Red Cell

CHAPTER 16

It happened at 0237. The Reaper targeting Fuzhou had just crossed the thirteen nautical mile marker drawn on the radar track. Without a sound, the infrared video feed turned to static.

“What happened?” a lieutenant asked. Kyra didn’t know his name. “Camera malfunction?”

“No, sir,” one of the techs answered. He couldn’t have been more than twenty by Kyra’s estimation. “Complete loss of all feeds. Sir, that one is down.”

“Freeze the track shift on the other two,” the lieutenant said. “Keep them outside the thirteen-mile limit. It looks like that’s where the PLA drew its red line.”

The Reaper had dropped all its feeds simultaneously. Kyra was no military analyst—yet? — but there weren’t many possibilities worth considering. Only one, she thought. The Chinese just destroyed a Reaper and nobody saw it coming.

“The AWACs sent over their radar tracks and we compared ours with theirs,” the J2—Lincoln’s senior intelligence officer — said. “One of them caught a return that we didn’t, which bugs me. It’s a weak hit, but definitely a hit.” The J2 cued up the track on one of the smaller screens. He walked the video forward one frame at a time. “Starting at kill minus five seconds, the screen is clear. Four… three… and there.” Kyra watched, saw an icon, a red triangle, appear behind the position marking where the Reaper spent its final seconds. The J2 advanced the frame. “The bogey shows up for less than two seconds and then…” The red triangle disappeared in a single frame, with the Reaper icon clearing off the screen a second later. “We have a ghost.”

“We should be so lucky,” Nagin said.

“Your ghost has a temper and can dish out a hard kill,” Kyra said.

“Is that your stealth plane, Mr. Burke?” Pollard asked.

“I believe so,” Jonathan said. “I suspect that the Assassin’s Mace has internal weapons bays to keep the stealth profile intact, like the F-35. I suggest that what you just saw on the radar track was the return signal from a stealth plane that opened its bay doors to fire an air-to-air missile. The plane closed up the doors, restored its stealth profile, and fell off the screen.”

“That fits with what we expect the other man to see when we’re flying F-35s against him,” Nagin said. “Not quite a smoking gun but maybe as close as we’re going to get.”

“He took the fat piece of bait you left dangling for him. Doesn’t that worry anyone here besides me?” Kyra asked.

“Never let them see you sweat, young lady.” Pollard glared at her. “Yes, they took the bait. It means that either the Chinese are convinced we have no idea what’s going on and that they can knock down a Reaper with impunity. Or they’re confident enough in their design that they don’t care whether we know,” he reasoned. “The former is more likely, and this puts us in a good position. But in either case, at least we can make an educated guess which air base he’s flying from. Are we getting anything from the other two?”

“Nothing we haven’t already gotten from the birds in orbit,” Nagin said. “Troops massing at the ports, enough to make a play for Penghu, but not nearly enough for a stab at Taiwan proper.”

“No time like the present,” Pollard said. He would have preferred to have Navy Intel take a long, hard look, preferably a few years’ worth of looks, at Jonathan’s theory and evidence before risking his ship, but Tian Kai seemed determined not to grant them the time. “J2, tell Kadena to recall the other two before the PLA decide to take a shot at them. No sense wasting the taxpayers’ money.” The admiral picked up the mic and called the bridge. “Helm, make your course one-nine-five, speed ten knots,” Pollard said. He hated for Lincoln to run at anything less than full speed, but silence would be more important. F-22 Raptors from Kadena would provide additional air cover. They had launched two hours before and mated with a tanker that came over from Guam. The two AWACS birds that were circling several hundred miles to the northeast had come from Okinawa as well. The PLA would see those, but not the Raptors, which were stealth fighters. If the PLA Air Force decided to move on the airborne radar platforms, Chinese pilots would start dying in large numbers with no warning.

“All ahead full, course one-nine-five, aye,” the bridge officer announced.

“We’ll round the point in two hours,” Pollard said to Nagin. “Send the Vikings and the Seahawks up just before then to begin ASW operations. They should have a free run for a couple of hours. We should pass east of Liu-ch’iu Yu before the storm clears.” The rain pounding on the ocean surface would make it harder for Lincoln’s submarine-hunting aircraft and helicopters to find the Chinese subs that were certainly holding station off the Taiwanese coast, but it would also mask the noise from the planes and choppers’ engines from the Chinese fast-attack boat hiding under the waves. The storm would move past them to the east before Lincoln would reach the northern point the admiral had set as his private goal.

“A shame we have to hug the coastline so close,” Nagin said. “I’d love to drive right up the middle of the Strait just to tell the Chinese what they can do with themselves.”

“Makes me wish they’d try to approach us from starboard. I’d love to watch some Chinese subs get swamped in the silt plain,” Pollard said. Much of Taiwan’s coast was a mud flat, submerged only a few feet under the surface, which extended a half mile to the west. “And I’d bet real money that the PLA has sleepers on the beaches with binoculars watching for us, but they won’t see us in this squall.” The rain would see to that, as well as the fact that the entire carrier group had killed their running lights. GPS removed much of the danger of a collision between friendly ships, but night maneuvers in tight formation near a coastline were a risk even with help from satellites.

“Are you sure you won’t want a JAG on the bridge for this?” Nagin asked.

“A good lawyer doesn’t tell you what you can and can’t do,” Pollard advised his subordinate. “A good lawyer tells you how you can do what you want to do legally. But never ask them, if you can avoid it.”

“Always better to ask forgiveness than permission?” Kyra asked. It was the rule to live by in the National Clandestine Service.

“POTUS gave me the green light. But I don’t need anyone’s permission to protect my carrier group,” Pollard said.