End Game (18 page)

“We are three miles from Karachi,” announced the submarine commander. “We're ahead of schedule.”

“Very good,” said Sattari.

“There are no ships near us. Would you like to surface?”

A short respite on the surface would be welcome. To breathe fresh air, if only for a moment—Sattari was tempted to say yes, and felt the eyes of the others staring at him, hoping.

But it would increase the risk of being spotted. They were too close now, too close.

“No. We will have fresh air soon enough. Push on,” Sattari said.

Aboard the
Levitow
,
over the northern Arabian Sea
0243

B
REANNA IGNORED THE CHALLENGE FROM THE
C
HINESE AIRCRAFT
, staying on course in Pakistani coastal waters. She had to drop a buoy soon or risk losing the inputs from the Piranha, which was trailing the submarine following the Chinese aircraft carrier. But she didn't want to drop the buoy while the J-13s were nearby; it might tip off the Chinese to the fact that the submarine was being followed.

“Levitow,
this is Piranha,” said Ensign English. “Bree, I can't stay with the submarine much longer. I'm slowing the Piranha down, but the submarine will sail out of range within a half hour.”

“All right, I have an idea,” Breanna told her. “Flighthawk leader, can you run
Hawk Three
south about eighteen miles and pickle a flare?”

“Repeat?” said Mack.

“I want to get the J-13s off my back. They'll shoot over to check out the flares, don't you think?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Throw some chaff, too, so their radars know something's there. Let's do it quick—we don't have much time.”

“I'm going, Captain. Keep your blouse on.”

Breanna shook her head, then glanced at her copilot. Stewart was doing a little better than she had the other day, keeping track of the Chinese patrols as well as a flight of Pakistani F-16s that were roughly twenty minutes flying time to their north. But Stewart still had a ways to go. The copilot in the EB-52 had a great deal to do; in some respects her job was actually harder than the pilot's. In a B-52 four crewmen worked the navigational and weapons systems. Computers aboard the EB-52 might have taken over a great deal of their work, but someone still had to supervise the computers.

“How you doing, Jan?”

“I'm with you.”

“I'm going to have Mack toss some flares south of us. Hopefully the J-13s will go in that direction and we can drop a buoy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm going to take us down through three thousand feet so we're ready to drop the buoy. When I give you the signal, I want you to hit the ECMs—I'm going to make it look like we're reacting to the flares that Mack lights, as if we're worried about being under attack. Then you launch. All right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Are you all right, Captain?”

“I'm
all right!
”

Breanna turned her attention back to the sky in front of her, lining up for the buoy drop.

 

M
ACK POINTED HIS NOSE TOWARD THE SKY AND RODE THE
Flighthawk south. Neither of the Chinese J-13s dogging the Megafortress followed. The Chinese navy had encountered Flighthawks before, and referred to them as “Lei Gong”—
the name of an ancient Chinese thunder god, which Mack supposed was a compliment. But it wasn't clear from the J-13s' actions whether they knew he was there.

Mack continued to climb, meanwhile plotting out what he would do. The Chinese aircraft carrier was thirty-two miles away, off his right wing as he flew south. Karachi was ten miles almost directly opposite his left wing. The Indian aircraft carrier was about fifty miles south from the Chinese carrier. An assortment of small escorts were scattered between them, including the Chinese submarine, which was submerged south of Karachi in Pakistani waters.

“All right, Bree, light show begins in ten seconds,” he said, reaching his mark. “Get ready.”

“Make it a good one.”

 

“S
UKHOIS
—I
MEAN
, J-13
S
,
THE
C
HINESE PLANES
—
THEY
'
RE
biting for it. They're going south,” said Stewart, eyes pasted to the radar plot.

“Buoys!” said Breanna.

Stewart tapped the panel to ready a control buoy for the Piranha. She missed the box and had to tap it again.

Why was everything so hard on this deployment? Back at Dreamland she'd done this sort of thing with her eyes closed. She'd driven B-1s through sandstorms and everything else without a single problem. But she was all thumbs now.

