Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

“Soleck, is this pertinent to anything we’re doing?”

  Stevens cut in. “Hey, give him a shot. He helps pass the time.” It was almost civil, from Stevens.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Then what happened?”

  “After fifty years of increased trade and contact with the outside world, China folded. The Emperor basically decreed that nothing outside of China mattered. The fleet was scrapped. If they hadn’t, Vasco da Gama might have found a Chinese empire waiting for him when he brought the first western fleet into the Indian Ocean.”

  “Why do you think they folded?”

  “This is the neat part. Because their merchant class was suddenly getting too rich, taking over at home. And foreign stuff was catching on, changing things.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “That’s why I thought you might like to hear it. Besides, like Mister Stevens says, it passes the time.”

  Point Dallas, 800 miles ESE of Socotra Island, Indian Ocean.

  Stevens hit the funnel dangling under the VS-53 S-3 perfectly, slapping their probe in and then turning very slightly to stay in formation with the tanker. The tanker was itself moving east, so that they wouldn’t lose a minute toward their goal. Soleck watched the gas and called the fuel load aloud. Stevens massaged the controls, making fractional corrections to keep the probe in the funnel.

  The chainsaw stretched away behind them. When they left Point Dallas, there would be only four planes left at the front of the operation—the two MARI birds and their front-line air cover, two VF-162 F-14s. The entire massive launch had been intended to get these four planes to this point, eight hundred miles from their carrier. Now they would fly on, a further four hundred miles. Or more. Somewhere to the east were the Chinese ships.

  “Okay, we’re full.”

  “Roger. Wagon Train Six, this is Lone Ranger breaking away.”

  “Roger, I copy breakaway.”

  Stevens backed off his airspeed just enough to pull his fuel probe gently out of the basket and rolled out from under. He pulled alongside the other S-3 and the crews waved, and then he pressed on, with Tonto beginning to separate to the south. The F-14s stayed between the two MARI birds, a little below them and a few miles behind. The E-2C was too far behind to see an enemy or provide a vector, and the S-3 radar was not designed to find air targets. If it came to an aerial engagement, the F-14s would have to count on their own RIOs and their own radars to find the enemy.

  Alan looked over his screen one more time. He had a good link to the other plane. His radar was currently locked off, but warm. It was time to do what they had come all this way to do.

  “Paul, I’m going to tell Lead we’re going live.”

  “Roger.”

  “High Noon, this is Lone Ranger, over.”

  Alan fiddled with his screen resolution and realized that there was moisture from condensation on his screen. His clothes had begun to dry, and his teeth weren’t chattering, but it was still cold as hell. They were high, almost twenty thousand feet. This was not a stealthy approach.

  “Lone Ranger, this is High Noon, go ahead.”

  “Ready to start the music, High Noon.”

  “Concur. Good hunting.”

  Alan nodded at Craw, and he activated the first sweeps from the radar in the S-3’s nose.

  Over the Indian Ocean.

  Soleck had surpassed himself in creating a baseline overlay for the area of operations. He had mined unused portions of the MARI system’s memory and had input current data from landmasses and borders to SAM sites. He had done most of it by uploading existing databases from the ship, and, because of his work and the datalink, they had a set of grid-box overlays to show their search pattern. It was a small visual aid, but it simplified the whole mission, and, as the first search box was completed with no hit, it suddenly changed color.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “There’s a lot of waste space in that system,” said Soleck primly.

  Four hours later they had six colored boxes on their screens and no concrete hits. MARI had identified a dozen merchant ships, an Indian Ghodavari-Class frigate, and a dhow riding the last of the monsoon from Somalia. The Ghodavari raised their hopes for a while, as they expected to find Indian ships pacing the Chinese group. But they saw nothing else. The Indian ship seemed to be moving slowly, waiting. Alan used his track ball to draw an imaginary line from Sri Lanka to the Indian picket, and then he slowly ran the radar in surface search mode up his line, calling out directions to Stevens. He began to register small hits toward Sri Lanka—fishing boats. Otherwise, an empty ocean.

