Typhoon Season

EIGHT

When Tombstone walked into his house, he was greeted by a sharp-planed face not unlike his own. “Uncle Thomas,” he said, pleased.

His uncle held out his hand, and they shook. “This isn’t a social visit, Matthew, sorry to say. Joyce and I were just discussing some business. It involves you, too.”

Tombstone peered around the corner into the sitting room. Tomboy looked back at him, her expression grim, yet there was something else shining in her eyes. The kind of fierce excitement he recognized from any number of combat sorties.

“Uh-oh,” Tombstone said. “What is this?”

“They’re sending me to China,” she said. “To Jefferson.”

Tombstone turned toward his uncle. “What for?”

“Better sit down, Matthew.” Thomas Magruder led him into the room and sat him next to his wife, then took a chair opposite. The admiral, the most powerful man in the navy, was wearing civilian clothes. All at once Tombstone realized he hadn’t seen his uncle’s car in the driveway, or even on the street. This visit was incognito.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Things are heating up over in Hong Kong,” his uncle said. “Early this morning our time, an American Air Force jet used for NOAA research was shot down outside Hong Kong. Jefferson got involved again; this time there was a real tangle. We lost some, Matthew.”

“Who?” Tombstone asked.

“Chris Hanson, Randall Carpenter, Benjamin Rogers.”

Tombstone had steeled himself, and was surprised — and guiltily relieved — that only one name was familiar. Still, that one name rocked him. “God, not Lobo.”

“She’s MIA. Carpenter is KIA; Rogers is presumed KIA. One Tomcat down, and one Hornet. That’s all I have right now.”

Tombstone was faintly aware of Tomboy sliding her arm through his. “What’s our response? From Washington?”

His uncle hesitated. “As you know, dealing with the PRC requires exceptional delicacy. Nobody wants to start a world war.”

Tombstone snorted.

“Nobody here wants to start a world war,” his uncle amended, face hard. “And the Chinese absolutely deny responsibility for the shoot-down, just as they did for the Lady of Leisure massacre. Frankly, that’s got me a little puzzled. It’s not like them to deny the things they do; they typically just make transparent excuses or refuse to discuss it at all.”

Tombstone shook his head. “Batman must be livid.”

“Of course. But he’ll do what’s right, just as you would if you were in his place. And right now, that means waiting. When the North Koreans shot down a civilian airliner, it didn’t lead to war, and this shouldn’t either.”

“What’s the Air Force’s position on it?”

“What else? They wish they’d had the chance to tangle with the Flankers, instead of us. But their wings are tied in that part of the world.” His uncle paused. “Speaking of the Air Force, what else have they found out about your little UAV?”

Tombstone’s eyebrows rose. He looked from his uncle to Tomboy, then back. “You know?”

“I was fully briefed on the background before I came up here. Just finished briefing your wife. We’re all on the same page now.”

“Not exactly,” Tombstone said, and described what the DARPA kid had discovered about the bogey’s nation of origin. Then he took a deep breath and added, “But here’s the trick: It was loaded with electronics from one of Uncle Phil’s companies.”

His uncle blinked, then shook his head. “Don’t be thinking ‘treason,’ Tombstone. The PRC has been buying up technology for years. American, Japanese, you name it; if they want it, they simply buy it. It’s perfectly legitimate.”

“Legitimate?”

“Good for business,” his uncle said expressionlessly. “Good for international relations. It’s not like anyone’s letting them buy weapons, after all.”

“Just the means to make them.”

Thomas Magruder sighed. “As far as Phil’s concerned, the odds are he didn’t even know who the end buyer was, far less what the components were going to be used for. No man in the world was more committed to democracy and free enterprise than he was.”

“Maybe that’s why he was killed,” Tombstone said, suddenly both relieved and excited. “Maybe he figured out where the technology was going, and what for, so they murdered him.”

“That occurred to us,” his uncle said somberly. “We’re checking out the possibility.”

Tombstone suddenly sobered, too. “But… from what the DARPA kid told me, this bogey was years ahead of what we thought anyone else was capable of, never mind China. So even with the right parts, how could they…” He noticed that his uncle’s face looked grimmer than ever. “What?”

Tomboy spoke up. “Your bogey isn’t the only surprise the Chinese had for us. The aircraft that downed the Air Force jet was a completely unknown design, from all descriptions a flying wing with stealth characteristics. It’s got JCS worried.”