Maybe it was Captain Stockard, breathing down her neck. Breanna just didn't like her for some reason. Maybe she resented working for another woman.

“Buoy!”

Stewart put her forefinger on the release button and pushed. A control buoy spun out of the rear fuselage, deploying from a special compartment behind the bomb bay, added to the planes after the Piranha had become part of the Dreamland tool set.

“ECMs,” said Breanna. “I'll take the chaff.”

Stewart realized she'd forgotten the stinking ECMs. They should have already been fuzzing the airwaves.

“I'm trying, I'm trying,” she said, hands fumbling against the controls.

 

M
ACK JERKED THE LITTLE
F
LIGHTHAWK TO THE WEST
,
LEAVING
a trail of fire and tinsel behind him. He tucked the plane into a roll and then put its nose down, flying it so hard that the tail threatened to pull over on him in a cartwheel. The Flighthawk didn't peep about it, merely trying to keep up with the dictates of the control stick.

The J-13s were racing toward him, wondering what was going on.

If he pushed the nose of the fighter down right now, and slammed the aircraft exactly ninety degrees due east, slammed max power and went for broke, he could take a shot at one of the Chinese planes. If he timed it properly—and if C
³
worked out the angle right—he would slash the fighter across its wings.

This was not the sort of attack you'd make in an F-15. For one thing, you'd never get close enough to use your guns. For another, the g forces as you changed direction to bring the attack would slam you so hard you'd have to struggle to keep your head clear. And…

Mack remembered something Cantor had told him during their sortie over the Gulf of Aden:
You're not flying an F-15.
He felt a twinge of anger, and then, far worse, embarrassment.

The punk kid was right. If he really wanted to fly the stinking Flighthawk, he would have to forget everything he knew about flying F-15s or anything other than the Flighthawk. He was going to have to live with its limits—and take advantage of its assets.

And, umpteen kills to his credit or not, he was going to have to face the fact that he had a lot to learn. He was a newbie when it came to the Flighthawk.

“No more F-15s,” he told the plane. “Just U/MF-3s.”

“Repeat command,” answered the flight computer.

“It's you and me, babe. Just you and me.”

 

B
REANNA JERKED THE
M
EGAFORTRESS BACK AND FORTH
across the water, shimmying and shaking as if she thought she was being followed by an SA-6 antiair missile. Finally she eased up, putting the plane into a banking climb and heading back to the west.

“English, how are we looking?” she said to the ensign.

“Buoy is good. I have control.”

“Great.”

“But…”

“But?”

“I have a contact at long range, submerged, unknown source. There's another sub out there,” explained English. “Except that the sound profile doesn't match anything I know. Which is almost impossible.”

“Did the Chinese sub launch a decoy?”

“We would have caught that. It's not a known Pakistani sub either. I'd like to follow it, but I can't watch the Chinese submarine and this at the same time.”

“Stand by,” Breanna told her. “I'll talk to Captain Gale.”

Aboard the
Abner Read
,
in the northern Arabian Sea
0301

S
TORM STUDIED THE HOLOGRAM
. T
HE
C
HINESE AIRCRAFT
carrier
Deng Xiaoping
and the Indian carrier
Shiva
were pointing their bows at each other, boxers jutting out their chins and daring their opponent to start something. The Indian carrier had eight planes in the air, along with two ASW; antisubmarine helicopters. The Chinese had twelve planes up, plus two helicopters supplying long-range radar and three on ASW duty.

Two destroyers and one frigate accompanied the Chinese vessel, along with a submarine being tracked by Dreamland's Piranha. The Indians had one destroyer, an old frigate, and two coastal corvettes, which were a little
smaller than frigates but were packed with ship-to-ship missiles. The edge went to the Chinese, whose gear was newer and, though largely untested, probably more potent. But at a range of fifty miles, where both task forces could rely on antiship missiles as well as their aircraft, the battle would be ferocious.

