Piranha

Chapter 1 Piranha

The ocean sat before him like an azure mirror, its surface gleaming with a light haze of silky heat. His small sloop glided forward slowly, as if too much movement would disturb the tranquility. There was no wind for the sail and he had just cut the engine, content to drift into the calm of the open sea. A man could count on one hand the number of days he might encounter such perfect peace, and as Mark Stoner gripped the rail of his boat, the Samsara, a sensation of great ease came over him, a taste of the nirvana his Zen Buddhist teachers promised would come when he managed to shed worldly desire. The moment lingered around him, vanquishing time in its perfection. As the thick muscles of his neck and shoulders loosened, the rest of his body seemed to float upward, assimilating into the universe.

But all was not as it appeared.

A geyser broke three hundred yards off Samsara’s port bow, the water erupting as if a volcano had tossed a fireball into the sky. The blue water furled green and black as a thick spear crashed upwards, rising quickly from the ocean’s surface. It stuttered momentarily, as if it were a fish shocked at the sudden loss of water flowing over its grills. Then it steadied and began picking up speed, rocketing north by northeast at something over five hundred miles an hour.

“Shit,” said Stoner aloud, though he was the only one on the boat. “Hole shit.”

Then he ran back to the cabin to make sure the recording devices were working.

Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian slipped the throttle the throttle forward, continuing to pick up speed as they approached the approximate location of Task Force Nirvana. The Megafortress’s forward airspeed push up past five hundred knots as the big plane shot no more than twenty feet over the ocean swells. Dog hated flying over the ocean, especially at low altitude; he somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that a massive tsunami lurked just ahead, ready to rise up and engulf him. Even at high altitude, he had a landlubber’s paranoia about going down in the water. Something about the idea of struggling to inflate and then board a tiny rubber raft filled him with irrational dread. It didn’t help that any time he thought about it, his mind supplied a posse of circling sharks to supervise the operation.

“Should be able to see the test area buoys in sixty seconds,” said Bastian’s copilot, Chris Ferris. “We’ll have the feed of the Flighthawk.”

“Roger that,” replied the colonel. “Zen, how are we looking?” he asked over the Dreamland com circuit.

“Ocean’s clean,” replied Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard. Stockard was flying two U/MF-3’s or Unmanned Fighters, nicknamed Flighthawk, from Raven, the second EB-52 in the flight. The two robot planes, roughly the size of Miata sports cars, acted as forward scouts for Bastian’s three-Megafortress flight. Two other U/MF’s flown by Captain Kelvin “Curly” Fentress in Galatica, were flying above the EB-52’s as combat air patrol. The Megafortresses were spread across the water at roughly half-mile intervals, flying what would have looked like an offset V from above. Though all shared the basic Megafortress chassis, each craft was outfitted differently.

Galatica, on the left wing, had a radar suite comparable to an E-3 AWACS. Since the powerful radar would alert their quarry, it was currently in passive mode — for all intents and purposes turned off.

Raven, at the right of the formation, featured a suite of electronic listening devices that would rival any Rivet Joint RC-135 spy plane. A myriad of antennas picked up both voice and telemetry transmission all across the radio spectrum; the computer gear stuffed into the rear compartments provided the onboard operator with real-time decoding of all but the most advanced encryptions. A second operator commanded a suite of gear similar to that found in Wild Weasel and Spark Vark aircraft; he could both detect and jam active radar units at roughly two hundred miles. The rotating dispenser in the bomb bay included four Tacit-Plus antiradiation missiles. Launched from just inside one hundred miles, they could either fly straight to a known radar site or orbit a suspect area until the radar activated. A thick, eighteen-inch section had been added to the weapons behind their warhead. This new section had been designed specifically for the sea mission. The gear inside the area allowed the missile to use its active radar on its final leg if the target switched its own radar off. Though relatively weak and short-ranged, it was hard to detect and also difficult to jam. Once fully operational, the missile promised to make aircraft essentially invulnerable to surface ships — at least until enough missiles were used so that an enemy could figure a way around them.

The payload aboard Iowa, Bastian’s plane, was the reason the three Megafortresses were here.

Stuffed into Iowa’s forward bomb bay were a half-dozen fiberglass and steel container that looked like the old-fashioned milk containers once used to gather milk from cows on the copilot’s family farm. A thick ring that sat about where the handles would have been contained just enough air to properly orient the container’s “head” float a few meters below the surface of the water. Above the ring was a rectangular web of thin wires that, once deployed, would extend precisely 13.4 meters. The wires were attached to a line-of-sight radio transmitter that generated a short-rang signal across a wide range of bands. These signals could be received and processed by a specially modified version of the antennas and gear used by the Megafortresses while directing Flighthawks.

The bottom portion of the buoy contained three different arrays, the first was designed to broadcast audible signals that sounded like a cross between the clicks of a dolphin and the beeps of a telephone network. The second picked up similar audible transmissions in a very narrow range. The third transmitted and listened for long and extremely-low-frequency (or ELF) radio waves. These devices were actually relatively simple and while not inexpensive, were considered expendable — which was why the buoyant ring was equipped with small charges that would blow it off the buoy, sending them to the bottom of the ocean.

