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  Then after another refuel over the ’Peens, they’d be back on Oki for breakfast.

  Takeoff was normal. They climbed to 20,000 feet, steering south. The clear skies, the blazing stars, good weather was predicted both down and back. These were perfect conditions for the invisible airplane.

  Atlas and Teddy had done so many highly classified flights, very little impressed them now. But this one was very different.

  What if these guys come out with their Nikons and start shooting pictures? Atlas wondered as soon as they reached altitude and leveled off. There were a lot of things about the Stealth plane that were still top-secret. Now they were going to fly not just a B-2 bomber but this highly classified version of the bomber into a place where, a generation before, U.S. pilots just like them had fought hard, dropped bombs, and, in many cases, tumbled to their deaths, trying to destroy.

  Teddy Ballgame knew just what he was thinking.

  “Things change,” he said simply.

  The flight along the Pacific Rim was sweet.

  Had this been a combat mission, say to Afghanistan or above some pesky target in Iraq (or even Iran), Atlas would not have to touch the main controls of the B-2F at all, through the approach, through the target run, through the exit, so computer-driven the bomber was. For the most part, this flight was no different. They were caretakers, watching over the controls certainly, but leaving it up to Hal to actually run things. The designers of the plane knew this; they factored in the crew’s comfort and attention levels when designing the flight compartment—this would be the last manned bomber of this size ever built for the U.S. military, and to some degree Atlas and Teddy were just along for the ride. Teddy brought along a book, a biography of FDR. Atlas brought his Sports Illustrateds, three months’ worth; they’d arrived from his father the day before, an accumulation that would do perfectly for the projected 12-hour flight.

  They passed Taiwan, after seeing the lights of Hong Kong off to the west. Even at night, the first islands of the Philippines appeared almost emerald. They were still at 20,000 feet, still invisible. Then their communications suite came alive. It was a beacon being sent out by their refueling plane. They had arrived at precisely the moment they should have. And so had the refueler.

  It was a KC-10 Extender, a reconfigured DC-10 airliner used by the U.S. Air Force to carry and transfer thousands of gallons of highly volatile JP-8 aviation fuel, the lifeblood of the B-2F and every other warplane in the U.S. arsenal. Literally, it was a flying gas station.

  The refueler was out of Diego Garcia, another out-of-the-way place, this one located in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It was not unusual for tankers to fly many hours in one direction to meet a plane needing to refuel coming in the other direction. Atlas and Teddy were talking on the radio with the KC-10 within minutes of getting a clear visual. Aerial refuelings were usually done entirely over water. This one would take place mostly over water, specifically the Bangtang Channel, a narrow strip of ocean just off the mainland of Luzon. But once they reached the channel, they would pick up the small islands of Calayan, Fuggu and Dalu Pree below. Combined they did not equal the square footage of downtown Dallas. They served well as navigation guides, though, friendly reminders that Atlas and Teddy were on-course.

  The Bangtang Channel was the most advantageous place for both planes to meet. In fact, it was a favorite refueling spot for the United States’ aerial black ops. Isolated yet easy to find, dark except for the stars, with very few eyes on the ground looking up. Thousands of gallons of aviation fuel would be transferred up here tonight, between two planes worth about a billion and ten, all without the knowledge—or permission—of the Filipino government.

  The B-2 was hands-off, but the computer couldn’t fly the refueling session. Atlas would have to make sure the plane was riding right, and when it came time to fuck the duck it would be his eyes, his hands, his brain. Teddy, by procedure, would be constantly monitoring the plane’s survival systems during fuel transfer. The computer quickly pulled the plane up to the long fuel boom extended out of the rear of the KC-10 and then switched the flight over to Atlas. He eased the big bat up toward the boom. The KC guys were good; they were holding their Johnson pipe steady. Atlas caught a little wind at the last moment but then pushed the throttle forward just a bit and the two planes connected without so much as a bump. In seconds, hundreds of gallons of fuel was rushing into the spy bomber’s tanks.