“A stealth plane?” Tombstone said numbly. “The Chinese have stealth, too?”

As he listened to Tomboy describe what little was currently known about the mystery bogey in Hong Kong, Tombstone felt himself tensing. Although stealth technology was largely an Air Force game, Tombstone had a good understanding of it. Most people, including some in the military and most in politics, had the right idea about stealth. To them, it seemed like a clever but otherwise innocuous idea, and prohibitively expensive. But that wasn’t the case at all. From a military standpoint, stealth was at once the most important and most extraordinarily successful technological development in decades.

The original goal of stealth was simple and realistic. It wasn’t to make an invisible airplane, or even one completely transparent to radar; no one expected that. The problem was that radar installations were relatively cheap to build, upgrade and maintain, while bombers were expensive to make, more expensive to improve upon, and most of all, expensive to lose. Imagine a bomber with the radar cross-section of a goose or an eagle. Imagine how deeply such an aircraft could infiltrate before AA noticed it.

This was the Pentagon’s dream when, in 1975, they funded Project Harvey — named after the invisible rabbit — to fund research into the problem. In the end, Northrop and Lockheed each presented DARPA with a wooden mock-up of its design, to be tested head-to-head at the Gray Butte radar cross-section test site. The Northrup model created quite a stir: To radar, it was no bigger than a pigeon, DARPA’s dreams exceeded. Then came the Lockheed entry, nicknamed “Hopeless Diamond,” which didn’t even look like it could fly. It was bathed in radar waves… and nothing happened. Nothing at all. In fact, according to legend, the model produced its first return only when a crow landed on it.

The battle for technological advantage in military applications is usually measured in tiny evolutionary steps. Relatively speaking, with the creation of what would become known as the F/A-117 Stealth Fighter, the United States had just stepped from the Stone Age directly into the Space Age. A stealth plane could fly over your headquarters and release a precision-guided bomb before you even knew you were in trouble. No other country was close to finding a way to combat this menace, far less produce a counter-menace of their own.

At least, that had been the belief. Until now.

Tombstone was so busy contemplating the ramifications of this information that he almost missed Tomboy’s next words: “That’s why I’m going to China. They want to see if I can get more information on this plane, maybe even get a glimpse of it. We’ve got to know more about it.”

Tombstone scowled. “This doesn’t make any sense. Okay, the Chinese could have stolen stealth technology; everybody knows it’s bound to leak out sooner or later. But UAVs? I got the impression from DARPA that the best the U.S. has come up with so far are nice little recon drones.”

His uncle was shaking his head. Tombstone had never seen the man look so grim. “That’s what I thought, too, until my briefing today. The truth is, the UAV program in this country has been struggling uphill for all the wrong reasons. It’s not because the technology’s really that hard to develop, especially if you’re satisfied with only partial stealth capability. The guidance system used to be tough, but hell, one of today’s ordinary laptop computers has more processing power than the computer that runs the guidance system of the entire space shuttle. The UAV program lags for one reason only: money.”

“Well, I understand new technology is expensive to develop, but — ”

“Virtually all of China’s GNP gets squeezed through a single pipeline,” his uncle went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “That’s the Communist way, of course. No matter where the money comes from or who generates it, it gets divvied up by the government, no arguments allowed.

“In the U.S., it’s obviously a different matter. Here, everybody argues. You’ve been in the Pentagon long enough to know what I mean about bickering. The Army fights for funding with the Navy, who fights with the Air Force. The technology guys fight with the grunts-in-the-mud types, and taxpayers fight with Washington over the whole thing. And underneath it all you’ve got politics. Remember what happened with Arsenal.”

Tombstone grimaced. “Don’t remind me.” Arsenal had been the Navy’s newest creation, essentially a floating weapons barge stuck inside a Navy hull and capable of doing battle almost entirely by remote control. When things flared up with Cuba, the president of the United States himself had tried to utilize the ship in just that way, with predictably disastrous results.

“The Arsenal mess wasn’t just about Washington micro-managing a battle,” his uncle said, as if reading his mind. Maybe he was reading his mind. After all, they were both Magruders. “Remember, a senator from the state where Arsenal was built played a big part in the whole fiasco.”

Tombstone nodded. “He figured his state would get rich building ships like Arsenal for the navy, if the prototype proved herself in battle.”

