Stoner saw the panel behind the vat of sulfuric acid a second or two after the Marines did, and had to shout at them to keep back.
“Very good chance the sucker’s booby-trapped,” he told the two men, who unlike him were wearing special chem suits with breathers to protect them from the acidic fumes.
It wasn’t that Stoner liked to take unnecessary risks; he knew people worked in this plant with the acid all the time, and figured his brief exposure was nothing like what they exposed themselves to.
Not that it was pleasant. He went to the floor panel and knelt down, instantly soaking his knees in the residue of a thousand car batteries. He could feel the material get sodden and start to tickle at his skin.
“Back,” he told the Marines, pulling out a long knife.
One of the men began to object; if the panel was booby-trapped, they had a special squad trained to defuse it. But Stoner had already found two wires with his knife; he pulled them up gently, scraped some of the insulation off, then checked the current with a small meter the size of pen top. A yellow light flashed on; he clipped another set of alligator clips to the wires and got a green.
“You’re fucking lucky,” said one of the Marines as he jimmied open the lock.
“How’s that?”
“Could have just as easily blown when it was shorted.”
“Well, only if my sensor here screwed up. It’s all right — my guess is it’s just an alarm and it was taken out by the E-bomb,” said Stoner, shining around the flashlight. “There aren’t any charges here.”
He’d suspected that; the acid would have made keeping explosives here fairly dangerous, especially with people working all around the area. What he hadn’t expected was that the panel led to a ladder, which disappeared downward.
“Come on,” he told the Marines as he positioned his NOD monocle and pulled out his Beretta. “Cover me.”
Kick leaned back as the computer took the Flighthawk further out into the harbor, still searching for any other Mainland boats or submarines. The Taiwanese port authorities, local police, and navy assets were all rushing to the area, and a search-and-rescue operation was under way.
If he were in their place, he wouldn’t want to be saved.
“Major Alou is asking you to check that merchant ship out, just about head on at two miles,” relayed Starship.
“Yeah, roger that, thanks.”
“Easy man, you’re jerking your stick like you’re muscling a Hog,” added Starship. “This is fly by wire. Fly by
“You know, Starship, I really don’t need your help.”
“Fuck yourself then.”
“And fuck yourself back.”
Starship laughed. Kick started to laugh too.
Starship watched the small trawler grow large in the display. There were two or three people on deck, but the ship had no lights on at all.
He suspected the craft had launched the commandos they’d intercepted in the harbor. But they’d already run a check on the registry and found that it was owned by a company in the Philippines.
That would undoubtedly prove to be bogus, but at the moment there was nothing they could do about it.
Kick brought the Flighthawk across the bow in a gentle arc, still a bit unsure of himself as he flew. That was reassuring in a way. Kick would never be as good a pilot, even a remote pilot, as Starship; he could compare himself to Kick any time and know he was ahead.
It didn’t take away the jitter he felt in his chest, though. And he was thirsty, very thirsty. And for something more than the bottled water in the galley fridge at the back of the compartment.
“See any antiair?” Kick asked.
“Negative.”
“This has to be the ship. Think we ought to splash it?”
Starship looked at the shadow of the ship. They could say they saw someone with a shoulder-launched missile on deck — thought they saw someone.
Shoot out the rudder, stop the damn boat cold.
Be heroes.
That wasn’t their job, though.
“I think we better tell Major Alou it’s clean but suspicious,” said Starship. “Get the Taiwan or Navy people on it.”
“Yeah. Better. I’d love to nail the mother.”
“You and me both.”
Stoner could hear the sound of water dripping in the distance as he walked down the hall the ladder had led down to. Six feet wide and seven feet high, the passage ran straight for about ten feet, then took a sharp turn to the right.
Stoner stopped at the corner, his hand on the smooth concrete. There could be anything around the bend.
One of the Marines stepped forward with his M-16. Stoner grabbed the man’s shoulder, stopping him.
He wasn’t going to let anyone else do his job.
“Just cover me,” he said, and before the two Marines could stop him, Stoner had thrown himself onto the floor, sliding into the middle of the open space with his pistol ready.
The hallway was empty. It went on for about fifteen feet, then took another bend to the right. Stoner jumped up and scrambled down it.
The Marines were at most a half step behind him, their gear clacking as they whipped the noses of their rifles up and down across the space. One of the young men started forward. Stoner grabbed him.
“No — a motion detector. This bunker must’ve been shielded somehow against the E-bomb.”
As he finished the sentence, the space behind them exploded.
Zen requested a refuel for
The Taiwan air force, officially known as Chung-kuo Kung Chuan or the Republic of China Air Force, had launched several patrols, including a full set of submarine hunters to chase the commando craft in the south. A Grumman E-2T radar plane, escorted by a group of F-5Es, was just taking up a station in the strait to the north, its radar sweeping the area for Mainland attackers.
The E-2Ts were essentially the same aircraft as the U.S. Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye, extremely capable, fleet, airborne radar craft. The longish nose of the planes carried a forward-looking Litton AN-ALR-73 Passive Detection System antenna; three other antennas were stuffed into other locations in the plane. But the truly unique feature of the Hawkeye was its radardome, a twenty-four-foot flying saucer mounted over the wings and fuselage. The E-2T could find an airplane at roughly 260 nautical miles; the computers aboard allowed it to track at least six hundred air targets (later-model American planes could handle over two thousand). In practice, “only” forty or so intercepts could be controlled at one time; even so, that would allow one E-2T to nail more than half of the attack sorties in the Battle of Midway in one shot.
