Silver Tower

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Three hundred miles east of Tokyo the aircraft carrier CV-64 USS Constellation rode the gentle swells of the north Pacific Ocean. She was cruising at only six knots, barely enough to maintain steerage way. The thirty-year-old, eighty-thousand-ton Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier was surrounded by an armada of eleven smaller support ships and other surface combatants arranged in a wide hexagon pattern.

The Constellation itself was buzzing with activity. Poised for battle, two F/A-18E Hornet fighter-bombers were positioned in their catapults, engines running, ready for the steam-powered push that would shoot them from zero to one hundred forty knots in three seconds. Two more F-18s on external power were parked just behind the catapult blast deflectors, ready to take their places once the first two alert birds launched. A CH-53F Super Sea Stallion III transport helicopter, its seventy-five-foot-diameter rotor slowly spinning, sat on the Constellation's flight deck just beside the "island" superstructure. Another was hovering a few hundred feet from the Constellation's fantail, ready in a few seconds to drop onto the carrier's broad stem if ordered.

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