“Bridge, buoy has been deployed.”
“Very well Secure the deck.”
Amanda crossed back into the wheelhouse. “Back us off about fifty yards on the GPU Hydrojets only.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. Translating astern now.”
Impatiently, she waited out the seconds as her ship reversed silently through the shadows.
“Translation complete, Captain.”
“You, helm. Resume station keeping. Sonar, this is the captain. We are clear of the buoy. Transmit your test codes Intelligence section, stand by.”
The Cunningham’s sonar transducers swept the surrounding waters with a low powered sound beam, a beam that carried a carefully modulated binary message for a certain listener. A hundred and twenty feet down, on the muddy bottom of the inlet, the listener responded. The maritime reconnaissance buoy uncoupled from its sinker weight and unreeled its mooring line, drifting back toward the surface like an inverted spider on a thread. Just beneath the waves, it halted its rise and extended a water proof radio antenna.
“Bridge, this is Raven’s Roost. We have acquired a test signal. All buoy systems read green. We have a successful deployment.”
“Very good, Raven’s Roost. Actuate the buoy.”
The maritime reconnaissance buoy conversed with its mother station aboard the Cunningham for a few microseconds more, then retracted its antenna. Smoothly it winched itself back down to the midpoint of its tether. A technological first cousin to the naval pressure mine, its anechoic sheathed bulk was packed with hydrophones and signal processors instead of high explosives. From its position within the cove, it would passively monitor the comings and goings of all sea traffic that would come near. The accumulated information would be electronically stored for a schedule of highspeed data dumps over the next few weeks.
Ever since her arrival in theater the Duke had been systematically seeding the Chinese coastal waters between Shanghai and Amoy with a network of these remote sensor units. This was the last to go down.
With its successful placing half of the night’s tasking program was complete. The riskier part was still under way. Amanda paced slowly in front of the helm console. Around her, in the dimness, the rest of the bridge crew stood or sat, wire nerved and sweating.
“CIC, this is the bridge. Is Raven’s Roost seeing any change at all in the local signal environment?”
She could have called that same data up on one of the repeaters at her elbow, but at the moment she wanted to hear another human voice.
“Still okay, Captain,” Ken Hiro replied reassuringly. “Raven’s Roost reports all quiet on all frequencies.”
As per their set doctrine, she and Ken traded off positions when the ship was at battle station — one on the bridge, the other in the CIC, or vice versa as required. Thus, no single hit could likely take them both out simultaneously.
“We still have another fifteen minutes before they’re due back aboard,” her exec continued.
“Yeah.” She resumed her pacing, driven by tensions akin to those of a mother whose children were out of reach.
Twenty miles inland, Vince Arkady found this particular insertion sortie getting old fast. The back of his neck was aching from the drag of the heavy night-vision visor mounted on his flight helmet. He was also perforce having to stay totally focused on the Sea Comanche’s controls. Retainer Zero One was running in full stealth tonight. The snub wings she usually mounted had been unshipped, and the loss of lift was throwing off his feel for the aircraft.
For the past half hour, he had been snake-dancing the little helicopter along the ridgeline. Hugging each swale and circling each knoll in an airborne version of a combat infantryman’s sprint and cover, he had been giving his passenger the opportunity she needed to conduct her survey.
“Hey, sis, leave us not take all night on this thing. Okay?”
“Patience, patience,” Christine Rendino murmured back over the intercom. “I know what I’m looking for. It’s just not all that easy to find in this neighborhood.”
In Zero One’s rear cockpit, the Intel used a joystick controller to track the helo’s thermographic sight along the road that ran up the valley floor. She needed a good patch of cover right up alongside that road, preferably the west side.
The farms down there had probably been first cleared and divided into fields sometime before the birth of Christ. Since then, God knows how many meager harvests had been worked out of those fields by God knows how many generations of peasants. Even the lower hillsides had been ribbed with growing terraces, eking out every last yard of crop space. All of the wildness had long since been worn off this land, leaving only the stone fences and thin, tired soil.
The search wasn’t totally hopeless, however. Many of the fields were overgrown and abandoned. This valley was located dead-on between two opposing armies, and with the ingrained survival instincts of the Chinese peasant, most of the locals had gotten the hell out while the getting was good.
The occasional light in the lonely scattering of villages marked where someone was either too old to run or too weary to give a damn.
Christine broke off her line of thought as a darker patch began to scroll across the screen, a large irregular bead strung on the pale thread of the roadway.
“Okay! That’s it, boy! At your two o’clock.”
“Rug, sis. I see it. Scanning for threats … Looks like nobody’s around … Going’ in.”
Retainer Zero One kicked over into a dive down toward the valley floor.
It had been a woodlot. Its spindly collection of poplar trees had been harvested off almost at ground level sometime in the recent past, leaving only a low tangle of brush behind.
The narrow road that ran through it had been oil-paved at one time, indicating a major thoroughfare for this part of the world. Now, though, that paving was breaking down into potholes and muddy gravel.
The road wasn’t the primary concern this night, barring its utility as a landmark. The regional main-trunk telephone cable buried beside it was.
To conduct modern-day military operations, rapid and extensive communications are both an absolute necessity and a glaring vulnerability. All radio frequencies can be scanned and monitored, and even the tightest microwave transmissions can leak. Even if all messages are encrypted, an alert Signal Intelligence unit can still learn a great deal from direction-finder bearings and traffic volumes.
Accordingly, as others had before, the Communist military leadership had come to value landline telephone as their only truly secure communications net.
Christine and Arkady were about to prove them to be in error.
Retainer Zero One went into a low hover just off the pavement, her rotor wash whipping the scrub. Arkady scanned his surroundings again through the cool, green glow of his low-light visors, seeking sign of any movement, any covert observer. His ears were attuned to the helo’s threat board, ready to react to the first instant of a warning squall.
“Ready to open bay doors?” Christine inquired.
“Yep. Let’s get it done, but let’s make it fast.” Opening the weapons bay would also open a hole in the Sea Comanche’s stealth envelope, leaving them vulnerable for a few seconds to a sudden radar sweep.
In the aft cockpit, Christine cradled a remote-control box in her lap, a light coaxial cable linking it to the auxiliary systems jack of the dashboard display. As the belly doors snapped open, the sensor unit that was revealed began to react to its environment, projecting its readout onto the oscilloscope display of the control box.
“Yeah! We’re hot! This is it!”
She flipped the guards up and off a row of actuator keys and hit them in sequence.