Strike Zone (39 page)

“All right guys, let's not forget we're working,” Zen told them finally.

He felt more than a little proud, as if he were a high school basketball coach whose team had just won the
championship. It wasn't that bad a metaphor, actually—they were clucking away like high school kids, their jokes on a sophomore's level.

At best.

“Check your fuel,” he added. “I don't want you walking home.”

Starship's retort was cut off by Dog on the interphone.

“Zen, I want you in on this. Go to the main Dreamland channel.”

He clicked off without saying anything else to the two Flighthawk pilots, listening as Ray Rubeo detailed an argument for another UAV.

“We're trying to get a line on that plane,” added Rubeo. “The surveillance equipment that Captain Freah placed shows the other still in the hangar.”

“What plane?” asked Zen.

“Chen Lee's companies have two 767s. One is in Taipei on the ground but we're looking for another that they seem to have leased a few months back,” explained Dog. “The UAV has handles that could be used for an air launch. We have someone en route to the airport to take a look at it.”

“Let's get north,” said Zen.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Dog.

Aboard Island Flight A101
0130

F
ANN CHECKED THE
course marker. The UAV had a range just over fifteen hundred miles, but that was without the extra weight of a bomb, and flying at medium to high altitude. Professor Ai had calculated that its fuel
would take it roughly a thousand as presently configured. They were just approaching the thousand-mile mark now.

The longer they waited, the less possibility there was of the small plane running out of fuel. But it also increased the chance that they would be found.

He checked the map and his watch again. In less than two hours, Beijing would be destroyed.

No—the communists would be destroyed. The capital,
his
capital, would be intact.

He would return to Taipei, a hero.

And a criminal, in the eyes of the communists and their collaborators in the present government. Undoubtedly he would be killed. But death merely meant a change; it was no more permanent than life.

Waiting increased the chances of success, but it would also allow him to see the explosion. He would witness the moment of his grandfather's triumph with his own eyes.

“We are in range,” said Ai.

“We will wait as long as possible. I calculate an optimum launch in twenty minutes,” he told the scientists.

“The communists are reacting to action by the Americans. They are scrambling fighters, alerting their troops. I've seen the radar and radio intercepts and—”

“We will wait as long as possible.”

Aboard
Raven
0140

A
CCORDING TO THE
manual, a “stock” B-52H could make 516 knots at altitude. B-52s had long ago ceased
to be “stock,” and in practice the typical Stratofortress's hull was so cluttered with add-ons and extra gear that even 500 knots in level flight could be more fantasy than reality.

Dreamland's EB-52s—which in most cases had started their lives as B-52Hs—contained no external blisters to slow them down. Thirty-something years of work on jet engine technology allowed their four power plants to do the work of the original eight more efficiently, and the use of more alloy and composites in the wing and tail structures did the same for the airfoil. In short, if an entry for the Megafortress's top speed were to be made in a reference book, it would be listed at close to 600 knots, along with an asterisk indicating that, depending on the configuration of the power plants and the load the massive plane carried, it might do considerably better.

Dog, with full military power selected, passed the 600-knot mark as he pushed northward through the Taiwan Strait, the two U/MF-3s leading the way.

Mainland China and Taiwan existed side by side in an intricate and highly charged relationship. On the one hand, their governments considered each other bitter enemies. On the other, there was a myriad of commercial relationships between the pair. Among those relationships were regular flights from Taipei to a number of Mainland cities, most especially Shanghai.

Such flights might give cover to a 767 loaded with a UAV and nuclear device, Dog thought.

“
Raven
to Dream Command. Major Catsman, have we located that other 767 yet?”

“We're going over the airport right now,” said Catsman. “We have CIA assets on the ground.”

“Copy that.”

Dog looked over at his fuel panel. They had about three more hours of flying time before nudging into the reserve cushion, depending on what twists and turns Dog took.

He brought up another set of instrument readings on the configurable screen, focusing on his aircraft's performance.
Raven
could have been used to set the benchmarks for a maintenance manual.

Come to think of it, it had.

“Danny, what's your situation?” he asked Captain Freah, bouncing back onto the Dreamland line.

“We're secure here. Still going over everything, but it looks about as clean as a diner an hour before the health department inspectors arrive. Authorities are at the gate,” Danny added. “We're holding them off—got about another ten to fifteen minutes of searching to get through.”

“Roger that.”

On the Ground in Kaohisiung
0151

S
TONER SAW THE
panel behind the vat of sulfuric acid a second or two after the Marines did, and had to shout at them to keep back.

“Very good chance the sucker's booby-trapped,” he told the two men, who unlike him were wearing special chem suits with breathers to protect them from the acidic fumes.

It wasn't that Stoner liked to take unnecessary risks; he knew people worked in this plant with the acid all
the time, and figured his brief exposure was nothing like what they exposed themselves to.

Not that it was pleasant. He went to the floor panel and knelt down, instantly soaking his knees in the residue of a thousand car batteries. He could feel the material get sodden and start to tickle at his skin.

“Back,” he told the Marines, pulling out a long knife.

One of the men began to object; if the panel was booby-trapped, they had a special squad trained to defuse it. But Stoner had already found two wires with his knife; he pulled them up gently, scraped some of the insulation off, then checked the current with a small meter the size of pen top. A yellow light flashed on; he clipped another set of alligator clips to the wires and got a green.

“You're fucking lucky,” said one of the Marines as he jimmied open the lock.

“How's that?”

“Could have just as easily blown when it was shorted.”

“Well, only if my sensor here screwed up. It's all right—my guess is it's just an alarm and it was taken out by the E-bomb,” said Stoner, shining around the flashlight. “There aren't any charges here.”

