Dale Brown - Dale Brown's Dreamland 04 - Piranha(and Jim DeFelice)(2003) (41 page)

 
          
“Understood,”
said Dog.

 
          
“Anything
else, Daddy?”

 
          
“Captain,
I’d appreciate it—”

 
          
“Bag
the Daddy stuff. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

 
          
He
longed to ask to speak to Jennifer—she was on board Quicksilver, helping
Zen—but it was too much of an indulgence.

 
          
“All
right, Quicksilver. See you later.”

 
          
“Roger
that.”

 
          
Dog
broke the Megafortress out of her figure-eight track and found his bearings for
the Philippine base. They were just climbing through twenty-five thousand feet
when the computer buzzed with an interruption on the Whiplash command link. The
words INCOMING TRANSMISSION. PRIORITY: DOG EARS appeared on the HUD screen.

 
          
Danny
Freah’s voice, but no image, came through after Dog authorized the feed.

 
          
“Colonel
Bastian?”

 
          
“Daniel.
How we doing?”

 
          
“Not
good, sir. We’ve lost one of our men. Sergeant Talcom. Powder.”

 
          
Dog
listened as Captain Freah described the operation in cold, sober tones.

 
          
“I
understand,” he said when the captain was finished. “I’ll notify Admiral Woods.
Where are you now?”

 
          
“We’re
still at the site, waiting for the Osprey to return from transporting Sergeant
Liu.”

 
          
Dog
listened as Danny told him what they’d found—not much actually. They still had
the mission tapes to analyze. The dead enemy soldiers who hadn’t been charred
beyond seemed to be Chinese; they figured the atoll had been a spy site.

 
          
“We
think there’s a whole chain of them, running north,” said Danny. “Stoner thinks
that, but they’re not using known Chinese codes; or Indian codes for that
matter. CIA’s pretty interested.”

 
          
“I’m
assuming you don’t require my assistance,” said Dog.

 
          
“Affirmative.
We’re ready to bug out.”

 
          
“I’ll
see you back at the FOA.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir.”

 
          
“Hang
in there, Danny.” The words were trite, way too automatic—he had to say
something but couldn’t come up with anything profound. “Iowa out.”

 
          
He
killed the connection, then went through the plane’s status with Rosen. He
checked on the other members of the crew, talked to Delaford about the way Zen
had handled Piranha, asked Ensign English what it was like a hundred meters
below the ocean during a storm—all delaying actions before telling the rest of
the Dreamland team their friend was dead.

 
          
He
punched through the circuit that connected back to Dreamland, bringing the
command center on-line in what amounted to a conference call with the other
Megafortresses and the mobile base back at the Philippines.

 
          
“I
have some very sad news. Today, Technical Sergeant
Perse
‘Powder’ Talcom lost his life to an enemy mine in a reconnaissance mission in
the South China Sea. Powder was an exceptional man, an important member of the
Whiplash action team, a cutup at times, and a ferocious fighter.”

 
          
Dog
stopped abruptly. He couldn’t sum up a man in a sentence, and there was no need
to. The people listening knew him pretty well, most of them probably better
than Dog did.

 
          
“Colonel
Bastian out.”

 
          
Aboard Quicksilver

 
          
“God,
Sergeant Powder,” said Jennifer. Tears started to slip from her eyes. “He was
so sweet—he was one of the people who helped deliver that baby in Turkey. God.”

 
          
She
started sobbing, then brought her hand up to clear her eyes so she could see
the display. The communication algorithms didn’t require any tweaking—the
Piranha system as a whole was probably the least bug-ridden project she’d ever
worked on—but she ran a test on the signal strength anyway.

 
          
“You
okay, Jen?” asked Zen. He was sitting a short distance away on the Flighthawk
control deck.

 
          
“Oh,
yeah, I’m all right.”

 
          
“It
sucks. Powder.”

 
          
“Yeah.”

 
          
The
sobs bubbled up again. She pushed back her teeth together, trying to force them
away. She barely knew the sergeant, barely knew most of the enlisted men in
Whiplash and at Dreamland.

 
          
What
if Colonel Bastian were killed? What if his plane went down? It was not
impossible—the EB-52’s weren’t invincible. A mechanical problem, a
screwup
in the computer system that helped run the plane…

 
          
She’d
worked on that system. Maybe she hadn’t tested it properly, maybe there was
something she’d messed up. God, she’d worked so hard she must have forgotten a
million things, screwed up in a million ways.

 
          
“Jen?”

 
          
“I’m
okay,” she said. She reached to push her hair back, forgetting she was wearing
a helmet. “I’m all right,” she insisted again.

 
          
“It’ll
help a little if you focus on the mission,” said Zen.

 
          
“Since
when did you become a fucking shrink?”

