Lenore added, “Two minutes isn’t much warning. We better pack everyone down in the bunker and keep them there.” She looked at Rebecca. “Is that doable?”
Their hostess nodded. “We’ll need more blankets. We can’t use a heater because the bunker isn’t ventilated.”
Sixteen waved that comment off. “We have plenty of chemical heat pads to put inside blankets to keep everyone warm for a couple days. We can leave the concrete entry door open until the attack is imminent. We’ll keep the wood stove blazing to confuse their heat sensors. They won’t know we’re not in the cabin.”
“Okay,” Rebecca said. “A blazing fire is believable this time of year. It gets down into the upper thirties at night.”
Lenore agreed. “If a missile hits first, the cabin will be destroyed and they’ll eventually find the stairs down to the bunker. If they send in foot soldiers first, the grenade will take out a couple of them on the stairs.”
“Um, yeah, about that,” Sixteen said. “A grenade is unreliable really, so I took the liberty of replacing it with C-4.”
Sixteen explained the rest of their defenses, and Lenore notched an eyebrow at the boldness of his plan.
“Devious,” she said. “That’s Carl Johnson kind of thinking. I like it.”
Chapter 33
Grainger Koll had just grabbed his coffee mug and was about to take a sip when Thaddeus Leak gave the latest intel on Carl Johnson’s whereabouts. He seethed with anger as he followed Thaddeus Leak back to the control room. Trembling with a sudden irrepressible rage, he flung his mug of coffee against the nearest wall. Brown liquid and shards of glass splattered.
“Fuck!” He paced like a caged lion back and forth across the control room, aware of the nervous glances of his three administrators. Then he turned his face toward the bare concrete ceiling and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Fuuuuuuck!” He focused his attention back on Leak. “Where is Admiral Montmarkle’s carrier strike group right now?”
A tactical map popped up on the monitor showing a white triangle two hundred fifty miles off the coast of Baja California. The ledger next to the CSG9 triangle listed the components of the formidable force—one aircraft carrier, two Aegis cruisers, four Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, a tender, and six subs.
The group’s speed vector showed the strike force was sailing south at twenty knots. They’d be in optimal position for the coordinated attack in two hours.
“Get the admiral on the line.”
“Right away.”
He started to pace the room again. He completed only one circuit when the tech made the announcement. “The admiral is on, Mr. Koll.”
Grainger looked at the wall monitor. Piercing blue eyes framed by severe crow’s feet in a narrow hawk-like face gazed at him. She spoke first as was her leadership style.
“We’ll launch in one-one-two minutes. Intel doesn’t reveal which of his estates he’s at so we will hit them all.”
“Agreed, but he’s not there.”
“Excuse me?”
Hollis stepped up beside his brother. “He’s not at any of them, Admiral. He fucking played us.”
Grainger glanced at his brother. “He played me.” He looked at the concrete floor and nodded his head, then looked at the monitor again. “He let us believe Aaron McGrath was his next target. Instead, we now believe McGrath may be sequestered at one of Johnson’s estates and is actually running their ops. They rightly figured we’d never consider the possibility that they’d be working together, not after what they did to each other eight months ago. But it looks like they’ve been working together all along.”
The admiral narrowed her eyes. “I find that nearly impossible to believe, Grainger.”
“That doesn’t change the reality. I still want you to continue with the multiple strikes, but launch now. Don’t wait for the optimum launch window. And I want you to reverse course immediately. Proceed north at maximum speed.”
“Destination?”
Grainger hesitated a moment. “We don’t know yet.”
That drew a raised eyebrow from the admiral.
Grainger added, “You’ve seen the comm traffic from the naval yard at San Diego?”
She nodded. “There was a massive fire, but fortunately it’s under control. A fuel pumping station on the north end of the pier exploded. No casualties. Limited damage.”
“It was a distraction, compliments of the American Terrorist.”
“What makes you think that?”
