Strike Zone

by Dale Brown

  “Too risky,” said Danny. “Those bullets can go through that wall like butter. Easier.”

  While they were wearing body armor, a hundred shots at very close range were bound to find something soft sooner or later. At this point, it was better to go a little slow rather than take any unnecessary risk.

  Danny switched his helmet’s com device to loudspeaker, and repeated the Mandarin word for surrender Dream Command had given him.

  There was no response.

  The language specialist at Dream Command suggested they tell the man he was under arrest, and gave him the phrase, which was rather long. Danny tried it.

  “Didn’t work, Coach.”

  “Try Cantonese.”

  “Give me the words.”

  To Danny, the phrase sounded nearly identical to the Mandarin: “Nay in joy bee ku boh”—néī yīn jōi bēi kùi bō.

  His pronunciation may not have been precise, and he couldn’t quite master the up-and-down bounce of the tonal language, but the captain did a good enough job to get an answer: A dozen slugs from the Minimi splattered through the hallway.

  “You had the wrong tense,” said the translator. “That was You have been arrested.”

  “Forget about it,” said Danny.

  “Let’s just fucking take the bastard out,” said Egg. “Demo the door.”

  “No. You got a flash-bang?” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can make him use up his ammo.”

  Egg rolled the stun grenade down the hallway, hunkering down as the loud bang and flash filled the corridor. The Taiwanese guard immediately began to fire his weapon; if he didn’t go through the entire box of slugs, he came pretty close. Danny waited until he stopped firing, then told Bison to toss another grenade. It bounced, rolled a bit, and then went off. Another fusillade of gunfire filled the hall.

  Danny trained his taser on the doorway, expecting that the man would run out into the hall, tired of being toyed with. But the guard showed admirable restraint.

  “Let’s smoke him out,” said Egg. “I’ll go down and pop a smoke grenade in.”

  “Not yet,” said Danny, fingering his own stun grenade. He set it, then underhanded it down the hall.

  The grenade boomed and flashed, but this time the guard did nothing.

  “Figured it out,” said Danny.

  “Or he’s out of ammo.”

  Danny put the visor in radar mode and went down the hall, half walking, half crouching. The man was still there, still staring at the door. Danny took out the telescoping IR viewer, angling to get an idea of what was left of the door. The center had been shot out, but the frame and lower portion remained intact.

  The man inside began firing again. Danny fell back as a slew of 5.56mm bullets laced up the corridor, the last few only inches away.

  No one would blame him now for saying the hell with the damn nonlethal crap. One conventional grenade—he had two—and the SOB and his stinking machine guns would be history.

  But he had his orders.

  “We’re going to use a variation of your plan,” Danny told Egg. “Post a flash-bang. When it goes off, I’ll toss in a smoke grenade. Nail the motherfucker with the tasers when he comes out.”

  “You going down that close?”

  “Bullet holes show where he can reach.”

  “Damn, Cap. Be careful he doesn’t shoot your hand off.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s go.”

  The grenade rolled down to the end of the hall. Danny pushed his head down, waiting. The helmet took some of the loud impact away, but the charge was still unsettling; he swung up and popped the grenade into the hole, slipping and losing his balance as he did.

  A shadow moved behind the doorway.

  Danny saw the barrel of the Minimi inches away.

  He pressed the trigger on his taser just as the first bullet flew from the Belgian-made gun. Something smacked him hard against the leg—then everything went blue, and he smelled fire.

  “Shit, shit,” Egg cursed, running up. He fired his taser at the door two, three times without a target.

  “He’s down, he’s down,” said Danny, seeing on his visor that his shot had knocked the Taiwanese guard back into the room. “I’m all right. Chill.”

  BY THE TIME Stoner got in with the Marines, the technical experts back at Dreamland had finished a preliminary analysis of Building Two. Aided by the data on the computer as well as their physical analysis, they had no doubt that one or two devices had been stored and probably assembled here.

  They also had no doubt that the devices were no longer in the building.

  The next logical place on the site was Building One, and Stoner sent a team inside with their rad meters and a video cam. But even before the feeds from their gear started back through the mobile transmitters, Stoner had climbed to the top of the administrative building, trying to figure out where else on the site the bomb might be.

  “How you doing?” asked Danny Freah, clambering up behind him.

  “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “Yeah. I’m going to let Zen and Colonel Bastian know what’s going on.”

  Stoner folded his arms, thinking.

  “I say we stop that ship right away.”

  Dreamland Command Center

  14 September 1997

  0935

  JENNIFER JOINED THE others in the command center after pulling an all-nighter working with the computer team on a Trojan horse virus to take over the ghost clone’s control system. Jennifer was convinced that the best bet was to simply block the communications, then try to insert some of the commands they’d intercepted. The problem was, they couldn’t be sure what those commands were, which meant they might succeed in stopping the clone from doing what its masters wanted, but not be able to have the clone do what they wanted.

  Jennifer took a seat at a station in the second row reserved for her use and began loading the necessary code into computer memory so it could be shipped out to Zen. As the CD-ROM spun, she popped open her notebook computer; she had some more code for the Flighthawk control computer aboard Raven, which would have to attempt the takeover.

