2034: A Novel of the Next World War(6)
Hunt listened patiently. She could feel Morris’s crew going about their tasks on the bridge, trying to ignore these two senior-most officers as they had their disagreement. Then Hunt repeated the order. Morris complied.
As the John Paul Jones came astride the trawler, Hunt could now see its name, Wén Rui, and its home port, Quanzhou, a provincial-level anchorage astride the Taiwan Strait. Her crew shot grapples over the trawler’s gunnels, which allowed them to affix steel tow cables to its side. Lashed together, the two ships cut through the water in tandem like a motorcycle with an unruly sidecar. The danger of this maneuver was obvious to everyone on the bridge. They went about their tasks with a glum air of silent-sailor-disapproval, all thinking their commodore was risking the ship unnecessarily for a bunch of agitated Chinese fishermen. No one voiced their collective wish that their commodore let her hunch go by the boards and return them to safer waters.
Sensing the discontent, Hunt announced that she was heading belowdecks.
Heads snapped around.
“Where to, ma’am?” Morris said by way of protest, seemingly indignant that her commander would abandon her in such a precarious position.
“To the Wén Rui,” answered Hunt. “I want to see her for myself.”
And this is what she did, surprising the master-at-arms, who handed her a holstered pistol, which she strapped on as she clamored over the side, ignoring the throbbing in her bad leg. When Hunt dropped onto the deck of the trawler, she found that the boarding party had already placed under arrest the half dozen crew members of the Wén Rui. They sat cross-legged amidships with an armed guard hovering behind them, their wrists bound at their backs in plastic flex-cuffs, their peaked fishing caps pulled low, and their clothes oily and stained. When Hunt stepped on deck, one of the arrested men, who was oddly clean-shaven and whose cap wasn’t pulled low but was worn proudly back on his head, stood. The gesture wasn’t defiant, actually quite the opposite; he was clear-eyed. Hunt immediately took him for the captain of the Wén Rui.
The chief petty officer who was leading the party explained that they’d searched most of the trawler but that a steel, watertight hatch secured one of the stern compartments and the crew had refused to unlock it. The chief had ordered a welding torch brought from the ship’s locker. In about fifteen minutes they’d have everything opened up.
The clean-shaven man, the trawler’s captain, began to speak in uncertain and heavily accented English: “Are you command here?”
“You speak English?” Hunt replied.
“Are you command here?” he repeated to her, as if perhaps he weren’t certain what these words meant and had simply memorized them long ago as a contingency.
“I am Captain Sarah Hunt, United States Navy,” she answered, placing her palm on her chest. “Yes, this is my command.”
He nodded, and as he did his shoulders collapsed, as if shrugging off a heavy pack. “I surrender my command to you.” Then he turned his back to Hunt, a gesture that, at first, seemed to be a sign of disrespect, but that she soon recognized as being something altogether different. In his open palm, which was cuffed behind him at the wrist, was a key. He’d been holding it all this time and was now, with whatever ceremony he could muster, surrendering it to Hunt.
Hunt plucked the key from his palm, which was noticeably soft, not the calloused palm of a fisherman. She approached the compartment at the stern on the Wén Rui, popped off the lock, and opened the hatch.
“What we got, ma’am?” asked the master-at-arms, who stood close behind her.
“Christ,” said Hunt, staring at racks of blinking miniature hard drives and plasma screens. “I have no idea.”
* * *
13:47 March 12, 2034 (GMT+4:30)
Strait of Hormuz
When Wedge switched to manual control, the Lockheed contractors on the George H. W. Bush immediately began to radio, wanting to know if everything was okay. He hadn’t answered, at least not at first. They could still track him and see that he was adhering to their flight plan, which at this moment placed him approximately fifty nautical miles west of Bandar Abbas, the main regional Iranian naval base. The accuracy of his flight proved—at least to him—that his navigation was as precise as any computer.
Then his F-35 hit a pocket of atmospheric turbulence—a bad one. Wedge could feel it shudder up the controls, through his feet, which were planted on the rudder pedals, into the stick, and across his shoulders. The turbulence threatened to throw him off course, which could have diverted him into the more technologically advanced layers of Iranian air defenses, the ones that expanded outward from Tehran, in which the F-35’s stealth countermeasures might prove inadequate.
This is it, he thought.
Or at least as close to it as he had ever come. His manipulation of throttle, stick, and rudder was fast, instinctual, the result of his entire career in the cockpit, and of four generations’ worth of Mitchell family breeding.
He skittered his aircraft on the edge of the turbulence, flying for a total of 3.6 nautical miles at a speed of 736 knots with his aircraft oriented with 28 degrees of yaw respective to its direction of flight. The entire episode lasted under four seconds, but it was a moment of hidden grace, one that only he and perhaps his great-grandfather watching from the afterlife appreciated in the instant of its occurrence.