In essence, the milk cans were simply sophisticated transmitting stations for “Piranha,” the larger device strapped to Iowa’s belly. Piranha looked like an oversized torpedo with extra sets of fins on the front and rear. Once in the water, the conical cover on its nose fell off to reveal a cluster of oval and circular sensors that fed temperature, current, and optical information back to a small computer located in the body of the device. Between these sensors and the computer was a ball-shaped container that held a passive sonar; this too fed information to the computer, which in turn transmitted it, whole or in part, back to the buoy. The rear two thirds of Piranha contained its hydrogen-cell engine. Pellets made primarily of sodium hydride were fed into a reaction chamber where they mixed with salt water, creating hydrogen. This part of the engine was based on the hydrogen-powered, long-endurance, low-emission motor that powered an ultra-light UAV being tested at Dreamland. The sea application presented both major advantages — the availability of water allowed the compressed, pelletized fuel to be substituted for a gas system — and great challenges — the fact that it was salt water greatly complicated what was otherwise a fairly simple chemical process.

Rather than turning a propeller as it did in the ultra-light, Piranha’s engine was used to heat and cool a series of alloy connectors that ran through the outer shell of the vessel. Similar to a keychain or a child’s toy, the outer shell was connected in sections, allowing it to slip and slither from side to side. Using a technique first pioneered at Texas A&M, the expansion and contraction of the alloy strands moved the outer hull like a snake through water. The process was essentially wakeless, impossible to detect on the surface and almost impossible below. While there was still work to be down, the propulsion system was nearly as fast as it was quiet — Piranha could read speeds close to fifty knots, with an endurance of just under eighteen hours at a more modest average pace of thirty-six knots.

Piranha had been developed by a joint Navy and Dreamland team; it was represented the next generation of unmanned robes of UUVs (unmanned underwater vehicles) designed for launch from Seawolf submarines. Current UUVs used active forward- and side-looking sonars and had an overall range of approximately 120 nautical miles. They moved slowly, and could cover about fifty square miles of search area a day. They were fantastic weapons, intimately connected to the Seawolf and Virginia-class boats, and were perfectly suited for the inherently hazardous missions they had been designed for, such as searching for mines in littoral or shallow coastal waters.

Unlike those probes, Piranha could be operated from aircraft, thanks to the buoy system. Like the buoys, the probe itself was disposable, or would be in the future. For now, a low-power battery mode took it back to a specific GPS point and depth for recovery by submarine or surface ship up to 150 miles from rundown.

The data transmitted back to the buoys — and from them to a controlling airplane or vessel ship — was considerably greater than that possible in the current-generation UUVs, thanks largely to compression techniques that had been pioneered for the Flighthawk. These “rich” signals were difficult to decode and had a short range, which limited the ability of an enemy to detect and track them. in the stealth mode, which used only the intermittent audible mode to communicate, the operator received enough information to identify size, course, and bearings of an enemy target out to seventy-five miles, depending on the water conditions. In “full como,” or communications mode, the signal fed a synthetic sonar system. This sonar was passive, and thus completely undetectable. It painted a three-dimensional sound picture on an operator’s screen; the computer’s ability to interpret and translate the sounds into pictures of the object that created them not only meant that combat decisions could be made quickly, but the operators required considerably less training than traditional sonar experts. Just as the improvements in sensor gear and computers allowed the copilot on a Megafortress to perform the duties of several B-52 crew members, the synthetic sonar would allow a back-seater in a Navy Tomcat to handle Nirvana while taking negative G’s.

In theory, Colonel Bastian and his people were going to find out if the impressive results in static and shallow-water tests could be duplicated in the middle of the ocean, against some of the best people with Seventh Fleet could muster. The Kitty Hawk, steaming out toward Japan after a brief respite at Pearl, was the target.

If you’re going to test a new weapon system, might as well go against the best, thought Dog.

“Piranha Buoy in ten seconds,” said Ferris.

“Ten seconds,” said Dog. “Piranha Team, you ready?” he added, speaking over the interphone circuit to the Piranha specialist, Lieutenant Commander Tommy Delaford and Ensign Gloria English. They were sitting downstairs in what ordinarily was the Flighthawk deck on the Dreamland Megafortresses.

“Ready,” replied Delaford, the project leader for Piranha. Delaford worked directly for the Chief of Naval Operations, Warfare Division; his handpicked Navy team include people from N77 (the submarine warfare division), N775 (science and technology), and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command.

“I have Task Force Charlie,” said Captain Derek Teijen, piloting Galatica. “Tapping in coordinates — they’re a bit closer than they’re supposed to be, Colonel. Lead ship is barely one hundred miles away. Have it ID’s as a DDG. Carrier is sending two F-14’s toward us.”

“Roger that,” replied Dog. He’d expected the Navy to jump the gun; in a way, it was surprising that the task force had waited so long. The new Seventh Fleet commander, Admiral Jonathon “Tex” Woods, had boarded the aircraft carrier to personally oversee the tests. While his military record was sufficiently impressive for him to be known even in the Air Force — and hated to be shown up in combined-forces exercises.