  Atlas and Teddy relaxed a little. It wasn’t exactly the time to go back to their reading, but they could have. The plane was flying that perfectly.

  That’s why the threat-warning buzzer startled them so. One moment everything was going swimmingly; the next, chaos in the cockpit. Both assumed, in the first half-second of panic, that something was wrong with the refueling. But the warning buzzer was not emanating from anything connected with the aerial fuel hookup. Instead it was coming from the plane’s air defense suite.

  The first thing Teddy said was, “This has got to be a glitch.” But they both knew it could not be. The B-2 was virtually glitch-proof. Especially in its defensive systems.

  “Shit, we’ve got a launch,” was what Teddy said next. “A hot home….”

  Atlas was astonished. They were flying above the island of Fuggu. If what Teddy was reading could be believed, someone below, in the dense jungle, had just fired a radar-guided surface-to-air missile at them.

  The pilots glared at each other—just for a second. They had identical looks: What the hell do we do now?

  Finally they went into action, but time was not on their side. Teddy frantically called the guys in the tanker, this while Atlas began to manually unhook from the tanker. But it was too late; this was a monster missile coming up at them and it was traveling very fast. Atlas tore his eyes off his controls, just for a second, to look out the window into the night—just to see if this was real. He saw a huge fireball climbing toward them. It was barely 500 feet away.

  Could anyone be this unlucky? Even with the missile, just seconds before impact, the irony was as bright as its exhaust plume. Atlas and Teddy knew the SAM wasn’t going to hit them. Their radar signature was less than a marble. The KC-10, however, was like a huge bull’s-eye flying in the sky.

  Atlas finally got the B-2F to unhook from the fuel spout. The missile hit the big refueler two seconds later. It exploded in violent slow motion not 30 feet in front of them. The missile had impacted square on the Extender’s belly. There was a white flash, so bright, it blinded Atlas and Teddy. Then the concussion hit. Their control panel’s TV screens blew out, showering both pilots in shards of glass. All of their primary electrical systems shorted out at the same moment. Suddenly the cockpit was filled with sparks. Then came a noise so intense, the headphones inside their crash helmets blew outward. The result was simply deafening.

  Through all this, Atlas managed to yank the flying wing to the left, this as the conflagration that was the tanker slid off to the right.

  The B-2F went right over onto its back, not something allowed by the flight envelope of the bat wing. Going inverted added to the confusion of the moment, but again Atlas came through. With great strength, he slowly turned the plane back over again. The strain on the engines proved too much, though. They began coughing. Atlas applied power but then looked down at his flight screen and saw through it that their third crew member—Hal the computer—was dead, killed by the concussion of the KC-10’s explosion.

  Atlas now fought with the controls, at the same time aware that pieces of the bomber’s wing were coming off. The engines coughed again. Then the plane began spinning.

  Atlas was thrown to the back of his seat. His Sports Illustrateds were flying all over the flight compartment. Teddy had his nose pressed up against the cockpit window; he couldn’t move. They were falling like a rock

  “Do you see anything flat down there?” Atlas somehow yelled through the smoke and sparks.

  But Teddy never replied.

  Chapter 5

  Mekong Delta,
Vietnam

  24 hours later

  It was another rainy day in Go Dong.

  The monsoon season was here, so it rained most every day. This particular morning, it was coming down in waves.

  The weather wasn’t bothering the residents of this small village, located on the lower fringes of the Mekong Delta, near the convergence of two bodies of water. The climate here was never very pleasant, either hot and unbearably humid or besieged by downpours like today. The locals took the bad atmospherics in stride.

  The village marketplace was crowded as always. Plastic tarps and tent covers protected the merchandise from the rain. Vegetables, pots of rice, and tong sticks were the most popular items. However, anything from American-made sneakers to small TVs and radios could also be had for the right price. The same with rice wine, Australian whiskey, and even opium-laced cigarettes. One just had to know how to ask.