  They had all feared a chaotic ocean full of neutral hits, merchants and oil tankers going about the world’s business, but the merchants were smarter than that and the sea was empty. Twice, Alan reported his status to High Noon. Because of the empty sea, they were well ahead of schedule, more than halfway complete. Now they were on boxes a little east of Sri Lanka, Stevens moving the plane up and down the sky in search of ducts that would get them a peek over their already immense horizon and into the unknown seas beyond. Craw and Alan were both masters at the art of ducting, and they took turns, one resting his eyes while the other stared relentlessly into the unblinking screen, cycling the radar from surface search to image when a contact met certain undeclared parameters and then cycling back.

  Twelve hundred miles behind them, the carrier began its second great pulse of activity as the first elements of chainsaw two launched and began to creep up the chain. The tankers and fighter support of the first wave turned for home, grateful to escape from the five hours of torture strapped to their ejection seats. In the two MARI birds, and seven miles behind in their F-14 escorts, there was no hope of relief. They were too far east to be relieved; indeed, the plan had never expected it. In an hour, they would start to run back to the replacement tanker from the second wave, hundreds of miles west of them at Point Dallas.

  Alan was getting intermittent peeks into a box east of Sri Lanka and slightly south, well over the radar horizon and almost three hundred miles away. He almost passed over one contact, a lone banana that was degraded by the duct and appeared almost as two small contacts at the very edge of his surface search capability.

  “Possible contact in box eleven. Senior, watch ESM. Going to image mode.”

  Alan hit the selector switch. No image appeared.

  “Lost the duct. Mister Stevens, up a little?”

  “Aye, aye.” The plane moved sluggishly into a shallow climb. At this altitude, the S-3’s turbofans didn’t have much air to bite.

  “Tonto, I’m trying to image grid C17 in box eleven. Do you copy?”

  “Loud and clear, Lone Ranger. We have the contact. We’re at angels 26.”

  Alan recycled the radar to surface search and regained the contact. In the old S-3B, you had to guess at the effect of the duct; there was no reliable method of knowing how far out the reflecting tunnel of weather conditions had carried your signal. The MARI gave a reliable prediction of the effect of the ducts. He found himself looking at a contact almost four hundred miles away, more than twice their radar horizon.

  Alan held the contact and got an image. He didn’t look up from his screen because the contact was so fragile. He felt for the comms switch with his right hand and toggled it.

  “High Noon, this is Lone Ranger, over?” Craw was leaning out of his seat to look at the picture. Then he looked back at his own screen.

  “That’s an Eye Shield, sir.” Eye Shield was a Chinese air search radar. ESM had caught it. A duct transmitted signals both ways.

  “Soleck, are you seeing this?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a Jianghu.”

  “Concur. See the returns from the mast aft of the superstructure?”

  “Roger. No slope to the bow. I just built one of these on the simulator last night. It’s a type two.”

  “Lone Ranger, this is Wagon Train Four. I’m relaying to High Noon.” The voice sounded tinny and distorted through the encrypted link. Alan swi
tched back to transmit.

  “Wagon Train Four, this is Lone Ranger. I have a pos contact.” He looked away from the screen just long enough to scan the coded kneeboard card taped next to his screen. “I make it a Blackfoot Two. Repeat Blackfoot Two.” It not only resembled Soleck’s radar prediction, but it also made sense: an old ship placed in the position of maximum vulnerability as an advance radar picket.

  “Sir? Either the duct just changed or they just woke up.” Alan glanced away from the swimming image on his screen and watched as radar hits began to scroll up the SENSO screen, so many and so fast that they filled it as he watched.

  “I think we found them.”

  “I think they found us, too, Senior.”

  Langley.

  Dukas and Menzes had sat in Menzes’s office for an hour without news. There had been lots of activity but no news, and all they knew that was at all pertinent was that Shreed hadn’t kept the appointment at his doctor’s office.

