Red Cell

CHAPTER 6

“You called?” Jonathan stood in the doorway. Morning sunlight was pouring in through the blinds, Cooke was sitting on the leather couch opposite the door, and it was obvious to Jon that the woman hadn’t slept much the night before. She had to force her eyes to focus on him, he saw, and he knew that she could turn brusque when she was wearing down. He suspected she was running on coffee or something stronger, but it wasn’t his place to say anything.

The CIA director looked at the analyst and realized that, in her tired state, she’d forgotten to tell her secretaries out front that Jon would be coming. How he’d gotten past them was something she’d have to drag out of him later when she had the patience. She also realized that he hadn’t knocked.

She ignored that fact and waved him in. “How’s Kyra?” she asked.

“Hard couple of days, I think. She’ll adjust.”

Cooke nodded. “She survived Caracas, she’ll survive you.”

“One can hope,” he said wryly. “Though I’m the least of her problems. And yours, I suspect.”

You underestimate yourself, Cooke thought, but it wasn’t time for that discussion. She held up the Red Cell report that Jonathan had delivered to her a few days previous. “I’ve been reading this. Inside Strait — How the PLA Could Invade Taiwan,” she read off the front page. “That’s terrible. How did you get this published with a title like that?”

“I presume you’re not reading for the literary merit,” Jonathan answered, sidestepping the question.

“No,” Cooke conceded. Jon was still on his feet, she realized. “Sit down please.” He obeyed. Cooke, relieved, held out the Red Cell paper over the low table in front of the couch and let it drop. “Do you think the Chinese are going to do it?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I’m sure APLAA would tell you that the smart money isn’t on invasion.”

“I’ve heard their side. They caveated everything so much I couldn’t tell what they really thought. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Invasion, probably not,” Jonathan said. “But if the PLA took out the Tashan Power Plant, then yeah, I think they’re going to move.”

The People’s Liberation Army invasion of Jinmen Dao, known to the West as the archipelago of Kinmen, began at 0200 hours local time with the faint sounds of boots in wet sand.

The PLA put commandos ashore near Kuningtou for the second time, as their fathers had before on October 25, 1949. That battle had been fought over fifty-six hours along Kinmen’s northern coast. The PLA had landed several battalions on the beaches and suffered immediate counterattacks by the Nationalist “Kinmen Bears” riding in American M5 A1 tanks for which the Communists had no counter. Fifteen thousand men had died in less than three days. The victory left Kinmen itself a hallowed ground in the minds of the Taiwanese.

That had been almost seventy years ago. Now, the Taiwanese Army troops stationed on Kinmen had enough firepower to attack the Chinese mainland ports of Xiamen and Fuzhou — artillery range is a measure that works both ways — so the PLA could not ignore them. When the invasion of Taiwan finally began, it was thought, Kinmen’s Defense Command would be overwhelmed by superior numbers in short order. They would fight to make Kinmen a bloody win for the PLA and maybe create enough gore to make Beijing reconsider the larger endeavor. The defense would start on the beaches, then fall back into the townships, most of which had stone buildings capable of withstanding heavy fire. The Taiwanese troops would then fall back to the tunnel and bunker complexes at Tai-Wu and Lonpun Mountains, Yangchai, Tingpao, and Lan Lake. The PLA would have to spill blood for weeks assaulting narrow concrete tunnel passages, where they would close up the hallways with their dead.

When the invasion of Taiwan itself was repulsed — the Americans would surely come — reinforcements would arrive or a peace treaty would be signed, the PLA would pull back, and the defenders who had survived the siege of Kinmen would emerge from the ground and take up their watch again. It was a strategy that relied on a number of assumptions, not the least of which was that the will of Taiwan’s political leaders would be as strong as that of the soldiers deployed to Kinmen itself. Several of those assumptions would prove wrong this night.

At the same time as their brethren were landing their hovercraft at Kuningtou, a second company of PLA Special Operations Forces rode their own air-cushioned landing craft through the surf of Liaoluo Bay onto solid ground near Shangyi township and unloaded their gear by moonlight. Their mission was to cut off the three major roads that ran through the island’s narrow central neck, effectively splitting the island into halves that could not reinforce each other. A third company came ashore on the northwestern coast near the Mashan Observation Station. They all carried light explosives and small arms, nothing larger than a 7.62 mm machine gun. The fifth column forces the Chinese had placed on Kinmen years before had the supplies needed to cripple any targets larger than individual men, and PLA infantry would be standing on this beach by noon with far heavier arms. The soldiers shouldered their weapons, slung their light packs, and dispersed across the islands to their waypoints.

“Sir?” The APLAA analyst didn’t take her eyes off her monitor. Drescher read the woman’s face, bit off the first snarky remark that passed through his head, and made his way to the woman’s desk.

“What?” he asked.

The live feed on APLAA’s monitor was thermal, shades of reds, yellows, and grays over a black field, and Drescher needed a few seconds to realize he was looking at a beach at night. He’d never been an imagery analyst, but he could figure that much. “This is Kinmen, east coast,” APLAA told him, and then she pointed at a pair of objects sitting on the sand just past the water’s edge. “I’m not an imagery analyst, but I’m pretty sure those are Jingsah Two — class hovercraft. You can tell by the double fans on the aft ends. Engines are still warm.”

“Taiwanese?” Drescher asked.

“I don’t think so. The only people who own Jingsahs in the neighborhood are PLA. Probably the First Group Army, First Amphibious Mechanized Division staging out of Hangzhou. I zoomed out and went looking around the rest of the coastline. I found this.” She worked her mouse around on the desk and pulled up several still images. Drescher checked the time codes: the imagery was less than a half hour old. It was clear that the hovercrafts had come onto the beach at a frightening rate of speed and stopped hard enough that anyone inside must have been strapped in to keep from getting thrown around. The final photo showed the hovercrafts had dropped doors by the bows and the bright silhouettes of men were running for the trees. Drescher couldn’t see the weapons, but he was sure they were carrying carbines or rifles, given how they held their hands. What kind and caliber they might be, Drescher couldn’t tell, but he didn’t need that particular bit of information to make his next decision.

Cooke set the phone back on the handset. “That was the Ops Center,” she told Jon. “It looks like the Chinese are moving on Kinmen. I have to go.” She stood, hesitated, then turned back. “Want to come?”

“Wouldn’t miss this,” he said, rising.

The first civilian targets were infrastructure. Power, telephone, and Internet lines were cut and radio transmitters were felled by satchel charges. With the Tashan Power Plant already down, every building on the island that lacked its own generator was dark by 0400, though most of the sleeping populace didn’t know it. The few civilians who were awake and realized that the island was dark had no way to tell anyone who mattered.

The first military targets were people. The Taiwanese soldiers garrisoned on Kinmen had kept a high state of readiness for years, but all men must sleep. Sentries were killed with silenced rifles at long distance, shortly after which the commanding officer of the Kinmen Defense Command and his wife were shot in their bed. Other Taiwanese senior officers followed.

