ Salman, Bahrain

  2. Stonefield, Vermont

  3. Karachi, Pakistan

  4. Manama, Bahrain

  5. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  II: The Convoy

  6. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  7. U.S. Naval Base, Charleston, South Carolina

  8. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  9. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  10. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  11. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  12. U.S.S. Audacity

  13. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  14. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  15. U.S.S. Mobile Bay, CG-53

  16. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  17. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  18. U.S.S. Audacity, Hawalli, Kuwait

  19. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  20. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  21. U.S.S. Mobile Bay

  22. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  III: The Stand-Down

  23. Mombasa, Kenya

  24. Al Hadd, Bahrain

  25. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  26. Regency Hotel, Bahrain

  27. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  28. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  29. The U.S. Embassy, Manama, Bahrain

  30. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  31. U.S.S. Audacity

  IV: The Strike

  32. U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  33. U.S.S. Charles F. Adams, DDG-2

  34. 2100 Hours: Off Abu Musa Island, Southern Gulf

  35. 0000 Hours: U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  36. The Southern Gulf

  V: The Afterimage

  Epilogue

  Novels by David Poyer and D.C. Poyer

  Copyright

  On the far side of the earth

  You were our walls, steel and flesh,

  Against the barbarisms of our century.

  Yours was a strange war, a half-war, shadowy and constrained.

  This novel is dedicated to all those who serve in what we call peace—though it isn’t.

  But especially for the officers, men, and families of U.S.S.

  Stark and U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts,

  For the other sailors, marines, and support personnel of the Middle East Force and the Indian Ocean Battle Group,

  And for all those who made the last sacrifice for what they believed was right.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Ex nihilo nihil fit. For this work of fiction I owe much to James Allen, Park Balevre, Eric Berryman, Jean-Philippe Cadoret, Daniel Flynn, Kelly Fisher, Wayne Fuller, Vince Goodrich, John Gorton, Frank and Amy Green, Paul Golubovs, Lenore Hart, Robert Kelly, Chuck Key, Carl Kilhoffer, Sid Perryman, Art Riccio, Ervin Tate, Tim Taylor, William and Fran Schubert, Jim Sullivan, Nemat Tokmachi, C. T. Walters, George Witte, and many others who gave generously of their time to contribute or criticize. All errors and deficiencies are my own.

  Shake off this fever of ignorance. Stop hoping for worldly rewards.… Be free from the sense of ego. Dedicate all your actions to Me. Then go forward and fight.

  —The Bhagavad Gita, III

  Prologue

  The Persian Gulf: U.S.S. Louis Strong, FF-1099

  THE forward lookout, a twenty-year-old seaman from Chula Vista, was lighting his fifteenth Winston of the morning when he saw the incoming missile.

  He had been straining his eyes against the sand-colored sky for hours since dawn and at first he did not recognize it. It was only a far-off wisp of smoke, not unlike the smoke from the flareoff towers that dotted this upper part of the Gulf between Kuwait and the Iranian-declared Exclusion Zone.

  A moment later, he lifted his head from his cupped hands, frowning back at that same chunk of horizon. The moving haze was already noticeably nearer, and over the tan sea, stirred by the faint hot breath of a dying shamal, he could make out something dark inside it.

  He forgot the cigarette. The lighter clattered on the deck as he jammed down the button on his phones and shouted, “Missile! Incoming! Bearing one-two-zero!”

  “Say again, Butt Kit,” said a bored voice in his ear. “An’ make it in English this time, okay?”

  “Jesus Christ, listen up! I said there is a fucking mee-sel comin’ at us, you dipshit!”

  At that moment, two decks above, the destroyer’s captain—thirty-eight years old, from Kansas City—was reading the morning’s radio traffic. Perched in his chair on the bridge wing, where it was slightly cooler than the oven the pilothouse became at twenty-eight degrees latitude, he was not so absorbed that he missed the sudden frantic gesture of the man on the bow. His glance followed the pointed arm.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered. Then, instantly and in the same breath, shouted through the open door, “OOD! Cruise missile incoming, starboard! Come right, notify CIC, fire chaff. Sound general quarters!”

