Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  Sachs watched as the old man turned to Kyra after a moment’s silence. “Thank you,” Pioneer said. The man spoke a bit of English after all. There was a strong undercurrent of gratitude in the words, stronger than he would have expected between an asset and his escort. Sachs wondered what the brunette had done to deserve it.

  “You’re welcome,” Kyra said. Then she leaned in close and whispered to him in plain English. “You’ll never be alone.”

  Sachs couldn’t tell whether the man understood her. He seemed to grasp the emotion if not the words. Regardless, Pioneer gripped her hand with both of his own, bowed to her again, and then turned to Mitchell and said something in Mandarin.

  “‘I hope to see you soon,’” Mitchell translated. “We need to get in the air.” Kyra looked at Pioneer and nodded.

  “We’re gone,” Jonathan said.

  The analysts climbed down the stairs and moved to a safe distance. Mitchell grabbed the rope and pulled the stairway up into the plane, then locked the hatch as the Learjet’s engines began to spin up.

  “They’ll be at Dulles in eighteen hours,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

  “We meet our own escort,” Jonathan said. “Have you ever been on an aircraft carrier?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  Jonathan smiled. “Trust me, you’ll love it.”

  “No, I won’t,” Kyra assured him. “I get seasick.”

  She made the analyst wait as she bought Dramamine at one of the airport shops.

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  482 KILOMETERS NORTHEAST OF TAIWAN

  Captain Nagin eased back on the F-35’s throttle and leveled the plane as he came out of his turn. Two fellow Bounty Hunters were behind him, one fifty meters off each wing, and another trio of his fellow Bounty Hunters ten miles behind. All six stealth planes were sharing data with feeds coming from Lincoln, an AWACS out of Guam, and a pair of E-2C Hawkeyes that had taken off from the carrier after Nagin’s flight. For the moment, their own active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars were off and the F-35’s four-panel cockpit screen still offered Nagin a fine view of the sky ahead. The horizon was dark with thunderclouds, and a lightning storm thirty miles ahead was giving a light show as good as any the Lincoln CAG had ever seen from a cockpit. It was a beautiful sight, as long as one kept a respectful distance, and one he wouldn’t have minded lingering to watch.

  The four Chinese Su-27 Flankers ahead marred the view.

  The Flankers were in an echelon formation, each plane slightly to the rear and to the right of the one ahead, and all a thousand feet higher and two miles ahead of Nagin’s flight. They were also on course to encroach on Lincoln’s defense zone unless they changed course in the next five minutes. Some things were not to be trifled with in Nagin’s world, and the safety of home was one them. At the moment, home was the Lincoln—the landing strips on the flattop, not to put too fine a point on it.

  “Think they know we’re here?” asked one of Nagin’s wingmen, a youngish lieutenant, call sign Squib. The other wingman was Cleetus.

  “Nope,” said Nagin. The Flankers’ relatively weak radars almost certainly hadn’t been able to get a return off the stealthy F-35s. And with the AESA systems off, there were no emissions for the Flankers to detect. “Think I’ll go introduce myself.”

  Nagin pulled back on the stick and advanced the throttle ever so slightly, and his plane obediently rose in the sky, pulling ahead of the rest of his personal pack and pushing forward toward the Chinese fighters. He closed the distance gently until he was in position to join the formation, becoming the rearmost plane in the echelon line.

  I love this part, he thought. He pushed the F-35 forward a few meters until he flanked the Chinese fighter in the rear position.

  The PLA pilot took a moment to notice, obviously seeing the US Navy aircraft only out of his peripheral vision at first. Then his head swung full around. Nagin couldn’t see his face through the darkened helmet visor, but the other pilot’s body language told him everything. His head began to jerk wildly about and he started to slip switches in the cockpit with abandon. Doubtless he was yelling to his flight leader and wondering where the American had come from.

  Nagin waved, then motioned hard for him to change course. The PLA pilot made no obvious response. Nagin gave the entire group several seconds to respond, but the line held steady on course.

  Okay, Nagin thought. Meet the boys. “Gentlemen,” he said over his radio, “time to open the coat.”

