Red Cell (20 page)

“Or stole some,” Jonathan said. “They’re big on that.” He pushed back from the desk with his foot and let his chair roll across the floor back until it stopped near the marker board where he had drafted his list. He stood and walked to the window and stared out at the A-12 monument overlooking the west parking lot. “You don’t actually need a fighter to attack a carrier. A bomber could do the job just fine if it could penetrate the air defense umbrella. Very difficult, but not impossible.”

Kyra thought for a moment. “Speed?”

“Speed. Altitude. Stealth. Any of those three would solve the
problem. When the Cold War broke out and we needed to keep watch on the Russians, we built the U-2. And by ‘we,’ I do mean CIA. The U-2 was ours—highest-altitude plane ever built at the time. When the Russians figured out how to shoot those down, we went for speed and built the A-12. The Russians never did figure out how to shoot that down, but it was only a matter of time. So the Air Force worked out stealth and built the F-117 Nighthawk. Back in the Gulf War, Saddam had more antiair defenses surrounding Baghdad than the Russians had surrounding Moscow, literally. Three thousand double-A guns and sixtyish SAM batteries. The Iraqis never even managed to scratch the paint on a Nighthawk, much less shoot one down.”

“The Serbs managed it,” Kyra said. “They shot one down near Sarajevo.”

“Dumb luck with an assist from our stupidity,” Jonathan said. “Orders forced the pilots to fly the same approach routes from Aviano every night, so the Serbs had a pretty good idea where to point their radar.”

“Any of those three would stick in the Pentagon’s craw,” Kyra admitted.

“It’s great fun being the only person with a particular technology. It stops being fun the moment someone else gets it,” Jonathan agreed. “The question is how do we prove any of this.”

“That one’s easy.” Kyra put her head down and smiled slightly. “We go out there and debrief Pioneer.”

Jonathan rocked back in his chair, surprised at the suggestion. “You’re serious?”

“Better to interview the asset in person than just read somebody else’s reports about it. Let’s cut out the middleman.”
And get out of this office.

The senior analyst cocked an eyebrow. “There’s no way with PLA tanks rolling that NCS is going to let a pair of analysts go to China to talk to one of their prize assets.”

Coward. Cynic?
The two were not mutually exclusive, though Kyra suspected that only the latter was true. There was no question about that one. “It’ll never happen if we don’t ask.”

“Feel free,” Jonathan replied without hesitation. “While you’re tilting at windmills, see if you can get NCS to cough up copies of those disks that Pioneer handed over.”

USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(CVN 72) 240 KILOMETERS WEST OF SASEBO, JAPAN

Captain (USN) Moshe Nagin rolled the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter ten degrees to give him a wider view of USS
Abraham Lincoln
. Truth be told, and he never admitted it to his fellow naval aviators, he hated trapping on aircraft carriers. Landing a jet fighter on a moving
Nimitz
-class carrier at night in a squall was a task so hard it made grown men want to wet their pants, and it never got easy with practice. Runways are supposed to sit still and be a mile long. Landing on a ship’s deck that was only five hundred feet long and moving at thirty knots was unnatural, and his life depended on some too-young-to-drink boatswain’s mate below decks setting the proper tension on the deck cables. Too little tension on the wires and the plane would roll off into the water. Too much and only divine intervention would keep the cable from ripping the tailhook out of the plane. The other possibilities all involved varying amounts of burning jet fuel, live ordnance, and pilot spread over the deck.

Nagin looked past the
Lincoln
and picked out an HH-60H Seahawk flying its own pattern low and slow. Some of his younger pilots mocked the helo pilots, as though flying jets was the only job on a carrier that mattered, but time would solve that. Bold pilots sometimes got to be old pilots only through the gracious courtesy of helo search and rescue teams. He had found religion the first time a Seahawk had pulled him out of the water. One of the engines on his first Hornet malfunctioned a half second into a catapult launch, rupturing the cowling and sending shrapnel into the other. The catapult had obediently thrown his Hornet off the carrier anyway. Nagin ejected just before the plane hit the Persian Gulf. The Seahawk crew that lifted him from the water hadn’t even cracked a joke about his flying skills, and that earned them a share of the love he otherwise saved for his wife.

