Red Cell

CHAPTER 17

Kyra had Vulture’s Row to herself. The open-air balcony gave her a broad view of Lincoln’s flattop, from which F/A-18E/F Super Hornets were launching and landing at a steady clip. The rain had stopped and the sky was just light enough after the dawn that she could make out the contours of the other surface vessels in Lincoln’s group. An experienced military analyst could tell a vessel’s class by its shape. Kyra wished for a moment that she’d had that training and supposed that Jonathan could do it. She knew these naval officers could do it. Regret welled up, surprisingly strong and sudden, that she’d never served in the military. Kyra had considered it. She had even taken the military ASVAB exam after high school and managed a perfect score. Recruiters had called her at home for nine months after, but her father forbade her from entering the service. Peter Stryker was a high-minded liberal UVA political science professor with a religious streak who had protested the Vietnam War, still thought soldiers were baby-killers, and had threatened to disown her if she joined the military that he hated so much. He hadn’t carried through on his threat when she had joined the CIA only because her cover status gave her a reason not to tell him, and she never would if she could avoid it. He’d wanted his daughter to become an activist lawyer but had at least made peace with her being an entry-level executive in a software company. Kyra was sure they would never talk again if she ever told him the truth. What she wasn’t sure about was whether that would bother her. They talked little enough as it was.

A brief suspension of flight operations had given her a few hours of unbroken sleep until the first launches began without warning. Kyra had pulled herself from the bunk, piled her hair under a blue Lincoln ball cap she’d charmed off an ensign the day before, and made her way to Vulture’s Row to watch. All four of the catapults were engaged. The carrier had already launched its support aircraft and was now sending up its fighter squadrons in short order. The noise generated by the multiple screaming Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce jet engines during the first launch had been overwhelming. Kyra was forced to scrounge a pair of ear protectors, these off a first lieutenant who was eager to spend five minutes talking to a woman.

She wasn’t counting but was sure at least twenty or more Super Hornets had taken to the air in the last few minutes, and now F-35s were moving onto the flight deck. Lincoln was going to war. Kyra wondered why Pollard hadn’t evacuated her and Jonathan to the mainland. Maybe the admiral didn’t want to risk a departing helicopter or Greyhound giving away the carrier’s position.

She felt a hand tap her shoulder and turned. Jonathan waved her inside. She followed him through the hatch, pulled the heavy metal door closed to seal out the sound, though some still penetrated the bulkheads, and pulled her ear protection down so she could hear the senior analyst.

“Nice trick, scrounging the muffs,” he said. “I couldn’t get anyone to loan me a pair.”

“You don’t have the same draw with men who’ve been at sea too long,” Kyra said.

“No doubt,” Jonathan said. “The admiral invited us to camp out in the Tactical Flag Command Center when the shooting starts.”

“Safest place on the ship to keep two civvies from getting hurt during the fight?” Kyra asked. The TFCC was below the flight deck near Pollard’s quarters, almost directly underneath catapult number one.

“If the Chinese start shooting at us, there won’t be any safe place on the ship,” Jonathan said. That shook her a bit, he saw, and it was understandable. Playing with the MSS on the Beijing streets had been dangerous, but her training had offered her a degree of control over events. She wouldn’t get that if a Chinese antiship missile was inbound.

“You think we’ll get hit?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Always a possibility. But attacking a drone is one thing. Attacking a carrier is quite something else. The public handles stories about downed Reapers better than pictures of ships with holes in them. We might just find out how committed the Chinese really are.”

“If the Mace works and we can’t prove the Chinese attacked us, wouldn’t that be irrelevant? Isn’t that what it’s for?”

“If the Mace blows a hole in this ship, the president won’t be sending carriers into Chinese waters anytime soon,” Jonathan said. “That’s what the Mace is for.”

The E-2C Hawkeyes were the first planes to go up. Lincoln only had four of the airborne early warning planes and they would not be straying far from the fleet. All four pushed immediately for higher altitudes, almost to their limit of thirty thousand feet, turned south, and spread into a quarter-arc formation with a fifty-mile spread. Washington sent four more aloft at nearly the same time. They mirrored the half arc to the north, forming a shallow half circle together with their Lincoln brothers that started west of Taiwan’s midpoint and reached to the island’s southern end. Together with the two AWACS aircraft from Kadena and Guam circling behind the airborne line, there were ten aircraft aloft whose raison d’être was radar tracking. Together, their connected radar network would have been overkill for managing the destruction of almost any air force in the world. On this day, they were looking for a single plane and the combined crews were left wondering if they were enough.

The S-3B Vikings left the carrier deck next. Their missions for the day were midair refueling. All carried buddy fuel tanks under their wings. They stopped their ascent at a mere five thousand feet and began slow orbits of their carriers, waiting for the next aircraft that would be leaving the decks.

The EA-6B Prowlers followed. Two had been aloft since before dawn, providing electronic cover for the carrier by jamming Chinese radars. They would be landing shortly to refuel and switch flight crews before going back up to join their brothers.

Lincoln’s F-18 Hornets took their turns after the Prowlers. They all turned northwest from Lincoln’s once they were in the air. Washington’s own Hornets lined up on the deck with four waiting on the catapults. They would sit on the deck, their pilots antsy to fight but not launching until Lincoln’s fighters engaged the enemy. Once Lincoln’s planes began running low on fuel and ammunition, Washington’s second wave would move in and cover their brothers’ withdrawal.

The Bounty Hunters’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighters went up last. They turned west as one and pulled away from the carrier fleet. They lowered their noses and did not level out until they had reached an altitude of one hundred feet above the waves of the Taiwan Strait.

Nagin was the last to go up. He flew in formation with the Bounty Hunters for two minutes, then rolled away, pulled back on his stick, and climbed for the sky.

