Wall of Night

by Grant Blackwood

He was about to turn around and call to the others when something caught his eye.

  He cocked his head, looking more closely at the island. Something there … He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was a pattern to the underbrush. Slowly at first, and then more steadily, he began to see it: Straight lines, angles, corners … As if there were a structure hidden by all the foliage.

  He scanned the island for a few more moments, then suddenly saw it: What looked like the skeleton of a massive barrel lying on its side. But instead of staves it was joined together by … what?

  Fins—horizontal fins.

  The image was familiar somehow, but each time be reached for it, it slipped from his grasp

  Come on, what is it … ? Then, from his subconscious, thoughts began to bubble forth: Tom Sawyer … Huck Finn … the Mississippi River …

  “That’s it,” Tanner said aloud. How in the world …

  He was looking at the waterwheel of a paddle boat.

  Five miles to Tanner’s south and east, Kyung Xiang’s Hind sat in the small clearing the pilot had managed to find after their collision with the Hoplite. Armored as it was, the Hind had survived with only a rough landing and a damaged rear tailfin. The pilot reported he would be able to make the repair, but it would take several hours.

  “What about communications?” Xiang asked.

  “We lost our VLF antenna, along with most of our tactical frequencies,” the pilot told him. “I’ll start rotating through the emergency frequencies, but—”

  “Fine, fine,” Xiang said. “What about the beacon?”

  “That shouldn’t be affected.” The pilot powered up the RFDF console and adjusted it to the correct frequency. The beacon showed as a spike radiating from the center of the screen. “There it is—northwest of us … make it bearing three-four-zero.”

  “How far?”

  “Signal’s pretty strong,” the pilot replied. “Not more than ten miles.”

  Xiang walked out of the cockpit into the cabin. Two of Shen’s men—one with a broken collarbone, the other with a concussion—lay on the floor. Xiang stepped over them and hopped to the ground. The remaining paratroopers were squatting in the snow in groups of twos and threes. “Report, Lieutenant.”

  Shen said, “Twenty-six men, two injured.”

  “Good,” Xiang said. “Get them up and moving. We have a trail to follow.”

  78

  Russia

  Twenty-five thousand feet above the river in which Tanner and his party had just crashed, the flight of thirty F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets, two EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare planes, and two E-2 Hawkeye AWACS from John Stennis were arriving on-station three hundred miles north of the Chinese-Russian border.

  Having made contact with their Russian ground controllers, the fighters left their Hawkeyes behind and climbed to their sustained combat ceiling of 52,000 feet—almost ten miles above the earth’s surface—then throttled back into an energy-saving loiter and began their waiting game, mere ghosts at the edge’s of the Chinese ground and AWACS radar.

  Thirty thousand feet below them and two hundred miles to the south, the leading edge of the Chinese fighters was approaching the border. As predicted, it was four regiments strong, almost two hundred fighters spread across a fifty-mile front, led by a spearhead of aging MiG and Sukhois designed to entangle the defenders and absorb their punishment. Above and behind them, the two remaining regiments of J-10 and -12 interceptors circled with their AWACS, waiting to be directed into the fight.

  Sixteen minutes after sunrise, they crossed the border.

  Five miles into Russian airspace they encountered their first defenders, a squadron of Floggers and Flankers climbing from their bases to intercept. Three miles from one another, forces exchanged their first missile volley, but within seconds they had closed to dogfighting range. The Chinese’s three-to-one advantage quickly began to take its toll. As ordered, the Russian pilots put up a brave fight before reluctantly turning tail and heading north, drawing the Chinese force with it.

  Orbiting at the rear of the attacking wave, the Chinese AWACS detected a second flight of Russian MiG-25 Foxbat interceptors one hundred miles to the northwest. Seeing the classic pincer movement unfolding, the AWACS planes vectored half of the J-10s and -12s toward the approaching Foxbats.