He'd suspected that; the acid would have made keeping explosives here fairly dangerous, especially with people working all around the area. What he hadn't expected was that the panel led to a ladder, which disappeared downward.

“Come on,” he told the Marines as he positioned his NOD monocle and pulled out his Beretta. “Cover me.”

Aboard
Penn
0200

K
ICK LEANED BACK
as the computer took the Flighthawk further out into the harbor, still searching for any other Mainland boats or submarines. The Taiwanese port authorities, local police, and navy assets were all rushing to the area, and a search-and-rescue operation was under way.
Penn
had vectored in some of the SAR assets, but communication with the local units was torturous because of the different radio frequencies and, more importantly, accents. Still, several of the Mainlanders had already been recovered.

If he were in their place, he wouldn't want to be saved.

“Major Alou is asking you to check that merchant ship out, just about head on at two miles,” relayed Starship.

“Yeah, roger that, thanks.”

“Easy man, you're jerking your stick like you're muscling a Hog,” added Starship. “This is fly by wire. Fly by
remote
wire.”

“You know, Starship, I really don't need your help.”

“Fuck yourself then.”

“And fuck yourself back.”

Starship laughed. Kick started to laugh too.

 

S
TARSHIP WATCHED THE
small trawler grow large in the display. There were two or three people on deck, but the ship had no lights on at all.

He suspected the craft had launched the commandos they'd intercepted in the harbor. But they'd already run a check on the registry and found that it was owned by a company in the Philippines.

That would undoubtedly prove to be bogus, but at the moment there was nothing they could do about it.

Kick brought the Flighthawk across the bow in a gentle arc, still a bit unsure of himself as he flew. That was reassuring in a way. Kick would never be as good a pilot, even a remote pilot, as Starship; he could compare himself to Kick any time and know he was ahead.

It didn't take away the jitter he felt in his chest, though. And he was thirsty, very thirsty. And for something more than the bottled water in the galley fridge at the back of the compartment.

“See any antiair?” Kick asked.

“Negative.”

“This has to be the ship. Think we ought to splash it?”

Starship looked at the shadow of the ship. They could say they saw someone with a shoulder-launched missile on deck—thought they saw someone.

Shoot out the rudder, stop the damn boat cold.

Be heroes.

That wasn't their job, though.

“I think we better tell Major Alou it's clean but suspicious,” said Starship. “Get the Taiwan or Navy people on it.”

“Yeah. Better. I'd love to nail the mother.”

“You and me both.”

On the Ground in Kaohisiung
0200

S
TONER COULD HEAR
the sound of water dripping in the distance as he walked down the hall the ladder had led down to. Six feet wide and seven feet high, the
passage ran straight for about ten feet, then took a sharp turn to the right.

Stoner stopped at the corner, his hand on the smooth concrete. There could be anything around the bend.

One of the Marines stepped forward with his M-16. Stoner grabbed the man's shoulder, stopping him.

He wasn't going to let anyone else do his job.

“Just cover me,” he said, and before the two Marines could stop him, Stoner had thrown himself onto the floor, sliding into the middle of the open space with his pistol ready.

The hallway was empty. It went on for about fifteen feet, then took another bend to the right. Stoner jumped up and scrambled down it.

The Marines were at most a half step behind him, their gear clacking as they whipped the noses of their rifles up and down across the space. One of the young men started forward. Stoner grabbed him.

“No—a motion detector. This bunker must've been shielded somehow against the E-bomb.”

As he finished the sentence, the space behind them exploded.

Aboard
Raven
0200

Z
EN REQUESTED A
refuel for
Hawk Three
as
Raven
neared the north end of the Taiwan Strait. Dog acknowledged and started backing down his speed—anything over 400 knots made for a very difficult tank, even when handled by the computer.

The Taiwan air force, officially known as Chung-
kuo Kung Chuan or the Republic of China Air Force, had launched several patrols, including a full set of submarine hunters to chase the commando craft in the south. A Grumman E-2T radar plane, escorted by a group of F-5Es, was just taking up a station in the strait to the north, its radar sweeping the area for Mainland attackers.

The E-2Ts were essentially the same aircraft as the U.S. Navy's E-2C Hawkeye, extremely capable, fleet, airborne radar craft. The longish nose of the planes carried a forward-looking Litton AN-ALR-73 Passive Detection System antenna; three other antennas were stuffed into other locations in the plane. But the truly unique feature of the Hawkeye was its radardome, a twenty-four-foot flying saucer mounted over the wings and fuselage. The E-2T could find an airplane at roughly 260 nautical miles; the computers
aboard allowed it to track at least six hundred air targets (later-model American planes could handle over two thousand). In practice, “only” forty or so intercepts could be controlled at one time; even so, that would allow one E-2T to nail more than half of the attack sorties in the Battle of Midway in one shot.

Zen listened to the
Raven
copilot exchange pleasantries with the Taiwanese as he came in for the refuel. The computer painted cues on the screen, making it unnecessary for the Megafortress to carry the director lights common on dedicated tankers like the KC-10. As the small robot closed, Zen turned the procedure over to C
³
, which fought through the rough eddies of air rushing off the Megafortress's bulky body. As the robot plane slapped into the straw, the automated system aboard the Megafortress exchanged some code with the Flighthawk—the digital equivalent of “Fill ‘er up”—and the jet fuel began to flow.

 

R
EFUEL
COMPLETE, D
OG
checked their position against the GPS screen and turned the helm over to his copilot so he could stretch his legs. But before he could unsnap his restraints, Major Catsman's overstressed voice came over the Dreamland channel.

“Colonel, we have an update on that leased 767 that Chen's company owned,” said Major Catsman. “We're still trying to pull together information, but it was moved to Hualin two weeks ago. It underwent work there to one of the wings.”