The Kinmen Defense Command’s three divisions on the larger island were decapitated in ten minutes. The assassinations left eleven dead, including three civilians.

“Assume those were PLA Special Forces,” Cooke said. “What’s on their target list?” The Ops Center had fallen quiet when the CIA director had walked in.

“The usual, I think,” Drescher said. “Power lines, communications, maybe small bridges. Assassinations of key personnel if Taiwanese security isn’t up to snuff.”

“What’s the population of Kinmen?” Jonathan asked.

“Eighty thousand, give or take a few thousand,” the APLAA analyst replied. She quietly began to type on her keyboard, double-checking to make sure she hadn’t just led Cooke astray.

“Then Special Forces can’t take that island,” Jonathan noted. “If they want to occupy Kinmen, they’ll have to bring in regular forces, and that means they need a beachhead or an airport, maybe both if they’re feeling ambitious.”

“Do you have anyone watching the airport?” Cooke asked Drescher.

Drescher just looked around the room. A half-dozen people began pounding keyboards and the room started buzzing with low conversation. “Yep,” he said.

The Shangyi Airport was the next target. The massive fireball that had been the Air Defense Command Center surged five hundred feet toward the stars and was visible on the mainland. The primary air defense system guarding the airport followed. The Hawk and Patriot 2 missile batteries purchased from the United States at considerable expense were never used.

The SOF soldiers, joined with their fifth column supporters bearing heavy machine guns, overran the landing strip. They established overlapping fields of fire and killed anyone, soldier or civilian, who entered them. They moved through the buildings and terminals, eliminating security forces and seizing grounded fighter aircraft and weapons stores as they went. It was here that the PLA took its first casualties. A Taiwanese sergeant advanced toward the enemy, took cover behind a concrete Jersey wall at a small construction site, and used his sidearm to kill two PLA commandos running toward the main terminal. The cement barrier gave him excellent protection against small arms fire, and he managed to hold back the enemy for almost five minutes until they flanked him. When the commandos breached the front door, they met their first organized resistance of the morning — Taiwanese soldiers finally armed with weapons heavier than pistols. They held the buildings for almost an hour.

With Kinmen’s air defenses suppressed, the first of thirty IL-76 PLA transports filled with reinforcements lifted off in sequence from a runway at Xiamen. The total flight time was less than ten minutes. The transport landed, the pilots lowered the rear access ramp, and almost two hundred PLA soldiers erupted from the back. The plane was stationary for less than one minute before closing the ramp and taxiing off to clear the approach for the next plane and begin its own run back to the mainland. Every IL-76 would make ten runs by dusk. Together they moved a total of four infantry divisions and their associated equipment by nightfall.

The Liaoluo Pier and its two hundred soldiers followed. The PLA used the same tactics there as at the airport. The same results were achieved, though the casualties on both sides were marginally higher. Liaoluo had no landing strip, so PLA Navy amphibious transports and helicopters were used to bring the reinforcements ashore. Small numbers of Taiwanese troops managed to get to the beach with their own heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and even a pair of mortars. The first amphibious assault craft that landed on the beach suffered a direct hit from a mortar crew that got lucky, jamming the landing ramp closed and trapping its cargo inside. Dozens of landing craft followed and the Taiwanese troops held their defensive positions for almost an hour until they saw the Yuting II landing ship, the first of seven, approaching the shore. Each carried two hundred fifty men and ten amphibious tanks, marking the arrival of the PLA’s armored cavalry. The Taiwanese struck back with Javelin antitank weapons and turned the first three tanks into flaming pyres fed by diesel gasoline and the bodies of the tanker crews, but they had no chance to win without air support—where was the air support? The only combat planes overhead were Su-30 fighters escorting the monstrous IL-76s. The island’s defenders cheered when a vapor trail raced up to one of the Chinese transports and tore it from the sky in a raucous flash. The IL-76 went down, the entire airframe tumbling through the surf before settling in water barely deep enough to drown the crew and troops trapped inside. PLA helicopters began low runs under the transports, strafing covered ground to kill or flush out anything alive under the greenery.

The Ops Center was normally a very quiet place, or so Drescher had told Cooke. It wasn’t upholding the reputation and she was starting to wonder whether Drescher hadn’t undersold his unit to her. She assumed that there must have been some semblance of order or control in the room, but if so she couldn’t see it, and yet the senior duty officer seemed to have perfect knowledge of how information was flowing around the room. The man was in his element, riding herd on the mob before him, and having far too much fun, given the circumstances.

The rest of the staff wasn’t enjoying it so much. The APLAA analyst — a tall, very thin girl with a pixie haircut and angry face — was fighting down an urge to hyperventilate as she read a SIGINT report, whether from fear or pure joy that the long-awaited war with Taiwan had arrived, Cooke couldn’t tell. She gave the young woman a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder and a confident nod, which calmed the analyst down and seemed to give her a second wind. Cooke looked over the other analysts, who were all on telephones parceling out the few details they could scrounge up, all of which were surely erroneous. The first reports of any crisis were always wrong.

“You’re smiling,” Cooke noted quietly to Drescher.

“I love my job.” He pushed all the papers on his desk to the side, stacked them, and put them on the file cabinet behind. He was going to need a clean space to work. The director of national intelligence and the president would be calling Cooke, demanding answers, and she could not tell them to be patient. Politicians considered any information, even if they knew it was wrong, better than none. They would have to answer to the press and they could not, they would not, allow themselves to look ignorant. The press had to fill its airtime with something, and if the networks lacked hard facts, they would bring in paid experts to theorize and repeat the same uninformed conjectures until they finally did have real facts. Taipei had no shortage of political think-tank pundits and lobbyists on the payroll willing to spout off, and leaders on the Hill would be screaming alternately for blood and restraint, depending on their politics. But even the networks would tire of the rhetoric and would start yelling at the White House press secretary for something real. The White House would then scream at Cooke to give the president something, anything, that he could repeat to the press. She would tell them that they could not vouch for the reliability of the data, the president would demand the data anyway, and the press secretary would begin to feed false information to the reporters in a bid to buy time. The press secretary would later go off the record and blame the errors on CIA or some other intelligence organ. But to stand in front of the press and admit they knew nothing would make them look incompetent, and that was unacceptable.

“Got it!” one of the analysts yelled. The front monitor wall went black and then live with a satellite thermal video feed.

“What are we looking at?” Drescher yelled back.

“Shangyi Airport,” the analyst said.

Cooke grimaced as she stared at the front wall, stunned into silence, then looked back at Jonathan. His face showed no emotion at all.

The Kinmen Air Defense Command Center was a pyre, and the heat outlines of men dead and wounded speckled the tarmac. The closer ones to the burning building were harder to make out as the hot air rising from the fire superheated the concrete and asphalt on which the bodies lay. The corpses that close were roasting like steak in a cast iron skillet. Other men ran over and around the prone bodies further from the fire. Which soldiers were Taiwanese and which were Chinese, Cooke couldn’t tell, and she decided it was foolish to think she should know.

