Target Utopia (23 page)

“Boston, what's the situation?”

“Closed door,” said Boston. “I'm going to blow it.”

“Not too much,” warned Danny. “Damned ship's falling apart. One charge may tear it to pieces.”

He heard the muffled explosion a few seconds later. The rest of the Filipino contingent—which
only consisted of a single man—was in the compartment, sleeping peacefully despite the commotion. In fact, he didn't even react to the boom that took out the door. The reason was obvious as soon as anyone entered the compartment—it smelled like formaldehyde, a result of the burn-off from the homemade still that dominated the center of the compartment.

Roused to semiconsciousness, the man was taken above, to join the other prisoners. Boston and Achmoody began questioning the Filipinos while the rest of the team proceeded to search the ship.

Danny was making his way up into the superstructure when Breanna hailed him from the Cube.

“What's your situation?” she asked.

“I have no command center here, no computers, no nothing,” he told her. “We're searching.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Negative. Six Filipinos. Every one of them was asleep when we landed. Including the people who were supposed to be on watch.”

“Have you questioned them?”

“About to.”

“Don't forget, you have a Chinese warship nearby.”

“I'm not about to forget that.”

“All right. We're watching.”

Danny continued into the superstructure. The analysts had guessed it would be in a state of advanced decay, and they were correct. Huge flakes of metal and pieces of broken bulkheads littered Danny's path as he made his way to the bridge.

The space that had been the bridge was now
used only as a lookout area, a fact attested to by a pair of binoculars hanging near the entrance. The navigation and communications gear had been stripped from the ship years before; a handful of wires hung forlornly from the panel, as if longing for their old companions. The ship's wheel was gone, as were most of the metal panels that had once held other controls. Even some of the boards that made up the deck had been lifted out, probably to be used as fuel by the men stationed here.

Danny saw no reason to test the jigsaw puzzle of rotted wood and rusted metal that formed a scrabblelike walkway across the space. He leaned in far enough to scan the compartment immediately behind the bridge—the bulkhead there had rusted into nothingness—and once assured that it was completely empty, backtracked to continue hunting through the rest of the ship's superstructure.

“Colonel, we got one of the fishing boats moving,” said Turk from the Tigershark. “It's moving parallel to the reef, not getting any closer, but I think it's trying to get a view of what's going on.”

“Thanks, Turk. Keep an eye on it.”

“Roger that.”

Dalton and Morgan had come up and were working their way through the compartments in the superstructure. Danny decided to go back and see how Boston and Achmoody were getting on with the Filipinos.

W
HEN
D
ANNY
F
REAH
had drawn up the plan, he'd predicted that the boarding team would be discovered
by the Chinese fishing boats or the minesweeper within thirty seconds of landing. Things were going much better than that: they'd been on the ship for more than five minutes before the system told Turk that one of the first fishing boats was starting to move.

“Track surface target one,” Turk directed the computer. “Network, scan for communications.”

“Null set,”
responded the computer.

It was telling him that the Whiplash network, which was tied into the elint data from the Global Hawk above, was not picking up any transmissions from the fishing boat. There were several possible reasons for this, beginning with the most likely: the fishing boat wasn't using its radio. But it was also possible that the boat was using an extremely sophisticated low-powered radio too weak and too far from the Global Hawk for the signal to be detected.

The fishing boat was clearly curious. It sailed parallel to the merchant ship, passing the stern, then slowed and turned back in the direction it had come. After passing the beached vessel once more, it made another turn and headed in closer.

“Danny, that fishing boat is taking a real interest,” Turk told Freah. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just monitor it. Let me know if something changes.”

T
HE FIRST TWO
team members to land had carried down what looked like lightweight machine guns with extra high stilts. These were actually fully
automated gunbots, called “mechs” by the team, that could be guided by remote control and used for extra firepower. While some were capable of fully autonomous operation—they could be preprogrammed to guard a base perimeter and fire at anything coming toward them—in this case they were controlled by the troopers who carried them, or Danny himself through an override. He checked on both, making sure they could repel any boarders from the fishing boats, then ran up to Boston and the captured Filipinos.

“What do they know?” Danny asked.

“Nothing,” said Boston with disgust. “The guys on duty were drunk and all passed out.”

“Drunk?”

