Crash Dive

Midnight. No moon, no stars, the sea a flat black void a few feet beneath his wingtips. For a man streaking through the night over hostile foreign waters at nearly the speed of sound, at an altitude no sane man would dare consider, Alex Hawke was remarkably comfortable. He was piloting an F-16 Viper. The matte-black American-built fighter jet was one of many purchased and heavily modified by Britain’s Royal Navy for under-the-radar special operations just like this one.

Lord Alexander Hawke, a former Royal Navy pilot and combat veteran of the Gulf War, now a seasoned British intelligence officer with MI6, had to smile.

Like the Syrian hospital bed he’d only recently escaped, the sleek F-16’s single seat reclined at an angle of exactly thirty degrees, transforming the deadly Viper, Hawke thought, into something along the lines of a supersonic Barcalounger. Leave it to the Americans to worry about fighter pilot comfort.

His eyes flicked over the dimly lit instrument array and found nothing remotely exciting. Even the hazy reddish glow inside the cockpit somehow reassured him that all was well. He was less than six hundred nautical miles from the tiny island of Xiachuan, his destination, and closing fast. Every mile he put behind him lessened the chance of a Chinese Sukhoi 33 jet interceptor or a surface-to-air missile blasting him out of the sky. Although equipped with the very latest antimissile defense systems, the Viper was no stealth fighter.

He was vulnerable and he knew it. Should he be forced to eject and was captured by the Red Chinese, he’d be tortured mercilessly before he was killed. A British intelligence officer flying an unmarked American fighter jet had no business entering Chinese airspace. But he did have business, very serious business, and his success might well avert impending hostilities that could lead to global war.

That was his mission. And he’d gladly chosen to accept it.

In London one week earlier, “C,” as the chief of MI6 was traditionally called, had summoned Hawke to join him for lunch at his men’s club, Boodle’s. Lord Hawke had thought it was a purely social invitation. Usually the old man conducted serious SIS business only within the sanctum sanctorum of his office at 85 Albert Embankment. So it was a very relaxed Alex Hawke who presented himself promptly at the appointed hour of noon.

“Well, here you are at last, Alex,” C said, amiably enough. Sir David Trulove, a gruff old party thirty years Hawke’s senior, had his customary corner table at the third-floor Men’s Grill. Shafts of dusty sunlight pouring down from the tall leaded windows set the table crystal and silver afire, all sparkle and gleam. Above the table, ragged tendrils of tobacco smoke hung in wreaths and coils, turning and twisting slowly in the sunlit room.

The dining room at Boodle’s was, by any standard, one of the poshest man-caves in London.

C took a spartan sip of his gin and bitters, looked his subordinate up and down in a cursory fashion, and said, “I must say, a bit of convalescence becomes you. You’re looking rather fit again, Alex. ‘Steel true, blade straight,’ as Conan Doyle would have it. Sit, sit.”

Hawke, favoring his injured right leg, sat. He paid scant attention to such “on the job” injuries. They simply went with the territory. The nasty business in a Syrian prison hospital was already receding from memory.

“Most kind of you, sir. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

“Let’s see if you still feel that way at the conclusion. What are you drinking? My club, my treat,” Trulove said, catching a waiter’s eye.

“Gosling’s, please. The Black Seal, neat. So. Trouble, I take it,” Hawke said after C had ordered his rum.

“No end of it, sadly. The bloody Chinese again.”

“Something new? I thought I was fairly well up to speed.”

“Well, Alex, you know those inscrutable Mandarins in Beijing as well as I do. Always some new wrinkle up their red silk sleeves. It’s that abominable South China Sea situation, I’m afraid.”

“Heating up?”

“Boiling over.”

Hawke’s rum arrived. He took a sip and said, “What now, sir? Don’t tell me they’ve blockaded one of the world’s busiest trade routes.”

“No, no, not yet anyway. Still, simply outrageous behavior. They unilaterally extended their territorial claims in the South China Sea hundreds of miles south and east from their most southerly province of Hainan. All done with zero regard for international maritime law. They now claim a huge U-shaped area of the sea, a claim that overlaps areas that Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Brunei say belong to them.”

“Good Lord. With what possible justification?”

