Chapter 73
Aboard the Oregon
Eric Stone idled the Oregon’s engines and rotated its thrusters, keeping the big ship in place like a swimmer treading water.
He had just put the Oregon twenty-five miles due east from the Baktun.
If his estimates were correct, that put them safely beyond the range of its tripod-mounted optics and, hopefully, well outside the estimated perimeter of the Baktun’s sensor drones.
They hadn’t picked up any active radar or sonar activity from the mystery ship, nor had the Sniffer detected any radio, satellite, or laser communications.
Like the Baktun, the Oregon was also maintaining complete electromagnetic silence, careful not to send any kind of signal that would trigger the Baktun’s electronic spiderweb of passive sensors and send her scurrying away.
But without active sensors, they still needed a way to confirm the Baktun’s location.
“This will be the first time we’ve deployed the Madyar in combat conditions,” Linda Ross said. She had replaced Murphy at the weapons station since he had been relieved of duty.
“She tested in her sea trials well enough,” Cabrillo said.
Max huffed. “That’s like shooting paper targets at the range.”
“But it’s not the first time these Ukrainian drones have been around the block,” Ross protested. “They’ve flown against Russian defenses without much of a hitch.”
“The Russkies don’t hold a candle to what these Baktun boys have, at least in the technology department.”
“We’re about to find out what the Baktun can really do,” Cabrillo said.
Juan wasn’t completely confident. The whole point of the Madyar drone was to avoid any kind of detection or destruction by enemy electronics. They named the drone Madyar after its inventors, the “Madyar’s Birds,” otherwise known as Ukraine’s 414th Drone Strike Regiment.
Of course, Max, Murph, and Eric couldn’t help but tinker with the battle-proven drone when they first got their hands on it a month ago.
They extended both its range and optics, and modified its carbon-fiber airframe to Oregon specs.
The Madyar was relatively small—no bigger than the deck of a push mower—which aided in its stealth capabilities.
Cabrillo nodded at Gomez, seated at his command station. “Launch the Madyar.”
“Roger that.”
Gomez pulled on his first-person view goggles and flipped a couple of toggles on his desktop. His first-person view was now displayed on one of the op center’s giant bulkhead LCD monitors. He worked a traditional pilot’s joystick affixed to the station.
The drone’s camera displayed black until the launch tube door popped off, revealing a cloudy gray sky above a wine-dark sea spattered with small whitecaps marching off into the distance.
The drone shot out of its pod with a mighty whoosh of air. Its spring-loaded quadcopter limbs deployed and its four motors instantly powered up. Their high-pitched whining rattled the overhead speakers until Hali Kasim nudged the sound level down.
Unlike most drones, the Madyar wasn’t controlled by wireless RF signals.
There was no question wireless drones carrying small-explosive payloads had changed the face of modern war.
But defensive technologies were beginning to swing the pendulum in the other direction.
Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, British, Turkish, European, and American drone operators were discovering that electronic countermeasures, especially jamming of RF signals, were increasingly successful knocking drones out of the sky.
Interrupting the signal between the operator and drone was responsible for seventy-five percent of drone losses in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Worse, jamming tech was becoming ubiquitous. Besides the large and expensive theater-wide systems being deployed, smaller devices like “backpack jammers” and even narrow-beamed radio wave “rifles” were suddenly flooding the field.
But wartime engineers were nothing if not inventive, and it wasn’t long before the drone fighters discovered the virtue of wire-guided drone flights.
Drones were now carrying specially wound spools of fiber slung beneath their airframes like fishing reels, providing a direct, high-bandwidth data link between the operator and the drone.
That physical connection meant radio interference was impossible.
Better still, the drones themselves now emitted no radio waves that could locate either the drone or the operator by electronic detection.
The ultimate bonus: the quality of video imagery of the “flyby fiber” technology was exponentially higher than traditional RF systems.
The Oregon’s modified Madyar carried over thirty miles of fine filament, strong enough that the drone could even fly backward or turn in circles without breaking the line or having it tangle in the rotors.
In place of munitions, the Oregon team mounted a 10x camera and gimbal, extending the Madyar’s optical range far beyond its thirty-mile cable limit.
Gomez flew the bird at twenty-five feet above the ocean at radar-avoiding “sea-skimming” levels.
The slight chop in the water added to the sea clutter, making radar detection and targeting of the Madyar even more unlikely.
At that low height, and with the current weather conditions, the drone should be able to spot a ship the size of the Baktun around thirteen miles away.
The Madyar gave the Oregon the best possible shot at stealthy, long-range optical reconnaissance. With any luck, they’d find the Baktun without the Oregon ever being detected, its electromagnetic systems in a state of complete silence.
