“Um, State may contact you,” added Jed. “They’re a little behind the curve on this, so they may need a full, uh, briefing. Director says do it, but you have to watch their clearance.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Nothing on Kali,” said Jed.
“Then what’s the sense of briefing them?
“Yeah. Not my call,” said Jed, which Dog had learned was Jed’s standard response when he agreed something didn’t make sense, but his boss hadn’t listened to the reasons. “I guess you have to do what you can do.”
“All right, Jed. We should have the cargo planes on the Philippines tonight,” added Dog.
“I’ll keep you updated,” said Jed.
“Thanks.” Dog killed the connection himself with his remote control, then clicked onto the Quicksilver circuit to update them.
Cargo stretched across the water like so many icebergs. The fantail of the ship jutted upward from the water, its large screw looking like a bizarre metal daisy waiting to be plucked. Zen brought the Flighthawk down for a pass at two thousand feet, his airspeed bleeding back under two hundred knots. He could see bodies in the water; two or three appeared to be clinging to something, and there was a man on one of the floating cargo containers.
“I think we have survivors,” he told Breanna. “I’m going to take another pass and try to get better video. You might want to radio any ships that are coming.”
“We’re in the process of making contact now,” she told him. “We’re going to pipe your feed up here.”
“Hawk Leader,” acknowledged Zen.
He checked Hawk Two, still in trail above and behind Quicksilver, then turned Hawk One around for another run. The feed off the robot plane was being pumped back to Dreamland, were it could be analyzed for potential survivors, as well as any hazardous cargo or weapons.
The merchant ship that had been sailing ahead of the container vessel when it was struck had made a large, cautious turn in the water and was approaching the debris field slowly. It hadn’t yet lowered boats into the water. In answer to the SOS, another vessel, a tanker, was about ten miles away, coming north at fifteen knots. Several miles beyond the tanker, but making better time, was a cruise ship. Collins had ID’s the tanker and cruise ship already — the Exxon Global and the Royal Scotsman—and now Ferris clicked in to say they had acknowledged his message that there survivors in the water. The closer merchant ship, meanwhile, did not answer on any of the frequencies the copilot tried, even as it continued at a snail’s pace toward the bobbing containers.
“Hawk Leader — we’re getting something twenty miles west of than tanker — odd reading on the water,” said Ferris. “Could be our sub getting ready to surface. We want to change course to check it out.”
“Yeah, go for it,” said Zen, immediately turning toward the coordinates.
Hawk One cruised in range just in time to see a submarine rise gently above the waves, the black, elongated oval of its conning tower pushing aside the water. Zen slid around the sub at just over three thousand feet; Collins ID’s it as a Russian Kilo, a diesel-powered boat that according to his brief usually didn’t operate this far south.
“This bastard that sank the container ship?” questioned Zen.
“Not sure who it is,” said Collins. “We don’t have any transmissions. I’m piping your feed to Dreamland, but they can’t ID it either. Probably Chinese, not Indian.”
“You think the Chinese sank the ship?”
“Stand by, Hawk Leader,” said Collins, undoubtedly so he could talk to Dreamland people uninterrupted.
Zen took two passes low and slow, but failed to pick up and identifying marks. Like nearly all modern designs, the sub had no bow gun or surface weapons, beside its torpedoes and mines, and seemed to be taking no hostile action. It didn’t use its radio either; the only emissions coming from it were from a relatively short-range surface search radar, which Torbin announced was a “Snoop Tray.”
“Checking on his handiwork?” Zen asked.
“Can’t tell for sure what he’s doing,” answered Torbin. “But I don’t think these guys carry cruise missiles. Assuming he’s Chinese.”
“Thinking is, definitely Chinese,” said Collins, coming back into the discussion. “Container ship almost certainly got nailed by a cruise missile, so odds are this guy’s clean. Container ship was supposedly going to Pakistan, so the implication is that might have been a motive; that, or target practice.”
Zen had dealt with the Chinese and their proxies before; he didn’t trust them not to have sunk the ship.
“Ship captains are requesting instructions,” said Ferris. “One of them got the sub on his radar; now they’re all chattering about it.”
“Tell them to proceed with the rescue,” snapped Breanna. “Collins, if you can figure out what the hell radio frequency they’re using, advise the submarine to help out or get lost!”
“We don’t have a precoded message for that,” said Collins. “Not in Chinese.”
“Do it in English. Use every frequency you can think of — Russian and Indian as well as Chinese. Hell, try Dutch and French too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Collins.
“Sub’s moving southward, changing course,” said Zen. He brought Hawk One down to five hundred feet and rode the sub bow to stern. There were three or four men in the tower; no weapons visible. Hawk One was moving too fast to get a good look at uniforms, let alone faces, and the freeze-frame didn’t make it any clearer. “Looks like they’re headed toward the damaged ship. If they try to interfere with the rescue, I’m going to perforate their hull.”
“It may come to that,” said Bree. “Lets drop down a bit and make sure they know we’re here.”
“They’d be awful blind not to,” said Zen. He did a quick check on Hawk Two; its systems were all in the green and the computer had it in Trail Two, one of the preset flight patterns programmed into the Flighthawk’s onboard systems. To save communications bandwidth, a number of routine flight operations and patterns were carried aboard the robot, allowing it to perform basic functions without being told precisely what to do. In Trail Two, it homed in on the mother ship, staying precisely three miles off the V-shaped tail, varying its altitude and position as it flew, pretty much the way a “real” pilot would.
“Uh-oh. Got another sub surfacing,” said Chris as the Megafortress spiraled down toward the ocean. “Five miles beyond the cruise ship.”
“On it,” said Zen, jumping into Hawk Two as the Megafortress changed course to get a look.
In the few minutes it took to get in range, the submarine was already fully surfaced. Its conning tower was longer than the first sub’s, shaped like a rounded dagger with the knifepoint facing backward. Otherwise, the sub itself seemed to be roughly the same shape and size as the Kilo.
“Not in our library,” said Chris. “We’ll want to route video on this to Dreamland.”
Zen had the Flighthawk down to two thousand feet. Tipping the wing gently, he cruised around the submarine, trying to go as slow and steady as possible. There were no markings on it, let along a flag, but he felt sure this was what they’d been sent to find — the Indian hunter-killer that was blowing Chinese ships.
“Zen, they think it’s a modified Kilo,” said Chris Ferris. “But the conning tower looks like an Akula, which is a nuke boat. They’re real interested in this; it’s off their maps.”