The machine gun.
“Shit fuck,” said Bison.
“All right, everyone relax now, relax,” said Danny.
“Got two guys here,” said Powder. “Older than the hills.”
“Powder, watch it — natives coming at you,” said Liu.
“We’re on it.”
Danny pushed up the helmet screen, looking through the windscreen of the Quick Bird as the pilot pointed to the ground. Stoner leaner over, trying to make out what was happening.
“Can you get us down?” Danny asked the pilot.
“I can hover over that roof there,” he replied. “You’ll have to go down the rope.”
“Yeah, do it,” said Stoner.
“Do it,” said Danny.
There was gunfire to the right of the helicopter. The pilot hesitated, then pitched his nose toward it, steadying into a firing position.
“Hold off,” said Danny, touching the man’s arm. “Powder, what the fuck?”
“Wild stinking dogs,” said the sergeant. “Mean motherfuckers.”
“What about the people?”
“They’re all right,” he said. “We’re okay. We have two, three natives secured. No resistance, Cap. ’Cept for the barking dogs. Man, they bug the shit out of me.”
Danny let go of the pilot’s arm. “We’ll use the rope,” he said.
By the time Stoner got to the ground, the village was secure and the huts had already been searched. The unrehearsed, ad hoc operation had gone remarkably well, so well, in fact, Stoner thought the Whiplash people might actually give his old SEAL team a run for the money.
A run, nothing more.
Even the Marines had done well. The only casualties were six dogs, probably kept by the villagers for food.
The locals were sitting grim-faced in a small circle in front of one of the huts. They were all old, easily in their fifties if not well beyond. The place was what the girl had told him it was — a refugee village started by people who had fled from another island.
Captain Freah was consulting with his people, dividing the surrounding area into quadrants for a detailed search. To Stoner, it seemed a waste of time, though he wouldn’t bother pointing it out.
“Looks pretty clean,” said Danny.
“We have to hit the atolls,” said Stoner. “Sooner rather than later.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, his voice still flat. While the captain turned and went back over to his men, Stoner looked at the huts. They couldn’t have been here for more than a few months.
“We’ll go out through the beach,” said Danny when he came back. “It’s quicker. Marine helo will shoot us to the base. I have to leave one of my guys here to supervise, and one at the security post. That’ll give us a total of six people, including myself.”
“We can use the Marines,” said Stoner.
“I have an okay for an armed recon already,” said Danny. “If we add Marines, that has to be cleared. They’ll probably want to fly in more forces, set up a whole operation. It’ll be thorough, but it’ll be overkill — and it won’t happen till tomorrow night. You told me you wanted to go sooner rather than later.”
“I do.”
“Then let’s do it.”
They gave the Chinese carriers a wide berth, working their way close to the Vietnamese coastline before heading back west. It occurred to Dog this very same B-52 frame might have pulled many missions here decades ago, dropping its sticks on North Vietnamese targets, maybe even mining Haiphong harbor. Dog had an unobstructed view of the coastline from roughly 25,000 feet; it seemed like a faceted jewel, a piece of intricately cut jade. He’d missed Vietnam, and wasn’t the nostalgic type besides, but even to Dog, it looked like the last place on earth a war would break out.
Then again, so did the empty ocean in front of him.
“Two minutes to our search area,” reported Rosen.
“Delaford, how’s it looking down there?” Dog asked him.
“We’re ready when you are, Colonel.”
“We’re talking to your friends in the Orions. They haven’t found anything for us yet.”
“Tell ’em to listen harder,” said Delaford.
“I’d give ’em new hearing aids if I thought it would help.” Dog did an instrument check, then turned his gaze back to the side window, looking down at the now-peaceful sea. His quarry was somewhere below, but where?
Armed with the satellite information as well as intercepts from SOUS and another hydrophone net, the Fleet intelligence officers had analyzed the probably course of the Chinese submarines. They had decided, given the mission, the subs would work as direct a course to the carrier group as possible, and probably get regular updates as they closed. This scenario presented several opportunities for finding the subs; not only would their route be some-what predictable, but the subs would probably pole their masts above the surface from time to time. The intel officers looked for specific choke points — in this case, places where it would be easy to find the subs as they passed — and concentrated their resources there. It sounded good, but so far, it wasn’t working. There was so much sea to cover, and without support vessels and submarines to assist, the Orions had a relatively limited view.
Dog wondered about the possibilities of extending Piranha’s range — not by the factor of two, which Delaford had said was doable, but by ten or even a hundred. It would be much more effective to launch it now and let it go find its target on its own.
Actually, they could, theoretically, do that. Just launch and search. Set a course southwest, toward the Chinese carriers; they’d find the subs sooner or later.
“Tommy, what do you think of launching Piranha blind and letting it look for the subs on its own?” Dog asked Delaford over the interphone.
“You mean completely without contact?” asked Delaford. “The problem is, Colonel, it’s such a wide area to cover. Considering Piranha can only stay in the water for eighteen hours — well, twenty or twenty-one …”
“It’ll stay longer than that,” said Dog.
“Right, I mean, it can only pursue at speed for that long, then runs down.”
“But if we figure, say, an eighteen-hour patrol, so the last six hours or so it’s near the carriers — I don’t know, can you plot something like that out? How close would we have to be?”
“Let me talk to English.”
“Orions are clean,” reported Rosen. “You know what we need? Hot dogs.”
“Oh, that’d be great on a long mission,” said Dog sarcastically.
“Break up the monotony.”
“Colonel, we think we have a good drop,” said Delaford, coming back on the line. He laid out a plan to launch Piranha at 260 nautical miles from the carrier task force and run it on an intercept. When it reached a point twenty miles from the carriers, it would then sweep ahead in an arcing search pattern.
“The only problem is what we do if, after we launch, the Orions find the Chinese subs and they’re really far away.”
“How far?” asked Dog.
“Well, anything over fifty miles and not heading in our direction is going to be problematic,” said Delaford.
“But we’ll know where they’re headed.”
“Only if our guess that they’re after the Indian sub is right.”
“I say we go for it,” said Dog.
“I agree.”