“They cook up some moonshine and that's how they spend their days.”

“Great.”

“Probably can't blame them. Nothing to do on this tub but wait for the rust to make it collapse.”

“What about the others?”

“Working on it. They claim to know nothing.”

“We have to get them talking. Our friends out there are taking an interest.”

Danny picked one of the captive Filipinos nearby and squatted down in front of him, asking in Spanish how many people were aboard.

“I can speak English,” said the man. “Why are you here?”

“I'm here because we're looking for people who have stolen computer material and other technology from the U.S.,” said Danny, phrasing the situation as diplomatically as possible. “They're also
helping rebels in Malaysia, which is against a UN resolution. That resolution authorizes me to use force to stop them.”

“And what does that have to do with us?”

“They have a base here,” said Danny.

“Who? Where?”

“They're technical experts,” said Danny.

“What? We have been here a full month and we are the only ones here.”

“No one else?”

The man gave him a confused look. Before Danny could rephrase the question, Melissa Grisif broke in on the team radio.

“Colonel, I found a hatchway off the forward cargo compartment. You're going to want to look at this, sir.”

“On my way.” Danny looked over at Achmoody and pointed to the Filipino marine. “Talk to this guy.”

Clambering down the steps to the hold, Danny kept slipping on the wet rails. There were two inches of water where the ladder met the deck planks; by the time he walked back to where Grisif was waiting, the water came nearly to his knees.

“It looks like the kind of hatchway you'd see on a submarine,” she told him, pointing to the round wheel in front of her.

“You try opening it?” Danny asked.

“Yes, but it's locked in place,” she said. “At first I thought it was welded or rusted, but there's a little movement when you turn the wheel, and I think it's hitting a bar or something on the other side.”

Danny bent down to take a look.

“Get some plastic explosive down here,” he told her. “Let's blow it open.”

Over the South China Sea

C
OWBOY LOCKED ON
both targets, then pressed the mike button.

“Basher One, request permission to fire.”

“Do it!” said Greenstreet.

Four seconds later a pair of AMRAAMs dropped from the F-35's internal bay. The air-to-air semiactive radar missiles launched toward the pair of enemy UAVs, accelerating to a speed of Mach 4.

When they set out, the AMRAAMs used the radar in the F-35 to locate and fly toward their targets. But as they got closer, they switched to their own onboard radars. A few seconds after that happened, the UAVs made sharp turns into the path of the missiles, then disappeared from Cowboy's screen.

His first thought was that the AMRAAMs had hit them. But in fact they were still several miles from their targets. They'd missed, and failing to find the drones as they maneuvered, blew themselves up a few moments later.

“Basher One—Cap, I lost the contacts,” radioed Cowboy. “Missiles just self-destructed.”

“They must be jamming the radars,” said Colonel Greenstreet.

“No indication.”

Cowboy turned his aircraft north, heading in the direction the UAVs had been going when they disappeared from his radar.

“Basher Two to Whiplash Tigershark.”

“This is Shark. Go ahead, Two.”

“I need some quarterbacking. Just locked up and shot two missiles at the UAVs. The aircraft disappeared from the screens before the missiles got close enough to detonate.”

“Are they jamming you?”

“If they are, we can't pick it up. I can't find the UAVs,” Cowboy added. “Can you see them on your screens?”

“Stand by.”

A few moments later Turk came back on line.

“Our tech guys think they're using a selective jammer to mimic your waves,” said Turk. “I still have the aircraft on the Sabre long-range scan—they're flying almost perpendicular to your course, forty miles south.”

Turk gave him a heading and then GPS readings that could get Cowboy into the area for an intercept.

“How do I deal with them?”

“Close on them. They can only hit certain wavelengths and they need to be picking up your signal steadily. It might help to keep changing the scan. The technique pumps out something like an echo of your signal. Eventually, they won't be able to keep up.”

Cowboy wondered when eventually was. He got his answer a few seconds later, as the UAVs popped back onto his screen. They were coming head-on toward him, less than a minute away.

The South China Sea, north of Malaysia

T
URK STUDIED THE
feed from Sabre Three, trying to work out a strategy for Cowboy and Greenstreet.

