Red Cell (38 page)

“I’ll make sure Jonathan pays off the debt,” she promised.

“He’s not there, is he?” Weaver asked.

“Nope. So I get to be his pimp for once,” Kyra replied.

“That will do nicely,” Weaver said. “See you soon.”

Kyra handed the phone back to the ensign and stepped out into the crowded passageway. She looked both ways and realized she had no idea how to get back to the admiral’s quarters.

Pollard dropped the file folder on his desk. The Stryker woman had delivered it to his staff a few minutes before and then left for Wardroom 3 to grab breakfast. The admiral had always preferred to study intelligence reports in private before meeting with his J2 to ask questions and saw no reason to change that habit for the two civilians, no matter what they were selling.

After ten minutes of reading, he summoned Nagin to his quarters. “What do you think?” Pollard asked his subordinate. He kept his own counsel but he was not so arrogant as to think he was always the smartest man in the room.

Nagin was still searching through his own copy of the reports. “Well, the CAD program is a real kicker, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Pollard agreed. “Combine that with these reports from that Chinese asset, and Mr. Burke’s theory suddenly looks a lot more reasonable.” He tossed his glasses onto the file folder, then sat back and put his hands behind his head.

“If Burke and Stryker are right and the PLA moves on Penghu, we could end up with a big hole in the flight deck if we try to intervene. Even if we stay on this side of the island,” Nagin said. “If the PLA does finally have a real stealth plane, once they know we’ve seen it, a withdrawal will look like we’re retreating out of fear. They’ll claim it deterred us.”

“And they’d be right,” Pollard said. “So either we bloody the PLA’s nose now or they’ll just get more aggressive and we’ll catch it all later.”

“
If
Burke and Stryker are right,” Nagin added. “They still don’t have a smoking gun.”

“A smoking gun happens a lot less than people think,” Pollard said. “Stryker was right. Everyone always wants that perfect piece of intel that tells you exactly what’s going on
right now,
and you can almost never get it. Those two have given us intel that’s as good as any we could really ask for and better than most of what we usually get.” He
leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees and covered his eyes with his hands. He felt very tired.

“So what do you want to do?” Nagin asked. “If we go charging in there and pick a fight with the Chinese, we might be starting a war. The president won’t like that much.”

“No, he won’t,” Pollard agreed. “We run, we lose. We stay, do nothing, and get hit, we lose and some of my kids probably get killed. So I want to go hit ’em. If they’ve really got a stealth plane up in our sky, we find a way to shoot it down. We make them think the whole project was a failure. We make them believe that this Assassin’s Mace was a waste of time, money, and some pilot’s life so we don’t have to see it again.”

“The Chinese won’t abandon stealth,” Nagin said. “They know what it’s done for us. They’ll keep at it until they make it work.” The idea that he might have to share the sky with hostile stealth fighters did not sit well with him.

“Probably,” Pollard admitted after a few seconds’ thought. “Then the Pentagon had better perfect those unmanned fighter drones before we lose too many pilots.” He hated the thought of robot fighter planes, and of losing pilots just a little more. He’d been a pilot too.

“So where do we start looking for the thing?” Nagin asked. Pollard just shook his head.

J2 INTELLIGENCE OFFICE
USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The Navy called this particular version the Reaper, but Kyra still struggled to stop thinking of the drones by their more common name of Predators. The MQ-9 unmanned drone could carry arms for ground attack. Admiral Pollard wanted to make the Chinese nervous. The hunter/killers’ trip from Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa to the Chinese coast had taken four hours and had reached their second set of waypoints shortly after nightfall three hours before. A radar technician in the Combat Information Center told her they could stay up for twenty hours more before they would have to return to Kadena to refuel. Each Reaper was loaded out with Hellfire missiles that no one expected to use on this mission, though they could have carried a five-hundred-pound bomb if the Air Force so desired.

