Stoner folded his arms in front of his chest, staring at the video screen. Both the Chinese and the Indians had their chessmen in place; they could start duking it out in an hour.
So what were the Taiwanese up to anyway? Egging the Indians on? Usually, they took a more laid-back approach, but they had spy ships all over the place, including one so close it was going to catch shrapnel when the fighting started.
Stoner stared at the fifteen-inch display screen where the sitrep view was displayed. It was a simple thing, a plot of positions against longitude and latitude, yet cobbling it together was not exactly child’s play. To get all these different inputs, process them, out them on the screen so that even an untrained operator like himself could see what was going on — Dreamland indeed.
“Say, uh, Captain Ferris. Chris. This is Stoner. What’s the green triangle on my screen?”
“On the sitrep? That’s the marker for the Piranha buoy. It’s tied into the tactical system so it comes on the display. Sorry if it’s confusing.”
“That Taiwanese trawler is going to run right over our buoy if they stay on that course. Is he tracking it?”
“No way,” said Ferris.
“Well, he’s going to run over it anyway.”
Breanna pushed the plane down through the leading edge of the fast-moving cloud front, trying to get low enough for a visual on the players — and the trawler that was on a collision course for their buoy. “Stoner’s right — they’re aimed almost perfectly for it,” said Chris as they broke through the clouds into the gray stillness above the water. The spy ship looked like a child’s boat in a bathtub. “Should I try hailing them?”
“What are you going to tell them?” asked Bree. “That they’re about to run over a top-secret communications system for a high-tech weapon?”
“I probably wouldn’t want to say that,” said Chris contritely.
If the trawler hit the buoy, they would most likely lose their connection — and Piranha. It occurred to Breanna the ocean was awful big and the buoy awfully small — and yet the ship was uncannily on course for the device.
“Could they track the transmission, you think?”
“Well, the Navy couldn’t,” said Chris. “But in theory, it’s possible. That ship had been around — they might have seen the buoy launched.”
“Fentress’s — how’s your connection with Piranha?” Bree asked.
“As far as I can tell, Captain, they’re not interfering.”
“Going through two thousand feet to nineteen hundred, eighteen hundred,” said the copilot, belatedly calling out their altitude. “We’re getting low.”
“Is there enough time to auto-sink this buoy and launch another?” Bree asked Chris and Fentress as she leveled off.
“Sinking procedure takes a hundred and eighty seconds,” said Fentress. “I have the screen up.”
“We have to get the new one in the water first,” said Chris.
“Pick a spot about five miles away. Make it ten.”
“Hang on.” He worked on his screens, plotting a course. “Five minutes total. If they’re watching and they’re interested, there’s no guarantee they won’t see us, Bree. They’ll know what we’re doing and get at least a rough idea of where we launch. The Chinese may too.”
“I don’t know that we have any other choice. Give me the course. Kevin, be ready with the self-destruct.”
“I can’t get that panel once we’re trying to reconnect,” he told her. “What I mean is, it’ll take a few more seconds.”
“They’re just about alongside,” said Chris.
If Zen were here, she’d have him send the Flighthawks to buzz the spy ship.
So where the hell was he when she needed him?
“Think they’ll back off if we buzz them?” she asked Chris.
“Don’t know,” said the copilot. “Sure get them talking about us, though.”
Breanna slid the Megafortress onto her left wing, pirouetting back toward the trawler and kicking up her speed. ‘They may be armed,” said Stoner over the interphone.
“Don’t be so optimistic,” said Breanna. She pushed the EB-52 to just three hundred feet over the white-capped waves, the plane a black finger wagging at the trawler not to be naughty. They could see the people on the deck duck as they roared over.
“One more time,” she said, picking up the plane’s nose and then pedaling into a tight bank. “And this time, we’re going to one hundred feet.”
“We can snap their aerial if you want,” offered Chris.
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Two hundred fifty feet,” said the copilot. As he continued to read the descending numbers, a bit of a tremble entered his voice. They cleared the upper mast by maybe ten feet.
“They stop?” Breanna asked.
“Not sure. They’re on the deck.”
“One more pass. Prepare to deploy buoy,” said Breanna.
This time they cleared the mast by inches rather than feet, but the trawler had continued moving and was no practically alongside the buoy. Two or three crew members were leaning over the rail there.
“Getting static here,” said Fentress as they cleared the shop.
“Activate the targeting radar for the air mines,” said Breanna.
“Captain?” said Ferris.
“We’ll get their attention, launch another probe while we’re firing, sink the first, launch a third further away, then sink the second,” said Breanna. “Calculate it so we come close, but don’t hit them with the shrapnel.”
“I’m not sure I can do that. I don’t even know if I can get the gun on them.”
“You can do anything, Chris.” She swung the Megafortress through another turn so she could get her tail aimed at the spy ship.
“All right. We cross over the trawler, bank, take our shot, then launch.”
“You disappoint me,” she told him, hitting the throttle for more speed.
“How’s that?”
“All that potential and no sexual innuendo?”
“Yeah, well, you should hear what I’m thinking.”
IT wasn’t until he was four miles from the aircraft carrier that the Chinese destroyer picked up Balin’s submarine. Even then, the destroyer wasn’t quite sure what if had found, or where its quarry was — the ship began tracking north, probably after one of the other subs Balin’s men had detected in the vicinity. And so he managed to get nearly two miles closer before Captain Varja passed the word that the enemy escort was now bearing down on them.
“Prepare torpedoes,” said Balin calmly.
“Torpedoes ready,” said Varja.
“Range to target?”
“Three thousand, five hundred meters,” reported the captain.
The others in the control room were trying to strangle their excitement; the few words they exchanged as they prepared to fire were high-pitched and anxious. Varja, though, was calm. Balin appreciated that; he felt he had taught the young man something worthwhile.
“We will fire at three thousand meters,” Balin said.
A moment later, a depth charge exploded somewhere behind them. The boat shook off the shrudder and the helmsman managed to stay on course, but Balin realized this had only been the opening blow.
“Launch torpedoes,” said the admiral. “Sink them.”
In order to get the air mines where Chris wanted them, Breanna had to practically stand the Megafortress on its tail, fighting all of Newton’s laws — not to mention those of common sense. Breanna barely managed to control the big plane, sliding sideways across the waves at a mere thousand feet. She finally had to let her left wing sail downward; the front windscreen filled with blue before she could recover.
“Got a couple of shots on their bow,” said Chris. His helmet was touching the display where the Stinger target box was displayed. “I don’t think we hurt anybody. They all ran aft. Ship’s dead in the water, eight, ten feet from the buoy.”