11

ONE QUARTER MILE OFF THE MEIZHOU WAN PENINSULA
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
0134 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 8, 2006

“Closing on point item, Captain. Closing. Closing. Closing. And mark!”

“Very good, Quartermaster. Lee helm, all stop on main engines. Helmsman, initiate station keeping on hydrojets.”

“Aye, aye.”

Everyone on the Cunningham’s bridge kept his or her voice low. All odds were that a normal speaking tone wouldn’t have carried across to the shore of the inlet, but their reaction was instinctive to the black, looming presence of the hills that surrounded them on three sides. Sweat prickled under the combination flak vest and life jacket Amanda wore, and the Kevlar helmet she had donned over her command headset pinched painfully. She ignored the discomfort, and her eyes flicked from repeater to repeater the sweeping low-light televisions, the passive radar detectors, the radio frequency scanners. All clear.

“Deployment crew,” she spoke into her lip mike “We are on station Get it in the water.”

Sliding out of the captain’s chair, she crossed to the starboard side bridge doorway and stepped out onto the bridge wing. Below and forward, deckhands worked swiftly in the dim cool glow of light sticks. The VLS’s missile handling crane had been deployed and its cable was now linked to a dark lozenge-shaped object the size of a large hot-water tank. Now, with the howl of its motor muffled by a blanket, the crane lifted the module from the deck and swung it out over the rail. The winch reel reversed and swiftly the object was lowered into the low, oily swells. A line was yanked and a shackle released, freeing it It bobbed at the destroyer’s side for a few moments as ballast chambers flooded, and then it was gone, sinking from sight.

“Bridge, buoy has been deployed.”

“Very well Secure the deck.”

Amanda crossed back into the wheelhouse. “Back us off about fifty yards on the GPU Hydrojets only.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am. Translating astern now.”

Impatiently, she waited out the seconds as her ship reversed silently through the shadows.

“Translation complete, Captain.”

“You, helm. Resume station keeping. Sonar, this is the captain. We are clear of the buoy. Transmit your test codes Intelligence section, stand by.”

The Cunningham’s sonar transducers swept the surrounding waters with a low powered sound beam, a beam that carried a carefully modulated binary message for a certain listener. A hundred and twenty feet down, on the muddy bottom of the inlet, the listener responded. The maritime reconnaissance buoy uncoupled from its sinker weight and unreeled its mooring line, drifting back toward the surface like an inverted spider on a thread. Just beneath the waves, it halted its rise and extended a water proof radio antenna.

“Bridge, this is Raven’s Roost. We have acquired a test signal. All buoy systems read green. We have a successful deployment.”

“Very good, Raven’s Roost. Actuate the buoy.”

The maritime reconnaissance buoy conversed with its mother station aboard the Cunningham for a few microseconds more, then retracted its antenna. Smoothly it winched itself back down to the midpoint of its tether. A technological first cousin to the naval pressure mine, its anechoic sheathed bulk was packed with hydrophones and signal processors instead of high explosives. From its position within the cove, it would passively monitor the comings and goings of all sea traffic that would come near. The accumulated information would be electronically stored for a schedule of highspeed data dumps over the next few weeks.

Ever since her arrival in theater the Duke had been systematically seeding the Chinese coastal waters between Shanghai and Amoy with a network of these remote sensor units. This was the last to go down.

With its successful placing half of the night’s tasking program was complete. The riskier part was still under way. Amanda paced slowly in front of the helm console. Around her, in the dimness, the rest of the bridge crew stood or sat, wire nerved and sweating.

“CIC, this is the bridge. Is Raven’s Roost seeing any change at all in the local signal environment?”

She could have called that same data up on one of the repeaters at her elbow, but at the moment she wanted to hear another human voice.

“Still okay, Captain,” Ken Hiro replied reassuringly. “Raven’s Roost reports all quiet on all frequencies.”

As per their set doctrine, she and Ken traded off positions when the ship was at battle station — one on the bridge, the other in the CIC, or vice versa as required. Thus, no single hit could likely take them both out simultaneously.

