The
Of course, these days a “flanking position” did not imply close proximity.
Standing on the bridge, Kung surveyed the busy waters ahead of his ship. Navigation was no problem; despite the 200-plus small islands that made the Hong Kong vicinity a spiders’s web of channels and tributaries, the routes in and out had been charted for centuries. However, these waters perpetually swarmed with boats: fishing craft, pleasure boats, sailboats, commercial steamers, cruise ships, and visiting military craft from innumerable nations. They made maneuvering a headache. Despite his recent pleasant leave in Hong Kong, Kung looked forward to seeing the open sea once more. Weather predictions warned of scattered squalls over the next week, but nothing too heavy.
One good thing about moving a large ship in and out of Hong Kong: Here was one of the greatest deep-water harbors in the world, so there was little danger of going aground. Which was ironic, really, considering that the South China Sea was itself comparatively shallow.
In the distance, he saw a small military vessel chugging slowly across the channel. Even before he focused his glasses on it, he had a feeling he knew what kind of boat it was: a CDF patrol boat.
He scowled. Say what you wished about the British, they had known how to control the harbor. But Major General Chin, commander of the Coastal Defense Force, was a fool. His boats were always tangling with the wrong vessels, halting and searching steamers loaded with New Zealand wool while tankers full of opium sailed right past. And so far, there had been at least three reported collisions between CDF craft and civilian vessels cruising in the bay. Such incompetence could only be the product of leadership selected for political clout rather than military competence.
So Kung kept his gaze warily on the craft dead ahead. It was stern-on to him, and too far away for him to read any of its markings, but sure enough, he recognized the CDF uniforms of the men scurrying over her fantail. Kung sighed. Probably the boat had fouled her screws on a piece of flotsam in the water, a nylon rope or a wayward fish pot. It was an embarrassment.
He was about to direct the destroyer’s radioman to contact the patrol boat when he saw the small craft’s stern dig into the water, foam billowing out behind her. The patrol boat tore off across the Channel at high speed. Kung was startled. Her skipper might be incompetent, but that was one well-maintained boat.
He returned his gaze to the water ahead, searching for other obstacles.
The one obstacle he couldn’t see, and wasn’t even thinking about, lay dead ahead at a depth of eight meters. It was an American-made MK65 Quickstrike mine, essentially a 2,390 pound bomb sheathed in a thin-walled casing, tethered to the bottom of the channel by a long cable.
As the
Kung felt a sharp jolt through the bottoms of his feet. His immediate thought was that his ship had, somehow, impossibly, run aground. Then — even worse — that she had struck some unseen civilian or commercial vessel. After what had happened to that yacht the other night, no one — least of all Major General Po Yu Li — would believe there had been an accident.
But even as these thoughts raced through his mind, a huge column of water and foam shot up from the port bow. Kung felt the deck rear up under his feet, and the next thing he knew he had stumbled back into the wall. Then he was stumbling forward again, catching himself on the console. Through the windshield he saw metal plates buckled back on the weatherdeck, which was almost underwater. Then it reared up again, even as the column of water crashed back down, much of it exploding across
Even so, he knew instantly that his ship had been severely holed. Its movement was abruptly all wrong, a heavy corkscrewing as the bow settled deeper into the water, pushed there by the still-churning screws.
Kung began shouting orders to reduce speed and get damage-control crews to the bow. Then he let the Officer of the Deck take command of the immediate emergency while he got on the radio to contact Hong Kong.
There were advantages to being the nephew of the chief of naval operations. For one, you got to sit in a plush chair in a nice meeting room while being grilled. For another, they served better-than-average coffee.
That was about it.
Besides Tombstone, four men sat around the conference table. They must have been chosen from Pentagon Central Casting: There was the Air Force rep, perhaps forty years old, with a cleft chin punctuating a square, Dudley Doright jaw. There was the Navy rep, older, appropriately bright of eye and ruddy of complexion, with clipped white hair and steely gaze. There was the colorless guy in the gray suit, who had introduced himself as “a consultant on advanced aviation technology.” And finally there was the kid representing DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old and was not actually in the military himself, a fact he emphasized by wearing a Hawaiian shirt over baggy chinos and tennis shoes.
Tombstone wished he were on the
But at least you knew who your enemies were.
Tombstone had been grilled for a half hour now — or, rather, been warmed up for grilling by being asked to clarify a few points from his preliminary report.
There was a moment of silence, then the man in the suit leaned across the table. “Tell me, Admiral,” he said. “Who do you think might want to shoot you down that way? Not in combat, but over American soil?”
“Shoot me down?” Tombstone raised one eyebrow. “Well, let’s see. The North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Indians, the Cubans, the — ”
The man in the suit held up a hand and smiled blandly. Everything about him was bland. “You miss my point. This wasn’t a normal terrorist-style attack, or even a military assault. There are conventional surface-to-air missiles that could have done the job.”
“Not to mention car bombs,” the DARPA kid said. He had his tennis shoes propped on the armrest of a vacant seat. “Or a bullet in the back of the head while you’re asleep in your bed.”
Tombstone looked at him, then back at the suit. “Maybe the wreckage from the bogey will tell you something. There must be something left. I assume you’ve found it.”
“That’s being taken care of,” the Air Force rep said.
The Navy rep scowled. “Don’t be coy, Foster. He’ll figure it out soon enough on his own; plus we owe him as much information as we can spare. It was
Tombstone nodded. “Thank you.” He looked back at the suit. “Surely there aren’t that many governments