What happened after that would be anything but quiet.
Cabrillo glanced at the countdown clock on one of the bulkhead monitors. Only twenty-nine minutes until Project Q launched.
Max was right. Despite charging across the Pacific at full tilt, they had cut it close getting here. Maybe too close. That countdown clock was only an estimate based on Eidolon’s stolen code.
And if that estimate was wrong, they might even be too late.
★
“What’s that?” Max asked, pointing at the big video display. In the far distance, a jagged speck appeared on the choppy water. The Madyar had flown just over six miles since leaving the Oregon.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not a duck,” Cabrillo said. He stood near the wall monitor, his thick arms crossed against his wide swimmer’s chest.
“It’s some kind of a ship, but I can’t quite make it out,” Ross said. All eyes in the op center were glued to the image playing on the wall-size LCD screen. Several minutes later, the jagged speck morphed into the unmistakable outline of a large oceangoing vessel.
“She matches the Baktun’s description,” Eric said as he threw a stock photo of the vessel up onto an adjacent screen.
Eidolon’s coded message didn’t include either a picture or a description of the mystery ship.
But scouring the maritime databases for a vessel of the same name finally turned up the Baktun, a global research vessel registered to a nonprofit environmentalist organization.
One of the Oregon’s research team, Russ Kefauver, deployed his forensic accounting skills to uncover a carefully hidden and legally tenuous connection between the nonprofit organization and a sizable Fierro offshore bank account.
With each passing second, the Baktun came into clearer relief.
“That high foredeck definitely looks like the Baktun’s helipad,” Ross said. “I’d say we have confirmation.”
“No visible weapons,” Gomez said.
“She looks dead in the water to me, and quiet as the grave,” Max said. “I wonder if she’s playing opossum.”
“What do you want me to do, skip?” Gomez asked. “I’ve got plenty of rope left on the saddle. And by the looks of things, we haven’t rattled any cans down there.”
“Push on a bit, and let’s gain some altitude. I want to see if she’s hiding any surprises.”
“You got it.” Gomez eased the stick back and raised the Madyar to over a hundred feet.
Every jaw in the op center dropped when a second vessel appeared a short distance beyond.
“What the heck is that?” Max asked as Eric’s fingers raced across his keyboard. The former weapons designer pulled up a recently posted Pentagon image and threw it on the screen. It was a perfect match.
“That’s the Fuzhou,” Stone announced. “China’s latest version of the Type 055 destroyer.”
What caught everyone’s attention wasn’t the photo so much as the list of weapons on the spec screen.
The top of that long list showed the carrier-killer kitted out with hypersonic anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, two helicopters, and even an experimental rail gun.
Despite its label as a destroyer, it was more of a cruiser given its size and armaments.
Max whistled. “She’s a monster, all right. And a quiet one at that.”
The Oregon’s electro-optical display estimated the Fuzhou was steaming at less than ten knots toward the Baktun, some three miles distant, and due west of the slightly smaller ship.
At that speed and with its noise-reduction engineering, it was impossible for the anchored Oregon to pick up her screw noise this far away.
“They beat us here—but how?” Linda said. “And why didn’t our passive systems pick her up?”
“The hydrodynamic-flow noise from our engines at max speed interfered with our passive hull sonar,” Juan explained. “The good news is that the Fuzhou couldn’t hear us, either.”
One of the many advantages of the Oregon’s revolutionary propless propulsion system was that it didn’t produce the acoustic signatures detected by passive sonar systems. Without active pinging by the Chinese, the Oregon was functionally invisible to them.
“Interesting,” Linda said. “So now we have three ships, including ours, all running silent.”
“That means whoever farts in church first is gonna have to pay the preacher,” Max said.
Eric stifled a snorting laugh.
“Doesn’t matter how she got here,” Juan said, falling back into the Kirk Chair. “We knew they’d show up some time.”
“At least they don’t know we’re here,” Max said.
“No radar, no sonar, no weapons activated,” Linda said, checking her instruments. “What are the Chinese up to?”
Cabrillo leaned forward, studying the screen. “A rendezvous. Either they’re going to escort the Baktun back to a home base or they’re going to transfer tech and personnel right here.”
“Skip…” Gomez said.
All eyes turned back to the wall monitor. The Madyar’s automated optics put a red square around a distant object lifting off the rear helo deck.
“That’s one of the Fuzhou’s choppers,” Max said.
Cabrillo stood, his eyes fixed on the Chinese helo lofting high into the air, his voice calm and measured.
“Hali, sound battle stations. We’re blown.”