“We still have another fifteen minutes before they’re due back aboard,” her exec continued.

“Yeah.” She resumed her pacing, driven by tensions akin to those of a mother whose children were out of reach.

* * *

Twenty miles inland, Vince Arkady found this particular insertion sortie getting old fast. The back of his neck was aching from the drag of the heavy night-vision visor mounted on his flight helmet. He was also perforce having to stay totally focused on the Sea Comanche’s controls. Retainer Zero One was running in full stealth tonight. The snub wings she usually mounted had been unshipped, and the loss of lift was throwing off his feel for the aircraft.

For the past half hour, he had been snake-dancing the little helicopter along the ridgeline. Hugging each swale and circling each knoll in an airborne version of a combat infantryman’s sprint and cover, he had been giving his passenger the opportunity she needed to conduct her survey.

“Hey, sis, leave us not take all night on this thing. Okay?”

“Patience, patience,” Christine Rendino murmured back over the intercom. “I know what I’m looking for. It’s just not all that easy to find in this neighborhood.”

In Zero One’s rear cockpit, the Intel used a joystick controller to track the helo’s thermographic sight along the road that ran up the valley floor. She needed a good patch of cover right up alongside that road, preferably the west side.

The farms down there had probably been first cleared and divided into fields sometime before the birth of Christ. Since then, God knows how many meager harvests had been worked out of those fields by God knows how many generations of peasants. Even the lower hillsides had been ribbed with growing terraces, eking out every last yard of crop space. All of the wildness had long since been worn off this land, leaving only the stone fences and thin, tired soil.

The search wasn’t totally hopeless, however. Many of the fields were overgrown and abandoned. This valley was located dead-on between two opposing armies, and with the ingrained survival instincts of the Chinese peasant, most of the locals had gotten the hell out while the getting was good.

The occasional light in the lonely scattering of villages marked where someone was either too old to run or too weary to give a damn.

Christine broke off her line of thought as a darker patch began to scroll across the screen, a large irregular bead strung on the pale thread of the roadway.

“Okay! That’s it, boy! At your two o’clock.”

“Rug, sis. I see it. Scanning for threats … Looks like nobody’s around … Going’ in.”

Retainer Zero One kicked over into a dive down toward the valley floor.

It had been a woodlot. Its spindly collection of poplar trees had been harvested off almost at ground level sometime in the recent past, leaving only a low tangle of brush behind.

The narrow road that ran through it had been oil-paved at one time, indicating a major thoroughfare for this part of the world. Now, though, that paving was breaking down into potholes and muddy gravel.

The road wasn’t the primary concern this night, barring its utility as a landmark. The regional main-trunk telephone cable buried beside it was.

To conduct modern-day military operations, rapid and extensive communications are both an absolute necessity and a glaring vulnerability. All radio frequencies can be scanned and monitored, and even the tightest microwave transmissions can leak. Even if all messages are encrypted, an alert Signal Intelligence unit can still learn a great deal from direction-finder bearings and traffic volumes.

Accordingly, as others had before, the Communist military leadership had come to value landline telephone as their only truly secure communications net.

Christine and Arkady were about to prove them to be in error.

Retainer Zero One went into a low hover just off the pavement, her rotor wash whipping the scrub. Arkady scanned his surroundings again through the cool, green glow of his low-light visors, seeking sign of any movement, any covert observer. His ears were attuned to the helo’s threat board, ready to react to the first instant of a warning squall.

“Ready to open bay doors?” Christine inquired.

“Yep. Let’s get it done, but let’s make it fast.” Opening the weapons bay would also open a hole in the Sea Comanche’s stealth envelope, leaving them vulnerable for a few seconds to a sudden radar sweep.

In the aft cockpit, Christine cradled a remote-control box in her lap, a light coaxial cable linking it to the auxiliary systems jack of the dashboard display. As the belly doors snapped open, the sensor unit that was revealed began to react to its environment, projecting its readout onto the oscilloscope display of the control box.

