Mirage

encryption, the plane had already nosed around, and the ship-killing missile was off its rails.

“Wepps!” Taking a few rounds of 20mm was one thing. Nearly a quarter ton of high explosives was an entirely different challenge.

“On it.”

The Harpoon missile dropped down to surface-skimming mode as quickly as it could and accelerated up to five hundred miles per hour. Its radar immediately locked onto the one juicy target it saw and flew at it with robotic efficiency.

Mark Murphy dropped the doors hiding the Oregon’s primary defensive weapon and had the six-barreled Gatling, a clone of the one carried by their attacker, spun up to optimal speed. Its own radar was housed in a dome above the gun that gave it the nickname of R2-FU because it looked like the cute droid from the Star Wars movies but had a nasty attitude.

When the inbound Harpoon was still a mile away, the Gatling opened up, throwing out a barrier of tungsten that the missile would have to fly through to reach the target. It was the old problem of hitting a bullet with another bullet, but, in this case, the Gatling had unleashed more than a thousand, all aimed directly at the missile.

The Harpoon exploded well away from the ship, and Murph silenced the gun. Pieces of missile plowed into the ocean while its fireball bloomed and distorted as it lost the force of the Harpoon’s powerful rocket motor.

In the op center, they watched the battle unfold via a camera mounted near the gun emplacement. The resolution hadn’t been good enough to actually see the incoming missile, but they all cheered when the orange- and-yellow explosion suddenly appeared.

“Juan!”

“What?”

It was Linda. She was pointing to the bottom corner of the massive screen, the mast camera that had been slaved to tracking the first F-18. “It just vanished.”

“What?”

“The plane. I was watching it and it just vanished like it faded out of existence. I just checked radar, and it’s gone.”

Cabrillo’s jaw tightened. “Helm, plot a course of thirty-seven degrees. All ahead flank. Wepps, ready the main gun.”

“This is Alert One,” the pilot of the lead inbound flight reported. “They have something like the Sea Wiz, the Gatling guns our Navy uses. They shot down my missile.” This had been reported by the pilot moments ago. “And I no longer have Viper Seven on my scope.”

“Copy that, Alert One. Fire all. Again, fire all. You and Alert Two.” This time, it was Commander O’Connell aboard the Ross giving the order, and there was no countermand from the admiral aboard his flagship. “I knew this guy was a black hat.”

Cabrillo felt the blood drain from his face. There was nothing they could do. Nailing one of the Harpoons with the Gatling was what the system had been designed to do. There would be seven missiles inbound. If they were lucky, they could take out four of them. Damn lucky at that, but three would still make it through, penetrate deep into the ship, and explode with enough force to peel her hull apart like an overripe banana. They had mere minutes.

But still they drove on, water blowing through the Oregon’s drive tubes with unimaginable force, the prow cleaving the sea, shouldering aside two symmetrical curls of white water.

“Chairman, I don’t have a target,” Mark said.

“You will in just a minute.” Juan studied the display, noting the exact position Linda had seen Viper 7 disappear.

“You do realize we’re between the proverbial rock and hard place,” Max said.

“It’s going to get worse. I intend on hitting the rock.”

“We didn’t fare so well last time,” Hanley reminded him.

Cabrillo keyed on the shipwide intercom. “Crew, this is the Chairman. Prepare for impact.” He then looked over at his oldest friend. “Last time, we grazed the field. That’s its deadly power. At an angle, it will capsize a ship with no problem, but if we hit it head-on, we should slice right through it. Isn’t that right, guys?”

Mark and Eric exchanged a few words before Stone deferred to Murph to answer. “In theory, that’s a good idea, but we’re still going to feel the sheering effects. It won’t capsize us, but it could drive the bows so deep that the ship sinks, driven under as if pushed.”

“See,” Juan said with an optimistic uptick to his voice.

The sound of canvas ripping on an industrial scale reverberated throughout the Oregon as the Gatling engaged one of the incoming Harpoons. No one was paying the slightest attention. Everyone watched the forward camera. They were getting nearer and nearer the invisible field.

Juan double-checked their position, calculating angles and drift, wind, and a few other factors. “Helm, another point to starboard.”

The ship was just beginning to respond when the entire hull lurched as though the sea had been sucked out from under the bow. It was the sensation of going over a waterfall. They had reached the dome of optoelectronic camouflage hiding the Chinese warship, and as the Oregon passed through, the magnetic forces attacked the hull with varying degrees of intensity. The stern felt nothing, while the bow was being enveloped with unimaginable force.

Then the noise hit, a transonic thrum that drove deep into the skull. Juan slammed his palms over his ears, but it did little good. The sound was already in his head, it seemed, and it echoed off the bones, trying to scramble his brain. Above this came the high-pitch scream of tortured metal. It sounded as though the keel itself was bending. The angle grew steeper still. Max clung to the back of Juan’s seat to keep from being thrown to the deck. Loose articles began to roll toward the forward bulkhead. The lights flickered and a few of the computer screens went dead, their circuitry not sufficiently hardened against the magnetic waves and other forces that came and warped light around the stealth ship to make it invisible.

The main view screen exploded without warning because the metal wall behind it flexed past the glass’s tolerance. Mark and Eric were peppered with shards, but both had been bent over so the cuts were limited to a few on the nape of their necks.

The Oregon was pitched so far forward that her drive tubes came free from the ocean, and two great columns of water were shot into the air like massive fire hoses blasting with everything they had. Another couple of degrees more and the Oregon would be driven under with no hope of ever recovering. Juan had gambled and lost. His beloved ship was no match for the forces she had been asked to overcome. She’d given it everything she could, but it was just too much.

The motion was so sudden that Max almost hit the ceiling. The ship had bulled its way through the invisible edge of the dome of optomagnetic camouflage and popped back up onto an even keel with the frenetic energy of a bath toy. The sound that had so tortured them passed as though it had never struck. The Oregon lurched when the force of her motors was once again fighting the resistance of the seas.

Unbeknownst to the crew, the six remaining Harpoon missiles struck the barrier seconds later and all six experienced catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic pulse overload. They fell harmlessly into the ocean in her wake.

“Everyone okay?” Juan called out.

“What a ride!” Murph whooped.

When it was clear the op center crew was okay and Max was starting to evaluate the rest of their people, Cabrillo scanned external camera feeds on his chair’s built-in miniscreen. Unlike their first encounter with the barrier, this time much of the ship had been hardened against EMP. There would surely be damage, but the engines hadn’t died and the main power buses hadn’t tripped. Just as he suspected, not a mile away sat the oddly shaped stealth ship. He could only wonder what its captain was thinking at this moment.

“Wepps, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yes, sir,” Murph said wolfishly. “Permission to fire?”

“Fire at will. And don’t stop until there’s nothing left to hit.”