Red Cell (36 page)

“It’s not on the web?”

“Only in Russian,” she explained. “You read Russian?”

“You have the title and author?”

“
Theory of Edge Diffraction of Electromagnetics.
Written by Pyotr Ufimtsev, 1966. The original Russian title is
Metod kraevykh voln v fizicheskoi teorii difraktsii
.” It sounded like Stryker was reading the titles off something. Weaver’s ear for accents wasn’t well trained, but he’d been sent to Russia on several occasions. Stryker’s Russian pronunciation sounded flawless, the accent nearly pure Muscovite as far as he could discern.

“Give me a second, I don’t have a Cyrillic keyboard,” Weaver said. He winced and hoped that Kyra appreciated sarcasm, but she sounded too tired to care. The tech stole an engineer’s graph pad from the next cubicle and hunted for a pencil. “Repeat the name.” Kyra repeated the Russian words again. “What’s the paper about?”

“Stealth.”

“I thought Lockheed Martin invented stealth in the seventies,” Weaver said.

“Ufimtsev worked out the math, but the Russians didn’t realize what it could be used for. Lockheed Martin did. We think the algorithms you extracted are Ufimtsev’s equations for calculating radar cross sections. He figured out that the size of the object reflecting the radar wave is irrelevant: all that matters is the shape. That’s why that number on
the CAD program only changed when you loaded a new shape. It was the radar cross section. The actual dimensions of the object were irrelevant.”

“That’s counterintuitive,” Weaver said.

“The technology works.”

“I guess,” Weaver said. “If nobody in WINPAC has a copy of that paper, I’ll have to see if the librarians can track it down.”

“Whatever you have to do,” Kyra conceded. She disconnected the phone.

CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

The CIA director’s secure phone rang. She enabled the encrypted connection. “Cooke.”

“It’s Burke. We’re in Seoul.”

“How were the potstickers?”

“Wish we’d had the chance to try some,” Jonathan said. “I need a favor.”

“Sure.”

“This might be nothing, but I want to rule it out if there’s no connection. Did the Taiwanese ever figure out what that chemical was that took down those SWAT officers in Taipei?”

“The Ops Center finally dropped that one on my desk yesterday, after you two started playing games with the Chinese,” Cooke said. “The chemical was something called chlorofluorosulfonic acid. Finding out what that is took another call. The common use is to inhibit water vapor from condensing at near-freezing temperatures. It’s used occasionally by DoD to break up contrails on aircraft so they can’t be tracked visually from the ground. Is that helpful?”

“You have no idea.”

“You going to tell me what this is about?” Cooke asked.

Jonathan told her. “Kyra and I need a flight to one of the carrier battle groups in the Strait,” Jonathan said.

“Not a chance. I am not sending you two into an active war zone,” Cooke declared.

“We know what the Assassin’s Mace is. I can either explain it to an admiral in person, or I can explain it in a cable and we can pray that he bothers to read it and loves my Shakespearean prose.”

“You’re not the most charming analyst.”

“Charming enough for you, I hope,” Jon answered.

There was a very long pause and Jonathan found himself listening to the slight hissing static. “You’re going to owe me whole barrels of whiskey when you get home,” Cooke finally said.

“I’ll be able to afford them with the performance bonus that you’re going to give me,” Jonathan said. “By the way, you should call Garr Weaver. He’s an IOC analyst but he should be knocking around WINPAC in another hour or so. He’s got something you’ll want to see.”

“I’ll track him down,” Cooke said. “Give me fifteen minutes to call the SecDef and see about getting you down to the
Lincoln
.” It took her precisely that long to get back to him with the answer.

INCHEON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

Jonathan snapped the handset shut and tapped it lightly against his forehead.

“And?” Kyra asked.

Jonathan looked to Mitchell. “You’re taking off without us,” he said. He turned to Kyra.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The
Abraham Lincoln
.” It was his turn to smile. “You never get to go if you don’t ask.”

Kyra grinned. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned over to Mitchell. “I want to say good-bye to him.” Mitchell nodded, then turned to Pioneer and spoke to him in Mandarin. The Chinese asset listened to Mitchell, focused on his face until the man stopped speaking.