“Break to line up,” the landing signal officer ordered through his helmet. Nagin sucked in a breath of sterile, recycled air through his mask and pulled the plane into a turn, rolling hard left.

“Call the ball,” the LSO said.

Nagin sought out the “meatball” light on the port side. The yellow dot emitted by the Fresnel lens was agreeably where it was supposed to be, sitting between horizontal green lights above and below. He was riding the glide slope straight as a ruler.

“Fencer eight-zero-one, juliet sierra foxtrot ball, eight-point-eight,” Nagin called out.

“Roger ball,” the LSO acknowledged.

Nagin held the turn until he’d come around 180 degrees from his previous course, then rolled the plane level.
Lincoln
was ahead and the absurdly short runway was a thousand feet below and moving to the right. Nagin corrected for the drift and nudged the nose up a bit to kill some speed. The LSO stayed silent—Nagin’s best indication that he wasn’t completely screwing up.

The exact moment the landing gear hit the deck was always a surprise. The plane touched down moving at a hair under 150 miles per hour. White smoke poured off the tires as the rubber went molten from the friction, and for a moment the plane was sliding on liquid made from its own wheels. Nagin jammed the throttle full forward and heard the F-35’s single engine scream as it spooled up to full power.

Inertia threw Nagin against his harness, and he knew that the tailhook had caught a wire—the number three—which held with the right amount of tension. His speed dropped, the tires stopped melting, and they caught traction on the nonskid deck. Nagin yanked the throttle back, the engine went quiet, and his speed went to zero.

It wasn’t the moment to relax. The carrier deck was a busy and cramped space, and it wouldn’t do to drive the new stealth fighter into the water. His shoulders ached where the harness had pressed into the muscle. He wondered if he’d bruised them again.

MAIN HANGAR DECK
USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Lincoln
’s hangar deck reeked of jet fuel. Everyone aboard ended up in the hangar sooner or later, where the smell of refined hydrocarbons attached itself to their clothing, and they carried the odor out to their shipmates like missionaries spreading the gospel. Rear Admiral Alton Pollard had lived a quarter century on carriers, which was long enough for his mind to learn to ignore the smell the same way it ignored the feeling of clothing on his skin. He had to think about the odor to notice it, and it was smarter not to think about it.

The hangar deck was almost 700 feet long and 110 wide but still felt cramped when more than a few fighters were parked inside. The
new F-35s were off the hardtop above and more than a few off-duty sailors were down to see the planes. The Lightning II was clearly American, looked like a fighter, but it was not fearsome.
What’s scarier?
the Pentagon desk pilots had reasoned.
The plane they see up close in combat or the one they never see coming at all?
But in the back of Pollard’s mind something nagged at him, telling him that a psychological weapon had been lost. Maybe he was just finally old enough that he couldn’t embrace change with any enthusiasm. He shook his head, cleared his mind, and approached the senior pilot, who was holding class on the new plane with enlisted sailors young enough to be his children.

“Admiral.” Nagin’s posture straightened and he gestured to the F-35. “The replacement for the Hornet,” he said. “What do you think?” The senior pilot aboard was still dressed in his flight suit and cradling his helmet in his arm like a football. As commander, air group (CAG), Nagin had exactly one superior aboard. Pollard was the only man who outranked him. The admiral thought a CAG had the best job in the Navy, had been one himself, and missed the job most days. Nagin had the privileges of elevated rank and still got to fly a fighter every day. Being the commanding officer of a battle group had its own rewards, but they never quite equaled the logging of flight hours in the cockpit.

“You tell me,” Pollard said. “You’ve flown one. I haven’t.” He put his hand on the plane’s wing, the first time he’d actually touched a Lightning II. He could have taken one of the new fighters out for a joyride, but Pollard’s body didn’t quite bounce back from hard carrier landings the way it used to. His back loved flying less every year, and he refused to think what an ejection seat would do to his spine now. He’d had to do that once. Although forever grateful to the Martin-Baker company for building an escape vehicle that worked every time, he was quite sure the compression of his vertebrae had left him an inch shorter. It was a small price to pay to come home to his wife.

