Target Utopia (30 page)

Aboard Air Force One

“I
HARDLY THINK
China will go to war over a minesweeper,” President Todd told the Secretary of State, Alistar Newhaven, over the secure video connection. “Especially since they took the first shot.”

Newhaven frowned. The lighting in the State Department “tank” made him look ten years
older than he was, and he was no spring chicken to begin with, as the saying went.

“I'm just reporting their stance,” he told her. “They're calling it a provocation.”

“Theirs or ours?”

“They are one-sided, obviously.”

“We have tape and plenty of evidence, and frankly they ought to be glad that we didn't sink their damn ship and destroy their aircraft.”

“Madam President, we have come so close to a rapprochement, and now it's going to go up in smoke.”

“I'm not going to knuckle under to bullying tactics. Reiterate our earlier statement. We are chasing international outlaws in accordance with the UN resolution,” said Todd, trying to speak in as diplomatic a tone as she could muster, “and in the interests of justice and safety, they would do well to stay the hell out of our way. Fix my verbiage, obviously. But make it clear that we're not backing down. That's my position.”

“I wasn't suggesting we back down—”

“Good.”

Newhaven started to say something she thought was an objection. Todd cut him off. “If you can't do that, then submit your resignation.”

He looked stricken. “I was about to say that I had no problem with it.”

“Good. I'm glad we agree.” Todd flicked off the call and hit the next one in the queue—Charles Lovel, the Secretary of Defense.

“Mr. Lovel, you're up to date, I assume?” she
said, knowing that he was. “The Flighthawks are grounded until further notice?”

“They are. We're in the process of providing a fix.” He switched the topic quickly, subtly attacking Whiplash and its unique command arrangement. “I have to say, Madam President, that this would have been better from the start if the CIA was not involved. The operation should have been launched by the Navy.”

“In a month, when the rebels they were supporting were in full control of eastern Malaysia.”

“I don't think that would have happened. And here we have basically your private army—”

“You're starting to sound like certain members of Congress,” answered the President. “Whiplash is under joint control, Mr. Lovel. Your department is responsible for the people.”

“They answer to the Joint Chiefs, not me.”

“I'm not in the mood for a turf battle,” warned the President.

“I'm not starting one. The Joint Chiefs are recommending that our submarine move between the Chinese and the Whiplash operation,” added Lovel. “Frankly, I'd recommend a greater show of force.”

Now it was Todd's turn to argue for restraint. “We don't want this to escalate too far if we can help it,” she told the secretary. “Nor do I want to call attention to the fact that we've lost two of our most advanced UAVs. Responding too strongly will only make them more curious, not less. How capable is the submarine?”

“Very. But it doesn't have a land force. Or an air arm.”

The submarine Lovel was referring to was the
Connecticut
, a Seawolf-class sub that had been assigned to shadow the Chinese carrier. It was currently running a pair of unmanned submersibles known as ROUVs—remote-operated underwater vehicles—within a few hundred yards of the carrier. The ROUVs were not capable of attacking the Chinese carrier or its escorts, but were recording data and could be used to divert attention if the submarine did attack. The sub itself was roughly a mile outside the defensive screen.

The U.S. Navy had two aircraft carriers and their escorts near the Philippines, but Todd hesitated sending them south.

“Let's see what Whiplash comes up with before we make any further decisions,” she said.

“Very well. But I've asked SOCCOM to move a SEAL team into position aboard the
Reagan
. They're as capable of Whiplash in a situation like this—This isn't a case where high-tech alone can get the job done. If anything, it's been just the opposite.”

The remark, to Todd, was one more indication that the Secretary of Defense wanted to shut Whiplash and the Office of Special Projects down. He'd never particularly liked either the group or the arrangement with the CIA, arguing that all special operations should be handled by SOCCOM, or the Special Operations Command, which was in charge of the SEALs, Special Forces, Rangers, and other spec op units.
While occasionally accused of being cowboys, SOCCOM was a highly disciplined operation with a clear chain of command—and not coincidentally enjoyed a very tight relationship with the secretary, who had made sure several of his friends had high places in the command structure.