Which in a way, this was.

“Zen, those Tomcats are yours if they get close enough,” Dog said. “Curly, stand by for launch of Piranha system. Chris, open bay doors.”

The Megafortress shook slightly as the large doors of the bomb bay cranked open. The sophisticated flight computer system compensated for the plane’s altered aerodynamics so swiftly Dog hardly noticed. He pulled back gently on the stick, pushing the plane exactly onto the

dotted red line the computer put on his screen.

“Three, two, one—” said Ferris.

There was a loud rumble from the rear as the buoy fell into the water.

“Device launch in twenty seconds,” said Ferris.

“We concur,” said Delaford. “Counting down.”

Dog pitched the big plane’s nose toward the waves; the optimum launch angle was a fairly steep forty-three degrees.

“Tomcats are looking for us,” reported Ferris. “Ten seconds to launch — we need more angle, Colonel.”

“Got it,” said Bastian, hitting his mark. The weapons section of the flight computer that helped manage the Megafortress projected the launch countdown in his HUD, “Launch device,” he said as the numbers drained to zero.

“We’re off,” said Ferris. “Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house she goes.”

Dog ignored Ferris’s attempt at cosmic relief and began to pull the plane upward. He’d had to drop fairly low to the waves for the launch, and the vision of sharks circling his dinghy returned. As they climbed, the Piranha team went through the shakedown procedure, establishing contact with the probe. They immediately began steering it toward the target task force. Traveling at just over forty knots, Piranha had already identified the ships in the group for the operators. She dove to four hundred meters, completely undetected by the screening vessels and the two ASW helicopters, which had set up a picket of sonar buoys. The operators detected a submarine operating a towed array-probably the Connecticut, a killer in the ultramodern Seawolf class, though they were too far away for a real ID or even an accurate range. Meanwhile, the stealthy profiles of the Megafortresses made it possible for them to elude the Tomcats for close to half an hour, even though opening the bay doors to drop the buoy had alerted their airborne radar plane to their presence. Dog began to think they’d manage to complete the exercise scot-free.

His copilot brought him back to reality.

“Tomcats are on us, changing course,” said Ferris. “At bearing — shit — they’re launching weapons!” yelled Ferris, as usual far more agitated than the situation called for.

“Evasive maneuvers. Hang on. Zen, those Navy birds are yours.”

“Engaging,” replied Major Stockard. His voice, although relayed through a satellite system in orbit several kilometers above the Megafortress, sounded like he was in the next seat over.

The F-14’s had slowed to fire their long-range Phoenix AIM-54’s, but they were still closing on the Megafortresses at over five hundred miles an hour. It was clear from the way they were flying their radar hadn’t picked up the Flighthawk, which were now heading into a bank of clouds just over the attackers’ flight path. Raven began blanketing the air with a thick fog of countermeasures, confusing not just the Tomcats’ radar, but the Grumman E-2 Hawkeye feeding them data more than a hundred miles to the north. The Navy interceptors were now limited to what their Mark-1 eyeballs could feed them; which meant they had to close to visual distance. In another sixty seconds, they’d be able to nail the Megafortresses with short-range heat-seekers or cannons.

Simulated, of course.

Zen didn’t intend to let that happen. The U/MFs had several disadvantages fighting the sort of long-rang combat the Tomcats preferred; they were equipped only with cannons and their mobility was limited by the need to stay within ten miles of their mother ship. But in a close-quarters knife-fight, they were hard to top. Hawk One broke from the cloud bank she was sitting in as close to the canopy of the lead F-14 as he could manage, flashing across its bow like a meteor shot from the heavens.

Or an air-to-air missile launched by an undetected fighter.

The slashing dive had the desired effect — the lead F-14 pilot jinked madly as he unleashed a parcel of flares and chaff, not quite sure what was coming at him. The decoys would have been more than enough to clear an enemy missile from his back — but Zen wasn’t an enemy missile. He curled Hawk One upward, angling toward the dark shadow of the Navy aircraft. The Tomcat’s variable geometry wings had flipped outward to increase aerodynamic lift, a sure sign to Zen the plane was caught flat-footed. He pressed his attack into the Tomcat’s belly even as it upgraded GE F110’s spit red fire, the massive turbines winding to push the plane away.

Had this been a “real” encounter, the Navy pilot might have escaped — an ol’ big block Pontiac Goat could beat a slammed Civic off the line any day of the week, and Zen at best could have gotten only a half-dozen shots into the belly of the accelerating beast — not nearly enough to bring her down, barring ridiculous luck. But the computers keeping score took the U/MF’s chronically optimistic targeting gear at its word. According to its calculations, something over a hundred 20mm shells raked the Navy plane’s fuselage and wings, turning it into a mass of flame and metal.

“Score one for the AF,” said the event moderator blandly, circling above in a P-3 Orion. “Nirvana Tomcat One splashed.”

