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

his mission had been successfully completed and that he was now returning to base on the speck of land once called North Danger Reef.

Ψ

TJ Dillon braced himself against a stout sea breeze as he stood outside Eluanbi Lighthouse, at the far southern end of Taiwan, overlooking the South China Sea to his right, the Philippine Sea to his left, and a narrow, rocky beach almost a thousand feet below. Down there was a flurry of activity. A couple of bright yellow dozers were pushing piles of sand around. Barges and tenders were making regular shuttle runs between the spit of land and a bright red ship that rode at anchor half a mile offshore.

Dillon did not need his powerful binoculars to read the six-foot-tall white letters along the ship’s high side, spelling out “GLOBAL MARINE.” He could also easily read the ship’s name, CS Sovereign, in smaller black letters toward her stern. Dillon’s employers had hired the British cable company, an affiliate of British Telecom, to do some critical cable laying. In the process, they used a fictitious but legally valid corporation to execute the contract and deliver the deposit for the job. In truth, British Telecom had not deemed it necessary to investigate the transaction very deeply once the check cleared. Besides, they had done business with this particular “company” before, and all had gone well. So, there was nothing that could tie back this job to Dillon’s actual employer. One of those three-letter US government agencies.

As Dillon watched—now through his binoculars—a heavy black line draped over the ship’s stern and disappeared below the waves. A pair of tugs laboriously pulled a large barge loaded with heavy equipment toward the beach in a straight line from the cable-laying ship. A heavy crane hung out over the barge’s broad stern with cables and power lines disappearing from it into the water. The last few thousand yards to the beach were where a submarine fiber-optic cable was most vulnerable. Anchors, fishing trawls, just about anything somebody dragged along the shallow bottom could snag on and break them. For this reason, the barge was guiding a remotely operated trencher as it buried the cable on the bottom and right up to the water’s edge under ten feet of sand, stone, and bottom muck.

As Dillon watched the process play out far below, his encrypted cell phone buzzed.

“TJ, how’s it going?” Dillon immediately recognized the voice of Rear Admiral Jon Ward. Now this was a most unexpected call. “Looks like we are getting good data from the north string as well as the ones on the east coast. The data extraction seems to be working quite well.”

Ward was cryptically referring to the technology hidden in the sensors now tapping off raw hydrophone data at the shore terminal and re-routing it back to the US for intense analysis. And the technology was doing its job while not allowing the Taiwanese engineers any opportunity to detect hacking on their seismic monitoring system. They were listening for the first rumblings of earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. But thanks to fiber-optics and the wonders of the internet, the spooks back in Norfolk were studying the same data, looking instead for Chinese submarines.

“Jon, guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you are read in on this particular little operation,” Dillon answered. “After all, you’re now the Navy’s top spook.”

Jon Ward was a former submariner who had been kicked upstairs. Way upstairs. He now ran Naval Intelligence from his office at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., after the retirement of its longtime head, Tom Donnegan.

“Yeah, and after all the times we’ve worked together, your boss was happy to help us with this little plan,” Ward responded with a chuckle. It still amazed Ward how often other agencies, purportedly defending the country against the same foes, could not seem to be able to cooperate. “But look, since you are really over there vacationing on my nickel, I figure you have another day or so in Eluanbi to wrap things up, so why don’t you enjoy a couple of days in Taipei? You gotta have dinner at Din Tai Fung on Xinyi Road. Michelin Star and the xiaolongbao are out of this world. Easy walk from the Grand Hyatt.”

“Admiral, thank you for the suggestion,” Dillon replied. “You know my previous visits to the area were considerably more stressful. And the best meals we had were MREs. Far as I know, Michelin hasn’t rated those things.”

Dillon was a retired Navy SEAL, called back into service doing covert and dangerous duty on behalf of the aforementioned three-letter government agency.

“Delicious, I know. But at the time, you were probably glad to get them, right?”

“Always. They were meals and they were ready to eat. Thanks, Admiral, and I’ll let you know if I see anything out of whack over here.”

“Likewise, TJ. Be careful, though. You never know. You just never know.”

Ψ

Jonathan Ward sat back in his big office chair. He was still getting acclimated to being a flag officer, having an office in the Pentagon, a desk half the size of an aircraft carrier, a chair with electronic adjustments for height, tilt, and back resistance. Nothing like these digs in all those submarines he had ridden for most of his military career. And he had already developed even more respect for what Tom Donnegan, his predecessor and godfather, had been forced to contend with. Papa Tom was retired now, obsessing over his orchids and watching his beloved submarines going into and out of Pearl Harbor from his lanai, high up on Aiea Heights in Pearl City, Hawaii. And that meant Jon Ward now had the unenviable task of wading through yet another stack of reports that somebody somewhere who outranked him believed needed reading.

Most were important, frightening, but ultimately boring. This latest one, though, Ward did not like. No, not at all. The reports out of Southeast Asia—and particularly the South China Sea—had been especially worrisome for quite a while now. The Chinese had