End Game

by Dale Brown

  Stewart put her forefinger on the release button and pushed. A control buoy spun out of the rear fuselage, deploying from a special compartment behind the bomb bay, added to the planes after the Piranha had become part of the Dreamland tool set.

  “ECMs,” said Breanna. “I’ll take the chaff.”

  Stewart realized she’d forgotten the stinking ECMs. They should have already been fuzzing the airwaves.

  “I’m trying, I’m trying,” she said, hands fumbling against the controls.

  MACK JERKED THE LITTLE FLIGHTHAWK TO THE WEST, LEAVING a trail of fire and tinsel behind him. He tucked the plane into a roll and then put its nose down, flying it so hard that the tail threatened to pull over on him in a cartwheel. The Flighthawk didn’t peep about it, merely trying to keep up with the dictates of the control stick.

  The J-13s were racing toward him, wondering what was going on.

  If he pushed the nose of the fighter down right now, and slammed the aircraft exactly ninety degrees due east, slammed max power and went for broke, he could take a shot at one of the Chinese planes. If he timed it properly—and if C3 worked out the angle right—he would slash the fighter across its wings.

  This was not the sort of attack you’d make in an F-15. For one thing, you’d never get close enough to use your guns. For another, the g forces as you changed direction to bring the attack would slam you so hard you’d have to struggle to keep your head clear. And…

  Mack remembered something Cantor had told him during their sortie over the Gulf of Aden: You’re not flying an F-15. He felt a twinge of anger, and then, far worse, embarrassment.

  The punk kid was right. If he really wanted to fly the stinking Flighthawk, he would have to forget everything he knew about flying F-15s or anything other than the Flighthawk. He was going to have to live with its limits—and take advantage of its assets.

  And, umpteen kills to his credit or not, he was going to have to face the fact that he had a lot to learn. He was a newbie when it came to the Flighthawk.

  “No more F-15s,” he told the plane. “Just U/MF-3s.”

  “Repeat command,” answered the flight computer.

  “It’s you and me, babe. Just you and me.”

  BREANNA JERKED THE MEGAFORTRESS BACK AND FORTH across the water, shimmying and shaking as if she thought she was being followed by an SA-6 antiair missile. Finally she eased up, putting the plane into a banking climb and heading back to the west.

  “English, how are we looking?” she said to the ensign.

  “Buoy is good. I have control.”

  “Great.”

  “But…”

  “But?”

  “I have a contact at long range, submerged, unknown source. There’s another sub out there,” explained English. “Except that the sound profile doesn’t match anything I know. Which is almost impossible.”

  “Did the Chinese sub launch a decoy?”

  “We would have caught that. It’s not a known Pakistani sub either. I’d like to follow it, but I can’t watch the Chinese submarine and this at the same time.”

  “Stand by,” Breanna told her. “I’ll talk to Captain Gale.”

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  in the northern Arabian Sea

  0301

  STORM STUDIED THE HOLOGRAM. THE CHINESE AIRCRAFT carrier Deng Xiaoping and the Indian carrier Shiva were pointing their bows at each other, boxers jutting out their chins and daring their opponent to start something. The Indian carrier had eight planes in the air, along with two ASW; antisubmarine helicopters. The Chinese had twelve planes up, plus two helicopters supplying long-range radar and three on ASW duty.

  Two destroyers and one frigate accompanied the Chinese vessel, along with a submarine being tracked by Dreamland’s Piranha. The Indians had one destroyer, an old frigate, and two coastal corvettes, which were a little smaller than frigates but were packed with ship-to-ship missiles. The edge went to the Chinese, whose gear was newer and, though largely untested, probably more potent. But at a range of fifty miles, where both task forces could rely on antiship missiles as well as their aircraft, the battle would be ferocious.

  And if both navies were to turn on him, rather than each other?

