Dreamland: Piranha

by Dale Brown

  “Hawk Leader, we’re ready for your run.”

  “Copy that,” Fentress sounded a lot like Zen over the radio, though the two men could not have been more different. Fentress was rail-thin, and looked like he’d fall over in a breeze. Zen looked like a running back, and except for his legs, might be in as good shape. Personality-wise, Fentress bordered on flighty, though while flying the UM/Fs, he made an effort to project a calm, almost cold, demeanor.

  “Feeding you video,” said Fentress.

  The island came into sharp focus as the Flighthawk approached, the optical feed was at maximum magnification, making objects ten times larger than in real life. The U/MF was at five thousand feet for its first run, still relatively high.

  Nothing from the village—no small-arms fire, no shoulder-launched SAMs. Good.

  “Teams, move forward,” said Danny as the plane came in. “Confirm when you reach Alpha Point.”

  He told the helo pilot to move forward also. A slight twinge of adrenaline hit his stomach; he leaned against his restraints as the chopper pushed toward its own Alpha Point near the coastline.

  The IR feed on the Flighthawk’s next run painted the village as a green sepia Currier & Ives scene, assuming structure that might not have sides, a fenced area, probably for animals. He saw something that looked like a goat, but no people yet.

  No people? Shit.

  “ready,” reported Liu.

  “You guys are cheatin’,” said Powder. “They must’ve gotten a head start.”

  “Powder,” said Danny.

  “We’re ready,” said the sergeant. So were the other teams.

  “Hawk Leader. I need that low-and-slow run, give me your best shot,” said Danny. “Three and Four, move in, I’ll locate the natives for you in a second.”

  “Machine gun,” said Bison.

  “Everybody gold. Hold!”

  Danny keyed the feed from Bison’s helmet to his, but he couldn’t make out what Bison had spotted.

  “You sure, Bison?”

  “I got something moving, Cap,” said Powder.

  “What’s going on?” said Stoner.

  Danny held up his hand, needing him to be quiet. He was in automatic mode now, punching buttons. The scram of things had a swirling logic of their own and you wanted to keep yourself on the edge, away from the whirlpool.

  “Everyone hold on,” Danny told his people. “Hawk Leader, we’re ready for you now, Captain.”

  “Hawk Leader,” acknowledged Fentress.

  The Flighthawk dropped to a hundred feet over the island, literally at treetop level. Though it was moving slow for an aircraft—just under 150 knots—the feed nonetheless blew by in a blur. Danny calmly hit the freeze frame as the first building came in view.

  Three figures in one hut, one figure in another. Four, maybe five in the pen.

  Three more up near Squad Four.

  “Floyd, you have three natives on your right, above that ridge there. Everybody else is in the hut, or the pen—those are animals in the pen. I don’t have Squad One and Two in view. Hang tight.”

  Danny clicked forward on the feed, still didn’t have them. He could wait for another run or just go.

  Waiting was conservative, but it meant giving the people in the village more time to man weapons, plan a defense.

  “Three and Four move in,” Danny said, finding another solution, “One and Two hold.”

  “Aw, shit,” said Powder.

  “Hawk Leader, another run, further east,” Danny said.

  “Copy that,” said Fentress.

  The Flighthawk came over again—two people were walking south toward Liu’s team. Danny fed the details to Liu, then ordered One and Two to move in.

  “Take us there,” Danny told the helo pilot, who gunned the engine on the small helicopter. The scout rocketed forward so fast Danny flew back in the seat.

  “Go, go, go!” Bison was yelling. Danny clicked in the Flighthawk feed, saw an explosion on the west side of the camp. Going at the machine gun, the team used flashbangs and smoke grenades. Voices shouted in his ears. He struggled to stay above it all—outside the scram.

  “Quick Birds, hold your fire,” said Danny. “That smoke is from our grenades.”

  He clicked into the feed from Bison—the trees moved swiftly, then he saw ground, smoke—an old tree trunk in front of his team member.

  The machine gun.

  “Shit fuck,” said Bison.

  “All right, everyone relax now, relax,” said Danny.

  “Got two guys here,” said Powder. “Older than the hills.”

  “Powder, watch it—natives coming at you,” said Liu.

  “We’re on it.”

  Danny pushed up the helmet screen, looking through the windscreen of the Quick Bird as the pilot pointed to the ground. Stoner leaner over, trying to make out what was happening.

  “Can you get us down?” Danny asked the pilot.

  “I can hover over that roof there,” he replied. “You’ll have to go down the rope.”

  “Yeah, do it,” said Stoner.

  “Do it,” said Danny.

  There was gunfire to the right of the helicopter. The pilot hesitated, then pitched his nose toward it, steadying into a firing position.

  “Hold off,” said Danny, touching the man’s arm. “Powder, what the fuck?”