The rest of Kinmen’s defenders fell back to the bunkers, taking with them as many civilians as were able to reach the garrisons before the doors were closed and sealed.

The remaining command officers inside Tai-Wu Mountain sealed the complex’s heavy outer doors and spent the remainder of the day listening to a dwindling array of reports from their brothers outside. They pleaded for reinforcements and screamed for air support until PLA Navy vessels took up final blockade positions and began jamming the signal.

The Taiwanese command authorities calmly informed the Kinmen Defense Command before losing contact that its soldiers would be rescued eventually. It was a lie, though the senior Taiwanese military officers didn’t know it yet. There would be no reinforcements and no air support. The corrupt president in Taipei who had so eagerly stoked Beijing’s animosity for his own ends was terrified that he would need to save his military forces in case China’s coup de main of Kinmen was just the first of many.

Lieutenant Samuel Roselli checked his course and azimuth for the third time in five minutes and scanned the airspace ahead. It was a clear morning, 0620, visibility a hundred miles in all directions. The lack of cloud cover at least would let Roselli see the MIG patrols coming, but it left his plane nowhere in the sky to hide, and the old EP-3E Aries II would not be outrunning any Chinese fighters. The plane was an old crow, a four-engine turboprop built for surveillance, not combat. It had no offensive weapons, couldn’t fly higher than 27,000 feet or come anywhere close to Mach 1 even in a steep dive. For all practical purposes, the EP-3 couldn’t fight and it couldn’t run. If the MIGs got truly unfriendly, the best he could do was throw the Aries into a dive toward the deck, hold an altitude so low the plane would get a wash from ocean spray, and pray that the waves would confuse an attacker’s radar.

Roselli didn’t begrudge the Chinese their frustration at watching US spy planes run up and down their coast on a regular basis. He expected the politicians back in Washington would scream if PLA spy planes were making runs near Naval Base San Diego or any of the Navy’s other facilities scattered along the West Coast. One day, Roselli figured, they would be. The US wouldn’t be the world’s lone superpower forever.

“They’re going crazy back there. Radio ground traffic all up and down the coast, like an order of magnitude more than they’ve ever seen. It sounds like every PLA armor unit for a thousand miles is on the move. I miss anything up here?” Lieutenant Julie Ford crawled back into the right seat, which brightened Roselli’s mood considerably. He’d flown with copilots far less competent and pretty. The PLAAF had buzzed them several times and she’d held herself together nicely. It was harder for Roselli to imagine a faster way to earn another pilot’s trust.

“AWACS says the PLAAF is doing up here what PLA armor is doing down there. Combat patrols everywhere,” Roselli said. An Air Force Boeing E-3C Sentry was airborne two hundred miles to the northeast, flying a little higher than twenty-nine thousand feet. The AWACS rotodome was far more powerful than the EP-3’s own radar and could see every plane the Chinese had in the air for several thousand miles in all directions. Roselli’s EP-3 had links to the AWACS data feed and he didn’t like the picture. “I’ve never seen them keep this many birds in the air.”

“Nobody’s come by to check us out,” Ford said.

“Give ’em time.”

“Time” was two minutes, forty seconds. “Incoming,” Roselli said. “Three contacts inbound bearing zero-one-five, range one-two-four kilometers, speed five-two-five knots. Intercept in four minutes.”

“They’re lighting us up,” Ford said, her voice calm despite what the EP-3’s threat receiver was telling her.

We’re still in international airspace, Roselli thought. Just trying to scare us. They were flying inside the letter of the law and the PLAAF knew it.

Roselli heard the obscene roar of the fighters through the cockpit glass, the rising and falling pitch of the jetwash scream left by the Doppler effect louder than he could remember ever hearing during flight. They passed the EP-3 in succession less than a second apart and missed the Navy turboprop by less than fifty feet on either side. The EP-3 was heavy for its size, weighing 140,000 pounds on takeoff, but the jet-propelled wake still bounced the prop-driven Navy plane on turbulent air currents, throwing both pilots against their restraints. The Navy technicians in the back grabbed for their chairs and consoles. Two fell, one against a bulkhead, which cost him a cracked rib, the other sprawling on the floor and wondering whether it wasn’t safer to stay there.

“They’re coming around,” Ford said. “Immelmann turns.”

The Chinese fighters came about, the two on the flanks peeling around in opposite directions to come in behind. The lead plane’s pilot pulled straight up into a circular turn that left him upside down and a thousand feet higher when he matched course with the EP-3. He rolled the Su-27 onto its belly, lowered the nose to drop the altitude, and increased speed to make up the six miles he had lost in the ten seconds it had taken him to come about. His wingmen took up station on either side of the EP-3, doing their best to match speed. The fighters weren’t designed for optimal stability at such low speeds in the thinner air and the Chinese pilots had to finesse their aircraft to hold their positions. The lead pilot slowed his plane to a relative stop less than five hundred feet behind the US Navy plane.

“Lead bogey is on our six,” Roselli said. He didn’t have to tell Ford about the other two at the three and nine o’clock positions. She was looking out the window.

“They don’t learn, do they?” Ford said. “This isn’t 2001, you know? Touch wings and we have a prayer. They don’t.”

“Maybe their ejection seats got better,” Roselli said. “Or maybe they want us to spend a couple weeks on Hainan Island.”

Roselli watched the nine o’clock fighter holding station off the port-side wing. He was too close for comfort. That’s the point, he thought. Cat-and-mouse, and we’re a fat old rat.

Ford watched her partner but said nothing, her own poker face holding steady. No sense in being scared until there was something to be scared about.

The lead pilot provided the reason a minute later. The American pilots hadn’t changed course or altitude or given him a sign of any kind that they even took notice of his presence. The Americans’ conceit angered him. These surveillance flights were arrogance on display, open espionage done in full view of his country. To disregard the pilots sent to confront them showed disdain heaped upon disrespect. The PLAAF flight leader wished he had orders more liberal than those he had received, but they were liberal enough. He turned his radar to fire control mode.

The EP-3’s threat receiver almost screamed at the pilots. “Bogey at six o’clock just lit us up!” Ford yelled. “He’s got a lock!”

Roselli pushed the stick forward hard and the EP-3 dropped into a dive steep enough to lift the pilots out of their seats until the harnesses pushed back. He pulled hard left, sending the EP-3 into a corkscrew turn as it raced for the deck. Ford activated the electronic countermeasures, and the Chinese pilots suddenly faced radar clutter and air filled with chaff. The dive broke the flight leader’s missile lock, but he had never intended to work hard to maintain it. He ordered his wingmen to hold their altitude while he stayed behind the plane as it fell through four miles of air, leveling out less than a thousand feet above the waves. He followed the US Navy plane until it took up course zero-one-five, its four bladed engines pushing it as fast as it could go. Convinced they were going home, the flight leader pulled back on his own stick to do the same.

Roselli watched the Su-27s fall away on the scope. He looked down at his hands and didn’t see the tremors his mind told him were there, but he let the computer take over the duty of returning them to Kadena. “He’s falling back,” he said, relieved. Did my voice just shake?

