Typhoon Season

FIVE

The Juhai, a Luda III class destroyer, steamed slowly into the West Lamma Channel and turned toward the open sea. Her orders were to join her PLA Navy sister ships in the area where the American aircraft carrier battle group was currently operating, and take up a flanking position. With her four twin C801 missile launchers, new twin 37mm guns and brand-new electronics, Juhai was more than formidable enough to cause the Americans concern.

Of course, these days a “flanking position” did not imply close proximity. Juhai’s commander, Kung Choug, had been warned to exhibit special care not to appear hostile in any way. It had something to do with an American yacht that sank in the South China Sea a couple of days earlier. The Americans had apparently accused the PLA of involvement.

Standing on the bridge, Kung surveyed the busy waters ahead of his ship. Navigation was no problem; despite the 200-plus small islands that made the Hong Kong vicinity a spiders’s web of channels and tributaries, the routes in and out had been charted for centuries. However, these waters perpetually swarmed with boats: fishing craft, pleasure boats, sailboats, commercial steamers, cruise ships, and visiting military craft from innumerable nations. They made maneuvering a headache. Despite his recent pleasant leave in Hong Kong, Kung looked forward to seeing the open sea once more. Weather predictions warned of scattered squalls over the next week, but nothing too heavy.

One good thing about moving a large ship in and out of Hong Kong: Here was one of the greatest deep-water harbors in the world, so there was little danger of going aground. Which was ironic, really, considering that the South China Sea was itself comparatively shallow.

In the distance, he saw a small military vessel chugging slowly across the channel. Even before he focused his glasses on it, he had a feeling he knew what kind of boat it was: a CDF patrol boat.

He scowled. Say what you wished about the British, they had known how to control the harbor. But Major General Chin, commander of the Coastal Defense Force, was a fool. His boats were always tangling with the wrong vessels, halting and searching steamers loaded with New Zealand wool while tankers full of opium sailed right past. And so far, there had been at least three reported collisions between CDF craft and civilian vessels cruising in the bay. Such incompetence could only be the product of leadership selected for political clout rather than military competence.

So Kung kept his gaze warily on the craft dead ahead. It was stern-on to him, and too far away for him to read any of its markings, but sure enough, he recognized the CDF uniforms of the men scurrying over her fantail. Kung sighed. Probably the boat had fouled her screws on a piece of flotsam in the water, a nylon rope or a wayward fish pot. It was an embarrassment.

He was about to direct the destroyer’s radioman to contact the patrol boat when he saw the small craft’s stern dig into the water, foam billowing out behind her. The patrol boat tore off across the Channel at high speed. Kung was startled. Her skipper might be incompetent, but that was one well-maintained boat.

He returned his gaze to the water ahead, searching for other obstacles.

The one obstacle he couldn’t see, and wasn’t even thinking about, lay dead ahead at a depth of eight meters. It was an American-made MK65 Quickstrike mine, essentially a 2,390 pound bomb sheathed in a thin-walled casing, tethered to the bottom of the channel by a long cable.

As the Juhai approached, her 3,700 ton bulk pushed before her a pressure wave that registered on the preset triggering device of the mine. Acoustic sensors analyzed the sound saturating the seawater, broke the signal into its component parts, and arrived at a decision. Critical arming circuits clicked shut.

Kung felt a sharp jolt through the bottoms of his feet. His immediate thought was that his ship had, somehow, impossibly, run aground. Then — even worse — that she had struck some unseen civilian or commercial vessel. After what had happened to that yacht the other night, no one — least of all Major General Po Yu Li — would believe there had been an accident.

But even as these thoughts raced through his mind, a huge column of water and foam shot up from the port bow. Kung felt the deck rear up under his feet, and the next thing he knew he had stumbled back into the wall. Then he was stumbling forward again, catching himself on the console. Through the windshield he saw metal plates buckled back on the weatherdeck, which was almost underwater. Then it reared up again, even as the column of water crashed back down, much of it exploding across Juhai’s bridge windscreen, making Kung blind.

