Sword of Shiva - Страница 31

She held up a paper cup with the café’s logo. “May I join you?”

Still a bit put off by the unexpected encounter, Brenthoven took a couple of seconds to respond. “Of course. Yes, please do.”

The ambassador took the chair opposite his own, and pulled the lid from her cup.

Brenthoven nodded toward it. “Coffee?”

“Tea, actually,” the Ambassador said. “With milk. Apparently it is the closest thing to chai that this establishment can make, unless I want to try something called a smoothie.”

“If you’re not familiar with smoothies, you’re probably safer with the tea,” Brenthoven said.

He tipped his cup slightly in the ambassador’s direction in a toasting gesture, and then took a drink. When he set the cup down, he looked the Indian woman in the eyes. “I have a strong hunch that you are not a frequent customer of this café.”

Ambassador Shankar toyed with the lid of her cup. “You are quite correct, of course. I have never been here before.”

Brenthoven nodded. “Then, may I ask what brings you here this evening?”

“Surely, you must know the answer to that,” the ambassador said. “I am here because you are here.”

Brenthoven nodded again. “You had me followed?”

The ambassador grimaced. “Only with the best of intentions, I assure you.”

Brenthoven met her grimace with a frown of his own. Apparently he was becoming careless. He’d never needed Secret Service protection before, but if his movements were that easy to track, it might be time to think about better options for his personal security.

He looked at his unexpected visitor. “You’ve obviously found me, and I can promise that you have my undivided attention, Madam Ambassador.”

“Please,” she said. “Call me Gita.”

“And you can call me Gregory,” he said. “But I’d still like to know why you took the trouble to have me followed here. I assume you want to discuss something outside of the traditional channels. As I said, you have my attention.”

The Indian ambassador raised her cup, and then lowered it without drinking. “You’re quite correct, of course. I wish to speak to you informally, and outside of normal channels.”

Brenthoven took another swallow of cappuccino. “About what?”

“About the hydroelectric site that we have been discussing. And my country’s possible intentions regarding the disposition of that site in the near future.”

“I see,” Brenthoven said. The ambassador obviously didn’t want to name the Three Gorges Dam in this public setting, and any discussion about India’s plan to destroy it would apparently be couched in indirect terms. That was okay. Brenthoven knew how to talk around a subject as well as any government official.

“Is there something specific you wanted to tell me about your country’s intentions regarding the hydroelectric facility in question?”

“Yes,” the ambassador said. “Unofficially, I have been authorized to tell you that our planned actions will occur in two days.”

She looked at her watch. “Approximately forty-eight hours from now.”

Brenthoven sat up. “Forty-eight hours? Are you serious?”

“I am quite serious,” said Ambassador Shankar. “That timeline is given to you in strict confidence. We expect you to protect this information as you would defend the military secrets of a close ally. If it should leak to the wrong people, any trust between my government and yours would be irreparably damaged.”

“I understand,” Brenthoven said. “But I don’t understand why you are sharing this with us. If this information is so sensitive, and I agree that it is, why not restrict the knowledge to your own inner circles?”

“Because there is still time for your government to convince my leaders to divert from the plan,” the ambassador said.

Brenthoven stared at her. “How? What do we have to do to convince your government not to go through with this plan?”

Ambassador Shankar smiled. “We have already discussed that. You can enter the conflict on the side of my country, and help us force the People’s Republic of China to end their acts of aggression, without resorting to unthinkable strategic options.”

“We can’t do that,” Brenthoven said. “The PRC has done nothing to provoke the United States. We have no justification for entering into direct military confrontation.”

The ambassador looked surprised. “Shooting down your military aircraft was not sufficient provocation?”

Brenthoven felt a knot form in his chest. “Madam Ambassador, what are you talking about?”

“Ah,” said the ambassador. “I assumed that you knew…”

The knot in Brenthoven’s chest tightened. “Knew what?”