“Yeah! We’re hot! This is it!”

She flipped the guards up and off a row of actuator keys and hit them in sequence.

A launching tube swung down from the helicopter’s belly, like an insect’s ovipositor, aiming vertically at the ground below. A black-powder propulsive charge fired and a metallic spike the length and diameter of a man’s arm punched down through the underbrush. Driven into the soil for three quarters of its length, a protective cap blew off and a slender antenna deployed. On Christine’s control box, a green diagnostic light glowed.

In the past, tapping an enemy landline would have been a laborious and risky task performed by a Special Forces team. This method was swifter and placed only two people directly at risk. A hypersensitive induction coil within the sensor they had just planted would read the faint electromagnetic modulations radiating from the telephone cable. Recorded and electronically compressed, they would be stored for later burst transmission to an orbiting NSA satellite.

Until the unit’s batteries wore down, or until a human-size object entered the range of its motion sensors, triggering the thermite self destruct charge, the PLA’s phone was effectively bugged.

“Spike’s set Go!”

The launcher retracted and the bay doors slammed shut. Retainer Zero One dipped her nose and regained airspeed, skimming the valley floor and angling away to the east.

“Well, that wasn’t such a big deal, now, was it?”

“Repeat that question once we’re back on the Duke, sis.”

“How are we on time?”

“Right on the edge. If nothing goes Murphy on us, we can just make the rendezvous.”

Arkady aimed Zero One upslope toward a shallow saddle in the far ridge. The low, rolling landscape with its lack of tall trees and high-tension lines made for good helicopter country, and the night sky had been comfortingly clear of hostile traffic. If they could just stretch this rollout a little longer.

Flying nape of the earth, a bare twenty feet above the ground, Zero One crested the saddle.

“Sheeeit!”

Arkady’s right foot smashed down on its rudder pedal, nearly bending the mount. Retainer Zero One flared around like a startled quail, the abrupt g-load forcing a protesting yelp out of his passenger. With weed stalks sweeping her belly, Zero One raced back over the saddle and downslope again.

“Jeez, Arkady! What’s going on?”

“It appears, sis, that Mr. Murphy has just bitten us in the ass.”

While they had been planting their bug, a solid wall of steel had rolled across their line of retreat.

Arkady dropped south half a click along the ridgeline and gingerly hovered up to an observation position.

“Where the hell did all of these guys come from?” he murmured.

“From the PRC staging ground at Fuzhou,” Christine replied grimly. “Fa’ sure, that’s got to be at least a full armored division down there.”

Through the night-vision systems, they could see a steady stream of military vehicles flowing for miles along the valley floor tanks and armored personnel earners, interspersed with an occasional truck or fuel transport. They were moving in combat mode, the AFVs running on their own tracks instead of being carried aboard lowboys, cannon out-angled, covering both sides of the roadway. Cataloging the stream, Christine noted that a majority of the tanks were angular, late-model, Chinese Type 85s. Here and there, however, was the flattened teakettle turret of an older Type 69. At one point, the Intel even thought she spotted the brakeless gun barrel of an ancient Soviet-built T-55.

A shot-up outfit, she decided, brought back to fighting strength with whatever odds and ends could be swept up out of the depots. She panned the video system along the column, storing the images. Arkady backed the helo below the crestline again. “We,” he said, “are royally screwed. We’re going to have to swing wide and circle around these guys, and that’s going to flush our time line right down the toilet.”

“Any chance of just sneaking through a crack?”

“Nope. The Nationalist Air Force has been giving these guys a hard time lately. You can bet every antiair vehicle and deck machine gun in that column is manned. Stealthed or not, we’d get burned flying over that outfit. We’ve got to go around.”

“Boy, are we gonna get yelled at when we get back, or what?”

Arkady paid Zero One off and headed back upvalley. “Let’s just hope that there’s somebody still there to yell at.”

