Dreamland: Piranha

by Dale Brown

  He had a handsome face, deep blue eyes that seemed out of place with his dark hair.

  We’ll try. Use the interphone from now on,” she told him. “Downstairs.”

  He stared at her a while longer, then nodded.

  “Kind of a jerk,” she said as she sat back in her seat.

  “Who?” said Chris.

  “Stoner.”

  “Yeah? Seemed okay to me. First CIA guy I ever met.”

  “Give him a sitrep screen, all right? Show him where everything is.”

  Breanna checked with Collins about the intercepts. They’d only isolated one or two from the spy ships, and they were all heavily encoded. “Give Mr. Stoner a lowdown, would you?”

  “Not a problem.”

  Restraints snugged, Breanna checked their position as well as that of the other players. The Chinese and Indian fleets were moving slowly toward each other. Two Sukhois had begun shadowing the Megafortress in a long oval track three miles to the east. Same old, same old.

  “Trawler’s heading off south,” Chris pointed out, referring to the Taiwanese spy ship. “Wimping out?”

  “Just getting out of the way for the showdown” said Breanna.

  Stoner folded his arms in front of his chest, staring at the video screen. Both the Chinese and the Indians had their chessmen in place; they could start duking it out in an hour.

  So what were the Taiwanese up to anyway? Egging the Indians on? Usually, they took a more laid-back approach, but they had spy ships all over the place, including one so close it was going to catch shrapnel when the fighting started.

  Stoner stared at the fifteen-inch display screen where the sitrep view was displayed. It was a simple thing, a plot of positions against longitude and latitude, yet cobbling it together was not exactly child’s play. To get all these different inputs, process them, out them on the screen so that even an untrained operator like himself could see what was going on—Dreamland indeed.

  “Say, uh, Captain Ferris. Chris. This is Stoner. What’s the green triangle on my screen?”

  “On the sitrep? That’s the marker for the Piranha buoy. It’s tied into the tactical system so it comes on the display. Sorry if it’s confusing.”

  “That Taiwanese trawler is going to run right over our buoy if they stay on that course. Is he tracking it?”

  “No way,” said Ferris.

  “Well, he’s going to run over it anyway.”

  Breanna pushed the plane down through the leading edge of the fast-moving cloud front, trying to get low enough for a visual on the players—and the trawler that was on a collision course for their buoy. “Stoner’s right—they’re aimed almost perfectly for it,” said Chris as they broke through the clouds into the gray stillness above the water. The spy ship looked like a child’s boat in a bathtub. “Should I try hailing them?”

  “What are you going to tell them?” asked Bree. “That they’re about to run over a top-secret communications system for a high-tech weapon?”

  “I probably wouldn’t want to say that,” said Chris contritely.

  If the trawler hit the buoy, they would most likely lose their connection—and Piranha. It occurred to Breanna the ocean was awful big and the buoy awfully small—and yet the ship was uncannily on course for the device.

  “Could they track the transmission, you think?”

  “Well, the Navy couldn’t,” said Chris. “But in theory, it’s possible. That ship had been around—they might have seen the buoy launched.”

  “Fentress’s—how’s your connection with Piranha?” Bree asked.

  “As far as I can tell, Captain, they’re not interfering.”

  “Going through two thousand feet to nineteen hundred, eighteen hundred,” said the copilot, belatedly calling out their altitude. “We’re getting low.”

  “Is there enough time to auto-sink this buoy and launch another?” Bree asked Chris and Fentress as she leveled off.

  “Sinking procedure takes a hundred and eighty seconds,” said Fentress. “I have the screen up.”

  “We have to get the new one in the water first,” said Chris.

  “Pick a spot about five miles away. Make it ten.”

  “Hang on.” He worked on his screens, plotting a course. “Five minutes total. If they’re watching and they’re interested, there’s no guarantee they won’t see us, Bree. They’ll know what we’re doing and get at least a rough idea of where we launch. The Chinese may too.”

  “I don’t know that we have any other choice. Give me the course. Kevin, be ready with the self-destruct.”

  “I can’t get that panel once we’re trying to reconnect,” he told her. “What I mean is, it’ll take a few more seconds.”

  “They’re just about alongside,” said Chris.

  If Zen were here, she’d have him send the Flighthawks to buzz the spy ship.

  So where the hell was he when she needed him?

  “Think they’ll back off if we buzz them?” she asked Chris.

  “Don’t know,” said the copilot. “Sure get them talking about us, though.”

  Breanna slid the Megafortress onto her left wing, pirouetting back toward the trawler and kicking up her speed. ‘They may be armed,” said Stoner over the interphone.

