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Lab Rat nodded. “Good.”

“Admiral?” Bird Dog said.

Batman looked at him.

“If you’re increasing Combat Air Patrol, I’d like to request some air time. I’m getting rusty, if you know what I mean.”

“Do I ever,” Batman said. Then he remembered something. “No offense, Bird Dog, but I understand you’ve had a little trouble finding an RIO who wants to fly with you.”

Bird Dog’s eyes widened. “That’s not true at all, sir. Hell, before this trip I had the same RIO for longer than anyone else in the Navy. Gator Cummings. And my RIO, Catwoman — she loves to fly with me.”

Batman debated calling the young aviator on his rather freeform interpretation of events. Surely the aviator knew that everyone on Jefferson was aware of the circumstances of his split with “the same RIO” he’d had for so long. According to scuttlebutt, the RIO, Gator, had finally demanded transfer — not just to another pilot, but to an entirely different ship. “Back in Cuba, he put me into the water,” Gator had said. “Then I turned around and flew with him again in Turkey. After that, I started wondering if maybe I had a death wish. I decided to get as far away from that maniac as I possibly can.”

Gator was now flying with VF-91 off the USS Eisenhower.

Maybe Bird Dog had learned something from that whole experience — certainly, the youngster was trying hard to do well in his new position as advisor. Finally, Batman nodded. “Talk to CAG. Tell him I said it was all right.”

Bird Dog grinned with the palpable relief of any Naval aviator who hadn’t been in the air for a while. It made Batman long, more than ever, for the feel of a Tomcat strapped around his own body.

Across the hangar bay, in the entrance to the aft elevator, sparks showered down from welding arcs.

FIVE

Sunday, 3 August
0800 local (-8 GMT)
PLA Destroyer Juhai
Victoria Harbor

The Juhai, a Luda III class destroyer, steamed slowly into the West Lamma Channel and turned toward the open sea. Her orders were to join her PLA Navy sister ships in the area where the American aircraft carrier battle group was currently operating, and take up a flanking position. With her four twin C801 missile launchers, new twin 37mm guns and brand-new electronics, Juhai was more than formidable enough to cause the Americans concern.

Of course, these days a “flanking position” did not imply close proximity. Juhai’s commander, Kung Choug, had been warned to exhibit special care not to appear hostile in any way. It had something to do with an American yacht that sank in the South China Sea a couple of days earlier. The Americans had apparently accused the PLA of involvement.

Standing on the bridge, Kung surveyed the busy waters ahead of his ship. Navigation was no problem; despite the 200-plus small islands that made the Hong Kong vicinity a spiders’s web of channels and tributaries, the routes in and out had been charted for centuries. However, these waters perpetually swarmed with boats: fishing craft, pleasure boats, sailboats, commercial steamers, cruise ships, and visiting military craft from innumerable nations. They made maneuvering a headache. Despite his recent pleasant leave in Hong Kong, Kung looked forward to seeing the open sea once more. Weather predictions warned of scattered squalls over the next week, but nothing too heavy.

One good thing about moving a large ship in and out of Hong Kong: Here was one of the greatest deep-water harbors in the world, so there was little danger of going aground. Which was ironic, really, considering that the South China Sea was itself comparatively shallow.

In the distance, he saw a small military vessel chugging slowly across the channel. Even before he focused his glasses on it, he had a feeling he knew what kind of boat it was: a CDF patrol boat.

He scowled. Say what you wished about the British, they had known how to control the harbor. But Major General Chin, commander of the Coastal Defense Force, was a fool. His boats were always tangling with the wrong vessels, halting and searching steamers loaded with New Zealand wool while tankers full of opium sailed right past. And so far, there had been at least three reported collisions between CDF craft and civilian vessels cruising in the bay. Such incompetence could only be the product of leadership selected for political clout rather than military competence.

So Kung kept his gaze warily on the craft dead ahead. It was stern-on to him, and too far away for him to read any of its markings, but sure enough, he recognized the CDF uniforms of the men scurrying over her fantail. Kung sighed. Probably the boat had fouled her screws on a piece of flotsam in the water, a nylon rope or a wayward fish pot. It was an embarrassment.

He was about to direct the destroyer’s radioman to contact the patrol boat when he saw the small craft’s stern dig into the water, foam billowing out behind her. The patrol boat tore off across the Channel at high speed. Kung was startled. Her skipper might be incompetent, but that was one well-maintained boat.

He returned his gaze to the water ahead, searching for other obstacles.

The one obstacle he couldn’t see, and wasn’t even thinking about, lay dead ahead at a depth of eight meters. It was an American-made MK65 Quickstrike mine, essentially a 2,390 pound bomb sheathed in a thin-walled casing, tethered to the bottom of the channel by a long cable.

As the Juhai approached, her 3,700 ton bulk pushed before her a pressure wave that registered on the preset triggering device of the mine. Acoustic sensors analyzed the sound saturating the seawater, broke the signal into its component parts, and arrived at a decision. Critical arming circuits clicked shut.

Kung felt a sharp jolt through the bottoms of his feet. His immediate thought was that his ship had, somehow, impossibly, run aground. Then — even worse — that she had struck some unseen civilian or commercial vessel. After what had happened to that yacht the other night, no one — least of all Major General Po Yu Li — would believe there had been an accident.

But even as these thoughts raced through his mind, a huge column of water and foam shot up from the port bow. Kung felt the deck rear up under his feet, and the next thing he knew he had stumbled back into the wall. Then he was stumbling forward again, catching himself on the console. Through the windshield he saw metal plates buckled back on the weatherdeck, which was almost underwater. Then it reared up again, even as the column of water crashed back down, much of it exploding across Juhai’s bridge windscreen, making Kung blind.

Even so, he knew instantly that his ship had been severely holed. Its movement was abruptly all wrong, a heavy corkscrewing as the bow settled deeper into the water, pushed there by the still-churning screws.

Kung began shouting orders to reduce speed and get damage-control crews to the bow. Then he let the Officer of the Deck take command of the immediate emergency while he got on the radio to contact Hong Kong.

Saturday, 2 August
0900 local (+5 GMT)
Briefing Room
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

There were advantages to being the nephew of the chief of naval operations. For one, you got to sit in a plush chair in a nice meeting room while being grilled. For another, they served better-than-average coffee.

That was about it.

Besides Tombstone, four men sat around the conference table. They must have been chosen from Pentagon Central Casting: There was the Air Force rep, perhaps forty years old, with a cleft chin punctuating a square, Dudley Doright jaw. There was the Navy rep, older, appropriately bright of eye and ruddy of complexion, with clipped white hair and steely gaze. There was the colorless guy in the gray suit, who had introduced himself as “a consultant on advanced aviation technology.” And finally there was the kid representing DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old and was not actually in the military himself, a fact he emphasized by wearing a Hawaiian shirt over baggy chinos and tennis shoes.