Threat Vector

SEVENTY-FIVE

Fourteen Marine F/A-18C pilots took to the skies over Taiwan at midnight. They climbed into heavy cloud cover over the island and adopted flight paths to appear on PLA radars as if they were heading for regular CAP stations in the strait, just as they had done dozens of times before.

The ROC F-16s on station began leaving their sectors, as if the approaching flights would be relieving them, again to give the appearance to the Chinese that these radar signatures were just fighter planes on fighter missions, protecting the island from centerline incursions.

But not all the jets were flying as fighter planes tonight. Many of them, Trash’s and Cheese’s included, were equipped for a strike mission, and their destination was not a space of cold black sky over international waters.

No, their destination was the Huadu district of Guangzhou.

Fully laden with ordnance and extra fuel, Trash’s F/A-18C weighed more than fifty thousand pounds, and the controls felt sluggish. This Hornet felt like a different species from the nimble dogfighter he had flown when getting his two gun kills, and this plane even felt different from how it did the day before, when he shot down his third enemy fighter, an Su-27, with an AIM-9 missile.

There was no way in hell he could dogfight with all the bombs and fuel; if any J-10s or Su-27s came after his flight, he and the others with a strike loadout would have to dump all the air-to-ground weapons from their pylons and concentrate on their survival.

That might save their lives, but it would also ensure they would fail their mission, and they had been told they would get only one crack at this.

As the fourteen aircraft — flying in flights of two and four — approached the strait as if to go on station, no Chinese planes came up to meet them, as the weather was bad tonight and there would be plenty of opportunities for air-to-air engagements during the day tomorrow.

They met a pair of ROC refuelers over the strait, and this might have seemed to be an anomaly to PLA radar officers, but it would not raise concern. It looked as if this group of flights would just be loitering on their CAPs a bit longer than normal, which would not have triggered any alarms for the Chinese.

Once Trash and the others topped off their tanks, they turned to the south, still looking like most every fighter signature to fly west of Taiwan for the past month.

And then things got interesting.

Trash and the thirteen other planes dove out of thirty thousand feet, down toward the deck, on a heading that took them to the west. Their speed increased, and they tightened up as much as they could in the dark night, and they adopted a heading that took them out into the South China Sea.

Trash and Cheese were two of the six jets on this mission tasked with dropping ordnance on the China Telecom building in Guangzhou, a target that neither of the men understood really, although they had been too busy in the past eight hours since their initial briefing to worry about the larger context of their roles.

Four other Hornets each carried two two-thousand-pound JDAMs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. These were Mark 84 iron bombs with tailkits that increased the weapons’ accuracy and the distance from the target the pilot could release his payload. The weapons were incredibly accurate, but no one on the flight knew if they would even be employed, as the GPS satellites that flew overhead were flicking on and off like table lamps with shorts in their wiring. The decision was made to outfit the fighters with the JDAMs for the simple reason that the survivability potential of aircraft dropping JDAMs at altitude from distance was better than the other option.

Dumb bombs dropped from low altitude.

That role went to the B-team on this mission, Trash and Cheese. If the first four Hornets could not get a GPS signal to allow them to drop their weapons, then the B-team would dive in. Both F/A-18s carried the two-thousand-pound Mark 84 iron bombs, two on each plane. The Mark 84 bomb had not changed at all since it was dropped by F4 Phantoms over Vietnam nearly fifty years earlier.

Trash found it ironic that with ultramodern aircraft in the U.S. inventory, such as the F-22 Raptor and the F/A-18E Super Hornet, and with ultramodern air-to-ground munitions, such as laser-guided bombs and pinpoint-accurate GPS weapons, he and his flight lead were flying into battle in twenty-five-year-old airplanes that carried fifty-year-old bombs.

In addition to the six planes designated for ground attack, six more had a strictly air-to-air role this evening. They were fully loaded with AIM-9s and AIM-120s, and they would fly out to meet any aggressors that approached the squadron.

The last two planes in the mission were loaded with HARMs, high-speed anti-radiation missiles, to take out enemy SAM sites along the route.

All the pilots wore NVGs, night-vision goggles, which gave them the ability to see both their HUDs and the terrain outside, although they all knew the NVGs brought an additional hazard to their already dangerous operation: if any of the men had to eject, they needed to remember to pull off their NVGs before punching out, as the weight of the device on the front of the helmet would snap their necks during the ejection.

At one-thirty a.m. the Hornets flew fast and low, screaming over the waves as they headed southwest. By now they all knew the Chinese had scrambled fighters and alerted their coastal defenses, but for a few moments more, at least, the PLA had no idea what the group of planes’ intentions were.

After a heading change announced by the strike leader, the aircraft turned due north as one, directly toward Hong Kong.

Trash was the eleventh of the fourteen planes, and he kept his eyes on his HUD, making sure he didn’t slam into the water or another aircraft as he made his turn at three hundred feet above the surface. With a quick smile he wondered how to say “What the hell?” in Chinese, because he expected the phrase was being spoken in every radar room on every PLA base along the coast to the north.

Several flights of Chinese fighters took off from bases near the Taiwan Strait and headed out to meet the flight of Hornets racing over the South China Sea toward land. ROC Air Force planes flying combat patrols over Taiwan raced out to intercept them, launching AIM-120s from just south of the centerline, and then crossed it, heading into China’s side of the strait. This broke up the attack on the Marine jets, but it created a massive air-to-air battle that lasted more than an hour in the strait.

