For now, his radar scope was empty of aircraft not flashing the allies’ IFF beacons. He knew that one of the planes up there with him was the E-2D Hawkeye AWACS, with its big radar dome on its back like the shell of a turtle. It gave those flying CAP a massive advantage in range over any other aircraft in the theater. He’d see an approaching Chinese fighter not long after it left the mainland.
“Stinger Eleven, over.” It was a call from operations. On this sortie he was Stinger 11 and his wingman Stinger 12.
“Eleven, over.”
“Eleven, be advised we have a delay on Twelve, over.”
“Roger that.”
A problem with the catapult most likely was causing the delay. They would need to either fix it quick or hook Stinger 12 onto another cat. Either way, Slider didn’t mind having the skies all to himself.
Though he had at his fingertips electronics that allowed him to see the virtual world for more than a hundred miles, Slider kept his head on a swivel, always looking around, scanning the instruments, looking at each section of sky, making sure someone wasn’t hiding in the sun or behind him in a blind spot. He knew the Chinese were developing stealth technology, and if this turned out to be the Big Show — and the intel weenies said it might just be — then the People’s Air Force would deploy their best toys. He searched for an aircraft his sensors might miss with unwavering vigilance.
Damn, he thought, I love my job.
And then he didn’t.
Without warning, the F-18 yawed hard to starboard and dove for the earth. He’d been cruising at six hundred knots, well below the plane’s maximum speed of Mach 1.8. The Super Hornet shattered the sound barrier even before Slider responded to the yaw. No matter what he did to the stick, the plane remained in a nose-down position, and chopping the throttles had no effect on his speed.
G-forces built, and his pressure suit constricted his legs and abdomen in an attempt to keep blood from pooling in his lower extremities. Still, his vision grayed. A god-awful shriek filled his head. The altimeter unwound in a blur.
“Mayday, Mayday. Stinger Eleven,” he gasped over the radio.
He couldn’t wait for a response from the Stennis. He had to punch out now.
Slider pulled the handle for his ejection seat, and though the system had been hardened against EMP, the amount of magnetism slamming the airframe was simply too much for the hardware/software interface of the seat’s sequencer. Not that it would have mattered. The shock of ejecting out of an aircraft hurtling toward the ground at twelve hundred knots would have killed Slider instantly.
He shouted as the ocean filled his field of vision. The plane shuddered. The engines were throttled back to zero, and still the F-18 raced earthward, accelerating all the way. The forces acting on the plane went beyond its design parameters, and chunks of its aluminum skin began to tear away. It started spiraling, shedding more of itself. A whole wing ripped free.
Slider mercifully lost consciousness.
The Super Hornet arrowed into the cool waters of the East China Sea with a surprisingly small splash, like a well-executed dive off the high board. The remaining wing and tail fins came off with impact while the streamlined fuselage plummeted a hundred feet mere seconds after impact on momentum alone.
All this had been recorded by the Stennis’s circling AWACS plane. They had seen the fighter’s dramatic flip and quick plunge to the ocean. The controller had tried calling the stricken plane but received no response. The crash was strange on many levels. Normally, if something catastrophic happened to an aircraft, it slowed, and yet Stinger 11 had sped up. It made no sense.
What would have made less sense was if there had been an actual eyewitness to the crash. Because they wouldn’t have seen a thing. One second, a high-performance plane was flying high overhead and, the next, it had vanished as if it had never been there at all. Its snowy white contrail of water vapor streaked across the sky in a straight line, then ended abruptly, as though it had been erased by the hand of God.
The USS John C. Stennis was some sixty miles away from the spot the F-18 went down, and steaming hard.
* * *
“What just happened?” Max stood behind Cabrillo in the op center. Eric was at the helm, Murph at the weapons station, and Hali and Linda manned communications and the sensor suite. They had all watched the jet crash on radar.
“They screwed up,” Juan replied, a fighter’s gleam in his eye.
“The Chinese’s stealth ship.”
“It looks like the plane experienced the same magnetic pull we felt when we took out Kenin’s first stealth ship. The Chinese are too far out from the Stennis, and this crash means the area will be crawling with rescue choppers and one of the battle group’s ancillary ships.”
“Meaning, he’s going to have to bug out.”
“Stoney, why aren’t we headed to the crash?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.
The incident occurred well within the search box the Chairman had deduced. The only problem was, they had been caught out while patrolling the far edge, nearly fifty miles from where the plane went down.
“On it,” Stone said, and the ship came about and the cryopumps began to scream.
Juan now had to second-guess the captain of the Chinese stealth ship once again, and he was beginning to regret an earlier decision. He hadn’t passed the data stick of information from the car carrier to Eric and Mark because he knew the two of them would have spent the night poring over it and he needed them fresh. Now he realized he needed to know a lot more about his adversary’s capabilities.
He called down to the butler’s pantry off the galley, “Maurice, it’s Cabrillo. I need you to do me a favor.”
The Englishman replied, “I assure you, Captain, that anything I do for you is surely not a favor. You pay me handsomely for my services.”
“Fair enough,” Juan replied. “In the middle drawer of my desk is a thumb drive. Could you please plug it into my computer?”