And if both navies were to turn on him, rather than each other?

The problem would not be hitting them—he was thirty-five miles to the west of the two carriers, well within range of his Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles; the ship-to-air SM-2 missiles, packed in a Vertical Launching System at the forward deck, could take down an airplane at roughly ninety miles and hit a ship at the same distance. The problem was that there were simply too many targets—the
Abner Read
had only sixteen vertical launch tubes on her forward deck, and while they could be loaded with torpedoes, antiair or antiship missiles, the weapons mix had to be preselected before battle. Reloading was a laborious undertaking and could not be done during a fight.

Storm had eight Harpoons and eight antiaircraft missiles loaded.

Precisely how many missiles it would take to sink either of the carriers was a matter of immense debate and countless computer simulations. According to the intel experts back at the Pentagon, precise hits by four Harpoons should be enough to disable the Indian carrier; the Chinese ship could be crippled with three. In neither case would the ships be sunk—the Indian vessel was known to have been up-armored at the waterline—but the hits would disable enough of their systems to take them out of a battle and leave them highly vulnerable to a second round of attacks to take them to the bottom.

None of the so-called experts had been in battle, however; Storm had, and he suspected their estimates were optimistic. Two months ago it had taken four Harpoons to sink
an old Russian amphibious warfare ship that had light defenses and no appreciable armor. Storm and his officers had concluded that it would take at least six very well-placed missile hits to permanently disable either one of the vessels. The real question was how many missiles it would take to get six hits. The answer depended not only on the proficiency of the people firing the missiles and the defenses they faced, but sheer luck. The intel officer threw around some fancy mathematics he called regression analysis and claimed that seven launches would yield six hits, but Storm knew he was just guessing like everyone else.

Missiles were not the
Abner Read
's only weapon. Storm could use his below-waterline tubes to fire torpedoes at a submarine, and his 155mm gun to hit a surface ship that came within twenty-two miles. His accompanying Sharkboat had four Harpoons and a much more limited 25mm gun. And then there were the Megafortresses…

“Tac to bridge—Storm,
Dreamland Levitow
needs to talk to you right away. Piranha's picked up another submarine contact.”

Storm hit the switch on his belt and opened the com channel. “Talk to me, Dreamland.”

“The Piranha operator has an unknown contact near Karachi,” said Breanna Stockard. “I'm going to let her fill you in.”

“Do it.”

Another voice came on the line—Ensign Gloria English, who'd been assigned to wipe the Dreamland team's noses.

“Captain Gale, we have an unknown contact near the Karachi port, two miles south of the oil terminal. It appears to be headed toward shore. I can't follow it and the Chinese submarine at the same time.”

“It's going toward shore?”

“Affirmative. I'm going to punch in the coordinates through the shared-information system. They should be there—now.”

Storm looked at the holographic table. A small yellow dot appeared near the coast, roughly twenty miles from the Chinese submarine. Given the direction it was heading, he knew it might be a Pakistani vessel.

Or an Indian boat preparing an attack?

It seemed too far for that.

“Ensign English—what sort of submarine is it?” asked Storm.

“Sir, I can only tell you what it isn't. It's not a Kilo boat, it's not anything the Pakistanis have, at least that we know of. Same with the Indians.”

“You're
sure
it's not Indian?”

“I tried matching against German Type 209s, Kilos, and Foxtrots,” she said, naming the three types of submarines in the Indian fleet. “No match. I even tried comparing the profile to the Italian CE-f/X1000s. Nada.”

“Help me out here, Ensign. What are those Italian boats?”

“Two-man special forces craft, submersibles. They only have a range of twenty-five miles, but I thought I better be sure. I checked comparable Russian craft as well.”

Was this the boat that had launched the torpedo at the Indian destroyer and taken the special forces teams in and out of Port Somalia?

If so, it was a Pakistani vessel, returning to port.

Not port, exactly. Storm looked at the hologram. There was no submarine docking area anywhere near Karachi.