Dale Brown - Executive Intent

“Sounds like bull to me.”

“Try it sometime-when you’re on leave and not flying my spaceplanes.”

“I do it all the time,” Boomer said. “I play cards at night in Vegas because the dealers and pit bosses on the graveyard shift are usually less experienced. I can play, fly, and work whenever.”

“Cardplayer, huh?” Kai realized that he had been working off and on with Hunter Noble for the better part of four years, and he knew very little about the guy. “Are you any good?”

“I probably would make a decent living playing poker if I kept at it,” Boomer said. “It’s a numbers game, and I’m pretty good at numbers. My problem is, I can’t concentrate on cards too long. I see a pretty girl or start turning over an engineering problem in my head, and I get distracted. Not a good thing for the bottom line. You like cards, General?”

“I don’t even know any card games.”

“What do you like? Craps? Slots? Horses?”

“I think I’ve gambled a grand total of five hundred bucks in my entire lifetime, mostly pro football and basketball office pools,” Kai admitted. “And Vegas is just too intense. It’s just a huge waste of electricity if you ask me.”

“So what do you do for fun?”

“I keep a little fishing boat in Long Beach, cruise up and down the coast, sometimes to Mexico, scare some fish every now and then. If I go to Nevada, I’d rather go out into the mountains with a backpack and camera and do some photo-hunting.”

“Photo-hunting? You hunt for photos?”

“Real funny. No, I bring back photos of wild game centered in crosshairs, critters I would’ve bagged if I had a gun. I have photos on my wall instead of animal heads.”

“Why don’t you use a gun? And why bother hunting if you’re not going to kill anything?”

“I’ve been hunting since I was fourteen,” Kai said. “I used to go out with my grandfather and uncles a couple times a season-pheasant and deer mostly. But I remember trudging back to the camper one cold snowy weekend without seeing one bird, and one of my uncles was so frustrated that he put the muzzle of his shotgun up to a little bird sitting on a fence and pulled the trigger. That little bird disappeared in a puff of feathers. Never killed another animal after seeing that.”

“How very PETA-friendly of you, General,” Boomer said.

“But I missed being out in the wide open, especially after becoming an astronaut, so I decided to use a camera instead of a gun.”

“Sounds weird. But the boat sounds nice.”

“Haven’t been on it in a while.”

“Married? Kids?”

“Divorced. The ex tolerated the Air Force, disliked Houston and NASA politics, and hated the boat. Three strikes and she was out. No kids.”

“Any lady friends?”

Kai glanced at Boomer, obviously not comfortable talking about himself or about subjects like this. Perhaps, he thought, Noble was just realizing the same as he was a moment ago: They’d worked very closely together for years but knew very little about each other. Despite his discomfort, he resigned himself to answering anyway: “Plenty of ladies…no friends.”

“Copy that.”

The two fell silent for several moments; then Kai asked, “So did Seeker show you how to use her console?”

“Yeah. I peek into a few places now and then-the Strip, my condo complex, Hainan Island. The Chinese are sure acting restless, like they feel the need to show they won’t be pushed around, especially by us.”

“Agreed.” Kai punched in instructions into his console and studied the responses. “Hmm…no recent reports on the Chinese convoy heading to Tanzania.” He punched in more instructions. “They should be off the coast of Kenya by now, a couple hundred miles north of Mombasa. Let’s get an updated image…” Now the info he was getting made him look worried. “No recent reconnaissance patrol sightings? Do they have weather problems out there, too?”

He motioned for Boomer to switch seats with him so he could use Seeker’s console, then called up positions of all the reconnaissance satellites available in his system. “Twenty-six minutes to a TacSat-3 overflight; there’s a NOSS satellite in the area, but the Navy hasn’t let us get access to its data yet.” NOSS, or Naval Ocean Surveillance System, was a satellite that could locate ships at sea by collecting and tracking radio signals. “Now, why can’t we get any manned or unmanned recce photos?” In a separate window he made several queries for status information…and his jaw dropped in surprise. “Datalinks inactive off the southern coast of Somalia -no one’s been able to make radio or satellite contact in the past two hours.”

“Sunspots?”

“Might be, but I think solar-flare activity was supposed to be normal this week,” Kai said. He punched in still more instructions. “I’m getting stuff from the Gulf of Aden and Djibouti, but the Combined Task Force reports nothing from patrols in the Indian Ocean, with occasional outages and unreliable datalinks, so UAV overflights were postponed.”

“The eccentricities of electromagnetic propagation, no doubt.”

“The what?”

“Something a buddy once told me. His explanation of the unexplainable.”

“Whatever the hell it is, I don’t believe in it,” Kai said. “We’ll have to wait for the TacSat overflight.”

It was a long twenty-six minutes. Kai was so concerned about the alarm bells ringing in his head that he called several members of the day shift into the command module, including Seeker. He quickly filled her in as she checked her sensors and computers for any sign of malfunction. “All our equipment is fine, sir,” she reported. “We’re picking up UAV imagery from the Gulf of Aden, but nothing farther south. That’s not right.”

“Any contact from that Chinese convoy of ships heading to Tanzania?”

“No, sir,” she replied after checking the CTF status messages, “but the rest of the Combined Task Force is staying away from that convoy because the Chinese have all three of their ships and a couple planes guarding it-in fact, there are five Chinese ships in the area right now because they were in the process of patrol changeover. There are two destroyers, two frigates, and a supply ship escorting that convoy.”

“Pretty good timing-all that firepower arriving exactly when the convoy did.”

“It could explain the week delay in Pakistan,” Seeker offered. “Wait a week and get twice as many escorts.”

“Maybe. But I hate guessing and assuming.” He had to wait another two minutes until the TacSat-3 flew over where they expected the Chinese convoy to be. “Put in a call to the CTF-HOA operations center and ask them to-”

“Look!” Seeker exclaimed. The TacSat-3 hadn’t reached the proper viewing area off the coast of Kenya yet, but it didn’t need to…because the eleven-ship Chinese convoy was about forty miles off the coast of Mogadishu, Somalia! “That looks like the Chinese cargo-ship convoy! What are they doing so close to Mogadishu? They couldn’t all have been hijacked!”

“I’m no Marine, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say that was an amphibious invasion,” Kai said. “Get Camp Lemonier on the line, fast!”

“Nauert, AFRICOM, secure,” the NCOIC of AFRICOM responded after Seeker made the secure connection.

“Raydon, Space Defense Force, secure. Sergeant Major, are you getting reports from off the coast of Mogadishu?”

“We’ve had reported UAV datalink disruptions, so overflights in that area are grounded for now, sir,” the NCOIC of U.S. Africa Command in Ethiopia replied. “We’ve got several task-force ships and patrol aircraft in the area, but they’ve reported ops-normal for the past couple hours. We were going to launch a patrol plane to cover the area until we figured out what’s going on, but the Chinese say they’ll handle it. Why?”