Mirage

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Under his flight suit, Slider had on a T-shirt with a picture of an F-18. Below was “0 to 60 in.7 seconds.” With the two turbofans shrieking behind him at max power, he threw a salute to the catapult officer and felt that acceleration for himself. Johnny Reb’s number two cat launched him and his F/A-18 Super Hornet down the runway and out over the bow. The sleek fighter jet was pushing 165 miles per hour when the deck vanished beneath it, and its swept wings generated enough lift to sustain flight.

Captain Mike Davis (USMC), call sign Slider, gave a little whoop as he was catapulted off the carrier and the plane was transformed from a helpless little bird that needed coddling by the deck crew to a deadly raptor that dominated the skies. He raised the plane’s nose and roared into the dawn. In minutes he was at twenty thousand feet and fifty miles out from the Stennis. He and his wingman, who would launch just after him, were flying combat air patrol over the whole battle group.

Because they’d really poured on the atoms getting to the East China Sea, the group had been forced to leave behind its slower resupply ship, but the cruisers, destroyers, and frigate were all on-station covering Johnny Reb from attack on all fronts. Below the surface lurked a pair of Los Angeles — class subs that had had no problems keeping up with the carrier’s frenetic pace. The group was still three hundred miles from the Senkaku Islands, so Slider wasn’t expecting much of anything to happen on his patrol. Closer in, he hoped things got a little more interesting.

For now, his radar scope was empty of aircraft not flashing the allies’ IFF beacons. He knew that one of the planes up there with him was the E-2D Hawkeye AWACS, with its big radar dome on its back like the shell of a turtle. It gave those flying CAP a massive advantage in range over any other aircraft in the theater. He’d see an approaching Chinese fighter not long after it left the mainland.

“Stinger Eleven, over.” It was a call from operations. On this sortie he was Stinger 11 and his wingman Stinger 12.

“Eleven, over.”

“Eleven, be advised we have a delay on Twelve, over.”

“Roger that.”

A problem with the catapult most likely was causing the delay. They would need to either fix it quick or hook Stinger 12 onto another cat. Either way, Slider didn’t mind having the skies all to himself.

Though he had at his fingertips electronics that allowed him to see the virtual world for more than a hundred miles, Slider kept his head on a swivel, always looking around, scanning the instruments, looking at each section of sky, making sure someone wasn’t hiding in the sun or behind him in a blind spot. He knew the Chinese were developing stealth technology, and if this turned out to be the Big Show — and the intel weenies said it might just be — then the People’s Air Force would deploy their best toys. He searched for an aircraft his sensors might miss with unwavering vigilance.

Damn, he thought, I love my job.

And then he didn’t.

Without warning, the F-18 yawed hard to starboard and dove for the earth. He’d been cruising at six hundred knots, well below the plane’s maximum speed of Mach 1.8. The Super Hornet shattered the sound barrier even before Slider responded to the yaw. No matter what he did to the stick, the plane remained in a nose-down position, and chopping the throttles had no effect on his speed.

G-forces built, and his pressure suit constricted his legs and abdomen in an attempt to keep blood from pooling in his lower extremities. Still, his vision grayed. A god-awful shriek filled his head. The altimeter unwound in a blur.

“Mayday, Mayday. Stinger Eleven,” he gasped over the radio.

He couldn’t wait for a response from the Stennis. He had to punch out now.

Slider pulled the handle for his ejection seat, and though the system had been hardened against EMP, the amount of magnetism slamming the airframe was simply too much for the hardware/software interface of the seat’s sequencer. Not that it would have mattered. The shock of ejecting out of an aircraft hurtling toward the ground at twelve hundred knots would have killed Slider instantly.

He shouted as the ocean filled his field of vision. The plane shuddered. The engines were throttled back to zero, and still the F-18 raced earthward, accelerating all the way. The forces acting on the plane went beyond its design parameters, and chunks of its aluminum skin began to tear away. It started spiraling, shedding more of itself. A whole wing ripped free.

