Warriors

CHAPTER 11

Hawke gave the internationally required hand signal to the crewmen on deck below and flicked the switch that lit the candle. The sudden engine roar behind him was instant and powerful. He added power and taxied into position behind the last jet in line. The blast shield had already risen from the deck behind the lead jet in the squadron, and Hawke watched calmly as the fighter was catapulted out over the ocean, afterburners glowing white hot.

A wave of pain in his rib cage washed over him and he must have passed out because he suddenly heard the air boss screaming in his headset, telling him to get his ass moving. The aircraft directly in front of him had advanced into position and he’d not followed quickly enough for the air boss. Now he added a touch of power and tucked in where he belonged. There remained only three fighters on the deck ahead of him.

He focused for a second on what to say and how to say it. He not only had to get the Chinese right, the words, but also had to get the attitude right, a slangy mixture of swagger and humble obeisance to the air boss gods on high.

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

“Don’t let it happen again, Passionflower, or I’ll kick your sugarcoated ass off this boat and clear back to Shanghai.”

“Roger that, sir,” Hawke said, advancing a few feet forward.

“You forget something in your preflight, Passionflower?”

“No, sir,” Hawke said, starting to sweat a bit.

“Yeah? Check your goddamn nav lights off-on switch for me, will you? Just humor me.”

Shit, he thought, flicking the nav lights switch. He’d actually forgotten to turn his bloody nav lights on! Dumb mistake, and he could not afford to be dumb at this point, not in the slightest.

“You awake down there, boy? I’m inclined to pull your ass right out of the lineup.”

“Sir, no, sir! I’m good to go.”

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

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

“Damn right you will. Now, you get the hell off my boat, Passionflower. I got more important things to deal with up here than to worry about little pissant pilots like you. Taxi into position. You’re up.”

Hawke throttled up and engaged the catapult hook inside the track buried in the deck. He heard the blast shield rumbling up into place behind him and looked to his left. He nodded his head, a signal to the launch chief that his aircraft was poised and ready. The chief raised his right arm and dropped it, meaning any second now.

Hawke’s right hand immediately went to what fighter jocks fondly call the “oh-shit bar.” It was located just inside the canopy and above the instrument display. The reason for the handhold is simple: when a pilot is violently launched into space, the gut reaction is to grab the control stick and try to climb. It’s terrifying to feel out of control when the plane’s wheels separate from the mother ship. In the tiny amount of time it takes a pilot to move his or her right hand from the oh-shit bar to the joystick, a nanosecond, the catapult has done its job and the pilot can safely assume control of the aircraft.

Adrenaline was pumping, flooding Hawke’s veins as he gripped the bar with his right hand. A “cat shot” from a modern carrier is as close as any human being can come to the experience of being in a catastrophic automobile crash and surviving. It was that intense.

The cat fired and he was thrown violently backward, leaving the leading edge of the deck.

He stifled an intense scream of pain at the back of his throat.

He was airborne.

He craned his head around and looked back down at the deck lights of Varyag, the carrier growing rapidly smaller as he swiftly gained altitude. He deliberately suppressed any feelings of joy over having escaped 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 form up with “his” squadron’s flight. Their heading was a WNW course that would take them directly over the disputed Paracel Islands. Exactly the wrong direction, in other words. He needed to be on a heading north-northeast and he needed to get moving.

The rim of the earth was edged in violent pink as Hawke slipped into his designated slot at the rear of the tight formation. The squadron leader acknowledged his arrival and went quiet. There was a minimum of radio chat for which he was grateful. 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, things he couldn’t respond to without sacrificing his cover.

He needed precious time to remain anonymous until he could figure out the next step of the plan he’d hatched in those few hours he spent alone and in pain. Namely, how the hell to get away from the squadron without a dogfight. A dogfight that would pit him against seven of China’s top guns was a bad bet.

If he simply peeled off and made a run for it, and didn’t respond to radio calls, the squadron leader would immediately radio the carrier and report what was going on. One of their pilots was behaving very strangely. It wouldn’t take a second for the Chinese carrier skipper to put two and two together: the missing American pilot had somehow gotten inside one of their fighters. He was about to steal it. Blow him out of the sky.

The Chinese would then use the incident as clear-cut proof the West was being deliberately provocative. Instead of preventing a confrontation, Hawke would now be the cause of it. C, to put it mildly, would not be pleased.

They would trot out his blackened corpse and the twisted remnants of the stolen fighter jet on global TV. Use his actions to justify an even more aggressive posture in the region. Take retaliatory measures against Taiwan, Japan, 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.

For the moment, he had little choice.

He flew on, maintaining his slot in the formation, flying north toward the Pacific Ocean, desperately searching for a means of escape for the second time in twelve hours.

Half an hour later, battling pain and fatigue, it came to him. It was so simple. The only reason he had not thought of it sooner was the pain of his injuries and mental fatigue. But, he thought, it just might work.

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, Red Flight Leader. System malfunctions, over.”

“State your situation.”

“I’m flying hot, sir. Engine overheat. Power loss. Cause unknown. Running override systems 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 mission abort and return to the carrier, sir. Over.”

“Uh, roger that, Passionflower. Permission to abort. Get back safely. Over.”

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

Hawke peeled away from the formation, banked hard right, and went into a steep diving turn away from his flight. The sun was up now, just a sliver above the far horizon, red light streaking across the sea far below. He looked up and saw Red Flight’s multiple contrails emblazoned across the dawn.

When Red Flight was completely out of visual and radar range, he corrected course to NNE and throttled up. He leveled off at 40,000 feet and took stock of his situation. By his calculations, he could reach his destination in under two hours.

He set a heading for South Korea and stepped on the gas.

His plan was simple.

Contact Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. Home of the American Eighth Fighter Wing, Thirty-Fifth Fighter Squadron, and the Eightieth Fighter Squadron. Tell them exactly who he was, identify his J-2 Chinese fighter, and beg them not to shoot him down. Land. Refuel. Contact C from a secure phone at the base commander’s office and tell him his lockbox containing a few million quid were gone to the bottom of the South China Sea. Admiral Tsang would just have to wait.

But he was coming back to England’s Lakenheath RAF base with one or two little surprises that might just be worth more than the contents of the lost lockbox.

Infinitely more.