Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “And that means you’re here because the Chinese want you here,” Kyra finished. “We were playing China’s game the minute the president ordered you into the Strait. It’s the logical end to the theory. Your Aegis air defense systems are more advanced than anything the Chinese have and we’ve had decades to figure out how to beat the Ufimtsev equations. They don’t have a test bed that can make sure their plane works against your systems, and they have to know that before they can attack Taiwan.”

  Pollard took his time coming up with an answer. “That would be a risky way to test the platform,” Pollard said. “If it doesn’t work, they’ve blown their black program open.”

  “If it does work, they change the entire balance of power along the Pacific Rim,” Jonathan countered. “Consider it. The PLA takes the first small steps toward invasion to draw in some carriers. They test the plane. If it takes out the carrier and the president pulls the rest of the fleet back, they go full bore against Taiwan. If it takes out the carrier and the president doesn’t pull back the fleet, they start taking out the fleet. And if it doesn’t take out the carrier, they pull back and still own Kinmen, knowing that no president in his right mind will start a full-on war to take it back for the Taiwanese. The possible rewards outweigh the risk no matter how it plays out.”

  “Point taken,” Pollard admitted.

  “It’s still just a theory,” Nagin observed. “You don’t have a smoking gun. You have a radar hit that could be a flock of birds and a pile of reports from a single source that possibly point at a stealth plane program, which could have produced that showpiece junker and not some mysterious second fighter.”

  “When do we ever have a smoking gun in this business?” Kyra replied.

  “Assuming I believe you, how do we defend against a stealth bomber?” Pollard asked, ignoring the question,

  “I think you have to draw it out into the open. Give it a target worth chasing,” Jonathan said.

  “You think I should take the battle group into the Strait,” Pollard said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I think that if you don’t pick the time and place, Tian Kai will.”

  Pollard lifted a coffee mug from the table sitting between himself and the CIA officers, took a long sip, and then set it down carefully in the exact spot from which he’d picked it up. “Mr. Burke, there are eighty-seven hundred sailors in this battle group,” the admiral said. “Fifty-six hundred on this ship alone. Another three thousand on seven ships and three subs, and so far, President Liang hasn’t showed me that he’s got the stones to defend his own people, much less help me defend mine. And if I order us into the Strait and the Chinese really do want to rumble for Penghu, the PLA won’t need a stealth fighter to kill a lot of my kids. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m not going to even think about giving that order unless you can give me something better than a theory and a bird on a radar track.”

  “Give me a few hours—,” Jonathan started.

  “Mr. Burke, you can have all week as far as I’m concerned,” Pollard replied. “I’ve got this battle group right where I want it and I’m not moving without a good reason.”

  “Any matches on the names?” Kyra asked. She crooked the phone between her head and shoulder, checked her watch, and tried to ignore the gaze of the Navy ensign who thought he never had enough female visitors in his comms shack.

  “Barron put the screws to the Taiwanese. They finally coughed up enough information for us to get matches on all of them,” Cooke said. “A few are unknowns, but that’s to be expected. One of the MSS officers at the Taipei raid site where they recovered the acid was from the Tenth Bureau, a gentleman by the name of Han Song. We also have two reports of him taking trips to Chengdu. A shame he didn’t get a lungful of the stuff. Makes me wonder why the Chinese can’t figure out how to make it.”

  “I asked that too. Jonathan thinks they probably just wanted a sample of ours to reverse-engineer so they could compare it with their own recipe.”

  “That makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with,” Cooke said. “Anything else you need?”

  “Admiral Pollard isn’t buying. We could use a little more material to persuade him.”

  “What are you asking for?” Cooke asked.

  “It would help if you would declassify Pioneer’s reporting,” Kyra said. “He’s out of country now, so there’s no threat to him if we clear Pollard and a couple of members of his staff to read the good stuff.”

  Cooke frowned at the other end of the phone. “Barron won’t like that, but we’ll have a talk. Is that it?”