“Thank you for your assessment, Charles,” said Todd, filing her observation away. “We'll reconvene when we have news.”

South China Sea

B
RAXTON HAD TO
hand it to the Dreamland people: not only had the Sabre UAVs landed intact, but their self-diagnosis modules declared they were in fit shape and ready for action pending refueling. It was far better than he had hoped: even the second generation Flighthawks would have experienced some damage to their wing structure.

While it was their “brains” he wanted, the Sabres' airfoils would be of great interest to several countries, and could undoubtedly fetch a considerable sum if sold. The question was to whom. The two most likely candidates were China and Iran, but neither was suitable. Braxton hated the Chinese, and knew the Iranians could never be trusted, as an earlier attempt at a deal with them had proven.

Russia was a possibility, though that would also
carry risks. The country's prime minister was mercurial, which meant those under him were mercurial as well; they were as likely to try to steal aircraft as they were to actually pay for them, and Russia's annoying tendency to insist on using Russian banks to initiate payment might even help the U.S.: for some reason, Russian officials refused to believe that the NSA routinely watched all large transactions, and would undoubtedly use that lead to break into Braxton's financial network.

But the other countries that could afford to pay the amount of money the UAVs were worth were allies of the U.S., at least nominally, which would make dealing with them even more difficult. The only one he really would trust would be Israel, but they had a strong relationship with President Todd, who had backed them most recently on the Syrian partition.

All of that was to be worried about later. Right now Braxton had to get the aircraft aboard the launch and meet up with the cargo container.

Given their abilities, the Sabres were not only small but surprisingly light. Much of the UAV's operational weight came from the fuel it carried; three-quarters empty meant it was light enough to be easily handled by two men. In fact, Talbot could probably have handled it by himself; holding the left wing, Braxton mostly steered as they carried the aircraft off the beach and onto the bow area of the long launch. With a wingspan barely as big as the average desk, both aircraft fit nicely in the front of the boat. Lashed down to the deck, they looked a little like stingrays with short tails.

As soon as the aircraft were secured, Talbot backed the launch off the shoal, turning carefully toward the open sea. Satisfied that they were in good shape, Braxton eased himself forward to examine the Sabres. It was hard to believe that aircraft so small and sleek could be so deadly.

If his own UAVs were advanced—as aircraft, he reckoned they were close to the second generation Flighthawks, though not quite as fast—these were a step or two beyond. Even smaller than the Flighthawks, they were built around a lightweight but powerful jet engine and a 25mm cannon. The main electronics, consisting of custom-made chips and IC circuits, were distributed along the aircraft, rather than concentrated in one place; they couldn't be accessed without disassembling the spine of the aircraft.

The bulge of the rear part of the engine on the underside of the aircraft was similar to that on his airplanes—not a surprise, given that his engine was an earlier version of the Sabres'. The nozzle and variable thrust mechanisms at the back of the planes was both strikingly simple—two perforated pieces of metal, one over the other, made up the body—and yet effective, acting as both a thermal dissipater and directional thruster at the same time. Unable to access the interior of the molded unit, Braxton surmised it was controlled by a coglike mechanism that aligned the perforations as well as changed the length and shape of the tailpipe, adding a vector effect to the thrust.

It would be a shame to sell the technology, he thought. They should keep it for themselves.

“We're being hailed,” said Talbot from the wheelhouse.

“By who?”

“A Chinese patrol craft.”

“Screw them,” said Braxton.

“I'm not answering.”

“Do they have aircraft up?”

“Not clear,” said Talbot. “Nothing on the passive radar.”

Braxton took the binoculars from the shelf next to the wheel and scanned the horizon. There was a dot in the distance to the north, directly in their path. It was too close to be the cargo container ship.