“Exactly.”

“But I don’t see how that applies here. You just said China doesn’t have the same financial entanglements.”

“Which is why they could be building UAVs,” his uncle said.

“Whoa. I hate to sound stupid, but — ”

“Look at it this way, sweetheart,” Tomboy said. “A brand-new Tomcat ain’t cheap and B-2s are over two billion each. A UAV? Maybe a quarter-mil; you get three for the price of a single Tomahawk. Sounds good, right? Nice and cost-effective. Now think about it from the perspective of a senator lobbying for defense contracting dollars for his state. You’ve got thousands of voters on welfare, on unemployment. Are you going to grab for the B-2 contract, or the UAVs?”

“Wait.” Tombstone held up a hand. “You mean to tell me we’d be developing and using more UAVs ourselves… except they don’t cost enough?”

His uncle gave him a grim smile. “And you always thought it was because you and your fellow aviators were irreplacable, didn’t you?”

Tombstone sat silently for a moment, trying to reconstruct his whole image of his life, and what it was all about. Finally he tightened his jaw. “Look, if you’re going to send Tomboy out there as an expert, you ought to send me, too. I’m the expert on Chinese UAVs.”

His uncle shook his head. “Sorry. We don’t need you on the carrier. We need you somewhere else. But this is a volunteer job, Matthew. Not up your normal alley at all.”

“Pardon?”

“Earlier, you mentioned that Phillip McIntyre’s death might have been related in some way to his business, and from there to the UAV. Since Phil’s not around to talk to, we need to ask someone else about that. Unfortunately his headquarters is in Hong Kong, so we have no authority to go in and simply start demanding information. But one of his top executives survived the Lady of Leisure massacre. He’s in Hong Kong right now, and evidently he’s frightened for his life, and a bit difficult to reach. We need someone he might trust to go speak with him. You’re the closest thing Phillip’s got to a son, so the employee should trust you. I wish I could go instead, but I can’t, not with the way things are over there right now. I’m needed in Washington.”

Tombstone folded his wife’s small hand between his. “If it would get me out from behind a desk, I’d go to Antarctica.”

Lobo awoke with a sense of terrible pressure in her lungs, and darkness burning in her eyes. Immediately she knew where she was, and why, and she struggled not to panic. Instead she kicked steadily, patiently holding her breath.

She burst through the surface of the sea and coughed up seawater for so long she thought she would turn inside out.

The sea was smooth and warm. This was not the Aleutians. She was not going to be picked up and gang raped here. Not with her own people ruling the air, and SAR already on the way.

Don’t even think about what happened in the Aleutians. One thing at a time. She checked to see that her saltwater-activated beacon was flashing. Yes. Presumably the radio beacon was, too.

She looked around for her RIO, or for his chute. Far to the east she saw a fiercely flashing strobe, the wrong color, though — but beneath it was the darting beam of a searchlight. A helo! Perhaps SAR had already found Handyman and was even now plucking him from the water.

Between her and the helo moved a surprising number of lights, cruising slowly. Boats. Of course — she’d seen them from the air. All kinds of boats; trawlers, pleasure craft, junks. Should she signal one of them? Or just wait?

At that moment, not fifty yards away and very low to the water, a bright strobe appeared. Her heart leaped with joy. Handyman! He must have been turned away from her until now. She tried to call his name, but her throat was caked with salt, and all she could do was croak. She paddled toward him instead, moving clumsily through the piss-warm water. Tears flowed down her cheeks. His strobe swayed back and forth, vanished, then reappeared. Handyman must be swimming, too.

Then she saw his helmet, his splayed arms. She thrashed closer, reached out and grabbed his harness. “Handyman!” she rasped. “Handy, are you — ”

His head rolled back, eyes open, staring over her shoulder. Blood stained his lips. Yet his body moved with jerking, trembling vitality in her grasp. A seizure? He —

With a violent shudder, he pulled away from her hands and sank a couple of feet beneath the surface. Rose again, eyes still wide open.

That was when Lobo realized the water beneath him was full of sharks.