Zen had already jumped into the cockpit of Hawk Two. He had the other F-14 on his left wing, cutting back toward its original course, C³, the sophisticated control-and-tactical-assistance computer that helped fly the Flighthawks, suggested a high-speed attack at the rear quarter of the F-14. Zen recognized it immediately as a long shot; even with the computers keeping score, such an attack would have an extremely low kill-probability.

Deciding that was better than nothing, Zen told C³ to implement the attack plan, then jumped back into Hawk One, changing the view screens and control selections via a verbal command to the computer of “One” and “Two,” then pulling around, trying to set up an ambush on the Tomcat. A call from Raven’s radar operator changed his priorities.

“Bogies at one hundred miles — make that a four-group of F-18’s, angels twenty.”

“Hawk leader,” acknowledged Zen. Even as the information about the bandits’ course and speed was downloaded into his computer, Zen had decided he would pass off the Tomcat and concentrate on the Hornets.

“Yo, Curly — you see the Tomcat gunning for the flight?”

“On him,” said the other pilot.

Unlike Zen, Captain Kevin “Curly” Fentress had never flown in real combat; nor was he a fully qualified jet pilot. He’d only racked up ten hours so far in Dreamland’s T-38 jet trainer, every minute among the longest of his life. Curly had come into the Flighthawk program after helping develop early-model unmanned aircraft including the Predator and Globak Hawk. While a good remote pilot, he lacked both the experience and instincts of a first-rate combat jock.

But he was learning.

The Tomcat packed a pair of all-aspect heat-seekers. While Fentress had to be respectful of the missiles, they were considerably less dangerous than AMRAAMS. It was also to his advantage that the Tomcat was gunning for the Megafortresses and probably had only a vague notion of the Flighthawks’ location. Fentress’s two robot planes were running roughly half a mile apart, separated by five hundred feet at thirty-one thousand and 31,5000 feet. His game plan was relatively straightforward — he’d engage the F-14 with one plane in a diving attack, and at the same time have the computer arc the second Flighthawk so it could grab the Tomcat’s tail for the kill. It was a classic strategy, basically the same double attack perfected by the Army Air Force Captains John Godfrey and Don Gentile against Me-109’s during World War II — minus the missiles, radars, and very high speeds the planes were using.

The Navy jock wasn’t flying a Messerschmitt. Rather than engaging the small fighter as it dove in front of his F-14, he lit the burners and blew past both the U/MF and the approaching Megafortresses. Fentress gave a few blinks from the gun of Hawk Four, but the smaller engines couldn’t drive the Hawk close enough to the muscular Navy plane to record a hit.

“We can take him with a Scorpion,” said Captain Tom Dolan, the copilot in Raven.

“No, he’s mine,” said Fentress tightly. “You’re going to need that Scorpion later.”

He knew better than to try to run the F-14 down. Fentress held back as the Tomcat started tracking north, waiting for the plane to single out its quarry and start to close.

Though it had a much easier angle on Raven, it seemed to be picking out Iowa.

Coincidence? Or had he been briefed beyond the accepted rules?

No matter. The F-14 began picking up steam as it pressed toward the Megafortress’s tail. Fentress had a good intercept plotted — the target indicator on Hawk Three began blinking yellow, indicating he was almost in range. Just as it went red, the F-14 pilot belatedly spotted the robot and abruptly nosed downward. Fentress once more found he couldn’t stay with the Tomcat, but according to C³, did manage to put six shells into its wing.

The event moderator called it “light damage.” Under the rules of the game, the F-14 should have broken off and gone home. But instead, the Navy jock lit the burners and jerked his nose up, pulling a good seven or eight Gs. He recovered from his evasive maneuver and bullied his plane toward a firing solution a bare five miles off the EB-52’s vulnerable V-shaped tail.

Dog shook his head as his copilot reported that the F-14 was getting ready to launch AIM-9’s.

“Flares.”

“Flares. Stinger ready,” said Ferris. “They’re cheating,” he added bitterly. “Bastards.”

“Fire when you have him,” answered Dog calmly. “Don’t hit the Flighthawk. Crew, hold on for evasive maneuvers.”

Dog jerked the stick hard, pushing the big plane to the left, then back again, jinking the massive bomber as if she were an F-16. Adrenaline shot through his veins, and he realized he was laughing. It was times like this that reminded him why he’d joined the Air Force.

Fentress slapped Hawk Four toward the F-14’s tail as it closed on the Megafortress. The magnified screen showed the bomber’s tail stinger tracking back and forth, obviously taking aim at the aggressor — its air mines were fatal at 2.5 miles, which was just inside the fatal range of the Sidewinders. Undoubtedly the Navy pilot wasn’t concerned about “surviving” the conflict; he’d get close enough to launch the Sidewinders even if it meant he got slammed himself.

Fentress pushed his nose down, moving his pipper dead into the canopy of the Tomcat’s two-man cockpit. He waited a second after the red bar flashed, remembering Zen’s admonitions regarding the Flighthawk control computer’s unyielding optimism.

