Cabrillo slid the drive into position and, moments later, the dormant computer came to life. After that, there really wasn’t much to see. Mark said a curser would appear on the otherwise blank screen and start to blink when his device had sucked all extractable information out of the system.
He wished they could use the ballast controls to scuttle the ship, but there would be mechanical fail-safes in place to prevent that. Better off just to set scuttling charges and be done with it. While he waited for the computer to do its thing, he split the rest of the C-4 he carried to Eddie and MacD to take care of that particular task.
“Linc, you copy?”
“Roger that.”
“Round up our prisoners and see to it they get to a lifeboat.”
“Gotcha.”
“Don’t launch yet. I’ve got two more down here.”
“You find the stealth boat?”
“No, but this was definitely its base.” A curser started blinking, just as Mark had programmed. Juan plucked the drive from the USB slot and eyed it. “And we might have been given a look under her skirts.”
Ten minutes later, the crew had been jettisoned from the ship in her encapsulated lifeboat. Eddie had found two more men down in engineering. One would go down with his ship, foolishly thinking he could kick a gun out of Seng’s hands. The charges had been laid, and Gomez Adams had the chopper resting lightly on the deck. Though the craft weighed less than a ton, it had such a small footprint that it put tremendous pressure on whatever it landed on. Keeping the revs up prevented it from damaging the deck plate and potentially trapping itself.
The men climbed aboard the chopper, and Adams, wearing night vision goggles for it was now fully dark, lifted them away. They let Linc do the honors since his had been the most boring part of the operation. He thumbed the detonator.
The blasts were little more than bursts of bubbles from under the waterline, and it looked like something so puny would have no effect on the elephantine ship. But Eddie was a master at demolition, and MacD had been an eager student. Aiding them was the fact that Juan had firewalled the ship’s big diesel engines. The forward momentum had water pumping through the strategic holes Seng and Lawless had punched through the hull. And as the speed increased, so too did the volume of water. This would keep going until the engines were swamped, but even then inertia would keep the water coming.
The car carrier would slip under the waves within the hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Under his flight suit, Slider had on a T-shirt with a picture of an F-18. Below was “0 to 60 in.7 seconds.” With the two turbofans shrieking behind him at max power, he threw a salute to the catapult officer and felt that acceleration for himself.
Captain Mike Davis (USMC), call sign Slider, gave a little whoop as he was catapulted off the carrier and the plane was transformed from a helpless little bird that needed coddling by the deck crew to a deadly raptor that dominated the skies. He raised the plane’s nose and roared into the dawn. In minutes he was at twenty thousand feet and fifty miles out from the
Because they’d really poured on the atoms getting to the East China Sea, the group had been forced to leave behind its slower resupply ship, but the cruisers, destroyers, and frigate were all on-station covering
For now, his radar scope was empty of aircraft not flashing the allies’ IFF beacons. He knew that one of the planes up there with him was the E-2D Hawkeye AWACS, with its big radar dome on its back like the shell of a turtle. It gave those flying CAP a massive advantage in range over any other aircraft in the theater. He’d see an approaching Chinese fighter not long after it left the mainland.
“Stinger Eleven, over.” It was a call from operations. On this sortie he was Stinger 11 and his wingman Stinger 12.
“Eleven, over.”
“Eleven, be advised we have a delay on Twelve, over.”
“Roger that.”
A problem with the catapult most likely was causing the delay. They would need to either fix it quick or hook Stinger 12 onto another cat. Either way, Slider didn’t mind having the skies all to himself.
Though he had at his fingertips electronics that allowed him to see the virtual world for more than a hundred miles, Slider kept his head on a swivel, always looking around, scanning the instruments, looking at each section of sky, making sure someone wasn’t hiding in the sun or behind him in a blind spot. He knew the Chinese were developing stealth technology, and if this turned out to be the Big Show — and the intel weenies said it might just be — then the People’s Air Force would deploy their best toys. He searched for an aircraft his sensors might miss with unwavering vigilance.
Damn, he thought, I love my job.
And then he didn’t.
Without warning, the F-18 yawed hard to starboard and dove for the earth. He’d been cruising at six hundred knots, well below the plane’s maximum speed of Mach 1.8. The Super Hornet shattered the sound barrier even before Slider responded to the yaw. No matter what he did to the stick, the plane remained in a nose-down position, and chopping the throttles had no effect on his speed.
G-forces built, and his pressure suit constricted his legs and abdomen in an attempt to keep blood from pooling in his lower extremities. Still, his vision grayed. A god-awful shriek filled his head. The altimeter unwound in a blur.
“Mayday, Mayday. Stinger Eleven,” he gasped over the radio.
He couldn’t wait for a response from the
Slider pulled the handle for his ejection seat, and though the system had been hardened against EMP, the amount of magnetism slamming the airframe was simply too much for the hardware/software interface of the seat’s sequencer. Not that it would have mattered. The shock of ejecting out of an aircraft hurtling toward the ground at twelve hundred knots would have killed Slider instantly.
He shouted as the ocean filled his field of vision. The plane shuddered. The engines were throttled back to zero, and still the F-18 raced earthward, accelerating all the way. The forces acting on the plane went beyond its design parameters, and chunks of its aluminum skin began to tear away. It started spiraling, shedding more of itself. A whole wing ripped free.
Slider mercifully lost consciousness.
The Super Hornet arrowed into the cool waters of the East China Sea with a surprisingly small splash, like a well-executed dive off the high board. The remaining wing and tail fins came off with impact while the streamlined fuselage plummeted a hundred feet mere seconds after impact on momentum alone.
All this had been recorded by the
What would have made less sense was if there had been an actual eyewitness to the crash. Because they wouldn’t have seen a thing. One second, a high-performance plane was flying high overhead and, the next, it had vanished as if it had never been there at all. Its snowy white contrail of water vapor streaked across the sky in a straight line, then ended abruptly, as though it had been erased by the hand of God.
The USS
