CARRIER 8: ALPHA STRIKE By: Keith Douglass

From the amused look on her face, she knew exactly what that meant.

2000 local (Zulu -7)

Flag Briefing Room

The demands of planning a response to the FON message kept him from

seeing Pamela Drake again immediately, but Tombstone was irritated to find

that she was constantly on his mind. He ignored the vivid recollections of

her that kept crowding in, distracting him from the brief in progress, but

thoughts of the round fullness of her heavy breasts, the smooth, flat lines of

her belly gently flaring to the boyish hips, kept intruding. There’d been

times when they were together that he could barely tell where she ended and

his own body began, so closely locked together had they been. He shook his

head, trying to clear his thoughts, and glanced at the other officers

surrounding the cloth-covered briefing table. Not a one of them would believe

that their Admiral, with his legendary reputation for an impassive face and

calm demeanor, was sitting there thinking about the last time he’d made love

to Miss Pamela Drake.

The lights in the briefing room came up as the intelligence officer

finished the slide show portion of the brief. Two ISs darted forward and

started unrolling a small-scale chart taped to the top of the chalkboard. It

displayed the South China Sea and the littoral countries that bordered it.

Running from east to west, a rectangle bisected the middle of the South China

Sea.

“Okay, here’s what we recommend, Admiral. This box takes us east to

twelve miles off the coast of Vietnam, then due west back out to the Spratly

Islands. One day in, another day back out. A little longer if we linger on

Vietnam’s coast.” Busby used a pencil-sized laser pointer to trace out the

proposed course.

“It accomplishes what Seventh Fleet wants us to do, without getting us

too far from the Spratly Islands. I like that. Doing FON ops off China’s

coast, moving up north further, might be what they had in mind, though,”

Tombstone remarked. He stared at the narrow rectangle on the chart.

Something about it seemed familiar–no, not familiar, but it reminded him of

something else he’d seen recently.

“We thought of that, Admiral, but we don’t recommend it at this time.

There has to be some connection between the political maneuvering in the UN

and what we’ve witnessed down here. The Chinese are just too accomplished at

this game for it to be coincidence. Moving north to China’s coast puts us two

days away from the Spratly Islands,” the CARGRU operations officer answered.

What is it, damn it? Why do I get an uneasy feeling just looking at the

box? It’s not any particular operation that I can remember. The only thing I

can think of is that fjord we once used to hide the carrier in up around

Norway, but that’s not it either. Those double lines around the box–is that

it?

A more northern op-area would put us in the vicinity of the Paracel

Islands,” Tombstone said, stalling for time while he tried to let whatever

random association his mind had made float to the top of his thoughts. “if

something odd is going on in the Spratly Islands, I’d lay odds that the

Paracels are having their share of unexplained events as well.”

The Paracels were a small group of islands located in the northern half

of the South China Sea. Slightly more prominent and stable than the tiny

Spratly chain, the islands were also claimed by China, with Vietnam and Taiwan

disputing their ownership. China was two hundred miles to the north of the

Paracels, and Vietnam slightly closer to the west. Taiwan was almost six

hundred miles to the northeast.

“We might gather some information, but we’d also be mounting a more

direct challenge to China’s exclusion zone,” the CARGRU Operations Officer

chimed in. “It’s one thing to be eight hundred miles to the south of her

coast, another to be cruising around the twelve-mile limit. Our best guess is

that Seventh Fleet–as well as his bosses–isn’t quite ready to push China

that hard. From the box Commander Busby is proposing, we can still reach out

and touch the Paracels anytime we need to. Keeping the battle group around