  Fifty miles into Russian airspace, the Chinese force left the periphery coverage of their ground radar stations. Safe in their assumption of coverage from their orbiting AWACS, the spearhead of the wave pushed on, the leading edge pursuing the retreating Floggers and Flankers while the split force of J-10s and -12s closed on the still-unsuspecting Foxbats.

  At a prearranged signal from the Russian ground controllers, the two Navy Prowlers that had been loitering fifty miles southeast of the Chinese AWACS loosed a volley of four HARMs—or High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles—each of which was designed to home in on the radar signatures of the Chinese AWACS. Even as the HARMs left their rails and began streaking toward their targets, the Prowlers turned on their powerful jammers.

  Focused on the battle below them, the four Chinese AWACS failed to react quickly enough to the cloud of white noise suddenly filling their radar screens. It took a precious ten seconds for them to burn through the interference and see the missiles coming. Hoping to throw the missiles off their scent, the AWACS shut down their radar.

  It was too late. The HARMs had already switched to terminal homing mode. No longer a mere radar signature inside each missile’s electronic brain, but rather physical targets, the HARMs ignored the ploy and kept going.

  Each HARM found its target, and ten seconds after the first explosion the Chinese attack force found itself without radar coverage, naked, and virtually blind.

  At a signal from the Prowlers, the E-2 Hawkeyes turned on their radars. Having already been fed the location of each of the Chinese J-10 and -12 fighters, it took only seconds for the Hawkeyes to sort out the radar picture and give the Tomcats and Hornets their attack vectors.

  Twenty thousand feet above the Chinese wave, the navy fighters moved into firing position, made one last check of their targets’ locations, then fired their first volley of missiles.

  Having lost not only their protective radar umbrella but also their source of stand-off targeting information, the Chinese fighters were forced to depend on their own short-range targeting radars. Even so, whether from bravery or confusion or overconfidence, the Chinese wave pressed on toward the last known location of the MiG defenders.

  Well beyond the radar range of the Chinese fighters and traveling at three thousand miles per hour, the fifty-four Phoenix missiles launched from the Tomcats and Hornets tore into the split force of Chinese J-10s and -12s, instantly blotting forty-six of them from the sky and leaving the remaining forty-two in disarray.

  With a go signal from the Hawkeyes, the earlier decoy force of Russian Foxbats turned hard east and went to after-burner, closing the distance to the Chinese interceptors in less than ninety seconds. Though at a slight numerical disadvantage, the Foxbats used the attacker’s confusion to quickly make up the difference. One by one, Chinese fighters began, plummeting to earth.

  Meanwhile, the Tomcats and Hornets launched their remaining missiles at the leading edge of older Chinese fighters still in pursuit of the first Russian defenders. In groups of twos and threes, the older MiGs and Sukhois were blown from the sky.

  Twelve minutes after the battle began, it ended. Of the two hundred fighters that crossed into Russia, only thirty-two returned to Chinese airspace.

  NMCC

  “It worked!” David Lahey boomed and clapped Cathermeier on the back. “General, it worked!”

  “Yes, sir, it did. This time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cathermeier pointed to the Keyhole image on the big screen. “Unless I’m mistaken, those black shapes south of the Hinggan Mountains are more fighters. Commander?”

  “I agree,” said the duty
officer. “I make it at least two divisions coming north from Beijing.”

  “How many planes?” Lahey asked.

  “Another two hundred fifty.”

  Mason said, “Replacements for their losses. They aren’t wasting much time.”

  “If we had any doubt about their commitment to seeing this through to the end, we don’t now,” Dutcher said. “We just decimated four regiments and it didn’t phase them.”

  The duty officer called, “General, I have Defense Minister Beskrovny on the line.”

  Cathermeier picked up the phone and said, “Congratulations, Marshal.”

  “And to you, General. It seems we’ve bought ourselves some breathing room.”

  “I fear that’s all we’ve done.”

  “We’ve seen them. How long do you estimate before they’re ready to launch the next wave?”

  “Five hours, no more,” said Cathermeier.

  “I agree. Not enough time for your fighters to return to Stennis, reload, and return.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, we’ll have to make due with what we have.”