Ford relaxed, let go of her stick, and looked back to the cabin. Prayers and profanities had been uttered aft, some more vocal than others. She stuck her thumb over her shoulder to point toward the SIGINT technicians, who were doing their own best to calm themselves. “I hope they got something that was worth it.”

“They almost shot down an EP-3?” Kyra put the cable behind the manila folder of satellite imagery and started to file through it, splitting her attention between the pictures and Jonathan’s voice. The first image was an overhead shot of PLA tanks moving in formation down some Chinese highway. She had climbed on M1 Abrams tanks, beige sixty-ton metal monsters whose thirty-foot length was covered with depleted uranium armor, and it wasn’t hard for her imagination to fill in the gaps about the formation of dozens rolling across the asphalt.

“And overran Kinmen while you were asleep in bed,” Jonathan confirmed. “They’ve been busy little buggers.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Kyra said, and she meant it. “They were definitely outside Chinese airspace?” she asked.

“Depends on your definition of Chinese airspace,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese think they own the Strait, so by their standard, no. By everyone else’s standard, yes. AWACS out of Kadena AFB on Okinawa tracked the entire flight path. EP-3s don’t carry weapons. The PLA knows that. They got to take one apart a few years back.”

“You’d think the Chinese would be averse to midair collisions after that one,” Kyra mused. “Makes you wonder whether they learned anything from the last time they buzzed an EP-3.”

“They learned that for the cheap price of one dead PLA pilot and a crashed MIG, they might get their hands on a US Navy plane full of classified gear,” Jonathan told her.

“What did Navy Intel get out of the flight?”

“That’s another report,” Jonathan said, holding up another paper. “SIGINT confirming that PLA Joint Operational Headquarters in Fujian has assumed command of the buildup. The order of battle matches what APLAA says we should see in an invasion force, except for the missile batteries not standing up. They argue that the Chinese would want to soften up the Taiwanese defenses with a long-range bombardment before sending the troops in. But DIA and the Pentagon say the troop numbers are too small for that just yet. And Tian hasn’t made any moves to put the Chinese economy on a war footing, and the People’s Daily ran an editorial this morning saying this is an exercise.”

“Which we can’t trust,” Kyra said.

“Of course not.” Jonathan smiled. Now you’re thinking like an analyst.

“So it looks like an invasion force, but nobody wants to call it because the numbers aren’t big enough and nobody wants to risk being wrong and offending the Chinese,” Kyra said.

“Correct,” Jonathan replied. He watched her study the overhead imagery. Given how bloodshot her eyes were this morning, he was mildly surprised that she could see anything.

“Do they think Tian is moving tanks because the PLA needs to burn up some surplus diesel?” The Vicodin was doing good things for her headache but nothing for her patience.

“Hardly,” Jonathan said, unmoved. “But you may be right for the wrong reason. With Kinmen occupied, this could be the buildup of an invasion force for Penghu. If they’re going to move on Taiwan in stages, it’s the next logical step.”

“You could have just said ‘I agree,’” Kyra said, satisfied and annoyed at once.

“That wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun,” he replied. “In any case, we should focus on the Assassin’s Mace. APLAA tried to preempt us by offering their collective wisdom on the matter.” He tilted the monitor toward her.

“That was fast,” she said.

“The China analysts have been waiting a long time for this,” Jonathan said. “The running joke is that they have stacks of prewritten President’s Daily Brief articles on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan sitting on their desks, though I suspect they had to think about this one a bit.”

The facing page was a montage of photographs of Russian-made ships and missiles. A small map of the Chinese coast covered the lower right corner and displayed icons marking PLA naval base locations.

“I take it you think they’re wrong?” Kyra asked. It always seemed to be his default answer.

“Russian-made ships and subs in the hands of the PLA Navy are a threat,” Jonathan admitted. “But we know that the Chinese didn’t restrict their little carrier-killer research project to buying up Russian equipment.”

He walked around a group of short filing cabinets to the whiteboard, then took up a red marker and eraser. He stopped short, staring at the scrawls of his previous thought experiment on the slick surface. Jonathan frowned, then finally began to erase.

“Giving up on detecting confirmation bias?” Kyra asked.

“Hardly,” he said. “But the more interesting problem gets the space.” He wiped the board clean, then retrieved a large bound volume from a nearby desk and dropped it on Kyra’s with a loud thump. “I’ve been going over the Agency’s last National Intelligence Estimate on the PLA — everything the intelligence community thinks it knows about Chinese military capabilities in one report. It’s two years old and this is the short version. The long version has an extra hundred pages with the really good intel; it backs up what APLAA said. China doesn’t have the combat power to force unification. No exceptions for an Assassin’s Mace. The other intel backs that up. Variations on a theme, but everything says the same thing.”

“APLAA wrote it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that explains it,” she said.

“Yes and no. They accounted for the PLA’s known capabilities, no question, and I didn’t doubt they would. What we need to determine is whether there are gaps in the intelligence that point to unknown capabilities.”

“Where do we start?” Kyra asked, frustrated. “We’ve got reports on the PLA going back to Mao.”

“Nineteen ninety-one, I think, unless we can find something more recent and conclusive,” Jonathan said after a moment’s thought. “The Gulf War inspired the PLA’s push to modernize their arsenal.”

“That was twenty-five years ago,” Kyra noted.

“Weapons platforms aren’t developed on a short schedule.”

“And what if we don’t find any that APLAA hasn’t considered?” Kyra asked.

“Then we tell Cooke that APLAA is right. And I hate for APLAA to be right about anything,” Jonathan said.

Kyra held out a paper two hours later. “The original PDB on the ‘Assassin’s Mace from ninety-seven.”

Jonathan took the paper and scanned it quickly, then began reading aloud. “ ‘Jiang Zemin Speech Augurs Increase in Military Spending. PRC President Jiang Zemin’s call for an ‘assassin’s mace’ weapon could spark a significant increase in PLA research and development spending.’” He dropped the article on the table. “I’m sure it was exciting at the time, but it’s hardly news to us now. Certainly nothing there that narrows down the technology. What else?”

“Since that PDB was published, nineteen hits that didn’t appear totally useless,” Kyra said. She laid a printed page on the desk and grabbed a yellow highlighter. She marked off a text block in the list. “These five are NSA reports, all PLA discussions about whether an ongoing project should qualify for the Mace label. Somebody up at Fort Meade probably tapped some PLA colonel’s phone. Some projects qualified, some didn’t, but none of them say what the criteria are.”

“We can assume ‘anything that can cripple a carrier’ and start from there,” Jonathan said.

“Works for me,” Kyra continued. “These”—which took up more than half the page with reference numbers and titles—“are excerpts translated from Chinese military publications. Those start in 1999. They all talk about possible changes to PLA military doctrine to accommodate Assassin’s Mace weapons but they don’t give specifics. This last one talks about proposed changes in PLA Air Force doctrine and strategy to accommodate new weapons, but again, no specifics on the weapons.”

