“How you doing, Jan?”

“I’m with you.”

“I’m going to have Mack toss some flares south of us.

Hopefully the J-13s will go in that direction and we can drop a buoy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m going to take us down through three thousand feet so we’re ready to drop the buoy. When I give you the signal, I want you to hit the ECMs—I’m going to make it look like we’re reacting to the flares that Mack lights, as if we’re worried about being under attack. Then you launch. All right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Are you all right, Captain?”

“I’m all right! ”

Breanna turned her attention back to the sky in front of her, lining up for the buoy drop.

MACK POINTED HIS NOSE TOWARD THE SKY AND RODE THE

Flighthawk south. Neither of the Chinese J-13s dogging the Megafortress followed. The Chinese navy had encountered Flighthawks before, and referred to them as “Lei Gong”—

END GAME

171

the name of an ancient Chinese thunder god, which Mack supposed was a compliment. But it wasn’t clear from the J-13s’ actions whether they knew he was there.

Mack continued to climb, meanwhile plotting out what he would do. The Chinese aircraft carrier was thirty-two miles away, off his right wing as he flew south. Karachi was ten miles almost directly opposite his left wing. The Indian aircraft carrier was about fifty miles south from the Chinese carrier. An assortment of small escorts were scattered between them, including the Chinese submarine, which was submerged south of Karachi in Pakistani waters.

“All right, Bree, light show begins in ten seconds,” he said, reaching his mark. “Get ready.”

“Make it a good one.”

“SUKHOIS—I MEAN, J-13S, THE CHINESE PLANES—THEY’RE

biting for it. They’re going south,” said Stewart, eyes pasted to the radar plot.

“Buoys!” said Breanna.

Stewart tapped the panel to ready a control buoy for the Piranha. She missed the box and had to tap it again.

Why was everything so hard on this deployment? Back at Dreamland she’d done this sort of thing with her eyes closed.

She’d driven B-1s through sandstorms and everything else without a single problem. But she was all thumbs now.

Maybe it was Captain Stockard, breathing down her neck. Breanna just didn’t like her for some reason. Maybe she resented working for another woman.

“Buoy!”

Stewart put her forefinger on the release button and pushed. A control buoy spun out of the rear fuselage, deploying from a special compartment behind the bomb bay, added to the planes after the Piranha had become part of the Dreamland tool set.

“ECMs,” said Breanna. “I’ll take the chaff.”

Stewart realized she’d forgotten the stinking ECMs.

They should have already been fuzzing the airwaves.

172

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” she said, hands fumbling against the controls.

MACK JERKED THE LITTLE FLIGHTHAWK TO THE WEST, LEAVING

a trail of fire and tinsel behind him. He tucked the plane into a roll and then put its nose down, flying it so hard that the tail threatened to pull over on him in a cartwheel. The Flighthawk didn’t peep about it, merely trying to keep up with the dictates of the control stick.

The J-13s were racing toward him, wondering what was going on.

If he pushed the nose of the fighter down right now, and slammed the aircraft exactly ninety degrees due east, slammed max power and went for broke, he could take a shot at one of the Chinese planes. If he timed it properly—and if C3 worked out the angle right—he would slash the fighter across its wings.

This was not the sort of attack you’d make in an F-15.

For one thing, you’d never get close enough to use your guns. For another, the g forces as you changed direction to bring the attack would slam you so hard you’d have to struggle to keep your head clear. And …

Mack remembered something Cantor had told him during their sortie over the Gulf of Aden: You’re not flying an F-15.

He felt a twinge of anger, and then, far worse, embarrassment.

The punk kid was right. If he really wanted to fly the stinking Flighthawk, he would have to forget everything he knew about flying F-15s or anything other than the Flighthawk. He was going to have to live with its limits—and take advantage of its assets.

And, umpteen kills to his credit or not, he was going to have to face the fact that he had a lot to learn. He was a newbie when it came to the Flighthawk.

“No more F-15s,” he told the plane. “Just U/MF-3s.”

“Repeat command,” answered the flight computer.

“It’s you and me, babe. Just you and me.”

*

*

*

END GAME

173

BREANNA JERKED THE MEGAFORTRESS BACK AND FORTH

across the water, shimmying and shaking as if she thought she was being followed by an SA-6 antiair missile. Finally she eased up, putting the plane into a banking climb and heading back to the west.

“English, how are we looking?” she said to the ensign.

“Buoy is good. I have control.”

“Great.”

“But …”

“But?”

“I have a contact at long range, submerged, unknown source. There’s another sub out there,” explained English.

“Except that the sound profile doesn’t match anything I know. Which is almost impossible.”

“Did the Chinese sub launch a decoy?”

“We would have caught that. It’s not a known Pakistani sub either. I’d like to follow it, but I can’t watch the Chinese submarine and this at the same time.”

“Stand by,” Breanna told her. “I’ll talk to Captain Gale.”

Aboard the Abner Read , in the northern Arabian Sea

0301

STORM STUDIED THE HOLOGRAM. THE CHINESE AIRCRAFT

carrier Deng Xiaoping and the Indian carrier Shiva were pointing their bows at each other, boxers jutting out their chins and daring their opponent to start something. The Indian carrier had eight planes in the air, along with two ASW; antisubmarine helicopters. The Chinese had twelve planes up, plus two helicopters supplying long-range radar and three on ASW duty.

Two destroyers and one frigate accompanied the Chinese vessel, along with a submarine being tracked by Dreamland’s Piranha. The Indians had one destroyer, an old frigate, and two coastal corvettes, which were a little 174

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

smaller than frigates but were packed with ship-to-ship missiles. The edge went to the Chinese, whose gear was newer and, though largely untested, probably more potent. But at a range of fifty miles, where both task forces could rely on antiship missiles as well as their aircraft, the battle would be ferocious.

And if both navies were to turn on him, rather than each other?

The problem would not be hitting them—he was thirty-five miles to the west of the two carriers, well within range of his Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles; the ship-to-air SM-2

missiles, packed in a Vertical Launching System at the forward deck, could take down an airplane at roughly ninety miles and hit a ship at the same distance. The problem was that there were simply too many targets—the Abner Read had only sixteen vertical launch tubes on her forward deck, and while they could be loaded with torpedoes, antiair or antiship missiles, the weapons mix had to be preselected before battle. Reloading was a laborious undertaking and could not be done during a fight.

Storm had eight Harpoons and eight antiaircraft missiles loaded.

Precisely how many missiles it would take to sink either of the carriers was a matter of immense debate and count-less computer simulations. According to the intel experts back at the Pentagon, precise hits by four Harpoons should be enough to disable the Indian carrier; the Chinese ship could be crippled with three. In neither case would the ships be sunk—the Indian vessel was known to have been up-armored at the waterline—but the hits would disable enough of their systems to take them out of a battle and leave them highly vulnerable to a second round of attacks to take them to the bottom.