Even so, he knew instantly that his ship had been severely holed. Its movement was abruptly all wrong, a heavy corkscrewing as the bow settled deeper into the water, pushed there by the still-churning screws.

Kung began shouting orders to reduce speed and get damage-control crews to the bow. Then he let the Officer of the Deck take command of the immediate emergency while he got on the radio to contact Hong Kong.

There were advantages to being the nephew of the chief of naval operations. For one, you got to sit in a plush chair in a nice meeting room while being grilled. For another, they served better-than-average coffee.

That was about it.

Besides Tombstone, four men sat around the conference table. They must have been chosen from Pentagon Central Casting: There was the Air Force rep, perhaps forty years old, with a cleft chin punctuating a square, Dudley Doright jaw. There was the Navy rep, older, appropriately bright of eye and ruddy of complexion, with clipped white hair and steely gaze. There was the colorless guy in the gray suit, who had introduced himself as “a consultant on advanced aviation technology.” And finally there was the kid representing DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old and was not actually in the military himself, a fact he emphasized by wearing a Hawaiian shirt over baggy chinos and tennis shoes.

Tombstone wished he were on the Jefferson. Things were escalating out there; the latest word was that a PLA destroyer had been damaged by an explosion in Victoria Harbor, and the Chinese immediately accused the United States of planting a mine. It was a messy situation, and getting messier.

But at least you knew who your enemies were.

Tombstone had been grilled for a half hour now — or, rather, been warmed up for grilling by being asked to clarify a few points from his preliminary report.

There was a moment of silence, then the man in the suit leaned across the table. “Tell me, Admiral,” he said. “Who do you think might want to shoot you down that way? Not in combat, but over American soil?”

“Shoot me down?” Tombstone raised one eyebrow. “Well, let’s see. The North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Indians, the Cubans, the — ”

The man in the suit held up a hand and smiled blandly. Everything about him was bland. “You miss my point. This wasn’t a normal terrorist-style attack, or even a military assault. There are conventional surface-to-air missiles that could have done the job.”

“Not to mention car bombs,” the DARPA kid said. He had his tennis shoes propped on the armrest of a vacant seat. “Or a bullet in the back of the head while you’re asleep in your bed.”

Tombstone looked at him, then back at the suit. “Maybe the wreckage from the bogey will tell you something. There must be something left. I assume you’ve found it.”

“That’s being taken care of,” the Air Force rep said.

The Navy rep scowled. “Don’t be coy, Foster. He’ll figure it out soon enough on his own; plus we owe him as much information as we can spare. It was his ass on the line yesterday. Could happen again tomorrow.” He transferred his blue gaze to Tombstone. “We found the impact site, yes. We’re in the process of recovering the wreckage now, but it’s a hell of a job working in that muck. Especially with environmental groups screaming to high heaven in the background. Could take a while.”

Tombstone nodded. “Thank you.” He looked back at the suit. “Surely there aren’t that many governments capable of building an RPV like that. Maybe the CIA could narrow down our list of suspects for us.”

The suit shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. Now, what about markings? Did this vehicle have any kind of national or manufacturer emblems on it? Words? Symbols?”

“It was moving a little fast to be sure, but no, I didn’t notice anything like that. Just marine camo paint.”

“And it didn’t resemble any aircraft or missile you’re familiar with, is that right? You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. It not only didn’t look like anything I’m familiar with, it didn’t fly like anything I’m familiar with. You’ve got a drawing of it right in front of you; what’s it look like to you?”

“A paper airplane with another paper airplane stuck up its ass,” the DARPA kid said. He poked at his copy of the drawing. “My question is, what makes you so sure this was a Remotely Piloted Vehicle in the first place?”

Tombstone frowned. “Do you see a cockpit there? Or any room for one? Also, I repeat: This bogey’s flight characteristics were well outside the envelope of survivability for a human pilot.”

“Unless the pilot were prone,” the Air Force rep said. “The human body can take a lot of extra g’s that way. Jack Northrop once developed a flying wing fighter like that.”

“Which crashed during a test flight,” the DARPA kid said, still poking at his drawing.