  “For now.”

  “Then I’ve got someone else here who wants to talk.” There was a pause while Cooke handed the phone over to someone else.

  “It’s Weaver.” Kyra realized that her call to Cooke had been transferred to the WINPAC vault. The IOC analyst was at his desk and Kyra could hear several people chattering in the background. Weaver was hosting a small party in his office, it seemed. “I found your paper. Some crusty old gent in WINPAC had a hard copy. You should see his office. Looks like he never throws anything out. Paper everywhere. Anyway, the equations match. The CAD program definitely calculates radar cross sections. WINPAC is running some test objects now to check the accuracy, but it looks like the Chinese worked out their own coding for the algorithm,” Weaver said. “By the way, there was serious bribery involved to make your deadline.”

  “I’ll make sure Jonathan pays off the debt,” she promised.

  “He’s not there, is he?” Weaver asked.

  “Nope. So I get to be his pimp for once,” Kyra replied.

  “That will do nicely,” Weaver said. “See you soon.”

  Kyra handed the phone back to the ensign and stepped out into the crowded passageway. She looked both ways and realized she had no idea how to get back to the admiral’s quarters.

  Pollard dropped the file folder on his desk. The Stryker woman had delivered it to his staff a few minutes before and then left for Wardroom 3 to grab breakfast. The admiral had always preferred to study intelligence reports in private before meeting with his J2 to ask questions and saw no reason to change that habit for the two civilians, no matter what they were selling.

  After ten minutes of reading, he summoned Nagin to his quarters. “What do you think?” Pollard asked his subordinate. He kept his own counsel but he was not so arrogant as to think he was always the smartest man in the room.

  Nagin was still searching through his own copy of the reports. “Well, the CAD program is a real kicker, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Pollard agreed. “Combine that with these reports from that Chinese asset, and Mr. Burke’s theory suddenly looks a lot more reasonable.” He tossed his glasses onto the file folder, then sat back and put his hands behind his head.

  “If Burke and Stryker are right and the PLA moves on Penghu, we could end up with a big hole in the flight deck if we try to intervene. Even if we stay on this side of the island,” Nagin said. “If the PLA does finally have a real stealth plane, once they know we’ve seen it, a withdrawal will look like we’re retreating out of fear. They’ll claim it deterred us.”

  “And they’d be right,” Pollard said. “So either we bloody the PLA’s nose now or they’ll just get more aggressive and we’ll catch it all later.”

  “If Burke and Stryker are right,” Nagin added. “They still don’t have a smoking gun.”

  “A smoking gun happens a lot less than people think,” Pollard said. “Stryker was right. Everyone always wants that perfect piece of intel that tells you exactly what’s going on right now, and you can almost never get it. Those two have given us intel that’s as good as any we could really ask for and better than most of what we usually get.” He leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees and covered his eyes with his hands. He felt very tired.

  “So what do you want to do?” Nagin asked. “If we go charging in there and pick a fight with the Chinese, we might be starting a war. The president won�
��t like that much.”

  “No, he won’t,” Pollard agreed. “We run, we lose. We stay, do nothing, and get hit, we lose and some of my kids probably get killed. So I want to go hit ’em. If they’ve really got a stealth plane up in our sky, we find a way to shoot it down. We make them think the whole project was a failure. We make them believe that this Assassin’s Mace was a waste of time, money, and some pilot’s life so we don’t have to see it again.”

  “The Chinese won’t abandon stealth,” Nagin said. “They know what it’s done for us. They’ll keep at it until they make it work.” The idea that he might have to share the sky with hostile stealth fighters did not sit well with him.

  “Probably,” Pollard admitted after a few seconds’ thought. “Then the Pentagon had better perfect those unmanned fighter drones before we lose too many pilots.” He hated the thought of robot fighter planes, and of losing pilots just a little more. He’d been a pilot too.