  “Will it be enough?”

  “I wish I could say yes, but I’d be lying. We’ll do our best, however. I’ll be in touch, General.”

  “Good luck.”

  Cathermeier disconnected and turned to the group. “I don’t envy his position.”

  “There’s nothing we can do to help?” Lahey asked.

  “Not in the near term. We have to face facts: the Chinese are going to see this through to the bloody end, and right now there’s not much we can do about it.”

  79

  Birobijan

  Tanner stared at the paddle wheel, his brain slowly connecting lines and angles until he could make out the entire underlying form. A dozen questions jockeyed for position in his head. How long had it been here? Where had it come from? How had this half-jungle island, half-ship hybrid come to be?

  As for the first question, the earliest steam paddle wheel had been built in the early 1800s, so if by some quirk of history one of them had found its way here, this vessel could be almost two hundred years old. Tanner doubted that, but it piqued his curiosity all the more.

  As for the last question, if he were right and this were a tributary of the Bira, the answer might lie with the history of the river itself. Given that much of the Bira wound through the mountains and was fed by often torrential spring runoff, the river often changed course and depth every spring. From year to year lakes become mere bulges in the river; bulges in the river, deepwater lakes.

  Assuming the paddle wheel had been here long enough, it may have simply become a self-evolving part of the ecosystem: Pushed from sandbar to sandbar, with each spring flood depositing onto its decks yet another layer of silt that eventually became soil strong enough to catch and nurture seeds blown by the wind, the paddle wheel became a living island. Grass would have grown, followed by vegetation, then finally small trees.

  Tanner could see it in his mind. Just as a sunken ship becomes an ecosystem to the plants and fish beneath the surface, this boat had over time mutated into just another among the hundreds dotting the Bira River.

  Whatever its history and origin, Tanner knew this boat meant one thing for them: shelter.

  It took only a minute to gather the others and make their way back to the paddleboat. With Soong on Tanner’s back and the pilot on Hsiao’s, they climbed off the ice near the waterwheel and picked their way through the outer ring of vegetation into the interior. The paddle wheel’s once-white hull was now mottled in shades of brown, green, and black. It had sunk so deeply into the sandbar that only the upper edge of its gunwales were visible. The handrail was still intact, albeit thick with vines and creepers.

  With some help from Hsiao, Briggs boosted himself onto the gunwale, pried apart the vines, and poked his head through. It was the main deck. He stuck his leg through the opening until his foot found the handrail, then climbed over and dropped to the deck below. His feet sunk two inches into the dirt.

  The first thing he noticed was the drastic temperature difference; it was ten degrees warmer here than on the river. The wind had died to a whisper. To his left and right—fore and aft—the main deck stretched into the darkness, a leafy tunnel broken only by overgrown doorways leading into the superstructure. The deck was a carpet of thick ferns and grass.

  Tanner poked his head out. “Hsiao, can you and Lian hand me Han and the pilot?”

  “Sure.”

  They jostled both men through the opening. Tanner laid them onto the deck, then helped Hsiao and Lian over the railing. “Briggs, what is this place?” Lian said.

  “It’s an old steam-driven paddle wheel boat.”

  “What’s it doing here?” said Soong.

  “I have no idea, and right now that doesn’t matter. Let’s find a way inside and get warm.”

  At midships they found a passage that led them to a wide alleyway running the length of the boat, with entrances at the forecastle and afterdeck. Like everything else, the alleyway’s bulkheads were splotchy with mildew and moss. Both sides of the passage were lined with closed doors.

  Tanner clicked on his flashlight and shined it into the darkness. “Come on,” he whispered.

  They started forward, stopping every few feet to rattle doorknobs. Briggs found the sixth door unlocked, but jammed shut by a mound of topsoil. He and Hsiao dropped to their knees and dug until they’d cleared a path, then wrenched open the door.