  As the alarm began, the officer of the deck, a lieutenant from St. Cloud, Minnesota, shouted rapidly, “Right hard rudder, ahead flank emergency. Fire the chaff. Fire it now, God damn it!”

  He turned and put his glasses on the incoming weapon. In the twin circles of the 7X50s he could see it clearly. It was nose-on to him. It gleamed in the sun ahead of a twisting haze of exhaust. It was very low, no more than a hundred feet off the chop.

  “Rudder hard right, sir!” The scared voice of the seaman apprentice behind the helm.

  The captain shouted over his shoulder, “Steady up short, keep the launcher unmasked.”

  “Aye, sir. Steady zero-eight-zero.”

  Crump. Crump. Crump. Behind them, dulled by the steel doors the bo’s’n had just slammed and dogged, they heard the chaff mortars fire. Given ten seconds, their bloom of thousands of foil shreds would present the missile’s radar with six or eight false Strongs. Given twelve, their flares would ignite, pinpoint sources of intense heat to decoy away an infrared homer.

  Through the glasses, the lieutenant could make out stubby fins.

  There might not be twelve seconds.

  In the Combat Information Center, aft and below the bridge, six men were already at radarscopes and weapons consoles. Sliding back into the chair he’d left to use the head, the electronic-warfare petty officer, a twenty-five-year-old from Sheboygan, froze as he recognized the pattern on his screen. Then he began punching buttons. He had twelve Soviet-bloc threat profiles in the computer. What he saw matched none of them.

  “Cruise missile, unknown type!” he shouted, bracing with one hand against the sudden heel. “I-band altimeter, H-band seeker, radar homer, bearing one-one-five, threat close!”

  “Jam it!” shouted the captain, appearing at the bottom of the ladder from the bridge. “Rossetti! Sea Sparrow, two-round engagement, now!”

  “Point defense, locked on!” shouted a chief.

  The tactical-action officer lifted a red cover and stabbed the button beneath it. Through the muffled whine of turbines climbing to full power came a sudden, deafening roar. “Missile away,” shouted the chief. Two seconds later, another roar shuddered the plates and dwindled away.

  The captain said rapidly, “Mitch, do a three-sixty search. Look for the launching platform. Get me a range and bearing.” He reached for a handset and began barking at the gunnery officer. On the radar, a f
irst-class OS from Baltimore leaned to watch two pulses of light move away from the center of the screen, so rapidly they jumped outward with each sweep.

  The lead one reached the incoming missile.

  “CIC, Bridge: Warhead detonation to starboard, looked close. Wait a second—no, he just came out of the smoke. Target’s still incoming.”

  The TAO reached instantly for the REFIRE button, but before his hand reached it, the chief said: “Six thousand yards, sir. It’s inside minimum range.”

  “Second round intercepts—now.”

  The GQ bell stopped ringing. The metallic voice of the announcing system said, all over the ship, “General quarters, general quarters. No drill. Missile incoming, starboard side.”

  “Terminal seeker, locked on,” said the twenty-five-year-old, his eyes blasted wide as he stared into the green flicker on his screen. He turned up the speaker and the high-pitched whine of the lock-on jerked everyone’s head toward it.

  “CIC, Bridge,” said the suddenly empty voice of the lieutenant, above them. “Our second round went right by it. Still boosting. Couldn’t have been twenty feet apart. But no burst. It’s coming right down our throat.”

  The captain barked into the phone, “What’s the problem with the fucking five-inch?”

  “We’ve got ammo at the transfer tray now—maybe fifteen, twenty more seconds, sir—”

  The captain stopped thinking. He put out his hand to the bulkhead and bent his knees slightly. There was nothing else left to do.

  * * *

  The thirteen-foot-long missile’s starboard wing root had been punctured by the expanding-rod warhead of the first antiaircraft round. This slowed it from .89 to .80 Mach, but the guidance computer trimmed to correct for the off-center drag, and it steadied again.

