The incident occurred well within the search box the Chairman had deduced. The only problem was, they had been caught out while patrolling the far edge, nearly fifty miles from where the plane went down.

“On it,” Stone said, and the ship came about and the cryopumps began to scream.

Juan now had to second-guess the captain of the Chinese stealth ship once again, and he was beginning to regret an earlier decision. He hadn’t passed the data stick of information from the car carrier to Eric and Mark because he knew the two of them would have spent the night poring over it and he needed them fresh. Now he realized he needed to know a lot more about his adversary’s capabilities.

He called down to the butler’s pantry off the galley, “Maurice, it’s Cabrillo. I need you to do me a favor.”

The Englishman replied, “I assure you, Captain, that anything I do for you is surely not a favor. You pay me handsomely for my services.”

“Fair enough,” Juan replied. “In the middle drawer of my desk is a thumb drive. Could you please plug it into my computer?”

Eric and Mark both looked at him like a couple of dogs eyeing a T-bone. They had not been happy with Cabrillo’s earlier decision and now they couldn’t wait to get a look at what they’d gotten.

A minute later, the information had been fed into the mainframe, translated into English, and the two of them were glued to a pair of tablet computers.

Juan still had to make a call about where the stealth ship would reposition itself for another run on the carrier.

Linda broke his silent musings. “Looks like a rescue chopper just launched off the Stennis. And one of the screening destroyers is breaking formation to investigate.”

Cabrillo also knew that the U.S. Navy wasn’t going to like the Oregon’s presence here. In fact, he fully expected to be told to leave, especially now they had lost one of their fighters. The old tramp steamer was the one wild card the Chinese captain didn’t know was in the deck. He would have studied American naval tactics and doctrine and could anticipate responses to just about any scenario. But he didn’t know the Corporation was gunning for him. Juan had to find a way to exploit that advantage.

“You’re right about him screwing up,” Eric said, looking up from his tablet. “When the magnetic field is activated, they lose their radar. With the jet flying in the clouds, they never knew it was inbound.”

“How big of a field can they put up?” Cabrillo asked. “What’s its range?”

“I’m reading that section,” Murph said. “I need a little more time. There is some seriously funky math going on here.”