19

75 MILES NORTHEAST OF SHANGHAI, CHINA
1854 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 11, 2006

“Yes?”

“It’s only Lieutenant Arkady, ma’am.”

“Come in.”

Amanda wasn’t in the office section of her cabin as Arkady entered. He could hear stirring beyond the curtained doorway that led to her sleeping quarters.

“Be out in a second,” she called. “Have a seat.”

Arkady set his flight harness and helmet down on the deck and dropped into the office space’s single guest chair. Tilting it back into the corner the couple of inches permissible within the cabin’s cramped confines, he braced one foot against the edge of the desk. Since coming aboard the Duke, he had lounged a lot of hours away in this position. As he always did, he explored the work space with his eyes, seeking for some new fragment of Amanda’s essence.

On the bulkhead behind her workstation, a row of sticky notes had been tacked up beneath the small oil painting of Amanda’s Cape Cod sloop. The corner of Arkady’s mouth quirked up. He had some fond memories of that little sail boat. Especially of a warm evening spent in its cockpit during their last layover in Norfolk.

On this cruise, the painting had been joined by a framed pen-and-ink sketch of a Navy Fleet ocean tug. Another gift from her admiral-turned artist father, the little vessel, the Piegan, had been Amanda’s first command. There was a small stack of books on the edge of the desk. Tilting his chair forward again, Arkady turned them so he could read the titles Regional reading a copy of Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China and an English version of Mao’s Red Book. He didn’t recognize the third volume, a large green bound paperback titled “Can the Chinese Armed Forces Win the Next War.” Selecting it from the stack, he read the title page and learned that it was a Naval Institute Press translation of a Red Chinese publication.

He was leafing through the first chapter when Amanda Garrett brushed past the door curtain and entered the office. Her usual sober demeanor vanished for a moment in the bright flash of her smile. “Welcome home. How did the recon flight go?”

“No problems. Say, who is this Liu Huaqing guy, anyway?”

“They call him the Chinese Mahan,” Amanda replied, slipping into her desk chair and swiveling to face him. Slouching back, she comfortably matched Arkady’s posture. “During the 1980s and ’90s, Admiral Liu was a major voice for reform and modernization within the Red Chinese armed forces. He was one of the first to call for China to abandon its had fangyu naval strategy.” She formed the Mandarin phrase carefully.

“That sounds like the Chinese version of an extremely obscene suggestion had fangyu naval.”

Amanda chuckled “Jmhai fangvu means ‘defense’. Historically, the Chinese Navy has always been a small-craft coastal force. They have no tradition of open-ocean operations. Liu felt that for China to truly become a world power, they must develop that tradition and an effective blue-water doctrine to go along with it. Fortunately for us, things fell apart for the Chinese before they could implement many of his proposals.”

“Hmm, could I borrow this?”

“Be my guest,” she replied. “With the Chinese, we’re dealing with a vastly different culture structure. Whether they’re enemies or friends, we’re going to need to learn how to understand their worldview. Now, what did you find out there?”

“Things were real quiet.”

“Unusually so?”

“I dunno, babe. I stayed about thirty miles out and executed four pop-up sweeps above the radar horizon. Nothing on the scope. No guard ship. No shipping traffic. Not even any fishing boats.”

“Sub activity?”

“Nobody stuck up a periscope or a snorkel while I had my radar hot. I also ran a line of passive sonobuoys while I was out there without kicking up anything. That isn’t saying that there couldn’t be somebody lying on the bottom closer in.”

“Air? The signal environment?”

“Air ops seem to be just what we’ve been reading off the Aegis screens. No sign of a BARCAP off the coast. No surface searches up. No standing combat air patrol over the city.

“As for the signal environment, the Reds have a lot of air-search sites radiating around the Shanghai perimeter, but my threat boards reacted to only one surface-search radar. A single low-powered unit out at the mouth of the estuary.”

Amanda nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. Those are what your systems said. Now, what did your gut read?”