Sachs watched as the old man turned to Kyra after a moment’s silence. “Thank you,” Pioneer said. The man spoke a bit of English after all. There was a strong undercurrent of gratitude in the words, stronger than he would have expected between an asset and his escort. Sachs wondered what the brunette had done to deserve it.

“You’re welcome,” Kyra said. Then she leaned in close and whispered to him in plain English. “You’ll never be alone.”

Sachs couldn’t tell whether the man understood her. He seemed
to grasp the emotion if not the words. Regardless, Pioneer gripped her hand with both of his own, bowed to her again, and then turned to Mitchell and said something in Mandarin.

“‘I hope to see you soon,’” Mitchell translated. “We need to get in the air.” Kyra looked at Pioneer and nodded.

“We’re gone,” Jonathan said.

The analysts climbed down the stairs and moved to a safe distance. Mitchell grabbed the rope and pulled the stairway up into the plane, then locked the hatch as the Learjet’s engines began to spin up.

“They’ll be at Dulles in eighteen hours,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

“We meet our own escort,” Jonathan said. “Have you ever been on an aircraft carrier?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

Jonathan smiled. “Trust me, you’ll love it.”

“No, I won’t,” Kyra assured him. “I get seasick.”

She made the analyst wait as she bought Dramamine at one of the airport shops.

USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
482 KILOMETERS NORTHEAST OF TAIWAN

Captain Nagin eased back on the F-35’s throttle and leveled the plane as he came out of his turn. Two fellow Bounty Hunters were behind him, one fifty meters off each wing, and another trio of his fellow Bounty Hunters ten miles behind. All six stealth planes were sharing data with feeds coming from
Lincoln
, an AWACS out of Guam, and a pair of E-2C Hawkeyes that had taken off from the carrier after Nagin’s flight. For the moment, their own active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars were off and the F-35’s four-panel cockpit screen still offered Nagin a fine view of the sky ahead. The horizon was dark with thunderclouds, and a lightning storm thirty miles ahead was giving a light show as good as any the
Lincoln
CAG had ever seen from a cockpit. It was a beautiful sight, as long as one kept a respectful distance, and one he wouldn’t have minded lingering to watch.

The four Chinese Su-27 Flankers ahead marred the view.

The Flankers were in an echelon formation, each plane slightly to the rear and to the right of the one ahead, and all a thousand feet higher and two miles ahead of Nagin’s flight. They were also on course to encroach on
Lincoln
’s defense zone unless they changed course in the next five minutes. Some things were not to be trifled with in Nagin’s world, and the safety of home was one them. At the moment, home was the
Lincoln
—the landing strips on the flattop, not to put too fine a point on it.

“Think they know we’re here?” asked one of Nagin’s wingmen, a youngish lieutenant, call sign Squib. The other wingman was Cleetus.

“Nope,” said Nagin. The Flankers’ relatively weak radars almost certainly hadn’t been able to get a return off the stealthy F-35s. And with the AESA systems off, there were no emissions for the Flankers to detect. “Think I’ll go introduce myself.”

Nagin pulled back on the stick and advanced the throttle ever so slightly, and his plane obediently rose in the sky, pulling ahead of the rest of his personal pack and pushing forward toward the Chinese fighters. He closed the distance gently until he was in position to join the formation, becoming the rearmost plane in the echelon line.

I love this part,
he thought. He pushed the F-35 forward a few meters until he flanked the Chinese fighter in the rear position.

The PLA pilot took a moment to notice, obviously seeing the US Navy aircraft only out of his peripheral vision at first. Then his head swung full around. Nagin couldn’t see his face through the darkened helmet visor, but the other pilot’s body language told him everything. His head began to jerk wildly about and he started to slip switches in the cockpit with abandon. Doubtless he was yelling to his flight leader and wondering where the American had come from.

Nagin waved, then motioned hard for him to change course. The PLA pilot made no obvious response. Nagin gave the entire group several seconds to respond, but the line held steady on course.

Okay
, Nagin thought.
Meet the boys.
“Gentlemen,” he said over his radio, “time to open the coat.”

