Piranha

“Roger that,” said Torbin.

Zen spun Hawk One back north, directly over the area where the Chinese interceptor had hit the water. There was no sign of the plane. The churning waves looked a bit darker than the surrounding ocean, though that might have been Zen’s imagination.

“Homers in the air. Jamming-geez, they’re persistent buggers,” complained Torbin.

“AA-8 Aphids—way out of range,” said Chris.

The Russian-made antiaircraft missiles were IR homers whose design dated back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Designed for extremely close-range work, they were generally ineffective at anything over a mile. They were, however, highly maneuverable, and when one managed to stick on Hawk One’s tail, Zen found he had to twist to less than fifty feet over the waves before the missiles gave up on him. It skipped into the water like a rock flung by a schoolboy across a lake; the warhead separated and bounced several times before disappearing into a swell nearly a mile from the original point of impact.

By then, Zen had climbed back toward the spot where the Sukhois had gone in. A thin ooze had appeared on the surface; the camera caught twists of metal, plastic, and fabric as he flashed by.

The poor son of a bitch.

The poor stupid son of a bitch.

“Gun battery on the lead destroyer is firing!” warned Collins, his voice cracking. “I don’t know what the hell at; we’re about five miles out of range.”

The Chinese destroyer, a member of the Jianghu III class, began peppering the air with rounds from its 37mm antiair gun. Quickly, two other escorts joined in. their shells arced far away from the American planes, undoubtedly more an expression of frustration than a serious attempt to shoot down anything. Either because of the gunfire, or perhaps because they were ru

The two freshly launched Sukhois pushed menacingly toward the rear of the Megafortress. Zen’s long-range video scan showed the planes had launched with only thin heat-seekers on their wings.

“Stinger radar is tracking,” said Chris. “They’re just out of range.”

“Still not responding?” Bree asked.

“Negative.”

“Jeff, what do you think?”

“Sooner or later they’re going to hit something,” he told her. “But I think we can hold these two off, then hope they get a helo over the wreckage,” he added. Zen had worked with Bree long enough to know he was just reinforcing her own thinking. “Then we resume our patrol.”

“I concur. Collins—you getting all the transmissions?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. They’re going to love his back at the Puzzle Palace,” he added, referring to the NSA’s analysis section. Dreamland’s mission orders included provisions for forwarding intercept data to the spy agency, which would use them to update estimates of the Chinese military and its hardware.

Hawk Two was flying two miles north of the orbiting Megafortress, sitting between Quicksilver and the two Chinese planes. Zen told the computer to keep Hawk One in an orbit over the wreckage bobbing to the surface, then jumped back into Hawk Two. He nudged back on his speed, tilting his wing slightly to let the bandit on the left catch up. The Chinese pilot pulled up cautiously—a hopeful sign, since he could have angled for a shot.

Zen tried broadcasting himself, “spi

“Hawk Leader to Chinese Su-33. If you can hear me, please acknowledge in some form. I understand you may not speak English. One of your aircraft ditched and I have the location marked for you.”

Nothing, not even a click on the mike. At the same time, the Chinese seemed to understand that the American planes were not being aggressive; the Sukhois pilot made no move to close on the Megafortress, or the Flighthawk for that matter, which would have been vulnerable to a close-quarters gun attack.

For about a third of a second.

“I have the coordinates for your aircraft,” Zen said. He read out the exact longitude and latitude where the aircraft went in. “He went into a high-speed spin at low altitude and hit the water,” said Zen.

“Liar! You shot him down.”

The voice was sharp in Zen’s ears. It had come from one of the Chinese pilots, but when Zen asked them to repeat as if he hadn’t heard, there wasn’t even static in response. He repeated the information from before, then began turning with Quicksilver, watching the Sukhois carefully.

Neither made a move. Quicksilver’s sophisticated eavesdropping gear picked up transmission between the planes and the carrier. The code was in the clear, making it relatively easy for Collins to process. Locked on the frequency, he fed the voice stream into the automated translator, which produced readable text that could be tagged, corrected, and augmented at his station. He then piped it on the fly to the copilot, who was also getting a feed of the radar data Torbin processed. It was almost like sitting in the enemy’s control room.

“Pair of helos coming our from the ship,” reported Chris. “One off the carrier, one I think from the cruiser. Uh, our library says these are Panthers, Aerospatiale AS 565’s, performance similar to the Dauphin, Dolphin—looks like basically the same aircraft here. French. Vectoring for the coordinates of the crash. Sukhois are supposed to, uh, wait—no, excuse me, they’re supposed to watch us, that’s all. Not engage.”

The Panthers were, in fact, Chinese version of the sturdy French utility chopper. They rode slowly toward the wreckage, skimming around the area three times before settling into hovers above some of the flotsam. Two figures jumped from one of the aircraft, undoubtedly divers recovering some of the wreckage.