“You mean completely without contact?” asked Delaford. “The problem is, Colonel, it’s such a wide area to cover. Considering Piranha can only stay in the water for eighteen hours—well, twenty or twenty-one …”
“It’ll stay longer than that,” said Dog.
“Right, I mean, it can only pursue at speed for that long, then runs down.”
“But if we figure, say, an eighteen-hour patrol, so the last six hours or so it’s near the carriers—I don’t know, can you plot something like that out? How close would we have to be?”
“Let me talk to English.”
“Orions are clean,” reported Rosen. “You know what we need? Hot dogs.”
“Oh, that’d be great on a long mission,” said Dog sarcastically.
“Break up the monotony.”
“Colonel, we think we have a good drop,” said Delaford, coming back on the line. He laid out a plan to launch Piranha at 260 nautical miles from the carrier task force and run it on an intercept. When it reached a point twenty miles from the carriers, it would then sweep ahead in an arcing search pattern.
“The only problem is what we do if, after we launch, the Orions find the Chinese subs and they’re really far away.”
“How far?” asked Dog.
“Well, anything over fifty miles and not heading in our direction is going to be problematic,” said Delaford.
“But we’ll know where they’re headed.”
“Only if our guess that they’re after the Indian sub is right.”
“I say we go for it,” said Dog.
“I agree.”
Woods and Allen might not, but Dog couldn’t see the use of flying around all day and not launching. They had to take a shot sooner or later.
“Give us that launch point again,” Colonel Bastian told Delaford.
Twenty minutes later, Dog and his copilot took Iowa down to five hundred feet, surveying the ocean and preparing to launch a buoy and the device. After a last check with the Orions to make sure they hadn’t found anything, Dog dipped the plane’s nose. Piranha splashed into the water like an anxious dolphin, freed from her pen.
“Contact with Piranha,” said Delaford, reporting a link with the robot. “We’re running diagnostics now. Looking good, Colonel.”
They ran the Megafortress in a slow, steady oval at approximately five thousand feet above the waves. As they completed their second pass, Rosen got contacts on the radar—a pair of Shenyang F-8’s were heading south from China.
“I have them at one hundred twenty-five miles,’ said Rosen. “They’re between eighteen and twenty angels, descending.”
“They see us?” said Dog.
“Not clear at this time,” said Rosen.
“Check and record our position,” said Dog, who wanted the record clear in case of attack. They were, irrefutably, in international air space.
“Absolutemento.”
“Which means?”
“You got it, Colonel.”
“Still bored? I thought the launch would perk you up.”
“Just call me Mr. Perky, sir.” Rosen worked in silence for a few minutes, still tracking the pair of interceptors as they headed south, not quite on an intercept vector. It was possible a land-based radar had picked them up as they opened their bay to complete the Piranha launch. On the other hand, it was also possible the planes were merely on a routine mission. The F-8IIMs looked like supersized MiG-21’s. though their mission was considerably different. Intended as high-altitude, high-speed interceptors, they were not quite as competent as the more maneuverable Sukhois that had recently tangled with Iowa. Nonetheless, they were capable aircraft, and their Russian Phazotron Zhuk-8 multimode radars would be painting the Megafortress relatively soon.
“We have a surface ship, thirty miles west, thirteen degrees from our present heading,” said Rosen, “Unidentified type—trawler-size.”
“Yes, we have it on the passive sonar,” said Delaford. “We’re looking at our library now. Probably a spy ship.”
“Not in the library,” said Ensign English after comparing the acoustical signal picked up by Piranha with a library of known warships.
“We can swing over and take a look,” said Dog.
“Good idea, Colonel,” said Delaford. “We’ll keep the probe its present course.”
“Keep an eye on our F-8’s,” Dog told Rosen as he nudged the stick to get closer to the ship.
“They’re turning it up a notch—on an intercept now at forty miles.”
“Surface ship is tracking us for them?”
“No indication of that,” said Rosen.
By the time the ship appeared in the distance, the F-8’s were roughly ten miles out. The two planes had cut their afterburners and were now descending in an arc that would take them about a half mile off Iowa’s nose. If everyone stayed on their present course. The fact they were heading in that direction, rather than trying to take a position on Iowa’s rear, seemed a significant tactical shift to Dog. Maybe shooting down the cruise missiles yesterday had won some friends.
Not that they necessarily wanted them.
The ship in the distance looked like an old trawler. Ensign English, working off the video feed piped down by the copilot, identified it as a Republic of China or Taiwan ship, one of a class of spy vessels the Taiwanese used to keep tabs on their mainland brothers.