by Mark Henshaw
Cooke leaned back. “If there’s not much on it, then there shouldn’t be an issue letting the Red Cell have access to it.”
Barron knew an order when he heard one, but he didn’t have to like it. “I’d rather not.” He knew it was a weak protest.
“Clark, there are two men that I answer to,” Cooke said, talking slowly and clearly, as though to a child. “And at some point, I’m going to get a call from the president or, more likely, the director of national intelligence. That man will start asking me some very pointed questions about what’s going on here. And right now, I don’t have any good answers, just good theories. If the Red Cell can prove those theories, I’ll be a very happy woman, but that’s going to be very hard for them to do if your half of the house is refusing to lower the drawbridge and let them inside that big stone wall you case officers have erected between yourselves and the analysts.” Cooke stopped to let the tongue-lashing sink in. “If the Red Cell includes any of Pioneer’s intel in their report, I’ll restrict it to POTUS only,” she offered. “No one outside the Oval Office even hears about it, much less reads it.”
Barron’s face showed that he didn’t like it, and yes, ma’am, he certainly was going to worry about it, but an order was an order. “How many people are we talking here?”
“Two people. Burke, of course. The other one is your girl, Stryker,” Cooke said.
“I can live with that. Just make sure they don’t give me a reason to regret it, or next time I’ll let Kain have his way with them,” Barron warned.
“Fair enough,” Cooke said.
CIA RED CELL
“I need glasses,” Kyra said. She dropped a stack of reports on Jonathan’s desk, closed her eyes, and rested her head on her arms. The morning painkiller had finally worn off.
“You need to learn that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep.” Jonathan knew a hangover when he saw one, had never suffered one but had seen plenty in graduate school. She was lithe, he’d noted, not too much body mass to absorb alcohol. The current weather precluded many opportunities for parties, so the woman was either drinking alone or haunting one of Leesburg’s several excellent pubs and bars along King Street. A few shots of something harder than beer would cross her line between drinking to relax and drinking to excess. An officer’s personal drinking habits could become a matter for the Counterintelligence Center, the unit that hunted moles inside the Agency. Stryker was too new for that, he supposed, but she’d almost gotten killed, might have been self-medicating the stress with something harder than beer, and officers had been fired for alcoholism before. “Is that it?” he asked.
“Finally,” Kyra said. She had been logging Pioneer’s reports since Kain’s flunky arrived with the paperwork to get the Red Cell analysts read into the Assassin’s Mace compartment. The forms they signed were the United States Government’s version of a blood oath and promised vile retribution if they leaked the information to anyone, even other DI analysts.
Jonathan wheeled his chair over to Kyra’s desk and stared at the Excel spreadsheet on her screen. “What’s the final count?”
“Two hundred twenty-seven Assassin’s Mace reports total,” Kyra said. “One hundred thirty-six on aerospace projects. Fifty-seven on antiship missile projects. Twenty on naval projects, nine on lasers, and the rest on weapons that we’ve labeled as miscellaneous.”
“That breakdown matches our thinking,” Jonathan said. “Heavy numbers on aerospace and missiles.”
Kyra sat back and stared at the screen. It was an impressive list. “What about that stealth fighter the PLA was building back in the aughts? The J-20?”
“That one’s trying to be an air superiority plane, not a bomber,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese have always had serious issues building decent fighter engines. Still, it’s possible that they cross-bred the technology into another project. Any commonalities in the aerospace reports?”
“Most of them named the China Aviation Industry Corporation as the primary conduit for the projects. Only one other company was mentioned, Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute. According to the cable, the PLA was funding a big effort with Xian under CAIC direction. One of the CAIC senior managers asked for a progress report. Pioneer intercepted the Xian reply and copied a DVD that was part of the package.”
“What was the date on that cable?” Jonathan asked.
“June 1999,” Kyra said after a brief hunt for the paper.
“What was on the disk?”
“Whoever looked at the file said it was a computer-aided design program,” Kyra said.
Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “A CAD program wouldn’t tell us much. It’s the data files on whatever Xian was building that you’d want.”
“There’s no record that we got those. But look at this.” Kyra leaned over and made the spreadsheet obey. “If we reorder the list of Pioneer’s reporting by date instead of technology, almost all of the aerospace reports are dated after ninety-nine. Maybe CAIC made a technology breakthrough, developed some new tech.”
“Or stole some,” Jonathan said. “They’re big on that.” He pushed back from the desk with his foot and let his chair roll across the floor back until it stopped near the marker board where he had drafted his list. He stood and walked to the window and stared out at the A-12 monument overlooking the west parking lot. “You don’t actually need a fighter to attack a carrier. A bomber could do the job just fine if it could penetrate the air defense umbrella. Very difficult, but not impossible.”
Kyra thought for a moment. “Speed?”
“Speed. Altitude. Stealth. Any of those three would solve the problem. When the Cold War broke out and we needed to keep watch on the Russians, we built the U-2. And by ‘we,’ I do mean CIA. The U-2 was ours—highest-altitude plane ever built at the time. When the Russians figured out how to shoot those down, we went for speed and built the A-12. The Russians never did figure out how to shoot that down, but it was only a matter of time. So the Air Force worked out stealth and built the F-117 Nighthawk. Back in the Gulf War, Saddam had more antiair defenses surrounding Baghdad than the Russians had surrounding Moscow, literally. Three thousand double-A guns and sixtyish SAM batteries. The Iraqis never even managed to scratch the paint on a Nighthawk, much less shoot one down.”
“The Serbs managed it,” Kyra said. “They shot one down near Sarajevo.”
“Dumb luck with an assist from our stupidity,” Jonathan said. “Orders forced the pilots to fly the same approach routes from Aviano every night, so the Serbs had a pretty good idea where to point their radar.”
“Any of those three would stick in the Pentagon’s craw,” Kyra admitted.
“It’s great fun being the only person with a particular technology. It stops being fun the moment someone else gets it,” Jonathan agreed. “The question is how do we prove any of this.”
“That one’s easy.” Kyra put her head down and smiled slightly. “We go out there and debrief Pioneer.”
Jonathan rocked back in his chair, surprised at the suggestion. “You’re serious?”
“Better to interview the asset in person than just read somebody else’s reports about it. Let’s cut out the middleman.” And get out of this office.
The senior analyst cocked an eyebrow. “There’s no way with PLA tanks rolling that NCS is going to let a pair of analysts go to China to talk to one of their prize assets.”
Coward. Cynic? The two were not mutually exclusive, though Kyra suspected that only the latter was true. There was no question about that one. “It’ll never happen if we don’t ask.”
“Feel free,” Jonathan replied without hesitation. “While you’re tilting at windmills, see if you can get NCS to cough up copies of those disks that Pioneer handed over.”
USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN (CVN 72) 240 KILOMETERS WEST OF SASEBO, JAPAN
Captain (USN) Moshe Nagin rolled the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter ten degrees to give him a wider view of USS Abraham Lincoln. Truth be told, and he never admitted it
to his fellow naval aviators, he hated trapping on aircraft carriers. Landing a jet fighter on a moving Nimitz-class carrier at night in a squall was a task so hard it made grown men want to wet their pants, and it never got easy with practice. Runways are supposed to sit still and be a mile long. Landing on a ship’s deck that was only five hundred feet long and moving at thirty knots was unnatural, and his life depended on some too-young-to-drink boatswain’s mate below decks setting the proper tension on the deck cables. Too little tension on the wires and the plane would roll off into the water. Too much and only divine intervention would keep the cable from ripping the tailhook out of the plane. The other possibilities all involved varying amounts of burning jet fuel, live ordnance, and pilot spread over the deck.