She had no way of knowing how much time passed before she realized she was screaming, thrashing, doing all the things you weren’t supposed to do around sharks. Handyman was twenty yards away now, still marked by his strobe as it swayed and dipped. Lobo made herself stop kicking, stop slapping the water, and grab for her shark repellent instead. She popped it into the water and stared at the sky. Where was that SAR helo? Where was —

She heard the soft throb of a diesel engine, smelled its fumes. Spinning in the water, she saw the black bulk of a boat creeping toward her. Then a fierce spotlight beam struck her in the face.

“Help!” she croaked, squinting, waving her arms. Would a spotlight attract sharks? Were sharks moving in on her at this very moment? “Help! Please, hurry!”

The tone of the engine rose a third, and beneath it she heard the hiss of a curling bow wave. She raised a hand to block the glare of the spotlight. Now, as the boat came closer, she could read the printing on its bow:

COASTAL DEFENSE FORCE HONG KONG.

Jefferson at night was a chaotic Christmas tree of lights suspended in darkness. But right now Hot Rock was interested in only two clusters of lights. The first was the meatball, the stack of big, colored lenses that indicated when he was deviating from his preferred glide path to the deck. The second was the strip of lamps that descended vertically over the stern. The so-called “landing area line-up lights” provided an essential third dimension of visibility at night; before they had been created, aviators coming in for night traps faced the appalling illusion that the landing deck was not coming closer, but rising straight up, like an elevator. The results had frequently been fatal.

As Hot Rock came in on final, he listened to the murmured comments of the Landing Signals Officer, or LSO, standing on his platform adjacent to the meatball and coaching the Tomcat’s approach. Listened, but didn’t really pay attention. He knew his approach was perfect; he could feel it.

The ass end of the carrier slipped under his wing, and he brought the Tomcat down decisively, simultaneously shoving the throttles to full military power in case of a bolter, but knowing it was pointless. He’d snagged the three-wire; he always snagged the three-wire. How many perfect traps in a row was that for him? If the navy had an Olympics for aviators, this would be his gold-medal event.

“Nice trap, slick,” his RIO said as the Tomcat jolted to a halt and Hot Rock killed the engines. “Especially since we came back with such a heavy load under the wing.”

“Bird Dog, what’s your situation?” the air boss said over the radio. Hot Rock had just landed. Bird Dog was still limping toward the carrier.

“Good to go,” Bird Dog said. “Get me a green deck and I’ll get onboard.”

“I understand you’ve lost some control function,” the air boss said in a careful voice.

“Just enough to take me out of the dogfight,” Bird Dog snarled. “Not enough to keep me from putting this bird on the carrier.”

“Commander, don’t make me order you to eject.” Now the air boss sounded almost kind, although there was steel behind the tone. He was in absolute control of everything that happened on the flight deck, and responsible for it all as well. “I can’t let you jeopardize this boat just to keep from dumping that Tomcat in the drink. Is that understood?”

Bird Dog forced his voice to stay calm. “Listen, my RIO is unconscious. I don’t know… she might be hit, might have a broken neck… I don’t know. I can’t fire her out of this bird, not if I’ve got a chance of landing on the carrier. Which I do. So with your permission I’m coming in.”

There was a long pause. Ahead and to his left, Jefferson was a glowing blur in the darkness. Amazing how huge a carrier seemed when you were on it… and how tiny it looked from here.

“Roger that,” the air boss said. “Green deck. Tell me what you need.”

Bird Dog let out a breath. “You might have Jeff brought a few degrees to port. That’s the only way my Tomcat wants to turn, so I’d feel better having a little push on that side.”

“You got it. Stay in the stack until I let you know it’s time.”

Bird Dog clicked his mike twice, then concentrated on keeping the Tomcat wings-level as he flew in the marshall stack. In a way, the difficulty of handling his crippled bird, the effort required to keep it airborne at all — never mind trying to land it on a moving postage stamp — was good for him. It kept him from thinking about other things.

Like what might be happening to Lobo.

“Missing?” Batman said. “You mean, completely? But I understood her chute was sighted.”

Coyote looked haggard. “Here’s the situation, Admiral. Her plane was struck by a PLA heat-seeker and downed. Her chute was seen, fully deployed; so was her backseater’s. But it was getting dark at the time. The backseater was located and picked up by the SAR helo from Shiloh… but he was dead. And… the sharks had been at him.”

“Oh, Christ. Lobo — ”

“Her situation is a different matter, Batman. SAR hasn’t found any sign of her at all. No sign, you understand? Not even a shred of cloth.”

