Black Star

CHAPTER 18 — KILLING MACHINE

Muzzle flashes.

Chiu sensed bullets thudding into something close by. Then he heard the staccato rattle of another Chinese assault rifle. Ten meters away, a commando dropped to his knees and pitched forward.

“Down!” he barked over his shoulder, knowing it was too late. Rolling onto his side, he slipped the MP-5N off his shoulder.

Chiu cursed himself. More sentries. He should have anticipated that there would be more, probably equipped with their own NVG. Each shelter would have sentries posted in the same location. The PLA was predictable.

He peered into the shadows beneath the high slab side of the shelter, searching for the shooters. There were two, maybe more. He couldn’t spot them in his own NVG, but he sensed movement where he had seen the muzzle flashes.

He glanced over his shoulder again. The two Americans were on their bellies, eyes fixed on him. Watching, waiting to see what he would do. The woman seemed to have attached herself to Maxwell. Why? Was she using him to betray the operation? Or was she—

Another burst of fire. This time Chiu got a fix on the shooter. He was crouched behind a low wall. From this angle, neither Chiu nor his troops could get a clear shot at him.

Chiu lay in the darkness, trying to assess the matter. They were pinned down, out in the open. He’d lost another commando and his ground time was running out.

He scuttled over to Kee, six meters away. “Over there,” he ordered, pointing to the left. “Take two men with you, thirty meters away, draw their fire and give me cover.”

Kee gave him a quick nod and crawled into the darkness.

Chiu waited until they were in position. More muzzle flashes appeared from the low wall. When Kee’s SMGs opened up, returning the sentry’s fire, Chiu was on his feet. Sprinting toward the concealed sentry position, he kept an oblique angle to the low wall.

Not until he was nearly perpendicular to the wall did they spot him. The two startled sentries whirled, swinging their assault rifles. Too late.

Chiu fired from the waist. The spray of his nine-millimeter bullets ricocheted off the butt end of the wall. Sparks showered against the concrete side of the shelter.

The first sentry spun like a top and flipped over the wall. The second got off several wild rounds before Chiu’s bullets hit him in the upper chest, driving him backwards into the wall of the shelter.

Silence.

Chiu dropped to one knee. Keeping his MP-5N at the ready, he swept the perimeter with his NVG. No more sentries, at least that he could spot.

He signaled Kee to bring the team to the shelter while Chiu covered them from the corner. Kee stopped, kneeling to check the fallen commando. He rose, shaking his head negatively.

Chiu felt the fury rising like lava inside him. Another fatality. The losses they were taking, all in order to find a—

Through his boots he felt a vibration. A rumble came up through the concrete. Then another sound — a high-pitched metallic whine, swelling in volume like the wail of a banshee.

Perplexed, Chiu gazed around. In the greenish twilight of the NVG, he could see his commandos stopped on the tarmac. They were staring at the front of the shelter.

It came to him. The shelter door. It was opening. The rumble he felt through his boots — it was some kind of high-energy hydraulic device.

The other noise — the wailing metallic sound — was reaching a crescendo, bringing real pain to his ears. In the next moment, the advancing commandos broke and scattered across the sprawling concrete apron.

Even before the apparition burst onto the darkened tarmac, Chiu knew what it was. And he was too late.

Stunned, he stared at the specter. He saw only an amorphous shape, shimmering in the darkness like a winged wraith. Its engines were bellowing at full thrust.

As Chiu stared, the craft became invisible, blending into the night.

The Black Star. Chiu could tell by the changing roar that it was accelerating toward the runway.

He shouldered his MP-5N and fired a long burst. Not until the submachine gun had stopped stopped firing for several seconds did he realize he was still holding the trigger down. He’d fired the entire thirty-round magazine.

At nothing.

The Black Star was gone.

Another burst of gunfire, this time from inside the shelter. Chiu recognized the brittle sound of a Type 95. Another damned sentry?

One of the commandos yelped and dropped to the tarmac. The others dove for cover and opened fire on the shooter.

It was over in seconds. Chiu ran to the cavernous opening of the shelter. He saw the shooter — a man in coveralls, some sort of ground crewman. He was sprawled on the hangar floor, his body riddled with bullets. His assault rifle lay beside him.

A feeling of rage swept over Chiu. He had come this far to find the stealth jet — only to lose it in a single blinding moment. And he had lost another commando, killed by a grease monkey in coveralls.

He was still staring out into the darkness when Maxwell and Bass and the fire team came trotting up. The woman was with them.

“It was the Dong-jin,” she said in a flat voice.

He stared at her. For once she had been correct. The shelter contained the Black Star. But it didn’t matter now.

Chiu shook his head in frustration. “So what? It’s gone.”