  “Don’t be so optimistic,” said Breanna. She pushed the EB-52 to just three hundred feet over the white-capped waves, the plane a black finger wagging at the trawler not to be naughty. They could see the people on the deck duck as they roared over.

  “One more time,” she said, picking up the plane’s nose and then pedaling into a tight bank. “And this time, we’re going to one hundred feet.”

  “We can snap their aerial if you want,” offered Chris.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Two hundred fifty feet,” said the copilot. As he continued to read the descending numbers, a bit of a tremble entered his voice. They cleared the upper mast by maybe ten feet.

  “They stop?” Breanna asked.

  “Not sure. They’re on the deck.”

  “One more pass. Prepare to deploy buoy,” said Breanna.

  This time they cleared the mast by inches rather than feet, but the trawler had continued moving and was no practically alongside the buoy. Two or three crew members were leaning over the rail there.

  “Getting static here,” said Fentress as they cleared the shop.

  “Activate the targeting radar for the air mines,” said Breanna.

  “Captain?” said Ferris.

  “We’ll get their attention, launch another probe while we’re firing, sink the first, launch a third further away, then sink the second,” said Breanna. “Calculate it so we come close, but don’t hit them with the shrapnel.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that. I don’t even know if I can get the gun on them.”

  “You can do anything, Chris.” She swung the Megafortress through another turn so she could get her tail aimed at the spy ship.

  “All right. We cross over the trawler, bank, take our shot, then launch.”

  “You disappoint me,” she told him, hitting the throttle for more speed.

  “How’s that?”

  “All that potential and no sexual innuendo?”

  “Yeah, well, you should hear what I’m thinking.”

  Aboard Shiva in the South China Sea

  1830

  IT wasn’t until he was four miles from the aircraft carrier that the Chinese destroyer picked up Balin’s submarine. Even then, the destroyer wasn’t quite sure what if had found, or where its quarry was—the ship began tracking north, probably after one of the other subs Balin’s men had detected in the vicinity. And so he managed to get nearly two miles closer before Captain Varja passed the word that the enemy escort was now bearing down on them.

  “Prepare torpedoes,” said Balin calmly.

  “Torpedoes ready,” said Varja.

  “Range to target?”

  “Three thousand, five hundred meters,” reported the captain.

  The
others in the control room were trying to strangle their excitement; the few words they exchanged as they prepared to fire were high-pitched and anxious. Varja, though, was calm. Balin appreciated that; he felt he had taught the young man something worthwhile.

  “We will fire at three thousand meters,” Balin said.

  A moment later, a depth charge exploded somewhere behind them. The boat shook off the shrudder and the helmsman managed to stay on course, but Balin realized this had only been the opening blow.

  “Launch torpedoes,” said the admiral. “Sink them.”

  Aboard Quicksilver

  1835

  In order to get the air mines where Chris wanted them, Breanna had to practically stand the Megafortress on its tail, fighting all of Newton’s laws—not to mention those of common sense. Breanna barely managed to control the big plane, sliding sideways across the waves at a mere thousand feet. She finally had to let her left wing sail downward; the front windscreen filled with blue before she could recover.

  “Got a couple of shots on their bow,” said Chris. His helmet was touching the display where the Stinger target box was displayed. “I don’t think we hurt anybody. They all ran aft. Ship’s dead in the water, eight, ten feet from the buoy.”

  “Get ready to launch,” said Bree calmly.

  “Okay, right.”

  “Fentress?” she asked.

  “Not as much static. Geez, those bullets make a hell of a racket hitting the water. You should see them on the display screen—look like volcanoes erupting on top of you, then there’s this wild crisscross pattern in different shades of red and blue. Very 1960s. I had to hit the manual filter and—”

  Fentress stopped abruptly.

  “We’re at launch point,” said Chris.

  “Wait,” she told him. “Fentress? Kevin? You okay down there?”

  “Torpedoes in the water.”

  “What?”

  “Back by the carrier,” said Fentress. “Have two, three warning blocks.”

  “Launch the buoy,” she told Chris. “Kevin. We’re launching. You sure about the torpedoes?”

  “Yes ma’am. Have another sub.”

  “Give the coordinates to Chris as soon as you can. Buoys first.”

  Aboard the Dragon ship in the South China Sea

  1838

  Realizing his presence made the men nervous, Chen Lo Fann had refrained from coming into the operator’s suite until the robot planes were approaching the fleet. Now, his place was in this room.

  They rose as one as he entered, bowing stiffly. After he returned their salute, they went back to what they were doing.

  The long LCD screen at the center of the room was gray. He started at it, wondering why he had not been told of the malfunction, before realizing he was seeing clouds.

