Back in the wheelhouse, she knew that she could have supplemented her sight with the Cunningham’s low-light television systems. However, she wasn’t ready yet to fall back on such artifices. Instead, she leaned against the rail and tried to push her own senses and intuitions out into the night.
Her grandfather had sailed these waters once, back in the days of the old Yangtze Patrol. Now, as the warm, misting rain dampened her hair she sought his counsel.
Some eight miles to the south, the Five Nineteen boat tugged fitfully at the end of a too-short anchor cable. They were the southernmost boat of the squadron, deployed in a picket line just seaward of the Yangtze mine barrier. With engines off and all systems powered down, they had been on station for over two hours, the continuing drizzle saturating all hands above decks.
For the hundredth time, Lieutenant Zhou Shan tried to clear the lenses of his night glasses with a bit of sopping cloth. “I can’t understand what they expect us to accomplish out here tonight,” he grumbled. “Without using the radar, we won’t be able to see a thing.”
“Perhaps we will accomplish nothing. Lieutenant,” Bosun Hoong replied placidly, “but still, here is where they expect us to remain.”
Down in the Cunningham’s Combat Information Center, Commander Ken Hiro sat in the captain’s chair in the central cluster of command stations; Dix Beltrain was manning the tactical officer’s console at his right elbow. Now the TACCO glanced across at the Cunningham’s exec.
“Commander, GPU fix indicates we’re closing with the mine barrier. It might be advisable to bring up the thirty-two, sir.”
“I concur. Make it happen.”
Beltrain shifted his attention to one of the secondary workstations lining the CIC bulkhead. “Okay, Devega, lower your dome and light her up. Set your sweep arc for zero degrees relative off the bow to ninety degrees to starboard.”
Long before the keel of the Cunningham had ever been laid, it was realized that she would be operating in a new kind of military environment, that of littoral warfare. She would have to work in close to potentially hostile third-world coastlines. Accordingly, in addition to her powerful SQQ-89 antisubmarine sonar suite, she mounted an SQQ-32 mine hunter set as well.
“SQQ-32 is on line, sir. Initiating antimine sweep.”
Hiro and Beltrain moved in unison, dialing up the sonar imaging on their workstation repeaters. In moments, a dark spherical mass materialized and began to drift slowly across the flatscreen a computer generated simulacrum of the system’s echo return.
“Contact, sir. Bearing zero eight five relative. Range eight hundred yards. Range is constant. Target is treading aft. System data annex identifies target as a moored contact mine consistent with standard Red Chinese marks.”
The old horned horror. The basic design was more than a century old, and yet was still almost as deadly as the day it was conceived. Its sheer, iron age crudity was its greatest advantage. Unlike more sophisticated ordnance, it could not be foxed, fooled or neutralized from a distance. It merely bobbled sullenly at the end of its tether and exploded if anything as much as brushed against it. Disposing of them required the use of a cumbersome and dangerous mechanical sweeping process only slightly less archaic than the mines themselves or the time-consuming and dangerous task of countermining and detonating them one at a time, using divers or ROVs.
The tactical officer produced the briefest of whistles. “Yeah, glad we didn’t let that go for much longer.”
“It’s good to know your place in the world, Mr. Beltrain.”
Hiro keyed his headset microphone. “Bridge, we have contact with the Chinese mine barrier “
“Acknowledged, Ken,” Captain Garrett’s voice sounded in his earphone. “We see them on our repeaters. We’ll hold at about this range from the barrier facing. If you people spot anything that we miss, don’t hesitate to override our helm control.”
Topside the rain grew heavier. Like the rest of the watch, Amanda had donned helmet and combat vest. She had come in from the bridge wing, and now prowled slowly along the line of glowing monitor screens, her eyes flicking from readout to readout.
“Captain,” one of the lookouts said quietly, “it’s getting pretty murky out there. We’re losing visual definition on the low-light television.”
“Very well. Switch to FLIR.”
Throughout the bridge, vision systems were toggled over from standard to thermographic imaging.
Utilizing heat radiation rather than visual-spectrum light, the Forward Looking Infrared Scanners should have easily been able to cope with the deteriorating visibility. However, out in the night, an unusual convergence of environmental phenomena was taking place. As the low grade tropical storm saturated the environment with heat and humidity, an exceptionally dense concentration of water vapor was accumulating in the atmosphere — water vapor that absorbed infrared energy. Concurrently, the heavy, blood-temperature rain and quiet, windless sea allowed a thin layer of warmer fresh water to form atop the ocean’s surface, reducing the contrast between the sea and air temperatures. As these curves of absorption and ambience closed with each other, the Cunningham’s FLIR scanners began to lose efficiency.
The effect was subtle. With no specific object within immediate visual range, the bridge lookouts observed no change on their softly glowing screens. They had no comprehension that their ship was slowly going blind.
“Anything, Tina?”
“No, ma’am. If the locals are doing any communicating they’re sending Candy grams.”
Christine Rendino hovered over the shoulder of the scanner operator as the young enlisted woman systematically swept across the electromagnetic spectrum.
“Nothing at all?”
“I’m hearing what sounds like an elementary police radio dispatch net and a couple of AM radio channels full of music to kill capitalists by. The only military traffic of any kind is some very limited air-traffic-control stuff. The Reds are being real quiet out there.”
“Okay. Stay on it.”
They were twenty minutes into the recon pass and things were crawling under Christine’s skin. This wasn’t right. This was so not right that the Intel’s finely drawn nervous system was resonating to it like a plucked violin string.
Unable to be still, she stepped from the confines of the intelligence systems bay and into the central space of the Combat Information Center. Pausing for a moment behind the cluster of central command stations, she peered over Dix Beltrain’s shoulder at the big Alpha screen on the forward bulkhead.
The side-scan sonar was sketching out the perimeter of the estuary minefield, hacking each mine detected with a GPU position fix that would be stored in the navigational database.
At least that was working out right.
Moving on, she crossed over to the stealth systems bay.
Normally, for her this would be enemy territory. But now, with an operation on, her perpetual feud with Frank Mekelsie was in abeyance.
“Are you guys getting anything here that we might be missing over in Raven’s Roost?”
The stealth boss was hovering over the backs of his own systems operators, much as she had been doing. He didn’t take his eyes from the shimmering banks of oscilloscopes even for an instant as he replied.
“Nothing but what’s on the program, Rendino. Air-search stuff and one surface-search unit out on the southern tip of Jiuduan Sha. Low powered, probably a Fin Curve. I’d say navigational-assistance radar.”
“Any return risk?”
A tinge of contempt crept into Mckelsie’s voice. “That sucker’s practically tube technology, Rendino. They’d have a better chance of spotting us by standing out on the beach with a flashlight.”