Slider mercifully lost consciousness.

The Super Hornet arrowed into the cool waters of the East China Sea with a surprisingly small splash, like a well-executed dive off the high board. The remaining wing and tail fins came off with impact while the streamlined fuselage plummeted a hundred feet mere seconds after impact on momentum alone.

All this had been recorded by the Stennis’s circling AWACS plane. They had seen the fighter’s dramatic flip and quick plunge to the ocean. The controller had tried calling the stricken plane but received no response. The crash was strange on many levels. Normally, if something catastrophic happened to an aircraft, it slowed, and yet Stinger 11 had sped up. It made no sense.

What would have made less sense was if there had been an actual eyewitness to the crash. Because they wouldn’t have seen a thing. One second, a high-performance plane was flying high overhead and, the next, it had vanished as if it had never been there at all. Its snowy white contrail of water vapor streaked across the sky in a straight line, then ended abruptly, as though it had been erased by the hand of God.

The USS John C. Stennis was some sixty miles away from the spot the F-18 went down, and steaming hard.

“What just happened?” Max stood behind Cabrillo in the op center. Eric was at the helm, Murph at the weapons station, and Hali and Linda manned communications and the sensor suite. They had all watched the jet crash on radar.

“They screwed up,” Juan replied, a fighter’s gleam in his eye.

“The Chinese’s stealth ship.”

“It looks like the plane experienced the same magnetic pull we felt when we took out Kenin’s first stealth ship. The Chinese are too far out from the Stennis, and this crash means the area will be crawling with rescue choppers and one of the battle group’s ancillary ships.”

“Meaning, he’s going to have to bug out.”

“Stoney, why aren’t we headed to the crash?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.

The incident occurred well within the search box the Chairman had deduced. The only problem was, they had been caught out while patrolling the far edge, nearly fifty miles from where the plane went down.

“On it,” Stone said, and the ship came about and the cryopumps began to scream.

Juan now had to second-guess the captain of the Chinese stealth ship once again, and he was beginning to regret an earlier decision. He hadn’t passed the data stick of information from the car carrier to Eric and Mark because he knew the two of them would have spent the night poring over it and he needed them fresh. Now he realized he needed to know a lot more about his adversary’s capabilities.

He called down to the butler’s pantry off the galley, “Maurice, it’s Cabrillo. I need you to do me a favor.”

The Englishman replied, “I assure you, Captain, that anything I do for you is surely not a favor. You pay me handsomely for my services.”

“Fair enough,” Juan replied. “In the middle drawer of my desk is a thumb drive. Could you please plug it into my computer?”

Eric and Mark both looked at him like a couple of dogs eyeing a T-bone. They had not been happy with Cabrillo’s earlier decision and now they couldn’t wait to get a look at what they’d gotten.

A minute later, the information had been fed into the mainframe, translated into English, and the two of them were glued to a pair of tablet computers.

Juan still had to make a call about where the stealth ship would reposition itself for another run on the carrier.

Linda broke his silent musings. “Looks like a rescue chopper just launched off the Stennis. And one of the screening destroyers is breaking formation to investigate.”

Cabrillo also knew that the U.S. Navy wasn’t going to like the Oregon’s presence here. In fact, he fully expected to be told to leave, especially now they had lost one of their fighters. The old tramp steamer was the one wild card the Chinese captain didn’t know was in the deck. He would have studied American naval tactics and doctrine and could anticipate responses to just about any scenario. But he didn’t know the Corporation was gunning for him. Juan had to find a way to exploit that advantage.

“You’re right about him screwing up,” Eric said, looking up from his tablet. “When the magnetic field is activated, they lose their radar. With the jet flying in the clouds, they never knew it was inbound.”

“How big of a field can they put up?” Cabrillo asked. “What’s its range?”

