Mirage

down, and steaming hard.

* * *

“What just happened?” Max stood behind Cabrillo in the op center. Eric was at the helm, Murph at the weapons station, and Hali and Linda manned communications and the sensor suite. They had all watched the jet crash on radar.

“They screwed up,” Juan replied, a fighter’s gleam in his eye.

“The Chinese’s stealth ship.”

“It looks like the plane experienced the same magnetic pull we felt when we took out Kenin’s first stealth ship. The Chinese are too far out from the Stennis, and this crash means the area will be crawling with rescue choppers and one of the battle group’s ancillary ships.”

“Meaning, he’s going to have to bug out.”

“Stoney, why aren’t we headed to the crash?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.

The incident occurred well within the search box the Chairman had deduced. The only problem was, they had been caught out while patrolling the far edge, nearly fifty miles from where the plane went down.

“On it,” Stone said, and the ship came about and the cryopumps began to scream.

Juan now had to second-guess the captain of the Chinese stealth ship once again, and he was beginning to regret an earlier decision. He hadn’t passed the data stick of information from the car carrier to Eric and Mark because he knew the two of them would have spent the night poring over it and he needed them fresh. Now he realized he needed to know a lot more about his adversary’s capabilities.

He called down to the butler’s pantry off the galley, “Maurice, it’s Cabrillo. I need you to do me a favor.”

The Englishman replied, “I assure you, Captain, that anything I do for you is surely not a favor. You pay me handsomely for my services.”

“Fair enough,” Juan replied. “In the middle drawer of my desk is a thumb drive. Could you please plug it into my computer?”

Eric and Mark both looked at him like a couple of dogs eyeing a T-bone. They had not been happy with Cabrillo’s earlier decision and now they couldn’t wait to get a look at what they’d gotten.

A minute later, the information had been fed into the mainframe, translated into English, and the two of them were glued to a pair of tablet computers.

Juan still had to make a call about where the stealth ship would reposition itself for another run on the carrier.

Linda broke his silent musings. “Looks like a rescue chopper just launched off the Stennis. And one of the screening destroyers is breaking formation to investigate.”

Cabrillo also knew that the U.S. Navy wasn’t going to like the Oregon’s presence here. In fact, he fully expected to be told to leave, especially now they had lost one of their fighters. The old tramp steamer was the one wild card the Chinese captain didn’t know was in the deck. He would have studied American naval tactics and doctrine and could anticipate responses to just about any scenario. But he didn’t know the Corporation was gunning for him. Juan had to find a way to exploit that advantage.

“You’re right about him screwing up,” Eric said, looking up from his tablet. “When the magnetic field is activated, they lose their radar. With the jet flying in the clouds, they never knew it was inbound.”

“How big of a field can they put up?” Cabrillo asked. “What’s its range?”

“I’m reading that section,” Murph said. “I need a little more time. There is some seriously funky math going on here.”

He tilted his tablet so Eric could get a look, and soon they were whispering about gauss levels, angles of incidence, and terawattage. It was Greek to the rest of the crew.

Given the weather and lousy visibility, the Chinese stealth ship would only need to move a couple of miles away from the crash site to hide. It wouldn’t need its magnetic screen at all, not until it made another attempt on the Stennis. Juan wondered if they wouldn’t want to give themselves a bigger cushion. An Arleigh Burke — class destroyer had some of the most powerful radar systems deployed on any ship in the world. How much did the Chinese trust their vessel’s stealth capabilities? Were a couple of miles enough or would they back farther away?

If he were the Chinese captain, he’d give himself plenty of sea room and wait for another opportunity. They were still almost three hundred miles from the islands and at least two hundred from where the carrier battle group would position itself.

Cabrillo made up his mind. “Mr. Stone, take us another two points port, if you please.”

“Think he’s bugging out?” Max asked, his unlit pipe between his teeth.

“Out, no. Off a little, yes. He’s going to zig northeast and then zag southeast to get back into interception position.”

They were eavesdropping in on the Navy’s rescue attempt. A Seahawk helicopter was over the area where the Super Hornet had augured into the sea twenty minutes after the event, but then the Oregon received a direct call.

“Attention to the ship at”—the female voice rattled off the Oregon’s exact longitude and latitude down to the second—“you are about to enter a restricted military zone. Please be advised to alter your course.”

Before Juan could reply, Linda informed him that one of the patrolling jets had broken off its CAP and was headed their way.

“How long till he’s here?”

“About three minutes. The honchos gave him permission to light the fires. His airspeed’s close to a thousand knots.”

The inbound Hornet would need to drop out of the clouds for a visual and that meant he’d have to slow down also. That bought another couple of minutes. The Oregon was traveling at a hair over forty knots. That, in and of itself, was unusual. But that kind of speed from a broken-down rust bucket like her would raise even more hackles. He could bluff his way with the destroyer, since they were only looking at a radar return. Once the jet had eyes on them, the cat was out of the bag. Juan needed to slow, but he needed the speed in order to catch the stealth ship.

“It’s variable,” Mark Murphy said.

“What?” Juan asked him irritably. He didn’t need the distraction.

“The magnetic field. It’s variable up to fifteen miles, but, at that range, the ship is still invisible — well, mostly — but the sheering forces we experienced after rescuing Linda are negligible.”

“Is the ship armed at all?”

“Not as far as I can tell, but there’s a mountain of info here, and we’re just scratching at the foothills.”

Cabrillo didn’t think it would be armed. The magnetic field was the weapon and to work effectively it needed to get in close.

“‘Foothills of data’?” Max scoffed. “Wordsmith, you are not.”

Cabrillo was about to answer the radio hail when the woman’s voice filled the op center for a second time. “Unidentified vessel, this is the USS Ross. We are a guided missile destroyer and you are entering a restricted military area. Turn back at once or we will take steps to compel you to leave this region. Do you copy?”

Juan knew this was mostly bluff. They were still a good distance from the carrier, although the Ross might be protecting the crash site as well as the Stennis. Either way, they were still a long way from resorting to any kind of violent confrontation.

“Chairman,” Linda cried, “they just launched two more planes and they’re vectoring on our position.”

The Navy was reacting a lot more aggressively than he’d anticipated. No doubt those two planes would be armed with antiship missiles, probably Harpoons. He keyed his mic. “USS Ross, this is Captain Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo of the Oregon. Please repeat.”

Cabrillo didn’t know how to handle this. He doubted he could talk his way into letting them pass, but he didn’t think telling the truth would get him much either.

“You are about to enter a restricted military exclusion zone. You must turn at least ninety degrees from your current heading.”