  These exotic items came to the small village by way of the tiny port of Cong Ha, 13 miles to the south. Saigon was more than 100 miles to the north.

  Most of the people in the village were wearing long rain ponchos that covered from head to toe. This helped SEAL Team 99 blend right in.

  There were six of them. One man was watching each end of the tiny waterlogged village. Two more were sitting on the porch of the village exchange building, an old stucco structure left over from French occupation a half-century before. Two others were lingering on the periphery of the marketplace itself. Each man was covered with an innocuous poncho; each was carrying a small submachine gun beneath.

  They were all watching a small woman in her twenties named Li Ky. She was the daughter of a farmer who raised ducks and grew rice down by the Da Thong river two miles south of the village. Li was pretty, and recognizable by the streak of premature gray that ran down the center of her long otherwise jet-black hair.

  Li had arrived at the marketplace early. She’d been observed by the SEALs purchasing items that might have seemed typical for a peasant’s daughter: dried fish, some candles, a roll of baling wire. But Li was also buying some unusual items: rice wine, opium blunts, cigarettes, and some decidedly American food, like canned spaghetti and soup. These were considered luxury items in this part of Vietnam, and normally well beyond the means of a simple farm girl.

  Li was carrying two canvas bags; in itself this was a tip that her shopping was not typical. Most people in the area could afford only about as much as they could carry with two hands or in a pot on their heads.

  Li paid for her last purchase and then climbed on her bicycle and pedaled away. Subtle hand gestures were exchanged among the SEAL team members. They moved out of the village with great stealth, climbed aboard a Toyota truck hidden in the brush nearby, and began following her.

  It was raining so hard now the SEALs could barely keep her in sight. Their training told them to stay at least 500 feet behind. Li pedaled for two miles before reaching a rickety bridge that spanned the Da Thong river. A crossroads lay on the other side. Taking a right at the crossroads would lead her back to her family’s hooch. Taking a left would not.

  She started across the bridge but paused for a moment halfway across. Was it the weather or a sudden change of heart or just a moment to catch her breath? There was no way to tell. She began pedaling again. When she got to the other side of the bridge, she turned left.

  The jungle soon became very thick. So much so, the woman abandoned her bicycle and continued on foot. Likewise the SEALs had to leave their truck and double-time it to catch up to her. When they got her in sight again, they saw she was moving through the jungle with ease—she’d come this way many times before. But the undergrowth was so dense and the road, which was now down to a path, was so craggy, the hard-nosed SEALs were soon having trouble keeping up.

  Then the rain stopped. This would have seemed like good news for the SEALs; now they could keep the woman in sight by pure eyeball. But this was Vietnam. Nothing was ever as it appeared here. With the disappearance of the rain, the brutal heat of the Mekong fell on them like a bomb. Uniforms that were a minute before soaked through with water were now soaked through again, with perspiration. Suddenly their weapons felt heavy; their equipment, cumbersome.

  The woman was still moving quickly, almost delicately, through the jungle. If she was aware the SEALs were tracking her, she made no indication of it. It went on like this for more than five klicks. By the time the jungle cleared and the woman made her way down to a riverbank, the six SEALs were winded, covered in sweat—and totally lost.

  They were still near the Da Thong; it split into dozens of tiny rivulets here. But they were also near the coast. The South China Sea lay beyond. This was not the way the SEALs expected the woman to go.

  They still had her in sight, though. She’d crossed a stream by an ancient bamboo bridge. She ran by the rusting wreckage of a U.S. fighter jet shot down here 40 years before and up and over a dune, finally dropping out of sight. The SEALs splashed across the stream, paused just for a moment before the F-105’s wreckage, then ran up the opposite bank. Getting down on their stomachs, they crawled to the crest of the dune.

