The Shark Mutiny Read Online Free PDF Page B

Westerners, the symbol of the might of Communist China.
    The great portrait of the unforgotten Mao Zedong, staring out, somehow shy, and cold, may not have formed a secret smile through the falling snow, as the Admirals’ Mercedes swept past Tiananmen Gate. But it should have. Mao, above all other men, would have loved Zhang Yushu’s as yet unspoken plan.
    2100 (local). Same day .
NSA. Fort Meade, Maryland .
    Admiral Borden had gone home. A new shift of U.S. surveillance operators was working through the night. Only one member of the day staff was still on duty: Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe was in his office, still working, behind closed doors, poring over maps of Asia, pulling up charts on his computer, trying to ascertain where the giant Antonov-124, with its lethal cargo of ship-killing high explosives, could be headed, and where, more importantly, it would have to refuel.
    Those four big D-18Ts have gotta guzzle up more than ten tons of fuel per hour—which gives it a range of two thousand six hundred miles maximum. The bastard’s gotta stop somewhere. And it’s gotta stop soon .
    Jimmy’s thoughts were clear and accurate. He thought the aircraft would have to land around five hours after takeoff. Twice he checked with the CIA’s Russian desk at Langley, but there was nothing new. Three times he checked with MENA, Fort Meade’s Middle East North Africa desk, and they knew nothing either.
    Lieutenant Ramshawe, however, had a stubborn streak the size of Queensland, and he had resolved to sit right there until someone told him precisely where the world’s biggest cargo aircraft had landed.
    The hour 2200 came and went. Then 2230. And right after that the phone rang, secure line from Langley. No one was telling him where it had landed. But the news was definite. The Antonov had just taken off from a guarded airfield outside the remote central Kazakhstan city of Zhezkazgan. The interesting part was the name of the airfield, Baykonur—top-secret home base of the Russian space program. The CIA had always had a man in there.
    “Very nice and quiet, old mate,” muttered Jimmy Ramshawe thoughtfully to the air traffic controller 7,000 miles away in central Asia. “Very nice indeed.”
    Then he pulled up his computer maps again, and tried once more to assess the destination of the 120 sea mines. He checked the routes southeast to India, and gazed at the great high-peaked mass of the Himalayas, but in the end there was only one conclusion: The mines were on their way to China.
    “And since the bastards only work underwater,” he murmured, “a mighty intellect like mine would conclude they might be going all the way to the ocean, possibly Shanghai, or maybe one of the Chinese Naval bases in the south.”
    Either way, he decided, the Antonov would certainly have to be refueled again. But that would probably happen at a remote Chinese military base in the western part of the country.
    In which case, I’m going home to bed, he thought. But twelve hours from now, a little before midday tomorrow here, I’m looking for a report that it’s landed on the shores of the China Sea—probably near a Naval base .
    Still, there’s no point getting excited since the new bloke I work for wouldn’t give a kangaroo’s bollocks for my opinions . And he walked, somewhat disconsolately, through the huge main room, the dimly lit National Security Operations Center (NSOC), heading home.
    Thus Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe, like his boss, was sound asleep when the Antonov touched down to refuel on northwest China’s remote and forbidden airstrip—the one on the edge of the pitiless Taklamakan Desert, at Lop Nor, home of China’s nuclear weapons research and testing facility.
    The Taklamakan is China’s largest desert, 1,200 miles long, uninhabited for vast areas. Its name means “the desert one enters, but never leaves.” The Antonov, being Russian, completely ignored that, and one hour after landing, took off again with full tanks, heading southeast