Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

“Excuse me. Are we going back to the Poseidon idea?” Foley asked.

“No. I agree with John. They’re too expensive and too untested for something on this scale,” Ryan said. “And it’s pretty clear to me now the Russian government isn’t involved with this.”

“Drones can’t be the answer,” the admiral said. “Even the autonomous ones are short range—except for the new Orca XLUUV, which we’re building now. Fuel cells give it a range of sixty-five hundred nautical miles. Nobody on the planet has that system now except for us.”

“I know. But I wasn’t thinking long range.”

“Short range doesn’t work.”

“Sure it does.” Ryan turned to Burgess. “You remember the old Q-ships from World War One?”

“No, sir. I’ve got gray hair, but I’m not that old.”

A round of polite laughter rippled around the table.

Ryan grinned. “Subs were the newest naval tech in World War One, and the Brits didn’t have the ability to either find or sink them. So they started converting merchant vessels into sub hunters. They put up false superstructures to change their appearance, and hid deck guns behind the facades. U-boats would see them, think they were harmless merchantmen, and surface to take them out with their own deck guns, only to watch the facades drop and the Q-ship guns open up.”

Ryan stood and pointed at the bigger screen displaying the locations of the sunken vessels. “John, can you pull up the map that displays all of the AIS ships currently at sea?”

“Sure.” He clicked a button on his laser pointer. Tens of thousands of arrowheads in a variety of colors swarmed across the sea lanes, mostly hugging coastlines, but many traversing the open waters.

Ryan nodded toward the screen. “Our bad guys are out there in the middle of all of that, hunters hunting prey.”

“So you think Q-ships are behind this?” Arnie asked.

“Not Q-ships. Mother ships.”

“You mean, for the drones?”

“Yeah. And tell me this, where’s the best place to hide anything?”

“In plain sight,” Foley said, thinking about the dead drops she used to use when she was a cowboy CIA operative in Moscow. She’d stuff coded messages inside of dead pigeons, dead rats, even dead cats. “But disguised.”

“Exactly.”

“You think one or more of those ships on the board are a mother ship?” Arnie asked.

“Bingo. And if we can’t find the drone—small, silent, invisible—we find the mother ship.”

“Do you think one mother ship can control drones in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans?” Foley asked Talbot.

“Not likely.”

Arnie pointed at the map again. “Thirty thousand boats on the water right now. Could be any one of them. Container ship. Cargo ship. Tanker. Could be five, could be ten, could be a hundred of them.” He turned back to Ryan. “You may have figured it out, but you haven’t exactly solved the problem.”

“Like I said before, simple, not easy.”

He turned to the SecState and SecDef. “This thing is too big for us to handle now. We need to start reaching out to people we can trust and get some help. You two get together with John and come up with a list of people who understand the gravity of the situation—and who know how to keep a lid on this thing. If we thought the markets might get rattled earlier, well, this will cause a firestorm.”

“Understood,” Burgess said. The others nodded in agreement.

He turned to Foley. “Let’s find someone over at DARPA. They’re on the cutting edge of this stuff. Let’s get some of their people noodling on this problem—but without blowing any whistles.”

“I know just the person to call.”

“Do it, please. And do we have any idea if Buck Logan has had any success with his efforts?”

“He’s putting his security teams on his company-owned vessels, with automatic weapons and Stinger missiles,” Foley said.

“Do I want to know how you know this?”

“No, sir, you don’t,” Foley said with a smile.

“Any other ideas?” Ryan asked the room.

Heads shook. “Okay, then let’s get after it.”

46

HOUSTON, TEXAS

Buck Logan was a true paraplegic, having lost the use of his body from the L4-L5 lumbar region of his spine all the way down to the tips of his toes. His high-T libido still raged within his broken frame. He turned all of that frustrated sexual energy into building an empire, trading a lifelong commitment to one woman for an unbreakable bond with his destiny. He transformed his previous talent for feminine conquest into domination of his business competitors, doing to them in contract negotiations what he could no longer do to the buxom young cheerleaders he bedded as a youth.

While the lower half of his nerve-damaged body was unresponsive and weak, he religiously trained the upper half. He was in the middle of a German Volume Training exercise, doing ten sets of ten repetitions on a military press. His wheelchair was parked beneath a Smith machine with forty-five-pound iron plates on either side of the bar. Buck had the place to himself when he chose to work out there.

The door to the corporate gym pushed open. Phil Werley, his liaison to all things Fed, especially DNI Foley, came through the door.

Logan grunted out his last rep and rolled his wrists, slamming the hooks of the stop bars.

“Why the long face, Phil? Somebody cornhole your little sister?” Logan said, breathing heavily, speaking at Werley’s reflection in the mirror.

“Just got word from a friend. Another boat’s gone down. Not confirmed yet, but it seems to fit the profile of the other ones.”

Logan unlocked his chair, ducked his massive head beneath the weight bar, and spun around, his face reddened.

Whether it was reddened from the workout or the bad news, Werley wasn’t sure.

“One of ours?”

“No, sir. Some Indian rust bucket. Went down west of Perth. The Aussies found the wreckage—or what was left of it. No survivors.”

“That’s the IO, not the South Pacific. Guess these pukes are upping their game.”

“White House is pretty lathered up by it. They thought they had this thing nailed down when they cornered the Russian boat. Now they don’t know who’s behind it.”

“Goddamn it.” Logan swore long and low. “So, I take it, still no witnesses, no radar tracks, no sonar hits, and no fucking clue at all who did this?”

Werley knew his boss wasn’t actually asking him a question.

“They’re putting their heads together in D.C. on all of this. My understanding is that they’re working on a new plan and getting ready to roll it out.”

“What plan?”

“Moving air, sea, and space assets into place, where and when they can. It’s high priority, but not at the expense of ongoing combat operations.”

“You mean Ryan’s only putting his johnson halfway in.”

“It will take a few days. They’re hoping for an electronic solution. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of eyes-on at this point.”

“Ryan hasn’t panicked? Called in the cavalry?”

“He’s as worried as you are about roiling the markets. Until now, it’s still just the Aussies, the Kiwis, and us who are tackling this thing, but now that it’s moved to the Indian Ocean, all bets are off.”

“And our plans?”

“Rolling out as we discussed.”

“If the Russians aren’t behind this, who is? Gimme your best guess.”

“My guess? The Chi-Comms. I think it’s a test of one of their new weapons systems—and a test of our existing ones.”

“Not the Russians?” Logan asked.

Werley chuckled. “Ivan? Are you kidding me? The Russian economy is smaller than Canada’s—even smaller than Texas’s. They don’t want to pick a fight with us in the South Pacific, or the IO, for that matter. They’re more worried about the PLA Navy than us.”