Lincoln herself was hugging Taiwan’s southwestern coast. The position gave the small fleet the maximum distance between itself and China’s land-based forces and effectively prevented any PLA subs from sneaking up anywhere on Lincoln’s starboard side. The American ships were under EMCON — emissions control, radio silence. That and the Prowlers’ electronic jamming would make finding the fleet a hard job for the PLA Air Force, at least until Pollard wanted that situation to change.

“This is not a good idea.” Lieutenant Sam Roselli and his EP-3 Aries crew had taken off from Kadena hours before. “Same schedule, same flight plan. We’ll get the same MIGs off our wing and the same missile lock up our tail.”

“Somebody has to be the bait,” Lieutenant Julie Ford said. “Might as well be us.” The radar track showed several MIG combat air patrols off the coast and eight E2-C Hawkeyes dispersed in a north-south arc with a pair of AWACS birds circling behind. Some commercial traffic was heading east away from Taiwan and in various directions from the Chinese coast. There were no US fighters even close to the EP-3’s altitude.

“I’d feel better if I could see ’em.” Stealth planes flying on the waves weren’t easy for anyone to see, allies or enemies alike. The laws of physics didn’t discriminate between American and Chinese radar receivers, especially when the Vikings were out there doing their electronic warfare voodoo.

“They’re out here,” Ford said. Unless the entire mission had gone totally FUBAR from the start. She hoped Admiral Pollard aboard the Lincoln would have the courtesy to let them know if that was the case.

The EP-3’s HUD flashed a change. At least two dozen icons appeared in sequence over the Chinese coast on the radar track Ford and Roselli were sharing with the Hawkeyes. The icons formed up after several minutes in the air and began moving east. “I guess the PLA wants to see what’s going on,” Roselli said.

“Come to Mama,” Ford said.

Three of the triangles broke away from the main group. “Three contacts inbound, bearing two-zero-seven, range thirty miles,” one of the Hawkeyes reported. Ford stared at the HUD. The Su-27s were approaching too fast for comfort, using their afterburners for no good reason other than to intimidate the much slower EP-3. You can’t run was the message.

All done running, she hoped.

It was a very short minute before three Su-27s rocketed past the Aries faster than the speed of sound. The sonic boom shook the EP-3, and the turbulence increased as the prop-driven plane passed through the roiled air. Roselli pushed forward on the stick until the aircraft reached calmer air a thousand feet below. The MIGs turned and reduced speed to match the US Navy plane’s course.

“Tallyho. Weren’t we just here?” Roselli muttered.

Two of the MIGs flanked the EP-3, one off each wing, with a third holding position behind. “Lead bandit is on our six,” Ford announced. She looked to starboard. The Su-27 was close enough that she could see into the cockpit through the canopy. The PLA pilot waved at her, signaling for the EP-3 to change course. Ford shook her head. We’re in international airspace and you know it, she thought.

The flight leader didn’t disappoint. The EP-3’s threat receiver lit up on schedule. “Bandit just lit us up!” Ford announced. This time Roselli didn’t push the stick forward to dive for the waves. And he knew that this time his hand was shaking for certain.

“This is fun,” he muttered.

“Break!” Nagin ordered. The PLA Air Force, already engaged in active hostilities against Taiwanese territories, had just threatened a US Navy aircraft over international waters. At least that would be the story recounted in the UN Security Council. The Chinese would deny that they intended to shoot the EP-3 down, but the positive radar lock and the ongoing war would make it difficult for the Chinese ambassador to argue against the USS Abraham Lincoln coming to the defense of an unarmed US aircraft under the circumstances.

Lincoln’s unstealthy Hornets had held back over fifty miles to the rear, leading the Chinese pilots to think those were the closest American fighters. It was a bad assumption. The Bounty Hunters had held their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters at less than a hundred feet above the waves while flying in circles around the EP-3’s course. The Su-27s’ radar washed harmlessly off the Bounty Hunters, the energy deflected in every direction except back toward the Chinese planes. With the EP-3 now under threat of hostile fire, every US Navy fighter pilot in the area pulled back on the stick and the planes climbed for the sky in a wide sunburst formation that would have made the Blue Angels proud.

“There!” Ford yelled. An absurd number of icons appeared on the radar in a circle around their position almost simultaneously, and they were close. The fact that the radar returns on the new planes were holding steady meant that their missile bays were open.

It took less than a second for the Chinese pilots to prove they had seen the same on their HUDs, though she doubted the enemy pilots knew what they were up against. Every Su-27 was getting multiple threat warnings off their receivers, and the Chinese fighters began banking and rolling hard enough that Ford wondered whether the Chinese pilots weren’t seeing spots from the g-forces pulling the blood away from their brains and down to their legs.

“That’s our cue,” Roselli said. He pushed forward on the stick and the nose dropped. “Elvis is leaving the building.” There was no sense in giving the PLA another target. He suspected that the MIGs would be far too busy to go after his aircraft, but he was not a gambler at heart, even without the rest of his regular crew on board.

The F-35s were in near-vertical climbs. All of them found a missile lock on a dancing MIG and began maneuvering to keep the Chinese fighters within their firing envelope. One of the PLA pilots pulled his aircraft around toward the ascending stealth fighters and the lead F-35 roared past the Su-27’s nose less than two hundred feet out. The Chinese aviator reacted on instinct and pulled the trigger on his gun for a half second before realizing what he’d done. The rounds missed, but the tracers were visible.

“We are taking fire!” someone announced over the comm.

“Weapons free,” Nagin ordered.

The targeted F-35 pulled left, banked over, and rolled to wings level. The AMRAAM in his open bay dropped out and shot forward. The rocket motor burned for less than two seconds before the warhead struck the MIG’s airframe and ripped the plane in half. The stealth fighter’s weapons bay snapped shut, restoring the plane’s stealth profile. The dead Su-27’s wingman was maneuvering for a shot when the F-35 suddenly dropped off his radar track. The Chinese pilot screamed Mandarin curses into his microphone.