Fentress then fired a long, concentrated blast that, had this been a real thing, would have reamed a large hole in the Navy jet.

The next second, he got a warning that the EB-52 was getting ready to fire its Stinger. Fentress had to jerk off quickly to avoid getting nailed by an air mine. As he did, another warning buzzed sounded — the F-14 had just launched his Sidewinders.

“One simulated missile hit on engine four, one miss,” reported Ferris, Dog’s copilot. “He cheated bigtime,” added Ferris. “The Flighhawk nailed him.”

“We’ll send it to the Rules Committee,” stated Dog. “Wing damage?”

“Negligible.” Ferris began reading through the damage-control reports; the simulated hit wasn’t bad enough to keep them from completing their mission. But unlike the Tomcat, Iowa’s flight computer was plugged into the game and trimmed the plane as if it had really been hit — within reason, of course.

“How you doing down there, Delaford?” Dog asked the Navy Piranha specialist.

“Still no contact. We should be about thirty seconds away.”

“Too bad it’s not a torpedo,” said Dog.

“Believe me, Colonel, if this were the real thing, the target would be dead meat as soon as we can see it. Now under Option Four, carrying the double warhead—”

“We’re a little busy,” said Dog. “You just have fun down there.”

“Oh, I will, sir. It’s not every day you get to blow up an aircraft carrier.”

While the Hornets thumbed through their radar scans trying to sort out the Megafortresses behind all the electronic noise, Zen brought the Flighthawks around, positioning himself for a diving, rear-quarter attack. Once his attack had began, Galatica would launch Scorpions at the remaining planes. Another wave of fighters was sure to follow; hopefully, they’d be ready to saddle up and get away by then.

The Hornets were in double two-ship elements separated by over a mile. Zen launched his attack against the plane at the point closest to the Megafortresses; it was on his left as he angled Hawk One downward, Hawk Two holding above. The attack went ridiculously well — he could see the while globe of the pilot’s hard hat dead on in his pipper. Two squeezes on the trigger and the Hornet was gone; by the time the event observer called out the kill, Zen had jumped into Hawk Two and slashed another dozen slugs through the tail of the first plane’s wingman. This Hornet tried to tuck into a turn, hoping to throw the Flighthawk in front of him. It would have been a fine strategy against nearly any other plane in the world, but the U/MF could turn far tighter than an F/A-18. Zen could have driven his plane right through the Hornet — a fact that made him more than a little annoyed when the referee failed to call the hit. He turned back and stuffed another long fusillade of simulated shells into the Hornet’s twin tailpipe.

“Yo,” he said.

“Cougar Two slashed,” said the event moderator with obvious disappointment.

The delay kept Zen from pressing an attack on the second element. In his absence, the flight computer had managed to set Hawk One up for a reasonably good front-quarter run at one of the Hornets. Zen jumped in the cockpit, but then decided to let C³ finish the job. The computer obliged by tossing two dozen slugs into the Hornet’s belly and another dozen into the canopy area.

That left one plane. Zen had lost track of it in the swirl. He had to select the sitrep screen — a God’s-eye view of the battle area piped into his console courtesy of Galatica’s powerful radar. C³ highlighted the Hornet, which was shooting back toward its carrier group.

Running away?

No, decoying him, as had the other F/A-18’s.

“We have bogies south,” said Galatica’s radar operator tersely. “In range for Phoenix launch in thirty seconds.”

“Clever bastards.”

Colonel Bastian checked the overall position on the sitrep screen in the lower left-hand corner of his dashboard. Piranha, still undetected, was now closing on the Kitty Hawk.

He wished he could say that Iowa was also still undetected.

“Eight Tomcats, positively ID’d,” Ferris said. “They’ll launch any second.”

“Not a problem,” said Dog.

“Got it,” said Delaford.

“Yes!” added Ensign Gloria English. “We are within five miles of the aircraft carrier. Closing. We’re not detected.”

“If this were Option Four, they’d be dead. We could download to a sub now — boom, boom, boom!” sand Delaford.

“Tomcats are launching missiles!” shouted Ferris, so loud he could’ve been heard back on the tail.

“Evasive maneuvers,” said Dog. “If we’re in, we’re going to break, Tom,” he told Delaford. They were already at the extreme range for the Piranha system, and would have to close off contact to duck their attackers.

“Colonel, if we can hold contact for another sixty seconds, I can have Piranha pop up across from the Kitty Hawk’s bridge. Kind of put an exclamation mark on the demonstration,” Delaford said.

“Missiles are tracking,” said Ferris.

“Can we break them if we stay here?”

“Trying. The Tomcats are still coming. They want our blood.”

“We’ll hold our position as long as we can,” Dog told Delaford. “Hopefully, we won’t get nailed in the process.”

“It’ll be worth it,” said Delaford, whose project had faced considerable skepticism from the Navy brass.

Dog told the other Megafortresses they could break off.

“Sixty seconds,” said Delaford. “Right under the admiral’s nose.”

“Colonel, one of those Navy logs won’t quit.”

“Tinsel,” said Dog, giving the order to dispense electronic chaff designed to confuse the radar guiding the long-range missile.