* * *

“Captain, this is Raven’s Roost.” It was the voice of Lieutenant (J.g.) Randy Selkirk, the number-two man in Intelligence Division. “I think there may be somebody out there.”

A cold, hard hand clinched inside Amanda’s guts. Her eyes went to the glowing rows of repeaters again. Low-light Tactical display. ECM Scanners. Nothing.

“I’m not showing anything here, Mr. Selkirk.”

“It’s on the electromagnetic detection arrays, ma’am. Very, very low gam. Too low for the discriminator circuits of the Aegis system to recognize as a valid contact. We can’t even get a clear bearing on it, just that it’s somewhere to seaward.”

“Any idea what it could be?”

“Looks like systems discharge. Generator static and make and-break, that kind of stuff. But he’s either really small or he’s Faraday-screened damn near as good as we are.” A tone of frustration began to creep into Selkirk’s voice “On the other hand, we could just have a very active thunderstorm over the horizon I’m sorry, ma’am, just can’t tall it any closer.”

The junior officer was trying, but he had yet to develop Christine Rendino’s almost supernatural ability to analyze and extrapolate data.

“No problem, Lieutenant. Keep working the contact and keep me advised.”

Amanda rechecked the time hack that glowed in the bottom left corner of each monitor. They were six and a half minutes-plus on the projected recovery time. Arkady, Chris, where are you!

Something had gone wrong. Arkady would not miss a rendezvous like this unless something had gone seriously wrong.

She crossed to the port side of the bridge and scanned the star-spattered sky above the hills that rimmed the inlet.

No commander should ever be stupid enough to take a friend or a lover. Why the hell couldn’t she learn. Why couldn’t she be like those other officers, who could maintain that cool, emotionally insulated distance from those they served with. Because the best ones seem to be the ones who give a damn. The old comment of Arkady’s echoed unbidden out of her memory.

Well, she was giving a damn now, for what it was worth. But the only concrete action she could take was to decide how long she dare wait for them here at the recovery point. All right. Compute to the worst-case scenario. They crashed or were knocked down early on during the insertion mission.

Could they have survived the crash? Were they in PLA custody? No, dammit! Forget that! Stay focused on the scenario.

Say the wreck was immediately identified by someone who knew what a LAMPS-valiant Sea Comanche was and what kind of range it had. That would give them their search radius for the launching platform. How long would it take for the Red military to initiate a hunt? What kind of assets would they have available?

“Captain!” The strangled urgency in the lookout’s voice made Amanda whip around.

“Surface contact bearing zero five oh off the starboard bow!”

Instantly, she was at the lookout’s side, gazing up into the low-light monitor. On the gray-toned screen, the unmistakable, rakish silhouette of a large warship could be seen rounding the northern headland about a mile offshore. A second followed in column a few moments later, and then a third, farther out to sea. Angling across the entrance to the inlet, they had just cut off the Duke’s only line of escape.

The sudden, soft howl of hydraulics broke the shock paralysis that had settled on the bridge. The forward Oto Melara mount was indexing around to cover the intruders. Farther out along the bow, a scattering of small octagonal hatches popped open on the upper surfaces of the Vertical Launch Systems. Each open hatch revealed the dark mouth of a missile silo.

Down in the CIC, Dix Beltrain was baring the Duke’s fangs.

“All stations. Stand easy.” Amanda spoke deliberately into her lip mike, keeping her voice low and totally neutral, allowing no inflection that might increase tensions or trigger a premature reaction. “Helmsman, let’s go for a reduction in aspect here. Maintain station keeping, but bring our bow around to the mouth of the inlet.”

“Aye, aye.”

Under the silent impulse of the auxiliary hydrojets, the destroyer’s knife-edged bow began to come around. The 76mm turret remained fixed on target, a pivot around which the ship seemed to turn.

“Captain,” Ken Hiro’s voice sounded in her headphones. “We make them out to be a pair of Red Chinese Block IB Luda guided missile destroyers, with a single Jianghu-class frigate screening them to seaward.”