The Battle of the Taiwan Strait had begun. The Chinese had fired first. The Americans had drawn first blood.

The TFCC was not designed for beauty. Exposed cables and pipes ran through the ceilings and electronics were sticking out of the walls in almost random fashion. Kyra couldn’t find any logic or order to the layout, but she was sure that the design made sense to somebody. And it was cold, which did make sense when she thought about it. Nuclear-powered air conditioning, she realized.

Pollard had left the line open to CIC. “Fire up the network.”

Every vessel in the Lincoln fleet turned on its air-search radar almost simultaneously and flooded the air with electromagnetic radiation. The Hawkeye and AWACS rotodomes added their own radar beams to the sweeps running across the battle zone.

The first waves reached the MIGs and struck every surface in direct line of sight of a radar transmitter. The flattened surfaces of the Su-27s reflected huge amounts of energy back to their points of origin. The radar energy traveled at light speed; every transmitter afloat and in the air received solid hits from the Chinese planes in microseconds. The MIGs’ onboard computers screamed as they detected the energy emissions and their pilots had a new problem to worry about.

The same radar waves reached the F-35s. The stealth planes’ airframes absorbed much of the energy and the nonmetal composites under the skin let more through unhindered to pass out the other side and into space. The minimal energy that remained struck the carefully curved surfaces and rebounded in every direction possible away from their transmitters. None of the ships and planes scanning the air received more than an unmeasurable fraction of its own radar energy back from the stealth fighters.

“This’ll be the craziest furball the Chinese have ever seen,” Pollard muttered. “A dogfight where you can only see half of the planes.” Lincoln could tell where its birds were only by interrogating their transponders. The F-35s reflected radar from Lincoln the same as it did from the Chinese. One of the techs in the TFCC filtered out the transponder returns for a few moments at Pollard’s request so the admiral could see what the PLA would see, and it was bizarre. The carrier’s receivers picked up occasional weak returns from the radars mounted aboard the Hawkeyes, the AWACS, other ships in the fleet, and even the F-35s themselves, but the signals were broken up, and so the CIC screens marked the F-35s sporadically, like fireflies sparkling in a dark field. Washington’s F-18s moved through Taiwanese airspace, flying close to the deck, but Kyra could tell that they were holding their distance and holding down their speed to preserve fuel until they engaged, and she assumed that the second carrier’s F-35s were close to the inbound Hornets. She was impressed by their radio discipline. The pilots were probably crawling out of their flight suits to join the fight.

“Why are they dropping in and out?” one of Pollard’s aides asked, an ensign whose name Kyra hadn’t bothered to learn. The icons marking the MIGs’ positions were moving in arcs around the screen, steady, bright, and disappearing at a steady pace. More were moving east from the Chinese coast.

“Stealth works best when radar is monostatic, where transmitters and receivers are near the same location. But if the target sends enough of the radar wave in a different direction, the receivers don’t see anything,” Pollard said. “Putting the Hawkeyes and AWACS around the battle space in a circle to pick up those deflected waves breaks that model. It’s a multistatic radar net. The F-35s are reflecting the beams in different directions, but we have receivers where the radar beams were going to end up instead of where they were created. But when an F-35 makes a course change, it sends radar waves off in different directions from where it was sending them the second before. So no receiver in the net gets a constant reflection off a stealth fighter when it’s juking around. We need more airborne receivers. We’ve tried tuning some of the radars to the lower frequencies. Stealth doesn’t disperse radar waves in the lower bands well, but that’ll open the net up to more clutter — clouds and the like. We’ll never get accurate fixed position returns, but we might get an idea of where to look. It beats waiting for a visual contact on this Chinese stealth plane, assuming they have one.”

“And assuming they send it out,” Kyra muttered.

“Sir,” one of the techs called out to Pollard. “We have bandits taking off from the coast.” Multiple icons were appearing on the scope.

“Keep your eye on Fuzhou,” Pollard ordered. “Turn the Hornets loose.”

Nagin’s sense of duty alone kept him from pushing the stick forward and diving into the fight. The largest aerial battle since the Second World War had erupted three miles below him, and it made him sick that he had to stay above it. Navy aces were being made, the first since Vietnam, and he wouldn’t be one of them. At most, he would shoot down one plane today. If there was no Assassin’s Mace, the CAG likely would return to Lincoln as the only Bounty Hunter not to score at least a single kill, given the number of MIGs moving out from the coast. The PLA Air Force was offering his squadrons an embarrassment of targets and more were coming from the west.

He rolled his plane to port to get an expanded view of the aerial battle. A second MIG exploded as a Bounty Hunter AMRAAM penetrated the fuselage at supersonic speed and ignited the jet fuel and ordnance. Nagin saw no parachute and another icon disappeared from his helmet HUD. The MIGs couldn’t even see half their enemies on their own radars, and to his practiced eye their maneuvers showed panic in their ranks. The Chinese pilots were trying to focus on the planes they could see, but the Hornets themselves were an even match in performance for the MIGs, the Hornet pilots more than a match, and the F-35s were a painful overmatch. Every time a Chinese fighter tried to maneuver behind one of the American planes they could see on radar, their wingmen began screaming about an F-35 lining up behind for a kill shot. It was turning into a one-sided slaughter. The Chinese were finding the stealth disadvantage was too great. Their only advantage was numbers. The Americans would start running out of missiles and fuel eventually, which forced the carriers to stagger the rate at which their forces joined the fight. The first wave would return to Lincoln as fighters from Washington moved in. The fight was taking place at the extreme edge of Lincoln’s air defense umbrella, where the ships themselves would began shooting Chinese planes out of the sky if the MIGs came too far east.