  “And?”

  Jennifer looked up at Ray Rubeo, who was wearing his twenty-four-hours-with-no-sleep frown.

  “And is a conjunction,” said Jennifer. “You can’t use it alone.”

  “Can we take over the clone?”

  “Probably not,” she said frankly.

  Rubeo frowned.

  “Yes. Come look at this,” he told her, starting for one of the stations at the very front of the room, just below the large display screen. The bomb experts were reviewing coding from a computer at the Taiwan base.

  “It’s encrypted. We’re working with the NSA on it,” said one of the experts. “We’re feeding it back and forth. There’s a lot of technical data and inventory information. We want to see where to concentrate our resources; the encryption takes quite a while to get through.”

  “This block here is email,” said Jennifer. “Look at the structure. Tell them to look for the dates and times.”

  “Why?” asked Rubeo.

  “Maybe they’re instructions on when to do something, like launch an attack.”

  “They may just be love notes,” said Rubeo, scowling.

  Even though he meant it as one of his acerbic remarks, the idea stung Jennifer.

  “Maybe,” she said, looking over to the screen where the decryptions were appearing.

  Aboard Raven

  15 September 1997

  0040

  ZEN HADHAWK Four posted to the north, ready to intercept the ghost clone if it got off. He swung Hawk Three down, readying a pass that would take him from bow to stern and give the people back at Dreamland a good view of the ship, which was about forty miles out of the harbor. The Navy destroyers, meanwhile, were still a good hour away to the south.

  The E-bomb had successfully wiped out the radios back at the assault zone; Raven’s powerful sensors had not picked up any transmi
ssions from the Dragon Prince. It seemed clear that the ship did not know what was going on; its speed was below ten knots. Except for its normal running lights, the deck and the area where it launched the ghost were dark.

  Zen checked his speed, nudging off the throttle slightly as the ship grew in the screen. The HUD ladder notched downward; he dropped through five thousand feet. The Flighthawk engines were relatively quiet, but at this altitude the aircraft could be heard; Zen figured that was a reasonable trade-off for the better images the lower altitude would provide.

  As he closed to five miles off the bow, the water on the starboard side of the boat bubbled. His first thought was that the crew aboard the Dragon Prince had thrown the robot aircraft overboard; a few seconds later another geyser appeared on the port side, and Zen finally realized what was going on.

  “Submarines,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. “Two of ’em. Those ours?”

  Two people started to answer at once, and Dog said something over the interphone circuit. Zen kept Hawk Three on beam, riding in over the tanker.

  There were people moving now aboard the ship. Something flashed at the stern—Zen saw a small rubber boat in the water near the bow.

  “They’re being boarded,” he said. “The Chinese.”

  Aboard Penn

  0041

  AS SOON AS the Marines secured the wharf area, Kick took Hawk One over the water. He saw some flotsam where he’d sunk the boat earlier, and one body; as he began to bank for another run, he saw two small speedboats approaching from the distance. The dark, sleek hulls looked like very much like Mark V Special Operations Crafts (also known as SOCs), used to land SEALs.

  “Two un-ID’d boats,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. He clicked into one of the frequencies the Marines were using. “I have two unidentified boats approaching from the harbor, moving at twenty-three knots, twenty-four. I want to make sure they’re not ours.”

  “I’ll work on it,” interrupted Starship, buzzing in on the interphone circuit. “Take a pass and get some video back for Dreamland.”

  “Yeah, good thinking,” said Kick. He pulled the Flighthawk around, accelerating as he set up a pass that would take him across their bows.

  STARSHIP HIT THE keyboard preset and brought up the infrared on the approaching boats. The heat signal from the engines was baffled—these were not pleasure cruisers, and they certainly weren’t Americans.

  “I say we nail the mothers,” he told Kick.

  “Marines are checking with their captain. What’s Dream Command say?”

  “Screw Dreamland,” said Starship. “They’re scientists back there. Get these guys.”

  As he finished his sentence, a flare shot from the stern of one of the boats.

  Not a flare—a shoulder-launched weapon.

  KICK SAW THE missile’s ignition and knew it was coming for him; as the thought formed in his head another jumped in—scumbag.

  A jumble of other thoughts and images came in quick succession, the most important of which was the realization that the missile, fired at his nose, had no chance in hell of hitting him.

  “Guns,” he told the computer, activating the gun radar. The screen blinked red—he had the small boat’s midsection fat in the claws of his targeting pipper.

  The trigger on the Flighthawk stick had a long run, a precaution against it being fired accidentally. He nailed it all the way down, and a burst of 20mm shells punched a fat hole in the boat’s midsection.

  “Get the other mother,” said Starship.

  “Yeah, no shit,” said Kick. He tried pirouetting the Flighthawk on her wing but had too much speed to get the right position; he had to nose down and bank around, far out of position and cursing himself for trying to do too much.

  Not too much for the plane. He’d seen both Zen and Starship pull that hard a maneuver several times during various flight exercises. He didn’t quite have the right feel for it; he wasn’t really sure where the performance edge was, and maybe hesitated a little as he got near it.

  Not a problem, he told himself. He didn’t have to fly like Zen did, or even Starship. His job was to take the boat.