Tombstone shook his head. “This aircraft was unmanned, gentlemen. Based on the way it was flying, I assume it was remotely piloted as well.”

“Piloted from where?” the kid asked. “An RPV isn’t like a radio-controlled model, you know; you’d have to have some kind of command post, a power supply…”

Tombstone frowned at him. Two years ago this kid was probably building plastic model airplanes; now he worked for DARPA, the government agency responsible for dreaming up the military’s most exotic hardware: the SR-71 spy plane, the F-117 Stealth Fighter and the B-2 Bomber, not to mention fiascos like Star Wars. And who knew what else? A vast slurry of DARPA’s funding came out of the “black budget,” money protected from Congressional oversight.

“Maybe the command post was on a boat,” he said. “How’s that? There were plenty of large pleasure and fishing craft around. Or didn’t you read my report?”

“Not really. Not enough pictures.”

Tombstone leaned forward. “Tell me something, young man. Do you fly airplanes?”

“Not the kind I have to actually get into.”

“Then I suggest you keep your smart-ass comments to yourself, you little twerp.”

“Whoa.” The kid sat up. “Whoa. Whoa.”

“You want to be flippant,” Tombstone said coldly, “that’s fine. After you’ve flown against an unidentified aircraft that’s trying to knock you out of the sky, shoot off your mouth all you want. Until then, if you don’t have something constructive to say, shut up.”

The kid looked around the table. No one came to his defense. He sat there blinking behind his glasses, then slumped deeper in his chair and picked up his pencil. Started doodling on the bogey drawing. “Whatever,” he muttered.

“This brings us back to what’s supposed to be the main point of this briefing,” the Navy rep said. “Admiral Magruder, even if we’re able to reconstruct something useful from the vehicle’s wreckage, we’ll still need your impressions about how the thing actually flew.”

“And how you got away from it.” The Air Force rep picked up his copy of Tombstone’s report. “It says here you started turning snap rolls. Are you sure you don’t mean barrel rolls?”

“I know the difference, Colonel. No, it was snap rolls. They seemed to disorient it.”

“Disorient it?” the Air Force rep said.

“That’s right. It would be tracking me, I’d start snap-rolling, and the bogey would miss. Then it would start circling and come back at me again.”

The Air Force rep glanced at the DARPA kid, who just kept doodling on his drawing of the bogey without looking up.

“Perhaps I should be asking these questions,” the Navy rep said. “The Admiral and I are both Naval aviators. We speak the same language.”

“I’m sure you do,” the Air Force rep said. “But since the Navy doesn’t have an RPV program, I think I’m better qualified to determine the flight characteristics of — ”

“Nothing!” the DARPA kid shouted. He raised his face, lips curled in scorn. “Remember the Mig-29? Remember how American military intelligence, that famous oxymoron, didn’t believe the Soviets could possibly produce a truly competitive all-weather fighter? Oops! What a big surprise.” He fixed his gaze on Tombstone’s face. “Admiral, you want some advice? Here’s some advice: Don’t go flying again until I examine what’s left of your bogey. And one other thing.”

“What’s that?” Tombstone asked in a flat voice.

The kid smiled. “I’d carry a gun if I were you. Somebody’s got it out for you real bad.”

Sung Fei was watching CNN when the phone rang. His tiny flat in the Mongkok District of Kowloon was far from overfurnished, but by local standards he lived in luxury: He had no roommates, and his television was the latest Japanese model, with a satellite dish that picked up over two hundred stations from all over the world. In the last two days nearly half those stations had been broadcasting continuous “updates” on the so-called “Lady of Leisure attack.”

How symptomatic. In a world where millions starved to death every year, and hundreds of thousands more were ground into poverty by wealthy industrialists, what story was deemed worthy of round-the-clock dissection? Only the one where a handful of wealthy, worthless socialites and mega-capitalists died at sea in the middle of one of their debauched, high-profile soirees. Even the retaliatory attack on a PLA military ship in Victoria Harbor was referred to in the briefest of sidebars.