Enough of that, Nagin thought. He had a different mission from his brothers and it would be a stupid death if this so-called Assassin’s Mace shot him down while he was off watching the dogfight like a gawking plebe watching his first Army-Navy college football game. He started to roll wings-level when one of the Hornets pulled out of the fight into a high arc, pushing Mach 1, a MIG in close pursuit. The Hornet suddenly began dumping speed and pushing its nose higher. J-turn, Nagin realized. The American pilot — he couldn’t tell who — was forcing his plane into a stall and then would use his flight surfaces to reverse the turn. It was an advanced maneuver, difficult in a Hornet, and one that Nagin wouldn’t have tried in a large fight. Don’t get fancy, come around and let your wingman brush him off. Plenty of targets, you’ll get yours.

The MIG pilot was better trained than Nagin would have thought. The Chinese aviator recognized the J-turn and moved inside the curve to line up a kill shot. In a moment, the Hornet would be hanging in the air, as close to motionless as a Navy fighter ever got when it was off the ground, like a piñata waiting for a child to smack it with a bat. But the MIG was too close and the pilot overestimated the time he had to close the distance. The Hornet dropped more speed and the arc of his turn shallowed. The MIG pilot finally saw the danger and tried to pull away too late. The MIG-27 just missed the Hornet’s fuselage and the two planes sheared off each other’s wings instead.

Nagin held his breath, rolled and banked, and began a slow turn to keep eyes on the dead Hornet. Neither plane exploded on impact, but the Hornet was in a fast tumbling spin and the air around it was thick with burning jet fuel for the few moments before it began a death spiral down. The metal husk fell through its own flaming fuel, smoke now pouring from the burning skin of the fuselage.

Get out, Nagin thought. He hoped the other pilot was still conscious.

“Jumper is hit!” someone yelled over the comm.

Every alarm in the dying US fighter was screaming, and Jumper, rookie though he was, didn’t need anyone to tell him it was time to leave. The Hornet pilot reached between his legs, pulled the handle, and then crossed his arms. Explosive bolts in the windscreen fired, blowing the windscreen away from the fuselage. The rocket motors under him fired, driving the Martin-Baker ACES II ejection seat up its rails and out of the plane. The rockets burned off their propellant, the seat fell away, and the chute opened automatically. He wondered if the Chinese ejection seats were as reliable. The answer, it seemed, was no.

“Lincoln, I confirm one chute,” Nagin said like he was reading the newspaper. Another US naval aviator had just become a lifetime member of the Martin-Baker Fan Club, though the seat’s rocket motors manufactured by that company had shortened the man’s spine by a half inch. The downed pilot would not complain. The Chinese pilot was learning that the alternative was far worse.

“CSAR, go!” CIC ordered. One of the combat search-and-rescue Sea-hawk helicopters circling the carrier peeled away and rushed forward toward the fight. It would stay a hundred feet off the deck to avoid the Chinese radars as long as possible. They could have flown higher. The MIGs now had more pressing problems than trying to spot helicopters, but if not, the CSAR pilots wouldn’t have been deterred anyway. No Americans would die in the waters of the Taiwan Strait if they could prevent it, and enemy fire was not going to stop them from at least making the attempt.

A pair of triangles on the master screen moved out of the fight and began arcing far too close to Lincoln’s position. “Two bandits inbound, bearing two-three-zero, range forty miles!” one of the junior officers yelled.

“They’re going for the escorts. Probably trying to open a hole to the carrier,” Jonathan told Kyra. “Came around the fight from the southwest. Must be riding close to the water.” All of Lincoln’s fighters were out of position to intercept and none would be able to close the gap before the MIGs closed the distance for a missile shot.

“Worked for us,” Pollard said. The radar return off the two planes was intermittent. Shiloh was closer to the inbound planes but off-axis from their approach vector. Gettysburg was in a direct line. Pollard didn’t bother to radio out to the picket ship. Every captain in the battle group knew his primary job was to protect Lincoln even at the cost of his own vessel.

Two icons appeared, both moving away from the approaching MIGs and toward the carrier group. “Two vampires inbound on Gettysburg! Range thirty-five miles!”

“Helm, evasive. Fire control, stand by,” Kyra heard someone from Gettysburg order over the comm. She supposed it was the captain. Seven miles ahead of Lincoln, Gettysburg’s four General Electric gas turbine engines surged to full power, using all eighty-thousand horsepower to drive the ship into a hard turn through the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait.

“Range, twenty-five miles. Shiloh is firing,” one of the Lincoln’s techs said. The cruiser was off angle from the inbound missiles but was three nautical miles closer to the missiles and had the first shot.

The antiship missiles were Yingji-82 Eagle Strikes. The solid rocket boosters pushed the missiles to their maximum speed, then fell away into the sea, and the Yingjis’ turbojet engines kicked in. Both missiles settled at three meters above the Strait and pushed forward at just under Mach 1.

The two Jian-10B planes had dropped toward the sea once they broke away from the fight. They aimed for fifty feet above the waves, first hoping to get lost in the sea return to evade the AWACS and E-3A Sentry radars when they fired on Gettysburg, then to evade the picket ships’ fire control radars. It didn’t help. Both planes took direct hits from RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missiles. The pilots died instantly as they and their aircraft were almost vaporized between the missile warheads and their own flaming jet fuel.

“Hit!” Shiloh had knocked down one of the Yingji with a Phalanx Close-In Weapons Systems gun, which cut the odds in half for Gettsyburg, but her sister ship now had to defend itself. “One vampire inbound on Gettysburg, range seventeen miles, Mach point nine. Sir, it’s passed inside Shiloh’s firing envelope,” the tech observed. “CIWS guns didn’t have time to take the other one, and her RAMs won’t be able to catch it.”

“Deploy countermeasures.” Kyra heard Gettysburg’s commanding officer give the order over the comm. The man sounded like he was announcing the weather. Gettysburg’s chaff launchers began firing clouds of aluminum strips in front of the carrier, hoping to confuse the Yingji’s radars.