Grainger Koll looked away briefly, then shrugged. “Because he stole a fucking warship!”
The admiral tented her eyebrows like she didn’t believe him. When she started to speak, he interrupted.
“We’re still not sure how he did it, but he stole the USS Kestrel Andrus, the first US warship named after a woman.”
She gasped, and Grainger Koll saw the first crack in the admiral’s stone countenance.
“That’s not just a warship.” Admiral Janis Montmarkle stood from her chair and for a moment, Grainger could see nothing above her slender waist. Then she leaned down on her desk and her face filled the monitor. In her eyes, Grainger saw real fear. “Sweet Jesus, Grainger, you want me to engage a US warship? A Zumwalt-class guided missile stealth destroyer?”
“I know, Admiral.” Koll sighed. “It’s nuclear-capable.”
“Capable, yes. Armed, no. And that’s the only thing working in our favor. It just concluded three months of sea trials, so it has no nuclear armaments on board yet.” The admiral paused for a moment. “The general public and most of the military believe only three stealth destroyers of this class were built, but there was a fourth, the DDG-1004. It’s an advanced prototype, far superior to the other three stealth destroyers in its capabilities and systems. It’s basically a combat-capable test bed for new weapons systems. It’s the most advanced stealth naval vessel ever commissioned, and it’s armed with the most effective offensive and defensive weaponry on the planet.
“It has the radar signature of a sailboat, making it completely invisible to radar outside a thousand yards. With its new bow design, it can cut through the water at thirty-five knots in complete silence, and it can sprint up to the equivalent of fifty-eight miles an hour. We won’t be able to find her, much less target her without a dedicated satellite visual, and that’s only if we know exactly where to look. And I’m told all Pac-Fleet space assets are locked down tight.”
“I know all this, Admiral.” Grainger licked his lips.
Admiral Montmarkle nodded. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Koll nodded. “McGrath controls all military space assets,” he said.
The admiral shook her head. “So he really is working with the American Terrorist.”
Grainger nodded. “There’s no way Johnson could have hijacked that ship without highly classified intel and computer codes from someone like Aaron McGrath.”
“Goddamnit, Grainger!”
“We’re launching a civilian bird from New Mexico within the hour. In two hours, it’ll be over the sector of the Pacific where we think that ship might be.”
The admiral shook her head. “It will take half the armament of my entire fleet to take that ship out, and that’s if she only plays a defensive game. If the American Terrorist has control of that ship, there’s no way he won’t go offensive. A lot of people are going to die. Do you fully understand that?”
“You have your assignment, Admiral. I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake. The president is on that ship. Find it and kill it. Kill her.”
“Easier said than done.”
Chapter 34
The president’s helicopter skimmed just above the waves two hundred miles out to sea, but she was not on board.
President Mallory and her pilot had ejected from the fighter jet that whisked her away from the DC assassination attempt. The jet dipped below radar coverage in the hills of western Oklahoma just as the engines sputtered on empty fuel tanks, and they’d bailed out. The
y’d been safely retrieved, and Mallory was sealed in a cargo container headed straight west on I-40 to Los Angeles, on a cargo truck that looked like any other on the highway. Randal’s overlapping very fine copper mesh screens were mounted to the inner walls of the container and grounded to the eighteen-wheeler’s metal chassis.
The heavy-lift helicopter met them a hundred miles outside of Los Angeles at an abandoned pullout two miles north of I-40, near Barstow. It lifted the cargo container for the four-hundred-mile trip over land and water, staying low partly to avoid radar detection and partly because the cargo was too heavy to maintain any significant altitude.
…and the president was still in that box!
The pilot hollered into the open bay. “We have five minutes of fuel remaining, sir! There’s no sign of the ship!”
Carl had been stewing on the flaw in his plan for over an hour, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Three hours and fifty-five minutes into the four-hour maximum flight time of the heavily laden chopper, they were well past the point of no return. But that was not the problem Carl had discovered. It was a problem no one had anticipated—not Carl; not Aaron McGrath; not Randal Cunningham, the brilliant Thinking Machine; nor any of the mercs or the helicopter pilots.
