“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.
They were turning again, this time south. Zen made another course correction, then studied his sitrep map on the far-right screen. He guessed the subs were making an end run around the back of the carrier task force.
Zen glanced over at Jennifer. She seemed more herself, her nose almost touching one of the computer screens. The only signs she was still upset were that she wasn’t talking to herself or sipping her diet soda.
“Hey, Jen, we’re going to have to drop a buoy soon.” He said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just want to make sure they’re going to hold roughly this course. I’ll work it out with Captain Stockard.”
“You have to watch the carriers.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.”
“There’s a comeback for that, but I don’t remember what it is.”
Zen turned his attention back to the screen. He realized he’d slipped a big off-line, and started to correct a little too quickly. The probe went too far right, then wallowed a bit as he overcorrected. He backed off, easing his grip.
A warning tone buzzed in his ear. He started to frown, thinking the computer was scolding him, then he realized it was showing a new contact.
“Jennifer — I have a new contact. No range markings,” he said. He flipped back into the thermal mode — there were only two funnels. He went back — the third shadow was off to the left; it didn’t seem to be moving.