False Flag

by Jack Slater

  A salt breeze licked at his hair, which was flat and greasy from the combined effects of high-intensity combat and taking an unexpected dip in the ocean on his way out of China. Exhaustion tugged at his limbs, and the lids of his eyes, but he barely felt it. Trapp was used to pushing his body right up to its limits, and then past them.

  This was no different.

  He watched with his hands clamped over his ears, half-wishing he had hearing protection, half relishing the almost physical pain as a fighter jet rocketed along the flight deck, dragged by the steam catapult, and tumbled off the end of the aircraft carrier, dipping slightly before its powerful engines rocketed it into the sky.

  Trapp wondered where the jet was heading.

  The pace of flight operations on the Nimitz had noticeably increased since the two Chinese jets hit the surface of the ocean. A pair of E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning jets took to the sky shortly after the debris from the Chinese planes kissed the water, and had scoured the skies for further threats ever since. The combat air patrol now surrounded the carrier group in concentric circles, creating a gauntlet around the Nimitz that even the most foolhardy enemy pilot would not dare to brave.

  But still, Trapp questioned how the present situation was going to end. Though from his perspective, standing on the deck of the Nimitz, with blue ocean stretching to the horizon in every direction, he could see little—and what little he could suggested that the United States was heading for war with China.

  “You’re the OGA guy, right?”

  Trapp turned around and appraised the sailor. He was young, barely more than a boy, and wore three chevrons on his shoulders. Trapp wasn’t an expert on naval ranks, but the kid barely looked old enough to have graduated from diapers, let alone boot camp.

  “You’ve been watching too many movies,” Trapp replied.

  OGA stood for ‘other government agency,’ a common enough shorthand for the CIA. But coming out of the young sailor’s mouth, it sounded faintly ridiculous.

  The kid blanched. “I’ll…take that as a yes?” he ventured.

  Trapp nodded curtly, chiding himself for biting at the green sailor. It wasn’t his fault that he was pissed. “You’re correct.”

  “The skipper wants to see you,” the sailor replied, looking a little relieved at not having to spar with the grizzled special operator. “Just follow me.”

  Trapp did as the man asked, marveling as he clambered up steep stairwells and narrow, airless, cramped gangways how anyone could possibly live in a place like this for months at a time. Just as he had done on the USS Cheyenne, he thanked his lucky stars that he’d joined the army, not the navy. His powerful frame wasn’t made for places like this.

  Shortly afterwards, the young seaman brought him to the door of the captain’s stateroom, where one of the commanding officer’s aides was waiting for him, wearing blue fatigues topped with the gold oak leaf on his shoulders that designated his rank.

  “I’ll take it from here,” the lieutenant commander said, dismissing the young sailor. The kid departed with conspicuous haste—clearly uncomfortable with venturing this deep into officer country.

  “So you’re our unexpected guest,” the officer said, stretching out his hand. “Steve Hatch. Nice to meet you.”

  Trapp shook it firmly. “Jason,” he replied, leaving out his surname. “Any chance you can fill me in on what the hell happened while I was underwater?”

  As he spoke, the door to the captain’s stateroom opened, and a thin man with steely blue eyes and graying hair peeked out at the two men. “We were sort of hoping you could do the same for us.” He jerked his thumb. “Come on in.”

  Trapp’s eyes widened with surprise as he entered the luxuriously appointed room. He took his time looking around, taking in the floor-to-ceiling American flag mounted on the wall behind the captain’s desk. It was torn in places, the edges burned, and the red and white stripes coated in a gray dust.

  The captain caught him looking. “It’s from Ground Zero,” he said. “It was flying on the morning of 9/11. I bought it at a charity auction a few years ago, carried from command to command ever since.”

  He patted one of the enormous warship’s thick steel walls and grinned. “This old girl’s the only one big enough to actually stick it up on the wall.”

  Perhaps it was the exhaustion running through his bones, or the thought of Eliza Ikeda, stolen by an unknown enemy, and still in their clutches, but the sight of the battered American flag moved Trapp.