Batman looked up. “You’re saying she might have been picked up by somebody.”

“It’s a possibility, sir. SAR reports there was a lot of surface traffic in the area: Commercial boats, cabin cruisers, fishing boats… Could easily be one of those grabbed her.”

“Until we know for sure, keep SAR going out there.” Batman clenched his jaw so hard he felt two molars grind. “Lobo got shot down before… and it went very badly for her.”

“I’m aware of her story,” COS said softly.

“Of course.” Batman sighed. “All right. So now I suppose we just wait until we get some kind of word.”

“On the positive side,” Coyote said, “our pilots shot down three Flankers, and ran the rest off. And we also picked up a civilian survivor.”

Batman made a shamed grimace. The survivor. Somehow, in the last few hours the object of this entire disastrous episode had been relegated to the status of “Oh, yes, by the way…”

“His condition?” Batman asked.

“Strained back, cuts and bruises, dehydration. Shock. He was out there for hours, and I guess he spent some time fending off sharks himself. We know his name’s Alonzo George, and he’s with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He’s out of it for now; Doc says we can visit him in medical tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” Batman wondered if tomorrow would be soon enough, then pushed the thought out of his mind and turned toward the hatch. “I’m going to watch Bird Dog’s landing.”

Major General Wei Ao, supreme commander of the Hong Kong PLA, had obviously expected this phone call. It was equally obvious to Political Commissar Yeh that Wei had called him into the room specifically so he would be involved in the conversation.

As soon as Yeh was seated, Wei flicked on the speakerphone. “Yes, Comrade General Ming,” he said. “We did consider your orders, of course. But the situation was unique. We not only needed to provide aid and assistance, but to try to find and identify the attacking aircraft.”

Ming’s voice crackled slightly over the speakerphone. “And who authorized an air battle with U.S. Navy aircraft not a hundred miles from Hong Kong? Do you realize that this was seen live on television all over the world?”

Yeh watched the garrison commander’s throat pulse with his swallow. What had Ming said about this man’s vices? He collected imperial Chinese antiquities…. “I’m aware of it, yes,” Wei said.

“The American jet’s last transmission has been played on the media as well, over and over: ‘It’s Chinese; it’s got a red star.’ This is your interpretation of my orders not to provoke the United States?”

Wei drew himself up defiantly, something Yeh suspected he’d never dare do if the general were physically in the room. “The media broadcasts should work to our advantage, General. As you know, the attacker was described as a stealth-type aircraft, a flying wing. Obviously it could not have been a PLA fighter. The American pilot was obviously mistaken. That’s why I considered it in the interests of national security to send aircraft out to investigate what actually — ”

“And once again,” Ming said, “the only direct witness of the event ended up in the hands of the Americans. How is that possible? I consider this a very poor job on your part, Major General. Very disappointing.”

Wei slumped back in his chair. “But — ”

“Gather your co-commanders at eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” Ming said. “I’m flying down to talk with all of you and get this straightened out once and for all.”

As Bird Dog turned on final, he was annoyed to see that the crash barricade, that giant badminton net designed to catch wounded aircraft that missed the cables, had been raised across the deck. Well, of course they would raise it, under these circumstances, but he still found it infuriating. What, they didn’t think he could hit a three wire with half an airplane?

“You hang in there, Catwoman,” he said over ICS. “You just hang in there, okay?”

There was no answer. She was resting, he told himself.

Watching the meatball, listening to the patter from the LSO, he brought the Tomcat in toward her home. Many pilots referred to carrier landings as “controlled crashes,” but Bird Dog had a higher standard than that. And he was going to live up to it now, too — not because of his pride, but because he didn’t want to jar the precious cargo in his back seat any more than he had to.

And he was not going to need that damned net.

As Hot Rock entered the dirty-shirt mess, he was greeted with subdued applause and slaps on the back. With pilots dead and missing, the usual after-battle banter was subdued, but Hot Rock was still congratulated for making his first kill — even if it was only a helicopter, at least it was probably the same helicopter that blew up the Lady of Leisure, right? He was congratulated for his flying skills, outmaneuvering multiple bogeys even if he didn’t have the chance to take any of them out.

Only his RIO, Two Tone, stayed out of the group, Beaman said. “She’s a sorry sight, isn’t she?”

