Dreamland: Piranha

by Dale Brown

  The policemen argued it was time to leave. Danny exchanged glances with his two men, then told the Yugs they were going in.

  “Fine,” said one of the policemen. “We’ll wait out here.”

  More than likely, they were just being paranoid, but you could never tell. The building had to be inspected and it had to be inspected now.

  Danny and his men were dressed in fatigues with armored vests, but weren’t carrying rifles. They could and would call on air support if things got crazy, probably cancel the meeting tomorrow, and set the process back considerably.

  He left his Beretta in its holster, trying to play it as innocently as possible. The door squeaked on its jamb as he pushed inside, and a bell at the corner of the frame rang, but there was no one in sight. He walked in, boots creaking against the old floorboards—there was a basement; they’d have to investigate.

  Danny had memorized a set of cumbersome phrases in Serbo-Croatian, meant more to show he was friendly than to really communicate. He rehearsed one—“Vrlo mi je drago što vas vidim,” or roughly, “pleased to meet you”—as he walked toward a glass display counter about three quarters of the way back in the room. The display was empty, as were the shelves nearby. The place had a slightly sweet smell to it, the sort of scent that might come from cooking cabbage. The faint odor mixed with something more like dirt or mud.

  Something moved on his right. He spun, his hands down near his belt and gun.

  A figure came from behind a tattered curtain, a thin shadow. He thought it was a boy at first, then realized it was a girl, a young woman really. Maybe five-one, barely ninety pounds. Her hair was very short, unusual for the area.

  “Vrlo mi” he started, faltering almost immediately with the pronunciation. He had memorized a phrase for “are you the owner?”—“da li ste sopstvenik?” which was intended to apply to the taxi drivers. He tried to remember it, but before he could, the girl held her hands in front of her, then backed away.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, putting up his own hand.

  The girl stopped. The store was unlit, making it difficult to see her face well, but Danny thought she had understood what he said.

  “We’re just Americans. Yanks,” he told her. “United States. U.S. We just, uh, looking around. Do you have anything to sell?”

  It was lame, but it was all he could think of. Powder, who was a few feet behind him, said they were looking for coffee.

  “Powder,” said Danny. “This isn’t a deli.”

  “Hey, Cap, you never know. I could go for a good hit of joe right now.”

  “We just want to look around,” Danny told the girl. “Okay?”

  she stared at him, and then nodded, or seemed to nod.

  “You stay with her. Powder, while I check out the stairs.”

  “You sure, Cap?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The urge to take out his gun was overwhelming, but Danny managed to resist, determined to show the young woman he meant no harm. He walked toward an open staircase at the side of the room. A candle and matches were on a small ledge at the base of the steps; he lit them, then, calling ahead, went upstairs. In the glow of the candle, Danny saw the floor of a large room was covered with bird shit; he looked up and saw little remained of the roof. Still, he walked far enough inside to make sure no one was hiding in the shadows, then returned to where Powder was monitoring the young woman.

  “Basement next, Powder.”

  “Yes, Cap.”

  In the basement, Danny found a mattress and some bedclothes about four feet from the bottom step. There was nothing else; no furnace, no washing machine, not even a store of food—just the stone and dirt walls of the foundation.

  Danny relaxed a bit as he walked back up the stairs. Idiot policemen were probably just anxious to go home—

  or more likely, complete whatever black-market transaction was waiting for them near the checkpoint. Smuggling was a common sideline for the authorities here.

  Once back on the main floor, Danny started toward the door, then remembered he hadn’t looked beyond the torn curtain the girl had emerged from.

  As he turned and took a few steps toward the concealed area, Powder said something, then shouted. Totally by instinct, Danny ducked as the woman charged past his sergeant. He reached out and grabbed her leg, sending her tumbling against the shelves. A small revolver fell from her hand.

  “Shit,” said Powder.

  Now standing, Danny clamped his foot on the woman’s arm. The two Yugoslavian policemen charged inside, raking the ceiling with submachine guns. After shouts from the Americans finally managed to calm them, one of the policemen grabbed the woman and hauled her out. Danny—pistol now out—pulled back the curtain.

  A boy, three of four years old, sat on the floor in the middle of a small, squalid kitchen, his thumb in his mouth.

  By the time Danny got outside, the young woman was gone, and several policemen had poured out of the station next door. As Danny tried to sort out the situation, one of the policemen had said the woman was a known Muslim. Danny tried to find out what would happen to her, but was ignored. Finally, he and his men had no option but to leave. The meeting between the UN and government officials was never held.

  Powder had grabbed the pistol and found three bullets loaded, but the firing pug was broken and it probably couldn’t have fired.

  Months later, Danny saw a Reuters news story about bodies being unearthed in a field near the same village. There was murky photo of a recently opened ditch. In the corner of the photo were the bodies of a young woman and a small boy, both nude.