  “Captain,” he said finally, after subduing the unexpected wave of emotion, “I was wondering if I could trouble you for a line to Washington. I’ve got”—he paused, wondering how to phrase his request—“an urgent message to deliver.”

  The captain waved Trapp toward one of the dark brown leather sofas that were arranged around a coffee table. The only thing that separated this stateroom from a perfectly pleasant Georgetown townhouse was the fact the furniture was bolted to the floor, and the slightly lower ceilings.

  He sat down himself, and grimaced. “I would if I could, son,” he said. “But voice comms have been down since yesterday. We’re working on setting up a relay, but that won’t be ready for at least another twenty-four hours.”

  The captain and his aide were sitting on the sofa opposite Trapp. Hatch leaned forward before the operative had a chance to speak. “So what the hell happened out there? I’m guessing your appearance on this boat is connected with World War III kicking off out there?”

  Trapp paused, considering what he could and could not say. And then he threw caution to the wind. He knew little enough as it was. Perhaps the navy officers could help him fill in the gaps. It was worth a shot. “I presume we’re speaking in confidence?” he asked.

  The captain nodded, his aide echoing the action. “Naturally. Just give me the big picture.”

  Trapp winced and spread his hands apart. “Your guess is as good as mine, sir,” he said. “As you know, from the tasking of the USS Cheyenne, I was conducting a classified operation in the Chinese city of Macau. It was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab. I was ordered to retrieve a piece of classified intel and get out without causing an international incident.”

  The captain snorted. “How’d that go?”

  Trapp grimaced. “Not well. But it wasn’t my doing.”

  The captain raised his eyebrow.

  “Well—” Trapp grinned. “I didn’t start it, anyway. It turns out we weren’t the only people with eyes on my target. An unknown party kicked down the door, grabbed him along with one of my assets, and practically leveled the Ritz-Carlton in the process. I was in the process of tracking them down when my comms died.”

  He glanced up unconsciously, as if looking for the satellites that had once orbited this area of the globe. “And that’s when everything really went to shit.”

  “You think the two things are connected?” Lieutenant Commander Hatch asked.

  Trapp shrugged. “I don’t see how they can be,” he admitted. “But then again, it seems like a hell of a coincidence, and….”

  The carrier’s captain finished the trite cliché. “You don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Trapp shook his head. “Do you?”

  The captain lapsed into silence for a second before responding. “Not when they endanger the safety of my crew,” he grunted. “Or threaten to plunge this whole fucking region into the next world war.”

  “You mind if I ask what happened out there?” Trapp said, filling the silence.

  “The Chinese have been buzzing the battle group for the last twelve hours or so. We think they’re probing our air defense systems. Finding out how close they can get.”

  “Pretty damn close,” Trapp growled.

  The captain ran his fingers through his hair, and Trapp noticed how tired the man looked. “The two jets that just went down are modeled on the F-22. They stole the stealth technology from us. Their implementation isn’t quite as good, but even with the lookdown radars on our electro
nic warfare planes, they’re damn difficult to detect when they skim the surface of the ocean. But it’s not their airframes I’m worried about.”

  “No?”

  “They don’t have enough of the J-20 fifth generation planes to do much damage. Maybe thirty operational, as far as we know. Minus the two they just lost. Maybe half that will be combat-ready. Between the hardware our escorts carry and our own airpower, we can handle that number easily.”

  “So what then?”

  “Missiles,” Hatch replied grimly. “Chinese naval doctrine is built around area denial. They have enough short- and medium-range ballistic missiles to turn the South China Sea into an oil slick.”

  “Hell,” Trapp said, his voice little more than a whisper as he pictured the inferno.

  “Hell is right,” the captain agreed. He fixed Trapp with a steely gaze that left the covert operative with no illusions about the lengths to which the man would go to ensure the safety of his crew. “And the Lord’s not here right now to answer my prayers. All I have is you, Jason. Things are about to heat up pretty damn quick in this part of the world, and I need to know if the Chinese are going to strike first.”