  And that could be done very easily.

  STARSHIP SNICKERED TO himself as Kick tried to get on the second boat in the first pass; it was obvious from the screen that he hadn’t set himself up right for the hard slam downward that it would require to pirouette the Flighthawk back in that direction. Sure enough, Kick had to pull off and get into a wider approach.

  Dream Command said something about the boat being ID’d as a Mainland commando group.

  They had carte blanche to take it out.

  About time, he thought.

  “Sink the boats,” said Colonel Bastian, breaking in from Raven. “Take them.”

  “Roger that,” said Starship. “We’re on it.”

  As he clicked off his mike, he realized he’d covered Kick’s own acknowledgment.

  “Sorry about that, roomie,” he muttered as the cannon in the U/MF lit up.

  Aboard Raven

  0045

  DOG STUDIED THE feed on the small video screen as Zen finished his sweep. There was gunfire on the port side and stern of the Dragon Prince; two or more parties of commandos were aboard the ship. Most likely they had launched their operation from some distance away, and then waited for the submarines to close in before going aboard. The effort appeared coordinated with an attack on the Kaohisiung plant; fortunately, Dreamland’s schedule had been a half hour ahead of the Mainlander’s.

  Dog had no trouble giving approval to take out the Chinese boats attacking Kaohisiung himself; it was necessary to protect his people and clearly authorized by his governing orders. The situation below, however, was not quite so clear-cut. The Navy destroyers that were supposed to assist had been authorized only to stop the ship, with the minimal amount of force required to make it comply.

  Given the circumstances, however, Dog decided he had to take out the clone and the ship or the UAV would fall into communist hands.

  “I can pepper the submarines with cannonfire,” Zen told Dog. “Get them to back off until the destroyers get here.”

  “Negative, Hawk leader. It’s too late for that. We’re going to sink that ship. Stand off.”

  Dog told Delaney to open the bay doors.

  “Bays,” said the copilot, who functioned as a weapons officer in the slimmed-down crew structure.

  The large rotating bomb rack in the bay of the aircraft spun around, preparing to launch one of the two Harpoon missiles aboard. While the AGM-84 (Block 1D) missile had been developed by the Navy, B-52s had actually carried the tried-and-true antiship missile for more than a decade. A noodge over twelve and a half feet long, the missile carried five hundred pounds of explosives in its nose. Designed as a fire-and-forget weapon that could be launched from at least seventy-five nautical miles away, the Harpoon would duck toward the waves and then skim the surface of the ocean, extremely hard to detect and even harder to stop.

  “Ready to launch on your command,” said Delaney.

  “Jed Barclay in the Pentagon situation room for you,” interrupted Major Catsman at Dream Command. “You want Channel Two. It’s scrambled.”

  “Jed, make it quick,” said Dog as the NSC aide’s face flickered onto the com screen.

  “Colonel, we’re monitoring the situation here at the Pentagon.”

  “Then you know I have two Chinese submarines taking over the ship that controls the ghost clone,” said Dog, trying in vain to muzzle his anger. “They have to be stopped now.”

  “Stand by,” said Jed.

  “What the hell?” said Delaney.

  The defense secretary came on the line.

  “Colonel, we don’t want you to hit the Chinese submarines.”

  “Understood,” said Dog. “That’s why we have to strike right away.”

  Modern communications technology could be a blessing—he had a team of highly trained experts backing him up halfway across the globe at Dr
eamland. But it also gave the Washington types unprecedented ability to screw things up.

  “We can’t afford collateral damage,” added Chastain.

  “Look,” said Dog, his patience nearly gone. “I have about thirty seconds to decide whether to try to sink the tanker or not. If the robot plane is aboard, the communist commandos will grab it.”

  “Colonel, we’re on their radar,” said Delaney, breaking in. “This may be some sort of unbriefed fire control radar—the computer is doping it out as an SA-6. Has to be a mistake… ”

  The SA-6 was a Russian-made ground-based antiaircraft missile; there was no way it could be aboard the Chinese submarine.

  Then again, this wasn’t a particularly good time to be wrong.

  “You’re cleared to take down the Dragon Prince,” said the defense secretary.

  “Fire the Harpoon,” Dog told his copilot. Then reached to the panel and killed the connection to Dreamland—and the Pentagon. “Missile status?”

  “I’ve gone to ECMs. Computer says those subs carry no missiles.”

  “Is it on the tanker?”

  “Searching.”

  “Zen, can you get a look at the decks of those submarines?”

  “Roger that,” acknowledged the Flighthawk pilot.

  “Watch out for the Harpoon,” warned Delaney. “It’s terminal.”

  “No shit,” said Zen.

  ZEN CHECKED HAWK Four as he banked Three back to- ward the tanker, making sure the computer was doing a good job flying the robot. Systems green, course perfect—he jumped back into Three, zooming in toward the ship. The right side of the tanker flared.

  “Harpoon hit,” he told Dog.

  “Negative!” said Delaney. “It’s still en route.”

  Zen saw the shadow streaking toward the middle of the tanker at the bottom of his screen, then realized what had happened as the tanker exploded.