More PLAAF planes from bases in Shenzhen and Hainan flew out to meet the approaching aircraft, thinking them to be flown by ROC pilots, not by U.S. Marines. Four of the Marine jets with air-to-air munitions left the formation to engage the Chinese, launching medium-range missiles from distance and shooting down three J-5s before the Chinese even fired back.

An F/A-18 was blown out of the sky just twelve miles off the coast of Hong Kong, the victim of a J-5’s radar-guided missile, but two more J-5s were shot down by American missiles seconds later.

The remaining strike force flew on, low and fast, shooting over container ships at five hundred knots.

Four U.S. nuclear submarines had moved south of Hong Kong in the past forty-eight hours from their patrol areas in the Taiwan Strait. As the American aircraft approached Hong Kong, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from all four subs sprang from the black water, arced into the sky, and flew toward SAM batteries along the coast.

The Tomahawks were successful, knocking out several AA launchers along the path into Victoria Harbour and beyond.

At 2:04 a.m. there were ten strike aircraft still together in a tight trail formation as they shot through Victoria Harbour in the center of Hong Kong. At an altitude of only three hundred twenty feet they passed the Peninsula hotel at five hundred miles an hour, and the roar of their twenty jet engines broke windows and woke virtually everyone asleep within a mile of the channel.

Their flight path took them through the center of Hong Kong for the simple reason that the hills to the north and the high buildings, as well as heavy sea traffic, would muddle the radar picture in China for a time, and Chinese missile defenses in Shenzhen would not be able to lock on and fire SAMs on the low aircraft until they crossed into the mainland.

But more frontline PLAAF fighters appeared on radar, sending the last two air-to-air fighters peeling off from the trail and heading to the northeast. A flight of six Su-27s engaged them over Shenzhen. Both Marine pilots scored air-to-air kills, and within ninety seconds of the fight starting, the two surviving F/A-18s that had been battling J-5s over the South China Sea joined the fray.

SAMs destroyed two Hornets over Shenzhen, but both pilots ejected safely. Two more Hornets were destroyed by air-to-air missiles; one Marine ejected, but the other pilot crashed into the side of Wutong Mountain and died.

The four Marine aircraft shot down six Chinese planes and slowed the others, putting them precious minutes behind the strike force.

The strike force of ten crossed the border to mainland China, and eight of the ten jets climbed off the deck and to ten thousand feet. Only Cheese and Trash stayed low, flying through the dark, focusing virtually all their attention on the green-hued terrain through their NVGs as it raced by below them.

Adam and Jack sat in their rented apartment in northern Guangzhou. They had been doing exactly the same thing, virtually nonstop, for the past two days: watching the China Telecom building. They had long-distance photos of K. K. Tong on his twelfth-floor balcony, as well as dozens of other personalities, many whom Ryan had been able to identify on the database on his laptop from photo-recognition software.

Jack’s call to Mary Pat Foley the day before, coming on something like his thirty-fifth try to get a satellite call through, had been the culmination of Adam’s work to hunt down the organization Zha had worked for in Hong Kong, an organization, it was clear, that was directing the attacks on America.

Since that time they continued to amass intelligence in the hopes that when Jack returned to Hong Kong and flew back to the United States, he could give it to Mary Pat and increase pressure on the Chinese government to arrest Tong or at least shame them into stopping the attacks.

Ryan had no expectations whatsoever of what was about to happen.

He was only half awake, propped in a chair by the window with the camera on a tripod in front of him and a wool blanket around him, when something caused his heavy eyelids to open. Off to the north, way beyond the China Telecom building by a mile or two, a flash of light came from rooftop level. Jack thought at first it was lightning — there had been rain on and off for days — but a second and a third flash appeared near the same area.

A low rumble made its way to him, and he sat up straighter.

More flashes, now to the northeast, and more noise, louder now.

“Yao!” he said, calling to Adam, who slept on a mat on the floor just a few feet away. The CIA man did not move at first, so Jack knelt down and shook him.

“What’s up?”

“Something’s happening. Wake up!”

Jack went back to the window and now he saw the unmistakable sight of tracer fire, anti-aircraft cannons shooting into the sky. Another flash to his north and an explosion now, and then a clear missile launch from the ground to the north.

“Oh my God!” Jack said.

“You don’t think we’re attacking, do you?” asked Yao.

Before Jack could answer, a sound like the sky being ripped apart came from behind their apartment building. It was a jet engine, or more likely a lot of jet engines, and the sky now was alive with more streaks of light.

Jack knew Mary Pat would have tried to warn him before an attack came, but he also knew that sat-phone communications were seriously degraded. He had also told her he was “about a mile” away from the building, which was an exaggeration, but he knew Mary Pat had a near-direct line of communication with his father, and he knew his dad had more important things to worry about than his son’s getting arrested in China near the nerve center of the Chinese cyberattacks.

Now it seemed America was attacking a building less than a half-mile from where Jack Ryan, Jr., was staying.

While Ryan was still trying to process the images and sound around him, Adam Yao grabbed the camera and the tripod and said, “Let’s go!”

“Go where?”

“I don’t know,” Yao said, “but we’re not staying here!”

They were prepared to bug out quickly in the event of a compromise; they had most everything in the apartment packed up in a pair of duffel bags, and Adam’s car downstairs was gassed and ready to go. Together they threw the rest of their belongings in their bags and flipped out the lights, then began rushing to the stairs.