  “So where do we start looking for the thing?” Nagin asked. Pollard just shook his head.

  CHAPTER 15

  SUNDAY

  DAY FIFTEEN

  J2 INTELLIGENCE OFFICE

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  The Navy called this particular version the Reaper, but Kyra still struggled to stop thinking of the drones by their more common name of Predators. The MQ-9 unmanned drone could carry arms for ground attack. Admiral Pollard wanted to make the Chinese nervous. The hunter/killers’ trip from Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa to the Chinese coast had taken four hours and had reached their second set of waypoints shortly after nightfall three hours before. A radar technician in the Combat Information Center told her they could stay up for twenty hours more before they would have to return to Kadena to refuel. Each Reaper was loaded out with Hellfire missiles that no one expected to use on this mission, though they could have carried a five-hundred-pound bomb if the Air Force so desired.

  But the mission at the moment was not attack. NRO had retasked satellites to watch the coast, particularly the PLA nuclear missile forces, but the overlords in Chantilly were nervous that the Chinese might decide to take a shot at the orbiting cameras. The drones could provide near-constant coverage, which Pollard demanded, they were far cheaper to replace if destroyed, and spares could be brought along in hours. A damaged satellite network would take years and tens of billions of dollars to restore. NRO had assured the Department of Defense for years that its network could provide the wartime coverage the United States needed. There was less confidence in that assessment now and Pollard had no patience for it. His request to the Air Force for their Reapers had not been polite.

  If there was an Assassin’s Mace, it seemed likely to fly from one of six air bases within two hundred fifty miles of Taiwan, Jonathan had guessed. Navy Intelligence had designated three as prime candidates using some criteria they had not bothered to share with Kyra. She’d ignored the chance to catch up on the intelligence in favor of sleep, but Jonathan assured her that the deductions were sound and she trusted him. The Reapers had reached station near all three hours before. The first was circling off the Fuzhou coast. Its two brothers would need another half hour to arrive over Jinjiang and Longtian.

  The PLA’s combat air patrols had not challenged the drones during their approach over the open water. One MIG had made a quick pass, close enough to get a visual and see the missiles. The Reaper had sent back excellent video footage of the Chinese pilot ogling the drone, but the Reaper had been over international waters and the MIG had moved away. Probably wondering what a Reaper’s air-to-air capabilities are, Kyra thought. It could carry Stinger missiles, the tech had informed her, and she wondered if the Chinese pilots knew that. They were probably calling home asking for data in case they had to engage, and the Central Military Commission and the Politburo were likely debating the issue. If Tian and his circle did decide to engage the Reapers, it would be a one-sided fight and the United States would lose several million dollars’ worth of unmanned drones.

  Light from the passageway leaked into the J2 office, briefly disturbing the red tinge cast by the overhead lamps. Kyra watched Pollard enter. She kept her place next to the door, and if the senior officer noticed her presence, he didn’t acknowledge it. His focus went immediately to the Reapers’ radar track on the master screen.

  “Anything?” Pollard asked. It really was a moot question. The senior CIC officer on duty had standing orders to report anything more than a MIG flyby.

  “No, sir,” one of the officers reported, this one a lieutenant. Kyra knew how to read the ranks, yet another skill deemed important by the NCS. “The drones are outside Chinese airspace per your orders, with a five-mile cushion. AWACS are tracking multiple CAPs over the Strait, but they’re giving the drones plenty of room.”

  “Not five miles, I bet,” Pollard said. It was a rare joke from the senior officer aboard. The men laughed. Kyra did not, but she did allow herself a smile. “Let’s make ’em nervous. Shift the tracks west, quarter mile every pass, until they’re within a mile of the line.” The drones could return video footage of the coast from much farther out than their current position of seventeen miles east. They did not need to move in closer, but surveillance was not their true mission. The Reapers would have gone into the Strait whether there was an Assassin’s Mace or not, but now they would make for very expensive bait if the Chinese chose to see them as such.

