“Any matches on the names?” Kyra asked. She crooked the phone between her head and shoulder, checked her watch, and tried to ignore the gaze of the Navy ensign who thought he never had enough female visitors in his comms shack.
“Barron put the screws to the Taiwanese. They finally coughed up enough information for us to get matches on all of them,” Cooke said. “A few are unknowns, but that’s to be expected. One of the MSS officers at the Taipei raid site where they recovered the acid was from the Tenth Bureau, a gentleman by the name of Han Song. We also have two reports of him taking trips to Chengdu. A shame he didn’t get a lungful of the stuff. Makes me wonder why the Chinese can’t figure out how to make it.”
“I asked that too. Jonathan thinks they probably just wanted a sample of ours to reverse-engineer so they could compare it with their own recipe.”
“That makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with,” Cooke said. “Anything else you need?”
“Admiral Pollard isn’t buying. We could use a little more material to persuade him.”
“What are you asking for?” Cooke asked.
“It would help if you would declassify Pioneer’s reporting,” Kyra said. “He’s out of country now, so there’s no threat to him if we clear Pollard and a couple of members of his staff to read the good stuff.”
Cooke frowned at the other end of the phone. “Barron won’t like that, but we’ll have a talk. Is that it?”
“For now.”
“Then I’ve got someone else here who wants to talk.” There was a pause while Cooke handed the phone over to someone else.
“It’s Weaver.” Kyra realized that her call to Cooke had been transferred to the WINPAC vault. The IOC analyst was at his desk and Kyra could hear several people chattering in the background. Weaver was hosting a small party in his office, it seemed. “I found your paper. Some crusty old gent in WINPAC had a hard copy. You should see his office. Looks like he never throws anything out. Paper everywhere. Anyway, the equations match. The CAD program definitely calculates radar cross sections. WINPAC is running some test objects now to check the accuracy, but it looks like the Chinese worked out their own coding for the algorithm,” Weaver said. “By the way, there was serious bribery involved to make your deadline.”
“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.
CHAPTER 15
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.