“Beijing says its right to the area comes from two thousand years of history, when the Paracel and Spratly island chains were regarded as integral parts of the Chinese nation. Vietnam says, rightly, that both island chains lie entirely within its territory. That it has actively ruled over both chains since the seventeenth century and has the documents to prove it.”

“Bastards have created a flash point as dangerous as the Iranians and the Strait of Hormuz. Clearly global implications.”

“Yes. And now they’ve begun making intolerable demands. They’re demanding that every vessel transiting these formerly wide-open routes must first ask permission of the Chinese government. We will not, bloody hell, ask them permission for any such thing! Nor will anyone else.”

“Of course not. And the Western countermove?”

“The United States is dramatically increasing its naval presence in the region, of course. And, as you well know, they’ve deployed U.S. Marines to Darwin in Australia. Meanwhile, the PM, in a weak moment, actually had an extraordinary idea. The allies are going to assemble a massive convoy, Alex. Warships from the Royal Navy, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Yanks with an entire carrier battle group, and seven or eight other countries. Full steam ahead under their bloody noses and see what they do about it.”

“Well, for starters, they might take out a U.S. carrier with one of their killer satellites.”

“Hmm. Good to see the Syrians didn’t break your brain as well as your leg. That is a consideration, Alex. A few pantywaists in the U.S. Congress are thus far unwilling to go along with the scheme for fear of losing one of their billion-dollar babies. So, our convoy scheme is paralyzed at the moment. But, look, we’re not going to sit around on our arses and let this stand. Not for one blasted moment.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“You mean what are you going to do about it, dear boy. That’s why I’m springing for lunch.”

“No free lunch, as they say.”

“Never.”

“How can I help, sir? I’ve been deemed fit for active service as of yesterday morning.”

C looked around to establish if anyone was within earshot and then said, “We at Six have established a back-channel communication with a high-ranking Chinese naval officer. Someone with a working brain in his head who doesn’t want to go to war over his government’s deliberate and insane maritime provocation any more than we do.”

“This sounds good.”

“It is. Very.”

Hawke leaned forward and quietly said, “The Chinese are well aware that they cannot possibly afford to go to war with the West now. In a decade, perhaps, but certainly not now.”

“Of course not. It’s an obvious political ploy, albeit an extremely dangerous one. They wish to divert attention from their burgeoning internal domestic turmoil, particularly Tibet, with a bellicose show of force. Show the peasant population and the increasingly restive middle class just how powerful they now are.”

“Sheer insanity.”

“But you’re going to put a stop to it, Lord Hawke. I’ve arranged a secret rendezvous for you with Admiral Tiao Tsang on a small island in a remote quadrant of the South China Sea. It was formerly a Japanese air force base, now abandoned because of the territorial dispute. There’s an eight-thousand-foot airstrip there that should accommodate you nicely.”

“What kind of bus am I driving?”

“An American F-16 Viper. One of ours. Especially modified for nighttime insertions. All the latest offensive and defensive goodies, I assure you. Kinetic energy weapons and all that sort of thing.”

“Lovely airplane. Always wanted a crack at one.”

“You’ll get one first thing tomorrow morning at Lakenheath RAF. Three days of intensive flight training with a USAF chief instructor off your wingtip. Then off you go into the wild blue yonder.”

“This Admiral Tsang. How high ranking is he, exactly? I mean to say, is he actually powerful enough to defuse this thing?”

“Very high. Chinese chief of naval operations. You’ll find an obsessively complete dossier waiting for you when you get home. Memorize it and burn it. Now then, Alex, what will you have for lunch?”

A keening wail suddenly filled the Viper’s cockpit. Holy God, he’d just been painted by enemy radar! He whipped his head around and saw the Chinese SAM missile’s exhaust flame streaking toward his Viper’s afterburner. A HongQi 61A. Where the hell had it come from? Some kind of Chinese radar-proof shore battery on a nearby atoll? None of his so-called sophisticated gadgetry had even picked the damn thing up!

He hauled back on the joystick and instantly initiated a vertical climb, standing the Viper on its tail and rocketing skyward. He deployed chaff aft and switched on the jamming devices located in the airplane’s tail section. He was almost instantaneously at forty thousand feet and climbing, his eyes locked on the missile displayed on his radar screen. Its unverified speed, Hawke knew, was Mach 3. It was closing fast.