  The problem would not be hitting them—he was thirty-five miles to the west of the two carriers, well within range of his Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles; the ship-to-air SM-2 missiles, packed in a Vertical Launching System at the forward deck, could take down an airplane at roughly ninety miles and hit a ship at the same distance. The problem was that there were simply too many targets—the Abner Read had only sixteen vertical launch tubes on her forward deck, and while they could be loaded with torpedoes, antiair or antiship missiles, the weapons mix had to be preselected before battle. Reloading was a laborious undertaking and could not be done during a fight.

  Storm had eight Harpoons and eight antiaircraft missiles loaded.

  Precisely how many missiles it would take to sink either of the carriers was a matter of immense debate and countless computer simulations. According to the intel experts back at the Pentagon, precise hits by four Harpoons should be enough to disable the Indian carrier; the Chinese ship could be crippled with three. In neither case would the ships be sunk—the Indian vessel was known to have been up-armored at the waterline—but the hits would disable enough of their systems to take them out of a battle and leave them highly vulnerable to a second round of attacks to take them to the bottom.

  None of the so-called experts had been in battle, however; Storm had, and he suspected their estimates were optimistic. Two months ago it had taken four Harpoons to sink an old Russian amphibious warfare ship that had light defenses and no appreciable armor. Storm and his officers had concluded that it would take at least six very well-placed missile hits to permanently disable either one of the vessels. The real question was how many missiles it would take to get six hits. The answer depended not only on the proficiency of the people firing the missiles and the defenses they faced, but sheer luck. The intel officer threw around some fancy mathematics he called regression analysis and claimed that seven launches would yield six hits, but Storm knew he was just guessing like everyone else.

  Missiles were not the Abner Read’s only weapon. Storm could use his below-waterline tubes to fire torpedoes at a submarine, and his 155mm gun to hit a surface ship that came within twenty-two miles. His accompanying Sharkboat had four Harpoons and a much more limited 25mm gun. And then there were the Megafortresses…

  “Tac to bridge—Storm, Dreamland Levitow needs to talk to you right away. Piranha’s picked up another submarine contact.”

  Storm hit the switch on his belt and opened the com channel. “Talk to me, Dreamland.”

  “The Piranha operator has an unknown contact near Karachi,” said Breanna Stockard. “I’m going to let her fill you in.”

  “Do it.”

  Another voice came on the line—Ensign Gloria English, who’d been assigned to wipe the Dreamland team’s noses.

  “Captain Gale, we have an unknown contact near the Karachi port, two miles south of the oil terminal. It appears to be headed toward shore. I can’t follow it and the Chinese submarine at the same time.”

  “It’s going toward shore?”

  “Affirmative. I’m going to punch in the coordinates through the shared-information system. They should be there—now.”

  Storm looked at the holographic table. A small yellow dot appeared near the coast, roughly twenty miles from the Chinese submarine. Given the direction it was heading, he knew it might be a Pakistani vessel.

  Or an Indian boat preparing an attack?

  It seemed too far for that.

  “Ensign English—what sort of submarine is it?” asked Storm.

  “Sir, I can only tell you what it isn’t. It’s not a Kilo boat, it’s not anything the Pakistanis have, at least that we know of. Same with the Indians.”

  “You’re sure it’s not Indian?”

  “I tried matching against German T
ype 209s, Kilos, and Foxtrots,” she said, naming the three types of submarines in the Indian fleet. “No match. I even tried comparing the profile to the Italian CE-f/X1000s. Nada.”

  “Help me out here, Ensign. What are those Italian boats?”

  “Two-man special forces craft, submersibles. They only have a range of twenty-five miles, but I thought I better be sure. I checked comparable Russian craft as well.”

  Was this the boat that had launched the torpedo at the Indian destroyer and taken the special forces teams in and out of Port Somalia?

  If so, it was a Pakistani vessel, returning to port.

  Not port, exactly. Storm looked at the hologram. There was no submarine docking area anywhere near Karachi.

  That he knew about. Which made the sub worth following.

  But if Piranha turned off, he’d lose track of the Chinese submarine. That might put his own ship in danger; it was out of range of his sonar array.

  It had to be a Pakistani sub. In the end, English would be wasting her time following it—he couldn’t do anything about the Paks.