“I’m reading that section,” Murph said. “I need a little more time. There is some seriously funky math going on here.”

He tilted his tablet so Eric could get a look, and soon they were whispering about gauss levels, angles of incidence, and terawattage. It was Greek to the rest of the crew.

Given the weather and lousy visibility, the Chinese stealth ship would only need to move a couple of miles away from the crash site to hide. It wouldn’t need its magnetic screen at all, not until it made another attempt on the Stennis. Juan wondered if they wouldn’t want to give themselves a bigger cushion. An Arleigh Burke — class destroyer had some of the most powerful radar systems deployed on any ship in the world. How much did the Chinese trust their vessel’s stealth capabilities? Were a couple of miles enough or would they back farther away?

If he were the Chinese captain, he’d give himself plenty of sea room and wait for another opportunity. They were still almost three hundred miles from the islands and at least two hundred from where the carrier battle group would position itself.

Cabrillo made up his mind. “Mr. Stone, take us another two points port, if you please.”

“Think he’s bugging out?” Max asked, his unlit pipe between his teeth.

“Out, no. Off a little, yes. He’s going to zig northeast and then zag southeast to get back into interception position.”

They were eavesdropping in on the Navy’s rescue attempt. A Seahawk helicopter was over the area where the Super Hornet had augured into the sea twenty minutes after the event, but then the Oregon received a direct call.

“Attention to the ship at”—the female voice rattled off the Oregon’s exact longitude and latitude down to the second—“you are about to enter a restricted military zone. Please be advised to alter your course.”

Before Juan could reply, Linda informed him that one of the patrolling jets had broken off its CAP and was headed their way.

“How long till he’s here?”

“About three minutes. The honchos gave him permission to light the fires. His airspeed’s close to a thousand knots.”

The inbound Hornet would need to drop out of the clouds for a visual and that meant he’d have to slow down also. That bought another couple of minutes. The Oregon was traveling at a hair over forty knots. That, in and of itself, was unusual. But that kind of speed from a broken-down rust bucket like her would raise even more hackles. He could bluff his way with the destroyer, since they were only looking at a radar return. Once the jet had eyes on them, the cat was out of the bag. Juan needed to slow, but he needed the speed in order to catch the stealth ship.

“It’s variable,” Mark Murphy said.

“What?” Juan asked him irritably. He didn’t need the distraction.

“The magnetic field. It’s variable up to fifteen miles, but, at that range, the ship is still invisible — well, mostly — but the sheering forces we experienced after rescuing Linda are negligible.”

“Is the ship armed at all?”

“Not as far as I can tell, but there’s a mountain of info here, and we’re just scratching at the foothills.”

Cabrillo didn’t think it would be armed. The magnetic field was the weapon and to work effectively it needed to get in close.

“‘Foothills of data’?” Max scoffed. “Wordsmith, you are not.”

Cabrillo was about to answer the radio hail when the woman’s voice filled the op center for a second time. “Unidentified vessel, this is the USS Ross. We are a guided missile destroyer and you are entering a restricted military area. Turn back at once or we will take steps to compel you to leave this region. Do you copy?”

Juan knew this was mostly bluff. They were still a good distance from the carrier, although the Ross might be protecting the crash site as well as the Stennis. Either way, they were still a long way from resorting to any kind of violent confrontation.

“Chairman,” Linda cried, “they just launched two more planes and they’re vectoring on our position.”

The Navy was reacting a lot more aggressively than he’d anticipated. No doubt those two planes would be armed with antiship missiles, probably Harpoons. He keyed his mic. “USS Ross, this is Captain Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo of the Oregon. Please repeat.”

Cabrillo didn’t know how to handle this. He doubted he could talk his way into letting them pass, but he didn’t think telling the truth would get him much either.

“You are about to enter a restricted military exclusion zone. You must turn at least ninety degrees from your current heading.”

“That F-18 is going to be here in about thirty seconds,” Linda informed him.

