Typhoon Season

Tombstone grimaced. “Don’t remind me.” Arsenal had been the Navy’s newest creation, essentially a floating weapons barge stuck inside a Navy hull and capable of doing battle almost entirely by remote control. When things flared up with Cuba, the president of the United States himself had tried to utilize the ship in just that way, with predictably disastrous results.

“The Arsenal mess wasn’t just about Washington micro-managing a battle,” his uncle said, as if reading his mind. Maybe he was reading his mind. After all, they were both Magruders. “Remember, a senator from the state where Arsenal was built played a big part in the whole fiasco.”

Tombstone nodded. “He figured his state would get rich building ships like Arsenal for the navy, if the prototype proved herself in battle.”

“Exactly.”

“But I don’t see how that applies here. You just said China doesn’t have the same financial entanglements.”

“Which is why they could be building UAVs,” his uncle said.

“Whoa. I hate to sound stupid, but — ”

“Look at it this way, sweetheart,” Tomboy said. “A brand-new Tomcat ain’t cheap and B-2s are over two billion each. A UAV? Maybe a quarter-mil; you get three for the price of a single Tomahawk. Sounds good, right? Nice and cost-effective. Now think about it from the perspective of a senator lobbying for defense contracting dollars for his state. You’ve got thousands of voters on welfare, on unemployment. Are you going to grab for the B-2 contract, or the UAVs?”

“Wait.” Tombstone held up a hand. “You mean to tell me we’d be developing and using more UAVs ourselves… except they don’t cost enough?”

His uncle gave him a grim smile. “And you always thought it was because you and your fellow aviators were irreplacable, didn’t you?”

Tombstone sat silently for a moment, trying to reconstruct his whole image of his life, and what it was all about. Finally he tightened his jaw. “Look, if you’re going to send Tomboy out there as an expert, you ought to send me, too. I’m the expert on Chinese UAVs.”

His uncle shook his head. “Sorry. We don’t need you on the carrier. We need you somewhere else. But this is a volunteer job, Matthew. Not up your normal alley at all.”

“Pardon?”

“Earlier, you mentioned that Phillip McIntyre’s death might have been related in some way to his business, and from there to the UAV. Since Phil’s not around to talk to, we need to ask someone else about that. Unfortunately his headquarters is in Hong Kong, so we have no authority to go in and simply start demanding information. But one of his top executives survived the Lady of Leisure massacre. He’s in Hong Kong right now, and evidently he’s frightened for his life, and a bit difficult to reach. We need someone he might trust to go speak with him. You’re the closest thing Phillip’s got to a son, so the employee should trust you. I wish I could go instead, but I can’t, not with the way things are over there right now. I’m needed in Washington.”

Tombstone folded his wife’s small hand between his. “If it would get me out from behind a desk, I’d go to Antarctica.”

Tuesday, 5 August

2100 local (-8 GMT)

South China Sea

Lobo awoke with a sense of terrible pressure in her lungs, and darkness burning in her eyes. Immediately she knew where she was, and why, and she struggled not to panic. Instead she kicked steadily, patiently holding her breath.

She burst through the surface of the sea and coughed up seawater for so long she thought she would turn inside out.

The sea was smooth and warm. This was not the Aleutians. She was not going to be picked up and gang raped here. Not with her own people ruling the air, and SAR already on the way.

Don’t even think about what happened in the Aleutians. One thing at a time. She checked to see that her saltwater-activated beacon was flashing. Yes. Presumably the radio beacon was, too.

She looked around for her RIO, or for his chute. Far to the east she saw a fiercely flashing strobe, the wrong color, though — but beneath it was the darting beam of a searchlight. A helo! Perhaps SAR had already found Handyman and was even now plucking him from the water.

Between her and the helo moved a surprising number of lights, cruising slowly. Boats. Of course — she’d seen them from the air. All kinds of boats; trawlers, pleasure craft, junks. Should she signal one of them? Or just wait?

At that moment, not fifty yards away and very low to the water, a bright strobe appeared. Her heart leaped with joy. Handyman! He must have been turned away from her until now. She tried to call his name, but her throat was caked with salt, and all she could do was croak. She paddled toward him instead, moving clumsily through the piss-warm water. Tears flowed down her cheeks. His strobe swayed back and forth, vanished, then reappeared. Handyman must be swimming, too.

Then she saw his helmet, his splayed arms. She thrashed closer, reached out and grabbed his harness. “Handyman!” she rasped. “Handy, are you — ”

His head rolled back, eyes open, staring over her shoulder. Blood stained his lips. Yet his body moved with jerking, trembling vitality in her grasp. A seizure? He —

With a violent shudder, he pulled away from her hands and sank a couple of feet beneath the surface. Rose again, eyes still wide open.

That was when Lobo realized the water beneath him was full of sharks.

She had no way of knowing how much time passed before she realized she was screaming, thrashing, doing all the things you weren’t supposed to do around sharks. Handyman was twenty yards away now, still marked by his strobe as it swayed and dipped. Lobo made herself stop kicking, stop slapping the water, and grab for her shark repellent instead. She popped it into the water and stared at the sky. Where was that SAR helo? Where was —

She heard the soft throb of a diesel engine, smelled its fumes. Spinning in the water, she saw the black bulk of a boat creeping toward her. Then a fierce spotlight beam struck her in the face.

“Help!” she croaked, squinting, waving her arms. Would a spotlight attract sharks? Were sharks moving in on her at this very moment? “Help! Please, hurry!”

The tone of the engine rose a third, and beneath it she heard the hiss of a curling bow wave. She raised a hand to block the glare of the spotlight. Now, as the boat came closer, she could read the printing on its bow:

COASTAL DEFENSE FORCE HONG KONG.

2130 local (-8 GMT)

Tomcat 306

Jefferson at night was a chaotic Christmas tree of lights suspended in darkness. But right now Hot Rock was interested in only two clusters of lights. The first was the meatball, the stack of big, colored lenses that indicated when he was deviating from his preferred glide path to the deck. The second was the strip of lamps that descended vertically over the stern. The so-called “landing area line-up lights” provided an essential third dimension of visibility at night; before they had been created, aviators coming in for night traps faced the appalling illusion that the landing deck was not coming closer, but rising straight up, like an elevator. The results had frequently been fatal.

As Hot Rock came in on final, he listened to the murmured comments of the Landing Signals Officer, or LSO, standing on his platform adjacent to the meatball and coaching the Tomcat’s approach. Listened, but didn’t really pay attention. He knew his approach was perfect; he could feel it.

The ass end of the carrier slipped under his wing, and he brought the Tomcat down decisively, simultaneously shoving the throttles to full military power in case of a bolter, but knowing it was pointless. He’d snagged the three-wire; he always snagged the three-wire. How many perfect traps in a row was that for him? If the navy had an Olympics for aviators, this would be his gold-medal event.