  “Stay with the Chinese Kilo. That has to be your priority,” Storm told her. “Get as much data on this as you can. We’ll want to look into it.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Storm hit the switch on his com unit, tapping the small buttons to contact Colonel Bastian.

  “Bastian, this is Storm,” he said when the colonel’s face appeared on the bridge communications screen. “Piranha has an unidentified contact near Karachi. It can’t stay with it. But I’d like to figure out just what the hell it is.”

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  “Since your Megafortress can’t be in two places at the same time, I want you to get another one out there. The sub will have to surface soon, and you can catch it on your radar.”

  “Can’t do that, Storm. We’re on a very tight rotation as it is. If you want coverage—”

  “Damn it, Bastian. Find a way to make it happen.” He killed the connection with an angry slap at the control unit.

  Karachi oil terminal

  0305

  CAPTAIN SATTARI LOOPED THE WIRE FROM THE EXPLOSIVE pack around the terminals, then strung it across the metal girder to the base of the stanchion below the massive tank. The explosives were rigged to ignite the collector unit at the Karachi oil terminal complex. Designed to capture fumes from the storage tanks and prevent them from leaking into the environment, the system was the terminal’s weak link—blow it up, and the resulting backforce would rip through the pipes and cause fires and explosions in the storage tanks themselves.

  Or at least the engineer who had analyzed the terminal believed that to be the case.

  Sattari climbed over the long concrete barrier, letting the wire roll out of its spool as he went. He could feel the sweat pouring down his back and the sides of his body. He welcomed it—the poison was running from his body, the poison of fear.

  The terminal consisted of several different tank farms, connected by a vast network of piping. Three different docks were used by ships loading and unloading. The gas collection system was at the extreme eastern end, located on a man-made pennisula with a rock jetty that extended to the sea.

  The team’s demolition expert waited near the rocks. Sattari was glad to find he was not the last man to bring back the wire; two more men had yet to report back. He held up the wire for the man’s cutters.

  “Thank you, Captain,” said the man, quickly stripping the strands and attaching them to his unit.

  There were backup timers on each of the explosives, all set for the same time, but to do maximum damage to the tanks the explosives all had to go off at once, and the best way to guarantee that was by igniting them together. The signal would be received here by short-range radio, then instantly transmitted to the units.

  Sergeant Ibn climbed up over the nearby rocks. “The next to last boat is leaving,” he told the captain. “You should go.”

  “No,” said Sattari. “Two more men.”

  “Captain.” The rocks were covered in shadow, but even in the dim light Sattari knew that his captain was looking at him reproachfully. “You should be back aboard the submarine, sir. I will wait for them.”

  “Thank you, but I will not leave my men,” said Sattari. “We will come when we have ignited the tanks.”

  “Very good, Captain. Very good.”

  Ibn put his hand to his head and snapped off a salute. How much had changed in just a few short days; the aches and bruises, the sweat, even the fear, they were all worth it.

  Sattari returned the salute, then turned back to look for the others.

  Aboard the Shiva,

  northern Arabian Sea

  0310

  MEMON FELT HIS CHEST CATCH AS HE READ THE MESSAGE:

  WITHDRAW TO 24° 00' 00". DO NOT PROVOKE THE CHINESE.

  —ADM. SKANDAR

  He handed the message to Captain Adri, who smirked but said nothing before giving the paper back to Admiral Kala.

  “We will recover the aircraft,” the admiral said in a tone that suggested he was talking to himself rather than giving orders. “Then we will sail south, and farther out to sea.”

  “We’ve been cheated,” said Memon as the others went silently to their tasks.

  Drigh Road

  0312

  “HEY, COLONEL, WHAT CAN WE DO FOR YOU?” SAID DANNY Freah, rubbing his eyes as he sat down in front of the communications console in the Dreamland Command trailer. Sergeant Rockland, known as Boston, was on duty as the communications specialist. He walked to the other end of the trailer and began making some fresh coffee.