  Was it the woman and her son? The photo was too poor for him to tell. They could have been anyone in that war, any of a thousand victims, mother and child, sister and brother, innocents slain because of religion, or revenge, or just for the hell of it. It was the reason the U.S. got involved in the first place; to stop shit like that from happening, but reasons, and intentions, and the future didn’t make much difference to the people in that ditch.

  Aboard Iowa, over the South China Sea

  1600

  As she poked into a solid wall of rain just over the ocean, Dog slid Iowa back down through the clouds, holding her steady through a series of buffeting winds. Piranha was ready to dance, but they couldn’t find her a partner; the Navy ASW planes with their sonar buoys had been delayed. Delaford said the Indian sub captain might try to take advantage of the weather to snorkel and recharge batteries. So, with nothing else to, they were trying to find him on the surface. The laborious process of running tracks over the empty water hadn’t yielded any results, however, and Colonel Bastian was starting to feel tired.

  “I felt that yawn over here, Colonel,” said the copilot. “I thought we were heading into a hurricane.”

  “Very funny, Rosen. Just keep tabs on those Sukhois.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

  “We’re not in the Navy yet,” Dog told him.

  “No, but we’re low enough to be a ship,” said the copilot. It was only a slight exaggeration—they were at a thousand feet, using every sensor they had, including their eyes.

  “Shark Ears,” the Navy Orion with the sonar buoys, checked in. They were still a good forty minutes away.

  “Maybe we should set up a refuel,” suggested Rosen. “Extend our patrol and come back and work with them for a while, assuming they don’t totally scrub because of the weather. It’s pretty rough down there, and it’s going to get worse.”

  “Good idea,” said Dog.

  The tanker was flying a track well to the north east. With the help of Iowa’s sophisticated flight computer system, Rosen quickly plotted a course to rendezvous about thirty minutes away. Eager to get away from the water and the severe weather below, Dog leaned back on the stick and the airplane bolted upright. The air was fairly clear away from the leading edge of the storm, their view unimpeded.

  “We may have a contact on the surface,” said Rosen. “Ten miles, two degrees east o
f our nose, just about in our face.”

  Dog immediately began to level off and nudge toward the contact. Delaford, monitoring the feeds on his equipment downstairs, couldn’t find anything. Dog swung Iowa around, holding the Megafortress on her wing, and cruised over the coordinates at about a thousand feet.

  “If there was something there, it’s gone now,” said Delaford finally. “I don’t think we should launch Piranha until we have something more definite.”

  “I concur,” said Rosen.

  “All right. Let’s give Shark Ears this point as a reference,” said Dog. “In the meantime, let’s go tank.”

  As they started to climb once again, the two Chinese fighters flying over the nearest aircraft carriers changed their course.

  “Looks like we’ve finally aroused some curiosity,” said Rosen. “Their new course will put them in visual range in eight minutes.”

  There was no pressing need to refuel, so Dog decided not to lead the fighters out to the tanker. He told Rosen to cancel the rendezvous for now, and resumed what was essentially a holding pattern just over the worst of the storm. Big fists of gray clouds ran north west by south east for as long as the eye could see; a light haze sat to the northeast of the front, a dark blanket to the southwest where the storm was coming from.

  The Chinese planes weren’t moving particularly fast, an indication they weren’t intending hostile action, though there were no guarantees. Rosen tried hailing them at twenty miles, but to no one’s surprise, the Chinese pilots did not respond. A second two-ship of Sukhois was also heading out, a few minutes behind the first. Their carriers were just a little ahead of the storm, and it occurred to Dog the Sukhois wouldn’t be able to spend all that much time with them if they didn’t want to land in the teeth of the heavy weather.

  The enhanced optical feed from the Megafortress’s chin camera caught the lead Sukhoi at ten miles. The computer ID’d the missiles under its wings as R-73s, known to NATO as Archers. They were heat-seekers with excellent off-boresight capability, at least, in theory, better than all but the latest-model Sidewinders at sniffing out heat sources. They could be launched from any angle, including head-on.

  Which was pretty much were they were now.

  “Six miles and closing,” said Rosen. “Man, it pees me off they won’t answer our hails. I’ve been practicing my Chinese and everything.”

  “Just keep tracking,” Dog told him.

  The two lead Chinese fighters broke to Iowa’s right about a mile ahead of them, turning in a wide circle. Not coincidentally, the move put them in an excellent position to close and then fire their heat-seekers, though they made no obvious move to do so.

  “Computer thinks the second group of Sukhois is packing Exocets,” said Rosen, referring to the second flight of Sukhois. “Optical IDs are not perfect.”

  “Could be they’re hoping we have a line on the Indian sub,” said Dog. He kept Iowa steady as the second group of planes abruptly tipped their wings and shot downward toward the water. The nearest civilian ship was about two miles behind them; the Chinese fighters showed no interest in the tanker.