“Let's go to Daela instead of the rendezvous,” he told Talbot.

“Got it.”

Daela was the last of their reef hideouts. Larger than the others, with good vegetation covering a third of the land, Braxton had used it for the early tests of the UAVs. It was claimed by Vietnam as well as China and Malaysia, and nearly equidistant to Vietnam and Brunei.

Talbot immediately changed course, consulting the GPS to come to the right heading. Within minutes the blip on the horizon disappeared.

Braxton wondered if he'd been too cautious. He was about to tell Talbot to turn back to the north when they were hailed again, and this time told to stop dead in the water or face an attack.

“They can't possibly be talking to us,” said Braxton.

“They're using the Malaysian registration number of the launch,” said Talbot.

“How would they have gotten that?” Braxton asked. It was a rhetorical question—surely the Chinese had plenty of spies in Malaysia who could have supplied it. “It has to be a bluff.”

“Should I answer?”

“Absolutely not.”

Braxton went back to scanning the horizon. The way in front of them was clear, but there was another shadow now to the north.

“It may be a trick from the Dreamland people,” said Braxton, thinking out loud.

He had defeated the locator circuitry in the Sabres as part of the process of taking them over. It had to have worked, he thought; otherwise they would have been all over him when he recovered the planes, if they even let him get that far.

Were the Chinese really following?

“Talbot, when was the last time you used the launch?” he asked.

“Couple of days ago, after we left Brunei.”

“Was it scanned?”

“For bugs? Of course.”

But they were tracking them, weren't they? How?

Braxton went to the GPS unit.

“Has this been tampered with?” he asked, examining the holder plate. “These screws have been replaced.”

Talbot bent to look at it. “I think you're getting paranoid.”

“No. It's either been monkeyed with or replaced. It may even be the same unit; they just have to know which signal is pinging the satellites. Damn.”

He yanked it out and threw it in the water,
though if it had been bugged, the damage was already done.

The speck to the north was growing exponentially. Braxton noticed that it was above the water—a helicopter.

He took out the H&K 417 from its case beneath the seats.

“I can handle the gun if you take the wheel,” said Talbot.

“Just steer.”

In a few minutes the helicopter revealed itself as a drone—an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft used by the Chinese navy and generally flown off small patrol vessels. It was rare that they were this far from land.

Braxton hesitated as it approached on the port side of the launch, unsure whether shooting at it would make things worse. It came within thirty meters, passing without slowing or seeming to notice. As it circled back, Braxton raised the gun. He waited until the black bulb of the aircraft's nose filled his scope, then fired on full automatic, sending two long bursts at the middle of the aircraft. Seemingly unfazed, the aircraft continued past on the starboard side, flying for about a half mile before turning back toward him.

“I can't believe I missed,” said Braxton, aiming again.

This time the bullets burst the forward portion of the fuselage. The hardened plastic and metal splattered into the air. Part of the shrapnel damaged the rotors, and the aircraft's tail began to spin slowly. Braxton poured the rest of the magazine
into it; flames began spewing from the gas tank as it quickly rotated itself down into the water. It crashed with a satisfying hiss.

Braxton had barely any time to savor his victory—two more drone helicopters appeared from the same area as the other. Meanwhile, the dot on the horizon that had been following them had grown considerably larger and separated into two small fast patrol boats. They looked like speedboats, barely bigger than Braxton's launch—but considerably faster and undoubtedly armed.

“How far are we from Daela?” he asked Talbot.

“Ten miles.”

“We have to get there ahead of them,” said Braxton, slamming a new magazine box into the gun. “Or we're through.”

South China Sea

T
URK TRIED TO
relax as the Tigershark raced toward the cargo container vessel and the oceangoing tug, its array of sensors and optical cameras working overtime to record everything below. He was at 25,000 feet, not quite invisible to the naked eye but certainly far enough away that he'd look like little more than a blur in the distance. Neither of the two ships seemed to have a radar system capable of tracking him, let alone direct a weapons
system to shoot him down. And yet he somehow felt vulnerable, as if he were being shadowed by an enemy he couldn't identify, let alone defeat.

