“We can use the Marines,” said Stoner.
“I have an okay for an armed recon already,” said Danny. “If we add Marines, that has to be cleared. They’ll probably want to fly in more forces, set up a whole operation. It’ll be thorough, but it’ll be overkill — and it won’t happen till tomorrow night. You told me you wanted to go sooner rather than later.”
“I do.”
“Then let’s do it.”
They gave the Chinese carriers a wide berth, working their way close to the Vietnamese coastline before heading back west. It occurred to Dog this very same B-52 frame might have pulled many missions here decades ago, dropping its sticks on North Vietnamese targets, maybe even mining Haiphong harbor. Dog had an unobstructed view of the coastline from roughly 25,000 feet; it seemed like a faceted jewel, a piece of intricately cut jade. He’d missed Vietnam, and wasn’t the nostalgic type besides, but even to Dog, it looked like the last place on earth a war would break out.
Then again, so did the empty ocean in front of him.
“Two minutes to our search area,” reported Rosen.
“Delaford, how’s it looking down there?” Dog asked him.
“We’re ready when you are, Colonel.”
“We’re talking to your friends in the Orions. They haven’t found anything for us yet.”
“Tell ’em to listen harder,” said Delaford.
“I’d give ’em new hearing aids if I thought it would help.” Dog did an instrument check, then turned his gaze back to the side window, looking down at the now-peaceful sea. His quarry was somewhere below, but where?
Armed with the satellite information as well as intercepts from SOUS and another hydrophone net, the Fleet intelligence officers had analyzed the probably course of the Chinese submarines. They had decided, given the mission, the subs would work as direct a course to the carrier group as possible, and probably get regular updates as they closed. This scenario presented several opportunities for finding the subs; not only would their route be some-what predictable, but the subs would probably pole their masts above the surface from time to time. The intel officers looked for specific choke points — in this case, places where it would be easy to find the subs as they passed — and concentrated their resources there. It sounded good, but so far, it wasn’t working. There was so much sea to cover, and without support vessels and submarines to assist, the Orions had a relatively limited view.
Dog wondered about the possibilities of extending Piranha’s range — not by the factor of two, which Delaford had said was doable, but by ten or even a hundred. It would be much more effective to launch it now and let it go find its target on its own.
Actually, they could, theoretically, do that. Just launch and search. Set a course southwest, toward the Chinese carriers; they’d find the subs sooner or later.
“Tommy, what do you think of launching Piranha blind and letting it look for the subs on its own?” Dog asked Delaford over the interphone.
“You mean completely without contact?” asked Delaford. “The problem is, Colonel, it’s such a wide area to cover. Considering Piranha can only stay in the water for eighteen hours — well, twenty or twenty-one …”
“It’ll stay longer than that,” said Dog.
“Right, I mean, it can only pursue at speed for that long, then runs down.”
“But if we figure, say, an eighteen-hour patrol, so the last six hours or so it’s near the carriers — I don’t know, can you plot something like that out? How close would we have to be?”
“Let me talk to English.”
“Orions are clean,” reported Rosen. “You know what we need? Hot dogs.”
“Oh, that’d be great on a long mission,” said Dog sarcastically.
“Break up the monotony.”
“Colonel, we think we have a good drop,” said Delaford, coming back on the line. He laid out a plan to launch Piranha at 260 nautical miles from the carrier task force and run it on an intercept. When it reached a point twenty miles from the carriers, it would then sweep ahead in an arcing search pattern.
“The only problem is what we do if, after we launch, the Orions find the Chinese subs and they’re really far away.”
“How far?” asked Dog.
“Well, anything over fifty miles and not heading in our direction is going to be problematic,” said Delaford.
“But we’ll know where they’re headed.”
“Only if our guess that they’re after the Indian sub is right.”
“I say we go for it,” said Dog.
“I agree.”
Woods and Allen might not, but Dog couldn’t see the use of flying around all day and not launching. They had to take a shot sooner or later.
“Give us that launch point again,” Colonel Bastian told Delaford.
Twenty minutes later, Dog and his copilot took Iowa down to five hundred feet, surveying the ocean and preparing to launch a buoy and the device. After a last check with the Orions to make sure they hadn’t found anything, Dog dipped the plane’s nose. Piranha splashed into the water like an anxious dolphin, freed from her pen.
“Contact with Piranha,” said Delaford, reporting a link with the robot. “We’re running diagnostics now. Looking good, Colonel.”
They ran the Megafortress in a slow, steady oval at approximately five thousand feet above the waves. As they completed their second pass, Rosen got contacts on the radar — a pair of Shenyang F-8’s were heading south from China.
“I have them at one hundred twenty-five miles,’ said Rosen. “They’re between eighteen and twenty angels, descending.”
“They see us?” said Dog.
“Not clear at this time,” said Rosen.
“Check and record our position,” said Dog, who wanted the record clear in case of attack. They were, irrefutably, in international air space.
“Absolutemento.”
“Which means?”
“You got it, Colonel.”
“Still bored? I thought the launch would perk you up.”
“Just call me Mr. Perky, sir.” Rosen worked in silence for a few minutes, still tracking the pair of interceptors as they headed south, not quite on an intercept vector. It was possible a land-based radar had picked them up as they opened their bay to complete the Piranha launch. On the other hand, it was also possible the planes were merely on a routine mission. The F-8IIMs looked like supersized MiG-21’s. though their mission was considerably different. Intended as high-altitude, high-speed interceptors, they were not quite as competent as the more maneuverable Sukhois that had recently tangled with Iowa. Nonetheless, they were capable aircraft, and their Russian Phazotron Zhuk-8 multimode radars would be painting the Megafortress relatively soon.
“We have a surface ship, thirty miles west, thirteen degrees from our present heading,” said Rosen, “Unidentified type — trawler-size.”
“Yes, we have it on the passive sonar,” said Delaford. “We’re looking at our library now. Probably a spy ship.”
“Not in the library,” said Ensign English after comparing the acoustical signal picked up by Piranha with a library of known warships.
“We can swing over and take a look,” said Dog.
“Good idea, Colonel,” said Delaford. “We’ll keep the probe its present course.”
“Keep an eye on our F-8’s,” Dog told Rosen as he nudged the stick to get closer to the ship.
“They’re turning it up a notch — on an intercept now at forty miles.”
“Surface ship is tracking us for them?”
“No indication of that,” said Rosen.
By the time the ship appeared in the distance, the F-8’s were roughly ten miles out. The two planes had cut their afterburners and were now descending in an arc that would take them about a half mile off Iowa’s nose. If everyone stayed on their present course. The fact they were heading in that direction, rather than trying to take a position on Iowa’s rear, seemed a significant tactical shift to Dog. Maybe shooting down the cruise missiles yesterday had won some friends.