  “What do we do if they sink him?” Rosen asked.

  “I guess we take notes,” said Dog. “Delaford, how good are Exocets against submarines?”

  “I’d say next to useless, unless something keeps the sub on the surface for an extended period. You saw what happened the other day,” said the Navy commander. “The helicopters are what they’d really want out here, but we’re too far from the carrier group for them to operate comfortably. It’s just not in their normal doctrine.”

  “Then why did they blow it the other day?” Dog asked.

  “Well, they probably had the planes in the air, just like now, and decided to take their best shot. My guess now is they were planning to land soon anyway, they saw us dip down like we found something, so they decided to come out and see what’s up. We’re close to a hundred miles from the carrier, which is beyond the range of conventional submarine torpedoes. So, this far from the carrier, a submarine ordinarily wouldn’t be a threat, unless it was one of ours or maybe a Russian. See, that’s why Kali is so significant; it changes the equation for them.”

  “Hey, I have a question,” said Rosen. “Why didn’t the Chinese submarine take out the Indian sub the other day?”

  “Assuming it didn’t,” said Delaford, “since we don’t really know what happened under the water, my bet is that it was returning from the Indian Ocean and had fired all of its torpedoes earlier. Three ships sank out there last week.”

  “So why didn’t the Indian sub fire at the Chinese?” asked Dog.

  “Again, we’re assuming they didn’t,” said Delaford. “We don’t know what happened under the water later. But given that, my guess is the sub wasn’t a big enough target. They’d want the carrier. Or their orders didn’t call for firing on a combat vessel unless they were specifically attacked. They hadn’t fired on one.”

  “Still haven’t,” said Dog.

  “Right.”

  “Our Orion ASW plane is twenty minutes away,” said Rosen. “Tomcats are reporting they have Sukhois on their scopes at long range.”

  “Quite a party,” said Delaford.

  “Lay it out for them,” Dog said. before Rosen finished, however, the Sukhois had changed course to return to their carrier.

  Iowa directed the Navy sub hunter to the spot were they’d had the tentative contact. Twenty minutes later, Shark Ears reported a contact.

  There was only one problem—it was a Russian sub.

  “They know this guy,” Delaford reported. “It’s a Victor III. May just be keeping tabs on things, or not.”

  “Nothing else?” Dog asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  Aboard Shiva in the South China Sea

  1630

  Kali was the goddess of destruction, Shiva’s wife, the embodiment of the idea that true life begins only with death.

  It was an apt name for a weapon, and a perfect name for the missiles in Shiva’s forward tubes.

  Admiral Balin looked again at the chart where their position had been plotted. Balin studied the map carefully; his target should lay just within the range of his weapons, though he still needed fresh coordinates to fire.

  The Vikrant and her escorts would be twenty-four hours away. It was time.

  Varja remained with the radio man, translating the coordinates received by the ELF. ELF—extremely-low-frequency—transmissions were, by technical necessity, brief, but this one did not need to contain much information—simply a set of coordinates and a time. With those few numbers, the device could be launched. Once fired, the weapon was on its own, relying first on its stored data to take it to the target area, then using its low-probability-of-intercept radar to take it the rest of the way. As their earlier tests had shown, as long as the target ship was within five miles when the radar activated, it would be hit.

  “Precisely as the earlier coordinates predicted,” said Varja finally. “It is a good day, Admiral.”

  Balin watched the crewman mark the map, then nodded.

  “Launch in three minutes,” said Captain Varja, passing the word to the weapons controllers and the men in the torpedo room.

  Aboard Iowa

  1645

  “Sharks Ears reporting possible contact,” said Rosen.

  He gave Dog a set of coordinates almost due north, taking them rougly parallel to the Chinese carrier task force about forty miles away. And Australian container ship was plying the seas about ten miles ahead of them, going roughly in the direction of the carriers, though undoubtedly it would steer well clear as it approached.

  As Iowa changed direction and waited for an update, another set of Sukhois came over to check them out. Unlike the earlier pilots, there jocks were cowboys, clicking on their gun radars at long range. The Tomcats riding shotgun for the Navy patrol plane further south didn’t particularly appreciate the gesture, though they maintained good discipline, staying in their escort
pattern. They could afford to, knowing they could splash the Su-33’s in maybe ten seconds flat if that was what they decided to do; the Chinese planes were well within reach of their long-legged Phoenix missiles.

  “Contact—I have—a launch—two launches,” said Rosen suddenly. “Shit—tracking—we have a cruise missile—two cruise missiles, breaking the surface. Fifty miles, bearing on nine-zero, exactly nine-zero.”

  There was no time to consider whether the missiles were aimed at the Chinese carrier or the Australian ships; both were in range.

  “Target Scorpions,” said Dog.