  Trapp didn’t know how to reply. He had been asking himself the same question ever since he lost touch with Langley all those hours before. Something about the present situation didn’t make sense, and his mind kept drifting back to the tattoo he had found on the corpse of one of his unknown assailants.

  He let out a deep sigh. “The truth is, sir, I’m flying blind. My gut tells me that something else is going on here, that the Chinese were just as surprised to find out they’d taken out all our satellites as we were. But that’s all it is. A gut feeling.”

  The captain tousled his gray hair and sagged back into his sofa. “It might not matter anyway,” he admitted. “They attack us, we fight back, they retaliate, and pretty soon you got yourself a good old-fashioned shooting war, even if neither side wanted it in the first place.”

  Trapp nodded. “Yes sir. That’s why I need to get back in touch with Langley. I think we’re being played. I just don’t know why, or by who.”

  “If you’re right, it’s a hell of a game,” the captain growled, his expression murderous. “I’ve got six thousand sailors under my command on this boat, and a couple more riding shotgun with the escorts. We are on the front line of this one. I don’t like the idea of being sacrificed like a pawn.”

  “Me neither,” Trapp said, glancing around somewhat anxiously. He pictured a Chinese missile bearing down on the enormous ship, holing it beneath the water line, and the fizzing swell of the ocean sucking the Nimitz into its depths. He preferred fighting not just on land, or even face to face: but eye to eye, where you could see the man who planned to kill you. The idea of falling victim to a thunderbolt from the blue, of toiling in the bowels of the Nimitz and not even knowing you were in danger until the missile impact sickened him.

  The captain clapped his hands together firmly, as though he had come to a decision, and stood. “Okay. I can’t put you in touch with Washington, but maybe I can do one better…”

  The next few minutes happened so quickly Trapp felt like he’d been strapped into a slingshot and fired out the other end. Hatch called up to flight operations, and put a two-seater F-18 naval jet on standby, with a pilot up front, and one Jason Trapp in a U.S. Navy flight suit sitting in the back.

  Their destination was Naval Base Guam. The base was connected by a deep-sea fiber-optic cable to the mainland, which meant that short of waiting for full communications to be restored, Trapp’s best chance of finding out how the hell to help Eliza Ikeda was found in flying even further from wherever she’d been taken, riding at the speed of sound.

  The pilot turned around, glancing at Trapp’s hunched frame in the navigator’s rear seat. His visor was down, as was Trapp’s own, which made the pair of them resemble aliens more than humans. “You ever flown in one of these things before?”

  Trapp shook his head.

  The pilot let out a sharp laugh. “You’re in for a hell of a ride, sir. Just don’t throw up. If you do, you’ll be breathing it in for the next three hours.”

  “Great.”

  The pilot completed his final flight checks, the glass canopy closed and hissed into place, and Trapp concentrated on not touching anything that looked important. In fact, he didn’t touch anything at all, just in case.

  His powerful frame towered over six feet and carried over two hundred pounds of mostly muscle mass, and as the jet was maneuvered into position on the flight deck of the Nimitz, Trapp felt every last inch. He was crammed into the cockpit like a sardine into a can, and he wasn’t exactly looking forward to the ride.

  “How often have you flown this thing?” he asked weakly, feeling an unaccustomed wave of nerves wash over him like the wash of a swell against the aircraft carrier’s bow.

  Trapp hated being in a position where he was out of control—and this was about as out-of-control as it got. As soon as the F-18 galloped into the sky, he would be forced to sit on his hands until they touched down on the runway at Guam. Or worse still, if they ended up with a pair of Chinese fighter jets on their ass, he would be about as useful as an ice pick in the Sahara desert.

  The pilot turned around. He smirked, and Trapp couldn’t help but feel it was a macabre sight, as though the man was taking altogether too much pleasure in his passenger’s obvious anxiety. He patted the panel in front of him. “What, this old girl? Once or twice. I’m just a rookie. Needed to keep the hotshots on board in case the Chinese show back up, you know…”

  “Asshole,” Trapp grunted.