They still had miles to go before reaching where he thought the stealth ship would be hiding. It suddenly occurred to him that the ship had cloaked itself prematurely because its crew knew an American spy satellite was passing overhead. The new generation had no problem peering down from the heavens through cloud cover as dense as what they had hovering over them now. So the Chinese knew they would be spotted and had to cloak to avoid detection.

“Radar lock!” Mark Murphy called out.

“The Ross?”

“No. The first inbound fighter.”

Juan cursed. He’d been relying on the American reluctance to shoot first and ask questions later. Having the F-18 lock on weapons was no bluff, since a civilian ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. They either thought the Oregon was a Chinese warship or they didn’t care if they sank a civilian.

The mast camera zoomed in on a speck dropping out of the swollen sky that grew into the sleek fighter. She was just below the speed of sound, so her roar enveloped the ship a few seconds before the jet streaked over low enough that even down in the op center they could feel it.

“This is Viper Seven.” The Oregon’s onboard computer decrypted the transmissions so quickly, it was almost like listening to the pilot in real time. “It’s not a warship but some old rust bucket freighter.”

“Our radar shows it doing forty knots,” the flight controller countered.

“It’s not lying,” the pilot called back. “She’s showing a huge wake and has one hell of a bone in her teeth.”

“Oregon, this is the USS Ross. Come about immediately. This is your final warning.”

“Linda, how far out are those other jets?”

“Five minutes.”

“Viper Seven,” said the air controller. “You are weapons free. Put a burst over her bows. That’ll show these idiots we’re serious.”

“Wepps,” Juan called to Mark Murphy, “stand down.”

“Roger that.”

He knew Murph wouldn’t respond to the upcoming strafe, but he couldn’t help but give the order anyway.

The F-18 had already executed a tight turn and was on her way back when the order to fire came in. The pilot altered his course slightly so the plane would pass just ahead of the ship rather than over her bridge. At a half mile out, he toggled the six-barrel 20mm cannon in the Hornet’s nose and unleashed a string of slugs that came so close to the old freighter’s prow — the last two singed paint. He hit afterburners and screamed past in an angry display of military might.

They couldn’t afford to play chicken any longer. “USS Ross, this is the Oregon. Please do not fire again.” Juan went for broke. “Listen to me very carefully. There is a Chinese stealth warship in these waters. It used a modified EMP weapon to take down your plane.” He wasn’t going to try to explain it was invisible.

“Our aircraft are hardened against EMP weapons,” the woman aboard the destroyer responded. “We will consider it a provocation if you continue on this course. Come about now or we will disable your ship.”

Cabrillo grew desperate. “Ross, I beg you. Do not fire. You have a real enemy out here who is trying to sink the Stennis.”

The woman — Juan guessed she wasn’t the captain but probably the Ross’s XO — came back, wariness in her voice. “What do you know about the Stennis?”

“I know that she’s about to be targeted by the same weapon that downed your jet.”

“I will give you one last fair warning to turn your ship about or the next time we fire it won’t be for effect.”

Resigned to his fate, Cabrillo replied, “As Pat Benatar so famously sang, ‘Hit me with your best shot.’”

“I get it now,” Hali said.

“Why is the Navy being so aggressive? Would have been nice if Overholt had called to let us know,” Max said dourly.

“Damn.” Juan fished his cell from his back pocket and speed-dialed Overholt. With a little luck, he could get the Navy to back off this confrontation. The F-18 finished its turn and poured on the speed. She was coming hard, charging like a monster, but Juan knew this was a feint since the carrier hadn’t given the order to open fire.

The phone rang a fourth time and went to voice mail. Overholt was like a teenage girl when it came to his cell. He was never without it and rarely in a place where he couldn’t access a signal. Odd that he hadn’t picked up.

“Lang, it’s Juan,” Cabrillo said after the beep. “I need you to call me ASAP. The Navy wants to turn the Oregon into Swiss cheese.”

