Strike Zone (37 page)

Jennifer took a seat at a station in the second row reserved for her use and began loading the necessary code into computer memory so it could be shipped out to Zen. As the CD-ROM spun, she popped open her notebook computer; she had some more code for the Flighthawk control computer aboard
Raven
, which would have to attempt the takeover.

“And?”

Jennifer looked up at Ray Rubeo, who was wearing his twenty-four-hours-with-no-sleep frown.

“And is a conjunction,” said Jennifer. “You can't use it alone.”

“Can we take over the clone?”

“Probably not,” she said frankly.

Rubeo frowned.

“Yes. Come look at this,” he told her, starting for one of the stations at the very front of the room, just below the large display screen. The bomb experts were reviewing coding from a computer at the Taiwan base.

“It's encrypted. We're working with the NSA on it,” said one of the experts. “We're feeding it back and forth. There's a lot of technical data and inventory information. We want to see where to concentrate our resources; the encryption takes quite a while to get through.”

“This block here is email,” said Jennifer. “Look at the structure. Tell them to look for the dates and times.”

“Why?” asked Rubeo.

“Maybe they're instructions on when to do something, like launch an attack.”

“They may just be love notes,” said Rubeo, scowling.

Even though he meant it as one of his acerbic remarks, the idea stung Jennifer.

“Maybe,” she said, looking over to the screen where the decryptions were appearing.

Aboard
Raven
15 September 1997
0040

Z
EN HAD
H
AWK
Four
posted to the north, ready to intercept the ghost clone if it got off. He swung
Hawk Three
down, readying a pass that would take him from bow to stern and give the people back at Dreamland a good view of the ship, which was about forty miles out of the harbor. The Navy destroyers, meanwhile, were still a good hour away to the south.

The E-bomb had successfully wiped out the radios back at the assault zone; Raven's powerful sensors had not picked up any transmissions from the
Dragon Prince
. It seemed clear that the ship did not know what
was going on; its speed was below ten knots. Except for its normal running lights, the deck and the area where it launched the ghost were dark.

Zen checked his speed, nudging off the throttle slightly as the ship grew in the screen. The HUD ladder notched downward; he dropped through five thousand feet. The Flighthawk engines were relatively quiet, but at this altitude the aircraft could be heard; Zen figured that was a reasonable trade-off for the better images the lower altitude would provide.

As he closed to five miles off the bow, the water on the starboard side of the boat bubbled. His first thought was that the crew aboard the
Dragon Prince
had thrown the robot aircraft overboard; a few seconds later another geyser appeared on the port side, and Zen finally realized what was going on.

“Submarines,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. “Two of 'em. Those ours?”

Two people started to answer at once, and Dog said something over the interphone circuit. Zen kept
Hawk Three
on beam, riding in over the tanker.

There were people moving now aboard the ship. Something flashed at the stern—Zen saw a small rubber boat in the water near the bow.

“They're being boarded,” he said. “The Chinese.”

Aboard
Penn
0041

A
S SOON AS
the Marines secured the wharf area, Kick took
Hawk One
over the water. He saw some flotsam where he'd sunk the boat earlier, and one body; as
he began to bank for another run, he saw two small speedboats approaching from the distance. The dark, sleek hulls looked like very much like Mark V Special Operations Crafts (also known as SOCs), used to land SEALs.

“Two un-ID'd boats,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. He clicked into one of the frequencies the Marines were using. “I have two unidentified boats approaching from the harbor, moving at twenty-three knots, twenty-four. I want to make sure they're not ours.”

“I'll work on it,” interrupted Starship, buzzing in on the interphone circuit. “Take a pass and get some video back for Dreamland.”

“Yeah, good thinking,” said Kick. He pulled the Flighthawk around, accelerating as he set up a pass that would take him across their bows.

 

S
TARSHIP HIT THE
keyboard preset and brought up the infrared on the approaching boats. The heat signal from the engines was baffled—these were not pleasure cruisers, and they certainly weren't Americans.

“I say we nail the mothers,” he told Kick.

“Marines are checking with their captain. What's Dream Command say?”

“Screw Dreamland,” said Starship. “They're scientists back there. Get these guys.”

As he finished his sentence, a flare shot from the stern of one of the boats.

Not a flare—a shoulder-launched weapon.

 

K
ICK SAW THE
missile's ignition and knew it was coming for him; as the thought formed in his head another jumped in—scumbag.

A jumble of other thoughts and images came in quick succession, the most important of which was the realization that the missile, fired at his nose, had no chance in hell of hitting him.

“Guns,” he told the computer, activating the gun radar. The screen blinked red—he had the small boat's midsection fat in the claws of his targeting pipper.

The trigger on the Flighthawk stick had a long run, a precaution against it being fired accidentally. He nailed it all the way down, and a burst of 20mm shells punched a fat hole in the boat's midsection.

“Get the other mother,” said Starship.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Kick. He tried pirouetting the Flighthawk on her wing but had too much speed to get the right position; he had to nose down and bank around, far out of position and cursing himself for trying to do too much.

Not too much for the plane. He'd seen both Zen and Starship pull that hard a maneuver several times during various flight exercises. He didn't quite have the right feel for it; he wasn't really sure where the performance edge was, and maybe hesitated a little as he got near it.

Not a problem, he told himself. He didn't have to fly like Zen did, or even Starship. His job was to take the boat.

And that could be done very easily.

 

S
TARSHIP SNICKERED TO
himself as Kick tried to get on the second boat in the first pass; it was obvious from the screen that he hadn't set himself up right for the hard slam downward that it would require to pirouette the Flighthawk back in that direction. Sure enough, Kick had to pull off and get into a wider approach.

Dream Command said something about the boat being ID'd as a Mainland commando group.

They had carte blanche to take it out.

