“One thing you want to watch out for, Captain,” he added when he had exhausted his official brief, “is Admiral Woods. He seems to have a stick up his ass. He takes it out and beats me with it at every opportunity. He blamed us for the contact with the Chinese interceptors.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have buzzed Beijing,” said Breanna.
“Stay clear of the carrier air screen if at all possible,” Dog told her, not particularly appreciating the joke.
“That’s kind of up to them, isn’t it? If the subs keep going the way they’re going, it’ll only take another two hours or so before we’re in their patrol area,” said Bree. “Sooner or later they’re going to see us.”
“Understood,” said Dog.
“Anything else, Daddy?”
“Captain, I’d appreciate it—”
“Bag the Daddy stuff. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
He longed to ask to speak to Jennifer — she was on board Quicksilver, helping Zen — but it was too much of an indulgence.
“All right, Quicksilver. See you later.”
“Roger that.”
Dog broke the Megafortress out of her figure-eight track and found his bearings for the Philippine base. They were just climbing through twenty-five thousand feet when the computer buzzed with an interruption on the Whiplash command link. The words INCOMING TRANSMISSION. PRIORITY: DOG EARS appeared on the HUD screen.
Danny Freah’s voice, but no image, came through after Dog authorized the feed.
“Colonel Bastian?”
“Daniel. How we doing?”
“Not good, sir. We’ve lost one of our men. Sergeant Talcom. Powder.”
Dog listened as Captain Freah described the operation in cold, sober tones.
“I understand,” he said when the captain was finished. “I’ll notify Admiral Woods. Where are you now?”
“We’re still at the site, waiting for the Osprey to return from transporting Sergeant Liu.”
Dog listened as Danny told him what they’d found — not much actually. They still had the mission tapes to analyze. The dead enemy soldiers who hadn’t been charred beyond seemed to be Chinese; they figured the atoll had been a spy site.
“We think there’s a whole chain of them, running north,” said Danny. “Stoner thinks that, but they’re not using known Chinese codes; or Indian codes for that matter. CIA’s pretty interested.”
“I’m assuming you don’t require my assistance,” said Dog.
“Affirmative. We’re ready to bug out.”
“I’ll see you back at the FOA.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hang in there, Danny.” The words were trite, way too automatice — he had to say something but couldn’t come up with anything profound. “Iowa out.”
He killed the connection, then went through the plane’s status with Rosen. He checked on the other members of the crew, talked to Delaford about the way Zen had handled Piranha, asked Ensign English what it was like a hundred meters below the ocean during a storm — all delaying actions before telling the rest of the Dreamland team their friend was dead.
He punched through the circuit that connected back to Dreamland, bringing the command center on-line in what amounted to a conference call with the other Megafortresses and the mobile base back at the Philippines.
“I have some very sad news. Today, Technical Sergeant Perse ‘Powder’ Talcom lost his life to an enemy mine in a reconnaissance mission in the South China Sea. Powder was an exceptional man, an important member of the Whiplash action team, a cutup at times, and a ferocious fighter.”
Dog stopped abruptly. He couldn’t sum up a man in a sentence, and there was no need to. The people listening knew him pretty well, most of them probably better than Dog did.
“Colonel Bastian out.”
“God, Sergeant Powder,” said Jennifer. Tears started to slip from her eyes. “He was so sweet — he was one of the people who helped deliver that baby in Turkey. God.”
She started sobbing, then brought her hand up to clear her eyes so she could see the display. The communication algorithms didn’t require any tweaking — the Piranha system as a whole was probably the least bug-ridden project she’d ever worked on — but she ran a test on the signal strength anyway.
“You okay, Jen?” asked Zen. He was sitting a short distance away on the Flighthawk control deck.
“Oh, yeah, I’m all right.”
“It sucks. Powder.”
“Yeah.”
The sobs bubbled up again. She pushed back her teeth together, trying to force them away. She barely knew the sergeant, barely knew most of the enlisted men in Whiplash and at Dreamland.
What if Colonel Bastian were killed? What if his plane went down? It was not impossible — the EB-52’s weren’t invincible. A mechanical problem, a screwup in the computer system that helped run the plane…
She’d worked on that system. Maybe she hadn’t tested it properly, maybe there was something she’d messed up. God, she’d worked so hard she must have forgotten a million things, screwed up in a million ways.
“Jen?”
“I’m okay,” she said. She reached to push her hair back, forgetting she was wearing a helmet. “I’m all right,” she insisted again.
“It’ll help a little if you focus on the mission,” said Zen.
“Since when did you become a fucking shrink?”
The remark was wildly inappropriate, but Zen didn’t say anything, and she couldn’t find a way to take it back.
Bree settled onto the flight-eight pattern above the Piranha buoy. The sea was almost glasslike, and though it was getting dark, the sky was so clear, if you squinted just right you could see Australia, or at least think you could.
Thoughts of Sergeant Powder’s family crowded into her head as she went through some routine instrument checks with her copilot. She didn’t know Powder very well — he was a bit crude, a class clown, not the kind of man she liked — but he was a member of the team, of their family.
She could imagine his mother getting the news.
The nights by Zen’s bedside came back to her.
“Engines so in the green I think they’re sprouting buds,” said Chris, subtly hinting that she’d started to daydream.
“Roger that.”
He read the fuel states — having tanked before coming on station, they had more than ten hours of flying time. Breanna glanced at the long-range radar, which showed the Sukhois patrolling over the Chinese carriers one hundred miles away. It was unlikely they didn’t know the Megafortress was there, or why.
Powder’s poor mother would never know what happened. They wouldn’t be allowed to tell her much.
“Captain, we’re intercepting broadcast from that Taiwanese spy ship,” said Freddy Collins, handling the Elint board. “Should I roll tape?”
“Go for it,” said Breanna. The transmission were actually recorded on computer disk, but there was no ring to “imprint electrons.”
“Whole lot of talking going on,” added Collins. “But they’re using a very sophisticated code.”
“Can’t break it?”
“As a matter of fact, no, not with our equipment,” said Collins. “The computer claims it’s using some sort of bizarre fractal code on top of a 128-byte thing — and they’re skipping frequencies on some sort of ultrarandom basis besides. The boys at the NSA are going to want to see this.”