The deadly little bastard blew right through his chaff field without a single degree of deviation. The Chinese were not behaving according to MI6’s assessment of their military capability. With every passing second, his appointment with death went from possible to probable. He’d have to depend on the aircraft’s jamming devices and his own evasive maneuvers to survive.

He nosed the Viper over and put it into a screaming vertical dive, gaining himself precious seconds. The HongQi would have to recalculate before altering course and getting on his six again. He’d known from the second the SAM missile appeared on his screen that there was only one maneuver that stood a gnat’s chance of saving him.

A crash dive straight down into the sea.

Hairy, but sometimes effective. To succeed, however, he had to allow the deadly weapon to get dangerously close to impacting and destroying the Viper. So close in fact that when he pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant, he would be so near to the water’s surface that the missile would have zero time to correct before it hit the water doing Mach 3.

The missile nosed over as Hawke had and honed in. It was now closing at a ridiculous rate. His instrument panel told him he was clearly out of his bloody mind. The ingrained human instinct to run, to change course and escape, clawed around the edges of his conscious mind. But he’d erected a firewall around it that was impenetrable in times like this.

It was those few precious white-hot moments precisely like this one that Alex Hawke lived for. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a warrior to the bone and he was bloody good at it. His focus at this critical moment, fueled by adrenaline, was borderline supernatural. His altimeter display screen was a blur, but he didn’t see it; the collision-avoidance alarms were screaming in his headphones, but he didn’t hear them. His grip on the stick was feather light, his hands bone dry and surgeon steady.

His mind was calmly calculating the differential between the seconds remaining until the missile impacted the Viper and the seconds until the Viper impacted the sea. Ignoring his immediate surroundings, all the screeching alarms and flashing electronic warnings, Alex Hawke began his final mental countdown. The surface of the sea was approaching at a dizzying rate…

Five… four… three… two…

NOW!

He pulled back on the stick and brought his nose up. He noticed beads of water racing across the exterior of his canopy and figured he might have caught the top of a wave coming out of the dive….

You can’t get any closer in this kind of situation than when you get your nose wet. Some smart-ass RN combat instructor had said that lo those many years ago. He barely heard the impact of the missile over the roar of his afterburners, but he did. He was in the clear and could easily visualize it, vaporizing upon contact with the concrete hard water at that speed….

G forces were fierce as he initiated his climb back to his former below-the-radar altitude. That’s when his starboard wingtip caught a cresting wave that sent his aircraft out of control. He was skimming over the sea like a winged Frisbee. He felt a series of jolts as the fuselage made contact a couple of times and instinctively understood that the aircraft was seconds away from disintegrating right out from under his arse.

He reached down and grabbed the red handle to his right, yanked it, and the canopy exploded upward into the airstream and disappeared. The rocket motors beneath his seat instantly propelled him out of the spinning cockpit and straight up into the black sky. Seconds later, his chute deployed and he had a bird’s-eye view of his airplane turning into varying sizes of scrap-heap metal and disappearing into the deep.

He yanked the cord, which disengaged him from his seat, watched it fall, and moments later his boots hit the water. It was cold as hell, but he started shedding gear as quickly as he could. He was unhurt at least and able to tread water until his life jacket inflated. So far so good, he thought, keeping his spirits up surprisingly well for a downed airman all alone.

Normally, there’d be an EPIRB attached to his shoulder harness. Upon contact with water, it would immediately begin broadcasting his GPS coordinates to a passing satellite. He could hang out for a while here in the South China Sea and wait for one of Her Majesty’s Navy choppers to pluck him out of the water and winch him up. But of course he had no distress radio beacon, no EPIRB.

He figured the water temperature was cold enough to kill him eventually, but the thermal body suit he wore would stave off hypothermia long enough for him to have a shot at survival.

He spun his body through 360 degrees. Nothing. No lights on the horizon, no planes in the sky. Nada. Nothing but a vast black sea stretching away in all directions. No EPIRB. No hope of immediate rescue. He was some fifty miles off the southern coast of China. If he was lucky, he was in a shipping channel. He looked at his dive watch. Five hours minimum until sunrise. Nothing to do but hang here in limbo and see what happened next.

It didn’t take long.

