A launching tube swung down from the helicopter’s belly, like an insect’s ovipositor, aiming vertically at the ground below. A black-powder propulsive charge fired and a metallic spike the length and diameter of a man’s arm punched down through the underbrush. Driven into the soil for three quarters of its length, a protective cap blew off and a slender antenna deployed. On Christine’s control box, a green diagnostic light glowed.
In the past, tapping an enemy landline would have been a laborious and risky task performed by a Special Forces team. This method was swifter and placed only two people directly at risk. A hypersensitive induction coil within the sensor they had just planted would read the faint electromagnetic modulations radiating from the telephone cable. Recorded and electronically compressed, they would be stored for later burst transmission to an orbiting NSA satellite.
Until the unit’s batteries wore down, or until a human-size object entered the range of its motion sensors, triggering the thermite self destruct charge, the PLA’s phone was effectively bugged.
“Spike’s set Go!”
The launcher retracted and the bay doors slammed shut. Retainer Zero One dipped her nose and regained airspeed, skimming the valley floor and angling away to the east.
“Well, that wasn’t such a big deal, now, was it?”
“Repeat that question once we’re back on the Duke, sis.”
“How are we on time?”
“Right on the edge. If nothing goes Murphy on us, we can just make the rendezvous.”
Arkady aimed Zero One upslope toward a shallow saddle in the far ridge. The low, rolling landscape with its lack of tall trees and high-tension lines made for good helicopter country, and the night sky had been comfortingly clear of hostile traffic. If they could just stretch this rollout a little longer.
Flying nape of the earth, a bare twenty feet above the ground, Zero One crested the saddle.
“Sheeeit!”
Arkady’s right foot smashed down on its rudder pedal, nearly bending the mount. Retainer Zero One flared around like a startled quail, the abrupt g-load forcing a protesting yelp out of his passenger. With weed stalks sweeping her belly, Zero One raced back over the saddle and downslope again.
“Jeez, Arkady! What’s going on?”
“It appears, sis, that Mr. Murphy has just bitten us in the ass.”
While they had been planting their bug, a solid wall of steel had rolled across their line of retreat.
Arkady dropped south half a click along the ridgeline and gingerly hovered up to an observation position.
“Where the hell did all of these guys come from?” he murmured.
“From the PRC staging ground at Fuzhou,” Christine replied grimly. “Fa’ sure, that’s got to be at least a full armored division down there.”
Through the night-vision systems, they could see a steady stream of military vehicles flowing for miles along the valley floor tanks and armored personnel earners, interspersed with an occasional truck or fuel transport. They were moving in combat mode, the AFVs running on their own tracks instead of being carried aboard lowboys, cannon out-angled, covering both sides of the roadway. Cataloging the stream, Christine noted that a majority of the tanks were angular, late-model, Chinese Type 85s. Here and there, however, was the flattened teakettle turret of an older Type 69. At one point, the Intel even thought she spotted the brakeless gun barrel of an ancient Soviet-built T-55.
A shot-up outfit, she decided, brought back to fighting strength with whatever odds and ends could be swept up out of the depots. She panned the video system along the column, storing the images. Arkady backed the helo below the crestline again. “We,” he said, “are royally screwed. We’re going to have to swing wide and circle around these guys, and that’s going to flush our time line right down the toilet.”
“Any chance of just sneaking through a crack?”
“Nope. The Nationalist Air Force has been giving these guys a hard time lately. You can bet every antiair vehicle and deck machine gun in that column is manned. Stealthed or not, we’d get burned flying over that outfit. We’ve got to go around.”
“Boy, are we gonna get yelled at when we get back, or what?”
Arkady paid Zero One off and headed back upvalley. “Let’s just hope that there’s somebody still there to yell at.”
“Captain, this is Raven’s Roost.” It was the voice of Lieutenant (J.g.) Randy Selkirk, the number-two man in Intelligence Division. “I think there may be somebody out there.”
A cold, hard hand clinched inside Amanda’s guts. Her eyes went to the glowing rows of repeaters again. Low-light Tactical display. ECM Scanners. Nothing.
“I’m not showing anything here, Mr. Selkirk.”
“It’s on the electromagnetic detection arrays, ma’am. Very, very low gam. Too low for the discriminator circuits of the Aegis system to recognize as a valid contact. We can’t even get a clear bearing on it, just that it’s somewhere to seaward.”
“Any idea what it could be?”
“Looks like systems discharge. Generator static and make and-break, that kind of stuff. But he’s either really small or he’s Faraday-screened damn near as good as we are.” A tone of frustration began to creep into Selkirk’s voice “On the other hand, we could just have a very active thunderstorm over the horizon I’m sorry, ma’am, just can’t tall it any closer.”
The junior officer was trying, but he had yet to develop Christine Rendino’s almost supernatural ability to analyze and extrapolate data.
“No problem, Lieutenant. Keep working the contact and keep me advised.”
Amanda rechecked the time hack that glowed in the bottom left corner of each monitor. They were six and a half minutes-plus on the projected recovery time. Arkady, Chris, where are you!
Something had gone wrong. Arkady would not miss a rendezvous like this unless something had gone seriously wrong.
She crossed to the port side of the bridge and scanned the star-spattered sky above the hills that rimmed the inlet.
No commander should ever be stupid enough to take a friend or a lover. Why the hell couldn’t she learn. Why couldn’t she be like those other officers, who could maintain that cool, emotionally insulated distance from those they served with. Because the best ones seem to be the ones who give a damn. The old comment of Arkady’s echoed unbidden out of her memory.
Well, she was giving a damn now, for what it was worth. But the only concrete action she could take was to decide how long she dare wait for them here at the recovery point. All right. Compute to the worst-case scenario. They crashed or were knocked down early on during the insertion mission.
Could they have survived the crash? Were they in PLA custody? No, dammit! Forget that! Stay focused on the scenario.
Say the wreck was immediately identified by someone who knew what a LAMPS-valiant Sea Comanche was and what kind of range it had. That would give them their search radius for the launching platform. How long would it take for the Red military to initiate a hunt? What kind of assets would they have available?
“Captain!” The strangled urgency in the lookout’s voice made Amanda whip around.
“Surface contact bearing zero five oh off the starboard bow!”
Instantly, she was at the lookout’s side, gazing up into the low-light monitor. On the gray-toned screen, the unmistakable, rakish silhouette of a large warship could be seen rounding the northern headland about a mile offshore. A second followed in column a few moments later, and then a third, farther out to sea. Angling across the entrance to the inlet, they had just cut off the Duke’s only line of escape.
The sudden, soft howl of hydraulics broke the shock paralysis that had settled on the bridge. The forward Oto Melara mount was indexing around to cover the intruders. Farther out along the bow, a scattering of small octagonal hatches popped open on the upper surfaces of the Vertical Launch Systems. Each open hatch revealed the dark mouth of a missile silo.