Nagin frowned a bit. “Twice the range on internal fuel as the 18Cs, but she has a single engine, which worries me. I don’t like single points of failure and that’s a big one. And there’s no HUD. All the flight data is projected onto the inside of the helmet.” He hefted his flight helmet and showed it to the admiral. Pollard took it and examined the inside.

“That doesn’t make you sick?” Pollard asked.

“It feels a little unnatural at first, but works fine when you get used to it.”

Pollard handed the helmet back to its owner. “What about the ordnance load?”

“No question, she’s a bomb truck,” Nagin said. “She can lug around five thousand pounds of JDAM hurt inside and six hardpoints on the wings when stealth doesn’t matter. That only leaves room for two AMRAAMs mounted inside when you have to go air-to-air, and those have to mount on the bay doors.” Those bay doors were open, Nagin gestured inside. “You get two Sidewinders on the wings if you really need ’em and don’t care about the stealth.”

“Maneuverability?”

“She handles well enough to dogfight, but she’s no F-22 like the Air Force boys are flying these days. So she doesn’t carry much for it.”

“You don’t like the pistol?” Pollard asked, working his way back toward the engine. He found the gun mounted in an external pod on the undercarriage almost directly between the wings.

The CAG shook his head. “The gun’s fine. It’s a version of the GAU-12-slash-U—twenty-five millimeter four-barrel Gatling, pretty much the same thing the Harrier carries. But hanging it off the center pylon degrades the stealth a bit when it’s mounted. And I’m not too keen on the ammo load. It handles forty-one hundred rounds per minute but only carries two hundred twenty rounds in the pod. So you’ve got about three seconds worth of fire before you’re left hoping that you’ve still got some missiles.”

“Or some Hornets in the neighborhood,” Pollard said. “But nobody dogfights anymore, not like the old days, not at close range.”

“That’s the problem,” Nagin countered. “If the bogeys ever manage to get in close, we could have trouble.”

“Then don’t let ’em get in close.” Pollard watched his sailors stare at the new JSF like it was the burning bush, then finally took his gaze away from the plane and looked at the senior pilot. He motioned him away from the crowd of enlisted men. Nagin fell in behind the senior officer as the admiral sought privacy, looking for space in the hangar deck that was overrun only by equipment and not by sailors.

“Orders came in from CINCPACOM just after you left. The PLA overran Kinmen and caught everyone flat-footed. That island is so close to the coast that the Chinese were able to blitz out of their bases in range without having to move extra assets around. They could take the Matsus the same way and nobody will be able to call it more than five minutes in advance. PACOM is sending out EP-3s to ramp up
ELINT coverage in case the Chinese start getting ready to make a move on Penghu or Taiwan proper. And we’re changing course.
Washington
is coming down too. We’ll both keep the island between us and the mainland.
Washington
takes the north, we get the south,” Pollard told him. “Have you seen the morning intel?”

“Not today,” the pilot said, shaking his head. “The flight schedule had me in the air too early. I was going to catch up after I finish up down here. Anything on that PLA carrier threat?”

Pollard shook his head. “CIA and Navy Intel assessments came in. They all say it probably refers to PLA subs carrying Sunburns or Exocets, maybe Shkvals.”

“Academy plebes at Annapolis could’ve made that call,” Nagin said. “True,” Pollard said.

“But it’s the safe bet, and if it comes down to straight ASW, we can handle the PLA Navy.”

“I hate people who always make the safe bet,” Nagin said.

“You never win big and you can always still lose,” Pollard agreed. “But we’re getting some help to keep the PLA Navy off our backs.” He reached into his pocket and passed a hard copy of CINCPACOM’s orders to Nagin, who turned it over in his hand and began to study the small type. “
Honolulu, Tucson, Virginia,
and
Gettysburg
.” The first three were attack submarines: the two named for cities were
Los Angeles
–class, the third was the lead boat of the more modern
Virginia
class.
Gettysburg
was a
Ticonderoga-
class cruiser. “The subs will join us by day after tomorrow.
Gettysburg
is coming up from the south. She’s already in the Balintang Channel, so she’ll beat us there by a day or so.
Washington
is getting the
Salt Lake City, Columbia, New Mexico
, and
Leyte Gulf.
Not a bad start.”