“There might be another.”

He was too overcome with rage and frustration to listen. It had been so close. One minute sooner. In his mind’s eye he could still see the shimmering ghost of the Black Star vanishing in the night.

“I’ve lost too many men because of you. Our time is up. We will withdraw.”

“Listen to her,” said Maxwell. “She was right about this shelter. We have to look in the next one.”

“If she hadn’t led us to the wrong shelter, we would have stopped the Black Star.”

Maxwell inserted himself between Chiu and the others. In a low voice he said, “Listen Colonel, get over your problem with the woman. If there’s another Black Star out there, we have to find it.”

“Do not presume to tell me what I have to do. The woman cannot be trusted and neither can you. You have been sleeping with a traitor.”

“Damn it, use your brain. Don’t you understand that this is your last chance to stop China from winning this war?”

A long silent moment passed between them. He desperately wanted to kill the woman defector who had led him to this impasse. But despite the cloud of anger that enveloped him, he sensed that the American might be right.

“Our objective is to find the Black Star,” said Maxwell. “If we abort the mission now, the war will be lost.”

Chiu didn’t answer. It seemed that nothing that had occurred in his life up to this moment mattered. What he did in the next few minutes would define his existence.

And that of Taiwan.

Maxwell was standing there, looking at him. So were the others, waiting for his decision.

You are a warrior. Let them see how a warrior leads.

He released the empty clip from his MP-5N and shoved in a fresh magazine, letting them hear the hard, metallic click of the lower receiver.

He turned to his fire team. “Reload your weapons. Check flash suppressors.”

Only four of this squad remained, including the corporal who had been wounded by the crew chief in the shelter. He looked at the commando next to him. “Get the wounded man back to the helicopters. Kee and Lam, you stay with me.”

Chiu took the wounded commando’s MP-5N and handed it to Maxwell. He walked over to the dead Black Star crew chief and picked up his assault rifle. He tossed it to Catfish Bass. “You two are now commandos. Check that your weapons are loaded and ready, then follow me.”

Bass looked uncertainly at the Chinese rifle. “Where are we going?”

“To find the Black Star. Isn’t that what you came for?”

He didn’t hear Bass’s answer. From the distant runway, the roar of two jet engines reverberated across the open space, filling the night sky. Each pair of eyes swung to look for the departing fighter.

They saw nothing. The sky was empty.

I failed, Shaomin. I should have killed him, but I failed.

The words replayed in Mai-ling’s head like a mantra. For the rest of her life — measured now perhaps in minutes — she would wonder if the face staring down at her from the cockpit of the Black Star belonged to Colonel Zhang Yu.

She was sure he recognized her. They both wore night vision equipment. His oxygen mask had been hanging unfastened from the side of his helmet. Their gazes had met for only a couple of seconds, but it was enough. If it was Zhang, he would have understood in that compressed instant why she had come to Chouzhou.

It didn’t matter now. Whoever it was, he had escaped. Free to kill again, just as he had killed her beloved Shaomin. It meant that she had failed.

She carried the Beretta in the pocket of her utilities. She was not supposed to be armed — Chiu was emphatic about that — but she had conveniently recovered the pistol from the body of the fallen commando back at Shelter Number One.

But then came the time to use it — when the Dong-jin roared past her like a dragon from hell. With the shape of the fighter still shimmering in the darkness, she had glimpsed the face of the pilot sitting in the cockpit. She might have avenged the death of her beloved Shaomin.

She didn’t shoot.

At the last instant, she had been distracted by the gunfire — the crew chief, as it turned out — from inside the shelter. She stood there like a lump of clay. Then it was too late.

Was it Zhang?

The uncertainty hung over her like a leaden weight.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he was still here.

She decided to cling to that hope. It was the only way she could go on. With that thought planted in her head, she turned and trudged along in the darkness behind Chiu and his team.

Perhaps they would find another Black Star in the shelter. She no longer cared. She had already decided that she would surely die whether she found Zhang or not. If the PLA didn’t kill her, Chiu would. She would not be allowed to leave Chouzhou, and that was all right too. It meant that she would be joining Shaomin in eternity.

They were thirty meters from Shelter Number Three, still in the shadow of the second shelter, when Chiu signaled for them to take cover. The petroleum fire was casting a greater flood of orange light over the shelters. Even without NVG, Mai-ling could see details and objects around the third shelter.

“I’m not wasting any more time looking for sentries,” Chiu said.

While the others watched, wondering what he meant, he pulled a grenade from his belt. Motioning for them to remain in place, he crawled on his belly another ten meters toward the corner door of the shelter — the location where the sentries at the other two shelters had concealed themselves. A low wall jutted from the door, just as it had in the other shelters.