  Inside, they found a well-appointed cabin, with two triple-tier bunk beds, a pair of hardback captain’s chairs, and a small, potbellied stove. The ceiling planks, warped and cracked from untold years of rain, had been infested by root systems from the decks above. The air was thick with the musk of decaying vegetation. Thousands of snakelike tendrils covered every inch of the ceiling as well as the upper reaches of the bulkheads. Briggs felt a shiver on the back of his neck.

  He waved Hsiao and Lian into the room. Lian gasped as she saw the ceiling.

  “Just roots,” Tanner explained. “Hsiao, let’s get Han and the pilot onto those bunks.”

  Once everyone was situated, Tanner made a quick search of the cabin, but found little of use except for an ancient oil lantern. He shook it gently; it was full. After some tinkering and several lighting attempts, the lantern sputtered to life and filled the cabin with a warm, yellow glow.

  “Han, how’re you doing?” Tanner asked.

  “My legs are beginning to hurt badly.”

  “They’re starting to warm up, which is a good sign. Can you manage?”

  Soong forced a smile “Of course. Compared to my previous living conditions, this is luxurious.”

  “Hsiao, what about him?” Tanner asked, nodding to the pilot.

  “He’s got a laceration in his scalp, but the bleeding has stopped. He probably has a concussion. Rest is the best thing, I think.”

  “Good.” Tanner turned to Lian and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “And you?”

  She smiled shyly at him. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

  “Hsiao, see what you can do about getting that stove going. I’m going to have a look around.”

  Where the alleyway exited onto the forecastle he found a spiral ladder leading upward. Like the main deck’s handrails, the steps and balustrade were snarled with creepers. Rising beside the ladder, sapling rose upward and disappeared into a canopy of green.

  He climbed to the next deck, where he found himself in another fore-to-aft alleyway lined with cabin doors. He walked aft, shining his light over the doors and trying to quash the tingle of fear in his belly. The ship was a ghost town, each closed door a potential tomb.

  He spotted a vine-encrusted life ring on the bulkhead. He pried away the growth until he could read the stencil: SS PRISCILLA.

  Thanks for your hospitality, Priscilla, Briggs thought. Whoever and wherever you are.

  He found
another ladder and climbed upward until he came to a partially closed hatch. He braced his back against it, then coiled his legs on the steps and heaved. With a grinding of steel, the hatch popped open. A small avalanche of dirt poured onto Tanner’s head. He shook it off and climbed through the opening.

  He found himself starting at the ship’s wheel. He was on the bridge. Through the soiled windows he caught a glimpse of the trees and vegetation on the forecastle. Aside from what little sunlight made its way through the canopy, the bridge was otherwise as dark.

  Near the port bridge wing door was a raised pedestal chair. With a start, he realized the seat was occupied. Hand resting on the butt of the Makarov, he clicked on his flashlight and shined it over the figure. His beam picked out the glimmer of bone and the black hole of an eye socket.

  Could this be the captain? Tanner wondered. Heart pounding, he stepped closer.

  The skeleton sat perfectly upright in the chair, fully clothed in thick wool pants, a parka, and a fur cap, all so rotted Briggs could see patches of bone through the material. Clutched in the skeleton’s lap was a square package of what looked to be sealskin.

  One eye watching the skeleton’s face, Tanner tentatively reached out and pried the package free. He backed up to the windows for more light. It was in fact sealskin, hemmed at both ends by rawhide stitches. He opened his knife, plucked loose the seam, and unraveled the rest.

  Inside was a leather-bound book, roughly the size of a paperback and two inches thick. It was remarkably dry, with only the faintest water damage on the cover. He opened it to the first page. There was an inscription:

  JOURNAL OF ANDREW GALBRETH HADIN

  VOYAGE OF THE PRISCILLA, August 1909

  Tanner felt his breath catch in his throat. “Dashing Andy. I’ll be damned.”

  Like most people, Tanner loved a good mystery, and the disappearance of Andrew Galbreth Hadin was one of the greatest of the twentieth century, along with Amelia Earhart’s and Jimmy Hoffa’s.