“Yeah.”
“My footsteps.”
“I’m right behind you.”
Bison had started toward them with his gear, moving very slowly and marking the mines with reed-thin flags. It was as if he were laying out an odd golf course.
“They must’ve had some pretty high-tech stuff here,” said Stoner as they walked. “They sure as shit fought to protect it.”
“Yeah, they did.”
“That hump down by the water didn’t blow completely. Was probably a radar.”
“Yeah,” said Danny.
“Look at it once the mines are clear.”
“After we secure my sergeant’s body, yes.”
Aboard Quicksilver, over the South China Sea
2002
“We’re ready,” said Jennifer. “We should have it.”
Zen stared at the screen. “Nothing. Didn’t work, Jen.”
“All right, hold on.”
Zen pushed back in the seat. The sim program included a short-handoff module, but it wasn’t much of a workout—on the program, the screen appeared and you went.
No screen, no go.
“All right, let’s try again,” said Jennifer.
Zen’s main screen turned green. White axis lines dissected it into four quadrants. Two white blobs sat in the upper quarter, percolating like tiny Alka-Selzer tablets.
“Hey, got radar feed,” said Zen.
“Sonar!” corrected Jennifer.
“Yeah, sorry. Got it. Okay, this is the synthetic thermal feed?”
“Right.”
“Looks like I’m flying in soup. Except for the grid, there’s no reference.”
“You’re swimming, not flying.”
“Whatever. Running diagnostic set. You out there, Delaford?”
“I’m watching everything you do,” said the Navy commander from Iowa, which was orbiting the ocean a short distance away.
Zen’s Flighthawk controls had been replaced by two oversized keyboards and a control stick large, but considerably less flexible, than the Flighthawks’. While Piranha’s full range of commands could be entered through the keyboards, Zen’s interest—and training—was confined to a very small subset, which could be handled by preset buttons carefully marked with tape. He could flip between a view synthesized from either passive sonar or temperature-deviant sensors. The computer automatically processed the contact data, displaying a small amount of its information in captions beneath each of the white synthesized images on his main screen; more information on each could be called up on the auxiliary screen. His speed controls were also worked by dedicated keys on the left board.
“How are you looking over there, Quicksilver?” asked Delaford.
“Uh, well, the sea is kind of a brownish green,” said Zen.
Delaford laughed. “I can tell you how to change the colors if you want.”
“I’m just fine,” Zen told him.
“All right. Those two white blobs are our submarines. We’re twelve miles behind the closest one. This is as close as we want to get. They’re oblivious to us. All their attention is ahead. Pretty soon they’ll be turning around,” added Delaford. “They’ll pull a quick spin in the water to make sure there’s no one behind them.”
“What do I do then?”
“Just stop. Their active sonar can’t see us beyond roughly five miles, if that. Truth is, we could probably get right on their hulls and they’d never know we were there.”
“Okay.”
“Temperature sensors are not nearly as sensitive. Here, look at the screen.”
Delarod fed in the display. It took Zen a second to realize the orange funnels in the milky greenish-brown field were the target subs.
“Very obvious what sensor you’re looking at,” noted Delaford.
“Clever.”
Delaford ran through some of the routine, then repeated things Zen had already heard from one of the Navy briefers as well as Jennifer. Zen felt a little like a high school backup quarterback being crammed with information on the sideline after the star went down. Best things to do, he thought, was just get into the game and work it out on his own.
“Okay, so eventually these guys split up. It’s not going to matter who you go with, but once you do, you have to stay with him. Just make sure the other sub doesn’t come back around and try and sniff you out,” said Delaford.
“I thought they couldn’t see me.”
“Hear you. Probably, they won’t.”
“Probably?”
“If we could sneak past an American destroyer, I wouldn’t worry about a Chinese sub,” said Delaford. “On the other hand, that’s kind of why we’re here, to figure out what they can do.”
“All right, I’m ready.”
“I would go with the sub that heads west,” said Delaford. “That’s the one that will be likely to be closest to the Indian ships, so if they’re going to do anything fancy, that’s the one that’ll do it. We want to see if they lay mines, fire torpedoes, that sort of thing. Be an intelligence bonanza, as long as you don’t get in the way.”