  “That’s what they call me,” the pilot replied drily, flicking a switch in front of him by feel as he spoke. “By the way, I didn’t introduce myself. Call me Chuckie.”

  “Jason,” Trapp replied weakly.

  What kind of name is Chuckie? he thought.

  “Nice to meet you, Jason. Now, before we get going, did the crew chief show you how to bail out of this thing?”

  Trapp shook his head quickly. “No. Am I going to need to?”

  “With me flying?”

  Trapp heard a thunk sound underneath the airframe, and felt the shock of a slight impact vibrate through his cramped knees. Before he got a chance to ask what it was, whether it was bad, or what he was supposed to do if the Chinese fired a heat seeking missile up their tailpipe, he heard a crackle emanating from inside Chuckie’s headset.

  It quickly became apparent that the sound was flight operations confirming they were clear to kick the tires and light the fires, because that’s exactly what happened. Trapp glanced to his right, and saw one of the sailors on the flight deck delivering a complicated sequence of instructions through the medium of hand signals and flags. Chuckie registered his response, and before Trapp’s brain was able to parse what the hell was going on, the high-pitched whine of the engine behind them drowned out his capacity for conscious thought.

  The steam-powered catapult that ran down the center of the Nimitz’s deck grabbed the F-18 Super Hornet and hauled it from a standing start to over 170 miles an hour in the blink of an eye. Trapp was yanked back into his flight seat, his light gray helmet colliding with the leather headrest.

  And then the world ended.

  Trapp felt like he was sitting on an exploding volcano as the Super Hornet fired off the end of the Nimitz’s deck, hung in the air for a second as his vision compressed, as his eardrums threatened to explode, and then the F-18 kicked him in the back like an unbroken horse as Chuckie lit the afterburners and rode his airframe into the sky.

  Minutes later, as they reached cruising altitude, and as the gray deck of the Nimitz and her escorts dwindled into the distance, indistinguishable against the steel gray of the endless ocean, Trapp finally allowed himself to relax.

  Chuckie turned around. “Hey, buddy—you ever done a loop the loop?”

  27

  The F-18 kissed the runway at Naval Base Guam underneath a glorious blue sky. />
  The sun glinted off the waves surrounding the island, the glare bright enough to blind Trapp, had it not been for the visor built into his helmet. As he stepped out of the cramped cockpit, finally able to stretch his protesting limbs, and breathe fresh oxygen that wasn’t pumped from a high-pressure canister, he thanked his lucky stars that he had joined the good old US Army all those years ago.

  Trapp’s arrival was not telegraphed, in case the Chinese were eavesdropping on US Navy communications. As a result, there was no Agency welcoming party waiting on the asphalt. Still, it didn’t take him long to find the CIA station, hidden in a drab converted hangar in the depths of the base—unusual only as a result of the razor-wire topped steel fence that hemmed it in.

  It needed no other security, since the only personnel on Guam were serving on US military contracts. He stood in front of it, still dressed in his flight suit, but no longer carrying the heavy helmet, whose weight had pressed his dark hair into greasy strands.

  Two men were slumped in a guard booth at the entrance to the small compound. Trapp made a beeline for them. “I need to speak to Langley,” he said.

  One of the men, a slight African-American wearing black wraparound sunglasses and dark fatigues, laughed. “Yeah, you and what army?”

  Trapp didn’t have time to play word games. He knew that every second he delayed was another in which Ikeda’s life slowly but surely ticked away. The fact that she was gone was his fault, and his alone. And that meant it was his responsibility to get her back.

  He glowered at the man, who immediately wilted, aware that he had more than met his match. “Run inside,” he growled, “and find your boss. My authentication code is: Oscar, Mike, nine, nine, Delta. And while you’re in there, get Deputy Director Mitchell on the line.”

  The two men glanced at each other nervously until Trapp clapped his hands together and made them jump in unison. “Now, gentlemen.”