“Fifty seconds,” said Delaford.

“Missile impact in twenty,” warned Ferris.

“Hang on, everybody,” said Dog. He pulled the Megafortress hard right, then back left, accelerating north briefly but then pulling back west, trying to stay within range of the Piranha buoy.

“Must’ve graduated from Annapolis,” said Ferris. “That missile isn’t quitting.”

Dog decided to do something he’d never be able to manage in a stock B-52—he twisted the massive plane through an invert and accelerated directly toward the AIM-54. Against a “live” missile, the strategy would have been dubious, since the proximity fuse would have lit the warhead as he approached. But the gear in the nose used to record a hit was a few beats slower than the real McCoy, and Dog just managed to clear the AIM-54 before it “exploded.”

“Shit, I lost the connection,” said Delaford as Dog recovered.

“Can you get it back?”

“Trying.” Dog could hear Delaford and English tapping furiously on the keyboards that helped them control the remote devices.

“We can drop another buoy,” suggested English.

“We should,” said Delaford. “But this one is closer. You know Colonel, I think they’re trying to jam us.”

“They have two jammers aloft,” said Ferris.

“Give me a course,” said Dog. “Delaford, is there any way to make Piranha spit in the admiral’s eye when it comes to the surface?”

“Working on it, sir.”

Unlike the earlier attacker, these Tomcats not only knew Fentress’s Flighthawk were there, but considered them enough of a threat to target them with their Phoenix missiles. Ducking the long-distance homers wasn’t that difficult — Fentress had done so in about a dozen simulations over the past two weeks — but it did take time. It also cost him position — he lost control of Hawk Four as his Megafortress jinked out of the ECM-shortened communications range to avoid another volley of missiles. The onboard computer took over the robot, turning it toward the EB-52 in default return mode.

Fentress pulled Hawk Three higher, hoping to get into position to break the next wave of attack, which he expected to be close-in dash to fire heat-seekers. But the Tomcats had something else in mind; AMRAAM-pulses, fired from just over forty miles away.

A red-hot wire snaked around his chest. Not one but two of the Scorpions locked on his plane. These were considerably more difficult to avoid. Even in simulations, he’d never gotten away from a pair. Galatica, with its performance significantly hampered by the revolving radar dome in its upper body, would have an even more

difficult time, regardless of the countermeasures it spewed.

Fentress recoiled himself to his job; he’d do his best and jinked in the direction of the lead Tomcat, which was already homing in on Galatica. To catch the Navy pilot’s attention, he winked his cannon. Though several miles out of range, the F-14 diverted just long enough to launch a pair of Scorpions at him.

Two more missiles that can’t target Gal, Fentress thought to himself. He threw the Flighthawk downward, then cut diagonally, hoping against hope to beam the missiles.

He did. As he started to recover from the dive, he realized he had also gotten away from the missiles launched earlier. But all his jinking and jiving had left himself open to another F-14, which screamed toward him, gun blazing. Fentress started to turn, confident he could get out of the Tomcat’s gunsight. His screen showed a simulated run of bullets trotting past the canopy — and then everything buzzed red and a large “2” filled the control screen. He’d been nailed by a Sidewinder he’d never seen.

Hawk Four, flown by the computer, had already suffered the same fate. Shorn of its defenders, the over-matched EB-52 found itself sandwiched between a pair of Navy Top Guns, whose M61;s made confetti of the wings.

“We’re hit,” said the Megafortress pilot, Captain Teijen. “Performance degrading. Prepare for ejection.”

“Aw, shit,” grumbled the copilot.

Still, the EB-52 was a tough airframe. Teijen held her up, swooping left and right, and managed to take out one of the Navy fighters who apparently didn’t believe the brief on the potency of the Stinger tail weapon. There was no shaking the Tomcat flight leader, however, who came in close and winked his cannon, then rubbed their noses in it a bit by putting his plane directly over Gal’s tail.

“You be sunk,” said the pilot with a laugh.

The computer and the event moderator concurred.

“Yeah?” said Teijen. We’ll see how loud you laugh when your carrier goes down.”

Zen’s finger strained against the slider on the back of his combined stick-throttle. He had the engine nailed on the redline, trying to hustle the Flighthawks back to help Fentress fend off the rear-end attack. The Navy attackers had done an excellent job against the Dreamland planes, overcoming their technological disadvantage with shrewd tactics and kick-butt flying. They didn’t call these guys Top Guns for nothing.

Not, of course, than Zen would admit that in mixed company — mixed company meaning anyone who showed an affinity for bell bottoms and pea coats. Naval aviators might have proven in combat they were every bit as good as Air Force jocks, but no red-blooded USAF zippersuit would say so — except under extreme duress.

And maybe not even then.

Zen calculated a good merge on two planes coming in on his left figuring to turn and then let the Tomcats’ superior speed bring them to his gunsights. That worked fine for one of the planes, but the other wingman simply accelerated out of range as Zen brought Hawk Two to bear. He twisted off and gave the robot to the computer, telling it to target a new knot of Tomcats aiming for Iowa from the west, the computer handled if fairly well, but with four Scorpion AMRAAMs in the air, and its need to engage the enemy at close range, it was soon over-matched, taken down by a simulated explosion about fifty feet of its wingtip.