 
          
The
remark was wildly inappropriate, but Zen didn’t say anything, and she couldn’t
find a way to take it back.

 
          
Bree
settled onto the flight-eight pattern above the Piranha buoy. The sea was
almost glasslike, and though it was getting dark, the sky was so clear, if you
squinted just right you could see Australia, or at least think you could.

 
          
Thoughts
of Sergeant Powder’s family crowded into her head as she went through some
routine instrument checks with her copilot. She didn’t know Powder very well—he
was a bit crude, a class clown, not the kind of man she liked—but he was a
member of the team, of their family.

 
          
She
could imagine his mother getting the news.

 
          
The
nights by Zen’s bedside came back to her.

 
          
“Engines
so in the green I think they’re sprouting buds,” said Chris, subtly hinting
that she’d started to daydream.

 
          
“Roger
that.”

 
          
He
read the fuel states—having tanked before coming on station, they had more than
ten hours of flying time. Breanna glanced at the long-range radar, which showed
the Sukhois patrolling over the Chinese carriers one hundred miles away. It was
unlikely they didn’t know the Megafortress was there, or why.

 
          
Powder’s
poor mother would never know what happened. They wouldn’t be allowed to tell
her much.

 
          
“Captain,
we’re intercepting broadcast from that Taiwanese spy ship,” said Freddy
Collins, handling the
Elint
board. “Should I roll
tape?”

 
          
“Go
for it,” said Breanna. The transmission were actually recorded on computer
disk, but there was no ring to “imprint electrons.”

 
          
“Whole
lot of talking going on,” added Collins. “But they’re using a very
sophisticated code.”

 
          
“Can’t
break it?”

 
          
“As
a matter of fact, no, not with our equipment,” said Collins. “The computer
claims it’s using some sort of bizarre fractal code on top of a 128-byte
thing—and they’re skipping frequencies on some sort of
ultrarandom
basis besides. The boys at the NSA are going to want to see this.”

 
          
“Probably
talking about us,” said Chris.

 
          
“Torbin,
what kind of radar is that Taiwanese vessel using?” she asked.

 
          
“Negative
on that. Don’t have transmissions. Sukhois have standard Slot Back radar.
They’re not close to picking us up. You want data on the carrier and the
escorts?”

 
          
“They
tracking us?”

 
          
“Negative.
I’d compare the carrier’s radar capabilities to the AN/SPG-60 the Navy uses.
Not particularly a problem for us; they can’t see their own planes beyond fifty
miles. No airborne radar capacity.”

 
          
“You
sound a little disappointed.”

 
          
“You
always like to go against the best.”

 
          
“Don’t
get too cocky.”

 
          
“Yes,
ma’am; thank you, ma’am.”

 
          
Torbin
was a big blond Norseman, a rogue throwback to the days of the Vikings they’d
shanghaied from a terminal Wild Weasel posting in Turkey. He fit right into the
Dreamland crew.

 
          
All
they’d give the poor woman was a folded flag and some well-meaning salutes.

 
          
Zen
nudged the joystick ever so slightly to the right, trying to keep the closest
white blur in the center of his screen. Like the Flighthawks, Piranha had a set
of preprogrammed routines, one of which allowed it to simply trail its
designated target. Still, he preferred to manually steer the probe—otherwise, he
really had no function.

 
          
They
were about twenty miles from the end of their effective communication range;
they’d have to drop another buoy soon.

 
          
The
submarines were changing course, making a slight arc that took them due east.
They were well behind the carrier group—Zen started to slow, remembering
Delaford’s
warning they would probably spin around to look
for him, but they didn’t. They had their throttles open, plunging ahead at
thirty-eight knots. Much faster and he’d have trouble keeping up.

 
          
Zen
hit the toggle, changing the synthesized view from sonar to temp. the nearest
submarine looked like an orange funnel in a greenish-brown mist; the other was
such a faint blur, he wasn’t sure he would have seen it without the computer
legend. The computer used all of its sensors to keep track of the targets, and
could synthesize a plot from any angle. Jeff briefly toggled into front and top
views. I was important—but difficult—to remember the views were based only on
sensor information; he wasn’t looking at reality, but a very simplified slice
of it. Anything outside of the sensor’s sensitivity was missing from the scene.
That meant, for instance, when he looked at the thermal image, anything
precisely the temperature of the water wouldn’t show up.

 
          
He
went back to the passive sonar feed, the easiest to use when controlling the
probe. The lower portion of the screen looked foamy and white, a by-product of
the sound reflections the device picked up. As Jennifer had explained, it was a
kind of refracted energy, similar to glare bouncing off sand. The computer
could only filter so much of it out, but a good operator could compensate for
the blind spot by changing the position of the nose every so often. In effect,
pushing the spotlight into the darkness. Zen nudged the nose down slightly,
peering into the basement, then tucked back to keep his target in sight.