  “Wild stinking dogs,” said the sergeant. “Mean motherfuckers.”

  “What about the people?”

  “They’re all right,” he said. “We’re okay. We have two, three natives secured. No resistance, Cap. ’Cept for the barking dogs. Man, they bug the shit out of me.”

  Danny let go of the pilot’s arm. “We’ll use the rope,” he said.

  By the time Stoner got to the ground, the village was secure and the huts had already been searched. The unrehearsed, ad hoc operation had gone remarkably well, so well, in fact, Stoner thought the Whiplash people might actually give his old SEAL team a run for the money.

  A run, nothing more.

  Even the Marines had done well. The only casualties were six dogs, probably kept by the villagers for food.

  The locals were sitting grim-faced in a small circle in front of one of the huts. They were all old, easily in their fifties if not well beyond. The place was what the girl had told him it was—a refugee village started by people who had fled from another island.

  Captain Freah was consulting with his people, dividing the surrounding area into quadrants for a detailed search. To Stoner, it seemed a waste of time, though he wouldn’t bother pointing it out.

  “Looks pretty clean,” said Danny.

  “We have to hit the atolls,” said Stoner. “Sooner rather than later.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny, his voice still flat. While the captain turned and went back over to his men, Stoner looked at the huts. They couldn’t have been here for more than a few months.

  “We’ll go out through the beach,” said Danny when he came back. “It’s quicker. Marine helo will shoot us to the base. I have to leave one of my guys here to supervise, and one at the security post. That’ll give us a total of six people, including myself.”

  “We can use the Marines,” said Stoner.

  “I have an okay for an armed recon already,” said Danny. “If we add Marines, that has to be cleared. They’ll probably want to fly in more forces, set up a whole operation. It’ll be thorough, but it’ll be overkill—and it won’t happen till tomorrow night. You told me you wanted to go sooner rather than later.”

  “I do.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  Aboard Iowa

  1409

  They gave the Chinese carriers a wide berth, working their way close to the Vietnamese coastline before heading back west. It occurred to Dog this very same B-52 frame might have pulled many missions here decades ago, dropping its sticks on North Vietnamese targets, maybe even mining Haiphong harbor. Dog had an unobstructed view of the coastline from roughly 25,000 feet; it seemed like a faceted j
ewel, a piece of intricately cut jade. He’d missed Vietnam, and wasn’t the nostalgic type besides, but even to Dog, it looked like the last place on earth a war would break out.

  Then again, so did the empty ocean in front of him.

  “Two minutes to our search area,” reported Rosen.

  “Delaford, how’s it looking down there?” Dog asked him.

  “We’re ready when you are, Colonel.”

  “We’re talking to your friends in the Orions. They haven’t found anything for us yet.”

  “Tell ’em to listen harder,” said Delaford.

  “I’d give ’em new hearing aids if I thought it would help.” Dog did an instrument check, then turned his gaze back to the side window, looking down at the now-peaceful sea. His quarry was somewhere below, but where?

  Armed with the satellite information as well as intercepts from SOUS and another hydrophone net, the Fleet intelligence officers had analyzed the probably course of the Chinese submarines. They had decided, given the mission, the subs would work as direct a course to the carrier group as possible, and probably get regular updates as they closed. This scenario presented several opportunities for finding the subs; not only would their route be some-what predictable, but the subs would probably pole their masts above the surface from time to time. The intel officers looked for specific choke points—in this case, places where it would be easy to find the subs as they passed—and concentrated their resources there. It sounded good, but so far, it wasn’t working. There was so much sea to cover, and without support vessels and submarines to assist, the Orions had a relatively limited view.

  Dog wondered about the possibilities of extending Piranha’s range—not by the factor of two, which Delaford had said was doable, but by ten or even a hundred. It would be much more effective to launch it now and let it go find its target on its own.

  Actually, they could, theoretically, do that. Just launch and search. Set a course southwest, toward the Chinese carriers; they’d find the subs sooner or later.

  “Tommy, what do you think of launching Piranha blind and letting it look for the subs on its own?” Dog asked Delaford over the interphone.

  “You mean completely without contact?” asked Delaford. “The problem is, Colonel, it’s such a wide area to cover. Considering Piranha can only stay in the water for eighteen hours—well, twenty or twenty-one …”

  “It’ll stay longer than that,” said Dog.

  “Right, I mean, it can only pursue at speed for that long, then runs down.”

  “But if we figure, say, an eighteen-hour patrol, so the last six hours or so it’s near the carriers—I don’t know, can you plot something like that out? How close would we have to be?”

  “Let me talk to English.”

  “Orions are clean,” reported Rosen. “You know what we need? Hot dogs.”

  “Oh, that’d be great on a long mission,” said Dog sarcastically.

  “Break up the monotony.”