But the mission at the moment was not attack. NRO had retasked satellites to watch the coast, particularly the PLA nuclear missile forces, but the overlords in Chantilly were nervous that the Chinese might decide to take a shot at the orbiting cameras. The drones could provide near-constant coverage, which Pollard demanded, they were far cheaper to replace if destroyed, and spares could be brought along in hours. A damaged satellite network would take years and tens of billions of dollars to restore. NRO had assured the Department of Defense for years that its network could provide the wartime coverage the United States needed. There was less confidence in that assessment now and Pollard had no patience for it. His request to the Air Force for their Reapers had not been polite.

If there was an Assassin’s Mace, it seemed likely to fly from one of six air bases within two hundred fifty miles of Taiwan, Jonathan had guessed. Navy Intelligence had designated three as prime candidates using some criteria they had not bothered to share with Kyra. She’d ignored the chance to catch up on the intelligence in favor of sleep, but Jonathan assured her that the deductions were sound and she trusted him. The Reapers had reached station near all three hours before. The
first was circling off the Fuzhou coast. Its two brothers would need another half hour to arrive over Jinjiang and Longtian.

The PLA’s combat air patrols had not challenged the drones during their approach over the open water. One MIG had made a quick pass, close enough to get a visual and see the missiles. The Reaper had sent back excellent video footage of the Chinese pilot ogling the drone, but the Reaper had been over international waters and the MIG had moved away.
Probably wondering what a Reaper’s air-to-air capabilities are,
Kyra thought. It could carry Stinger missiles, the tech had informed her, and she wondered if the Chinese pilots knew that. They were probably calling home asking for data in case they had to engage, and the Central Military Commission and the Politburo were likely debating the issue. If Tian and his circle did decide to engage the Reapers, it would be a one-sided fight and the United States would lose several million dollars’ worth of unmanned drones.

Light from the passageway leaked into the J2 office, briefly disturbing the red tinge cast by the overhead lamps. Kyra watched Pollard enter. She kept her place next to the door, and if the senior officer noticed her presence, he didn’t acknowledge it. His focus went immediately to the Reapers’ radar track on the master screen.

“Anything?” Pollard asked. It really was a moot question. The senior CIC officer on duty had standing orders to report anything more than a MIG flyby.

“No, sir,” one of the officers reported, this one a lieutenant. Kyra knew how to read the ranks, yet another skill deemed important by the NCS. “The drones are outside Chinese airspace per your orders, with a five-mile cushion. AWACS are tracking multiple CAPs over the Strait, but they’re giving the drones plenty of room.”

“Not five miles, I bet,” Pollard said. It was a rare joke from the senior officer aboard. The men laughed. Kyra did not, but she did allow herself a smile. “Let’s make ’em nervous. Shift the tracks west, quarter mile every pass, until they’re within a mile of the line.” The drones could return video footage of the coast from much farther out than their current position of seventeen miles east. They did not need to move in closer, but surveillance was not their true mission. The Reapers would have gone into the Strait whether there was an Assassin’s Mace or not, but now they would make for very expensive bait if the Chinese chose to see them as such.

“Aye, sir,” the tech said.

Kyra looked at her watch: 2227 hours. International law dictated that a country’s territorial waters and airspace extended twelve nautical miles out from its coastline. The Reapers were five miles beyond that line and started moving toward it. They would fly in circles, one round every fifteen minutes by her estimation, cameras aimed at their targets, moving closer by a nautical mile every hour toward an invisible line found only on maps. If the Chinese didn’t interfere, the Reapers would be within one mile of their airspace, a whisker by any standard, in four hours. It would be a long, very slow night unless the Chinese made it interesting. Kyra thought about leaving, going to her cabin and trying to sleep, but she suspected sleep wouldn’t come. The Navy prohibited alcohol on board, and she’d had enough men try to flirt with her that she didn’t want to pass the time in a wardroom. She reached for an empty chair and pulled it against the rear wall where she could sit out of the way.

USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

It happened at 0237. The Reaper targeting Fuzhou had just crossed the thirteen nautical mile marker drawn on the radar track. Without a sound, the infrared video feed turned to static.

“What happened?” a lieutenant asked. Kyra didn’t know his name. “Camera malfunction?”

“No, sir,” one of the techs answered. He couldn’t have been more than twenty by Kyra’s estimation. “Complete loss of all feeds. Sir, that one is down.”