  “We will descend from the clouds in thirty seconds,” said Professor Ai. Overcoming the mishap with the crane seemed somehow to have calmed him, or at least drained some of his energy. He spoke slowly now, more himself. “The carriers will be in the far corner to your left. There is one Sukhoi approaching, but its radar has not detected us.”

  “At what point will it do so?” asked Chen.

  “We are not sure. We will be ready in any event.”

  “Yes,” said Chen.

  One of the radio operators at the far corner of the room held up his hand. “There is a report the Megafortress is firing on our ship near its probe,” said the man.

  Chen considered this. “Have them back away. Tell them to leave the area.”

  The robot supplying the video feed finally broke through the cloud bank. The operator adjusted the picture, compensating for the fading light. The Chinese aircraft carrier sat like a large, gray cow at the top of the screen.

  His robot was equipped with two small missiles, adapted from antitank weapons. They would do almost no damage on a target so vast. The thought occurred to him that he could crash his plane into the carrier, it would not sink, but the fire would kill many men.

  Relatives of his perhaps; much of his family had not escaped the Communists, and he knew that a few were now in their Navy. Fortune’s irony.

  “The Indian planes?” he asked Professor Ai.

  “They are still in their patrol pattern to the south.”

  “Look!” said one of the men at the console. He jumped to his feet and pointed at the LCD screen.

  Something blossomed beyond the Chinese aircraft carrier, the dull bud of an early spring flower.

  There were two other wakes approaching it.

  Torpedoes. Either they had come from the Indian submarine that had failed earlier, or from the American.

  It must have been an American. For surely, the Indian was gone by now.

  “Halt the attack,” said Chen Lo Fann, his satisfaction so deep that he could not possibly hide it. “Stay only close enough to observe the destruction, but remain undetected if possible.”

  Aboard the Quicksilver

  1838

  “Can we stop the torpedoes?” Bree asked.

  “No way,” said Chris.

  “They see them,” said Collins. “They’re trying to get out of the way. Too late.”

  There was an explosion in the water, a geyser back near the carrier force. But Breanna was too busy to watch it.

  “Long-range radar I can’t ID,” said Torbin.

  “Indians?”

  “Wrong direction,” said the radar intercept officer. “I-band, okay. Woah, woah. APG-73—no way!”

  “Torbinm what the hell are you talking about?”

  “The radar—the computer is IDing the source as an F/A-18 unit. No way.”

  “One torpedoes hit the carrier, maybe two,” said Chris.

  “I have telemetry out near your contact,” Collins told Torbin

  “I don’t know what the hell kind of radar this is,” said Torbin. “Shit. I mean, it could be an F/A-18. Chris?”

  “No American flights within a hundred miles. I have nothing on radar. You sure about this?”

  “Sure as shit.”

  “All right, everybody take a breath,” Breanna said in her calmest command voice. “Fentress, did we sink that buoy?”

  “Still trying to get the connection to the first one.”

  “Tell me when we’re on.”

  “Explosion!” said Chris. “Carrier’s hit.”

  “I need you to stay close to the buoy,” said Fentress.

  “Sukhois are trying to lock on us—we’re spiked!” said Torbin. The RWR screen flashed with a warning as well, showing the bearing of the radar looking for them.

  “Full ECMS,” said Breanna. “Hang on everyone.”

  Breanna threw the Megafortress into as sharp a turn as she could manage, dipping the wing and sliding in the direction of the buoy. Fentress, Collins, and Torbin all tried to speak at the same time; the computer gave her a warning she was approaching maximum Gs. Breanna filtered everything out but the plane, trying to beam the Doppler-pulse radar that had locked on them. there was a missile warning—one of the Sukhois had launched.

  “Chris, when you have the chance, broadcast the we’re-the-white-hats message in every language you can think of,” she said calmly.

  “I am.” His voice was three octaves higher than normal, which itself wasn’t exactly a bass.

  A silver needle shot across Quicksilver’s bow, no more than fifty yards away. It was the missile.

  “Optically aimed flak from that destroyer,” said the copilot. “Way out of range.”

  “I see it,” said Bree.

  “Sukhois coming down through ten thousand feet. “We’re jamming. They’re going to line up for an IR shot.”

  “Get the Stinger ready.”

  “On it.”

  “SAM radar active. I’m jamming,” said Torbin.

  “Fentress, we have to get moving here, friend,” said Bree.

  “I’m still having trouble with the link,” he said. “We’re too high. I need you as close as you can get. The jinking’s no
t helping.”

  “Getting shot down won’t help either.” She regretted snapping back like that, but there was no time to apologize—one of the ships launched antiaircraft missiles.