Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 10

  “Understood,” said Weed. “But I want you to double-check.”

  “I'll have counterintelligence all over the satellite programs tomorrow morning. If there was a mole, we'll find him.”

  When Barnett was gone, Weed turned away from the door and found himself staring at the painting of Theodore Roosevelt. The old Rough Rider looked as though he was about to shake his head in dismay. Weed wondered if he'd ever had to worry about Spanish moles in the Department of War, then shook his own head and headed back to the Oval Office.

  26 July 2029: Arusha, Tanzania

  McGaffney waited for a gap between cars, then trotted across Sokoino Road. Traffic was bad, though not half so heavy as what he'd had to dodge on the way to Arusha. The American air strikes along the coast sent refugees fleeing inland with everything they could carry; he'd had to leave the highway half a dozen times and go jolting over back roads to get around jams and keep moving away from the coast toward what safety there was.

  It had been a harrowing trip, but the first part of it was by far the worst, weaving inland on dirt roads in the darkness while the first fireballs erupted over the roofs of Pangani and the girl he'd been with clung to his back and cried. The fires were still visible when he got to the village where the girl had family; he waited outside the house for a moment to make sure everything was all right, then headed back onto the nearest road east and coaxed the scooter into giving him every bit of speed it could manage. Morning light showed great plumes of smoke rising here and there all along the eastern horizon: he'd watched that and wondered just how big a war this had become.

  Still, he'd made it to Arusha, which was probably safer than anywhere else in Tanzania—with all the expats and international charities there, not even the Americans would be likely to bomb it without some very good reason. A few days there would give him time to figure out where the fighting was and where it wasn't, and then it would be time to head back into the thick of things and keep the editors back home supplied with stories.

  He was most of the way to the old German fort when a familiar figure came toward him. “Tommy!” said Hafiz al-Nasrani. “Any luck with that tourist story?”

  “Filling in a few details,” McGaffney said, without missing a beat. “Should have guessed I'd find you here.”

  “I decided not to take my chances in Dar,” said the al-Jazeera stringer. “Probably just as well, given the latest news. Have you heard about the fleet?”

  “No, but I watched cruise missiles taking off at Pangani night before last.”

  Hafiz's eyebrows went up. “I'll fill you in, in exchange for an interview. I could use a witness who was on the scene.”

  “Add dinner to that,” said McGaffney, “and you've got a deal.”

  “Done. I've got plenty of leeway in the expense account.” In a low voice: “This is big. The Americans lost their carrier.”

  McGaffney stared. “You're serious?”

  “Dead serious. It's on a sandbar off the Kenyan coast. Word is they lost half a dozen other ships as well.”

  “That's more than big.” Then, returning to practicalities: “Let's get that dinner. You can fill me in, I can tell you what I saw in Pangani, and then we can hope the Americans don't start throwing nukes around or something.”

  “I wish that was funny,” said Hafiz. “I honestly have no idea what they'll do.”

  26 July 2029: Camp Pumbaa, Kenya

  “And the Paveways?” Mahoney asked.

  “I've got a request in stateside,” Melanie Bridgeport told him. “They're pretty sure we can fly in as many as we want in two or three days.”

  “Good.” The brigadier general frowned, shook his head. “That'll help, but if they can't get the satellites back up and running soon, this isn't going to go well.”

  Bridgeport's desk was heaped with paperwork—documentation from the Navy, most of it. In theory, Navy and Air Force computers ran interoperable programs; in practice, ever since the big systems upgrade in 2024, a bug in one of the Navy logistics modules reliably crashed the Air Force system, and repeated software patches from the supplier never fixed the problem. It wasn't considered professional to discuss the fact that the supplier donated heavily to the campaign funds of half a dozen influential congressmen, and so couldn't be replaced by a firm that could actually do the job, but of course that was the score, and every logistics officer in the Air Force knew it.