It wasn't the fact that he didn't have the Sabres escorting him, although it felt strange to fly without them. Nor was he really worried about the Chinese fleet sailing a few hundred miles away—he knew he could fly the pants off a dozen J-15s.

But the fact that someone had managed to take over the Sabres—had proven they were more advanced and smarter than OSP, Dreamland, Rubeo, and everyone else—that was a little unnerving.

And that, he decided as he checked his course, had to be the problem.

The Sabres were grounded until the brain trust figured out what was going on, but Turk had to now wonder if they could take over the Tigershark as well. It used a completely different intelligence system to help him fly, but its interface connected with that of the Sabres. Maybe these bastards could worm their way in through the UAVs' interface.

Rubeo had insisted it was impossible—but wouldn't he have said that about the Sabres as well?

“Whiplash Shark, we need you to take another pass at high altitude,” said Danny Freah over the radio. Freah was in one of the Osprey assault aircraft, heading toward the ships.

“Roger that, Colonel. Stand by.”

Turk brought the Tigershark through a bank and came back over the two ships a lot slower this time. He zoomed the infrared image on the left side of his screen, using the computer's filter to identify where the people were. There were about
twenty on the deck of the cargo carrier, and only eight topside on the tug. The infrared could get no images of anyone belowdecks.

“The cargo containers are shielded from the penetrating radar,” noted Danny. He was looking at his own set of images. The tops of the containers were lined with multiple layers of material arranged to confuse the penetrating waves of lower-powered units such as those carried by the Tigershark. “We need you to keep an eye on them.”

“Roger that.”

Turk selected the array of cargo containers on the forward deck, then instructed the computer to alert him to any physical change in that section. He took some more slow circuits of the area, extending his orbit to a five mile radius around the cargo ship. She was moving at about twelve knots, a decent pace for the vessel, though as far as Turk was concerned she could have been standing still. Satisfied the area was clear and the sensors hadn't missed anything obvious, he pushed down to 15,000 feet and started a run directly over the two vessels. Nothing had changed; the same number of people were on the decks of each ship.

“All right,” said Danny, watching the feeds. “We're ten minutes from go. Make your last pass at H minus 02 minutes.”

“Roger that,” said Turk, checking his time.

D
ANNY
F
REAH FORWARDED
the image of the tugboat to the helmets of the rest of the Whiplash assault team.

“We have eight people on the deck of our ship,” he told the troopers. “No weapons are visible. We go in exactly as we planned. Secure the bridge and work down. Everyone good?”

One by one the Whiplashers chimed in. Achmoody, now the team leader with Boston back at the base, pointed out that six of the crewmen were on the stern deck. He suggested they land some of the Marines with the two Whiplashers assigned there, assuming the crewmen on deck remained roughly where they were.

“That way it will be easier to hold them without having to shoot anyone,” he explained. “If they see a bunch of people, they're more likely just to stay put and not make a fuss. Safer for them, easier for us.”

Danny agreed. He went over to the Marines and showed them the setup using his tablet, then asked if they'd have a problem fast-roping down.

“Fast-roping is our middle name,” said Sergeant Hurst, the Marine NCO in charge.

Danny rolled his eyes, then called over Baby Joe and Glenn Fulsom to work with the Marines.

“Four Marines go in on the stern,” he told the sergeant. “The rest remain aboard as reserve; we use them on whichever ship needs support. These guys will lead you down.”

C
OWBOY TOOK HIS
position on Greenstreet's wing, then checked his systems one last time. The plan was to buzz the cargo container ship fast and low, a show of force ahead of the assault. They'd ride bow
to stern, with about twenty feet clearance directly over the deck—assuming, of course, that Turk didn't see something happening before then.

