“Hey, it’s no skin off my back. Tarpin made a fuss though.”
“Tarpin will live,” said Nick. He recounted what he had learned from the journal entries. “Only a few people knew about Novak’s plan: the supervisor in charge, the director of photo analysis, maybe Novak’s wife, and a pilot named Starek. One of those four people is our bad guy.”
“It’s not the photo analyst,” said McBride confidently.
“How do you know that?”
“He’s dead. It’s right here in the digital file you got from Tarpin. He was our first suspect because the Blackbirds sent the incident photos directly to him. If anyone had the opportunity and the know-how to doctor up the evidence, it would be the head photography guy. Unfortunately, he died in an accident on the airfield while the operation was packing up to move out.”
“What kind of accident?”
“He was crushed by a pallet loaded with heavy machinery.”
Nick winced. “Ow. That’s the kind of accident that leaves nothing to chance. Okay, keep on it. Also, keep digging into that photo of Wulóng from 2003. We need to know who that other guy is. Maybe we’ll find a connection to the salvage op or to the Triple Seven Chase. Wraith out.”
On the main screen, Nick could see the sprawling Chinese coast stretching away to the southwest. He tapped Quinn on the shoulder. “Your flying lesson is over, kid. It’s time to suit up.”
* * *
The rushing sound of wind and engines filled the flight deck as Nick popped open the crew hatch. He and Quinn wore their tactical harnesses, along with gray flight helmets and portable oxygen systems.
Drake also wore a helmet and mask. From the pilot station, he manipulated a display that read SHADOW CATCHER DIAGNOSTICS. He looked back and gave Nick a thumbs-up.
Despite the mask covering his friend’s face, Nick could see that he was concerned. Drake’s eyes said it all. Nick and Quinn were about to take an untested aircraft into the heavily defended airspace of a sovereign country, a country that the United States at least pretended to be friends with. They were not supposed to be there. There would be no rescue if the mission suddenly went pear-shaped. Nick pulled down his mask long enough to give Drake a thin smile. Then he dropped down the ladder.
Shadow Catcher’s top-mounted engine and intake system left no room for an upper entry hatch. Instead of climbing straight into the little aircraft’s cockpit, Nick and Quinn had to descend all the way to the bomb-bay doors and then squeeze underneath Shadow Catcher’s belly.
As he climbed down the ladder, Nick cast a glance at the two thermite bombs hanging above Shadow Catcher. If they could not get her airborne again after landing in China, Drake would use the five-thousand-pound weapons to wipe her from the face of the earth. Then Nick and Quinn would have to get Novak out on foot.
Nick could feel the pulsing slipstream through the thin composite sheeting as he moved across the bomb-bay door, crawling on all fours to distribute his weight. In his mind, he could see the cross section; mere inches of lightweight material separated him from an endless fall into cold darkness.
“You look nervous,” shouted Quinn as Nick opened the entry hatch.
He turned and looked at his young partner. Despite the bravado, the kid’s face was pale, his eyes wide. “So do you,” he shouted back.
Once Shadow Catcher’s hatch clamped shut, the rushing noise dimmed to a dull hum. Nick and Quinn lay prone in their crew stations, concave shelves on either side of the small cockpit. Green block letters on a wide screen in front of them proclaimed Shadow Catcher’s status.
SIGNAL ESTABLISHED
SYSTEM READY
“Go ahead and activate the Bluetooth in your helmet,” ordered Nick. He found a small slide switch near the ear guard of his helmet and moved it to the On position. Instantly, he heard the distinct static of an open line. “Drake, this is Nick. How do you hear?”
“Loud and clear. You guys are online through Shadow Catcher’s transmitters. Let’s spin this baby up.”
Nick, Drake, and Quinn ran the small aircraft through a series of checks. When they had finished, Shadow Catcher’s main screen showed an infrared display of the bomb-bay wall in front of the aircraft. A heads-up display was overlaid on the screen in front of Nick, similar to the Wraith’s display. All of his engine indications read zero, but his airspeed, altitude, and attitude displays were active, fed by Shadow Catcher’s GPS systems.