“Tracking,” Gettysburg’s Fire Control tech said. “The Artoos will get ’em.” The Ticonderoga-class cruiser’s Phalanx guns looked like the famous robot but were far more lethal.

“Hope you’re right,” Kyra heard Jonathan mutter.

One of Lincoln’s radar watch cut into the conversation. “Sir, I have an intermittent radar contact, bearing three-four-five, altitude twenty thousand feet, distance thirty miles.”

“Out of Fuzhou?” Pollard asked.

“That course is probable but not confirmed, sir.”

“And not one of ours?” Pollard asked. This contact wasn’t skimming the sea to get lost in the waves. The possible bogey was four miles above the Strait.

“No, sir,” the junior officer answered. “I’ve seen him twice. Unless I’m seeing three different planes or flocks of birds on a parallel course, this bogey came around the fight from the northwest. Constant bearing, decreasing range, distance and time between contacts are consistent with a single fighter.”

“You get that, Grizzly?” Pollard asked.

“Grizzly copies,” Nagin said. “Moving to intercept.” He pulled the stick right, rolled, and pointed his F-35 toward the northwest. He prayed that he would find seagulls.

“How many sailors on Gettysburg?” Kyra whispered to Jonathan.

“Four hundred, give or take.”

“Range ten miles,” someone said over the comm. “Gettysburg is firing.”

No safe place on a carrier, Kyra thought.

Not safe.

Jonathan looked down at his arm as Kyra squeezed it hard. The woman was starting to hyperventilate.

Gettysburg’s computers determined that the remaining Yingji was a threat without any help from the fire control technicians. Once its algorithms determined the Chinese missile was close enough, two rockets ignited and flew out of the deck launcher. They went supersonic, their infrared sensors locked onto the Yingji’s engine, and they closed the distance within seconds. The first RIM-116 warhead exploded within a few meters of the Eagle Strike and scattered a fragment cloud in its target’s path. The metal bits punctured the Chinese missile’s nose cone and damaged the stabilizing wings. In a fraction of a second, it shuddered in flight, yawed, and the airflow threw it into a circular spin off its flight path. The second RIM-116 finished the job an instant later. Its shrapnel punctured the Yingji’s engine and ignited the remaining fuel. The airframe tore itself apart. Chinese missile wreckage hit the Taiwan Strait at almost Mach 1, and bits of metal skipped across the waves for hundreds of yards.

“Lucky,” Pollard muttered. “Won’t get lucky forever.” Lincoln’s pilots were outnumbered and still eating the PLA alive anyway, but it wouldn’t last. Pollard was surprised that the Chinese Air Force hadn’t sent more aircraft after them, but that wouldn’t last either if they stayed in the Strait long enough. Chinese submarines could well have been advancing, but his instincts told him that was not the case. The Chinese seemed content with an aerial fight, which gave Pollard a very sick feeling inside. There was nothing to be gained by throwing older fighters and inferior pilots against the US Navy’s aviators and Tian knew it. The dogfight was holding the carrier in position to retrieve its planes, and now the radar network had picked up a possible hit.

“They’re playing with us,” he announced. “Maybe they wanted to try conventional arms before giving their science project a test run.” He checked the wall chronometer. “We’ve got ten minutes. If the PLA wants to keep fighting after that, Washington’s boys can have some fun.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Kyra muttered. She pushed past Jonathan and ran out into the passageway.

“Wait—,” he started.

“Sir?” the tech spoke up. “That intermittent contact has altered course. Now inbound, inside the outer screen. Thirty miles, constant bearing, decreasing range. It definitely arced around the furball, sir.”

Jonathan stared at the radar track.

The cloud cover at twenty thousand feet was patchy and gray and a brief spray of rainwater washed over his canopy. Nagin lifted the plane’s nose and climbed past the squall, then rolled his plane onto its side to look down. Another MIG-27 pilot died a mile below in a fireball that caught his attention.

“Lincoln, Grizzly. Negative on my scope, negative visual on that contact,” Nagin said. His heart was pounding hard, but years of practice kept his voice calm. “Do you have him?”

“Grizzly, Lincoln, no joy, repeat, no — Contact! Bogey on your four o’clock, one-zero-five, distance fifteen miles!” the radar tech radioed back.

Nagin held back from cursing on the open mic and turned his head. The bogey had passed him on the right, hiding in the cloud banks, and was arcing around behind him toward Lincoln. “No, you don’t,” he muttered. He pulled his stick right and put the F-35 into a hard turn that sent the blood in his body rushing toward his feet. He held the turn until he matched course, and a few seconds on the afterburner made up the distance. He rolled wings-level, the gray wall of vapor fell away, and his target ripped a hole in the cloud bank’s eastern edge.

“Lincoln, Grizzly, I have visual contact,” Nagin said.

The Assassin’s Mace was more beautiful than he had expected. Perhaps the unforgiving math of the Ufimtsev equations had forced the graceful design on Chinese engineers who had shown no aptitude for it before. It was also big, almost twice the size of Nagin’s F-35, big enough to carry any weapon in its bay that the Chinese cared to load. The stealth plane was a coal-black arrowhead, devoid of markings, with a razor blade profile. Its nose, stolen from the B-2, came straight back into a chined fuselage with tapered edges. Its delta wings started their outward spread at the midpoint of the body. Dual stabilizers rose from them, each canted inward at equal angles to the hard curve of the plane’s body. The cockpit windscreen was tinted the same coal-black color as the rest of the Mace, hiding its pilot from Nagin’s view but otherwise giving its pilot no advantage at the moment. In a moonless sky, the aircraft would have disappeared completely. The early morning sun robbed it of the advantage, but the storm clouds darkened the sky more than Nagin would have liked.

Pollard looked up at Burke. “Congratulations.”

“Thank me after he shoots it down,” Jonathan said.

“Where’s your partner?”