He felt the pressure of sudden underwater movement just before he felt a soft nudge in the small of his back. No pain, just a tentative probing by some large fish. Exactly what kind of fish it might have been was a question he preferred not to speculate about. But the words wouldn’t go away. The bad one was snout. That was what it had felt like. Then there was the really bad one.

Shark.

Minutes later there was another hit. A jarring slam to the rib cage on his right side. He’d glimpsed the shark’s dorsal fin slicing toward him maybe two seconds before impact. It hurt like a bastard. He turned slowly in the water, minimizing his movements. Even in the pitch-black, he could see the dorsal fins circling lazily around him. He knew a little bit about shark behavior. Right now they were merely curious about this new object in the neighborhood.

This could go either way. They could get bored with him and disappear. Or, the other way, they could shred him into several large chunks, ripping away his limbs first before fighting over the torso. Staying positive in adverse conditions was one of his strengths, so that’s what he did. The more fins that appeared to encircle him, and the fact that his body was hanging there helplessly suspended in the freezing water, made it tough.

But Alex Hawke, it had to be said, was nothing if not tough.

He closed his eyes and immobilized his body. He forced himself to concentrate on all the good things in his life. His cherished son, named Alexei by his mother, was now just four years old. He could see him running through the dappled sunlight on the green meadow in Hyde Park. The child’s nurse, Nell, was chasing him, laughing. Nell was much more than a nanny. She was Hawke’s much-loved woman, somewhat of a legend at Scotland Yard, and, in truth, Alexei’s bodyguard. She had saved the little boy’s life on more than one occasion. He’d been targeted by the KGB, and one of Hawke’s greatest fears was leaving his son without a father.

An hour passed, a very long hour.

For whatever reason, God’s infinite mercy perhaps, the toothsome beasts had left him alone, at least for the moment. Cold had begun to claw its way inside his protective armor. He was shaking now, and his teeth were chattering away, much ado about nothing. It crossed his mind that freezing to death was a vastly better way to go than serving himself up as breakfast for the finny denizens of the deep.

He slept, God knows how long.

And then the lights came on.

Literally.

He found himself the target of a shaft of pure white light. He looked up to his left and saw its source. A searchlight mounted high on the superstructure of a massive aircraft carrier. Then another, and another, both lower and near the deck, picked him out. And then, to his right, he became aware of the deep bass thumping of helicopter rotor blades. A spotlight from the chopper picked him up, and he saw a diver appear in the opening in the side of the fuselage.

Could this possibly be a friendly? The odds were certainly against it, given China’s recent military posturing in this little corner of the world. The diver splashed down about six feet away and hopes for a miracle vanished when he told Hawke to remain calm in Mandarin. Then he went about securing the lifting harness to Hawke’s body.

Hawke had spent a lot of time in mainland China with his friend and companion, the great Scotland Yard criminalist Ambrose Congreve. In addition to being a brilliant detective, Ambrose had studied languages at Cambridge. While doing a six-month stint in a Beijing prison for “subversive activities” that had never been proven, Congreve had given Hawke a rudimentary, but substantial, working knowledge of Chinese.

“In the nick of time,” Hawke said to the diver in his native tongue.

“What?”

“You arrived just in time. I was slowly freezing to death.”

“Silence. No conversation.”

“Have it your way. Just trying to be friendly.”

Hawke and his rescuer were winched up and into the belly of the Chinese Ahkoi helo. Nobody aboard would talk to him. He was sure they knew an unidentified aircraft had entered their airspace and had been shot down (they imagined) by one of their missiles. So they were sensibly predisposed not to be chatty. Hell with them — he was still alive, wasn’t he? He’d gotten out of tougher scrapes than this one over the years.

The initial interrogation aboard the Chinese carrier was short but brutal. Still, he’d gotten out of it with little more real damage than three broken fingers and a mild concussion. They’d told him he’d never leave this ship alive, then locked him up inside a stinking crew cabin in the bowels of the bilge with room for little more than a crappy bunk bed. He now lay on the top berth thinking very seriously about how the hell to escape.