  Under normal circumstances, the computer glitch wasn't a problem, since Air Force and Navy units had their own stocks of missiles and bombs, but these weren't normal circumstances. With all the GPS-guided weapons useless, the naval task force out of action, and the Navy planes that made it off the Ronald Reagan flying out of airfields set up for Air Force use, getting the Navy fliers the munitions they needed had suddenly become a first-class mess. All her staff were busy with the ordinary work of keeping a fighter wing supplied and running in combat, so the job of making sense of the Navy system was Bridgeport's baby.

  “Any other concerns?” Mahoney asked her.

  “Nothing worth worrying about.”

  “Good.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “If we can keep the air assault going until Washington pulls its head out of its ass and decides on a plan B, we can still win this thing.”

  26 July 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  “They bloodied our nose, no question,” Weed said. “The question is what we do now.”

  The National Security Council had just finished watching a presentation about exactly what had been done to the naval task force. Stedman, who already knew the details, spent the fifteen minutes of the presentation watching the faces of the others: Waite's as expressionless as armor plate, Weed's and most of the others appalled, Gurney's baffled and angry. Harbin, though, had leaned forward in her chair, her head tilted to one side, as though each image was a document in a language she couldn't quite read.

  Do any of you realize what just happened? Stedman wanted to shout. Have any of you noticed that half our global strategy is sitting on the bottom of the Indian Ocean at this moment? Instead, he sat back, made himself stay silent.

  “If we cave in, we're screwed,” Weed went on. “We've got to reinforce the troops in Kenya and proceed with the operation. I want a plan on my desk first thing tomorrow.”

  “You'll have it, sir,” said Admiral Waite. “If I may suggest, though—”

  Weed motioned for him to continue.

  “A plan for extracting our forces, sir. Just in case.”

  “We can't.” Weed all at once looked older than his sixty years. “If we cave in, we're screwed. The whole country is screwed.”

  The plan was on Weed's desk at six the next morning: a sketchy but viable draft of an airlift operation, using most of the Pentagon's available air transport capacity to get troops and supplies from Europe and the Persian Gulf to Kenya in a hurry. By the time it reached the Oval Office, though, the unfolding situation had already rendered it hopelessly obsolete.

  NINE

  27 July 2029: Chahbahar Air Base, Iran

  Colonel Hassan Gholadegh went to the window as the Chinese tankers began to take off. Chahbahar Air Base huddled on a coastal plain near the far southeastern corner of Iran—halfway between nowhere and Hell, they said in Tehran. You went there when someone higher up wanted to teach you a hard lesson, and when the orders came sending Gholadegh there, he'd racked his brains for days trying to figure out which of his superiors he might have offended. That was before the first advance party of Chinese officers landed, and he began to get some hint of what might be happening.

  That was two months back, two months of careful preparations that no American satellite or drone could be allowed to see. Finally the big Chinese tankers came flying in over the brown mountains to the north, low and fast. Now, one by one, they were taking off, heading for a rendezvous with other planes somewhere off the coast. No one had been so careless as to mention, or so rude as to ask, where those other planes might be going, but Gholadegh thought
he knew. If the rumors from Africa were more than empty wind…

  That was when he saw the contrails, up over the mountains to the east: twenty of them at least. He spat out an obscenity, sprinted up the stairs to the radar room.

  The radar technicians were watching them too, though with less surprise. “Word came in twenty minutes ago, sir,” said the duty officer. “They're Chinese. Tehran says let them through, give them help if they need it.”

  Gholadegh went to the nearest screen, watched the blips. “Did they say how many—”

  “No, sir.”

  More blips came in over the mountains. There must be at least a full fighter wing of them, Gholadegh realized, perhaps more. “They're infidels,” he said, “but may Allah grant them victory.”

  27 July 2029: Torit Airfield, South Sudan

  The J-20 came in low and fast, touched down, slowed. The ground crew sprinted out as the plane, earthbound now, turned at the runway's end and taxied over toward the hangar; by the time it was clear of the runway, another J-20 was coming in.

