Retribution

“We’re all here, Colonel,” answered Major Mack Smith.

“What’s your situation?”

“Treading water.”

“Where are your life rafts?”

Mack explained that the men had purposely sunk their chutes and rafts to make it harder for the Chinese to find them. They had two backup, uninflated rafts in reserve.

“The Chinese stood down,” said Dog. “They’re not going to use their nuke.”

“We’d still rather not be eating dinner with chopsticks tonight, Colonel,” said Mack.

“Go ahead and inflate the rafts,” Dog told him. “I’ll get the Abner Read to come north to pick you up.”

The Abner Read, an American littoral destroyer, had been shadowing the Chinese fleet during the conflict. They were roughly fifty miles away when Dog last checked; it might take them two hours or more to get there.

“You sure the Chinese aren’t going to interfere?” Mack asked.

“They took several hits during the conflict. It looks like they’re spending all their energy just keeping the ship afloat,” said Dog. “If the Abner Read can’t come, I’ll ask the Pakistanis to send one of their ships. They have some patrol vessels to the northeast.”

“No way — they’ll just hand us over to the Chinese.”

“They’re our allies,” said Dog, though he wasn’t sure how far to trust them — the Pakistanis were allied with the Chinese as well, and during the conflict the two forces had worked together against the Indians.

“I still think I’d rather swim,” said Mack.

“Careful what you wish for, Major.”

Northern Arabian Sea

0730

“Colonel says the Pakistanis may rescue us,” Mack told the others.

“The Paks?” said Sergeant Peter “Dish” Mallack. “Fuck that. They were just trying to blow us out of the air.”

“They’ll turn us over to the Chinese,” said Technical Sergeant Thomas “T-Bone” Boone. “I ain’t wearing no Asian pajamas for the rest of my life.”

“Yeah, I’m with you there,” said Mack.

Dish and T-Bone were radar systems operators; aboard the Wisconsin they’d kept track of hundreds of contacts — Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and American — as war threatened. Now they were just swimmers, and not particularly good ones.

Two other men had gone out with Mack — Lieutenant Sergio “Jazz” Jackson, the Megafortress’s copilot, and Lieutenant Evan Cantor, who along with Mack had been piloting the Flighthawk remote control aircraft from the Megafortress’s lower deck. Cantor had hit something on the way out of the aircraft and broken his arm; his face was deeply bruised and he seemed to have a concussion. Dish, the best swimmer of the bunch, had lashed himself to the lieutenant, helping to keep the younger man awake. Fortunately, all of their horseshoe-style life preservers had inflated; Mack couldn’t imagine staying afloat without them.

Mack turned to look to the south. He could see the mast of one of the Khan’s escort vessels, a destroyer, he thought, though he was far from an expert on ships. Behind it two thick curlicues of black smoke jutted from the water. The smoke came from ships damaged by the Indians; the Khan was farther east, marked on the horizon by a plume of white smoke — mostly water vapor rising from the hoses the crew was spraying on the parts of the ship damaged by missiles.

American missiles, for the record.

“If they pick us up, Major,” said Dish, “they’ll have a hell of a lot of questions about our plane. There’s no way they’re going to just let us go.”

“We’re not going to be picked up by the Pakistanis, or the Chinese,” Mack told them. “We’re going to get over to the Abner Read.”

“Hey, guys, I’m starting to get a little cold,” said Cantor.

Mack looked over at Cantor. His teeth were chattering.

“All right. We open one life raft,” said Mack. “We use that to get the hell out of here. Jazz, do the raft. Hang in there, Cantor. Dish’ll start a fire for you as soon as we get it open.”

Aboard the Abner Read, northern Arabian Sea

0736

Captain Harold “Storm” Gale put his hands against the sides of his head, trying to stop the ringing in his ears. He’d been slapped against the deck and bulkhead several times by salvos from attacking aircraft and missiles. His head hurt, but he decided arbitrarily that it wasn’t a concussion, and that even if it was, it wasn’t worth going to sickbay for.

The jagged cut in his leg from exploding shrapnel might deserve attention, but since the bleeding seemed to have slowed to an ooze, he’d deal with that later.

The ship herself was in good shape. The holographic damage control display on the deck of the Abner Read showed that she had sustained only minor damage despite the onslaught of missiles fired at her over the past hour.

What bothered Storm — what truly pissed him off — was the fact that his nemesis also remained afloat despite his own attack. The Chinese aircraft carrier Khan had taken three missiles from the Abner Read, and possibly a fourth from one of the destroyer’s smaller escorts, known as a Sharkboat, and the S.O.B. was still sailing.

Unlike the Indian carrier he had sunk some hours before.

“Captain, communication coming in from Fleet.”

“Give it to me.”

“Storm, Storm, Storm!” exclaimed Admiral Jonathon “Tex” Woods. “What the hell are you up to now?”

“Admiral.”

“You sunk the Shiva?”

“I believe that’s correct, sir. The Indian carrier is gone.”

“Great going, Storm.” The admiral’s voice swelled with pride, as if he were Storm’s greatest fan and biggest admirer. In fact just the opposite was true. “And you disabled the Khan?”

“I’m not sure of the damage to the Chinese, Admiral. The Dreamland people helped — they were invaluable.”

“You’re being uncharacteristically modest, Storm — a welcome development! Even if you are complimenting Lieutenant Colonel Bastian and his crew.”

Storm scowled. He didn’t like Bastian very much, but the colonel and his people had done an excellent job — and helped save his ship.

“The Abe is steaming north to take up a patrol off the Indian coast,” said the admiral, referring to the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the Seventh Fleet’s attack aircraft carriers and Woods’s temporary flagship. “Once the Abe is on station, you’ll receive new orders. In the meantime, get no closer than five miles to another warship — Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, or Croatian, for that matter.”

Storm had no intention of getting involved in another firefight; he was out of Harpoon antiship missiles, and Standard antiair missiles as well. But the order angered him.

“Why am I being ordered to withdraw?”

“You’re not being ordered to withdraw. All combatants have agreed to stay five miles apart. You have a problem with that, Captain?”

Woods’s belligerent tone was somehow more welcome than the phony proud-father routine he’d started with.

“I don’t have a problem, Admiral.”

“Good,” snapped Woods. “There’ll be a bottle of scotch with my compliments when you reach port.”

Woods signed off. Storm called up the navigational charts on the holographic display at the center of the bridge and had his navigator plot a course south. As he was about to relay their new orders to his exec and the rest