Nagin looked past the Lincoln and picked out an HH-60H Seahawk flying its own pattern low and slow. Some of his younger pilots mocked the helo pilots, as though flying jets was the only job on a carrier that mattered, but time would solve that. Bold pilots sometimes got to be old pilots only through the gracious courtesy of helo search and rescue teams. He had found religion the first time a Seahawk had pulled him out of the water. One of the engines on his first Hornet malfunctioned a half second into a catapult launch, rupturing the cowling and sending shrapnel into the other. The catapult had obediently thrown his Hornet off the carrier anyway. Nagin ejected just before the plane hit the Persian Gulf. The Seahawk crew that lifted him from the water hadn’t even cracked a joke about his flying skills, and that earned them a share of the love he otherwise saved for his wife.
“Break to line up,” the landing signal officer ordered through his helmet. Nagin sucked in a breath of sterile, recycled air through his mask and pulled the plane into a turn, rolling hard left.
“Call the ball,” the LSO said.
Nagin sought out the “meatball” light on the port side. The yellow dot emitted by the Fresnel lens was agreeably where it was supposed to be, sitting between horizontal green lights above and below. He was riding the glide slope straight as a ruler.
“Fencer eight-zero-one, juliet sierra foxtrot ball, eight-point-eight,” Nagin called out.
“Roger ball,” the LSO acknowledged.
Nagin held the turn until he’d come around 180 degrees from his previous course, then rolled the plane level. Lincoln was ahead and the absurdly short runway was a thousand feet below and moving to the right. Nagin corrected for the drift and nudged the nose up a bit to kill some speed. The LSO stayed silent—Nagin’s best indication that he wasn’t completely screwing up.
The exact moment the landing gear hit the deck was always a surprise. The plane touched down moving at a hair under 150 miles per hour. White smoke poured off the tires as the rubber went molten from the friction, and for a moment the plane was sliding on liquid made from its own wheels. Nagin jammed the throttle full forward and heard the F-35’s single engine scream as it spooled up to full power.
Inertia threw Nagin against his harness, and he knew that the tailhook had caught a wire—the number three—which held with the right amount of tension. His speed dropped, the tires stopped melting, and they caught traction on the nonskid deck. Nagin yanked the throttle back, the engine went quiet, and his speed went to zero.
It wasn’t the moment to relax. The carrier deck was a busy and cramped space, and it wouldn’t do to drive the new stealth fighter into the water. His shoulders ached where the harness had pressed into the muscle. He wondered if he’d bruised them again.
MAIN HANGAR DECK
USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Lincoln’s hangar deck reeked of jet fuel. Everyone aboard ended up in the hangar sooner or later, where the smell of refined hydrocarbons attached itself to their clothing, and they carried the odor out to their shipmates like missionaries spreading the gospel. Rear Admiral Alton Pollard had lived a quarter century on carriers, which was long enough for his mind to learn to ignore the smell the same way it ignored the feeling of clothing on his skin. He had to think about the odor to notice it, and it was smarter not to think about it.
The hangar deck was almost 700 feet long and 110 wide but still felt cramped when more than a few fighters were parked inside. The new F-35s were off the hardtop above and more than a few off-duty sailors were down to see the planes. The Lightning II was clearly American, looked like a fighter, but it was not fearsome. What’s scarier? the Pentagon desk pilots had reasoned. The plane they see up close in combat or the one they never see coming at all? But in the back of Pollard’s mind something nagged at him, telling him that a psychological weapon had been lost. Maybe he was just finally old enough that he couldn’t embrace change with any enthusiasm. He shook his head, cleared his mind, and approached the senior pilot, who was holding class on the new plane with enlisted sailors young enough to be his children.
“Admiral.” Nagin’s posture straightened and he gestured to the F-35. “The replacement for the Hornet,” he said. “What do you think?” The senior pilot aboard was still dressed in his flight suit and cradling his helmet in his arm like a football. As commander, air group (CAG), Nagin had exactly one superior aboard. Pollard was the only man who outranked him. The admiral thought a CAG had the best job in the Navy, had been one himself, and missed the job most days. Nagin had the privileges of elevated rank and still got to fly a fighter every day. Being the commanding officer of a battle group had its own rewards, but they never quite equaled the logging of flight hours in the cockpit.