  The two Bounty Hunters to the rear both grinned behind their visors, reached forward to the four-panel computer screens above their knees, and pressed virtual buttons on the glass. The AESA radars in the F-35s both came alive in tandem and washed the Flankers in electromagnetic waves. The Su-27s began screaming threat warnings in their masters’ ears. A second later, the F-35s’ bay doors snapped open and their missile loads emerged, breaking the stealth profiles. The F-35s were suddenly visible to anyone with a radar.

  The Flankers immediately began to break formation.

  “Now where did they come from?” Nagin chuckled to himself. The sight of two F-35s appearing out of nothing on the Flankers’ heads-up display must have been a brutal shock, which was the point.

  The Flankers went in four different directions, all moving west at varying altitudes and headings. Nagin eased back on his throttle and pushed his stick forward to descend a thousand feet to rejoin his flight. “Close up and pull back,” he radioed back to Squib and Cleetus. “No sense making them think we’re too anxious to get rowdy.” The two wingmen retracted their bay doors, restoring the stealth profiles, then killed the AESA radars, and all three F-35s disappeared off the Flankers’ screens.

  I wonder which one scares them more? Nagin asked himself. Watching us just appear or seeing us go away?

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  SOUTHEAST COAST OF TAIWAN

  They came aboard the carrier in the middle of a squall. The flight from Seoul to Tokyo’s Narita Airport had been turbulent but short. A Navy driver had delivered them to the US Naval Air Facility at Atsugi and led them to a waiting C-2A Greyhound on the tarmac. There had been no conversations with the crew, no talking at all except for the short safety briefing, which Jonathan had ignored. The ease with which he strapped himself in suggested that he’d had practice, but the turboprops were loud enough to discourage Kyra from asking him any questions. Once aloft, Jonathan slept and left Kyra to wish she could do the same. The float coat vests they were ordered to wear were not uncomfortable but the seats and the “Mickey Mouse” helmets with heavy ear protectors were. She might have made do, but the plane itself refused to sit still. She had never been aboard a propeller-driven aircraft. The Dramamine did nothing for her nerves. Every bit of wind and rough air made the Greyhound jump, leaving her edgy and awake. Alone in her thoughts, she wondered whether the aircraft could evade a MIG should the Chinese decide to take offense at their approach to the war zone. Probably not.

  The seat belts performed as advertised when the plane hit the deck harder than Kyra thought possible for an aircraft to survive and then rushed to a stop in a distance too short to be natural. Unseen crewmen disconnected the tailhook from the wire and Kyra watched, too tired to be curious, as they folded up the wings. The plane taxied to a space forward of the carrier island to make room for a Hornet coming less than a minute behind them. The crew chained the Greyhound to the deck and only then did the passengers deplane.

  Horizontal rain lashed the deck and everyone on it. Kyra was stunned to feel the deck pitching and rolling under her feet. She’d thought a carrier was too large to toss about, and she stumbled as the crew hurried them to a hatch into the island. A seaman from the Air Transport Office dropped their wet bags at their feet and gave them cursory directions to their quarters.

  It was the night watch. The island decks were at full lighting but the spaces under the hardtop were visible only under the red floodlights that preserved the crew’s night vision. Their staterooms w
ere on the O-2 level, a single deck removed from topside, where Kyra could still hear and feel aircraft launching and landing. The planes were hitting hard in the storm. She suspected that they could have berthed her several decks below and she still would have heard it. Jonathan had warned her during the drive to Atsugi that a carrier was not a quiet place.

  The stateroom was smaller than a college dorm, all gray metal and blue carpet, but she had the space to herself, for which she was grateful. She had her choice of three racks stacked in a vertical bunk; she chose the middle. Entering the lowest would have required her to get on her knees, and the upper rack was even with her head. She was sure that trying to get out of it in the dark with the ship pitching about would have been a dangerous exercise.

  There was a television mounted on the upper shelf of the metal desk, and Kyra found a live feed of the flight deck besides the DoD channels. She settled on CNN and tried to catch up on the war, but the news, the noise, and the rolling of the carrier in the restless sea together failed to keep her from wanting to collapse. The adrenaline that had surged through her during the Beijing operation had long since worn off. She hadn’t slept in days and now she was more tired than she could ever remember.