The Super Hornet flew over the Oregon from stern to stem, flying low enough that the noise and vibration and the brutality of her jet exhaust shattered all the bridge windows in a cascade of shards that would have injured anyone who’d been up there.

“This is Viper Seven. I just blew out their bridge windows with my exhaust. That’ll turn ’em.”

“Roger that, Viper Seven, but get into position for a real strafing run if this suicidal fool doesn’t turn. Guns only.”

“Turning now. And I’m carrying air-to-air, not air-to-surface, so my missiles wouldn’t do squat against a ship this big.”

Juan studied the radar plot showing up on the main screen. The two additional fighters off the Stennis were loitering about twenty miles away, but their missiles could cover that distance in seconds.

“Captain Cabrillo of the Oregon, this is Commander Michelle O’Connell of the USS Ross. Will you turn about now?”

Juan didn’t respond. Let them think they’d killed everyone on the bridge. It would take the crew a few minutes to organize a new watch. That would buy more time.

“Ross to Oregon, do you read me?” O’Connell asked. There was a hint of concern in her voice. “Is there anyone there? This is the USS Ross calling the freighter Oregon.”

Juan let her stew.

Over the military net, he listened in while O’Connell discussed options with the battle group’s CO, Admiral Roy Giddings. In the end, the F-18 was ordered back around for a reconnoiter to see if there was anyone on the bridge. So the plane closed in, now flying at just above stall speed.

“Negative,” Viper 7 radioed. “I didn’t see anyone up there.”

“They’ve come close enough,” Giddings said. “Viper Seven, strafe them at the waterline. Ross stand by to pick up the crew when they man the lifeboats.”

“Roger that.”

The fighter came down on them like an eagle, and as soon as it was in range, the 20mm erupted. The hardened shells hit the ship just above and at the waterline near the bow so that water frothed like she had been hit by a torpedo. None penetrated. The Oregon’s armor plate deflected all of the rounds. Had she been any other ship, this would have been a crippling attack, and at the speed she was running she’d be down by the head in minutes.

The old girl plowed on as if nothing had happened.

“Viper Seven, report,” Giddings asked a few moments later while the plane circled like a wolf around a wounded deer.

“Nothing,” Viper 7 finally said in dismay. “Nothing’s happened. I hit her good but she’s not sinking.”

“Alert One,” Giddings called out. This would be the lead plane of the two additional Hornets they’d put up. “You are go for Harpoon launch.”

Because of the time it took the Oregon’s supercomputer to decode the military encryption, the plane had already nosed around, and the ship-killing missile was off its rails.

“Wepps!” Taking a few rounds of 20mm was one thing. Nearly a quarter ton of high explosives was an entirely different challenge.

“On it.”

The Harpoon missile dropped down to surface-skimming mode as quickly as it could and accelerated up to five hundred miles per hour. Its radar immediately locked onto the one juicy target it saw and flew at it with robotic efficiency.

Mark Murphy dropped the doors hiding the Oregon’s primary defensive weapon and had the six-barreled Gatling, a clone of the one carried by their attacker, spun up to optimal speed. Its own radar was housed in a dome above the gun that gave it the nickname of R2-FU because it looked like the cute droid from the Star Wars movies but had a nasty attitude.

When the inbound Harpoon was still a mile away, the Gatling opened up, throwing out a barrier of tungsten that the missile would have to fly through to reach the target. It was the old problem of hitting a bullet with another bullet, but, in this case, the Gatling had unleashed more than a thousand, all aimed directly at the missile.

The Harpoon exploded well away from the ship, and Murph silenced the gun. Pieces of missile plowed into the ocean while its fireball bloomed and distorted as it lost the force of the Harpoon’s powerful rocket motor.

In the op center, they watched the battle unfold via a camera mounted near the gun emplacement. The resolution hadn’t been good enough to actually see the incoming missile, but they all cheered when the orange-and-yellow explosion suddenly appeared.

