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.
CHAPTER 16
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.