  She changed her clothing, pulled a Mini Maglite from her pack and turned it on, then killed the room light and crawled into the small bed. The rack barely gave her the space to roll onto her side, as her shoulder brushed the upper bunk. Kyra clenched the lit Maglite in her teeth as she locked the restraining curtain to keep herself from rolling out. A fall onto the metal desk next to the bed could kill her.

  She turned off the flashlight and was surprised for a few moments at how complete the darkness was before she dropped into unconsciousness.

  Reveille sounded at 0600, full lighting came on in the hallway and climbed under the door, breaking the blackness. The aircraft beating on the deck had never broken their rhythm throughout the night, and the morning shift now began pounding its way across the hallway’s floors. None of it disturbed Kyra a bit until Jonathan’s endless pounding on her door finally broke into her private oblivion.

  CHAPTER 14

  SATURDAY

  DAY FOURTEEN

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Grumbling by the enlisted notwithstanding, the Navy did not bestow flag rank on the gullible or the uncritical. Pollard was quite the opposite, perhaps too critical too often, or so he believed, but he made no apologies for applying stress to his intelligence officers. There was a difference between an error and an intelligence gap. He had suffered through intelligence briefings every morning at sea since his days as a carrier XO and could discern in less than a minute whether the briefer knew his subject. Pollard respected officers willing to confess uncertainty and had blocked the promotions of several who tried to fake their way past him. The admiral had no desire to humiliate any officer for no good reason, but Pollard had no patience for those who thought they could waste his time. Few tried it twice.

  His standards were no different if the briefer was a civilian. His gut impression of the analysts sitting in his quarters was favorable. Burke gave no sign of being intimidated by rank. Pollard had come across few men who acted with such equanimity in his presence aboard this ship. It was rare and slightly annoying. He didn’t consider himself a tyrant to be feared, but some display of intimidation would have shown a healthy respect for the experience and accomplishments underlying his senior rank.

  The woman was harder to read. Stryker came across as an odd mix of confidence and inexperience, traits that were usually contradictory. She handled herself well enough around the officers but deferred most questions to Burke.

  “If it had been my choice, I would have denied you permission to come aboard. You have some friends in high places,” Pollard told them. The order had come from Showalter by way of a shore-to-ship call. “I don’t like having civilians aboard in a possible war zone. Nothing personal.”

  “Understandable. But I promise, we can justify our presence,” Jonathan replied.

  “You’ve got five minutes to do it,” Pollard said.

  Jonathan nodded. “I assume you’ve heard of the Assassin’s Mace project?”

  “Of course.”

  “We believe the Chinese have deployed an Assassin’s Mace weapon and the PLA might be setting either the Lincoln or the Washington up as the target of a weapons test,” Jonathan said.

  Pollard dropped his head and stared at the analyst over the top of his glasses. “You get right to the point, Mr. Burke,” Pollard said.

  “Socializing isn’t his strong point,” Kyra advised.

  “Okay, forget the clock,” Pollard ordered. “What’s your evidence?”

  “Director Cooke has given us approval to share some intel with you that came from a CIA asset who was the senior archivist inside Ministry of State Security headquarters in Beijing,” Jonathan began. “He worked for us from 1991 until yesterday, when Ms. Stryker here exfiltrated him from the country.” The officers turned their heads to Kyra and the admiral’s eyebrows went up, but he remained silent. Kyra blushed a bit at the attention. “He’s provided us with information that suggests the PLA has developed stealth technology. We can review the fine details if you have the time, but suffice it to say that we believe the PLA has at least one fully functional stealth aircraft.”

  Pollard lowered his head and stared at the analysts, then pulled off his glasses and dropped them on the coffee table that separated him from Burke. “Mr. Burke, the Chinese have been showing off a stealth plane for years. Every piece of intel I’ve read says it’s a test bed piece of crap that can barely fly, much less fight. They just roll it out as a showpiece to embarrass the SecDef when he goes over for a visit. So please tell me you’re not that far behind on current events.”