“Which month?”

Kyra checked the report header, which mashed together both the date and time when the report had been issued. “May ninety-nine.”

“What does it say about the source on that one?” Jonathan asked.

“It’s a HUMINT report, human source who has access to the information because of his position, has an established reporting record, and is reliable. That doesn’t tell us anything.”

“By design,” Jonathan said. “The NCS doesn’t give information to DI analysts that could identify sources.”

Kyra shook her head and threw the highlighter across the desk. “So how can you tell if two reports are from the same source?”

“Call a reports officer and offer to buy him a beer.” Jonathan kept his focus on the paper. “Not much fun to be on the other side of the divide, is it?”

“It’s necessary,” she answered quietly. She saw his point.

Jonathan studied Kyra for a moment before speaking. The girl had gone on the defensive, but not in a hostile way. Interesting. “So why only the one report from the human source?” he asked. “If he was in position to report on the project in the first place, why not task him to follow up?”

No dig at the Dark Side of the house? She’d made herself a target and he’d passed up a chance to take a rhetorical shot at point-blank range. Maybe the man had a soft side after all. Or maybe he’d been testing her and had seen what he’d wanted. She wasn’t going to ask. “Maybe they did,” Kyra said, suspicious. “Maybe the project never went anywhere. Sometimes the assets report data that’s not worth writing up.”

Jonathan considered the idea, turning it over in his mind. “You don’t change military doctrine to accommodate ‘new’ weapons if those weapons are just more of what you already have.” He leaned forward and stared at the paper. “Look at the timeline. Jiang Zemin orders the project in ninety-seven, NSA grabs a flurry of reports about one project that peters out almost immediately, and then nothing until ninety-nine, when the PLA starts writing again about changing war plans. The idea didn’t just go away.” He put the hard copy down on the desk and pushed it back toward the young woman. “And it’s a given that the various shashoujian projects are run at multiple facilities and involve different groups of personnel.”

“Meaning what?” Kyra asked.

“You were a case officer. Think about it.”

A puzzle. Kyra was good at puzzles. She leaned back in her chair and tilted her head to think. Multiple facilities, different groups, one asset. She smiled. “There’s a compartment of Assassin’s Mace reports that we don’t have.”

“I agree.” For the first time, she noted, Burke smiled back. “Your reasoning?”

She rolled the facts around inside her mind, reordering them. It was funny, she thought, how the mind could hold random thoughts simultaneously but struggled to catalog them so a person could verbalize them, which was a linear process. “There’s an asset in a position to report on a change in war planning. That means the asset likely had access to the underlying technology driving the change. But if that technology was part of a black program, then we would have to separate that intelligence from the rest of the report because a leak could identify the asset. So the NCS would publish the report”—Kyra waved the paper in the air—“minus the good bits about the technology. But this asset is reporting on a change inspired by an Assassin’s Mace technology, which is just one part of a bigger program, so the asset likely has access to other Mace information. The more Mace projects he can report on, the faster the Chinese could triangulate on him if the information is leaked. So the NCS would pull out the stops to keep that from happening, which means that somewhere around here is a nice, fat compartment of Mace reports.”

Jonathan nodded. “Just because a reporting stream is new doesn’t mean the activity being reported is new,” he said. “And just because a reporting stream dies doesn’t mean the activity died. Sometimes it just vanishes into a classified compartment.”

Kyra narrowed her eyes and studied the man. He’d agreed with her several times over the last few hours and it seemed… wrong. She’d only known him for a few days but she could read a man. Any case officer worth her salt could. And Burke was a thinker—

Then she saw it. “You’re just saying that to butter me up because you want me to go get that compartment,” Kyra said. It wasn’t a question.

“You’re perceptive,” Jonathan said, smiling. “Much more enjoyable than having to explain everything.”

Another dig. She enjoyed this one.

It took Kyra an hour to find the phone numbers. The National Clandestine Service refused to publish a phone directory, citing the possible security risk of a foreign power stealing it. After pleas to Deity, enough curses to negate her prayers, and repeated calls to the Agency’s telephone switchboard, Kyra finally reached an officer who didn’t plead ignorance on China. The words assassin’s, mace, and compartment in the same sentence worked like a wizard’s incantation. The officer begged off and hung up, and the return call came a half hour later from a senior NCS manager several pay grades higher who agreed to talk in person readily enough to leave Kyra suspicious.

George Kain’s initial manner bordered on sycophantic. Kyra had been trained to evaluate character on short notice, Kain’s voice on the phone had disturbed her, and she had been appalled to find her evaluation more than accurate. Kain took precisely one question from Jonathan regarding information on any Assassin’s Mace project and switched from fawning to filibuster. He prattled without pause, talking over all attempts to interrupt, offering nothing useful, and staring out the window at the New Headquarters Building. Kyra was sure he hadn’t made eye contact with her once in the last hour.

She looked around the Red Cell vault for a wall clock and didn’t find one. How long? she mouthed silently to Jonathan. He didn’t move his head and said nothing, instead curling his hand on his leg into a fist, then sticking out two fingers. Kain didn’t see it. The man was in his own world.

Two? She mirrored his sign with her own fingers. Hours?

Jonathan nodded, barely.

Way past time to end this. For the first time, Kyra was ashamed to have been a case officer.

She made her own covert gesture at the mini fridge. Jonathan saw the motion, smiled slightly, then nodded again.

Kyra walked to the mini fridge, retrieved a bottled water, then walked back to her seat. She offered the plastic bottle to Kain. “You must be thirsty.”

For the first time in hours, Kain paused. “Thanks.” He uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and then saw the tactical error too late.

“You’ve tried very hard not to answer the question,” Jonathan said as soon as Kain’s mouth filled with Dasani water. “Stop wasting our time. We’re not idiots.”

Kain swallowed. “If we have anything worth reporting, you’ll have to wait until we publish it in finished intel channels.”

“The reports we’re looking for could be more than ten years old. They’d already be in finished intel channels if you were ever going to release them,” Kyra observed.

“Not my problem,” Kain said. “If there is any reporting being held back in a compartment, I’m not going to second-guess the decision not to release it.”

“This tasking came from Director Cooke—,” Jonathan said.

“I don’t care if it came from the president,” Kain interrupted. He drew another swig from the bottle. “If there’s something we think the president needs to know, we’ll tell him. We don’t need the DI to do it for us, not that your little fantasies even qualify as analysis. And we certainly don’t need a pair of failed wannabe operators turned analysts to do it for us.” Kain smirked at Jonathan, then frowned at Kyra, stood, finished the bottle, and took his time dropping it in the nearest garbage can. “Thanks for the water,” he said. He then strode out of the vault.

“You should have let me choke him,” Kyra said.

“You thought I would have stopped you?”

“He should run for the Senate,” Kyra said. “He wouldn’t be the first case officer to become a politician.”

“The two professions do share a disturbing number of skills,” Jonathan agreed. “Good move with the water.”