  The pilot of the first plane hauled himself out of the cockpit, climbed down to the tarmac. Another pilot, suited up and ready, was waiting for him. “No trouble, I hope?”

  “A little rough air over the mountains.” His head motioned eastward, toward Ethiopia. “Nothing to worry about.”

  A third J-20 landed on the airstrip. Meanwhile the ground crew swarmed over the first plane, refueling, checking systems, mounting and arming air-to-air missiles for the fight ahead.

  “Any word about the American fleet?” the first pilot asked.

  “Al-Jazeera says they were hit by cruise missiles. Nobody else is saying anything.” The relief pilot shrugged. “They have an air base south of Narok, so either way there's no shortage of them.”

  A bigger plane came down—a Y-8 turboprop, the transport workhorse of the PLAAF, bulging with the radomes that marked it as an aerial early warning and control plane. “Yet,” said the first pilot. “Leave a few for me.”

  The relief pilot laughed. “Only if I run out of missiles.” The crew chief signaled to him, and he climbed up into the cockpit. The first pilot waved and started across the field to the cluster of low buildings on the far side.

  The canopy came down, shutting out the engine noise. Systems checks went smoothly, the routine familiar after so many months of drills and exercises. Another signal from the crew chief, and the engine roared to life behind him. A little more throttle, and the J-20 taxied out toward the runway.

  The earphone in his helmet crackled, said, “Ndenge moja, akwalika kwa tekoff.” It took him a moment to recall the phrase. It was Swahili, of course, since no word of Chinese could be spoken over the air, not yet. A first J-20 took off.

  “Ndenge mbili, akwalika kwa tekoff.” That was his signal. He pushed the throttle forward. His mouth was dry, dry as old bones, thinking of the enemy planes and pilots waiting for him in the skies over Kenya: the best in the world, or the second best. Soon he would know.

  The J-20 shot down the runway, hurtled out of sight over the treetops to the southeast.

  27 July 2029: above central Kenya

  “Bandits,” said the radar operator. Every head in the cabin of the E-3 AWACS plane swiveled toward him, and the officer in charge hurried over. Ever since word had gotten out about the fleet, everyone had been on edge, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

  The radar systems on board the E-3 were the best the Air Force had, loaded with data analysis tricks that could extract a signal from the background noise that was all that the latest stealth technology let through. The operator had shifted his screen onto NCTR setting—Non-Cooperative Target Recognition—as soon as something out of the ordinary showed up on the screen. Now lines of text were appearing on the subscreen:

  TARGET 001 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 002 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 003 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  “George, confirm that,” said the officer.

  One of the other operators—there were fourteen of them in the cabin, seated back to back at big consoles—bent over his screen, moved a trackball one way, the other. “Confirmed, sir,” he said. “Not much else it could be.”

  The lines kept marching down the subscreen:

  TARGET 014 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 015 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 016 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  The crew knew their jobs, and though the satellite link was still down, they had other ways to get the necessary data to the Air Operations Center on the ground and the fighters already on combat air patrol over Kenya and northern Tanzania. At Camp Pumbaa, hundreds of miles south, sirens howled, antiaircraft missiles waited, and flight crews sprinted to their planes, preparing to face a contingency none of the plans for Operation Blazing Torch had taken into account.

  TARGET 39 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 40 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  TARGET 41 PRC J20 PROB HIGH

  The radar screens showed one set of F-35s turning to confront the Chinese planes and another set roaring off the runways and hurrying north, and the first signals from Navy fighters on their way from Mombasa added themselves to the mix. Via JTIDS, the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, data streamed out from the E-3 to the fighters and back again. The JTIDS and the powerful radar transmitters in the radome both used Low Probability of Intercept technology to try to defeat enemy detection equipment, and electronic countermeasures gear completed the protective shell. To a sufficiently advanced sensor, though, the E-3 glowed like an electromagnetic sun—and Chinese engineers had spent most of three decades finding increasingly effective ways of detecting and targeting that glow.