  On the other side was another rivulet and beyond, the vast expanse of the South China Sea. Across the stream was an island, separated from the land by just a few feet of slow-moving water.

  But something wasn’t right here—and the SEALs knew it.

  The topography in this part of Nam featured the sea, river streams, and heavily jungled islands close to shore. This particular island was about a quarter-mile long, maybe a third of that wide. It was shaped like a finger. The small channel that separated it from the mainland was 20 feet at its widest with the water growing very deep quickly from there. Or at least that’s how it appeared.

  The SEALs were able to access a file in their Palm Pilots that held a GPS photo image taken of this area several months before. It showed the beach, the dune, the rivulets—and the island. But the island was significantly smaller a few months ago, and it was significantly farther offshore.

  Though there was bright sun now and the heat was coming off the land in sheets, the SEALs took out their low-light infrared (IR) scope. What they saw through their distorted lens looked like a vision of hell. The island appeared as if on fire. So did the sky. But organics give off different heat signatures from the nonliving, and on the shore side of the heavily forested island they were getting a very strange indication.

  Something was hidden there. Something huge.

  “Just what we were looking for,” the SEAL squad leader told his men.

  It was a ship. A huge container-type ship. Close to 800 feet long, it fit in nicely on the backside of the island. It had been camouflaged so completely that even now, looking at it without their heat goggles, the SEALs could not see it. Somehow, someone had managed to make the huge cargo vessel disappear.

  The woman had forded the shallow channel and had disappeared up under the growth the SEALs now knew to be fake.

  They waited for five minutes, then scrambled over the dune.

  The SEALs were climbing onto the deck of the heavily camouflaged container vessel five minutes later.

  The veteran Navy operators were highly trained in taking over offshore targets, such as ships and oil platforms. But this boat was different, and it wasn’t just the size of it that they found daunting. It was the eerieness—they’d just never seen anything like it before. The camouflage was so expertly put in place, they could no longer see the blazing blue sky above them. In fact, it was so dim on the deck, it was as if night had suddenly fallen.

  They’d climbed up onto the bridge level and it was truly a weird scene from here. The main deck of the vast ship stretching before them, dozens of railroad car–size containers stacked neatly in rows from bow to stern. The amazingly intricate camouflage roof of branches, vines, and in some cases entire trees serving as a canopy overhead. None of it seemed real.

  The six SEALs stayed together, each man with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. They w
ere not risk takers. They had no idea what might be awaiting them below the decks of the ghost ship. Nor did they know very much about why they’d been sent on this very strange mission. Some very big wigs in Washington wanted to talk to people who might be aboard this vessel—that was just about the extent of it. The problem was, these people could be armed and there was a good chance they might not be in the mood to talk.

  The SEALs moved slowly across the bridge level, weapons pointing this way and that. Up ahead, the main hatchway that led into the ship’s aft end bridge house. This was their first goal. But just as they turned toward this hatch, suddenly came the most god-awful groaning sound. It shook the ship for 10 long seconds before fading away. The squad members froze in place.

  “What the fuck was that?” one whispered.

  “It’s just the ship moving in the water,” the squad leader barked under his breath, but really he had no idea what the noise was. They moved 10 feet forward—and the noise came again. Twice as long and twice as loud. The SEALS froze a second time. The deck was vibrating under their feet.

  “Is someone messing with our heads?” one man wondered aloud. “That almost seems like a psy-ops effect.”

  No one answered him.

  They reached the main hatch and started climbing up to the next level. It was pitch-black in here. Each man lowered his IR goggles, but this just gave the place an even spookier look. The sound of their boots on the ladder seemed extremely loud, this even though the SEALs were experts in stealth. Reaching the first passageway, they heard more strange noises around them: machinery turning on and off; a woman crying. Even the rattling of chains. Yet as soon as the squad leader took two steps into the next passageway, all the noise suddenly stopped. One step forward, the noise started again. Another step, it stopped. The squad froze again.