“I should’ve done it an hour earlier,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

“I suspected that was coming,” he admitted. “Some cooperation would have been nice, but I didn’t expect it. Still, we had to make a good faith effort to request access before we ask Cooke to start twisting arms.”

“I hope there really is a compartment,” Kyra said. “I’d hate to pick a fight just to find out they don’t have anything worth fighting over.”

“They do. Despite what you might think, an NCS manager doesn’t take two hours out of his day to belittle analysts just for fun,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be back.” He marched out of the vault and disappeared into the stairwell across the hall.

Kyra stared at the back of his head until the stairwell door closed and then let out a long breath. It was apparent where he was going. She wondered just how close Jonathan and Cooke really were. Real close, she hoped. The bureaucratic games were starting to get under her skin.

Barron’s composure had limits, and Cooke’s account of Kain’s sandbagging had pushed him close to them. Some things he expected to be handled below his pay grade. Hearing about them from one of the very few people he answered to always lit his very short fuse. But he expected that had been Burke’s intention. Sometimes it really did take a trip to the director’s office to make the case officers and analysts stop acting like children protective of their toys.

“They were asking about Pioneer’s compartment?” Barron asked. The question was almost redundant. There was no other sets of files that fit the bill Cooke had just described.

“They were,” Cooke confirmed. “George Kain stonewalled them. Sat in their space for two hours and treated them like they were complete idiots.”

“I’ll go talk to him about it. I understand his reasons, but his tactics were faulty, to say the least.”

“How many people have access to Pioneer’s reporting?” Cooke asked.

“If you count the two of us, still fewer than a dozen,” Barron replied.

“Has he fed you anything on the Assassin’s Mace lately?”

“No.” Barron frowned and took a deep breath. “He’s the guy who told us about it in the first place back after the ninety-six Taiwan Strait crisis. By ninety-seven it was clear the project wasn’t going anywhere, so we put him on other targets. Every once in a while he still sends us something on the project, but it’s just not a high priority. We’ve been more worried about the Russian equipment the PLA’s been buying.”

Cooke leaned back. “If there’s not much on it, then there shouldn’t be an issue letting the Red Cell have access to it.”

Barron knew an order when he heard one, but he didn’t have to like it. “I’d rather not.” He knew it was a weak protest.

“Clark, there are two men that I answer to,” Cooke said, talking slowly and clearly, as though to a child. “And at some point, I’m going to get a call from the president or, more likely, the director of national intelligence. That man will start asking me some very pointed questions about what’s going on here. And right now, I don’t have any good answers, just good theories. If the Red Cell can prove those theories, I’ll be a very happy woman, but that’s going to be very hard for them to do if your half of the house is refusing to lower the drawbridge and let them inside that big stone wall you case officers have erected between yourselves and the analysts.” Cooke stopped to let the tongue-lashing sink in. “If the Red Cell includes any of Pioneer’s intel in their report, I’ll restrict it to POTUS only,” she offered. “No one outside the Oval Office even hears about it, much less reads it.”

Barron’s face showed that he didn’t like it, and yes, ma’am, he certainly was going to worry about it, but an order was an order. “How many people are we talking here?”

“Two people. Burke, of course. The other one is your girl, Stryker,” Cooke said.

“I can live with that. Just make sure they don’t give me a reason to regret it, or next time I’ll let Kain have his way with them,” Barron warned.

“Fair enough,” Cooke said.

“I need glasses,” Kyra said. She dropped a stack of reports on Jonathan’s desk, closed her eyes, and rested her head on her arms. The morning painkiller had finally worn off.

“You need to learn that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep.” Jonathan knew a hangover when he saw one, had never suffered one but had seen plenty in graduate school. She was lithe, he’d noted, not too much body mass to absorb alcohol. The current weather precluded many opportunities for parties, so the woman was either drinking alone or haunting one of Leesburg’s several excellent pubs and bars along King Street. A few shots of something harder than beer would cross her line between drinking to relax and drinking to excess. An officer’s personal drinking habits could become a matter for the Counterintelligence Center, the unit that hunted moles inside the Agency. Stryker was too new for that, he supposed, but she’d almost gotten killed, might have been self-medicating the stress with something harder than beer, and officers had been fired for alcoholism before. “Is that it?” he asked.

“Finally,” Kyra said. She had been logging Pioneer’s reports since Kain’s flunky arrived with the paperwork to get the Red Cell analysts read into the Assassin’s Mace compartment. The forms they signed were the United States Government’s version of a blood oath and promised vile retribution if they leaked the information to anyone, even other DI analysts.

Jonathan wheeled his chair over to Kyra’s desk and stared at the Excel spreadsheet on her screen. “What’s the final count?”

“Two hundred twenty-seven Assassin’s Mace reports total,” Kyra said. “One hundred thirty-six on aerospace projects. Fifty-seven on antiship missile projects. Twenty on naval projects, nine on lasers, and the rest on weapons that we’ve labeled as miscellaneous.”

“That breakdown matches our thinking,” Jonathan said. “Heavy numbers on aerospace and missiles.”

Kyra sat back and stared at the screen. It was an impressive list. “What about that stealth fighter the PLA was building back in the aughts? The J-20?”

“That one’s trying to be an air superiority plane, not a bomber,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese have always had serious issues building decent fighter engines. Still, it’s possible that they cross-bred the technology into another project. Any commonalities in the aerospace reports?”

“Most of them named the China Aviation Industry Corporation as the primary conduit for the projects. Only one other company was mentioned, Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute. According to the cable, the PLA was funding a big effort with Xian under CAIC direction. One of the CAIC senior managers asked for a progress report. Pioneer intercepted the Xian reply and copied a DVD that was part of the package.”

“What was the date on that cable?” Jonathan asked.

“June 1999,” Kyra said after a brief hunt for the paper.

“What was on the disk?”

“Whoever looked at the file said it was a computer-aided design program,” Kyra said.

Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “A CAD program wouldn’t tell us much. It’s the data files on whatever Xian was building that you’d want.”

“There’s no record that we got those. But look at this.” Kyra leaned over and made the spreadsheet obey. “If we reorder the list of Pioneer’s reporting by date instead of technology, almost all of the aerospace reports are dated after ninety-nine. Maybe CAIC made a technology breakthrough, developed some new tech.”

“Or stole some,” Jonathan said. “They’re big on that.” He pushed back from the desk with his foot and let his chair roll across the floor back until it stopped near the marker board where he had drafted his list. He stood and walked to the window and stared out at the A-12 monument overlooking the west parking lot. “You don’t actually need a fighter to attack a carrier. A bomber could do the job just fine if it could penetrate the air defense umbrella. Very difficult, but not impossible.”

Kyra thought for a moment. “Speed?”

