Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📗

A salvage tug was already steaming out of Dong Doa’s tiny harbor, headed directly toward the burning ship. It would take just over an hour to rescue the survivors, extinguish the fires, and put what was left of the Tarbox under tow, headed back to the tiny outpost in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, people were already trying to figure out why the Navy’s newest warship and her crew had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth.

Ψ

The MQ-4 Triton orbited at sixty thousand feet, far too high to be seen by the frequent Tokyo-to-Singapore airline flights passing twenty thousand feet below the gray-and-white unmanned spy plane. From this high perch, Triton flight PE Six-Zero sent a steady stream of data back to its “pilot” and sensor operator, senso, who were sitting in a cinderblock building at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida. PE Six-Zero’s pilot, Lieutenant Cindy “Stick” Sidirourgos, had not actually seen her bird up close in more than six months. Her squadron, VUP-19, was homeported at NAS JAX, only a couple of blocks from the main runways. Their six Tritons, however, flew out of Anderson Air Force Base, high on a bluff in the northeast corner of Guam, over eight thousand miles away in the Mariana Islands.

Most of the considerable data that Six-Zero sent back from its package of state-of the-art sensors held little interest to Cindy Sidirourgos. She was only considering the information from the drone that she needed to know to be able to fly the bird. All that appeared on the four large flat-panels that fronted her “cockpit.” The rest of the bits and bytes went to the senso and then were shunted off to the numerous organizations and three-letter government agencies that really cared about what was going on in the contentious waters of the far western Pacific.

The flight up from Guam had taken almost three hours. Then, as ordered, Sidirourgos put her bird into a long elliptical search orbit. After a few quick button pushes, confident the craft was obeying her commands, she stood to stretch. The bird—she secretly and affectionately called it “Polly”—would now fly itself for a while. She shivered in the blast of cold air conditioning designed to keep the electronics cool, ignoring the humans and their comfort, then threw her leather flight jacket over the green flight coveralls she routinely wore when she was “flying a mission.” Sidirourgos then stepped across the hall to the tiny pantry for a cup of coffee and a donut.

Flying these ocean surveillance missions was hard, boring work, collecting valuable data, and she was responsible for the well-being of a very expensive hunk of machinery. Four hours in the cockpit, then four hours off, followed by four more hours flying, all to complete the twelve-hour watch. Four days on, then four days off.

Sidirourgos selected a plain glazed donut, not one of the jelly-filled ones she preferred. Just one more day to go, and then it was beach time. Four days of fun in the sun with her boyfriend on the sugary sands of Seagrove Beach, one of the Florida Panhandle’s best. She could hardly wait. But she had been watching her figure lately, better to fit into her new bikini.

Just then, the red light hanging outside the cockpit door flashed and the buzzer blasted. Something was happening to her bird. Sidirourgos quickly put down her coffee cup—no open liquids allowed in the cockpit, a cup of coffee spilled in the wrong place would be a bad day for a lot of people—and stuffed the rest of the donut in her mouth as she hurried back.

The chat link with Seventh Fleet was flashing red as she plopped down in her seat, still chewing.

“Mission PE-60, Seventh Fleet Ops,” the text on the screen read. “Emergency re-target your mission. Establish patrol area vicinity one-two-dot-five north, one-one-four-dot-eight east. Conduct all-sensor search. Target of interest USS Tarbox. Last contact eight hours, vicinity Spratly Islands. Highest priority. Report contact with Tarbox Op Immediate.”

She frowned, shook her head, and quickly re-read the message. In her six years in the Navy, Cindy Sidirourgos had never seen a communication like this one. Quickly acknowledging the text, she grabbed the joystick and swung the big bird around to its new course. Then she pushed the throttles to the firewall. After punching the ordered coordinates into the nav system, she learned that she had an hour’s flying time before she began this new and seemingly urgent mission.

Time to finish that coffee and maybe indulge in a second donut. No way it could show up on her thighs or hips in just one day, right?

Ψ

As the unmanned MQ-4 spy plane reached the northern end of its new search area, the senso, AWP-1 Flint Allerman, set up the systems for an all-sensor search of the cluttered ocean area far below. To the east and south was a vast area of rock, shoals, and tiny islands. Thousands of fishing boats littered his sensor screens. Just to the west were the main shipping channels through the South China Sea, perhaps the most heavily trafficked sea lane on the planet. Locating a lone frigate in all this clutter was not going to be easy.

Then, as Allerman watched intently, the image on the screen abruptly turned to fuzz. And there was nothing being reported by any of the bird’s sensors. Even the optical and IR circuits were suddenly out. Something very powerful and very close was actively jamming his bird, something the senso had never seen before. Not even during his extensive training.

Allerman was just keying his mike to call Sidirourgos when her voice blared over his speaker.

“Senso? Pilot. I’ve lost contact with our bird. What are you seeing?”

Ψ

Eight thousand miles away from where the two stared at their suddenly blank screens, the shattered remains of “Polly,” PE Six-Zero, fluttered down, eventually plunging into the sea far below. Meanwhile, the pilot of the Shenyang J-16 fighter was busy on his radio, proudly reporting that