In the meantime, two Tomcats closed on Iowa for Sidewinder shots. As Zen tried to dive on them, his seat spun wildly, moving in the opposite direction — Raven’s pilot, Major Alou, was jerking madly to avoid a fresh missile attack. The movement disoriented Zen, who had an image in his screen more than four miles away. He had to break off his attack after pumping dozen shells at the F-14, doing some damage but not enough to splash it.

The air was thick with flares, electronic fuzz, and dummy weapons. Zen rolled around and found himself approaching Raven. Making the best of the situation, he slid Hawk One into a gradual turn, figuring to try and catch the planes that were closing on his mother ship. At the same time, he got a warning tone from the computer that his fuel were getting low.

The Navy fliers stayed just out of reach of Raven’s Stinger as they kicked off their missiles. All but one of the Sidewinders missed their mark; the one that did explode caused “fifty-percent damage” to the right wing control surfaces and some minor damage to the power plants. Enough, claimed the moderator, to rule the Megafortress down.

“Down?” said Alou. “Down? No way.”

The other crew members’ reactions were considerably less polite. Zen had one of the Tomcats fat in his pipper — he laid on the trigger, then whipped across the air like a stone slipped on a pond to nail the second.

Except that, under the engagement rules, he was dead once the Megafortress was.

The Tomcat jocks were laughing. Zen had considerable trouble restraining himself from riding Hawk One over their canopies.

“Navy referees,” muttered Alou.

Dog could feel a curtain of sweat descending down the front of his undershirt, as if he were coming toward the kick lap of a great workout. And in a way, he was — jinking and jiving as a pair of Tomcats, now out of missiles, tried to get close enough to use their guns. He fended them left and right, riding up and down, all the while waiting for Delaford to tell him when they could launch the buoy. They’d temporarily lost contact with Piranha, though its operator was confident it was close to the aircraft carrier.

“We’re going to lose speed as soon as we open the bay door,” said Chris Ferris. The copilot had a habit of worrying out loud. In Dog’s opinion, not a particularly endearing trait.

“I’m counting on it,” replied the colonel, flashing left as one of the Tomcats began firing again. The Navy planes couldn’t position themselves effectively because of the air mines spitting out from the back of the plane, but that advantage would soon be lost — the computer warned they were below a hundred rounds.

Worse, another quarter of fighters were coming from the north.

“Okay,” said Delaford.

“Chris, turn off the Stinger as if we’ve run out of shells,” Dog told his copilot. “Then open the bay doors and launch. Everybody hang tough,” added Dog. “This will feel like we’ve hit a brick wall.”

The Tomcats, seeing the Stinger had stopped firing midburst, closed in tentatively, expecting a trick. Meanwhile, Ferris gave Dog a five count. When he reached one, the colonel did everything but throw the plane into reverse — and he might have tried that had he thought of it. The Megafortress dropped literally straight down in the sky, an elevator whose control cables had suddenly snapped.

The Tomcats shot overhead.

“Piranha Buoy Two launched,” reported Ferris, immediately closing up the doors to clear the Megafortress’s sleek belly. Dog banked so close to the water, its right wingtip might have grazed a dolphin.

“They’re coming back, and they’re mad,” said Ferris. “Whipping around — rear-quarter shot.” He started laughing. “Suckers — Stinger on and firing.”

Their anger and fatigue took its toll. One of the Navy fliers was mauled; the other backed off — then declared a fuel-emergency and broke off.

“Four bandits still coming at us. In AMRAAM range,” warned Ferris.

“How we doing down there, Delaford?” asked Dog, cutting back north to stay near the buoy, though this meant closing the gap on the approaching F-14’s.

“Got it! Ten seconds to surface!”

Dog jinked back, hit chaff as one of the Tomcats launched from long range.

“Were did they get the Scorpion missiles codes?” asked Ferris. “They’re only supposed to use operational missiles.”

“Take them over,” said Dog.

“Huh?”

“Overrise their guidance. Use our circuits.”

“I don’t know if I can, Colonel. And even if I could, that would be cheating.”

“Weren’t you just complaining about them using missiles that aren’t in their armament lockers?” inquired Dog. “Issue the universal self-destruct. See what happens.”

The Scorpions — still some months from production — had been designed at Dreamland. The test missiles contained what the programmers called off-line paragraphs — telemetry code useful for testing but not intended for the final product. Among them were instructions allowing the testbed aircraft to override onboard guidance and detonate the missiles — useful in case one veered off course. Dog wasn’t sure the code had been included in the simulated version, but it was worth a try.

Ferris dutifully hit the commands, and got an extra bonus — not only did the two dummies “explode,” but so did the four simulated ones that hadn’t been launched yet.

Fortunately for the Naval aviators carrying them, the self-destruct merely killed the programming.