Another staple part of most broadcasts was an appearance by a so-called “expert” who dissected events in the South China Sea and speculated as to motivations and possible outcomes. While admitting that solid evidence about exactly what had occurred in the South China Sea was scanty, these experts seemed remarkably certain about what the events meant, what had caused them, and what would happen next. None of them seemed to question the U.S. Navy’s policy of keeping all shipping and aircraft out of the area of the supposed “attack.”

So much for experts. The truth was, not one of those talking heads knew as much about what was happening in the Hong Kong area as did Sung Fei. Not nearly as much.

He had been waiting for the phone to ring all day and night, so when it happened, he was not startled. Instead, a shimmer of excitement played down his backbone.

He picked up the receiver. “Sung,” he said calmly.

As always, Mr. Blossom’s voice was weird, changeable, obviously run through a distorter. “You’ve been watching the news?” the voice asked in Cantonese.

“I always watch the news,” Sung said, reciting the words he’d memorized, knowing his voice and its point of origin were also being scrambled. “But I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

That concluded the password exchange. The voice said, “It is time.”

“I thought it might be, Comrade. I regret the loss of life aboard Suhai, but my heart is full of joy that the moment of freedom has arrived at last. I am honored to be participating.”

“You did an excellent job of filling Victoria Square with anti-China protestors this morning.”

“Students are easy to convince of anything. After what the Americans did in the harbor, I can guarantee hundreds more.”

“Both pro- and anti-American? This is very important.”

“I understand, but trust me. The Hong Kongese love a demonstration.”

“Not for long,” the voice on the other end said.

Tombstone was awakened by the ringing of the phone. He sat up groggily, only to find the soft pressure of his wife’s breasts on his naked chest as she slid over him to reach the receiver first. She muttered a few words into it, listened, then sighed and held it out to him.

She remained sprawled across him as he put the receiver to his ear. “Magruder.”

“Admiral, this is John Palmer.”

It took Tombstone a moment to remember that was the name of the man in the suit from the previous night’s meeting. The spook. Of course, Tombstone thought, his concentration wasn’t helped by the things Tomboy was doing to him. “How can I help you, Mr. Palmer?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice even.

“We were wondering if you’d come to Andrews as soon as possible. We’ve got something you might be interested in seeing.”

Instantly Tombstone’s concentration was on the phone. He sat halfway up, almost tumbling Tomboy off him. “I’ll be there right away.”

He hung up the phone and found Tomboy kneeling beside him on the mattress, her naked body as pale and beautiful as a marble statue in the darkness. “I take it this is important.”

“Very.” He reached out and touched her cheek, then slipped his fingertips down the front of her body. “I’m off to Andrews. I think it has something to do with my little encounter the other day.”

“Ah.” Her eyebrows rose. She knew about the bogey, but nothing about the content of his meeting the previous night. Nor had she asked about it. Her own job had made secrecy second nature to her. She waved a hand at him. “Go. Go.”

He looked her up and down, and sighed. “Damn the Navy.”

“Not to mention the Air Force,” she said.

“I see you’re on the flight schedule for CAP tomorrow,” Bird Dog said in his most casual voice.

Lobo looked over her shoulder at him. She was pouring coffee, not spilling a drop despite the fact she wasn’t watching what she was doing. “Gee, you’re capable of reading a flight schedule. That’s very impressive.”

“I went to college and everything,” Bird Dog said. “It’s just that I’m surprised they’re putting you in the air again so soon.”

“Part of the job. I don’t write the flight schedule.” She stared at him over the rim of her cup. God, she had killer eyes. “Besides, Bird Dog, I want to be up there. In case the Chinese try something else. And especially after the lies they told the U.N.”

Bird Dog moved up to the coffeepot. “So, who’s your backseater again?”

“Handyman.”

“Like him?”

“He’s the best.”

“And who’s flying wing for you?”

“Hot Rock.”

“Hm. He’s pretty raw, isn’t he?”

That maddening smirk climbed into her eye. He felt the stream of scalding coffee dribble over his thumb, and suppressed a wince. “Why?” she said. “You worried about me? Think I might get into trouble? Need a big strong man to help me out?”

“I just wish I could be your wingman, that’s all. We’d make a good team.”