“Freeze the track shift on the other two,” the lieutenant said. “Keep them outside the thirteen-mile limit. It looks like that’s where the PLA drew its red line.”

The Reaper had dropped all its feeds simultaneously. Kyra was no military analyst—
yet?
—but there weren’t many possibilities worth considering.
Only one,
she thought.
The Chinese just destroyed a Reaper and nobody saw it coming.

“The AWACs sent over their radar tracks and we compared ours with theirs,” the J2—
Lincoln
’s senior intelligence officer—said. “One of them caught a return that we didn’t, which bugs me. It’s a weak hit, but definitely a hit.” The J2 cued up the track on one of the smaller screens. He walked the video forward one frame at a time. “Starting at kill minus five seconds, the screen is clear. Four . . . three . . . and there.” Kyra watched, saw an icon, a red triangle, appear behind the position marking where the Reaper spent its final seconds. The J2 advanced the frame. “The bogey shows up for less than two seconds and then . . .” The red triangle disappeared in a single frame, with the Reaper icon clearing off the screen a second later. “We have a ghost.”

“We should be so lucky,” Nagin said.

“Your ghost has a temper and can dish out a hard kill,” Kyra said.

“Is that your stealth plane, Mr. Burke?” Pollard asked.

“I believe so,” Jonathan said. “I suspect that the Assassin’s Mace has internal weapons bays to keep the stealth profile intact, like the F-35. I
suggest that what you just saw on the radar track was the return signal from a stealth plane that opened its bay doors to fire an air-to-air missile. The plane closed up the doors, restored its stealth profile, and fell off the screen.”

“That fits with what we expect the other man to see when we’re flying F-35s against him,” Nagin said. “Not quite a smoking gun but maybe as close as we’re going to get.”

“He took the fat piece of bait you left dangling for him. Doesn’t that worry anyone here besides me?” Kyra asked.

“Never let them see you sweat, young lady.” Pollard glared at her. “Yes, they took the bait. It means that either the Chinese are convinced we have no idea what’s going on and that they can knock down a Reaper with impunity. Or they’re confident enough in their design that they don’t care whether we know,” he reasoned. “The former is more likely, and this puts us in a good position. But in either case, at least we can make an educated guess which air base he’s flying from. Are we getting anything from the other two?”

“Nothing we haven’t already gotten from the birds in orbit,” Nagin said. “Troops massing at the ports, enough to make a play for Penghu, but not nearly enough for a stab at Taiwan proper.”

“No time like the present,” Pollard said. He would have preferred to have Navy Intel take a long, hard look, preferably a few years’ worth of looks, at Jonathan’s theory and evidence before risking his ship, but Tian Kai seemed determined not to grant them the time. “J2, tell Kadena to recall the other two before the PLA decide to take a shot at them. No sense wasting the taxpayers’ money.” The admiral picked up the mic and called the bridge. “Helm, make your course one-nine-five, speed ten knots,” Pollard said. He hated for
Lincoln
to run at anything less than full speed, but silence would be more important. F-22 Raptors from Kadena would provide additional air cover. They had launched two hours before and mated with a tanker that came over from Guam. The two AWACS birds that were circling several hundred miles to the northeast had come from Okinawa as well. The PLA would see those, but not the Raptors, which were stealth fighters. If the PLA Air Force decided to move on the airborne radar platforms, Chinese pilots would start dying in large numbers with no warning.

“All ahead full, course one-nine-five, aye,” the bridge officer announced.

“We’ll round the point in two hours,” Pollard said to Nagin. “Send the Vikings and the Seahawks up just before then to begin ASW operations. They should have a free run for a couple of hours. We should pass east of Liu-ch’iu Yu before the storm clears.” The rain pounding on the ocean surface would make it harder for
Lincoln
’s submarine-hunting aircraft and helicopters to find the Chinese subs that were certainly holding station off the Taiwanese coast, but it would also mask the noise from the planes and choppers’ engines from the Chinese fast-attack boat hiding under the waves. The storm would move past them to the east before
Lincoln
would reach the northern point the admiral had set as his private goal.