Red Shark

Tokugawa didn’t respond, and for a heartbeat Scott thought he’d died. But he said, “The Philippines. Davao.”

Tokugawa’s eyes pleaded for Fumiko to pull the trigger. Instead she gave the pistol back to Jefferson. She leaned close to Tokugawa and said, “You don’t deserve to die a warrior’s death.” She stood and looked down at Tokugawa with undisguised loathing, until the knife fell from his hand onto his chest, inches from the oozing bullet wound. He went limp.

Jefferson took Fumiko’s arm. “Jake, you coming…”

Scott remembered hearing guns crackling and bullets whining off the helo’s skin. Then they were up over Noda and sweeping south toward the Kanto Plain.

42

East, Over Tokyo

From the darkness of the Seahawk’s cabin, Scott, wedged between pilot and copilot, looked out the windshield at the lights of Tokyo. Seated behind Scott, Fumiko and Jefferson leaned forward to hear his conversation with Karl Radford, who had been patched through to the chopper from Crystal City.

“She’s going to be damned hard to find and kill,” Scott said into the mouth mike of his headset.

Radford’s voice came over distorted by the patch-through and muffled under the noise from the chopper’s rotors. “A follow-up to our first message from Pyongyang confirmed what Tokugawa told you. ‘Red Shark’ made no sense to us either, until we received a second message from Pyongyang about a Type 213 submarine. That, plus the intercepted comm from the North Sea Fleet Lushun, that one of their amphibs reported a contact with an unidentified sub.”

“That contact was the Red Shark,” said Scott. “Bet on it.”

“We have. We also have satellite imagery we think is the same target but haven’t made a positive ID. Still studying its heat blooms. Looks like diesel-electric, not a nuke. If it was a Chinese nuke, we’d know it from its heat signature.”

“Any idea, General, how the NKs got hold of a Type 213?”

“No, but we’re working on it. Obviously we missed something, missed it by a mile.”

“We’ve got to find and kill this Red Shark while she’s still in the Yellow Sea, before she can break out into the Pacific. If she does, we might never find her.”

“I’ll recommend to the president that he not wait to confront the NKs with what we know, that he should force a showdown to get them to recall the Red Shark. No guarantee they will. Might deny everything. At the same time we’ll coordinate with Philippine president Santos and order a special-ops force to move out from Guam and link up with Filipino units to find that terrorist base in Davao and take it out. Right now I’m not as worried about the terrorist cell as I am about the Red Shark and those goddamned warheads she’s carrying. We can deploy SSNs to blockade the Yellow Sea, but if we do, the Chinese will probably go nuts.”

“General, you won’t kill the Red Shark by blockading the Yellow Sea. I know the Yellow Sea — it’s shallow, and an AIP sub hiding in the littorals will be virtually invisible. If she finds a hole in the blockade, kiss her good-bye. Keep the blockade in place, but someone has to go in there, hunt her down, and kill her.”

Silence from Radford, then, “That someone being you.”

“Sir, you said the Reno needs a skipper, that you could pull my rabbit out of a hat…”

Another silence. “Wait one.”

“Jake, what’s he telling you?” Fumiko asked. Jammed into a jump seat behind Scott, she looked crushed and exhausted.

“It’s all worked out,” Scott said. “We’re not going to the brig. At least you two aren’t.”