“Good question,” Jonathan said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be back.” He moved out into the passageway, looked both ways, then picked one and marched ahead.

Kyra reached the top of the metal ladder, then pressed her body against the bulkhead as a pair of sailors rushed by on their way down. She resumed her stumbling run. The bulkheads were closing around her and she shut her eyes to keep them away, then looked ahead again. She needed air and there was only one place on the carrier she could get outside without getting in the way of sailors carrying out combat operations.

Kyra found the hatch she had been searching for and fumbled with the heavy metal lever. She finally put her weight into it and then her shoulder against the metal door, and it swung open, letting her stumble out into the morning air. The sunlight blinded her for a few seconds, then she rushed forward until she could put her hands on the rail and look down from Vulture’s Row to the flight deck.

Sailors were everywhere, moving in a frenzied mass. In the distance, an F-18 Hornet was lined up and inbound, trailing smoke from an engine, its wings wobbling. The pilot managed to get the fighter’s nose up at the last minute, barely avoiding a ramp strike, or so Kyra thought. The arresting cables caught the tailhook and a fire crew was running toward the plane before it was dragged to a stop.

Not safe.

Kyra couldn’t slow her breathing. Panic attack, something told her. She clutched the rail and looked up and away from the carrier deck.

Gettysburg and Shiloh and two other picket ships rode the waves in the distance. All four vessels were firing at random intervals into the sky, and Kyra watched a pair of missiles lift off from Shiloh. She followed their contrails as they surged away from the ship, and Kyra realized she could see bits of the dogfights. An explosion flared as one of Shiloh’s missiles destroyed some plane, and Kyra saw Gettysburg send another one of its own missiles into the air.

Kyra clutched the rail and tried to hold her breath, but her lungs kept working on their own. She turned her head and only then saw that she wasn’t alone. Another young woman, a seaman apprentice, was hanging on to the rail too. She looked at Kyra, her eyes wide with terror. The seaman was younger than she was, still a kid, she realized. Scared out of her teenage mind enough that the girl had abandoned her post, wherever that was. We’re at general quarters. Where’s your station? Kyra thought, suddenly rational. They’ll throw you in the brig.

Kyra felt a hand on her shoulder and she grabbed it. Jonathan, she knew.

The strange plane dove for the water, rolling to one side. Nagin saw its bay doors open. A pair of missiles rolled down, and suddenly the Assassin’s Mace was on his scope. Nagin swung his F-35 around as hard as the avionics allowed, but the Chinese stealth plane was arcing inside his turn.

One of the enemy plane’s missiles flew off its rail with white smoke trailing behind and punched into a thundercloud ahead, where Nagin lost sight of it.

Fighter-BOMBER, he realized.

The bay doors snapped shut and the Assassin’s Mace disappeared from Nagin’s scope. His AMRAAM went blind and the PLA’s stealth fighter rolled away from Nagin.

Nagin could see the plane with his eyes but his F-35 couldn’t see it on radar.

So that’s what it feels like, he thought. Okay, a knife fight it is.

The inbound Yingji missile was twenty-five miles out and moving at Mach 1.6.

The Tactical Flag Command Center and every radio on the carrier exploded with excited chatter. Pollard was proud that everyone wasn’t diving for cover under their stations.

“You have to come inside!” Jonathan yelled.

“Can’t,” Kyra said. Her rapid breathing made it hard to speak. “I can’t.”

“It’s not safe out here!”

“You said… you said ‘no safe place on a carrier,’” she finally managed to answer.

“Some places are less dangerous than others.”

Kyra heard the 1MC speaker switch on. “All hands, brace for shock!” Then the chaff launchers fired.

Lincoln was no destroyer or frigate but she was hardly defenseless. The Nimitz-class vessel, like her sisters, had been built to fight a Soviet navy and air force with hundreds of planes, so the designers had assumed that somewhere, someday, a bandit would get close enough to fire on a carrier. Lincoln carried her own countermeasures and point-defense weapons.

“Countermeasures.” Lincoln’s captain in the CIC held his voice steady. The crew relied on his calm as much as anything to control their own fears.

On the flattop, the carrier began ejecting chaff into the air, port side. The Phalanx guns and Sea Sparrow missile launchers pivoted toward the inbound missile.

“Range nine miles and closing. Sea Sparrows firing.”

Pollard stared at the screen, watching the incoming missile close on his carrier. If it was going to hit anywhere, he would lay money on it striking the carrier island. Right where he was standing.

“Inside, now!” Jonathan yelled. Kyra saw his gaze fixed at the horizon.

“What—?” She turned to look just in time to see Lincoln fire its missiles.

The RIM-7 Sea Sparrow launchers put two missiles into the air. The solid propellant motors fired and got the weapons to speed in less than two seconds. They closed the distance to the incoming Yingji in a fraction less than seven.

“Miss!” a tech announced. “Eagle Strike was just outside their kill radius. Distance two miles. Artoos tracking.” The Yingji and Sparrows had closed on each other’s positions at a relative speed of almost four thousand miles an hour, giving the Sparrows too little time to make course corrections before detonation. Each missile had a ninety-pound warhead that pushed shrapnel in a thirty-foot circle, but the Yingji slipped through.

“We do it the old-fashioned way now.” Pollard’s voice was hard steel, but the crew knew he was trying to sound optimistic. The Phalanx guns were the last resort and considered less effective against high-speed missiles than the Sea Sparrows, which had just missed.

The chaff launchers kept punching aluminum strips into the air, trying to confuse the Yingji, which stubbornly held its course. The port-side Phalanx guns fore and aft spun on their mounts a bit, making a final targeting correction, and the 20 mm Gatlings fired together, sounding like the Devil’s own chainsaw. Streams of lead erupted at the rate of four thousand rounds a minute.

Kyra heard the buzzing of the guns, surprisingly loud over the other deafening noise of the flight deck.