Two military policemen with automatic weapons had delivered him to this lovely boudoir. He was fairly certain the same two would come for him when it was time for the more labor-intensive interrogation. They were thugs, those two, viciously abusive but stupid. Just the way he liked them. He’d feigned a far worse concussion than he’d actually suffered, forcing them to half carry him down many flights of stairs, something that they did not appear to enjoy.

He was consciously unconscious when they slammed into the tiny space and pulled him down from the upper berth. As he expected, they yanked him to his feet and wrapped his arms around their shoulders in order to keep him moving. He kept his head down, mumbling incoherently. When the MP on his left paused to kick open the half-closed door, he used the moment to grab a fistful of hair on each man’s head and violently slam their skulls together hard enough to cause them to sink to the floor. He checked. They were out for the long count.

He quickly stripped the uniform from the taller of the two. It fit him badly, but it was good enough to get him up eight flights of metal steps to the carrier’s deck level without incident. Hawke had jet-black hair, which helped, and he kept the cap brim pulled down and his face lowered. He also had the advantage of carrying an automatic rifle in case things got spicy.

He saw a sailor open a hatch in the bulkhead and felt the cold blast of icy wind howl in from the flight deck. He waited sixty seconds and then stepped through to the outside himself. He had no earthly idea how he was going to execute the plan he’d devised, but that was of little concern. You had to be able to make this stuff up as you went along. He heard a sizable group of men laughing as they approached his position and stepped back into the shadows.

Pilots.

There were eight of them, all in flight suits and some wearing their helmets, some holding them loosely in their hands, kidding around, walking with that cocky jet-jock walk. They were obviously en route across the expanse of darkened deck to their covey of Sukhoi 33 carrier aircraft being readied for immediate launch. He remained hidden between two huge storage lockers behind the bulwark until just after they had passed. Then he fell in behind them, quickening his pace until he caught up with the lone straggler at the rear. Fortunately, he was by far the tallest of the lot.

He approached his target from directly behind, shot out both hands, and used his thumbs on the carotid artery, to paralyze the poor fellow and still keep him on his feet. He gave the main group of pilots time to continue on, then pulled the unconscious one back into the shadows of the storage lockers. It was the work of a moment to zip himself inside the pilot’s jumpsuit and don his boots and helmet and flip the visor down. He strode quickly, but not too quickly, across the deck and caught up with the jocular pilots just as they were climbing into their respective Sukhois.

He made a beeline straight for the sole unoccupied fighter, then saluted the two attending crewmen who stood aside for him to mount the cockpit ladder.

“Lovely night for flying, boys,” he muttered in guttural Chinese, sliding himself down into the seat. After strapping himself in, he reached forward and flipped the switch that lowered the canopy. Then he studied the instrument array and illuminated controls, quickly deciding exactly what did what. The Chinese had stolen so much aeronautical technology from the West that getting the hang of things was embarrassingly easy.

He gave a hand signal to the crewmen below, lit the candle, and taxied into position behind the last jet in line for the center catapult. The blast shield had already risen from the deck behind the first jet in the squadron, and Hawke watched as the fighter was flung out over the ocean, afterburner glowing white hot.

He must have been daydreaming because he suddenly heard the air boss screaming at him in his headphones, telling him to get his ass moving. The aircraft in front of him had advanced into position and he’d not followed immediately. Now he added a touch of power and tucked in where he belonged. There remained only three planes ahead of him.

“So sorry, Boss,” he muttered in the time-honored traditional communicative style of fighter pilots all over the world. On a carrier, the air boss is God himself.

“Don’t let it happen again, Passionflower, or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Shanghai.”

“Roger that, sir,” Hawke said, advancing once more.

“You forget something in your preflight, Passionflower?”

“No, sir,” Hawke said.

“Yeah? Check your fucking nav lights switch for me, just humor me.”

Shit. He hadn’t turned them on. Dumb mistake and he couldn’t afford to be dumb at this point, not in the slightest.

“You awake down there, son? I’m inclined to pull your ass out of line.”

“Sir, no sir. I’m good to go.”

“Yeah, well, you damn well better be. I’ve got my eye on you now, honey. You screw up even a little bit on this mission this morning and your ass is mine. You believe me?”

“Sir, I always believe you. But I’ll come back clean, I swear it.”

“Damn right you will. Now get the hell off my boat, Passionflower. I got more important things than little pissants like you to worry about. You’re up.”

