Should have hit it last night then.

Liu was at the head of the dock, onshore already. The boat was on Stoner’s right. He pulled his knife and went to it, slashed the two lines, then kicked it away. Something pushed him down onto the bobbing boards—it was the helicopter rocking back after firing a salvo of rockets. Thick cordite and smoke, and something like diesel fuel, choked his nose. A fireball erupted; the water churned with a stream of steady explosions. Now all he smelled was burning metal.

These bastards had SAMs and all sorts of weapons.

“Hey, forward, damn it!” yelled someone.

It was Powder, waving through the smoke on the beach. Stoner pushed himself to his knees, stumbling toward the land.

By the time Danny made it to the ground, the gunfire had already stopped. The defenders’ stores of ammunition and weapons continued to explode, and the cottage burned bright orange, flames towering well overhead.

They’d rigged it. Bird One tried smothering the fire by flying over it, but this only made the flames shoot out the side and was dangerous as hell. Finally, Danny told them to back off. The inferno continued, doubling its height in triumph and sending a burst of flames exploding above.

“Team One, move back,” he told Bison and Pretty Boy. “Get back to that fence of vegetation. Powder, what’s your situation?”

“Two dead gomers. Can’t see what else is going on with all this smoke. We’re on the beach near the dock.”

“You got a way out of there?”

“Same way we came.”

“How’s Stoner?”

“Got a smile on his face,” said Powder. “I think we oughta draft him, Captain.”

Danny doubted the CIA officer was doing anything but frowning. The truth was, the operation was a fiasco. The only saving grace was that none of theirs were injured—a minor miracle, given all the lead and explosives in the air.

What listening post was worth this?

“We’ll wait for the fire to go down; then we’ll inspect the building,” Danny said. “Everybody just relax. Powder, those bodies near you got Ids?”

“Negative. Look Chinese, but no dog tags or anything. No names.

There was one more burst of fire from the walls of the hut, followed by an explosion that seemed to shake the island up and down an inch. Danny half-expected a volcano to open up in front of him.

Then everything was quiet. In less than two minutes, the flames had consumed themselves. Danny pushed the visor back on his helmet, and unbuttoned two buttons on his vest. He walked toward the ruins of the cottage, now a thick line of black and gray soot in the sand. The air was still hot, as if he was walking into a sauna.

“Looks like they had an underwater long-wave-communication system,” said Stoner from down the beach. “Most of it’s in pieces, but if that’s what it is, they’re very sophisticated.”

“You figure that’s what they were protecting?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “Sure blew everything up in a hurry.”

“They must have realized we were coming when the Flighhawks came in,” said Danny. “Or they picked up the helos with their radars.”

Powder and Liu had moved up from the beach toward the cottage, and were now poking at the dust of its remains.

Powder scooped up something in his hand and started toward Danny.

“Hey, Captain, look at this… .”

Danny raised his head just in time to see a mine explode beneath his sergeant’s foot, blowing him in half.

Aboard Iowa, over the South China Sea

1800

Once the Chinese planes turned back, Dog pushed the Megafortress south, tracking ahead of the submarines to a point about seventy-five miles away from the carrier’s air screen. Dog began running a figure-eight at two thousand feet, then ducked lower to drop the transponder buoy. It settled under the waves and began transmitting perfectly from its wire net. Delaford made sure he had the probe on the new channel, then sank the first buoy.

We’re looking good,” said Delaford as Iowa climbed back up through five thousand feet. “Buoy is gone. We have our two contacts now at fifteen miles, still moving at thirty-one knots now. Interestingly, the two subs are sticking pretty close together,” he added.

“Why is that interesting?” said Rosen, listening in. Delaford gave a short lecture in submarine tactics. It began fairly basically—splitting up made it more difficult for the two submarines to be followed—and progressed into a discussion of the wolf packs used by the Germans during World War II. Delaford had a theory the two subs might be talking to each other somehow, though there was no indication of that from Piranha. He had interesting ideas on short-range acoustical and light-wave systems that sounded more like science fiction than doable technology, even to Dog. His chatter, though, helped relieve some of the boredom of the routine; Dog’s job now consisted primarily of lying the same figure-eight pattern again, and again, and again, holding a steady course while Piranha did its thing.

Meanwhile, the submarines continued on a beeline for the position of the Chinese carriers. The Iowa began plotting the next buoy drop, deciding how close they would get to the Chinese task force.

As Dog found the coordinates for the next launch, a communication came in from PacCom, restricted for Dog.