Eric and Mark both looked at him like a couple of dogs eyeing a T-bone. They had not been happy with Cabrillo’s earlier decision and now they couldn’t wait to get a look at what they’d gotten.
A minute later, the information had been fed into the mainframe, translated into English, and the two of them were glued to a pair of tablet computers.
Juan still had to make a call about where the stealth ship would reposition itself for another run on the carrier.
Linda broke his silent musings. “Looks like a rescue chopper just launched off the Stennis. And one of the screening destroyers is breaking formation to investigate.”
Cabrillo also knew that the U.S. Navy wasn’t going to like the Oregon’s presence here. In fact, he fully expected to be told to leave, especially now they had lost one of their fighters. The old tramp steamer was the one wild card the Chinese captain didn’t know was in the deck. He would have studied American naval tactics and doctrine and could anticipate responses to just about any scenario. But he didn’t know the Corporation was gunning for him. Juan had to find a way to exploit that advantage.
“You’re right about him screwing up,” Eric said, looking up from his tablet. “When the magnetic field is activated, they lose their radar. With the jet flying in the clouds, they never knew it was inbound.”
“How big of a field can they put up?” Cabrillo asked. “What’s its range?”
“I’m reading that section,” Murph said. “I need a little more time. There is some seriously funky math going on here.”
He tilted his tablet so Eric could get a look, and soon they were whispering about gauss levels, angles of incidence, and terawattage. It was Greek to the rest of the crew.
Given the weather and lousy visibility, the Chinese stealth ship would only need to move a couple of miles away from the crash site to hide. It wouldn’t need its magnetic screen at all, not until it made another attempt on the Stennis. Juan wondered if they wouldn’t want to give themselves a bigger cushion. An Arleigh Burke — class destroyer had some
of the most powerful radar systems deployed on any ship in the world. How much did the Chinese trust their vessel’s stealth capabilities? Were a couple of miles enough or would they back farther away?
If he were the Chinese captain, he’d give himself plenty of sea room and wait for another opportunity. They were still almost three hundred miles from the islands and at least two hundred from where the carrier battle group would position itself.
Cabrillo made up his mind. “Mr. Stone, take us another two points port, if you please.”
“Think he’s bugging out?” Max asked, his unlit pipe between his teeth.
“Out, no. Off a little, yes. He’s going to zig northeast and then zag southeast to get back into interception position.”
They were eavesdropping in on the Navy’s rescue attempt. A Seahawk helicopter was over the area where the Super Hornet had augured into the sea twenty minutes after the event, but then the Oregon received a direct call.
“Attention to the ship at”—the female voice rattled off the Oregon’s exact longitude and latitude down to the second—“you are about to enter a restricted military zone. Please be advised to alter your course.”
Before Juan could reply, Linda informed him that one of the patrolling jets had broken off its CAP and was headed their way.
“How long till he’s here?”
“About three minutes. The honchos gave him permission to light the fires. His airspeed’s close to a thousand knots.”
The inbound Hornet would need to drop out of the clouds for a visual and that meant he’d have to slow down also. That bought another couple of minutes. The Oregon was traveling at a hair over forty knots. That, in and of itself, was unusual. But that kind of speed from a broken-down rust bucket like her would raise even more hackles. He could bluff his way with the destroyer, since they were only looking at a radar return. Once the jet had eyes on them, the cat was out of the bag. Juan needed to slow, but he needed the speed in order to catch the stealth ship.
“It’s variable,” Mark Murphy said.
“What?” Juan asked him irritably. He didn’t need the distraction.
“The magnetic field. It’s variable up to fifteen miles, but, at that range, the ship is still invisible — well, mostly — but the sheering forces we experienced after rescuing Linda are negligible.”
“Is the ship armed at all?”
“Not as far as I can tell, but there’s a mountain of info here, and we’re just scratching at the foothills.”
Cabrillo didn’t think it would be armed. The magnetic field was the weapon and to work effectively it needed to get in close.
“‘Foothills of data’?” Max scoffed. “Wordsmith, you are not.”
Cabrillo was about to answer the radio hail when the woman’s voice filled the op center for a second time. “Unidentified vessel, this is the USS Ross. We are a guided missile destroyer and you are entering a restricted military area. Turn back at once or we will take steps to compel you to leave this region. Do you copy?”
Juan knew this was mostly bluff. They were still a good distance from the carrier, although the Ross might be protecting the crash site as well as the Stennis. Either way, they were still a long way from resorting to any kind of violent confrontation.
“Chairman,” Linda cried, “they just launched two more planes and they’re vectoring on our position.”
The Navy was reacting a lot more aggressively than he’d anticipated. No doubt those two planes would be armed with antiship missiles, probably Harpoons. He keyed his mic. “USS Ross, this is Captain Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo of the Oregon. Please repeat.”
Cabrillo didn’t know how to handle this. He doubted he could talk his way into letting them pass, but he didn’t think telling the truth would get him much either.
“You are about to enter a restricted military exclusion zone. You must turn at least ninety degrees from your current heading.”