Franklin couldn’t look at him. Tomcat 304 was now a hangar queen. Fist-sized holes punched all over it, the metal blackened and splintered around the edges. The back half of the canopy just gone. How Bird Dog had managed to bring the plane in, Franklin had no idea.

Franklin felt sick and angry. He wasn’t sure who he was angry with, but it was a strong feeling.

“The RIO,” he said. “Is she…”

“In sick bay. Alive. Bad. And you know what? She’s lucky at that. I just had a little talk with Lieutenant Commander Robinson. He says that about the time things got hot, he lost hydraulic pressure in the left wing control surfaces. That was before he took any hits. Now, how do we explain a loss of hydraulic fluid?”

Franklin felt a frightful chill clatter down his spine. “I tightened that fitting,” he said. “I tightened it right down. I know I did.”

Beaman nodded gravely at the plane. “We’ll see.”

As always when they were going to the car to drive somewhere together, Tombstone and Tomboy both strode straight for the left front door. “I’m more current than you are,” Tomboy joked.

Tombstone handed her his duffel bag. “Exactly why I need some stick time. Besides, this is my car.”

“Sexist pig.”

They tossed their luggage in the back of the GTO and climbed in. Tombstone fired up the Goat’s engine and hit the street with a bit more velocity than necessary. He said, “Sorry. But I’m going to be spending the next fourteen hours letting somebody else fly us to Singapore, and then I have to switch to a civilian airliner. A Third World civilian airliner.”

Tomboy reached across the console and squeezed his thigh. “The way things are over there right now, it’s either that or swim.”

Only an hour ago, as a consequence of the air battle that had taken place following the downing of an Air Force plane, the Pentagon had curtailed all military flights into Hong Kong. Most American airlines had immediately canceled service to Hong Kong as well. Other nations were picking up the slack; Tombstone had been booked on a Thai Airlines flight out of Singapore.

“God, I wish I were going to Jefferson with you,” Tombstone said. “Not that Batman can’t handle the heat, but… hell, that’s where I feel like I should be.”

“Your talking to Martin Lee could make a big difference,” Tomboy said, her gaze on the road. “If you can help figure out how the Chinese got their UAV program up and running so well, it could make all the difference in the world — to Jefferson and to the United States.”

“According to you and Uncle Thomas, it’s not really an issue. According to you, UAVs are the Volkswagens of the aerospace world. Anybody can make one.”

“No, anybody can afford one. That’s not the same thing.” She paused. “Especially when you’re talking about combat UAVs.”

“Like the one that attacked me.”

“Yes. The Air Force supposedly has a CUAV program under way, but like Uncle Thomas said…” She shrugged. “The financial and political support is minimal. Of course, that might change now.”

“Because the Chinese are ahead of us. I can’t believe the politicians have gotten us into the position of playing catchup.”

“It’s strange when you think about it,” she said. “I mean, from the Chinese perspective. UAVs have two big advantages over conventional aircraft: low unit cost, and zero pilot mortality. But let’s face it: The PRC has always been known for throwing human bodies at the enemy; after all, they’ve got more of them than anyone else in the world. So why this sudden interest from them in cost-effective, user-friendly UAVs?”

“Maybe they’re not really interested. Maybe it’s like during the Cold War, when the Soviets used to park fake bombers on runways for our spy satellites to photograph. We spent billions developing countermeasures to a threat that never existed.”

“That’s possible…” Tomboy said. “I know there are people in the Pentagon who would consider it a blessing if more effort went into CUAV programs. Some people say CUAVs are the wave of the future — a natural extension of the success of cruise missiles and smart bombs.”

Tombstone shook his head. “People have been predicting for years that future wars would be fought by machine. At the beginning of the Vietnam war, American fighter jets didn’t even have guns because it was believed that missiles made dogfighting unnecessary. All it took was a bad kill ratio to bring things around. This is just another instance of that. There will always be the need for human beings on the front lines — including inside aircraft.”

“The Chinese seem to agree with you,” Tomboy said. “At least, judging by the fact they’ve got this other new aircraft out there, the flying wing.”

“That’s the one that scares me,” Tombstone said.

The officer in charge of the radar station on the mountain just outside of Hong Kong picked up the phone and dialed the number given to him the previous night by Major General Wei Ao, First Among Equals. I want to know the moment General Ming’s flight appears on your screen, Wei had said.

