Chapter 28

28

Aboard the Oregon

Callie and Linda helped the deckhands secure the Spook Fish as Cabrillo and Hanley made their way to the elevator. Murph and Eric were already in the lab with the dripping-wet flight data recorder and prepping it for examination.

Juan punched the elevator button. “Too bad we couldn’t find the attack vehicle trying to kill my ship.”

“Eric hacked into a French military satellite over the region. We tried to triangulate the missile launch location by reverse-tracking the missiles, but a hundred thousand square miles of cloud cover over the area blinded us.”

“What about our radar?”

The elevator door opened and the two men stepped inside. Juan hit the floor button.

“Too far away to pinpoint anything.”

That worried Juan. The Oregon had Aegis-class equivalent radar capabilities. “So more than one hundred nautical miles.”

“Looks like it. Judging by their speed, size, and payload, Wepps thinks those missiles were likely powered by mini turbojets—the same kind found on cruise missiles.”

Juan nodded, pulling up data from his prodigious memory files. “If they were cruise missiles, we could be looking at a three-hundred-mile range. Maybe more. And who knows the range of the torps they put in the water. Did you say they came in on a low trajectory?”

“Yeah. And that suggests a ship-based launch, but there’s no telling. Eric says we have Mark 54 torpedoes fixed with glide wings that launch from P-8s at thirty thousand feet. And most low-flying Storm Shadows are plane-launched first.”

“And nothing from the Sniffer?” Cabrillo was referring to the Oregon’s automated surveillance array capable of picking up and decrypting virtually any kind of signal in the electromagnetic spectrum. The Sniffer helped make the Oregon one of the most powerful spy ships afloat.

“Hali said there wasn’t anything useful or actionable,” Max said.

“Let’s table the search for now. I suspect at this point it’s a dead end.” Cabrillo checked his Doxa watch. “We’ll head to the lab and see what the boys have found under the hood of that box. But first I need to make a quick port of call at the little submariners’ room.”

“Ditto that, Chief. I’ve got ten cups of coffee sloshing around in my eight-cup thermos with a stopper that ain’t as snug as it used to be.”

Murph and Eric hovered over the orange flight recorder box as they attached the retrofitted power supply and data cables with surgical caution. An open laptop stood next to the recorder.

“Lucky we had a couple of spare mil-spec D38999 connectors lying around,” Murphy said. “Perfect fit.”

“So glad you retrieved this bad boy,” Eric said in a whisper as he tightened the power fitting. He flipped a switch on the box. “We’re powered up.”

“Excellent.” Murph connected the flight recorder to his laptop with a USB adapter cable and began tapping keys. “Now we’re going to find out every airstrip that plane ever landed on, every flight path it ever took, and every—”

Murphy frowned.

“Problem?” Juan asked.

“This thing’s encrypted. Doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does, if you’re trying to hide something,” Juan said.

“Well, we’ll just see about that.”

“You need any help?” Eric asked.

“Nah, this looks pretty easy. I’ll fire up my magic decoder ring and—”

Snap. Murphy’s screen flared like a supernova.

Eric dashed over. “What happened?”

“What do you think happened? Someone put a dead man’s switch on that thing—along with the software equivalent of an IED. It not only wiped its own hard drive clean, it zapped my machine.”

“What about the Cray?” Juan asked, referring to the Oregon’s supercomputer.

“Good thing I wasn’t connected to the mainframe. No telling what might have happened.”

Murph tugged at his wispy chin beard. “We’re dealing with some seriously sinister genius here—the automated plane, the missile-torpedoes, and this level of cybersecurity? Somehow my machine got reverse-hacked—and that’s something even the NSA hasn’t been able to do.”

“You mean this Vendor character?” Max asked. “It can’t just be one guy.”

Murph shook his head. “If it is just him, it means this dude is a one-man DARPA.”

“It has to be a national government,” Eric said. “Who else would have those kinds of resources?”

Juan frowned. “The usual suspects?”

Eric and Murph exchanged a look. “Yeah, we’ve been talking about that. None of them have deployed these kinds of capabilities before.”

“So maybe it’s not one of the usual suspects,” Max said.

Juan folded his arms. “Or maybe it’s all of them.”

Max raised one of his graying eyebrows. “A consortium?”

“Like the Legion of Doom,” Eric said.

“No way. Not DC. Think Marvel. Sinister Six, all day long. Dr. Octopus? Hello?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

Juan and Max exchanged a confused look just as Callie stepped to the table.

“Comic book references. Cool,” she said. “Wasn’t quite expecting that in a flight data recorder debrief.”

Eric and Murph couldn’t hide their delight at her appearance. Both were obviously smitten.

Juan couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Okay, gents. Cartoon stories aside, tell me more about what you two observed,” he said. “What kind of weapons system are we talking about?”

“Never saw anything exactly like it before,” Eric said. “The only missile-launched anti-submarine system I know of is our RUM-139 vertical launch anti-submarine rocket. But that missile only has a range of around twelve nautical miles.”

Murphy nodded. “This was an anti-sub rocket on steroids.”

Juan frowned with curiosity. “What did you mean when you said you’ve never seen anything ‘exactly’ like it before?”

“It’s almost as if they slapped Mark 54 torpedoes on Storm Shadows. A hybrid. Taking two existing systems and putting them together.”

Juan turned to Murph. “What about the torpedo signature? Something off the shelf?”

“It wasn’t a perfect match, but they sure sounded like Mark 54s.”

“And the missiles? Did our radar database recognize the profile?”

“No, not exactly. But then again, the radar profile was pretty close to a Storm Shadow. Maybe a modified version of it. And it moved at the same speed a TR60-30 turbojet would.”

“That’s the engine a Storm Shadow uses,” Eric said to Callie.

Callie smiled. “I kinda figured.”

“Whoever is designing this stuff is moving fast, almost improvising,” Eric said.

“And it’s definitely an automated operation,” Murphy said, “given that airplane of his.”

“Design or construction?” Max asked.

“Some combination of the two is my bet.”

“The bottom line is that we still don’t know who actually did this and we don’t really know what weapons they used,” Max said. “Where does that leave us?”

Juan rubbed his face, exasperated.

“What we do know for sure is that we had a lead on this Vendor character, and after I breached his drone airplane it exploded. And when we located his airplane wreckage in the water, the Oregon was attacked. If there is a consortium, the Vendor is the point man. And he’s deploying extremely sophisticated weapons. That means he’s even more dangerous than we suspected. Speaking of which, did Overholt light up those Afghani weapons caches?”

Max shook his head. “He contacted us when you were black box hunting. Those trackers you laid down? All of them stopped transmitting.”

“Malfunctioned?” Juan asked.

“No way. Tested them myself,” Murph said. “They got zapped. Either by the Afghanis—”

“—or the Vendor,” Juan said. He blew a blast of air through his nose, frustrated.

“We are way up a tall tree, gentlemen, and somebody keeps stealing our ladder.”