Ferris laughed so hard and loud he drowned out Delaford’s report that they were spitting at the carrier’s bridge.

“Almost,” said Delaford. “We’re twelve feet off their starboard side, bobbing up and down. I hope some of those sailors have cameras.”

“Gentlemen, and Miss English, job well done,” said Dog, who, despite his best effort to sound professional, was chuckling a bit as well. “Let’s go home.”

Stoner steadied himself against the rail of his boat as he drifted toward the piece of torn gray fabric bulky piece of flotsam bobbed a few yards beyond it; Stoner suspected it was the tip of something large enough to damage his boat. But he wanted the fabric, and decided the approach was worth the risk. There were words on the cloth, or at least something that looked like words.

He reached out with his long pole, sticking it in the middle of the material. Like a jellyfish prodded from above, it slipped downward and drifted away. Stoner reached again, nearly losing his balance grabbing the cloth.

He pulled the stick up quickly. The characters were definitely chinese, though he couldn’t make them out. He’d have to use his digital camera to take a picture, then transmit the image back.

Enough to go on.

Stoner looked back at the water. The flotsam was only a few feet away. It was smaller than he though, and not connected to anything. Even so, he put his pole out, trying to fend it off.

It rolled upward, revealing a face and torso. There were no legs, and only half-stumps where the arms had been.

In his career, Stoner had seen many unpretty things. He went back over the rail and reached down to a fabric-covered pocket at the top of the hull. Opening the compartment, he took out his camera, examining it quickly to make sure the settings were correct before slipping the thick strap over his neck. He went back and photographed the dead man’s face, recording it in case it might prove useful in the future. Then he out the long stick in the body’s chest and pushed it away, leaving it for the sharks.

Back at the helm, Stoner took the engines out of neutral, and steered the boat eastward. As he started below, he heard the drone of an aircraft in the distance.

The transmission would have to wait. He continued forward past the paneled area to the compartment at the bow. He threw the camera and media card inside, then stepped back and slammed the hatch shut. He struggled with the three long bolts at either side of the wall until his fingers were raw, finally taking off his sneakers to push at the end of the last bolt. By then, the aircraft was overhead.

He waited until he heard it pass, then pushed his head up to look. He knew of course, that it would be a Chinese patrol plane, though there was always hope he’d be wrong.

He wasn’t. And now a pair of delta-shaped blurs approached from the west — Shenyang F-811Ms, long-distance attack jets.

While he knew enough about the Chinese military to identify the planes’ units and air bases if he cared to, Stoner was much too busy to do so. With an immense leap, he threw himself overboard and into the water, just as the aircraft began firing.

It took approximately ten minutes for Samsara to sink. It would have taken considerably longer had Stoner not began flooding it by removing the bolts. He spent much of the time well below the surface of the water; what he lacked in negative buoyancy, he more than made up for in motivation.

When the aircraft were gone, Stoner bobbed to the surface, floating with as little effort as possible. It was at least an hour before sunset; if he were to survive the night he had to conserve his energy. And of course he knew he would survive. It was his job. It was what he always did.

Samsara’s life raft had been shot to pieces by the attack. Nothing else came off the boat after it went down — a matter of design, not accident. And so it was inevitable that Stoner resorted to the wreckage of the Chinese freighter — or what he strongly suspected was a Chinese freighter — to stay afloat. It was inevitable that the half-man he had poked before would float toward him. Stoner wrapped his arm’s around the torso without emotion. He kicked slowly, just enough to stay afloat and awake: Despite the warm day, the water cramped his muscles with its cold, and maybe made his teeth chatter.

The sun turned the sky pink as it set. Stoner waited in the water with his dead companion. Night crept up with an immense, bright moon. In the distance, he thought he saw the shadow of a shark’s fin. The wreckage of the freighter was drifting closer; paper with Chinese characters drifted near his nose. He moved to grab it, but found his arms frozen in place. He let go of the man’s head and sunk down in the water, trying to shake his limbs back to flexibility. When he reached the surface, the paper was gone and so was the head.

For the next hour he treaded slowly, faceup in the brine, cold and salt sandpapering his lips and nose. Then, suddenly, the water began to churn. He felt it coming for him now, the shark, drawn by his fatigue like a radio beacon in the night. It broke water fifty yards to his right, a massive thing of blackness.

Stoner waited. He had no weapon.

There was a sound behind him, an eerie cry not unlike the death rattle of a man at the end.

“Here!” Stoner yelled. “Here!”

A Seachlight played across the surface of the water. Two SEALs in diving gear paddled a rubber boat toward him.

“Here!” he yelled again.

“Mr. Stoner?” said one of the men.

“You’re not expecting someone else, I hope,” said Stoner as the raft crept up. His muscles were so stiff he had to be helped into the boat. But he managed to climb onto the deck of the waiting submarine and go below without further assistance.

“Stoner, I’m Captain Waldum,” said the skipper. “Glad we found you. Your signal’s getting weak.”

“Yeah,” said Stoner. “Let’s retrieve the bow pod from my boat and get back. About a dozen people are trying to have their underwater in knots about now.”