The president had to stay inside the container to remain undetected. McGrath had a stranglehold on all military satellites, but there was no guarantee that a civilian satellite hadn’t been modified with sensors to detect the isotope in Mallory’s blood and launched from California.
According to McGrath seventeen hours ago, a carrier strike group from the Third Fleet had been moving south, no doubt to engage Carl’s several estates, so Grainger Koll had at least fallen for that part of the head fake. But that was yesterday. Atlas had to know by now that the hijacking of the navy’s newest guided missile destroyer was connected to Carl and the president. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the obvious.
Find the ship and you find the president.
But the Kolls couldn’t be sure the president was onboard. They wouldn’t be certain it wasn’t another head fake, and Carl was counting on that. They couldn’t order CSG9 or any other military unit to fire on another warship without that certainty of knowledge. That would buy them valuable time for the isotope in Mallory’s blood to become undetectable…if they could get the president onto and deep inside the USS Kestrel Andrus without exposing her to probing satellites. Randal had come up with an ingenious plan to do that, but now that plan was moot.
Carl assumed all along his deception would be temporary. The Kolls had had over twelve hours to figure out his plan, so he had zero doubt that an enemy satellite was now in a geostationary orbit overhead. It might not be directly overhead, but it was certainly high enough to see the entire parcel of water that the destroyer could have traversed. They probably had the destroyer’s position already. They might even have the helicopter’s position too.
But that wasn’t the critical problem. The cargo container wasn’t watertight, and nobody had thought about the possibility of dropping the box in the drink. Now, as the helicopter flew on its last drops of fuel, Carl realized if they had to land in the water, the cargo container holding the president would sink like a rock. They wouldn’t be able to get her out in time. Even if they did, she’d be visible to sensors searching for her isotope.
Carl sat uncomfortably in the spacious cabin of the helicopter, still fully outfitted in his armor and ready for instant combat, even after almost four hours of flight time. Except for the two pilots, he was the only person aboard, so he tried to clear his mind. He found himself thinking about Agent Palmer. She’d had sky blue eyes that could either provide comfort or pierce one’s soul. He’d been on the receiving end of both emotions. Still, when she smiled or laughed, her nose crinkled up like a little girl. Now she was gone forever, snatched away like his son. He tried to compartmentalize the event like she’d coached him months ago, but in truth, he was emotionally unprepared for the loss. Now, without the stealth destroyer, he was going to lose the president too.
So this is how it ends, Carl thought. Out in the middle of the goddamn ocean.
The copilot hollered again. “Visibility is only a couple miles because we’re on the deck. If we climb, we can see farther, but that’ll cut our remaining flight time in half.”
Carl stepped forward to the cockpit. “Tighten your sphincters, guys, and continue with the plan. The ship will either be there or it won’t, and there’s nothing we can do about that. Besides, McGrath says the damn thing’s painted the color of the ocean specifically so it can’t be seen until it’s right on top of you, kicking your ass.”
He put his mind to work on stripping out of his armor with one minute of fuel remaining, jumping out of the helicopter, and swimming to the cargo container to get the president out while the chopper hovered high enough to keep the box from sinking. And as soon as he opened the box, the bad guys would arrive within an hour with a bomber or a missile or a SEAL team. And that would be that.
“Flare, nine o’clock!” hollered the pilot.
Carl looked out the open port door and saw a red flare arching high in the air. Then it drifted downward. The helicopter banked sharply and headed toward…something.
He hardly saw the vessel until it was only a mile away. It looked nothing like any destroyer he’d ever seen. Its wake and bow wave were almost nonexistent, though the vessel grew so rapidly in size it had to be moving at great speed. Instead of its bow rising forward out of the water, the front of the vessel looked more like a submarine. Its bow raked severely back from the waterline, up to the main deck. There were no masts or deck guns or radio antennae or rotating radar dishes on the deck. The superstructure had angled sides and was built low to the deck. All the normal radar-reflecting elements on deck had to be housed inside that angled superstructure.