If he did, they'd deal with it. Besides the small-diameter bombs, two of the four F-35s in the squadron formation were carrying “Slammers”—ARM-84 SLAM-ER Block 1Fs, long-range antiship missiles capable of sinking the large cargo ship with a single hit. While not quite as capable as the newer ALAM-ATA Block 1G—a Slammer with the ability to change targets and “reattack” following other missile hits or misses—the weapon was more than capable of dealing with a lumbering cargo vessel.

Cowboy was not carrying a Slammer; tasked to be on the lookout against the drones, he had a pair of AMRAAMs and Sidewinders to go with his small-diameter bombs.

Satisfied that his aircraft was ready for the fight, Cowboy pushed his head back against the top of his ejection seat and tried to slow-breathe away the growing tension and adrenaline. He needed to stay loose and relaxed—nearly impossible tasks this close to showtime. He was like a football player waiting for the Super Bowl to begin; it was just too damn important, too damn exciting, to calm down for.

He loved it.

Working for Whiplash would be like this all the time. Whatever it took, he was going to find a way to get there.

First, this,
Cowboy reminded himself.
Let's get this show on the road.

T
URK WATCHED THE
numbers marking his altitude drain on the screen. He'd taken the Tigershark down to 5,000 feet above sea level—low enough to get 4k images of every bolt head on deck.

It was also low enough to get him blown out of the sky if he wasn't careful. So even though this looked like a cake walk, he knew he couldn't take it for granted.

“Two minutes,” he told Danny over the Whiplash circuit. “Moving in.”

The Flighthawk bucked a bit as he started out of his turn toward the stern of the cargo carrier, shaking off a burst of turbulence. The sun glinted off the waves, round and bright and big. The back end of the cargo container looked like the squashed bulbous rear of a hippopotamus. The ship sat high in the water, fat and awkward. It was large enough to fit three stacks of containers top to bottom on the stern deck behind the superstructure, eight across. But there were only two there now, brown rectangles whose sides and tops were dotted with patches of rust.

The superstructure, which included the stack for the engine exhaust and all the important crew compartments from the chart room to the bridge, rose high above the stern deck, some eight stories—or container equivalents—high. There was a man on the rail at the starboard side, looking out toward the stern.

There were two large crane structures on the long forward deck. They looked like massive beams or pieces from a suspension bridge; they
made it possible for the ship to load and unload containers and other items in ports unequipped to handle large-scale container operations. Turk went straight over the middle of the structures, drawing a line that split the ship in half.

Three dozen containers sat on the forward deck area, arranged in an irregular pattern from one to four high, which left plenty of room not only on the deck itself but on each successive layer, except for the highest, where a single container sat near the centerline of the vessel.

Turk's flight over the ship lasted no more than a second or two. Rising as he cleared the vessel, he slid left, riding his wing into a tight twist that got him headed back toward the two ships. This time he put his nose on the tugboat's bow and let his altitude bleed down to 3,500 feet, exactly. His airspeed had slowed as well, though at 250 knots the Tigershark wasn't exactly standing still.

Unlike its cousins that worked in harbors, the oceangoing tug was a good-sized vessel, nearly three hundred feet long, with a boom behind the wheelhouse big enough to haul the cargo carrier behind her. The flat stern deck was long and low in comparison to the rest of the ship, but it still towered over the waves; the tug was small only in comparison to its companion.

These guys have got serious amounts of money, Turk realized as he pulled the Tigershark away from the two ships.

It was of course an obvious fact—they would never have been able to build the UAVs otherwise, let alone grab the Sabres—but he hadn't considered
the seriousness of the threat they posed until now. It wasn't just that they could take American secrets and use them against her interests: the conspiracy could, in effect, change the entire order of world politics.

Turk might have considered this further, or at least scolded himself for coming so late to such an obvious conclusion, but for a blaring warning that nearly pierced his eardrums—someone aboard the cargo ship had just launched a missile at his tailpipe.