“Whoa, the Chinese radar net is hyperactive tonight,” interjected Drake, his voice registering concern. “It’s almost like they’re looking for us.”
“Relax,” said Nick. “For all we know, they run the net hot every night at this hour. We can’t start second-guessing everything we see.”
Quinn looked over from his station and lowered his mask. “Aren’t you worried about opening the doors when we deploy? Doesn’t that hurt our stealth?”
“Not in the Wraith.” Nick changed Shadow Catcher’s screen to the belly cameras. The infrared picture displayed the closed bomb-bay doors below them. “One of Scott’s engineers got an idea from a TV show about the Bermuda triangle,” he said. “According to the show, aircraft and ships get lost in clouds of electric fog, put out by aliens.” A gray mist began to roll over the doors, masking them from the cameras. Nick dropped his own mask and smiled. “Welcome to the mothership.”
“What is that stuff?”
“Nanoparticle mist. Basically it’s atomized radar-absorbent material. It will create a stealth barrier to cover the gap when the doors open. Then we simply drop through. Since the engine won’t start until after we fall away, the fog won’t damage the aircraft.”
“We’re approaching the drop zone,” said Drake.
“Can’t we call it a launch zone?” asked Quinn. “‘Drop zone’ makes me feel like this thing is going to fall into the ocean.”
“Call it whatever you want, we’re there. Initiate deployment on my mark in three, two, one . . . mark.”
The words AUTO DEPLOY appeared on Shadow Catcher’s screen. Nick heard the hydraulic pistons pulling back the telescoping doors. There was an exponential increase in wind noise. With a resounding thunk, the catch released, and Shadow Catcher dropped into open air.
Nick anticipated the freefall and braced his body against the sides of his station, but he heard a painful “Oomph!” in his headset. He looked over and saw Quinn shaking his head as if he’d just been punched by a prizefighter. The pararescueman had smacked his head against the roof of the cockpit. “It’s a good thing we gave you a helmet, kid.”
“Very funny. A warning would have been nice.”
Shadow Catcher’s autopilot stabilized the aircraft in a shallow dive while the auto-deployment sequence counted off on Nick’s heads-up display.
FLIGHT CONTROLS: OPERATIONAL
ENGINE START: INITIATE
ENGINE: STABILIZED
AWAITING COMMAND . . .
He used the touch-screen controls to direct the aircraft toward its first waypoint, and Shadow Catcher obediently turned toward Fujian. Nick called up the radio frequency display. The image on the main screen changed into a chaotic melee of undulating spots and lines. Multicolored streaks and flashes clashed against a black background.
“Psychedelic,” said Quinn.
“That’s all of the electromagnetic energy coming from the Chinese coast,” Nick explained. “Hold on.” He refined the image to filter out all frequencies except for ground-to-air radars. Pulsating green and blue cones swept back and forth from numerous points along the Chinese shoreline. Some of them passed directly across the aircraft, tracking a bright vertical line across the screen. “Drake was right. It looks like they’re running every radar on the Taiwan Strait tonight.”
“Should I be scared?” asked Quinn.
“No. We’re already inside most of their sweeps, but none of them have focused on our sector. We’re good
.”
Quinn remained silent for a while and then rolled onto his side and stared at Nick. “How do you know if it’s really working?” he asked.
“What?”
“You know, stealth, how do you know if it’s working?”
Nick gave him a grim smile. “Faith.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“That’s not really the answer I was looking for.”
“Sorry, kid. That’s the reality of combat. This is our foxhole, and in foxholes, sometimes faith is all you’ve got.”
Nick switched the display back to infrared. A small green square blinked over a patch of jungle several miles inland from the coast. He tapped it with his finger. “That’s our landing zone. I’m going to start the approach.” He pushed forward on the side-stick control, disengaging the autopilot and diving toward the LZ. It looked just as it had in their satellite imagery: a thin gravel road cutting diagonally across a long ridge that rose out of the rain forest, an access road for power lines that had long been out of service. Unfortunately, the ridge lay nestled between two taller ridges. In order to land uphill, Nick would have to make his approach at a very steep angle, hugging the trees of the neighboring hillside.