“About the air battle that took place roughly an hour ago,” she said. “Two of your carrier-based F-18 aircraft were attacked by two flights of Chinese warplanes. I’m not sure about casualties on the Chinese side, but I know that one of your planes was destroyed. I believe the other was damaged, but I haven’t yet been briefed on the details.”

Brenthoven shook his head. “That’s impossible, Madam Ambassador… Gita. I would have been contacted.”

He reached for his cell phone, and fished it out of his pocket. It was off. The battery had died, or the software had recycled itself, or something else. It didn’t matter why it had happened. What mattered was that the damned thing had powered itself down.

How long had it been off? How long had he been completely out of touch? There was probably a chase team at his townhouse now, and they had no doubt tried his home phone fifty times already. They’d called his cell phone too, of course, but the goddamned thing had been sitting silent in his pocket, like a lump of fucking lead.

He punched the power button, and the phone began its boot-up routine. He didn’t have to wait to know what he would find. At least twenty voicemails, and an equal number of waiting text messages.

Damn. Damn. Damn!

He stood up. “I’m sorry, Gita. I have to go.”

The ambassador stood up as well. “Of course, Gregory. You have business to attend to.”

Her voice hardened. “But don’t forget what I said. Forty-eight hours.”

CHAPTER 36

COMBAT AIR PATROL

VFA-228 — MARAUDERS

BAY OF BENGAL

MONDAY; 01 DECEMBER

0626 hours (6:26 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Rob “Monk” Monkman eased his crippled Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet into a slow right turn and tried to ignore the growing vibrations that rattled his fighter. The carrier was only a little more than 60 miles away now. Almost home. Almost home…

He didn’t feel much like the Monk at the moment. His Shaolin fighter-jock machismo seemed to be on vacation. Right now, he felt like plain old Robby Monkman, and he was just about scared enough to piss his pants.

He ignored the collage of red tattletales blinking on his up-front control display. The touch-sensitive LCD screen was designed to give him fingertip control and status indications for nearly all of the plane’s onboard systems, but he had lost track of the ever-shifting jumble of warning readouts. His Hornet was hurt bad, he knew that much. He also knew he didn’t have a prayer of sorting out the cascading alert messages to figure out exactly how bad things were.

The Super Hornet’s digital flight control system was supposed to detect battle damage and make real-time corrections to compensate. It must be doing its job, because Monk’s plane had taken the missile hit more than an hour ago, and he was still in the air.

The starboard engine was fodded out and he’d lost a shitload of fuel, but the quadruplex fly-by-wire controls were still responding to his commands if he didn’t push his injured bird too hard. When he’d gone through initial Hornet flight training at NAS Lemoore and the advanced pipeline at NAS Fallon, everybody had talked about how tough the Super Hornet was. Well, the aircraft was definitely living up to its reputation for being able to take a punch.

But rugged airframe construction and multiply-redundant systems hadn’t been enough to save Poker. Rob had seen the Chinese air-to-air missile punch right through the canopy of Poker’s Hornet, blasting the entire cockpit section of the plane into titanium shrapnel. And Rob had reefed his own Hornet back around quickly enough to watch the remains of his flight leader’s aircraft cartwheel into the sea.

No ejection. No chute. Not that he’d expected one. He’d known from the instant of the missile impact that Owen ‘Poker’ Dowell was dead.

But any thoughts of grief had vanished from Rob’s consciousness almost as quickly as they had appeared. He had turned his attention — and his fury — on the Chinese bastards who had just blown his mentor and friend out of the sky.

Rob had no idea why the Chinese pilots had opened fire. It had been a routine intercept, two Navy F-18’s turning back two pairs of Bogies at the edge of the 300 mile defensive Combat Air Patrol perimeter.

They’d gotten close enough to eyeball the inbound aircraft, and identified them as Chinese J-15’s, confirming the classification provided by the E-2D Hawkeye flying Airborne Early Warning support for the Midway air wing.

There had been at least a dozen similar intercepts over the past week or so, as the Chinese probed the edges of the USS Midway’s air defense envelope. But the Chinese Bogies had always turned back, and there had never been any sign of real trouble.