Battle Born by Dale Brown

the
Aegis-class
warships, powerful enough to track a target as small as a bird two hundred miles away. “Nothing this time.”
    “Humpf,” the TAO grunted. Both missiles might have splashed down. He didn’t know enough about either of them to know if they floated, if the warheads became more unstable in seawater, what they looked like when they broke apart, how to disarm a ditched missile—and a hundred other things he would’ve been briefed on if the Air Force had done its job correctly. “Comm, tell all vessels to stay east of the second launch barge. Radar, clear all aircraft out of the range via the shortest way possible away from the missile tracks. Then do a systems check, find out why we can’t see their debris.” On the intercom, he radioed, “Bridge, Combat.”
    “Go ahead.” The TAO recognized the captain’s voice.
    “We lost track of the missile debris, sir, so we’re clearing all aircraft away from the missiles’ flight paths and terminating all activity. We’re done for the day.”
    “Copy that. We’ll form up and head back to the barn.”
    “What did you see up there, sir?”
    “We saw . . .” There was a very long pause, then: “We don’t quite know what we saw, Combat. We saw two good missile plumes heading toward each other, then . . . well, we’re not sure after that. We saw a flash of light, and some of the lookouts say they saw a big silver globe. But we didn’t hear or pick up anything. No explosion, no nothing.”
    “Checks down here, sir,” said the TAO.
    “What did it look like to you, Combat?”
    “About the same.”
    “What about the cruise missile? Did it hit its target?”
    “Stand by,” the TAO said. “Radar, what have you got on the second launch barge? Did the zoomies hit it?”
    “I . . . I don’t know, sir,” the radar technician stammered. “It’s like the ABM intercept. It looked normal, heading right for the target, then . . . gone.”
    “Gone? The target? Gone like blew up? Gone like sunk?”
    “Gone like . . . gone, sir,” the technician said. “I pick up nothing. The missile has disappeared . . . shit, and the barge disappeared too!”
    “What the hell are you talking about? Surface range thirty, high res,” he demanded, and checked the short-range surface radar depiction. There was no sign of the barge.
    “I’ve got a good radar lock on the first launch barge, sir,” the technician said, “but zilch on the second. It must’ve broke apart and sunk like a stone.”
    “That barge was almost two hundred feet long, eighty feet wide, and weighed ninety tons. Those things do not just disappear,” the TAO said aloud to no one in particular. Even the first launch barge, which was hit dead-on by the sensor-fused weapon dropped by the cruise missile, was still partially afloat. The TAO hit the intercom button: “Bridge, Combat. We don’t have a fix on the second launch pad. It must’ve sunk. What kind of warhead did they have on that thing? It must’ve been a two-thousand-pounder at least.”
    “Negative, Combat,” the captain responded. “We didn’t hear or see any explosion.”
    The TAO looked at his CIC crew members in shock. “How is that possible, sir?” was all he could think to ask.
    “I don’t know,” the captain said, feeling the anger rise in his throat. He had a suspicion that the Air Force had pulled a fast one on him—that they had tested a new weapon in the wide-open daylight skies and seas, in a well-used military weapons range that belonged to the U.S. Navy. To the officer of the deck, the captain said, “How long for us to get to that second launch barge’s last position?”
    “About thirty minutes at standard, sir.”
    “Officer of the deck, plot a course to the second launch barge’s position,” the captain ordered. “All ahead full. I want a full investigation on what kind of weapon sunk that barge. Air, water, electromagnetic, debris analysis, the works.” He paused, then added, “And have