“You’re going to land there?” asked Quinn as Nick lined up the aircraft. On the infrared, the forgotten road looked like a hiking trail, and a short one at that.
Nick nodded toward the lights of Fuzhou, blazing white on the infrared horizon. “Would you rather I land at the airport?”
A thick blanket of trees whipped by the right wing as Nick banked into the valley between the ridges. He pushed Shadow Catcher down to the very treetops, where the dense foliage would trap the sound of his engine. The road slowly opened up before them, but the gap in the trees looked barely wide enough for Shadow Catcher to drop through. Then he spotted the huge fallen tree that marked the beginning of his improvised runway. He knew their landing area was supposed to be short, but now that he saw it, he wasn’t sure they could make it, even with Shadow Catcher’s short takeoff and landing capability.
Nick used a thumb switch on the throttle to open the lower exhaust panels, slowly transitioning the power from forward thrust to lift augmentation. He eased back on the side-stick control, lifting Shadow Catcher’s nose into a flare. “One hundred feet,” he said, reading the radar altitude display. “Fifty, thirty, ten . . .”
Suddenly, an unexpected gap appeared in the makeshift runway. A recent rainstorm had cut a wide chasm across the gravel road, right where he intended to touch down. With part of the engine’s thrust vectored down, Shadow Catcher was making more of a cushioned fall than a traditional landing, and Nick feared that hitting the edge of that cavity might rip his main gear off. He jerked back on the stick and reverted to forward thrust, hoping to propel the aircraft over the gap.
It worked. Shadow Catcher ballooned across the washed-out chasm but not without sacrifice. On the other side, the aircraft ran out of lift. She dropped like a stone.
Nick clenched his teeth as the gear slammed down onto the gravel. Then he realized that the worst was not over. His last-minute correction had made them land farther down the road than expected. The end of their landing zone was coming up fast.
Two T-handles, set into the panel in front of Nick, served as hydraulic brake controls. He pulled hard on both. The tires skidded on the gravel, and Shadow Catcher veered toward the trees on the right side.
“You’re going to clip the wing!” shouted Quinn.
“No, I’m not.” Nick released some of the pressure on the right brake in order to straighten the aircraft, but that sacrificed some of his stopping power.
Up ahead, the improvised runway ended in a switchback as the access road continued its steep climb up the ridge. Nothing but a short dirt embankment, only a few inches high, guarded the impossible curve. Beyond that, the terrain dropped off into darkness.
“Watch the end of the road!”
“Shut . . . up,” Nick grunted, fighting with the brake controls.
Finally, Shadow Catcher slowed, aided by the upward incline of the road. Nick’s arms burned. As the aircraft rolled up to the switchback, he pulled with everything he had against both brake handles. Just as the little embankment disappeared under the nose, she jolted to a stop. A tree branch lay against the front of the aircraft, every detail of its wide, heart-shaped leaves distinctly visible on the enhanced infrared display.
“Nice one,” said Quinn flatly.
Nick ignored the pararescueman. He uncaged the wing camera controls and panned them to the rear. The infrared cut nicely through the dust that he had kicked up on his landing. The gravel road descended into the forest behind them, silent, empty. He prayed that it would stay that way. “Bounce up and down,” he said to Quinn.
“What?”
“You heard me. Do it.” Nick released the brakes and started bouncing heavily in his crew station.
Quinn reluctantly joined him. “This is a little weird.”
Soon, Shadow Catcher started rolling backward. Nick stopped bouncing and held out a hand for Quinn to do the same. He watched the road behind them closely, twisting the side-stick control and lightly pulling individual brake handles to steer the aircraft. A few meters down the incline, he saw what he was looking for. He allowed the aircraft to pick up speed, and then pulled hard on the left brake while twisting the nose gear. Shadow Catcher swung into a small gap in the trees and stopped.