“See if you can take them north toward the Sabres,” Turk told Cowboy. “Get them closer to the Sabres so if they try that radar trick again I'll be able to see what's going on and help. The Sabres need another ten minutes or so to get into the fight.”

“Roger that,” said Cowboy.

“Think of them as MiGs with only cannons left,” added Turk. “They can outturn you, and probably outaccelerate for a small distance. So don't let them get behind you.”

“We're trying to climb over them,” said Cowboy.

“Might work. Once they get closer I may be able to see what tactics they're following. They're pretty straightforward now.”

“Roger that.”

Turk glanced back at his main screen, looking
below at the fishing boat that was moving. A light flashed at its bow.

Another light blinked, this one on the third fishing boat. Then a light on the fifth began to blink.

That's weird, thought Turk.

Then he realized what was happening—the little boats were communicating via signal lamps.

And they weren't just talking among themselves. The minesweeper had begun throwing off her slumber. Smoke poured from the stack and the ship began moving toward the island.

“Colonel Freah, the minesweeper's moving,” radioed Turk. “The fishing boats are signaling each other with lights.”

“Tell me when he's within nine miles,” snapped Danny. “That's the range of his biggest gun.”

“Not going to take too long, Colonel.”

“Noted.”

D
ANNY
F
REAH TAPPED
the back of his helmet to end the radio call.

“Out of the compartment,” he told the others, fixing the timer on the plastic explosive. “Go!”

He set it for fifteen seconds, then scrambled back to the ladder. He reached the low bulkhead where the others were waiting just as the charge went off.

Though the explosive had been relatively small, the entire ship shook with it. The deck beneath Danny's legs began to wobble; for a moment he thought it would give way.

“Let's go,” said Grisif, jumping up. Eddie Guzman, who'd brought the explosives down, followed, leaving Danny temporarily behind.

He caught up to them on the ladder. Water oozed from a fresh crack in the deck ten feet from the landing; it looked as if a giant had tried to fold the ship and given up.

The hatchway had blown open. Wrist lights showing the way, Danny and the others waded over to it. The hatch opened to a space between the compartment bulkhead and the hull; a ladder leading downward sat directly below it.

“I'll check it out,” said Guzman.

Danny stepped back to give him room, then reached to turn the radio back on. “Turk, what's with the minesweeper?” he asked.

“Still coming toward you. The fishing boats are moving back,” added the pilot.

Not good, thought Danny. They're getting out of the line of fire.

The Cube

“I
HAVE A
tentative fix on where the UAVs came from,” said Yanni Turnis, one of Rubeo's top engineers. He was talking to him from New Mexico. “There's an atoll in the Grainger Bank. A cargo container is docked near the lagoon. The satellites
reported two flashes on the deck about thirty minutes ago.”

“I see.” Rubeo zoomed out the map on his display, then focused back on the area of a horseshoe-shaped island with a ship parked to the south. A pair of small boats were tied to a dock at the shore. The image had been taken by a satellite two days before.

“Was the flash analyzed?” Rubeo asked.

“Not considered significant by the Reconnaissance Office algorithms,” said the techie. “But look at the data. They have to be UAV launches, don't you think? Check it against the simulation. It matches, perfectly.”

Rubeo's technical expert was right. But the distance! It was some five hundred miles from the point where the Marines were operating. To have covered that distance in that short a time was beyond the capability of even the Sabres.

On the other hand, Rubeo hadn't thought Braxton would be able to spoof the radars, even for a limited time, but clearly he had. It wasn't so much the technical problems as the difficulty of manufacturing and packaging it reliably in something as small as the drones. Even the Sabres didn't have that ability.

What other tricks did Braxton have in store?

“The performance specs look almost exactly like the Gen 4s,” added Turnis. “They may be a little faster, but turn a little wider. The simulation says they'll bleed off speed pretty fast if you get them to pull over eight g's in a turn—you might get them to go into a flat spin.”

The F-35 pilots would black out well before that happened, Rubeo realized. They were best off not engaging the enemy planes—which of course wasn't an option, or probably even a thought.

“Are you talking to the Marine fighters?” he asked Turnis.

“We don't have a direct hookup. They're about to engage the fighters,” said Turnis. “I can relay tips to Frost in the Cube if you want.”

“Go ahead. I doubt they'll be of much use,” added Rubeo bitterly.