The panels of the ship seemed to reflect the color of the sky and the water, which, Carl knew, was why they hadn’t seen the ship until it was close. He wondered how tiny the vessel’s radar cross section would be with all those angled panels reflecting radar signals in every direction except back toward searchers.
The copilot rushed into the cabin. From the bulkhead over the door, he unhitched a rolled-up cable ladder and tossed it out.
“If they do an emergency stop right under us, we can drop the container on the aft deck.”
Perfect, Carl thought. Then she can step into the mesh suit Randal designed and walk right into the destroyer, grounded and undetected. Carl reached to strip out of his restrictive armor, but the co-pilot shoved him toward the open door.
“No time for that, sir. Out you go!”
Halfway down the cable ladder Carl saw the water behind the destroyer roil as the vessel slowed quickly, almost to a complete stop under the helicopter. The cargo container thumped down on the deck, completely missing the landing circle and, in fact, landing almost halfway over the edge of the ship.
The helicopter’s engine stalled two seconds later.
Dangling beneath the chopper, Carl let go and tumbled across the top of the cargo box.
The chopper fell right behind Carl, smashing the president’s container.
Chapter 35
Lenore Cummings wavered unsteadily on her feet and tried to make sense of what had happened. She reached out for something, anything, to stabilize the dizziness. She grabbed a slender branch of a sage bush on the bank of the gully’s slow-moving stream, but it broke off in her grasp and she fell to her knees in the water.
She looked around but couldn’t see more than a few feet around her. Smoke and dust filled the air, its swirling giving life to the normally invisible air currents that wafted through the forty-foot gully. Her fingers clenched the muddy bottom of the ice-cold stream flowing around her hands and knees. She recognized she was in shock, so tried to steady her breathing while mentally inventorying her body for injury.
Lenore recalled multiple cruise missiles. Atlas wasn’t messing around. T
hey wanted Carl’s people dead, no two ways about it. She recalled the tablet view of the attack.
The sonic detector had heard the first missile and the intercept radar immediately went active. Their defenses destroyed the first inbound cruise missile, and the radar and the launcher had immediately been destroyed by Atlas’s drone missiles. Through the tablet, Merc Sixteen had manually commanded their second antimissile battery located by the Twin Otter plane to destroy the drone, and the second cruise missile was neutralized less than a quarter mile away. But Atlas also had a backup, a second antimissile drone that made quick work of the second battery. Then, the high-explosive warhead on the third cruise missile had detonated directly over the cabin. The blast had scraped everything from the earth for two hundred feet in all directions.
It was a glorious air battle, Lenore recalled, and both sides had brought their A-game. Still, Lenore’s team fought remotely, safely protected in the underground concrete bunker. They barely felt the ground tremble.
Merc Sixteen had wired dozens of tiny sensors and cameras so they could monitor Atlas’s ground progress through the tablet. Most of the devices were destroyed in the blast, but three remained active. He had also set up buried proximity explosives and camouflaged claymores outside the estimated blast range of a cruise missile for the impending ground game.
Lenore recalled watching those hidden explosives claim six Atlas troops in the first wave. More troops, over twenty, had converged around the now-cleared foundation of the cabin and easily found the stairway to the bunker. Four more Atlas troops had been consumed in the stairwell trap. A fifth, who squatted at ground level waiting to lead three more men down into the bunker, had his head neatly cleaved from his body by a piece of shrapnel that blasted out of the stairwell.
Lenore got to her feet and gazed around in the swirling smoke. She saw shadows moving slowly, randomly through the smoke—maybe human, maybe friendly, maybe hostile, maybe hallucinations. Everything she heard was garbled and distant, like at the end of a long tunnel filled with cotton, like her eardrums had been…
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