  Now, in the last seconds of its flight, its discrimination circuits evaluated and then disregarded the still-expanding chaff clouds. It had picked up the ship’s radar and homed on it for four seconds, but now it ignored that, too, and for the last mile locked on the plume of heat blasting out of the frigate’s stack.

  It tilted its rear fins slightly, arched up and over in a graceful snap dive, and hit the still-turning ship on the main deck, starboard side, frame 103.

  This was the boat deck, and the missile, traveling at six hundred miles an hour, passed beneath the motor whaleboat and squarely between two steel davits. They sheared off its stub wings. The warhead and fuselage, with several hundred pounds of fuel remaining, penetrated the quarter-inch aluminum skin of the superstructure at a thirty-degree down angle.

  The outer plating hardly slowed the airframe, but it sliced dozens of rents in the fuselage. Fire leapt from the still-burning engine.

  The first set of compartments it entered were the starboard potable-water station, a firemain jumper station, and the executive officer’s stateroom. The executive officer and a damage controlman died instantly. Continuing downward and to port, the missile entered the main-deck passageway, shedding parts. So far, a fiftieth of a second had passed since impact.

  The steel main deck separated the airframe and the warhead. The fuselage rebounded from it and split apart. Its fragments scythed through the waist of the ship: staterooms, fan rooms, wardroom, and sick bay. Its sustainer disintegrated, scattering chunks of the solid fuel, burning at 3,200 degrees and containing its own oxygen, behind the flying metal.

  The steel-cased warhead had been designed to penetrate the armor of a Soviet Kynda-class cruiser. It continued through the main deck into the engineering spaces. In main control, a chief warrant and two enginemen were blown into the electrical control panel as the warhead passed through. It continued out the port bulkhead and entered the main machinery space. It passed over the number-two boiler, shearing steam and feedwater lines, penetrated another deck, went through five feet of beef in a chill-storage locker, and detonated ten feet below the waterline in shaft alley number one.

  * * *

  The officer of the deck was looking aft when the missile hit. He saw no flash, no explosion, felt only a quiver beneath his feet and then the wham of a solid hit. Black smoke burst out of the uptakes, followed by fire and pieces of burning insulation. A low rumble came from aft.

  There was a sudden eerie whir, descending the scale. The intake blowers, gyros, ventilators, all wound downward into a silence more disquieting than sound. Suddenly, he could hear the lazy slap of flags, could hear yelling and the pounding of feet aft. The frigate, losing way through the water, leaned gently to port.

  “Captain’s on the bridge!”

  The lieutenant spun to face him. “We’ve lost power, sir,” he said. “Lost propulsion, radio—”

  “Still got sound-powered comms?”

  “Yessir,” said the phone talker.

  “Call main control.”

  “They don’t answer, sir, DC central’s been calling them.”

  “Okay. Keep the lookouts alert. If you see another one coming in, use the manual toggle to fire the rest of the chaff.” The CO pressed the intercom lever, but it was dead. “I’m going aft, see what we got.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get one of the battery-powered radios going. See if you can raise somebody, get the word out we’ve been hit. Give them our position and ask them to pass it to MIDEASTFOR on three-oh-two point five. Keep your head, think slow, do what needs doing. I’ll get us out of this.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant again, looking after him.

  * * *

  The 250 pounds of explosive in the warhead had blown a chunk of the ship’s hull plating outward, below the waterline. Now the warm Gulf poured in. In the engine room, just above, superheated steam had displaced the air. Main Control no longer existed. No one was alive there.

  In engineering berthing, four men had been changing linens and waxing the decks. They had all gone through a blindfolded escape drill the week before. This was all that saved them when the lights went out and the compartment suddenly filled with flying flame.

  The location of the hit, midships angling down, providentially missed most of the areas where the crew concentrated during general quarters. But some men had lingered for a few seconds, over bug juice on the mess decks, over coffee in the chiefs’ quarters, over doughnuts in the wardroom or at their desks over paperwork. These men died or now lay unconscious, their lungs filling with smoke.