“Get down!” Jonathan grabbed her and pushed her down onto the deck behind the metal shield of the railing. He fell on top of her, then pushed himself up onto one foot to go for the seaman apprentice, who was still frozen in place.

The first gun missed by inches. The second hit the Yingji’s nose cone just off center and ripped it to pieces at a distance of three-quarters of a mile from Lincoln. The antiship missile was torn apart by a combination of bullets, stress from the supersonic air ripping into its now-damaged frame, and, a moment later, impact with the Taiwan Strait at just under Mach 2 a half mile from the carrier. At that speed, hitting the water was like diving into a field of concrete. The missile shattered into thousands of pieces, bits skipping across the water like stones. Others flew through the air in a straight line toward the ship.

Kyra heard tiny bits of metal on metal clang on the hull, sharp sounds, like gunshots hitting a steel backstop at supersonic speed.

The seaman apprentice shrieked. Kyra twisted her head to look as she heard the other woman’s body hit the deck plates. Jonathan scrambled over to her, and Kyra hauled herself to her feet. She heard Shiloh fire another missile miles away. Another Phalanx gun, probably Gettysburg, sounded in the distance.

The sailor was on her back and still conscious, a dark spot expanding on her blue coveralls over the left shoulder. Jonathan pulled the woman’s uniform open and tore her shirt so he could get a look at the wound.

“Vampire down,” the tech announced, his own voice quavering just a hair.

Lucky, Pollard thought. “We can’t stay here all day.” The admiral looked at the screen. “Sometime this week, Grizzly,” he announced. The mic wasn’t live. Nagin didn’t need to hear the nagging to get on with his job.

Nagin rolled in the opposite direction and approached the other plane almost head-on, certainly inside the Chinese plane’s radar cone, and the enemy fighter hadn’t shot at him. Nagin’s own plane hadn’t detected a radar sweep from the other plane. Even with the help of the AWACS and the entire Lincoln battle group, the return was still weak when it did show up. Nagin took a chance, put the F-35’s nose dead on the Mace, opened his missile bay, and switched on his active radar. The Slammers still refused to sound the tone that would have announced their willingness to shred the other plane into burning pieces.

Nagin had never shot at another plane with his guns. He had maybe three seconds’ worth of gunfire, and dogfighting another stealth plane was not something any Navy pilot had ever trained for. In fact, he was pretty sure that the Lockheed engineers had never even studied the possibility.

The Mace pushed hard into a turn and went nose down. Nagin followed, opened up his throttle to keep the distance constant, and pulled the trigger. I’m gonna pound your brains out.

His gun flashed and the 25 mm rounds missed their moving target as the Chinese arrowhead rolled to the side and braked hard. Nagin cursed as the Mace curved behind.

“No, you don’t,” Nagin muttered again, still loud enough to be broadcast. Nagin lifted his nose and leveled out. The Mace followed and Nagin rolled a quarter turn and went for the sky. The black plane behind him started to follow, but gravity pulled hard as it tried to end its dive and it could not make its climb as steep. Nagin backed off on his thrust, arced over and dove. The Mace flashed across his path, leveled, and dove again for the water. It was a skilled maneuver, and Nagin had expected no less. It only made sense that one of the PLA’s best pilots would be at the stick of their newest plane.

Jonathan reached underneath the woman’s back and felt for blood. There was plenty. “Shrapnel, still in the shoulder. She’s bleeding fast. Might have nicked the subclavian artery,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Kyra. “Get down to the battle dressing station on the flight deck level. We need a corpsman—”

“I don’t know where that is,” Kyra protested.

Jonathan frowned, then pulled off his jacket and overshirt. He pressed the shirt against the girl’s wound and she cried out in pain. He grabbed Kyra’s arm with his free hand and pushed her hand down on his shirt. “Press here. Don’t let up. I’ll be back.”

She shifted around Jonathan as he stood, lifting his hands off the sailor only when Kyra’s hands were firmly on the girl’s shoulder. “How do you know where it is?” Kyra asked.

“Not my first aircraft carrier,” he said. Then he stepped through the hatch.

“They’re in a rolling scissors,” Pollard said. The other Navy officers grumbled in agreement. Both planes were looping around in a line, trying to get position behind each other. It also meant the Chinese pilot had some real training. Assuming the pilots’ skills were an even match, the winner would be the man flying the better plane.

Nagin had dropped his airspeed too far for comfort and still couldn’t stay behind the Mace. The Chinese plane was slower to accelerate despite its second engine but the larger wings gave it more control at slower speeds. It’s heavier than I am, Nagin thought. Perhaps the Chinese hadn’t figured out or stolen the methods for manufacturing all the lightweight composites that made up most of his own F-35. It was a question some engineer would have to figure out after the fact. Grizzly’s immediate problem was that the hostile was crossing in behind him.

Tracers ripped by Nagin’s cockpit. He rolled the plane hard while dropping altitude.

Time to bug out of this. If the Mace was more maneuverable at slow speeds, then the throttle would be the American’s friend today. He pulled out of the roll and into a hard turn away from the Mace, the fighters moving in opposite directions. Nagin pulled back and climbed for the sun.

The Mace came around and started vertical toward the F-35. The hostile plane fired its guns again, the rounds going wide left. Nagin rolled over, turned into the Mace’s path and the two planes rushed past each other close enough that the jet wash rocked both planes. Nagin lifted his fighter into an Immelmann turn, moving in a half circle until his direction was reversed and he rolled wings-level.

The Chinese pilot was reversing his turn through a wide circle, like a car making a U-turn, leaving his fighter near the same altitude as the F-35.

“Come on, get inside that guy’s turn,” Pollard muttered.

“Sir, our ten minutes are up. Our birds are gonna be getting close to bingo fuel,” one of the junior officers announced.

“Any other bandits in positions to make a run on us?” Pollard asked.

