Warriors

CHAPTER 10

The initial interrogation aboard the Chinese aircraft carrier was short but brutal. Hawke gave up nothing, and he had gotten out of it with little more than a severely wounded left knee, a few broken ribs, a black eye, three broken fingers, and a concussion. The leg was the worst. Two gorillas had tried to break it by pulling it backward. The attempt failed, but they’d managed to snap a tendon or two. He could walk, but not far.

When they got bored with him, they told him he’d never leave the 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 before these bastards came for him again. Tortured and killed him.

Two military policemen with automatic weapons had delivered him to this charming boudoir. He was fairly certain the same two would come for him when it was time for the more labor-intensive interrogation. They were merely 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 steel stairs, something they bitched about all the way down.

At one point they threw him to the deck and took turns kicking at his already damaged rib cage with their steel-toed boots. He’d passed out from the pain.

He was consciously unconscious when they returned. They slammed into the tiny space and manhandled him down from the upper bunk. As he expected, they yanked him to his feet and wrapped his arms around each of their shoulders in order to keep him moving.

He kept his head down, chin bouncing on his chest, mumbling incoherently. When the goon on the left paused to kick open the half-closed door, Hawke took advantage of the moment. His powerful arms reached out with all the speed and precision of two striking cobras as he swept the two men’s heads together with sickening force. The collision of the two skulls was sufficiently forceful to cause the two men to drop like sacks of stones to the floor.

He dropped to one knee and checked.

They were dead.

“Hit them too hard,” he whispered to himself.

He fished the keys to his handcuffs from one of their pockets and freed his wrists. Then he quickly stripped the uniform from the taller of the two. It fit him badly, but it might be good enough to get him safely up eight flights of metal steps to the carrier’s flight deck without hindrance.

Hawke had jet-black hair, which helped, and he kept the military police cap brim pulled down over his eyes, and his face lowered. He also had the advantage of having a fully automatic rifle slung over his shoulder in case things suddenly got spicy.

He raced up as fast as he could without calling undue attention to himself.

A sailor opened a hatch in the bulkhead just as he mounted the last set of steps. He felt a cold blast of icy wind howl in from the flight deck. He waited a full sixty seconds before stepping through the hatch and out onto the flight deck.

He had no earthly idea how he was going to execute the plan he’d devised lying in his bunk, waiting to be tortured again and probably killed. The fact that he didn’t know was of little concern. You had to be able to make this stuff up as you went along. He heard laughter and saw a sizable group of men approaching his position.

He retreated and quickly stepped inside the nearest open hatchway. And suddenly found himself inside a large hangar amidships on the flight deck. Unusual, to say the least. Hangars on carriers were always belowdecks. He moved back deeper into the shadows.

A huge shrouded object loomed up in the dim overhead lights.

What the hell?

There was just enough light to see. He’d already formed a pretty good idea of what lay beneath the cover before he began tugging the tarp away.

The thing took his breath away.

It was the Sorcerer!

Either the supersecret American fighter/bomber itself, or a perfect facsimile of it, the Sorcerer was a massive, bat-winged, unmanned drone. Half again as large as his F-35C Lightning, and clearly equipped not only for surveillance, but for offensive aerial combat. Slung beneath the sleek, swept-back wings, six very lethal-looking missiles, three to a side.

And, under the fuselage, a bomb the size of which he’d never seen before. A huge bunker-buster? God forbid, a nuke?

A carrier-based drone of this size would be capable of delivering massive devastation from extremely high altitudes from anywhere on the planet. It immediately occurred to him that his entire perception of the world playing field had just altered. If he could e-mail a photo of this thing back home, it would lift Langley off its foundations.

China had somehow managed to leapfrog ahead of the West in terms of military technology and hardware. He knew the U.S. Navy was contemplating a future that included carrier-based drones for combat and delivering nuclear warheads, but China was already there!

How? How in God’s name had they managed it?

He heard laughter outside on the deck and rushed back to the open hatchway. He paused, calmed his racing heart, and peered out onto the deck.

Pilots.

There were eight of them, all in flight suits. Some had already donned their red-starred helmets, some were carrying them in their hands. All were kidding around, walking with that unmistakable and cocky jet-jock walk.

Their destination was obvious, Hawke thought. They were crossing the wide expanse of darkened deck, en route to the covey of eight highly advanced fighter jets parked near the starboard bow catapult. Fighters like the one Hawke had seen when the rescue chopper landed on the deck the night before. The pilots would have to pass directly in front of his position.

They represented his only hope of survival.

Hawke remained hidden in the shadows of a massive drone hangar directly beneath the carrier’s bridge looming above him. As the pilots approached, their banter continuing, Hawke stood stock-still and held his breath until the last Chinese fighter pilot was safely past him.

Hawke then stepped out of the shadows and fell in behind the lone straggler at the rear. Fortunately for him, this pilot was by far the tallest of the lot. He approached his target directly from behind, matching him stride for stride. When he was perhaps a foot behind the pilot, he shot out both hands, and used pressure from both thumbs on the carotid artery to paralyze the poor chap and yet still keep him on his feet.

Giving the main body of hotshots sufficient time to move on, he then quickly withdrew, walking the unconscious man back into the shadows of an AA battery. It was the work of a moment to zip himself inside the pilot’s flight suit, don his boots and helmet, and, finally, flip the dark visor down. He then strode quickly, but not too quickly, across the deck, rapidly catching up with the jocular pilots just as they were climbing up into their respective fighters.

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

“Lovely night for flying, boys,” he muttered in his guttural Chinese, sliding down into the seat and adjusting his safety harness. After strapping himself in, he reached forward and flipped the switch that lowered the canopy. He then took a long moment to study the instrument array and myriad illuminated controls, quickly deciding exactly what did what.

Looking at the array of aircraft instruments, Hawke was astonished for the second time since arriving up on the carrier’s flight deck.

Most of the cockpit controls on the fighter looked oddly familiar. Why? Because they were almost identical to those in the prototype of the top-secret new American fighter jet he had flown, the J-2. He was amused (in one way) to see that the Chinese had stolen so much advanced aeronautical technology from the West that getting the hang of basic things here in the cockpit was embarrassingly easy.

But he had flown the first-generation F-35C Lightning off the USN’s George Washington’s flight deck courtesy of Captain Garry White and the U.S. Navy. And this Chinese airplane? It was vastly more sophisticated in terms of avionics, communications, and, most important, offensive and defensive weapons systems. Holy God, compared to the current F-35C, this thing was like something from another goddamn planet.

Take the cookies when they’re passed, he thought, smiling.

Due to unforeseeable circumstances, a top British intelligence officer was about to take one of what had to be, up until this moment, China’s most closely guarded military secrets for a little airborne test drive!