The blood trail led Cabrillo down a spiraling car ramp. He slowed at the bottom to peer out onto this next cargo deck. More Ladas, more flat tires, and so many years in the salt air had covered many of them with lesions of rust. A pistol shot pounded off a fitting next to his head, and a sliver of metal nicked him at the temple. Blood trickled down his jaw. He fired off the rest of his clip, blowing glass and bits of metal into the air, while the shooter crouched behind a Lada wagon. The onslaught was enough to make him break cover and run.
Cabrillo didn’t want to kill the man. He wanted him to keep running and show him how to enter the secret parts of the ship, the ones, like on the Oregon, that customs men never saw. He changed magazines at a run, listening over the comm net to MacD and Eddie coordinate rounding up the rest of the crew.
The shooter descended one more level before making a beeline aft. Juan stayed on him like a scent hound, letting the man get far enough ahead that he didn’t bother taking delaying shots at his pursuer. Finally, Juan saw him come to a door that looked as though it was in the ship’s aft-most bulkhead. They should be directly over the propeller, and Juan should have been able to feel its vibrations through the soles of his boots. He quickly glanced toward the bow.
Cabrillo had an excellent sense of spatiality and knew immediately that the distant gloom of the forward part of the hold was considerably less than the nine-hundred-foot length of the ship. The closet was built into a false wall.
He looked back and could see over the man’s shoulder that it was a storage closet. This was it. The Oregon had the exact same setup. Cabrillo ran, cutting the distance, dodging and weaving around cars, until he accidentally knocked a wing mirror off one of the rustier ones. The noise alerted the gunman. He had been fumbling with something on the closet’s back wall. He whirled and raised his pistol.
Cabrillo already had the Super V tucked hard against his shoulder and cut him down with a quick pull of the trigger that unleashed a half dozen big .45 caliber slugs.
“Eddie, you there?” Juan said. Operational security demanded he not take his eyes off the body, but he knew the gunman was dead.
“Roger.”
“You guys secure?”
“Just the bridge and crew areas. Still haven’t swept the engine room or cargo area.”
“Don’t worry about that. Come aft on deck three. I think I hit the jackpot.”
Juan stalked toward the fallen man and confirmed he was dead. He let the Super V drop down on its single-point sling and dragged the corpse out of the way. He couldn’t find the trigger mechanism that would give him access to the ship’s secret area, so he rigged it with a block of plastic explosives.
“We’re coming,” Eddie announced over the radio when he and MacD approached Cabrillo’s location. No sense in getting killed by friendly fire.
“Any trouble?”
“Nothing a club over the head with the barrel of an old Mr. Uzi here couldn’t fix,” MacD drawled. “What’s up? We swabbing the decks for them?”
“Watch and learn.” Cabrillo backed them away from the utility closet and keyed the electronic detonator. The blast was an assault on the senses, loud and concussive, and it carried, echoing up and down the rows of cars.
He had blown a hole through the back of the closet. Beyond was something out of a James Bond movie. The aft section of the ship, a good hundred fifty feet in length, was a cavernous open space ringed with metal catwalks and staircases. Down below, water sloshed gently against a pair of piers that rose almost twenty feet. Thrusting out of the water between the docks was a cradle made of timbers that would secure the stealth ship, once it was in position, and the mother ship refloated to its proper trim.
To Juan’s disappointment, the cradle was empty. The stealth ship was out there, hunting the Stennis.
Atop one of the piers was a small structure that had to be a control room. It had a big plate-glass window overlooking the floating dock. The three men took off running across the catwalk and down the stairs. The door to the control room didn’t have a lock. MacD nodded to Juan, who opened it. As soon as it was ajar, Lawless tossed a flashbang, and Juan slammed the door to contain the blast.
The grenade went off with a roar that bowed the plate glass but didn’t shatter it. Cabrillo threw open the door again. Two Chinese men, wearing mechanic’s overalls, were staggering around, dazed and nearly half mad from the blast. Juan tackled one, MacD the other. No sooner were they down than Eddie had them cuffed.
