Threat Vector

until he was ready to make his move.

Though he’d been warned by the Russian mobster that Center would have him killed, he was not worried. Yes, Center contracted out the unpleasantness at Matrosskaya Tishina prison, but Kovalenko felt that staying out of Russia would keep him relatively safe from those thugs.

This was an organization of computer hackers and technical surveillance specialists. It’s not like the Center organization were killers themselves, after all.

THIRTY-FOUR

Captain Brandon “Trash” White looked away from his instruments, turned his attention outside his canopy, and saw nothing other than the black night and the streaking raindrops lit up by the lights of his aircraft.

Somewhere out there, off his eleven o’clock and several hundred feet below him, a tiny postage stamp of deck in the middle of the sea bobbed up and down on heaving swells. He closed on it at one hundred fifty miles an hour, except when the swirling winds at this altitude slowed him down, sped him up, or knocked him left and right.

And in just a couple of minutes he would, God willing, land on that erratically moving postage stamp.

This was a Case Three landing, night ops, and this meant he’d been “flying the needles,” watching the Automatic Carrier Landing System needles projected on the heads-up display in front of him. He kept his aircraft lined up in the center of the display as he neared the carrier, which was easy enough, but he was about to get passed off from radar control to the landing signals officer for the last few hundred feet to the deck, and he almost wished he could fly around up here in the shit a little while longer to compose himself.

The winds were said to be “down the angle” at deck level, meaning blowing from bow to stern, and this would help things a bit as he got lower, but up here he was getting knocked all over the damn place and his hands were sweating inside his gloves from the effort of keeping lined up.

Still, it was safe up here, and it was dicey as hell down there on the deck.

Trash hated carrier landings with a white-hot passion, and he hated nighttime carrier landings a hundred times more. Adding awful weather and an angry sea to the equation ensured that White was having one hell of a shitty evening.

There. Down there past all the digital information projected on his heads-up display, he saw a tiny row of green lights with a yellow light in the middle. This was the optical landing system, and it grew in brightness and size in his HUD.

A voice came over his radio an instant later, loud enough to be audible through the heavy sound of his own breathing coming through the intercom. “Four-oh-eight, three-quarter mile. Call the ball.”

Trash pressed his transmit key. “Four-oh-eight, Hornet-ball, Five-point-niner.”

In a calm and soothing voice the LSO answered, “Roger ball. You’re lined up left. Don’t go any higher.”

Trash’s left hand drew the throttle back just a hair, and his right hand nudged the stick a touch to the right.

Marines on carriers. Why? Trash thought to himself. He knew the answer, of course. Carrier integration, they called it. Marines had been flying off carriers for twenty years as a result of some bright idea thought up by some officer sitting motionless at a desk. It was a manifestation of the thinking that anything Naval Aviation could do Marine Corps Aviation was supposed to be able to do as well.

Whatever.

As far as Trash White was concerned, just because the Marine Corps could do it, it didn’t necessarily mean the Marine Corps should do it. Marines were meant to fly off flat runways cut out of jungles or deserts. They were meant to sleep in tents under camo netting with other Marines, to walk through the mud to their aircraft, and then to take off and support their fellow jarheads in battle.

They were not meant to live on and fly off of a damn boat.

That was Trash’s opinion, not that anyone had ever asked him for it.

* * *

His name was Brandon White, but no one had called him that in a long time. Everybody called him Trash. Yes, it came from a play on his last name, but the Kentucky native wasn’t really what anyone but the most blue- blooded Northerner would call white trash. His father was a doctor with a successful podiatry practice in Louisville, and his mother was a professor of art history at the University of Kentucky.

Not exactly trailer-park material, but his call sign was part of him now, and, he had to admit, there were worse call signs out there than Trash.

He knew a pilot in another squadron named Mangler, for example, which sounded cool as hell to Trash until he learned the poor guy received the moniker after one night chugging margaritas in a Key West bar. On his stagger out of the men’s room the young nugget zipped his balls in his fly, couldn’t get them out, and was rushed to the hospital. The medical term the ER nurse wrote down on his paperwork was “testicular mangling,” and though the young lieutenant recovered from the unfortunate incident, he was damn sure never going to be allowed to forget that night in the Keys, since it became his permanent call sign.

Earning a call sign as a play on one’s last name, as Trash White had done, seemed like a hell of a lot less trouble.

As a boy, Brandon had wanted to be a NASCAR driver, but by his mid-teens a ride-along in a friend’s father’s crop duster set his life’s course. That one morning he spent streaking low over soybean fields in a “two-holer,” a two-seat open biplane, showed him that the real excitement was not on the oval track but rather in the wide-open sky.

He could have gone into the Air Force or the Navy, but a friend’s big brother joined the Marines, and then sold Brandon on the Corps the night he came home from Paris Island and took his kid brother and his friend out to McDonald’s and regaled them with stories about what a badass he was.

Now White was twenty-eight, pilot of an F/A-18C Hornet tactical fighter, an aircraft about as far away from that first Air Tractor crop duster as one could get.

Trash loved flying, and he loved the Marine Corps. He’d been stationed in Japan for the past four months, and had enjoyed himself as much as anyone could. Japan wasn’t as much fun as San Diego or Key West or some other places he had been stationed, but still, he had no complaints.

Not until the day before yesterday, when he was told his squadron of twelve aircraft would be heading out to the Ronald Reagan to make haste toward Taiwan.

The day after the U.S. announced the Reagan was moving closer to the Republic of China, People’s Liberation Army — Air Force warplanes began harassing Taiwanese aircraft around the Strait of Taiwan in retaliation. Trash and his Marines were ordered to the carrier to bolster the Navy Super Hornets already on board. Together the Navy and Marine aviators would be flying combat air patrol missions on the ROC side of the centerline of the Strait of Taiwan.

He knew the Chinese would probably go ape shit when they saw American aircraft protecting the ROC, but Trash didn’t care. He welcomed the opportunity to mix things up with the Chinese. Hell, if there was going to be action and F/A-18Cs were going to be involved, Trash damn well wanted the Marine Corps there, and he damn well wanted his own aircraft in the thick of it.

But he hated boats. He’d qualified on carriers — every Marine has to qualify on carriers — but he had fewer than twenty traps under his belt, and all twenty of those were more than three years ago. Yes, for the past couple of weeks, he’d been on FCLP, field carrier landing practice, at a field in Okinawa, where he landed on a stretch of runway fixed with arresting wires just like on a carrier, but that flat stretch of concrete hadn’t been Dutch rolling in the dark in a rainstorm like the deck of the Reagan below him.

FCLP was a long way from what he was going through now.

Two minutes ago Trash’s flight lead, Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton, touched down on the deck and caught a four-wire for a long but acceptable landing. The other ten Marine F/A-18C pilots coming in this evening had all landed before Cheese. Trash was the last one in the sky tonight, with the exception of the refueler, and this sucked for Trash, because the weather was getting worse by the minute and Trash was down below six thousand pounds of fuel, meaning he would get only two passes at the deck before he’d have to refuel and try again, making