“I’m sure whoever you are flying wing with wishes you could be my wingman, too.” She gave him a wicked grin. “Who’s your backseater these days, anyway?”

“Catwoman.”

“Good RIO. What did you do to deserve her?”

“I don’t make the assignments. But yeah, she is good. We’ll be up there tomorrow, too. So if you run into trouble…”

“Well, that’s nice, because Handyman and I will be up there if you run into trouble.”

There were a couple of fundamental differences between Naval Air Stations and Air Force bases, apart from the obvious fact that the majority of Naval bases were situated near water. For one thing, Air Force bases served better coffee while making you wait for the meeting that had dragged you out of your bed. For another, the base commander’s office had photos of F-15s and B-2s on the walls.

Other things were exactly the same. The murmur of voices in the corridor, the distant ringing of phones, the whistling shriek of jet engines outside.

Tombstone stood at the window, staring at what little of the airstrip he could see from this angle. Every now and then an F-15 Eagle, the Air Force’s answer to the Tomcat, would come in to land. Like any naval aviator, Tombstone was mildly contemptuous of Air Force weenies and their birds. However impressive an Eagle might be in the air, in the end it only had to land on a motionless, fifteen-hundred foot long strip of asphalt. Nothing to it. Now, try putting one down on top of a boat in the open sea.

There was a knock, the door opened and an enlisted man stuck his head in. “They’re ready for you now, sir. Please follow me.”

Tombstone followed the crisply laundered back out of the building and across a tie-down area toward an enormous, windowless hangar where his pass was carefully examined by another, better armed and altogether meaner-looking weenie. Finally the guard saluted and opened the door.

Tombstone stepped into a vast, echoing hangar. At first it appeared to be empty. Then he saw a small collection of metal objects scattered across a tarp in the center of the concrete floor. Three men were bending over the tarp: the Air Force rep from the meeting; John Palmer the spook; and the young DARPA nerd. The Air Force rep looked up and waved him over.

As Tombstone approached, he stared at the garbage on the tarp. Immediately he recognized pieces of the bogey that had pursued him all over the Maryland sky, laid out in roughly correct configuration. Part of the rear half appeared to be intact, if scorched and bent; one of the forward fins had been laid out in more or less correct position; of the nose section there were only tiny fragments, unrecognizable to Tombstone. Other pieces sat in trays to either side. Tombstone was reminded of an archaeological dig, with a half-exposed fossil.

Still, the general shape of the bogey was recognizable enough to give him a chill. “I’m surprised there’s this much of it left,” he said.

“It wasn’t easy to find,” said the Air Force rep. “Fortunately, the vehicle buried itself in six feet of mud before the warhead went off. A lot of the aft section was simply fired right back out like a cannon shell.”

Tombstone released a breath. “So, what is it, who built it, and why was it following me?”

The DARPA kid looked up, eyes shining with excitement behind his glasses; Tombstone was reminded of a twelve-year-old kid staring at the Milky Way. “It’s a UAV,” he said.

“A UAV? But — that can’t be right. Didn’t you read my report? It was dogfighting me.”

The kid grinned. “No it wasn’t; it was just following you around, like a Sidewinder, and trying to take you out.”

“You mean it was a heat-seeker?”

The kid glanced at Palmer, then back. “Not exactly. You ever hear of Predator?”

“You mean the Air Force drone?”

“Predator’s a lot more than a drone, Admiral,” Palmer said. “It’s a completely automated surveillance aircraft. It takes off, flies to a defined location, performs its mission, then returns to base and lands… all without a bit of human intervention. It’s the future of aerial reconnaissance.”

Tombstone frowned. “That’s all very interesting, but a surveillance aircraft — unmanned or not — does its thing over stationary ground. I’m sure it’s fairly simple to write a mission program for that, but I’m telling you, this thing was dogfighting me. Somebody had to be flying it, like a radio-controlled plane.”

“Wrong-Oh, Admiral,” the kid said. He pointed into one of the bins. “Wrong kind of antennas for radio control. It used GPS — geosynchronous positioning satellite — data to get into position, but after that something else took over, and that’s when things got hairy for you.”

