Read Online By Dawn's Early Light by David Hagberg - Free Book Online Page A

and electronic sensor packages. During at least three orbits on the repair mission, they’ll be directly over the same spot in the Indian Ocean where the Kilo fired the laser on three other occasions.”
    Dillon looked at his officers. Every one of them knew what was coming next, but they wanted to hear their CO give the specific order. He felt ten feet tall.
    â€œGentlemen, they are not going to fire a laser at our guys aboard the Discovery, because we’re going to be waiting for them.”
    â€œAll right,” Bateman said.

5
    2000 LOCAL
AT THE DOCK
    Security on the dock had been super-tight since nightfall. Dillon stood alone on the bridge watching the second of two twenty-one-foot Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles being eased aboard through the weapons loading hatch just in front of the fair water.
    The half dozen hard hats crowded around the steeply-angled loading rail were shoreside personnel, experts at weapons-loading procedures.
    Most of his crew had no idea what was being loaded, and it would stay that way until they were safely at sea and submerged in a couple more hours. Bateman, Jablonski, Chief Young, and the torpedo room red crew were the only ones in on it.
    Bateman came up through the hatch, and looked over the rail. “Number one is secured,” he said.
    â€œGood. What’s the rumble from the crew, Charlie? Have the section heads been briefed?”
    Bateman nodded. “They know we’re loading a couple of extra weapons, but they don’t know what. I don’t think they’d care if they did know. Most of them would think it was cool. Marc does.”
    Dillon had never kept any essential information from his crew, and especially not his officers, until now. When he’d received his orders he’d glanced over at Admiral Puckett, who looked like an accountant tallying up the ledgers. If the numbers worked out on the plus side, Dillon was in; otherwise he would be relieved of his command on the spot, and someone else would take his place. Another CO, another boat.
    The fact of the matter was that only the boomers carried nuclear weapons these days. But he was being asked to load two Tomahawk missiles equipped with the W-80 two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads.
    The cold war was over; the Russians had gone home to try to straighen out the terrible mess that their economy and government was in. Attack submarines and most surface ships in the U.S. fleet almost never carried nuclear weapons. There was no need for them.
    If by chance a nuclear accident happened, or some rogue captain figuring his butt was about to be hung out managed to launch a missile and it detonated on any target anywhere in the world, the U.S. would be in major trouble. If World War III didn’t spark off, America’s last remaining shred of credibility with the rest of the world would be gone and buried, possibly forever.
    Nuclear weapons were nothing more than a deterrent, never meant to be actually used unless all else failed. And the SOP specified all else .
    The intention is to give most units a capability to attack land targets and to deter nuclear attack on the U.S. Navy by dispersing a nuclear retaliatory capability throughout the fleet, so that no nuclear attack by any foreign power could destroy the U.S. capability to respond in kind.
    Admiral Puckett’s argument had been crystal clear to Dillon. Someone in Pakistan arranged to have the U.S. satellites watching over its shoulder put out of commission. They did not care if innocent American civilians were killed. They would not want the shuttle Discovery ’s crew to fix the satellite. They would try to stop the repair mission. Any interference would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Pakistan was a nuclear power, and it was controlled by a very unstable military government.
    Seawolf was to carry two McDonnell Douglas B/UGM-109 Tomahawk TLAM-N nuclear missiles. If the situation came to it, authorization to release would be sent