Warriors

CHAPTER 6

A loud, keening wail suddenly filled the Lightning’s cockpit. Holy mother of God, Hawke thought, he’d just been painted by enemy radar!

He whipped his head around and saw the Chinese SAM missile’s fiery flame signature streaking up toward his Lightning, dead on his six, homing in on the afterburner. By the speed of the incoming, he guessed it to be one of the newer Hong Qi 61s. Where the hell had it come from? Some kind of new 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 stick and instantly initiated a vertical climb, standing the Lightning on its tail and rocketing skyward like something launched from Canaveral in the good old days. He deployed chaff aft and switched on all the jamming devices located in the airplane’s tail section. He was almost instantly at forty thousand feet and climbing, his eyes locked on the missile track displayed on his radar and thermal imaging screens. 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 weapon was not behaving in accordance with MI6 and CIA assessments of their military capability. With every passing second, his appointment with imminent death went from possible to probable. He’d have to depend on the Lightning’s jamming devices and his own evasive maneuvers if he was going to survive this attack.

He nosed the F-35C over and put it into a screaming vertical dive. He was now gaining precious seconds. The Hong Qi would now have to recalculate the target, alter course, and get on his six again. He’d known from the instant the SAM missile appeared on his screen that there was only one maneuver that stood any chance at all of saving him.

A crash dive.

Straight down into the sea.

Hairy, but sometimes effective, Hawke knew from long experience. To succeed, he had to allow the deadly missile to get extraordinarily close to impacting and destroying his aircraft. So close that when he pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant, the nose of his airplane would be so near the water’s surface that the missile would have zero time to correct before it hit the water at Mach 3, vaporizing on impact.

“You’ve got to dip your nose in the water, son,” an old flight instructor had told him once about the maneuver. “That’s the only way.”

The missile had now nosed over in a perfect simulation of Hawke’s maneuver and homed in on the diving jet. He watched it closing at a ridiculous rate of speed.

His instruments and screeching alarms were all telling him he was clearly out of his bloody mind. The deeply ingrained human instinct to run, to change course and evade, clawed around the edges of his conscious mind. But Hawke had the warrior’s ability to erect a firewall around it, one that was impenetrable in times like this.

It was those few precious white-hot moments precisely like this one that Alex Hawke lived for. At his squalling birth, his father had declared him “a boy born with a heart for any fate.” And, like his father and grandfather before him, he was all warrior, right down to the quick, 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 jarring blur, but he didn’t see it; the collision-avoidance alarms were howling in his headphones, but he didn’t hear them. His grip on the stick was featherlight, his breathing calm and measured, his hands bone-dry and surgeon steady.

His mind was now quietly calculating the differential between the seconds remaining until the missile impacted the Lightning and the seconds until the aircraft impacted the sea. Ignoring everything, the wail of the screeching sirens and the flashing electronic warnings, the pilot began his final mental countdown.

The surface of the sea raced up at him at a dizzying rate…

Five… four… three… two…

NOW!

He hauled back on the stick.

The nose literally splashed coming up, and he saw beads of seawater racing across the exterior of his canopy. He’d caught the crest of a wave pulling out of the dive… He felt the G forces building…

You got to dip your nose in the water, son.

Made it.

He barely registered the impact of the missile hitting the water over the roar of his afterburners. But he heard it, all right. He was in the clear and initiating a climb out as he visualized it: the SAM vaporizing upon contact with the concrete hard surface of the sea at such speed…

The G forces were fierce. He began his quick climb back to his former below-the-radar altitude.

And that’s when his starboard wingtip caught a huge cresting wave that sent his aircraft spinning out of control. Where the hell had that come from… He was suddenly skimming over the sea like a winged Frisbee. He felt a series of severe jolts as the fuselage made contact, and he instinctively understood that the aircraft was seconds away from disintegrating right out from under his doomed arse…

He reached down to his right and grabbed the red handle, yanked it, and the canopy exploded upward into the airstream and disappeared. The set of rocket motors beneath his seat instantly propelled him up and out of the spinning cockpit and straight into the black night sky.

Seconds later, his primary chute deployed and he had a bird’s-eye view of his airplane as it metamorphosed into varying sizes and shapes of scrap metal and disappeared beneath the waves.

Along with the five hundred million in the lockbox, he thought. Not only had his mission just gone straight to hell, it was a very bloody expensive failure.

He yanked the cord that disengaged him from his seat and watched it fall away as he floated down. 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, or it seemed that way, and he started treading water while his life jacket inflated. So far, so good, he thought, managing to keep his spirits aloft surprisingly well for a downed airman all alone in this dark world.

Normally, there’d be an EPIRB attached to his shoulder harness. Upon contact with the water, it would immediately begin broadcasting his GPS coordinates to a passing friendly satellite. Normally, he could just hang out for a while here in the South China Sea and wait for one of Her Majesty’s Navy rescue choppers to come pluck him from the soup and winch him aboard. Normally. But, of course, this was a secret transit and he had no distress radio beacon, no EPIRB. He had exactly nothing.

He knew the water temperature was cold enough to kill him eventually. The thermal bodysuit he wore would stave off hypothermia long enough for him to have a slim shot at survival.

He spun his suspended body through 360 degrees. Nothing of note popped out of the darkness. No lights on the horizon, no silver planes in the sky. Nada, zip, zero. Nothing but the vastness of black stretching away in all directions… no EPIRB equals NO hope of immediate rescue. He was some fifty miles off the southern coast of mainland China.

If he was lucky, and he usually was, he was in a shipping channel. If not, sayonara. He looked at his dive watch, whistling a chirrupy tune about sunshine and lollypops. Five hours minimum to sunrise.

He began to whistle a song his father had taught him for use at times like this.

Nothing to do but hang here in frozen limbo and wait to see what happens next.

And maybe pray a little.