“I concur on that, Ken.” Amanda had accessed the controls of the Mast Mounted Sighting System, zooming in and panning over the Chinese warships using a track ball con trailer. To the unaided human eye, there was nothing to be seen out there but black but to the powerful nite brite optics of the MMSS, night did not exist.

The Ludas were handsome ships. Built on the hull design of the old Soviet Kotlin class, they had the lean, greyhound sleekness of the old-school steam turbine destroyer. More to the point, however, both vessels still had their gun turrets trained fore and aft and the launching cells of their C-801 antiship missiles hadn’t been up angled into firing position. A quick call-up on another repeater verified that the Red task group was also running full EMCON, with all search and fire control radars down.

Slowly, the hair that was bristling down the back of her neck began to lower. Maybe these people were out hunting for trouble, but they weren’t hunting for the Duke. “I think we’re okay, Ken,” she said slowly into her headset. “I think that this is just a coincidence. That’s a pretty good slice of the surviving Communist surface fleet out there. I doubt they could have gotten it into position this fast just for us.”

“Yeah ” The tension in Hire’s voice eased down a notch as well. “I wonder what they’re up to!”

“Hard to say Maybe an antishipping sweep or a coastal bombardment run. Those Ludas each pack a couple of 130-millimeter mounts. They could be planning to shoot up a Nationalist supply depot or something as part of this big drive they’re building. Whatever it is, I think we’ll just lay low and let them go on their way.”

The Cunningham’s bow was coming around now, tracking on the passing hostile vessels. The tiger pattern camouflage on her hull merged her into the backdrop of the shore. The earlier generation Chinese optics would be left with nothing to see except for a narrow break in the white line of the surf.

A short time before, Amanda had been praying for Arkady’s return. Now she prayed that he would stay away just for a few minutes more, just until the enemy had disappeared beyond the southern headland.

Maybe that was why the voice that issued from the over head speaker carried the impact of an exploding bomb.

“Gray Lady, Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. Do you copy?”

She loved him and she had been worried about him, but just for the moment, she could kill him.

“Retainer Zero One,” she snarled after dialing into the air operations frequency, “have hostile surface forces in the area!”

Low Probability of Intercept radio was just that. There was still a chance that they could be detected.

Arkady’s reply was unperturbed. “More than you know, Gray Lady. We’ve just hovered up over the ridgeline about three clicks south of your location. In addition to your Reds, there are three fast-attack craft in the next cove down the coast from you. Chris identifies them as Taiwanese Navy Hai Ou missile boats. Looks like hot times a-coming!”

“Acknowledged. Stand by, Zero One.”

Amanda toggled back to the Combat Information Center. “Lieutenant Selkirk, this is the Captain. Could this Red task group be the source of that first EM contact you had?”

“Negative, ma’am,” the Intelligence Officer replied emphatically. “The emissions coming off of these guys are burying the needle. That first contact was hardly there at all.”

Amanda nodded and gave herself a five count to think. By the time the count was finished, she had her ops plan assembled.

“Lee helm. Bring up your Power Rooms. We’re going to be moving.” Keying her headset, she continued. “All stations, this is the bridge. Here’s the situation. The Reds are sailing into an ambush. They’ve got one Nationalist missile-boat group stalking them to seaward and another waiting for them down the coast. As soon as they move into the cross fire, I suspect that the Nationalists are going to hit them with everything they’ve got. I intend to pull us out of here under the cover of the fireworks. Stealth systems.”

“Stealth, aye.”

“Mr. Mckelsie, we’ll try to sneak out under passive stealth alone. Keep all active jammers and decoy systems armed and on standby.”

“Will do.”

“Officer.”

“Here, ma’am.”

“Dix, bring up a couple of Standard HARM flights. If anyone gets a radar lock on us, I want you set to send a round right back up the beam.”

“Is that Red and Nationalist both, ma’am?”

“Negative. Red only. I guess we can allow that much favoritism.”