  “Colonel, we think we have a good drop,” said Delaford, coming back on the line. He laid out a plan to launch Piranha at 260 nautical miles from the carrier task force and run it on an intercept. When it reached a point twenty miles from the carriers, it would then sweep ahead in an arcing search pattern.

  “The only problem is what we do if, after we launch, the Orions find the Chinese subs and they’re really far away.”

  “How far?” asked Dog.

  “Well, anything over fifty miles and not heading in our direction is going to be problematic,” said Delaford.

  “But we’ll know where they’re headed.”

  “Only if our guess that they’re after the Indian sub is right.”

  “I say we go for it,” said Dog.

  “I agree.”

  Woods and Allen might not, but Dog couldn’t see the use of flying around all day and not launching. They had to take a shot sooner or later.

  “Give us that launch point again,” Colonel Bastian told Delaford.

  Twenty minutes later, Dog and his copilot took Iowa down to five hundred feet, surveying the ocean and preparing to launch a buoy and the device. After a last check with the Orions to make sure they hadn’t found anything, Dog dipped the plane’s nose. Piranha splashed into the water like an anxious dolphin, freed from her pen.

  “Contact with Piranha,” said Delaford, reporting a link with the robot. “We’re running diagnostics now. Looking good, Colonel.”

  They ran the Megafortress in a slow, steady oval at approximately five thousand feet above the waves. As they completed their second pass, Rosen got contacts on the radar—a pair of Shenyang F-8’s were heading south from China.

  “I have them at one hundred twenty-five miles,’ said Rosen. “They’re between eighteen and twenty angels, descending.”

  “They see us?” said Dog.

  “Not clear at this time,” said Rosen.

  “Check and record our position,” said Dog, who wanted the record clear in case of attack. They were, irrefutably, in international air space.

  “Absolutemento.”

  “Which means?”

  “You got it, Colonel.”

  “Still bored? I thought the launch would perk you up.”

  “Just call me Mr. Perky, sir.” Rosen worked in silence for a few minutes, still tracking the pair of interceptors as they headed south, not quite on an intercept vector. It was possible a land-based radar had picked them up as they opened their bay to complete the Piranha launch. On the other hand, it was also possible the planes were merely on a routine mission. The F-8IIMs looked like supersized MiG-21’s. though their mission was considerably different. Intended as high-altitude, high-speed interceptors, they were not quite as competent as the more maneuverable Sukhois that had recently tangled with Iowa. Nonetheless, they were capable aircraft, and their Russian Phazotron Zhuk-8 multimode radars would be painting the Megafortress relatively soon.

  “We have a surface ship, thirty miles west, thirteen degrees from our present heading,” said Rosen, “Unidentified type—trawler-size.”

  “Yes, we have it on the passive sonar,” said Delaford. “We’re looking at our library now. Probably a spy ship.”

  “Not in the library,” said Ensign English after comparing the acoustical signal picked up by Piranha with a library of known warships.

  “We can swing over and take a look,” said Dog.

  “Good idea, Colonel,” said Delaford. “We’ll keep the probe its present course.”

  “Keep an eye on our F-8’s,” Dog told Rosen as he nudged the stick to get closer to the ship.

  “They’re turning it up a notch—on an intercept now at forty miles.”

  “Surface ship is tracking us for them?”

  “No indication of that,” said Rosen.

  By the time the ship appeared in the distance, the F-8’s were roughly ten miles out. The two planes had cut their afterburners and were now descending in an arc that would take them about a half mile off Iowa’s nose. If everyone stayed on their present course. The fact they were heading in that direction, rather than trying to take a position on Iowa’s rear, seemed a significant tactical shift to Dog. Maybe shooting down the cruise missiles yesterday had won some friends.

  Not that they necessarily wanted them.

  The ship in the distance looked like an old trawler. Ensign English, working off the video feed piped down by the copilot, identified it as a Republic of China or Taiwan ship, one of a class of spy vessels the Taiwanese used to keep tabs on their mainland brothers.

  “He may be looking for subs,” said Delaford. “He’s got active sonar.”

  “Can they find us?” asked Dog.

  “I don’t believe so.

  “F-8 pilots are challenging us,” said Rosen. “In pretty good English too.”

  Dog tuned his attention to the Chinese fighters, giving them the standard line about being in international airspace and having no “hostile intent.”

  The Chinese replied that the Yankees were
overrated and would have no chance in the World Series this year.

  “Couple of comedians,” said Rosen.

  In the exchange that followed, Rosen proved to be a ridiculously committed LA Dodger fan, predicting the Dodgers would “whup” whomever the American league managed to put up. The Chinese pilot—he was apparently the wingman in the two-plane flight—knew more than enough baseball to scoff at Rosen’s predictions. The man inexplicably favored the Cleveland Indians, and in fact, seemed to know the entire lineup.