“Speed. Altitude. Stealth. Any of those three would solve the problem. When the Cold War broke out and we needed to keep watch on the Russians, we built the U-2. And by ‘we,’ I do mean CIA. The U-2 was ours — highest-altitude plane ever built at the time. When the Russians figured out how to shoot those down, we went for speed and built the A-12. The Russians never did figure out how to shoot that down, but it was only a matter of time. So the Air Force worked out stealth and built the F-117 Nighthawk. Back in the Gulf War, Saddam had more antiair defenses surrounding Baghdad than the Russians had surrounding Moscow, literally. Three thousand double-A guns and sixtyish SAM batteries. The Iraqis never even managed to scratch the paint on a Nighthawk, much less shoot one down.”

“The Serbs managed it,” Kyra said. “They shot one down near Sarajevo.”

“Dumb luck with an assist from our stupidity,” Jonathan said. “Orders forced the pilots to fly the same approach routes from Aviano every night, so the Serbs had a pretty good idea where to point their radar.”

“Any of those three would stick in the Pentagon’s craw,” Kyra admitted.

“It’s great fun being the only person with a particular technology. It stops being fun the moment someone else gets it,” Jonathan agreed. “The question is how do we prove any of this.”

“That one’s easy.” Kyra put her head down and smiled slightly. “We go out there and debrief Pioneer.”

Jonathan rocked back in his chair, surprised at the suggestion. “You’re serious?”

“Better to interview the asset in person than just read somebody else’s reports about it. Let’s cut out the middleman.” And get out of this office.

The senior analyst cocked an eyebrow. “There’s no way with PLA tanks rolling that NCS is going to let a pair of analysts go to China to talk to one of their prize assets.”

Coward. Cynic? The two were not mutually exclusive, though Kyra suspected that only the latter was true. There was no question about that one. “It’ll never happen if we don’t ask.”

“Feel free,” Jonathan replied without hesitation. “While you’re tilting at windmills, see if you can get NCS to cough up copies of those disks that Pioneer handed over.”

Captain (USN) Moshe Nagin rolled the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter ten degrees to give him a wider view of USS Abraham Lincoln. Truth be told, and he never admitted it to his fellow naval aviators, he hated trapping on aircraft carriers. Landing a jet fighter on a moving Nimitz-class carrier at night in a squall was a task so hard it made grown men want to wet their pants, and it never got easy with practice. Runways are supposed to sit still and be a mile long. Landing on a ship’s deck that was only five hundred feet long and moving at thirty knots was unnatural, and his life depended on some too-young-to-drink boatswain’s mate below decks setting the proper tension on the deck cables. Too little tension on the wires and the plane would roll off into the water. Too much and only divine intervention would keep the cable from ripping the tailhook out of the plane. The other possibilities all involved varying amounts of burning jet fuel, live ordnance, and pilot spread over the deck.

Nagin looked past the Lincoln and picked out an HH-60H Seahawk flying its own pattern low and slow. Some of his younger pilots mocked the helo pilots, as though flying jets was the only job on a carrier that mattered, but time would solve that. Bold pilots sometimes got to be old pilots only through the gracious courtesy of helo search and rescue teams. He had found religion the first time a Seahawk had pulled him out of the water. One of the engines on his first Hornet malfunctioned a half second into a catapult launch, rupturing the cowling and sending shrapnel into the other. The catapult had obediently thrown his Hornet off the carrier anyway. Nagin ejected just before the plane hit the Persian Gulf. The Seahawk crew that lifted him from the water hadn’t even cracked a joke about his flying skills, and that earned them a share of the love he otherwise saved for his wife.

“Break to line up,” the landing signal officer ordered through his helmet. Nagin sucked in a breath of sterile, recycled air through his mask and pulled the plane into a turn, rolling hard left.

“Call the ball,” the LSO said.

Nagin sought out the “meatball” light on the port side. The yellow dot emitted by the Fresnel lens was agreeably where it was supposed to be, sitting between horizontal green lights above and below. He was riding the glide slope straight as a ruler.

“Fencer eight-zero-one, juliet sierra foxtrot ball, eight-point-eight,” Nagin called out.

“Roger ball,” the LSO acknowledged.

Nagin held the turn until he’d come around 180 degrees from his previous course, then rolled the plane level. Lincoln was ahead and the absurdly short runway was a thousand feet below and moving to the right. Nagin corrected for the drift and nudged the nose up a bit to kill some speed. The LSO stayed silent — Nagin’s best indication that he wasn’t completely screwing up.

The exact moment the landing gear hit the deck was always a surprise. The plane touched down moving at a hair under 150 miles per hour. White smoke poured off the tires as the rubber went molten from the friction, and for a moment the plane was sliding on liquid made from its own wheels. Nagin jammed the throttle full forward and heard the F-35’s single engine scream as it spooled up to full power.

Inertia threw Nagin against his harness, and he knew that the tailhook had caught a wire — the number three — which held with the right amount of tension. His speed dropped, the tires stopped melting, and they caught traction on the nonskid deck. Nagin yanked the throttle back, the engine went quiet, and his speed went to zero.

It wasn’t the moment to relax. The carrier deck was a busy and cramped space, and it wouldn’t do to drive the new stealth fighter into the water. His shoulders ached where the harness had pressed into the muscle. He wondered if he’d bruised them again.

Lincoln’s hangar deck reeked of jet fuel. Everyone aboard ended up in the hangar sooner or later, where the smell of refined hydrocarbons attached itself to their clothing, and they carried the odor out to their shipmates like missionaries spreading the gospel. Rear Admiral Alton Pollard had lived a quarter century on carriers, which was long enough for his mind to learn to ignore the smell the same way it ignored the feeling of clothing on his skin. He had to think about the odor to notice it, and it was smarter not to think about it.

The hangar deck was almost 700 feet long and 110 wide but still felt cramped when more than a few fighters were parked inside. The new F-35s were off the hardtop above and more than a few off-duty sailors were down to see the planes. The Lightning II was clearly American, looked like a fighter, but it was not fearsome. What’s scarier? the Pentagon desk pilots had reasoned. The plane they see up close in combat or the one they never see coming at all? But in the back of Pollard’s mind something nagged at him, telling him that a psychological weapon had been lost. Maybe he was just finally old enough that he couldn’t embrace change with any enthusiasm. He shook his head, cleared his mind, and approached the senior pilot, who was holding class on the new plane with enlisted sailors young enough to be his children.

“Admiral.” Nagin’s posture straightened and he gestured to the F-35. “The replacement for the Hornet,” he said. “What do you think?” The senior pilot aboard was still dressed in his flight suit and cradling his helmet in his arm like a football. As commander, air group (CAG), Nagin had exactly one superior aboard. Pollard was the only man who outranked him. The admiral thought a CAG had the best job in the Navy, had been one himself, and missed the job most days. Nagin had the privileges of elevated rank and still got to fly a fighter every day. Being the commanding officer of a battle group had its own rewards, but they never quite equaled the logging of flight hours in the cockpit.

“You tell me,” Pollard said. “You’ve flown one. I haven’t.” He put his hand on the plane’s wing, the first time he’d actually touched a Lightning II. He could have taken one of the new fighters out for a joyride, but Pollard’s body didn’t quite bounce back from hard carrier landings the way it used to. His back loved flying less every year, and he refused to think what an ejection seat would do to his spine now. He’d had to do that once. Although forever grateful to the Martin-Baker company for building an escape vehicle that worked every time, he was quite sure the compression of his vertebrae had left him an inch shorter. It was a small price to pay to come home to his wife.