“Will do.”

“Main Engine Control.”

“Yo.”

“Everything you’ve got, Chief.”

“What else?” There was a faint tinge of surprise in Commander Thomson’s voice.

“Air One.”

“Air One, aye,” Lieutenant Nancy Delany, the Aviation Section’s exec, replied from the air operations center at the rear of the superstructure.

“We’re going to be making a flying recovery on your boss. Have the helipad prepped and standing by. I want that helo down and belowdecks as fast as possible.”

“We’ll be ready, ma’am.”

Amanda dialed back to the air ops channel “Gray Lady to Retainer. You are instructed to hold at your current position and maintain observation of the Nationalist missile boats. Report when they open fire, then proceed up the ridgeline and return to the ship. We will be departing the inlet at high speed and turning to the northeast. I repeat, to the northeast. Follow our wake out and recover immediately. The helipad is standing by to receive you.”

“Roger,” Arkady came back crisply “Will comply.”

Amanda paced behind the helm station. The duty helms man already had the maneuvering chart of the inlet dialed up on his console repeater, the water depths outlined in glowing azure computer graphics. His left hand played with the controls of the auxiliary hydrojets, while the fingers of his right curled around the rudder controller.

Beside him, the lee helm leaned in over the center pedestal, one hand on the propeller controls, the other on the master throttles. The power levers had already been firewalled and the glowing bars of the generator room output displays were dancing at their peak, matched from belowdecks by the whispering howl of the great Rolls Royce gas turbines. Amanda dropped a hand to the helmsman’s shoulder. “Okay Here’s how we’ll work it. I’m not going to have a whole lot of time for giving orders, so I’ll let you take us out. We’ve got some shoals around here, so keep us right in the center of the channel. As soon as we get the water for it, we’ll be turning away to the northeast. I’ll give you the word when. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the young sailor replied tautly. Then they waited. One minute more… two…

To the south something like heat lightning played beyond the hills.

“That’s it!” Arkady’s voice rang over the circuit. “The Nationalists are launching!”

“Move out!” Amanda commanded. “All engines ahead full!”

The twin contrarotating propellers at the head of each propulsor pod spun, the water humping up and boiling along the Duke’s stern quarters In seconds, a rising bow wave was building under the destroyer’s stem as she surged ahead.

Out to sea and to the south, a massive mushroom of orange flame sprouted and rose into the sky, the thunder of its growth arriving a few heartbeats later. Raked by a missile salvo, the little Jianghu-class frigate that had been screening the Communist formation disintegrated, the explosion of her own magazines enhancing the destruction. The lead ship of the Red destroyer column had taken a hit as well, sending flames licking along her aft deck and the gun barrels of her stern turret angling crookedly into the sky.

However, the little Taiwanese-built Hsiung Feng (Male Bee) antiship missile had failed to pierce life-deep through the Luda’s thicker skin. Now the wounded warship, along with its undamaged partner, were lashing back at their attackers. Main-battery rifles belched gouts of hellfire and autocannon mounts hosed tracers across the surface of the sea.

With their missile cells empty, the Nationalist fast attack craft would now be going defensive, hugging the shallows and scurrying away to the south. They wouldn’t be a problem, Amanda acknowledged, but the surviving Red ships would likely soon be. They would probably reverse course and head back to the north, this way. And the Duke’s reduced radar cross section might just about match that of a fleeing Hai Do. She glanced at the iron log and silently willed it to climb faster. Twenty-one knots. Twenty-two. Twenty three. The Cunningham cleared the mouth of the inlet, gaining speed with every rev of her screws. Another stab of Amanda’s finger called up a navigational readout, and she studied the fall-away of the sea floor from beneath the keel.

“Helm, come left to zero four five.”

“Helm answering to zero four five, ma’am!”

“Mr. Mckelsie, are we being painted yet?”

“Negative. No scans on this bearing!”

Twenty-five. Twenty six. Twenty seven.

“Captain, aircraft contact off the stern, bearing one eight zero degrees.”

