Drone Command

TWENTY-FOUR

When Myers and Pearce arrived at the new business-jet terminal at Narita International Airport, everything was waiting for them, including one of the new HA-420 HondaJets. As soon as Pearce dropped his American Express Black Card onto the counter, a small army of uniformed agents suddenly appeared and swiftly expedited all the necessary legal, flight, and insurance documents for today’s scheduled round trip to Taiwan’s Taipei Songshan Airport. A courteous young flight steward served Myers a French press of dark Arabica coffee and a plate of matcha cookies in the executive lounge while Pearce conducted his preflight inspection of the HondaJet with a company official. An hour later, she and Pearce were airborne.

Why’d you pick the HondaJet?” Myers whispered in the headset.

“Because I own one,” Pearce said. “Judy taught me how to fly it.”

“I liked her.”

“Me, too.”

Judy Hopper had been his personal pilot and was the best flier he’d ever met, but she turned out to be a great flight instructor as well. She brought him along on single-engine prop planes before finally promoting him to the HondaJet, a magnificent lightweight aircraft with a state-of-the-art cockpit featuring flat-panel displays with touch-screen flight planning and navigational controls.

Pearce thought about Judy a lot lately. Her piloting skills saved his life back in Algeria. Myers’s, too. He hoped she was happy in her new life as a missionary’s wife in Africa. Wished she was flying the plane today. It would improve their chances of surviving greatly.

Pearce and Myers were flying at nearly five hundred miles an hour, bypassing Nagasaki Airport on their way out over the northern reaches of the East China Sea, heading roughly southwest toward the island nation of Taiwan.

The digital navigational panel displayed their GPS location and registered flight path, circumscribed by narrow red bands that warned against veering off course. The terminal agent explained that the air lanes between Japan and Taiwan weren’t safe beyond the red zone owing to certain recent political developments. She was either too polite or too afraid to say that the Chinese now considered the area their national airspace and that planes entering it were subject to being shot down without warning.

Pearce had previously marked the location of Mao Island on his digital map — a designation still unrecognized by every government in the world save North Korea and Cuba. The HondaJet was locked firmly in the middle of the designated flight path, nearly due south of the disputed new island.

He glanced over at Myers strapped into her padded leather seat. Whispered in the head set. “All set?”

Myers nodded. “You betcha.” She glanced around the high-tech cabin. “Not exactly a Buick.”

“Actually, Honda calls this ride the Civic of the Sky.”

Pearce turned the yoke and pressed the rudder pedal into a sharp, smooth turn heading due north. A moment later, cockpit alarms sounded as the navigation screen flashed a warning signal repeated by a female voice in their headsets. “Entering disputed airspace. Return to designated course.”

Pearce tapped the touch screen, killing the alarm bells and warning signals. His radio buzzed. An incoming call from a traffic controller, no doubt. He ignored it.

“There.” Myers pointed at the windscreen. On the far horizon they both saw the two-hundred-foot-tall oil derrick looming high above the deck of the Chinese drillship. She tapped another screen and a forward camera began feeding a live image of the drillship into a video monitor.

Pearce nodded toward the west. Far below, the wake of the Kunming missile destroyer, keeping a distant watchful eye.

“Looks menacing, even from here,” Myers said.

“Heading down.”

Pearce eased the yoke forward until the digital altimeter read just one thousand feet. From this height, oceangoing container ships looked like toy boats.

“We should have their attention now,” Myers said. Her gut tingled.

“We got it the moment we entered their airspace. That destroyer has already painted us.” Pearce and Myers were informed by Tanaka personally about the Volant drone getting shot down the day before. Didn’t exactly boost Pearce’s confidence in today’s mission. He wished the civilian HondaJet had missile-lock alarms and electronic countermeasures.

Pearce held his course steady until they passed directly over the drillship. His palms sweated. The radio call signal flashed again. Myers nodded for him to take it.

Pearce put the incoming call on both headsets. An angry voice in broken English screamed in their ears. The Kunming ordered them to return to their airspace immediately or risk being fired upon.

“Better do what the man says,” Myers said. “He sounds very displeased.”

Pearce snapped off the radio, then banked the aircraft to the northeast in the general direction of Japan.

“Think that will calm him down?”

“We’ll see,” Myers said.

Pearce held the long, looping bank steady, dropping his altitude at the same time. The wide blue ocean grew larger. Soon, the red-hulled Tiger II filled the lower half of the windscreen.

“This idea feels dumber by the minute,” Pearce said.

The HondaJet roared directly over the derrick again. They were low enough to see the crew scrambling over the deck. Pearce hoped it was out of sheer terror.

“I should’ve been a fighter pilot,” Pearce said. “Get to fight sitting down.”

“You might get your chance,” Myers said. She pointed at the radar screen. A red blip was screaming toward them at Mach 2. More than fifteen hundred miles per hour.

Pearce slammed the throttles into the firewall and banked hard right and down, straight toward the deck.

“Troy—”

Pearce put the HondaJet twenty feet above the water, low enough that he’d slam into the side of an oil tanker if one got in his way. Luckily, nothing in sight. He glanced at the radar just in time to see the red blip directly on his six a half mile back—

The air exploded like a shotgun blast as a twin-tailed Shenyang J-16 Red Eagle strike fighter rocketed past them, five hundred feet above their heads. Pearce felt the tiny HondaJet buck in his hands from the turbulence above. He and Myers watched the Chinese fighter pull into a near vertical climb and disappear into the late morning sun.

“That was too close for comfort,” Myers said.

“Maybe being a grunt isn’t so bad after all.” He kept his eyes on the radar scope. The blip reversed direction, heading back toward where it came from at a high rate of speed. “We just might be out of the woods.”

“That was reckless,” Myers said.

“Me or them?”

She glared at him. “Both.”

Pearce tapped the HondaJet’s yoke. “We needed a Buick. At least I didn’t hit anything.”

“Is that—” Myers pointed at the radar screen.

The red blip reappeared behind them again.

And gaining.

Pearce tapped a video screen. A rear-facing camera pulled up. Incredible. The Chinese fighter flew just above the deck, trailing a vapor cone as it cut deep trenches of water behind it. His computer said the bogey was subsonic.

Pearce made a quick calculation, speed and distance. He held direction for three seconds, cut his throttles back to near stall speed, banked right.

Wrong move.

The big J-16’s afterburners exploded again, roaring past them at supersonic speed, pulling a wall of pressure in its wake. The turbulence was too great this time. It grabbed one of the HondaJet’s wings and flipped it as if it were tossing a coin. Pearce fought the yoke and rudder pedals, got it righted. The stall alarm screamed. The plane yawed and pitched. Pearce fought the controls, but before he could slam the throttle forward, the engines died. He keyed the radio.

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

He kept the nose up as long as he could. Sixty knots and falling. He pointed the jet at a distant trawler. Prayed it was Japanese.

“BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

They hit the water.

Hard.