Nagin frowned a bit. “Twice the range on internal fuel as the 18Cs, but she has a single engine, which worries me. I don’t like single points of failure and that’s a big one. And there’s no HUD. All the flight data is projected onto the inside of the helmet.” He hefted his flight helmet and showed it to the admiral. Pollard took it and examined the inside.

“That doesn’t make you sick?” Pollard asked.

“It feels a little unnatural at first, but works fine when you get used to it.”

Pollard handed the helmet back to its owner. “What about the ordnance load?”

“No question, she’s a bomb truck,” Nagin said. “She can lug around five thousand pounds of JDAM hurt inside and six hardpoints on the wings when stealth doesn’t matter. That only leaves room for two AMRAAMs mounted inside when you have to go air-to-air, and those have to mount on the bay doors.” Those bay doors were open, Nagin gestured inside. “You get two Sidewinders on the wings if you really need ’em and don’t care about the stealth.”

“Maneuverability?”

“She handles well enough to dogfight, but she’s no F-22 like the Air Force boys are flying these days. So she doesn’t carry much for it.”

“You don’t like the pistol?” Pollard asked, working his way back toward the engine. He found the gun mounted in an external pod on the undercarriage almost directly between the wings.

The CAG shook his head. “The gun’s fine. It’s a version of the GAU-12-slash-U — twenty-five millimeter four-barrel Gatling, pretty much the same thing the Harrier carries. But hanging it off the center pylon degrades the stealth a bit when it’s mounted. And I’m not too keen on the ammo load. It handles forty-one hundred rounds per minute but only carries two hundred twenty rounds in the pod. So you’ve got about three seconds worth of fire before you’re left hoping that you’ve still got some missiles.”

“Or some Hornets in the neighborhood,” Pollard said. “But nobody dogfights anymore, not like the old days, not at close range.”

“That’s the problem,” Nagin countered. “If the bogeys ever manage to get in close, we could have trouble.”

“Then don’t let ’em get in close.” Pollard watched his sailors stare at the new JSF like it was the burning bush, then finally took his gaze away from the plane and looked at the senior pilot. He motioned him away from the crowd of enlisted men. Nagin fell in behind the senior officer as the admiral sought privacy, looking for space in the hangar deck that was overrun only by equipment and not by sailors.

“Orders came in from CINCPACOM just after you left. The PLA overran Kinmen and caught everyone flat-footed. That island is so close to the coast that the Chinese were able to blitz out of their bases in range without having to move extra assets around. They could take the Matsus the same way and nobody will be able to call it more than five minutes in advance. PACOM is sending out EP-3s to ramp up ELINT coverage in case the Chinese start getting ready to make a move on Penghu or Taiwan proper. And we’re changing course. Washington is coming down too. We’ll both keep the island between us and the mainland. Washington takes the north, we get the south,” Pollard told him. “Have you seen the morning intel?”

“Not today,” the pilot said, shaking his head. “The flight schedule had me in the air too early. I was going to catch up after I finish up down here. Anything on that PLA carrier threat?”

Pollard shook his head. “CIA and Navy Intel assessments came in. They all say it probably refers to PLA subs carrying Sunburns or Exocets, maybe Shkvals.”

“Academy plebes at Annapolis could’ve made that call,” Nagin said. “True,” Pollard said.

“But it’s the safe bet, and if it comes down to straight ASW, we can handle the PLA Navy.”

“I hate people who always make the safe bet,” Nagin said.

“You never win big and you can always still lose,” Pollard agreed. “But we’re getting some help to keep the PLA Navy off our backs.” He reached into his pocket and passed a hard copy of CINCPACOM’s orders to Nagin, who turned it over in his hand and began to study the small type. “Honolulu, Tucson, Virginia, and Gettysburg.” The first three were attack submarines: the two named for cities were Los Angeles—class, the third was the lead boat of the more modern Virginia class. Gettysburg was a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. “The subs will join us by day after tomorrow. Gettysburg is coming up from the south. She’s already in the Balintang Channel, so she’ll beat us there by a day or so. Washington is getting the Salt Lake City, Columbia, New Mexico, and Leyte Gulf. Not a bad start.”

“Maybe Gettysburg will clear out the water for us and save us the trouble,” Nagin said, hopeful. “We’ll be in the PLA’s ocean by Saturday.” Chinese submarines had shadowed US carriers in past years, at least one as far north as Okinawa. The US Navy usually found the PLA units and chased them off, but everyone on both sides understood that practice made perfect and the Chinese were only getting better. “Even with the help, the numbers will still be six to one in the PLA’s favor.”

“It’ll be a target-rich environment if we have to go ‘weapons free,’” Pollard said. “Intel says that at least half of the Chinese sub fleet are old Russian Romeos. Those are easy. It’s the Kilos and the Hans that worry me. Imagery puts the Hans to the north, closer to Washington’s AOR, so we’ll probably be facing Kilos if the PLA decides to take a shot at us. Diesel-electrics, nice and quiet, but they’re getting old,” Pollard said. “If we’ve got the island between us and them, they’ll have to approach us from the south. Washington will close off the north unless they want to take the really long route around. That’ll limit their approach vectors.”

“Not looking to take us into the Strait?” Nagin asked. The attempt at humor wasn’t even halfhearted.

“Not if I can help it,” Pollard replied. “Too close to too many PLA bases for my taste. I’d prefer not to be the one who has the limited approach options.”

“Nimitz did it back in ninety-six,” Nagin observed.

“The Chinese weren’t ready to take a shot at a US carrier in ninety-six. Maybe they are now,” Pollard told his subordinate. “And I’d rather make the PLA come to us. We’ve sold the Taiwanese enough weapons over the years. No sense in us being the first line of defense for them.”

Nagin lifted his helmet and held it in both hands, looking at it. He’d been to Pollard’s office upstairs and seen the admiral’s own flight helmet behind the desk. The moniker Tycho was stenciled across the front, scratched and faded. Nagin had shared plenty of beers in plenty of bars with Pollard and heard the old man’s war stories from Iraq and Bosnia. The admiral had earned his rank the right way. The man had been ordered into a fight, flown his own fighter straight onto the enemy’s home field, fired his guns in anger, and taken fire in return. Nagin respected the man and not just his rank. The admiral didn’t fly combat missions anymore, but the old man had been into the devil’s own home more than once and could tell his men the color of the paint on the walls inside. Admirals were considered too valuable for that, so Pollard had to settle for sitting on the carrier watching his pilots launch into unfriendly skies. It was the order of military life, and Nagin’s turn to leave the cockpit and watch others fly was coming soon enough.

Nagin squared his shoulders and faced the admiral. “If Tian wants to take it that far, we’ve had a long time to get ready for it.”

Pollard smiled. “So have they.”