Clive Cussler: Mirage

Inside the week, unless America’s calming presence could prevent it, the third Sino-Japanese war was about to erupt.

The Oregon patrolled the seaway leading to the islands like a restless bear in a cage. Back and forth she swept, radar set to maximum, her crew keyed up on caffeine and adrenaline. The weather was cooperative, allowing them to send up drone planes to enlarge their search area. Juan even convinced Langston Overholt to allow them access to satellite data, though, in truth, they didn’t have the expertise it took to interpret the high-res pictures with any degree of accuracy. For that, everyone was relying on the experts at the National Reconnaissance Office, a group even more secretive than the NSA.

For his part, Cabrillo sat in the center of the op center, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He rode the gentle swells that rocked the ship with the ease of a cowboy on a long cattle drive, his body tuned to his environment so that the minor adjustments to posture came without conscious thought. The gimbled cup holder built into his chair was rarely empty, though Maurice secretly switched him to decaf after the third cup. The watch would rotate at regular intervals and yet the Chairman remained a fixture in the room, silently brooding while his eyes darted from display screen to display screen. He checked the radar repeater over the shoulder of the watch stander and the feed from the drones over the shoulder of the remote pilot. And far from being distracted, the crew took comfort in Cabrillo’s steadying attention. As long as he was there, things would be all right.

He caught sleep when he could, usually when the ship was at the far end of her patrol box and thus less likely to stumble on the stealth ship. He didn’t bother with his bed but rather fell onto the sofa in his office and pulled up a woolen lap robe that had been rescued off the Normandie after she burned in New York Harbor in 1942. He would rouse himself after a couple of hours and use the ritual of shaving to convince his exhausted body he had received enough sleep. Then it was back to the op center, where he would prowl tirelessly just as his ship did.

Cabrillo had just returned from a two-hour catnap when something on radar caught his eye. It was a blip. That was little surprise. Though war clouds gathered, these were busy shipping lanes and would remain so up until the shooting started. Hali Kasim was on watch as both communications officer and radar operator.

“Hali, that target to our north, what’s the range?”

“Fifty miles, give or take.”

“How long has it been on our scope?”

Kasim typed into his keyboard for a minute. “Looks like twenty minutes.”

Cabrillo did some calculating in his head, using the radar’s range and the Oregon ’s speed and heading. “She’s doing less than three knots. Does that strike you as odd?”

Hali agreed. He was still working on his computer. “I’ve got one even odder. There was a target at this exact same location the last time we swept this grid.”

George Adams happened to be on duty, piloting the model airplane they used as an aerial surveillance platform. He said, “Don’t need to ask me even once. It’ll take me a bit, though. I’ve got a bird already in the air, but she’s fifty miles the other side of us.”

Juan kicked into overdrive. This wasn’t the time to wait around. There was something off here, and Cabrillo needed answers. “Tell you what, Gomez. Let that one ditch and send up another.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take the loss out of my share.”

Adams did as ordered, kamikazeing the one UAV and launching another off the deck. It still took the better part of thirty minutes for the four-foot plane to approach the target. Juan hadn’t altered the Oregon ’s search pattern, but he had slowed its speed so as to not break radar contact. Twenty miles out, Gomez dropped the drone from a comfortable altitude of five hundred feet to a wave-skimming twenty feet.

This was where his instincts and experience as a pilot paid off. They needed to remain below the target’s radar coverage, lost in the acoustical backscatter of heaving waves. There was no finer pilot aboard than Adams, so no one on the mystery ship knew they were being stalked. The drone’s camera showed the dark ocean seemingly inches below the little plane’s landing gear, while ahead the setting sun was a pale blaze of yellow against the horizon.

“There!” Juan called when he spotted a boxy silhouette sitting on the line dividing sky from sea.

Adams, with his superior eyesight, had already seen it and had slightly altered the UAV’s course to intercept.

It took just a few more minutes for expectation to turn into disappointment. This wasn’t the stealth ship. This ship was nearly nine hundred feet long and shaped like a box. Only at her flared bows near the waterline was there any attempt at streamlining the vessel. Forward was a little pillbox of a bridge to break up the monotony of her flat upper deck, while aft her twin funnels were blunt fins clustered on her starboard aft quarter. There was a large, garage-style door amidships, and another on her flat transom. The whole vessel was painted a dull green.

Juan recognized the class of ship immediately. She was a car carrier, a floating, multilevel parking garage that could transport a month’s worth of automobiles from a factory and ship them anywhere in the world. They were common in these waters, as both China and Japan were major car exporters. Why she was going so slowly was something of a mystery, but not today.

The feed suddenly cut out. Gomez cursed. Juan knew what had happened, and it wasn’t the first time. The UAV had been flying so low that a rogue wave had plucked her out of the sky. Such were the accepted dangers of approaching at wave-top altitude.

“And that, my friends,” Adams said, “is why we use unmanned planes and don’t put my backside at risk in the chopper for routine recons.”

“Nothing routine about that.” Cabrillo was out of his chair and standing below the main view screen. “Gomez, run the last few seconds of tape again.”

The chief pilot brought up the final twenty seconds of drone footage. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but Cabrillo made a gesture behind his back to play it a third time. Then a fourth. Finally, on the fifth viewing, just seconds before the wave smashed the UAV into the sea, Juan shouted, “Stop!” He studied the screen shot. “Advance slowly.” The picture turned choppy as it ran. “Stop! What do you see?”

Adams saw the big car carrier at a ninety-degree angle as it was quickly filling the camera lens’s angle. There was barely any wake at her stern and no frothing water at the bows, which meant she wasn’t moving very quickly, but that was something they already knew. Again, he couldn’t see what had so piqued the Chairman’s interest. No one else on duty seemed to see anything either because the crew remained silent.

As if sensing the collective confusion, Juan said, “Look about five feet up from her waterline. Does anyone else see a faint white line?” His question was greeted with a chorus of assents. “Any thoughts on what it is?”

This question was greeted by silence. Finally, it was Gomez Adams who figured out what the Chairman had understood immediately. He leapt from his seat. “I’ll have the bird warmed up by the time you’re ready.”

“People,” Juan said, “that isn’t a car hauler. It’s a floating dry dock. That white band is a line of salt rime from the last time she was under ballast.” He keyed on the shipwide intercom. “This is Cabrillo. Battle stations. Battle stations. We’ve found the at-sea base of operations for the Chinese stealth ship. Linc, Eddie, and MacD to report to the chopper pad in full combat gear. We’re going in black.” He issued several other orders and then followed the pilot out of the op center. Max was on his way to relieve his post in command of the ship.