“You tell me,” Pollard said. “You’ve flown one. I haven’t.” He put his hand on the plane’s wing, the first time he’d actually touched a Lightning II. He could have taken one of the new fighters out for a joyride, but Pollard’s body didn’t quite bounce back from hard carrier landings the way it used to. His back loved flying less every year, and he refused to think what an ejection seat would do to his spine now. He’d had to do that once. Although forever grateful to the Martin-Baker company for building an escape vehicle that worked every time, he was quite sure the compression of his vertebrae had left him an inch shorter. It was a small price to pay to come home to his wife.
Nagin frowned a bit. “Twice the range on internal fuel as the 18Cs, but she has a single engine, which worries me. I don’t like single points of failure and that’s a big one. And there’s no HUD. All the flight data is projected onto the inside of the helmet.” He hefted his flight helmet and showed it to the admiral. Pollard took it and examined the inside.
“That doesn’t make you sick?” Pollard asked.
“It feels a little unnatural at first, but works fine when you get used to it.”
Pollard handed the helmet back to its owner. “What about the ordnance load?”
“No question, she’s a bomb truck,” Nagin said. “She can lug around five thousand pounds of JDAM hurt inside and six hardpoints on the wings when stealth doesn’t matter. That only leaves room for two AMRAAMs mounted inside when you have to go air-to-air, and those have to mount on the bay doors.” Those bay doors were open, Nagin gestured inside. “You get two Sidewinders on the wings if you really need ’em and don’t care about the stealth.”
“Maneuverability?”
“She handles well enough to dogfight, but she’s no F-22 like the Air Force boys are flying these days. So she doesn’t carry much for it.”
“You don’t like the pistol?” Pollard asked, working his way back toward the engine. He found the gun mounted in an external pod on the undercarriage almost directly between the wings.
The CAG shook his head. “The gun’s fine. It’s a version of the GAU-12-slash-U—twenty-five millimeter four-barrel Gatling, pretty much the same thing the Harrier carries. But hanging it off the center pylon degrades the stealth a bit when it’s mounted. And I’m not too keen on the ammo load. It handles forty-one hundred rounds per minute but only carries two hundred twenty rounds in the pod. So you’ve got about three seconds worth of fire before you’re left hoping that you’ve still got some missiles.”
“Or some Hornets in the neig
hborhood,” Pollard said. “But nobody dogfights anymore, not like the old days, not at close range.”
“That’s the problem,” Nagin countered. “If the bogeys ever manage to get in close, we could have trouble.”
“Then don’t let ’em get in close.” Pollard watched his sailors stare at the new JSF like it was the burning bush, then finally took his gaze away from the plane and looked at the senior pilot. He motioned him away from the crowd of enlisted men. Nagin fell in behind the senior officer as the admiral sought privacy, looking for space in the hangar deck that was overrun only by equipment and not by sailors.
“Orders came in from CINCPACOM just after you left. The PLA overran Kinmen and caught everyone flat-footed. That island is so close to the coast that the Chinese were able to blitz out of their bases in range without having to move extra assets around. They could take the Matsus the same way and nobody will be able to call it more than five minutes in advance. PACOM is sending out EP-3s to ramp up ELINT coverage in case the Chinese start getting ready to make a move on Penghu or Taiwan proper. And we’re changing course. Washington is coming down too. We’ll both keep the island between us and the mainland. Washington takes the north, we get the south,” Pollard told him. “Have you seen the morning intel?”
“Not today,” the pilot said, shaking his head. “The flight schedule had me in the air too early. I was going to catch up after I finish up down here. Anything on that PLA carrier threat?”
Pollard shook his head. “CIA and Navy Intel assessments came in. They all say it probably refers to PLA subs carrying Sunburns or Exocets, maybe Shkvals.”
“Academy plebes at Annapolis could’ve made that call,” Nagin said. “True,” Pollard said.
“But it’s the safe bet, and if it comes down to straight ASW, we can handle the PLA Navy.”
“I hate people who always make the safe bet,” Nagin said.