So now, after identifying himself, the officer in charge said, “General Ming’s transport is two hundred kilometers out, sir. He’s vectoring in to Kai Tak Airport rather than the Air Force base.”

“The quicker to arrive at garrison headquarters,” Wei grunted, as if to himself. “Very well.”

After hanging up, the officer in charge went back and stared at the radar screen, watching the incoming blip. General Ming had left Hong Kong for Beijing only a couple of days ago, and now he was back. This did not bode well for certain military people in Hong Kong. The officer was determined to keep his installation running in top form, lest he be caught unawares in some sort of snap inspection.

He was about to turn to other duties when he noticed something strange on the screen — a tiny, brief return registering perhaps twenty kilometers to the rear of General Ming’s plane. It brought his full attention immediately back. Only after he stared at the screen for several sweeps without seeing anything else did he start to relax. Suddenly a strong, clear return appeared out of nowhere behind Ming’s plane. A moment after that, two more blips appeared, close together, racing toward Ming’s plane.

Even as the station officer reached for the radio, he wondered how quickly he could disappear, as so many others had, into the teeming hive of Hong Kong.

Under the pretext of inspecting the repair work being done on the aft elevator, Bird Dog walked out onto the platform and took in the afternoon air. Odd, when you thought about it: Here they were in the open ocean, yet for those who worked and lived in the carrier, fresh air was an uncommon gift. When you were on deck you were stepping lively, concentrating on things, trying not to get killed by any of the myriad heavy, sharp, fast-moving objects around you. When you were belowdecks, the air was filtered, air-conditioned, flattened. And of course when you were in a Tomcat, you flew through the air but didn’t feel it on your skin.

He inhaled deeply and looked out across the South China Sea. The water surged past below, appearing to move faster than it really was. Whitecaps were beginning to appear on it, he saw. On the horizon, thunderheads rose like white cliffs crowned in rubble. The wind yanked at Bird Dog’s khakis, and he heard the sizzle and crackle of an arc welder at work behind him, but he didn’t react, didn’t turn.

He was miserable.

It was a terrible thing to lose pilots in a battle. Even worse when one of them had been shot down saving your ass. And worst of all when that pilot was… well, one of the best damned sticks in the U.S. Navy.

He thought again about the hydraulic failure in his wing. Beaman, his plane captain, had been checking the Tomcat out ever since Bird Dog thumped it back onto the carrier. “I’m still looking,” he said every time Bird Dog asked him what he’d found. Plane captains were fanatically — and blessedly — devoted to their aircraft, and so to the pilots who were allowed to borrow the machines from time to time.

After climbing out of the aircraft last night, Bird Dog had looked at the rear cockpit and surrounding area and felt suddenly nauseous. It wasn’t the blood, because there wasn’t any. It wasn’t even the sight of the motionless Catwoman, who was already being checked out by corpsmen. It was the realization that his plane had been destroyed. Half the canopy was gone, and the right wing looked like a colander. There was more air than metal left in that wing. Bird Dog had landed a pile of scrap on the carrier, and he had no idea how he had done it, or what had made him think he could.

In retrospect, he wondered how anyone could hope to figure out what had gone wrong with the control-surface hydraulics on the mangled wing. But Beaman, aided by damned near every hydraulics tech onboard the carrier, refused to give up. If the Tomcat had had a mechanical seizure in the air, the plane captain wanted to know why, and where, and how. And as soon as he figured it out…

Last night, Bird Dog had been ready to kill whoever was responsible for the hydraulic failure. There had been a time — it seemed a lifetime ago, somehow — when he would have ripped into anyone who might even be remotely involved. Now, he found himself hoping the cause turned out to be something purely mechanical, a failed part no one could have anticipated or prepared for. Because if it was human error, God help the poor kid responsible.

And it was easy to forget that these were kids, most of the technicians and mechanics. Eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds responsible for millions of dollars of equipment, and dozens — or thousands, indirectly — of lives.

If one of the kids had screwed up, he’d have more than the plane captain to contend with. More than an official inquiry. That kid would have to think about dead aviators for the rest of his life.

Dead pilots.

Stop that. You don’t know she’s dead.

Bird Dog stared across the sea, and on the eastern horizon, under the flat bottoms of the thunderheads, lightning drubbed the ocean with white, skeletal fingers.