The two Bounty Hunters to the rear both grinned behind their visors, reached forward to the four-panel computer screens above their knees, and pressed virtual buttons on the glass. The AESA radars in the F-35s both came alive in tandem and washed the Flankers in electromagnetic waves. The Su-27s began screaming threat warnings in their
masters’ ears. A second later, the F-35s’ bay doors snapped open and their missile loads emerged, breaking the stealth profiles. The F-35s were suddenly visible to anyone with a radar.

The Flankers immediately began to break formation.

“
Now where did they come from?
” Nagin chuckled to himself. The sight of two F-35s appearing out of nothing on the Flankers’ heads-up display must have been a brutal shock, which was the point.

The Flankers went in four different directions, all moving west at varying altitudes and headings. Nagin eased back on his throttle and pushed his stick forward to descend a thousand feet to rejoin his flight. “Close up and pull back,” he radioed back to Squib and Cleetus. “No sense making them think we’re too anxious to get rowdy.” The two wingmen retracted their bay doors, restoring the stealth profiles, then killed the AESA radars, and all three F-35s disappeared off the Flankers’ screens.

I wonder which one scares them more?
Nagin asked himself.
Watching us just appear or seeing us go away?

USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
SOUTHEAST COAST OF TAIWAN

They came aboard the carrier in the middle of a squall. The flight from Seoul to Tokyo’s Narita Airport had been turbulent but short. A Navy driver had delivered them to the US Naval Air Facility at Atsugi and led them to a waiting C-2A Greyhound on the tarmac. There had been no conversations with the crew, no talking at all except for the short safety briefing, which Jonathan had ignored. The ease with which he strapped himself in suggested that he’d had practice, but the turboprops were loud enough to discourage Kyra from asking him any questions. Once aloft, Jonathan slept and left Kyra to wish she could do the same. The float coat vests they were ordered to wear were not uncomfortable but the seats and the “Mickey Mouse” helmets with heavy ear protectors were. She might have made do, but the plane itself refused to sit still. She had never been aboard a propeller-driven aircraft. The Dramamine did nothing for her nerves. Every bit of wind and rough air made the Greyhound jump, leaving her edgy and awake. Alone in her thoughts, she wondered whether the aircraft could evade a MIG should the Chinese decide to take offense at their approach to the war zone. Probably not.

The seat belts performed as advertised when the plane hit the deck harder than Kyra thought possible for an aircraft to survive and then rushed to a stop in a distance too short to be natural. Unseen crewmen disconnected the tailhook from the wire and Kyra watched, too tired to be curious, as they folded up the wings. The plane taxied to a space forward of the carrier island to make room for a Hornet coming less than a minute behind them. The crew chained the Greyhound to the deck and only then did the passengers deplane.

Horizontal rain lashed the deck and everyone on it. Kyra was stunned to feel the deck pitching and rolling under her feet. She’d thought a carrier was too large to toss about, and she stumbled as the crew hurried them to a hatch into the island. A seaman from the Air Transport Office dropped their wet bags at their feet and gave them cursory directions to their quarters.

It was the night watch. The island decks were at full lighting but the spaces under the hardtop were visible only under the red floodlights that preserved the crew’s night vision. Their staterooms were on the O-2 level, a single deck removed from topside, where Kyra could still hear and feel aircraft launching and landing. The planes were hitting hard in the storm. She suspected that they could have berthed her several decks below and she still would have heard it. Jonathan had warned her during the drive to Atsugi that a carrier was not a quiet place.

The stateroom was smaller than a college dorm, all gray metal and blue carpet, but she had the space to herself, for which she was grateful. She had her choice of three racks stacked in a vertical bunk; she chose the middle. Entering the lowest would have required her to get on her knees, and the upper rack was even with her head. She was sure that trying to get out of it in the dark with the ship pitching about would have been a dangerous exercise.

There was a television mounted on the upper shelf of the metal desk, and Kyra found a live feed of the flight deck besides the DoD channels. She settled on CNN and tried to catch up on the war, but the news, the noise, and the rolling of the carrier in the restless sea together failed to keep her from wanting to collapse. The adrenaline that had surged through her during the Beijing operation had long since worn off. She hadn’t slept in days and now she was more tired than she could ever remember.