  “Let’s fish or cut bait,” Dukas mumbled. “Is he gone or isn’t he?”

  Menzes was doing routine paperwork, filling the time. “We don’t know.”

  “When do we know?”

  “When he turns up someplace.”

  “Bullshit, Carl! Come on! You going to report him as gone or aren’t you?”

  “I’ll report him when I know something solid! I’ve got a team in his house; all I know is he isn’t there and everything looks normal. I am not going to declare somebody as disappeared when I don’t know the facts!”

  Dukas stood up. “Yeah, well, I got people who maybe can’t wait for the facts. I’m going to use your phone.” And he called his boss’s boss on his private line at home.

  Washington.

  The Chief of Naval Operations was watching Opera Glass on his own datalink at the Pentagon when an aide appeared at his side. It was late at night, but he was there and his people were there, because he had given his approval to this operation and now he wanted to make sure it went right.

  “Telephone,” the aide murmured. “Urgent.”

  The CNO scrambled out of his armchair and hurried out, calling, “Carry on!” over his shoulder; a minute later, he was in his office.

  He grabbed the office phone out of the aide’s hand as soon as it was presented. The aide whispered, “Walker at NCIS.”

  “CNO here.”

  “Sir, this is Chris Walker at NCIS. I’m the Deputy Director for Counterintelligence.”

  “Sure, Chris. I’m in the middle of an important operation.”

  “I understand, sir, but, um, so is this. Sir, this is not fully substantiated, but we have reason to believe that a very senior CIA officer may have defected to China.”

  “Holy crap. What do you know?”

  “One of our senior agents has an operation that, well, seemed to involve a senior CIA official. Anyway, our suspect may have just bolted.”

  “When?”

  “We don’t know. The Agency is stonewalling, and he may have been gone for as long as twenty-four hours.”

  “Christ, he could be in China by now!” The CNO realized he was yelling at the wrong man. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. What do we know about him?”

  “Name is George Shreed.”

  “Never heard of him. Why’s he important?”

  The other man hesitated. “It looks like he’s a spy.”

  The CNO winced. “What was his access?”

  “He had about everything, sir. Total code access, for example.”

  “Jesus. Jesus! Access to codes?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And he’s been gone twenty-four hours?”

  “Max—we think. We don’t have confirmation, let me make that clear. The agent on the case called me at home and I’m trying to pin this down, but I thought you needed to know. I have to call the DNI, too.”

  “Keep me informed. Thanks.” The CNO handed the phone back to his aide and moved across the room to his desk. “Get Magnussen in here.” Magnussen was a senior intelligence officer. When he hurried in, the CNO was scanning a page of classified data; he looked up, his face harsh in the desk light, and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong—if the classified codes are compromised, we might as well try to communicate in clear.”

  “If the wrong people got the codes, yessir. As you know, though, codes go missing and nothing—”

  “Assume they’ve gone missing in the hands of somebody who works for another country.”

  Magnussen shook his head. “It’d be a disaster. We’d have to do a worldwide rekey. Or else.”

  The CNO nodded and dismissed him with a look.

  “Get me the Director of Central Intelligence.” Another aide began dialing while the CNO took off his dress blue jacket. “I don’t care where he is.”

  Over the Indian Ocean.

  They were fifty miles farther east, farther from their tanker and farther from home. They had intermittent electronic contact with the Chinese, and Alan was reminded of the descriptions of the first sightings of the Japanese carrier force near Midway in World War II, glances from a seaplane through thick clouds. The seaplanes and torpedo bombers were the S-3’s ancestors.

  Even then the location of the enemy over the horizon had been important enough to risk big, slow aircraft that could stay aloft and in the search for hours.

  “Lone Ranger, this is High Noon, over.” Rafe, at last.

  “Copy, High Noon. Loud and clear.”

  “Lone Ranger, I have the reported location of the main body as zero five north, zero eight zero east.”

  “Roger. Close enough.”