Arkady grimaced. “Instincts, huh? All right. Vibes-wise, I’m burying the needle. Little Miss. Chris is right — something unnatural is going on out there.”

She sighed and brushed her copper-brown bangs back from her forehead. “I was hoping that you would say that we silly females were just imagining things.”

“No such luck.”

“Do your vibes also say whether or not this recon pass tonight is going to be worth it?”

“If the Reds are up to something in Shanghai, it behooves us to find out what.”

“And if the Reds are up to something, attempting a probe of the Yangtze estuary now could be the equivalent of sticking our hand right into a hornet’s nest.” An introspective frown passed across her face.

The aviator had come to recognize the phenomenon. Amanda Garrett seldom ever had any difficulty in intellectually making a decision. Sometimes, however, she had to work a little bit to coerre her heart and soul into line.

Christine Rendino had instructed him in the proper protocol to employ at such times. Listen, and let her talk herself around. Arkady put his own spin on the procedure, however. Encourage the sense of perspective.

“A great philosopher and sage once said, ‘who would count the teeth of the dragon must accept a degree of risk.’”

Amanda cocked an eyebrow. “Who said that?”

“I did. I was sitting right here. You heard me.”

That called her smile back up again, along with a low chuckle. “If I was the only one doing the counting, lover, it wouldn’t be any big deal. But I have to drag all of you people along with me. That’s something I still have a degree of difficulty reconciling myself to.”

“It comes with being the captain. That’s why you rate all the cool perks, like these sumptuous quarters. That’s why you get saluted … By the way, do you know where the salute really came from?”

“Where?”

“It came from some subordinate reaching up to wipe the sweat off of his forehead because his boss had shown up in time to make the really tough decisions.”

He was breaking her down. She was smiling more easily now. “You are not going to be serious here, are you?”

“I’ll be as serious as necessary, when necessary, babe. Later tonight, when we’re doing the probe, we’ll all be as serious as all hell. Especially me, considering I’m going to be Command Officer of the Deck. Because of that, though, I’m not going to prematurely let myself wind up any tighter than I have to.”

“Probably a very sound policy.”

“I think so. You have dinner yet?”

Amanda shook her head. “No. It’s hamburger night down in the wardroom, and I am not going to be able to cope with both this recon run and a government-issue slider at the same time.”

“Then where would you like to have dinner?” Arkady prompted.

Amanda started to reply offhand, then caught herself. She recognized the invitation to play the game, and her smile ceased being transitory.

“All right. Let’s see. Someplace a little out of the ordinary. No sameysamey.”

It was a counterploy to the imposed sterility of their current shipboard existence. Aboard the Cunningham, she and Arkady were lovers in an environment where a love affair’s traditional expressions — a touch, a kiss, a caress — were all inappropriate, if not professionally hazardous.

However, they were adaptable. The date game was just one of the counters they had developed on this cruise.

“Ever had roast duck?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“Good. Then it’s the Duck Club at the Monterey Plaza Hotel. It’s down there in Steinbeck country, right on Cannery Row. It’s the place all of us Monterey boys take our really serious ladies when we want to impress them.”

“Sounds interesting. What’s it like?”

“Very classy San Francisco. The dining room looks right out over the bay. The sunsets are to kill for, and they have this thing where they have sets of binoculars out on the tables. You can look out and watch the sea otters playing around in the kelp beds.”

“How incredibly neat! How should I dress for it?”

Arkady studied her and narrowed his eyes judgmentally.

“We are going to need a little flash here. Red. Definitely red.”

Amanda gave her head an emphatic shake. “That doesn’t work, love. I can’t wear that.”

“Sure you can. That ‘can’t wear red’ line was thought up by some brunette who wanted to hog a good thing. Every pretty lady should own at least one little red dress and one pair of red high heels, because she always looks great in them.”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ll prove the point. I’ll pick you up a couple of hours early and I’ll take you shopping … ”

Загрузка...