“That F-18 is going to be here in about thirty seconds,” Linda informed him.
They still had miles to go before reaching where he thought the stealth ship would be hiding. It suddenly occurred to him that the ship had cloaked itself prematurely because its crew knew an American spy satellite was passing overhead. The new generation had no problem peering down from the heavens through cloud cover as dense as what they had hovering over them now. So the Chinese knew they would be spotted and had to cloak to avoid detection.
“Radar lock!” Mark Murphy called out.
“The Ross?”
“No. The first inbound fighter.”
Juan cursed. He’d been relying on the American reluctance to shoot first and ask questions later. Having the F-18 lock on weapons was no bluff, since a civilian ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. They either thought the Oregon was a Chinese warship or they didn’t care if they sank a civilian.
The mast camera zoomed in on a speck dropping out of the swollen sky that grew into the sleek fighter. She was just below the speed of sound, so her roar enveloped the ship a few seconds before the jet streaked over low enough that even down in the op center they could feel it.
“This is Viper Seven.” The Oregon’s onboard computer decrypted the transmissions so quickly, it was almost like listening to the pilot in real time. “It’s not a warship but some old rust bucket freighter.”
“Our radar shows it doing forty knots,” the flight controller countered.
“It’s not lying,” the pilot called back. “She’s showing a huge wake and has one hell of a bone in her teeth.”
“Oregon, this is the USS Ross. Come about immediately. This is your final warning.”
“Linda, how far out are those other jets?”
“Five minutes.”
“Viper Seven,” said the air controller. “You are weapons free. Put a burst over her bows. That’ll show these idiots we’re serious.”
“Wepps,” Juan called to Mark Murphy, “stand down.”
“Roger that.”
He knew Murph wouldn’t respond to the upcoming strafe, but he couldn’t help but give the order anyway.
The F-18 had already executed a tight turn and was on her way back when the order to fire came in. The pilot altered his course slightly so the plane would pass just ahead of the ship rather than over her bridge. At a half mile out, he toggled the six-barrel 20mm cannon in the Hornet’s nose and unleashed a string of slugs that came so close to the old freighter’s prow — the last two singed paint. He hit afterburners and screamed past in an angry display of military might.
They couldn’t afford to play chicken any longer. “USS Ross, this is the Oregon. Please do not fire again.” Juan went for broke. “Listen to me very carefully. There is a Chinese stealth warship in these waters. It used a modified EMP weapon to take down your plane.” He wasn’t going to try to explain it was invisible.
“Our aircraft are hardened against EMP weapons,” the woman aboard the destroyer responded. “We will consider it a provocation if you continue on this course. Come about now or we will disable your ship.”
Cabrillo grew desperate. “Ross, I beg you. Do not fire. You have a real enemy out here who is trying to sink the Stennis.”
The woman — Juan guessed she wasn’t the captain but probably the Ross’s XO — came back, wariness in her voice. “What do you know about the Stennis?”
“I know that she’s about to be targeted by the same weapon that downed your jet.”
“I will give you one last fair warning to turn your ship about or the next time we fire it won’t be for effect.”
Resigned to his fate, Cabrillo replied, “As Pat Benatar so famously sang, ‘Hit me with your best shot.’”
“I get it now,” Hali said.
“Why is the Navy being so aggressive? Would have been nice if Overholt had called to let us know,” Max said dourly.
“Damn.” Juan fished his cell from his back pocket and speed-dialed Overholt. With a little luck, he could get the Navy to back off this confrontation. The F-18 finished
its turn and poured on the speed. She was coming hard, charging like a monster, but Juan knew this was a feint since the carrier hadn’t given the order to open fire.
The phone rang a fourth time and went to voice mail. Overholt was like a teenage girl when it came to his cell. He was never without it and rarely in a place where he couldn’t access a signal. Odd that he hadn’t picked up.
“Lang, it’s Juan,” Cabrillo said after the beep. “I need you to call me ASAP. The Navy wants to turn the Oregon into Swiss cheese.”
The Super Hornet flew over the Oregon from stern to stem, flying low enough that the noise and vibration and the brutality of her jet exhaust shattered all the bridge windows in a cascade of shards that would have injured anyone who’d been up there.
“This is Viper Seven. I just blew out their bridge windows with my exhaust. That’ll turn ’em.”
“Roger that, Viper Seven, but get into position for a real strafing run if this suicidal fool doesn’t turn. Guns only.”
“Turning now. And I’m carrying air-to-air, not air-to-surface, so my missiles wouldn’t do squat against a ship this big.”
Juan studied the radar plot showing up on the main screen. The two additional fighters off the Stennis were loitering about twenty miles away, but their missiles could cover that distance in seconds.
“Captain Cabrillo of the Oregon, this is Commander Michelle O’Connell of the USS Ross. Will you turn about now?”
Juan didn’t respond. Let them think they’d killed everyone on the bridge. It would take the crew a few minutes to organize a new watch. That would buy more time.
“Ross to Oregon, do you read me?” O’Connell asked. There was a hint of concern in her voice. “Is there anyone there? This is the USS Ross calling the freighter Oregon.”
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