  “That’s not……them, Lone Ranger.”

  “High Noon, please repeat.”

  “…expected……Ranger.”

  “I’m losing you, High Noon. Concur that contact is south of expected location.”

  “…Ranger!”

  “Wagon Train Four, this is Lone Ranger. I’ve lost contact with High Noon. Please request he advise. We are five zero minutes from refuel. Break, break. Gunslinger One, do you copy?”

  Donitz’s drawl came through perfectly.

  “Gotcha, Lone Ranger.”

  “Anything out there?”

  “Two guys with real sore asses, Lone Ranger.”

  The S-3 crews could get up and stretch. The F-14 pilots and RIOs were trapped in tiny cockpits, strapped into their seats for the whole ride.

  They tanked the F-14s from their buddy stores as planned, and then they drove east together with their eyes open, and behind them the chainsaw raced to prepare for their return.

  Washington.

  “He’s in bed.”

  “Tell him that it is a matter of immediate harm. Use that phrase.” The CNO jotted notes on his doodle pad.

  Another aide entered. “Sir, Jefferson may have a contact. They’re having some comm problems up the chainsaw.”

  “He’s coming to the phone.” The CNO picked up the handset, took a deep breath, and sought to sound calm. “Can we go secure? I’ll push.” Tinny sounds and a warble. The right message on the screen. He flashed on a bad night landing he had done fifteen years ago. It was like that. “Can you confirm that one of your senior officers has run off to the Chinese? I’m sorry, that’s not going to cut it. No, I’ve got half an air wing about to make contact with a potentially hostile Chinese force, and I have the need to know. Confirm it, or deny it absolutely.”

  The CNO looked up for a moment and snapped his fingers. “DNI, in here now!” Then his head went back down to the phone. “So he is gone. Oh, he may be gone.” He looked at his notes from the conversation with Walker at NCIS. “This is somebody named George Shreed, right? What access did this guy have? No, I’m not going to wait. Did he have codes? With all due respect, this is an immediate-harm issue. Did he have access to military codes? I take that as a yes. Okay, let me spell this out for you. I’ll call the President and check, but until this guy is either caught or he shows up somewhere, we have to assume the Chinese can read our crypto, right
? And I have a big mission package in the air.” He slowed the rhythm of his words. “I have to call it back.”

  The DNI entered the room and read the note the CNO had scrawled while talking. He scribbled at the bottom and then picked up a spare phone and started dialing. The CNO glanced at the note: Pos Ctc Jianghu II 200NM SSE Ceylon.

  He went back to his call. “I can’t take that risk. I have to recall it. You have to order a worldwide rekey.” He didn’t sound at that moment as if he was talking to an equal. “I’m well aware what a worldwide rekey means, sir. It means that for up to forty-eight hours our communications are crippled, meaning that the eyes and ears of my fleets are screwed. It means that I don’t dare send a ship or an aircraft against a real enemy.” He listened and then said in a grim voice, “No, we don’t know for sure that this Shreed stole the codes, but we don’t know for sure that he didn’t. So absent positive confirmation, you have to order a rekey!” He listened again and his jaw tightened. “He isn’t our spy—he’s yours. I suggest you catch him and find out for sure that he’s not passing crypto codes. Until you do, order a worldwide rekey—and pray nobody starts shooting.”

  He put the handset in its cradle with exaggerated care. “Dick, do you ever get the feeling we don’t all work for the same government?”

  The DNI smiled grimly. The CNO stopped writing and looked at his executive assistant.

  “Tracy, get me the Jefferson. And have them get me the strike lead for Opera Glass. If the brief this morning was right, he’s called High Noon.”

  Point Denver, Indian Ocean.

  “Sir, that Sovremenny just went to target acquisition on Smerch.”

  “We’re a little out of range.”

  “Just thought you’d like to know.”

  “I expect they’re sending us a message, Senior. Our MARI signal will look like a target acquisition signal to them until—”

  “Slot Back! Two signals!”