“Well,” said Quinn, “your landings suck, but you sure can parallel park.”
CHAPTER 41
Nick inspected Shadow Catcher as Quinn draped a MultiCam tarp over her frame. The aircraft’s skin looked little worse for wear, apart from some splashes of tree sap. “She’s looking pretty good,” he said.
“Maybe not.” Quinn had crawled underneath the nose to tie the front edge of the tarp to a stake. He motioned to Nick. “Take a look at the nose gear.”
Thick fluid oozed down the strut, glistening bloodred under the tinted glow of Quinn’s flashlight. Nick joined him on the ground and shined a white LED light on the gear, shielding the beam with his hand. Even under white light, the fluid still sparkled translucent red. He traced the drip back up the strut until he found a crack in the housing. “Hydraulic fluid. In a couple of hours, the front strut will be fully depressed.”
“Will we be able to launch?”
Nick crawled out from under the nose and evaluated their takeoff path. The neglected gravel road looked rough, really rough. He grimaced. “It’s going to be ugly, but she’ll manage. She’ll have to.”
The two of them finished hiding Shadow Catcher and then moved into the dark forest. Two-thirds of the way up the ridge, Nick stopped and crouched down, signaling the pararescueman to do the same. He scanned the valley behind them through his multifunction tactical goggles, looking for any sign of Chinese forces or civilians. The clarity of the new wide-spectrum goggles still astounded him, a major step up from the fuzzy green of the old binocular-style night-vision sets. Instead of simple light amplification, the ultralight MTGs offered several zoom levels of panoramic multispectrum video, with less bulk than a pair of ski glasses. They also served as a heads-up display system, fed by a wireless control box clipped to Nick’s harness. Turning his attention to the path ahead, he could see a digital readout of the range and bearing to their objective.
Quinn grabbed his arm. “We’re behind schedule. Let’s get moving,” he said in a harsh whisper.
Nick bit his tongue. He was finding it harder and harder to let the pararescueman’s lack of respect slide. A few hours of solid sleep had calmed his mood, but Quinn seemed to have a knack for getting under his skin. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “The phrase ‘slower is faster’ was never more true than it is now. The last thing we need is to run smack into a Chinese patrol.” He tapped his ear. “One more thing. We need a comms check.”
&nbs
p; Quinn raised his hands in defeat and leaned his back against a tree as Nick moved a few paces up the hill.
“How do you read?” whispered Nick, using the implant’s short-range mode.
“Loud and clear,” replied Quinn impatiently.
“Same. Stand by one.” Nick used voice commands to activate the link with the Wraith. There were no Milstar birds directly over China. With the ground team’s limited horizon, they had to relay through the aircraft to reach a satellite and talk to Romeo Seven. A distinctive beep told him when the line was ready. “Wraith, this is Shadow One on SATCOM.”
“Wraith is up, loud and clear,” said Drake. “Stand by for the relay.”
A few seconds later, Walker joined the line. “Lighthouse is up,” he said, his voice distorted over the encrypted satellite link. “You are twenty minutes behind schedule, Shadow. What’s the holdup?”
“We had a little trouble with the LZ,” replied Nick.
“He means he crashed into the road,” said Quinn.
Nick pulled his goggles down to his neck and scowled at the pararescueman. He pulled a level hand across his throat to tell him to pipe down. “The touchdown zone had an unexpected rut,” he explained. “I bounced the aircraft. She has a damaged nose gear strut, but I can get her in the air.”
“Lighthouse copies. Proceed.”
“Wilco.” Nick severed the link and switched to a short-range signal again. Using the low-power mode would save the implant batteries. It would also give him the opportunity to have a much-needed private chat with his young teammate. “What is your problem?” he asked.
“You’re my problem,” replied Quinn, standing up from his crouched position and pointing at Nick. “You treat me like a liability, but you’re the one who nearly killed us back there. Were you even going to tell the colonel that you crashed the plane?”