Hawke moved forward and engaged the catapult hook inside its buried track. He heard the blast shield rumble up into position behind him and looked to his left, nodding, a signal to the launch chief that he was poised and ready. The man raised his right arm and dropped it, meaning any second now. Hawke’s right hand automatically went to the “oh-shit bar” on the right-hand side of the canopy.

Adrenaline flooded Hawke’s veins as he gripped the bar with his right hand. Being launched violently into space by a modern carrier catapult was as close as any human being can come to the experience of being in a catastrophic fatal car crash and surviving. It was that intense.

Early on, after a lot of expensive hardware had gone into the drink, some aeronautical genius had figured out that most pilots instinctively grabbed the aircraft’s controls too quickly after launch. It’s scary to feel out of control when your wheels separate from the mother ship. Now every fighter had a handhold forward and to the right inside the canopy. You grabbed it just before they pulled the trigger. Thus its name, the oh-shit bar.

During a “cat shot,” the time it took you to remove your hand from that bar and take hold of the controls was precisely, to the nanosecond, the right amount of time needed to elapse before you seized control after leaving the leading edge of the deck.

He was airborne.

He looked back down at the deck lights of the Varyag, the carrier growing rapidly smaller as he gained altitude. He suppressed any feelings of joy over escaping an agonizing death at the hands of the most sophisticated torturers on the planet. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, he told himself, as he climbed upward to join “his” squadron’s flight. Their heading was a northerly course that would take them over the Paracel Islands. Exactly the wrong direction. He needed to be headed south-southeast and he needed to get moving or he’d miss his rapidly diminishing window: the one chance he had to try to defuse a crisis with global implications.

The rim of the earth was edged in violent pink as he slipped into his designated slot at the rear of the tight formation. There was a minimum of radio chat for which he was thankful. There was normally a lot of banter at this stage and he didn’t want to hear any questions or inside wisecracks over the radio that he couldn’t respond to without sacrificing his cover. He needed precious time to remain anonymous until he could figure out how the hell to peel off and head for his mission destination without arousing the slightest suspicion.

He knew what he had to do now, although he didn’t much like it.

Land on the island airstrip on Xiachuan Island. Meet with this Chinese Admiral Tsang and fulfill C’s back-channel charge as best he could. Find a strategic way to avert the imminent showdown and eliminate another global flash point. He didn’t much like the fact that a high-tech SAM had been launched at him streaking across some dinky little atoll in the middle of nowhere. And that a Chinese carrier just happened to be sailing the sea-lane where he went down? No. He simply couldn’t shake the distinct impression that this might all be an elaborate setup. That the wily Chinese were going to use his violation of their airspace as proof positive that the West was being deliberately provocative.

They’d trot out his blackened corpse and twisted pieces of his American fighter jet on global TV. Use him to justify an even more aggressive posture in the South China Sea. Take retaliatory measures against Taiwan, Japan, or Vietnam. Next step, war. That’s how he saw it, anyway. C might disagree. But C wasn’t sitting in the hot seat with his ass on the line.

He now had little choice. He flew on with the formation, heading north toward the Pacific. He looked at his watch, calculated time and distance to his target. A long way to go and a short time to get there. And suddenly it came to him.

He thumbed the transmit button on his radio.

“Flight leader, flight leader, this is, uh, Passionflower, over.”

“Roger, Passionflower, this is Red Flight Leader. Go ahead, over.”

“Experiencing mechanical difficulties. System malfunctions, over.”

“What’s your situation?”

“I’m flying hot, sir. Engine overheat. It’s getting worse. Running override system checks now. Doesn’t look good.”

“Are you declaring an emergency?”

“Negative, negative. I think I can throttle back and make it home to mother. Request permission to abort and return, over.”

“Permission granted, over.”

“Roger that, Red Flight Leader. Passionflower returning to the Varyag, over.”

Hawke peeled away from the formation and went into a steep diving turn away from his flight. The sun was up now, just a sliver above the horizon, streaks of red light streaming across the sea below. When Red Flight was out of radar range, he corrected course and went to full throttle. By his latest calculations, he’d touch down just in time. He sat back and allowed himself his first smile in hours.

If he didn’t get blown out of the sky, it promised to be another beautiful day in Paradise.