Cabrillo studied his surroundings, finally taking a chair at what looked like the main controls. Everything mechanical was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and then he noticed the room was painted that bland green the Soviets so loved. The computers were new additions. Mark Murphy had met up with the Chairman just before he’d stepped out on deck and handed over a standard-looking flash drive.
“Some of my best work,” he’d said with pride. “Plug it in to a USB port and it does the rest. I call it the Dyson Oreck Hoover 1000, ’cause it’ll vacuum up anything.”
Cabrillo slid the drive into position and, moments later, the dormant computer came to life. After that, there really wasn’t much to see. Mark said a curser would appear on the otherwise blank screen and start to blink when his device had sucked all extractable information out of the system.
He wished they could use the ballast controls to scuttle the ship, but there would be mechanical fail-safes in place to prevent that. Better off just to set scuttling charges and be done with it. While he waited for the computer to do its thing, he split the rest of the C-4 he carried to Eddie and MacD to take care of that particular task.
“Linc, you copy?”
“Roger that.”
“Round up our prisoners and see to it they get to a lifeboat.”
“Gotcha.”
“Don’t launch yet. I’ve got two more down here.”
“You find the stealth boat?”
“No, but this was definitely its base.” A curser started blinking, just as Mark had programmed. Juan plucked the drive from the USB slot and eyed it. “And we might have been given a look under her skirts.”
Ten minutes later, the crew had been jettisoned from the ship in her encapsulated lifeboat. Eddie had found two more men down in engineering. One would go down with his ship, foolishly thinking he could kick a gun out of Seng’s hands. The charges had been laid, and Gomez Adams had the chopper resting lightly on the deck. Though the craft weighed less than a ton, it had such a small footprint that it put tremendous pressure on whatever it landed on. Keeping the revs up prevented it from damaging the deck plate and potentially trapping itself.
The men climbed aboard the chopper, and Adams, wearing night vision goggles for it was now fully dark, lifted them away. They let Linc do the honors since his had been the most boring part of the operation. He thumbed the detonator.
The blasts were little more than bursts of bubbles from under the waterline, and it looked like something so puny would have no effect on the elephantine ship. But Eddie was a master at demolition, and MacD had been an eager student. Aiding them was the fact that Juan had firewalled the ship’s big diesel engines. The forward momentum had water pumping through the strategic holes Seng and Lawless had punched through the hull. And as the speed increased, so too did the volume of water. This would keep going until the engines were swamped, but even then inertia would keep the water coming.
The car carrier would slip under the waves within the hour.
Under his flight suit, Slider had on a T-shirt with a picture of an F-18. Below was “0 to 60 in .7 seconds.” With the two turbofans shrieking behind him at max power, he threw a salute to the catapult officer and felt that acceleration for himself. Johnny Reb’s number two cat launched him and his F/A-18 Super Hornet down the runway and out over the bow. The sleek fighter jet was pushing 165 miles per hour when the deck vanished beneath it, and its swept wings generate
d enough lift to sustain flight.
Captain Mike Davis (USMC), call sign Slider, gave a little whoop as he was catapulted off the carrier and the plane was transformed from a helpless little bird that needed coddling by the deck crew to a deadly raptor that dominated the skies. He raised the plane’s nose and roared into the dawn. In minutes he was at twenty thousand feet and fifty miles out from the Stennis. He and his wingman, who would launch just after him, were flying combat air patrol over the whole battle group.
Because they’d really poured on the atoms getting to the East China Sea, the group had been forced to leave behind its slower resupply ship, but the cruisers, destroyers, and frigate were all on-station covering Johnny Reb from attack on all fronts. Below the surface lurked a pair of Los Angeles–class subs that had had no problems keeping up with the carrier’s frenetic pace. The group was still three hundred miles from the Senkaku Islands, so Slider wasn’t expecting much of anything to happen on his patrol. Closer in, he hoped things got a little more interesting.
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 Americ
an 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.”