Chiu stopped and rose to a kneeling position. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade. It skipped off the concrete and slid to the edge of the wall.

Chiu rose to his feet. He turned on a flashlight and waved it like a wand. He yelled in Chinese. “Ho! Soldiers of the PLA sleep with pigs. Look over here, you pig fuckers!”

A head appeared over the wall. Then another. The sentries rose, swinging their weapons toward Chiu—

The grenade exploded.

In the flash and shower of debris, the sentries were flung back behind the wall. Even before the dust had cleared, Chiu covered the distance in a dead run. The muffled burp of his muzzle-suppressed MP-5N echoed from the shelter wall as he finished the sentries.

He waved to the fire team. “What are you waiting for? Move! We have work to do.”

Rising to their feet, Bass and Maxwell looked at each other.

“Is that guy the meanest sonofabitch in the world,” said Bass, “or is he just crazy?”

“Both,” said Maxwell.

Following Chiu’s hand signals, Maxwell stationed himself at the left of the shelter door. He kept the MP-5N submachine gun at the ready. On the opposite side, Bass was hunkered down with his assault rifle.

When Chiu gave the nod, Lieutenant Kee flung the door open. Chiu tossed an IR Chemlite flare through the opening, then pulled the pin on another and tossed it inside. With the NVG tilted down and SMGs mounted at the shoulder, he and the two commandos charged inside, followed by Maxwell and Bass.

As Chiu had instructed him, Maxwell broke to the left and ran toward the front of the hangar, aiming the barrel of his SMG like an extended antenna. The two Chemlites cast a flickering infra-red glow through the hangar, giving it the appearance of a witch’s cave.

Not until he reached the front of the hangar, finding no armed PLA troops, did Maxwell stop. He allowed himself to stare at the object that filled the center of the hangar.

He had gotten only a brief glimpse of the first jet that nearly ran over them when it burst from Shelter Number Three. The crew had already activated cloaking, and he couldn’t make out the details of the airframe. He hadn’t even seen the shape of the fighter before it was gone.

Over five years had passed since he flew the original Black Star at Groom Lake. He had already forgotten some of the exotic nuances in the jet’s design, the peculiar geometry of its airframe that absorbed and distorted and shed radar emissions and made it invisible on air defense displays. Now it came back to him.

Its wings were flat, no dihedral, sharp as a knife along its leading edges, swept back in a delta plan form. The two jet exhausts were embedded in the aft, triangular tail section. No vertical surfaces protruded to interrupt the flatness of its shape.

Beautiful.

No, he corrected himself. Not beautiful. The Black Star didn’t possess the slick, streamlined shape of a supersonic fighter. It was all angles, thick and flat, swept back like a manta ray.

Exotic. That was it. An exotic killing machine.

He heard a commotion in the back of the hangar where Chiu and one of the commandos had gone. He swung the submachine gun around and squinted through the night vision goggles.

A sentry? Another gun-wielding crew chief?

Holding the MP-5N extended in front of him, Maxwell slipped beneath the wing of the Black Star and moved toward the rear of the hangar. Next to a long workbench and a row of cabinets, Chiu and the two commandos had seized a man in coveralls. His wrists were already strapped with a plastic tie-wrap. The man was nearly blind in the infrared-lighted hangar.

Chiu looked at Maxwell. “He says he’s the crew chief. He was preparing the jet for a mission.”

“Where are the pilot and weapons officer?”

Chiu prodded the man with the muzzle of his MP-5N and said something in Mandarin. The crew chief blinked in the dim light, keeping his eyes locked on the submachine gun. He stammered an answer.

“Gone,” said Chiu. “He says they ran away when they heard the grenade explode outside.”

“Is it fueled and ready to fly?” Maxwell asked.

Chiu repeated the question for the crew chief. The man answered in Mandarin, his eyes firmly fixed on the MP-5N.

“Yes,” said Chiu. “The Black Star — he calls it Dong-jin—has full tanks and had been preflighted. It’s ready.”

Maxwell looked around for Bass. The Air Force pilot was standing beneath the cockpit, staring at the black mass of the fighter. His mouth was agape. “Holy shit,” he said. “That thing doesn’t look like any airplane I ever flew.”

“It’s not supposed to,” said Maxwell.

“How does it fly without any tail surfaces?”

“Same way the B-2 does it. Computerized flight control system, no aerodynamic stability of its own.”

“Like a big airborne video game.”

“Yeah. Just made for a guy like you.”

Chiu walked up to them. “What are you standing around for? You should be getting ready to fly.”

“I need Mai-ling to help with the cockpit setup,” said Maxwell. “She knows the switch logic and the display functions. And we need the crew chief to cooperate. He can work the access ladder and open the hangar bay door when we’re ready to launch.”