On the low-light monitors, Retainer Zero One could be seen rapidly overhauling the ship. Churning along a meager ten feet off the deck, her rotor wash flattened the spray of the wake crests. Tonight, Arkady couldn’t be concerned with niceties such as wind direction and proper angle of approach. Swinging slightly wide, the helo porpoised upward, her landing gear extending. Each maneuver flowed into the next as she weaved back in over the destroyer’s helipad, Arkady’s sure hand steadying her through the superstructure and stack turbulence. Then Zero One was home, touching down delicately in the center of the hangar bay elevator.

Amanda watched as the rotors spun down and the pad crew moved in to secure the aircraft. The helicopter’s canopies swung open and the shadowy form in the forward cock pit lifted and clasped his hands in his familiar proclamation of victory, a gesture aimed directly at the monitor camera and at her. She turned back to the iron log. Thirty-six knots. Thirty seven. That was it, then. No Luda ever built could overtake them now not even if they had the devil himself and the ghost of Chairman Mao tending the fire rooms.

To the south, the gunfire had ended. Only two light flares remained, the flames that outlined the damaged Communist destroyer and the burning oil slick that marked the grave of the frigate.

A quick check of the emission displays showed that all radars in the area had been shut down again. Nobody back there was looking for a fight anymore. A twin surge of elation and relief flooded through Amanda. Foxed you all you bastards! Catch me if you can!

She stepped back out onto the starboard bridge wing. Out here, away from the vision systems, the night was the night again. The faint, hazy glow of the Milky Way arced overhead, sharing the sky with uncountable stars. Astern, the dark silhouette of the Chinese coast was already losing form.

She stripped off her life jacket and helmet and let them drop to the deck, and savored the cooling gale generated by her ship’s passage. Just for a moment, she wondered how crew discipline would be affected if the Captain let out a whoop of sheer joy.

Amanda looked over her shoulder, from the captain’s chair, as Christine and Arkady filed onto the bridge. Coming up to her side, Arkady said formally, “Captain, I wish to apologize for being unable to meet my appointed time. An unexpected encounter with Communist forces mandated a course deviation to maintain mission security.”

Amanda nodded. “All’s well that ends well Lieutenant. We all had some unexpected encounters tonight. How did the deployment go?”

“Spike’s in the ground,” Christine reported from her left. “It was on target and is working.”

“That’ll be it for the insertion missions, then, at least until something busts or gets discovered. We’ll rendezvous and replenish with the Task Force tomorrow afternoon and then head north to Shanghai to start the next download sweep of the coastal monitors.”

“Good enough,” the Intel replied. “Begging your pardon, Boss Ma’am, but when can I get clearance to transmit a message? We saw some stuff out there that I really need to pass up the line.”

“Well, we’re clear of the Chinese twelve mile limit now. I was planning to stand down out of stealth mode in about another half hour. The radio room is already prepping a sighting report on that shoot-up we witnessed inshore tonight. You could tack your stuff onto that if you like.”

“That’ll work. I’ll do it.”

Amanda looked back and forth between her two officers. “Now, how did it go out there?”

Arkady gave a curt shrug “A couple of detours, pretty much your basic piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” Christine agreed. “A romantic night out under the stars with a handsome aviator. You ought to try it sometime, Skipper.”

There was a humorous edge in her friend’s voice, but before Amanda could remark on it, Christine was gone, heading away aft. Arkady stayed on. Leaning against the side of the captain’s chair in a carefully orchestrated posture of nonchalance, he gazed out of the bridge windscreen. After a couple of minutes Amanda inquired again, this time keeping her voice pitched so that only he could hear.

“Now, how did it go?”

“Oh, good for about a level two set of the shakes. But only a level two.”

“It was about the same here.”

She slipped her hand off the armrest of her chair, letting it drop down between them. Shielded by the shadows and by the positioning of their bodies, their fingers touched and they clasped hands tightly in the early morning darkness.

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