USS PHARRIS was steaming figure eights off the mouth of the Delaware River. Thirty miles north, at the piers of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, ships of the National Reserve Defense Fleet that had been held in readiness for years were getting ready to sail. Cargo holds were loading with tanks, guns, and crates of explosive ordnance. His air-search radar showed the tracks of numerous troop transports lifting out of Dover Air Force Base. The Military Airlift Command's huge aircraft could ferry the troops across to Germany where they would be mated with their prepositioned equipment, but when their unit loads of munitions ran out, the resupply would have to be ferried across the way it had always been, in ugly, fat, slow merchant ships-targets. Maybe the merchies weren't so slow anymore, and were larger than before, but there were fewer of them. During his naval career, the American merchant fleet had fallen sharply, even supplemented by these federally funded vessels. Now a submarine could sink one ship and get the benefit it would have achieved in World War Il by sinking four or five.
The merchant crews were another problem. Traditionally held in contempt by Navy sailors-a truism in the U.S. Navy was to steer well clear of any merchantman, lest he decide to liven up his day by ramming you -the average age of the crews running the ships was about fifty, more than double that in any American naval vessel. How would those grandfathers take the stress of combat operations? Morris wondered. They were quite well paid-some of the senior seamen made as much as he did-but would their comfortable, union-negotiated salaries devalue in the face of missiles and torpedoes? He had to erase the thought from his mind. These old men with kids in high school and college were his flock. He was the shepherd, and there were wolves hiding under the gray surface of the Atlantic.
Not a large flock. He had seen the figures only a year ago: the total number of privately owned cargo ships in operation under the American flag was 170 and averaged about eighteen thousand tons apiece. Of those, a mere 103 were routinely engaged in overseas trade. The supplemental National Defense Reserve Fleet consisted of only 172 cargo ships. To call the situation a disgrace was to describe gang rape as a mild social deviation.
They couldn't allow even one to be lost.
Morris wandered over to the bridge radarscope and looked down into the rubber eyeshield to watch the aircraft lifting out of Dover. Each blip contained three to five hundred men. What would happen when they ran out of shells?
"Another merchie, skipper." The officer of the dock pointed to a dot on the horizon. "She's a Dutch container boat. I expect she's inbound for military cargo."
Morris grunted. "We need all the help we can get."
"It's definite, sir," the colonel said. "That's a Soviet ASAT-bird, seventy-three nautical miles behind one of ours."
The colonel had ordered his satellite to turn in space and point its cameras at its new companion. The light wasn't all that good, but the shape of the Soviet killer satellite was unmistakable: a cylinder nearly a hundred feet long, with a rocket motor at one end and a radar seeker antenna at the other.
"What's your recommendation, Colonel?"
"Sir, I am requesting unlimited authority to maneuver my birds at will. As soon as anything with a red star on it gets within fifty miles, I'm going to do a series of delta-V maneuvers to screw up their intercept solution."
"That will cost you a lot of fuel, son," CINC-NORAD warned.
"What we have here, General, is a binary solution set." The colonel responded like a true mathematician. "Choice one, we maneuver the birds and risk the fuel loss. Choice two, we don't maneuver the birds and risk having them taken out. Once they close to fifty miles, they can achieve intercept and negate our bird in as little as five minutes. Maybe faster. Five minutes is only the best we've observed them to do. Sir, you have my recommendation." The colonel had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, but that was not where he'd learned to back generals into corners.
"Okay. This one goes to Washington, but I'll forward your recommendation with my endorsement."
"Admiral, we've just had a disturbing report from the Barents Sea." Toland read the dispatch from CINCLANTFLT.
"How many more subs can they throw at us now?"
"Perhaps as many as thirty additional boats, Admiral."
"Thirty?" Baker hadn't liked anything he'd been told for a week now. He especially didn't like this.