“ ‘Hairy?’ ” Tombstone said. He leaned forward. “You might call it that. I’d say it was a little more serious than ‘hairy’.”

The kid grinned. “Not tweaking you, Admiral. Here’s the deal: This thing carried enough fuel to cruise for maybe an hour or so. It could be launched from a meadow or a country road, or even a boat if some kind of catapult was used. Once it reached its assigned territory, it would start to circle around while its video camera — actually, four of them — scanned everything that entered that airspace. Its onboard computer would match each image against images stored on its internal hard drive. When it got a match, boom — it went in for the kill.”

“Wait. You mean this thing was set up to recognize my aircraft?”

“Looks that way. Somebody programmed it to fly around until it spotted a Pitts Special — maybe even a specific Pitts Special — and then go after it. That’s another major difference from Predator. Predator is slow, a prop-plane with long wings, basically a motorized glider. This sucker used a nifty little turbofan a lot like a Tomahawk’s. There are some of the fan blades.”

Tombstone stared at the debris again. “I can’t believe you can tell so much from this.”

“Well, only part of what I know is based on the wreckage itself. See, DARPA has been doing research along these same lines, so — ”

“Mr. Williams,” Palmer said quietly.

The kid glanced over at him with a glint of humor in his eye. “Sorry, 007.” Then, to Tombstone, “Guess this is where your need-to-know stops. Anyway, the main reason I know what kind of guidance system this thing used is because of how you avoided getting shot down. It finally hit me: You said that whenever you snap-rolled the Pitts, the vehicle seemed to lose track of you. Right?”

“So it seemed.”

“That’s because it wasn’t programmed as well as it could have been. I’m betting it was taught what a Pitts Special looks like from all kinds of angles, so it could always recognize your plane in the sky, regardless of your attitude or position. Right? But somebody forgot that when a plane rolls fast enough, it takes on a whole new profile, visually. It could be interpreted as a sort of big cylinder. The vehicle couldn’t recognize that shape, so it went back into search mode until you stopped rolling.”

“That’s it,” Tombstone said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

The kid shrugged. “Elementary.”

“So where did it come from? Who built it?”

The kid started to respond, glanced at Palmer. The spook nodded. Picking up a curved piece of the fuselage, the kid tilted it so Tombstone could see a character painted inside.

“Made in China,” the kid said.

Tombstone glanced from the kid to the spook, then back at the wreckage on the floor. “China built this?” he said.

“That’s what these symbols tell us,” Palmer said. “They say something like ‘Gift of the Eastern Wind.’ There are other indicators, too, like some of the construction methods and materials. China was involved.”

Tombstone shook his head. “I knew the PLA was developing cruise missiles, but this…”

“We thought the United States had a lead time of years, if not decades, in UAV technology,” Palmer said. “As you can imagine, this came as quite a shock to us as well.”

“Especially since this puppy was really well-designed,” the kid said. “I mean, most of China’s aeronautics is based on old Soviet stuff, right? And until real recently, the Russians were still building fighters using rinky-dink 1950s technology. Sheet steel, big clunky aluminum fittings; they even used vacuum tubes in their instruments long after we’d switched to solid-state circuitry.”

Tombstone nodded. He’d heard all that before; he also knew that the tune had changed dramatically with the advent of the Mig-29 and its successors.

“Okay,” the kid said. “So China has been just as bad, or worse. But this thing…” He picked up the piece of fuselage again, put it back. “It’s a masterpiece of minimalism. The fuselage and moving parts are sophisticated stuff — graphite composites, bonded aluminum, titanium alloy… but the electronics, what’s left of them, are pretty much off-the-shelf. In fact…”

Tombstone looked at the kid for a moment, then at Palmer. “What?”

For the first time, Palmer appeared a bit uncertain. “Well, despite the mess you see here, we were able to determine that more than seventy percent of the control and navigation components on this UAV came from the same manufacturer.”

“And?”

“It was MyTronic Corporation — the electronics division of a company you might have heard of: McIntyre Engineering International.”