  “Aye, sir,” the tech said.

  Kyra looked at her watch: 2227 hours. International law dictated that a country’s territorial waters and airspace extended twelve nautical miles out from its coastline. The Reapers were five miles beyond that line and started moving toward it. They would fly in circles, one round every fifteen minutes by her estimation, cameras aimed at their targets, moving closer by a nautical mile every hour toward an invisible line found only on maps. If the Chinese didn’t interfere, the Reapers would be within one mile of their airspace, a whisker by any standard, in four hours. It would be a long, very slow night unless the Chinese made it interesting. Kyra thought about leaving, going to her cabin and trying to sleep, but she suspected sleep wouldn’t come. The Navy prohibited alcohol on board, and she’d had enough men try to flirt with her that she didn’t want to pass the time in a wardroom. She reached for an empty chair and pulled it against the rear wall where she could sit out of the way.

  CHAPTER 16

  MONDAY

  DAY SIXTEEN

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  It happened at 0237. The Reaper targeting Fuzhou had just crossed the thirteen nautical mile marker drawn on the radar track. Without a sound, the infrared video feed turned to static.

  “What happened?” a lieutenant asked. Kyra didn’t know his name. “Camera malfunction?”

  “No, sir,” one of the techs answered. He couldn’t have been more than twenty by Kyra’s estimation. “Complete loss of all feeds. Sir, that one is down.”

  “Freeze the track shift on the other two,” the lieutenant said. “Keep them outside the thirteen-mile limit. It looks like that’s where the PLA drew its red line.”

  The Reaper had dropped all its feeds simultaneously. Kyra was no military analyst—yet?—but there weren’t many possibilities worth considering. Only one, she thought. The Chinese just destroyed a Reaper and nobody saw it coming.

  “The AWACs sent over their radar tracks and we compared ours with theirs,” the J2—Lincoln’s senior intelligence officer—said. “One of them caught a return that we didn’t, which bugs me. It’s a weak hit, but definitely a hit.” The J2 cued up the track on one of the smaller screens. He walked the video forward one frame at a time. “Starting at kill minus five seconds, the screen is clear. Four . . . three . . . and there.” Kyra watched, saw an icon, a red triangle, appear behind the position marking where the Reaper spent its final seconds. The J2 advanced the frame. “The bogey shows up for less than two seconds and then . . .” The red triangle disappeared in a single frame, with the Reaper icon clearing off the screen a second later. “We
have a ghost.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Nagin said.

  “Your ghost has a temper and can dish out a hard kill,” Kyra said.

  “Is that your stealth plane, Mr. Burke?” Pollard asked.

  “I believe so,” Jonathan said. “I suspect that the Assassin’s Mace has internal weapons bays to keep the stealth profile intact, like the F-35. I suggest that what you just saw on the radar track was the return signal from a stealth plane that opened its bay doors to fire an air-to-air missile. The plane closed up the doors, restored its stealth profile, and fell off the screen.”

  “That fits with what we expect the other man to see when we’re flying F-35s against him,” Nagin said. “Not quite a smoking gun but maybe as close as we’re going to get.”

  “He took the fat piece of bait you left dangling for him. Doesn’t that worry anyone here besides me?” Kyra asked.

  “Never let them see you sweat, young lady.” Pollard glared at her. “Yes, they took the bait. It means that either the Chinese are convinced we have no idea what’s going on and that they can knock down a Reaper with impunity. Or they’re confident enough in their design that they don’t care whether we know,” he reasoned. “The former is more likely, and this puts us in a good position. But in either case, at least we can make an educated guess which air base he’s flying from. Are we getting anything from the other two?”

  “Nothing we haven’t already gotten from the birds in orbit,” Nagin said. “Troops massing at the ports, enough to make a play for Penghu, but not nearly enough for a stab at Taiwan proper.”