“No, sir,” the junior officer replied. “We’ve got them cordoned off.”

“Contact Washington. Tell them it’s their turn to play,” Pollard ordered. “Once they’re in position, recall our people.”

“Aye, sir.”

The seaman apprentice tried to move under Kyra’s hands and screamed as the bit of shrapnel ground against her collarbone.

“Don’t move,” Kyra ordered her. “If you move—”

“I got shot?” It came out almost as a stutter.

She doesn’t know what happened. Kyra had taken the Agency’s course on trauma medicine, training for officers who were going to serve in war zones, where they might get pressed into service as first responders. Her thinking was suddenly clear and she recognized the symptoms of shock. The girl’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and she was staring straight up at the blue sky, her pupils dilated. “Yeah, something like that.”

“It hurts.”

Kyra had to lean close to the girl’s head to hear her. “I know,” Kyra told her. Distract her, she thought. “What’s your name?”

“Cassie.”

Nagin eased back on his throttle the smallest bit and pulled inside the Mace’s turn. The Chinese pilot saw it and throttled up his own plane. He began closing the distance between the two planes, trying to make the American overshoot or slow down again to avoid that error.

Nagin grinned and slammed his throttle full forward. The F-35 jumped forward and crossed the Mace’s turn. He pulled hard right on the stick, rolled the plane, and came around in a tight circle that threatened to cross the Chinese plane’s turn again.

Gotcha.

The distance between the planes was less than two miles and the Mace couldn’t move any direction fast enough to escape the F-35’s attack vector. Nagin kicked the afterburner, tracked the Mace’s direction for a quarter second, and pulled the gun trigger.

The rounds tore into the Mace’s airframe, shredding wing and stabilizer metal into jagged petals and ripping holes that began to spew fluids in dark contrails as the plane rolled into another corkscrew. Nagin held the gunsight on the black bird until his gun ran dry. He watched his tracers embed themselves in the black plane’s airframe—

A solid red triangle appeared on the radar track. “There!” Pollard yelled. The cheers in the Tactical Flag Command Center were matched by the noise coming over the comm from the crew in the CIC. “Hard to hide from radar with a bunch of jagged holes in your wing.”

“Sir, MIGs are moving to protect the Chinese plane,” someone announced over the comm. “Our birds are in pursuit. Time to intercept, forty seconds.”

“They won’t get them all,” Pollard said over the speaker. “Not enough missiles left to take them all out. Washington’s fighters?”

“Two minutes out,” someone said.

“Grizzly, you’ve got thirty seconds and then you’ll have company,” Pollard said.

Twenty more than I need. The Assassin’s Mace was in a steep dive, trailing black smoke and juking like a nervous insect. The island of Penghu was filling the canopy. Nagin pushed his throttle forward, fired the afterburner, and broke the speed of sound. Everyone on Penghu would hear it. Grizzly ignored the ground and focused on his helmet HUD. The radar in the nose was trying to get enough data on the black fighter for a missile lock, but even wounded, the black diamond was making itself a hard target. The Mace jerked up its nose and leveled out more quickly than Nagin had thought possible. He deployed the airbrakes and pulled back on his own stick and felt his entire body push against his seat harness as gravity pulled hard on him. He came out of the dive a half mile below the Mace. The Chinese stealth plane banked and turned toward its approaching brothers as it tried to close the distance faster than Pollard’s deadline.

Nagin got inside the Mace’s turn and put the Joint Strike Fighter’s nose directly on the Chinese fighter’s underbelly. The HUD in his helmet sounded a tone.

“Fox three!” Nagin said, trying not to shout.

The weapons bays under the F-35 snapped open. One of the two AMRAAMs mounted on the doors dropped out. Its rocket motors ignited and the bay doors snapped shut in less than a second.

The missile closed the distance to the Assassin’s Mace in four seconds. The Chinese pilot rolled hard left and deployed chaff and flares. The aluminum strips and pyrotechnics scattered behind did nothing to confuse the weapon tracking his ruptured airframe. The missile punched through the metal cloud and arced in toward its target.

The Assassin’s Mace had a lifespan that could now be measured in single seconds. The pilot knew it and reached for the ejection handle.

The missile exploded ten feet off the Mace’s right aileron, showering the rear quarter of the plane with shrapnel that tore into the prototype plane’s nose and forward body. The shock wave tore off the port wing and ignited a ruptured fuel tank. The rear half of the stealth plane’s airframe was shredded, with black smoke and flames leaking from every hole. The aircraft pinwheeled clockwise and the metal screamed as it began to tear itself apart.

Explosive bolts around the canopy fired. The plastic bubble tumbled away and the Chinese pilot’s ejection seat rocketed out of the dying plane.

Nagin arced around the dead plane and watched as it tumbled through the gray sky, flames and smoke marking its path down toward Penghu.

“I’m thirsty,” Cassie said. Her blood had soaked through Jonathan’s shirt and Kyra’s hands were covered with it. The average human body had five liters of blood. Kyra knew the girl had lost at least one, but it was easy to overestimate blood loss.

“They’re coming,” Kyra said. “They’ll patch you up and you can have all the water you want.” Hurry up, Jon, she thought.

Kyra saw the hatch open out of the corner of her eye. She twisted around and saw a corpsman step through carrying a duffel bag, then a second, and Jonathan behind.

“MIGs are bugging out!” one of the pilots announced. With nothing left to defend and fresh US fighters inbound, someone had given the order to retreat. The icons on the master screen showed the remaining Chinese planes turning west. Lincoln’s CIC exploded in shouts and yells. It would have been a moment for hard drinks and tall beers if the Navy didn’t ban alcohol aboard its vessels.

“Nothing left to protect,” Pollard said. “Call Washington. Tell them no pursuit. They won’t like that but I’ll buy Admiral Leavitt a few rounds to smooth things over.”

The staff could hardly understand him over the cheers coming through the 1MC.