About time, he thought.

“Sink the boats,” said Colonel Bastian, breaking in from
Raven
. “Take them.”

“Roger that,” said Starship. “We're on it.”

As he clicked off his mike, he realized he'd covered Kick's own acknowledgment.

“Sorry about that, roomie,” he muttered as the cannon in the U/MF lit up.

Aboard
Raven
0045

D
OG STUDIED THE
feed on the small video screen as Zen finished his sweep. There was gunfire on the port side and stern of the
Dragon Prince
; two or more parties of commandos were aboard the ship. Most likely they had launched their operation from some distance away, and then waited for the submarines to close in before going aboard. The effort appeared coordinated with an attack on the Kaohisiung plant; fortunately, Dreamland's schedule had been a half hour ahead of the Mainlander's.

Dog had no trouble giving approval to take out the Chinese boats attacking Kaohisiung himself; it was necessary to protect his people and clearly authorized by his governing orders. The situation below, however, was not quite so clear-cut. The Navy destroyers that were supposed to assist had been authorized only to stop the ship, with the minimal amount of force required to make it comply.

Given the circumstances, however, Dog decided he had to take out the clone and the ship or the UAV would fall into communist hands.

“I can pepper the submarines with cannonfire,” Zen told Dog. “Get them to back off until the destroyers get here.”

“Negative, Hawk leader. It's too late for that. We're going to sink that ship. Stand off.”

Dog told Delaney to open the bay doors.

“Bays,” said the copilot, who functioned as a weapons officer in the slimmed-down crew structure.

The large rotating bomb rack in the bay of the aircraft spun around, preparing to launch one of the two Harpoon missiles aboard. While the AGM-84 (Block 1D) missile had been developed by the Navy, B-52s had actually carried the tried-and-true antiship missile for more than a decade. A noodge over twelve and a half feet long, the missile carried five hundred pounds of explosives in its nose. Designed as a fire-and-forget weapon that could be launched from at least seventy-five nautical miles away, the Harpoon would duck toward the waves and then skim the surface of the ocean, extremely hard to detect and even harder to stop.

“Ready to launch on your command,” said Delaney.

“Jed Barclay in the Pentagon situation room for you,” interrupted Major Catsman at Dream Command. “You want Channel Two. It's scrambled.”

“Jed, make it quick,” said Dog as the NSC aide's face flickered onto the com screen.

“Colonel, we're monitoring the situation here at the Pentagon.”

“Then you know I have two Chinese submarines taking over the ship that controls the ghost clone,” said
Dog, trying in vain to muzzle his anger. “They have to be stopped now.”

“Stand by,” said Jed.

“What the hell?” said Delaney.

The defense secretary came on the line.

“Colonel, we don't want you to hit the Chinese submarines.”

“Understood,” said Dog. “That's why we have to strike right away.”

Modern communications technology could be a blessing—he had a team of highly trained experts backing him up halfway across the globe at Dreamland. But it also gave the Washington types unprecedented ability to screw things up.

“We can't afford collateral damage,” added Chastain.

“Look,” said Dog, his patience nearly gone. “I have about thirty seconds to decide whether to try to sink the tanker or not. If the robot plane is aboard, the communist commandos will grab it.”

“Colonel, we're on their radar,” said Delaney, breaking in. “This may be some sort of unbriefed fire control radar—the computer is doping it out as an SA-6. Has to be a mistake . . . ”

The SA-6 was a Russian-made ground-based antiaircraft missile; there was no way it could be aboard the Chinese submarine.

Then again, this wasn't a particularly good time to be wrong.

“You're cleared to take down the
Dragon Prince
,” said the defense secretary.

“Fire the Harpoon,” Dog told his copilot. Then reached to the panel and killed the connection to Dreamland—and the Pentagon. “Missile status?”

“I've gone to ECMs. Computer says those subs carry no missiles.”

“Is it on the tanker?”

“Searching.”

“Zen, can you get a look at the decks of those submarines?”

“Roger that,” acknowledged the Flighthawk pilot.

“Watch out for the Harpoon,” warned Delaney. “It's terminal.”

“No shit,” said Zen.

 

Z
EN CHECKED
H
AWK
Four
as he banked
Three
back to- ward the tanker, making sure the computer was doing a good job flying the robot. Systems green, course perfect—he jumped back into
Three
, zooming in toward the ship. The right side of the tanker flared.

“Harpoon hit,” he told Dog.

“Negative!” said Delaney. “It's still en route.”

Zen saw the shadow streaking toward the middle of the tanker at the bottom of his screen, then realized what had happened as the tanker exploded.

“I have a launch. The ghost clone is airborne!”

“Take it out,” said Dog.

Dreamland
14 September 1997
0958

J
ENNIFER PUNCHED THE
mike button again, trying to tell Zen that she was ready to upload the program. But they'd lost contact with the Megafortress.

Dog had punched it out, she knew, pissed at interference from the Pentagon people.

Just like him to shut off the rest of the world.

She slammed her hand down on the desk counter so hard it stung.

“Damn it,” she shouted. “I want to upload!”

“The telemetry circuits are open,” said Rubeo behind her, his voice soft and calm. “Go ahead. You don't need to talk to them until the program is ready to run.”

Aboard
Raven
15 September 1997
0058

Z
EN SLAMMED THE
throttle against the stop, coaxing
Hawk Three
out past Mach 1. He glanced at the sitrep, making sure
Four
was positioned in case he couldn't catch up. C
³
began calculating moves to stop the aircraft, its silicone brain prioritizing them according to the likely shootdown percentage.

Catching the clone from behind with
Hawk Three
rated only fifth on the list, with a 65.3 percent shot.

Zen laughed at the computer.

“You just want all the glory, my friend,” he said, momentarily baffling the verbal instruction interpreter circuits.