  As the air battle began, six J-20s broke away from the emerging fight and shot south with afterburners roaring, climbing rapidly toward the E-3. They were faster than the F-35s and equipped with equally good countermeasures gear, and five of them got clear, leaving one to dissolve in a fireball as a US air-to-air missile found its target. No one had any questions about their mission, and the E-3's fighter escort moved to intercept as the last F-35s within range hit their afterburners and raced upwards.

  It would not be enough.

  While three of the J-20s engaged the American fighters, two closed within missile range of the E-3 and launched high-speed radiation-seeking missiles at it. A moment later, the E-3 vanished in a ball of flame, taking with it the core of the US integrated air defense. The J-20s turned in a tight arc and plunged into the fight with the F-35s.

  27 July 2029: Camp Pumbaa, Kenya

  “Yes, sir.” Mahoney sounded as exhausted as he felt. “That's correct; we've lost nine planes, including the E-3, and we've confirmed the loss of six of theirs.”

  The fight was still going on in the skies above Kenya. The Navy planes had arrived in time to tip the balance and drive the Chinese planes further north, toward their bases in South Sudan and Ethiopia, but the first wave of J-20s had been replaced by a second. Every other mission the American planes had been assigned had gone by the board, forced aside by the desperate need to keep Camp Pumbaa, its troops and stores, and its airfield from being pounded into uselessness by Chinese missiles.

  “That's bad,” said the voice through the headset: General Wayne Crawford, the USAF vice chief of staff. Enough satellites were working again to manage the first threads of a communications net. “I've ordered CENTCOM and AFRICOM to get you as much help as you need, as soon as they can.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mahoney. “If I may, sir, we need something other than F-35s.”

  He could all but feel the chill through the satellite link. Plenty of senior staff in the Air Force had built their careers around the F-35 program, and still got defensive when the plane's performance problems came up. Still, it had to be said: “Six of our eight fighter losses were F-35s. The Navy lost one F-14 and one F/A-18, and they were right in the thick of it with us.”

  It was the right thing to say; nobody in the Air Force wanted to see Navy flyers come out a
head in a combat situation. “I'll see if I can chop you a couple of F-22 squadrons,” Crawford said at once. “One way or another, you'll get what you need to win.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mahoney.

  A minute later he was crossing the bare dirt between the HQ building and the Air Operations Center next to it. A sound like distant thunder came whispering out of the north, echoes of the air battle; closer in, the rising note of jet engines announced a pair of F-35s coming down to refuel, reload, and swap pilots before heading back in. So far, so good, he thought.

  That wasn't the mood in the AOC, though. Mahoney felt it the moment he came through the door, and went over to the duty officer's station. “What's up?”

  “We've lost two more, sir.”

  “Lardbuckets?” A quick you-got-it nod from the younger man answered him. “I've just talked with Crawford,” he said then, pitching his voice so that the others in the AOC could hear him. “They're chopping us more squadrons—he's going to try to get us some F-22s.”

  “Good,” said the duty officer. “We'll need ’em, sir—we're bleeding.”

  28 July 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  News of the arrival of the Chinese fighters forced the plans for resupplying the four US divisions in Kenya by air into indefinite hold. “Until we establish air superiority,” Stedman explained to Weed and the other members of the National Security Council, “there are hard limits to what we can do. Even if we send them with fighter cover, the big transports are sitting ducks for their air-to-air missiles.”

  The president nodded. “How soon can we expect to retake control of the air?”

  “Within a week, if everything goes well. I've got two fighter squadrons on the way in tomorrow, and two more following them in two days.”

  “What about the air bases in South Sudan and Ethiopia?” Harbin asked. “Those should get hit, hard.”

  “That would mean,” Stedman said, picking his words carefully, “widening the war to include two more Chinese allies. Maybe more than that, if the other African countries in their camp get involved.”