“Juan!”

“What?”

It was Linda. She was pointing to the bottom corner of the massive screen, the mast camera that had been slaved to tracking the first F-18. “It just vanished.”

“What?”

“The plane. I was watching it and it just vanished like it faded out of existence. I just checked radar, and it’s gone.”

Cabrillo’s jaw tightened. “Helm, plot a course of thirty-seven degrees. All ahead flank. Wepps, ready the main gun.”

“This is Alert One,” the pilot of the lead inbound flight reported. “They have something like the Sea Wiz, the Gatling guns our Navy uses. They shot down my missile.” This had been reported by the pilot moments ago. “And I no longer have Viper Seven on my scope.”

“Copy that, Alert One. Fire all. Again, fire all. You and Alert Two.” This time, it was Commander O’Connell aboard the Ross giving the order, and there was no countermand from the admiral aboard his flagship. “I knew this guy was a black hat.”

Cabrillo felt the blood drain from his face. There was nothing they could do. Nailing one of the Harpoons with the Gatling was what the system had been designed to do. There would be seven missiles inbound. If they were lucky, they could take out four of them. Damn lucky at that, but three would still make it through, penetrate deep into the ship, and explode with enough force to peel her hull apart like an overripe banana. They had mere minutes.

But still they drove on, water blowing through the Oregon’s drive tubes with unimaginable force, the prow cleaving the sea, shouldering aside two symmetrical curls of white water.

“Chairman, I don’t have a target,” Mark said.

“You will in just a minute.” Juan studied the display, noting the exact position Linda had seen Viper 7 disappear.

“You do realize we’re between the proverbial rock and hard place,” Max said.

“It’s going to get worse. I intend on hitting the rock.”

“We didn’t fare so well last time,” Hanley reminded him.

Cabrillo keyed on the shipwide intercom. “Crew, this is the Chairman. Prepare for impact.” He then looked over at his oldest friend. “Last time, we grazed the field. That’s its deadly power. At an angle, it will capsize a ship with no problem, but if we hit it head-on, we should slice right through it. Isn’t that right, guys?”

Mark and Eric exchanged a few words before Stone deferred to Murph to answer. “In theory, that’s a good idea, but we’re still going to feel the sheering effects. It won’t capsize us, but it could drive the bows so deep that the ship sinks, driven under as if pushed.”

“See,” Juan said with an optimistic uptick to his voice.

The sound of canvas ripping on an industrial scale reverberated throughout the Oregon as the Gatling engaged one of the incoming Harpoons. No one was paying the slightest attention. Everyone watched the forward camera. They were getting nearer and nearer the invisible field.

Juan double-checked their position, calculating angles and drift, wind, and a few other factors. “Helm, another point to starboard.”

The ship was just beginning to respond when the entire hull lurched as though the sea had been sucked out from under the bow. It was the sensation of going over a waterfall. They had reached the dome of optoelectronic camouflage hiding the Chinese warship, and as the Oregon passed through, the magnetic forces attacked the hull with varying degrees of intensity. The stern felt nothing, while the bow was being enveloped with unimaginable force.

Then the noise hit, a transonic thrum that drove deep into the skull. Juan slammed his palms over his ears, but it did little good. The sound was already in his head, it seemed, and it echoed off the bones, trying to scramble his brain. Above this came the high-pitch scream of tortured metal. It sounded as though the keel itself was bending. The angle grew steeper still. Max clung to the back of Juan’s seat to keep from being thrown to the deck. Loose articles began to roll toward the forward bulkhead. The lights flickered and a few of the computer screens went dead, their circuitry not sufficiently hardened against the magnetic waves and other forces that came and warped light around the stealth ship to make it invisible.

The main view screen exploded without warning because the metal wall behind it flexed past the glass’s tolerance. Mark and Eric were peppered with shards, but both had been bent over so the cuts were limited to a few on the nape of their necks.