  “Sorry to wake you up, Danny,” said Dog, talking from the Wisconsin. “But Piranha has an odd submarine contact near the Karachi port. Storm thinks it may be his mysterious submarine and he wants to see where it surfaces. If it surfaces.”

  “You want me to take Whiplash Osprey up and reconnoiter?”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

  “Question—do I tell the Pakistanis what I’m up to?”

  “No. He thinks this is their submarine, the same one that attacked the Calcutta. Run it as a training mission.”

  “Will do.” Danny got up from the console. “Yo, Boston—go wake up Pretty Boy.”

  “Action, Cap?”

  “Not really. Just a midnight joy ride. But it’ll have to do for now. Roust the Osprey crew on your way.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, DANNY, BOSTON, AND SERGEANT Jack “Pretty Boy” Floyd peered from the side windows of Dreamland’s MV-22 Osprey, using their Mk1 eyeballs to augment the craft’s search and air rescue radar and infrared sensors. They were less than fifty feet above the churning gray waves, heading south toward the spot where the Piranha had lost contact with the vessel.

  “Gotta be an underwater cave, Cap,” said Boston. “I say we dive in and find the sucker.”

  “Go for it,” said Pretty Boy. “That water’s a stinking sewer.”

  “You comin’ with me, dude,” joshed Boston. “You my swimmin’ buddy.”

  Danny peered out the window, using the night-vision gear embedded in his smart helmet to look at the shoreline. There was a small marina just ahead; pleasure boats bobbed at their moorings. Beyond them a channel led to a set of docks used by container ships. A little farther south sat a large oil terminal, where tankers unloaded their cargo.

  It seemed to him this would be a particularly bad place to hide a submarine base. While an enemy might not look for it here, there were so many small boats and commercial vessels that someone was bound to stumble across you sooner or later.

  “Whiplash leader to Levitow. Bree, can you spare me some attention?”

  “What do you need?”

  “Punch me through to Ensign English, would you? I want to pick her brain for a second.”

  “Stand by.”

  “English here.”

  “Ensign, this is Danny Freah. Help me out here—why do we think this submarine is Pakistani?”<
br />
  “We’re not really sure. The only thing we know is that it’s not similar to known submarines operating in any fleet nearby, nor a Russian or American, for that matter. It could be anyone’s.”

  “How about a special operations craft?”

  “Possible, Captain. I wouldn’t rule anything out. It may even be a noisemaker.”

  Before Danny could thank her, the aircraft was buffeted by a shock wave.

  “Holy shit!” yelled Boston. “Something just blew up half of Karachi!”

  V

  Fires of Hell

  Northern Arabian Sea,

  offshore of the Karachi oil terminal

  13 January 1998

  0312

  THE EXPLOSION WAS SO IMMENSE THAT IT BLEW ONE OF THE men into Captain Sattari, and they tumbled backward into the water. Sattari found himself on his back under the waves, surrounded by darkness. He tried to push himself upright but was paralyzed.

  I’m going to die, he thought.

  Rather than panic, the idea filled him with a kind of peace. He felt his arms and legs relax; he thought of his triumph now, another mission executed with complete precision.

  Then he felt himself being pulled upward. One of his men had grabbed him and was hauling him out of the water.

  The man who had fallen on top of him struggled to his knees as Sattari coughed the water from his lungs.

  “The boat, Captain,” said his man. “Into the boat.”

  Sattari pushed himself in the direction of the raft. He found one of the gunwales with his hand and flopped forward, landing in the bottom like a seal flipping itself out of the water. He got upright as the others entered the craft. In a moment they were heading out to sea.

  A mountain of fire had erupted from the collection system, setting off a tank of light fuel about fifty yards away. The heat was so warm he could feel it here, more than a quarter mile away. There were rumbles, more explosions—the entire terminal would burn, and burn for hours.

  The Pakistanis would have no choice now but to attack. The Indians would retaliate. The Chinese would come to Pakistan’s aid. The Indians would be destroyed, and with luck, the Chinese would be severely bloodied as well. Iran would be free of her two rivals—and the price of oil would soar.