“He will cooperate,” said Chiu, hefting the MP-5N. “So will the woman.” He peered around the big hangar. A deep frown passed over his face. “Where is she?”

They counted heads. There were five of them — Maxwell, Bass, Chiu, and the two remaining commandos. They scanned the cavernous space of the shelter.

Mai-ling was missing.

An ominous silence fell over the group.

“I knew she was a traitor,” snapped Chiu. He whirled and headed for the side door, slipping his pistol from its holster. “I will deal with her.”

Let him be there, she silently implored. Let Zhang be there. For Shaomin’s sake.

Mai-ling slipped across the tarmac behind the shelter as quickly as she could without making undue noise. The towering petroleum fire was casting an orange glow over the entire expanse of concrete. She knew she made an easy target for an alert sentry. Caution was no longer an option.

The crew briefing room, if she remembered correctly, was in the row of spaces in back of Hangar Number Four, the next shelter across the tarmac. She hadn’t told Chiu about the briefing room. He would want to go there first. And ruin her plan.

She wanted Colonel Zhang. She wanted to see him, face to face, to watch him cringe and beg. She would make him tell her what he had done with Shaomin.

Then she would kill him.

Could she do it? A few months ago such an act would have been unthinkable. Though she held the rank of captain in the PLA, she was a scientist, not a soldier. She had never killed anyone. But that was before the hate had built up in her like a raging fever. Now every fiber in her body was urging her to put a bullet in the brain of Col. Zhang Yu.

She hesitated before starting across the open expanse between the Shelter Three and Four. She decided to walk openly, as if she were on official business. If a sentry challenged her, she would bluff, throw some names out that he would recognize, then shoot him at close quarters.

Keeping a hand around the grip of the Beretta in her pocket, she started across the tarmac.

Forty meters to go. No challenge from a sentry.

Twenty meters. Perhaps there was no sentry—

She saw him.

Mai-ling froze, not sure whether he had spotted her yet. She could see the sentry at his post, slouched on the ground beside the side entrance. He was motionless, staring in her direction. Not until she had studied his features for several seconds through the NVG did she understand why the sentry had not challenged her.

He would never challenge anyone. A single, oozing hole glistened in the center of his forehead. Chiu, or one his commandos, had already taken care of the sentry. It meant, probably, that they were inside the shelter now looking for the remaining Black Star.

Go! she ordered herself. Run for the briefing room. Get there before it’s too late.

She darted to the right, toward the warren of spaces and offices built into the back of Shelter Four. The rooms were not accessible from inside the hangar without a special key — or so she remembered — which meant that Chiu would not stumble onto Zhang’s briefing room.

Not before she had concluded her mission.

In the darkened walkway behind the shelter, she had to peer carefully at each recess, each crevice in the wall. There were several metal doors, all alike. Which one? Which was Zhang’s briefing room? Nothing looked familiar in the darkness.

She tried the first door, applying a gentle pressure to the lever handle. It didn’t move. Should she rap on the door, try to bluff again? If she entered the wrong room, encountered someone besides Zhang, she was finished.

If only she could remember which door. She had been there on a couple of occasions, invited by Shaomin for an audience with the high and mighty Zhang. The same Zhang who turned on them and sent Shaomin to his death in the camps.

The recollection of his cruel, smirking face served to jog her memory. It was coming back to her. She remembered that they had arrived at the shelter in Shaomin’s Bei-jung—his army utility vehicle. He had parked directly beside Zhang’s entrance door.

There. Just as before. Ten meters away, in the deep shadow of the high rear wall — a drab-painted Bei-jung with a canvas top, just like the one Shaomin once drove.

The thought reinforced her sense of purpose. The fear and anxiety slipped away from her like an unwelcome burden. She slid the Beretta from her pocket and approached the door, taking small, determined steps.

No light was leaking around the door jamb. She pressed her ear to the door. She could hear a rustling sound, the noise of scuffing feet on the concrete floor.

Someone was inside. How many? It didn’t matter. She would kill whoever was there with Zhang. He would be the last.

She hesitated at the door, gathering her resolve. She took a long, deep breath, then yanked the lever. The door swung inward, and she stepped inside.

A dim red light illuminated the room. She saw a desk, someone sitting behind it, watching her with intense interest. She held the Beretta in both hands, keeping it trained on him.

Even before she discerned his features in the thin light, she recognized the familiar presence. He wore flight gear — a torso harness and G-suit — and leaned with one elbow on the desk, peering at her with that casual, bemused expression.

Just as she remembered.

“Come in,” said Major Han Shaomin. “I’ve been waiting for you.”