The Oregon was pitched so far forward that her drive tubes came free from the ocean, and two great columns of water were shot into the air like massive fire hoses blasting with everything they had. Another couple of degrees more and the Oregon would be driven under with no hope of ever recovering. Juan had gambled and lost. His beloved ship was no match for the forces she had been asked to overcome. She’d given it everything she could, but it was just too much.

The motion was so sudden that Max almost hit the ceiling. The ship had bulled its way through the invisible edge of the dome of optomagnetic camouflage and popped back up onto an even keel with the frenetic energy of a bath toy. The sound that had so tortured them passed as though it had never struck. The Oregon lurched when the force of her motors was once again fighting the resistance of the seas.

Unbeknownst to the crew, the six remaining Harpoon missiles struck the barrier seconds later and all six experienced catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic pulse overload. They fell harmlessly into the ocean in her wake.

“Everyone okay?” Juan called out.

“What a ride!” Murph whooped.

When it was clear the op center crew was okay and Max was starting to evaluate the rest of their people, Cabrillo scanned external camera feeds on his chair’s built-in miniscreen. Unlike their first encounter with the barrier, this time much of the ship had been hardened against EMP. There would surely be damage, but the engines hadn’t died and the main power buses hadn’t tripped. Just as he suspected, not a mile away sat the oddly shaped stealth ship. He could only wonder what its captain was thinking at this moment.

“Wepps, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yes, sir,” Murph said wolfishly. “Permission to fire?”

“Fire at will. And don’t stop until there’s nothing left to hit.”

The big 120 in the bow belched fire, and, a moment later, the solid shot hit dead center. Another followed even before the smoke cleared. A third a few seconds later. It was that round that hit some critical piece of equipment — something discovered by Tesla and tinkered with for over a century, something that teetered on the edge of physics — because when it was struck, what was left of the stealth ship vaporized in a dazzling corona of blue fire and blinding flashes of elemental electricity. It happened too fast for the mind to grasp, and, even later, when watched on tape played at its slowest possible speed, the very act of destruction was nearly instantaneous. All that remained behind were tiny bits of the composite hull and a slick of diesel fuel.

The overhead speakers played the voices of a very confused group of sailors and airmen who had just watched a ship nearly twice the length of a football field suddenly blink out of existence only to reappear a few seconds later, not to mention the six missiles they had fired vanishing too.

“Commander O’Connell, this is Juan Cabrillo of the Oregon. We are standing down and awaiting further instructions.”

“Please explain what just happened.”

“Think cloaking device. I told you there was a Chinese warship lurking out here. Give me an e-mail address and I’ll prove it.”

Mark took his cue and prepared a digital file of their one-sided gunfight with the stealth ship. The commander gave an address.

A few minutes later, O’Connell came back. “Who are you people and how did you know it was out here?”

Juan’s cell rang. It was Overholt. “One second, please, Commander.” He took the call. “Lang, I’m going to need your help convincing an Admiral Giddings that he and his people never saw a thing and have never heard of the Oregon.”

“Did you get them?”

“Yes, but the cat’s out of the bag about our secret identity. We also have the specs on how the stealth system operates.” He could picture Overholt rubbing his hands together with delight. Those plans were going to buy a lot of clout in Washington.

“Whatever you need, my boy. Whatever you need.”

“You’re a pip.” He killed the call and addressed the commander once again. “In a little while, Admiral Giddings is going to radio you and tell you that this incident never occurred and that you have no knowledge of a ship called Oregon.”

“So the CIA has their own navy now?”

“If that is what you choose to believe, that’s fine with me. Besides, you have a war to avert, so I’d put us out of your mind and carry on with your job.”

“Captain Cabrillo, I want—” Her transmission cut off suddenly. When she came back, her voice had a little bit of awe in it. Langston had outdone himself in record time. “Have a nice day, Captain.”

“You too, Commander, and good luck.”