  “That’s not the plane you need to worry about,” Burke said. “The J-20 is, I suspect, used for misdirection, to make us think the Chinese are less advanced than they really are. The PLA has a stealth fighter that can most definitely fight.”

  “And what’s your evidence that this thing is functional?” Pollard said.

  “First, and most to the point, our asset told us point-blank that the J-20 is considered a disappointment by the PLA and was removed from the Assassin’s Mace project years ago,” Jonathan replied. “Then there’s the bombing of the Kinmen power station. Everyone assumed that a Chinese fifth-column unit or sapper team took it out on the ground because the radar track didn’t show anything inbound before the explosion. But the radar track wasn’t entirely clean. There was a radar hit on a lower frequency above the target for a few seconds before the explosion. Stealth planes are detectable on low-band frequencies, but most modern radar systems don’t use them because they pick up birds, clouds, and everything else.”

  “Yeah. The clutter gets bad on the scope, and the software doesn’t always do a great job cleaning it up,” Nagin agreed. He looked at his superior officer. “Would’ve taken a lot of explosives to dig that hole, but I can believe that the PLA had that much stored up on Kinmen.”

  “With plenty more on Penghu and Taiwan proper,” Pollard added, skeptical.

  “In the absence of our other intelligence, I would agree. But imagery analysis suggests that the blast pattern was consistent with an air-dropped munition,” Jonathan said. “It certainly would have been far easier to deliver that quantity of explosives from the air, and it would have made a good first test of their current stealth technology. Then they took out the Ma Kong. She was a Kidd-class vessel, so she wasn’t top-of-the-line by our standards, but her radar systems were still better than most of what the Chinese have sailing around the Strait, and she was a key component of Taiwan’s air defense network. No sapper team did that, and I think it’s unlikely the PLA Navy really got a submarine that close to a secured naval base and then back out again without being detected.”

  “Tough,” Pollard agreed. “But not impossible. So where did they build this thing?” He didn’t expect an answer.

  Jo
nathan surprised him. He turned to Kyra and said nothing. It took her a second to realize he expected her to answer. It took another second to review the data in her head and extract the answer. “No idea,” she said. “But they’ve been test-flying it at Chengdu.”

  “Very good,” Jonathan muttered.

  “Chengdu?” Pollard asked.

  “It’s the one air base not in the Nanjing Military Region where imagery showed significant activity once the fighting started,” Kyra said. “And it’s where the Chinese sent the F-117 wreckage that they bought from the Serbs.”

  “Okay, you’re going to tell me that whole story later,” Nagin advised her. “You think the Chinese have their own Area Fifty-One.”

  “Why not?” Kyra asked. “It worked for us.”

  “And why do you think this is all a weapons test?” Pollard asked.

  “It’s the dog that didn’t bark,” Jonathan replied.

  “Excuse me?” Pollard asked, impatient.

  Kyra grasped the reference immediately. “Admiral, did the PLA harass you during your approach to Taiwan?”

  The admiral and his CAG exchanged short glances. “They certainly could have made life harder for us,” Nagin finally answered for the pair. “We’ve chased off a few PLA fighters. Four or five planes at the most each time.”

  “No submarines tried to approach?” she asked. “No surface vessels?”

  “No,” Pollard admitted. “At least none that our ASW screen has reported.”

  “Any cyberattacks on TRANSCOM, NIPRNet, or any of the other critical military networks?” Kyra asked.

  “Not that we’ve heard,” Nagin said.

  “And that, gentlemen, flies in the face of everything we know about Chinese doctrine for mounting an invasion of Taiwan,” Jonathan concluded. “The plan is for the PLA to do everything it can to delay your entry into the Taiwan Strait while they’re making their move, and they aren’t following the plan. So there are two possibilities. Either they’re planning to invade Taiwan and what we know about the plan is wrong, or they aren’t planning on invading, in which case they don’t need to follow the plan. And I can’t believe the first one is right because no sensible OPLAN for invading Taiwan would ignore the presence of US carriers.”