  The others, belowdecks in the feeble glow of battle lanterns, squatted or stood awaiting orders. In every man’s mind, the desire to bolt for open air struggled with his training and the duty to stay at his station.

  A few bolted. Most stayed. Gradually, over sound-powered circuits and by word of mouth, it filtered through the ship. They’d been hit amidships, the engine room was knocked out, and they had a fire to fight—a big fire.

  The men in the damage-control lockers had been dressing out when the missile struck. Repair Two was twenty feet aft of the explosion and their door was jammed shut by buckled steel. They cooked to death over the next fifteen minutes. The two other teams simply continued their routine, though now their hearts speeded up. They rolled down their sleeves, pulled their socks over their pants legs, and buttoned the collars of their dungaree shirts. They struggled into OBAs, clumsy rubber-and-metal breathing devices, slapped green cans into them, and pulled tabs to light off the oxygen candles. They buckled on steel helmets, then grabbed their tools and lines and lights and began groping toward the growing roar of the fire.

  Behind them, other men unrolled hoses and spun brass caps off the ship’s firemain. A little water spurted out, then stopped. The fire pumps were driven by steam and the single firemain was ruptured in three places. The team leaders hesitated. One grabbed a CO2 canister and tried it on a burning cord of solid fuel. The propellant dimmed for a moment, then blazed up again when the extinguisher hissed empty.

  Above them, on the flight deck, other men worked desperately to prime and start gasoline-powered pumps. In a few minutes, they began to buzz, like lawn mowers on a suburban
Saturday morning.

  Meanwhile the fire gathered strength. Fuel tanks, paint storerooms, helicopter fuel, lubricants, wooden shoring, vinyl tile on decks, insulation, the very paint on the bulkheads, all ignited. Above the main deck, the frigate’s structure was aluminum, not steel, and it began to soften, like chocolate on a hot day. Furniture, bunks, carpets, cabinets full of paper reached flash point and burst suddenly into flame. And above that, as the overheads sagged and split apart, the heat licked upward toward the torpedo room and the helicopter hangar on the 01 level.

  * * *

  In DC central, eighty feet forward of the hit and the fire, the damage-control officer, an ensign from Lubbock, Texas, looked at the first reports from his investigators. He had to deal with both fire and flooding. He knew it was impossible to extinguish the burning propellant, as he would a normal fire. He now decided to try to slow its lateral spread by venting heat upward. Holes at frames 100 and 125 might channel the fire around the torpedo room. For a while, at least. Control of the flooding would have to wait. He scribbled notes and handed them to grimy, scared-looking messengers.

  * * *

  Deep in the ship, the hoses went rigid at last, fed by the portable pumps. The nozzlemen from Repair Five began shuffling forward, walking under a blast of water mist from applicators held by the number-two men.

  They walked into a white hell. Through the eyepieces of their masks, they could see the flame-outlined sag of cables drooping from the overheads, ready to snag them. The overheads were on fire. The tile decks were on fire, and though they quenched when water hit them, they reignited as soon as it boiled off. The air was impenetrable with smoke and steam.

  The team leader, advancing with his men, screamed as the heat penetrated his dungarees. The cotton did not flame or melt. The nylon jockey shorts beneath did, shriveling, fusing to his skin. The nozzleman ran with him. The second man on the hose did not. He moved up, pulled the bail back to release a blast of water, and began edging forward again, into the smoke and growing heat.

  They came to a watertight door, closed and dogged when the ship went to general quarters. The number-two man smashed a porthole to get it open. Fire leapt out, melted his mask, and burned his hair and his face off. The number-three man stepped up and ripped his breathing bags open on a whetted shard of steel. He staggered back, sucking hot smoke instead of oxygen. The number-four man took his place and played the hose over the door, the stream spitting and boiling, then stuck it through the porthole. He left it there for a minute, then banged the dogs free and yanked the door open. The applicator man and the hose man followed him in.