“All ahead full, course one-nine-five, aye,” the bridge officer announced.
“We’ll round the point in two hours,” Pollard said to Nagin. “Send the Vikings and the Seahawks up just before then to begin ASW operations. They should have a free run for a couple of hours. We should pass east of Liu-ch’iu Yu before the storm clears.” The rain pounding on the ocean surface would make it harder for Lincoln’s submarine-hunting aircraft and helicopters to find the Chinese subs that were certainly holding station off the Taiwanese coast, but it would also mask the noise from the planes and choppers’ engines from the Chinese fast-attack boat hiding under the waves. The storm would move past them to the east before Lincoln would reach the northern point the admiral had set as his private goal.
“A shame we have to hug the coastline so close,” Nagin said. “I’d love to drive right up the middle of the Strait just to tell the Chinese what they can do with themselves.”
“Makes me wish they’d try to approach us from starboard. I’d love to watch some Chinese subs get swamped in the silt plain,” Pollard said. Much of Taiwan’s coast was a mud flat, submerged only a few feet under the surface, which extended a half mile to the west. “And I’d bet real money that the PLA has sleepers on the beaches with binoculars watching for us, but they won’t see us in this squall.” The rain would see to that, as well as the fact that the entire carrier group had killed their running lights. GPS removed much of the danger of a collision between friendly ships, but night maneuvers in tight formation near a coastline were a risk even with help from satellites.
“Are you sure you won’t want a JAG on the bridge for this?” Nagin asked.
“A good lawyer doesn’t tell you what you can and can’t do,” Pollard advised his subordinate. “A good lawyer tells you how you can do what you want to do legally. But never ask them, if you can avoid it.”
“Always better to ask forgiveness than permission?” Kyra asked. It was the rule to live by in the National Clandestine Service.
“POTUS gave me the green light. But I don’t need anyone’s permission to protect my carrier group,” Pollard said.
CHAPTER 17
Kyra had Vulture’s Row to herself. The open-air balcony gave her a broad view of Lincoln’s flattop, from which F/A-18E/F Super Hornets were launching and landing at a steady clip. The rain had stopped and the sky was just light enough after the dawn that she could make out the contours of the other surface vessels in Lincoln’s group. An experienced military analyst could tell a vessel’s class by its shape. Kyra wished for a moment that she’d had that training and supposed that Jonathan could do it. She knew these naval officers could do it. Regret welled up, surprisingly strong and sudden, that she’d never served in the military. Kyra had considered it. She had even taken the military ASVAB exam after high school and managed a perfect score. Recruiters had called her at home for nine months after, but her father forbade her from entering the service. Peter Stryker was a high-minded liberal UVA political science professor with a religious streak who had protested the Vietnam War, still thought soldiers were baby-killers, and had threatened to disown her if she joined the military that he hated so much. He hadn’t carried through on his threat when she had joined the CIA only because her cover status gave her a reason not to tell him, and she never would if she could avoid it. He’d wanted his daughter to become an activist lawyer but had at least made peace with her being an entry-level executive in a software company. Kyra was sure they would never talk again if she ever told him the truth. What she wasn’t sure about was whether that would bother her. They talked little enough as it was.
A brief suspension of flight operations had given her a few hours of unbroken sleep until the first launches began without warning. Kyra had pulled herself from the bunk, piled her hair under a blue Lincoln ball cap she’d charmed off an ensign the day before, and made her way to Vulture’s Row to watch. All four of the catapults were engaged. The carrier had already launched its support aircraft and was now sending up its fighter squadrons in short order. The noise generated by the multiple screaming Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce jet engines during the first launch had been overwhelming. Kyra was forced to scrounge a pair of ear protectors, these off a first lieutenant who was eager to spend five minutes talking to a woman.
She wasn’t counting but was sure at least twenty or more Super Hornets had taken to the air in the last few minutes, and now F-35s were moving onto the flight deck. Lincoln was going to war. Kyra wondered why Pollard hadn’t evacuated her and Jonathan to the mainland. Maybe the admiral didn’t want to risk a departing helicopter or Greyhound giving away the carrier’s position.
She felt a hand tap her shoulder and turned. Jonathan waved her inside. She followed him through the hatch, pulled the heavy metal door closed to seal out the sound, though some still penetrated the bulkheads, and pulled her ear protection down so she could hear the senior analyst.
“Nice trick, scrounging the muffs,” he said. “I couldn’t get anyone to loan me a pair.”
“You don’t have the same draw with men who’ve been at sea too long,” Kyra said.
“No doubt,” Jonathan said. “The admiral invited us to camp out in the Tactical Flag Command Center when the shooting starts.”
“Safest place on the ship to keep two civvies from getting hurt during the fight?” Kyra asked. The TFCC was below the flight deck near Pollard’s quarters, almost directly underneath catapult number one.
“If the Chinese start shooting at us, there won’t be any safe place on the ship,” Jonathan said. That shook her a bit, he saw, and it was understandable. Playing with the MSS on the Beijing streets had been dangerous, but her training had offered her a degree of control over events. She wouldn’t get that if a Chinese antiship missile was inbound.
“You think we’ll get hit?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Always a possibility. But attacking a drone is one thing. Attacking a carrier is quite something else. The public handles stories about downed Reapers better than pictures of ships with holes in them. We might just find out how committed the Chinese really are.”
“If the Mace works and we can’t prove the Chinese attacked us, wouldn’t that be irrelevant? Isn’t that what it’s for?”
“If the Mace blows a hole in this ship, the president won’t be sending carriers into Chinese waters anytime soon,” Jonathan said. “That’s what the Mace is for.”
The E-2C Hawkeyes were the first planes to go up. Lincoln only had four of the airborne early warning planes and they would not be straying far from the fleet. All four pushed immediately for higher altitudes, almost to their limit of thirty thousand feet, turned south, and spread into a quarter-arc formation with a fifty-mile spread. Washington sent four more aloft at nearly the same time. They mirrored the half arc to the north, forming a shallow half circle together with their Lincoln brothers that started west of Taiwan’s midpoint and reached to the island’s southern end. Together with the two AWACS aircraft from Kadena and Guam circling behind the airborne line, there were ten aircraft aloft whose raison d’être was radar tracking. Together, their connected radar network would have been overkill for managing the destruction of almost any air force in the world. On this day, they were looking for a single plane and the combined crews were left wondering if they were enough.