The next wave of cargo planes came down low, almost at sea level, staggered out in a long line, one behind another. As each plane raced down the length of the runway with its rear door open, a drogue parachute deployed out the back, caught the air, and then yanked out a large pallet. The plane then pulled up, its wheels never having touched the ground, and the pallet slid and bumped down the runway at over a hundred miles per hour before friction caused it to grind slowly to a stop. Teams of civilians directed by a paratrooper then swarmed over the pallet, tearing at thick belts strapping down everything from aviation-fuel bladders to combat vehicles. With all that extra manpower, the offloading went at least twice as fast as anticipated, and it freed up more forces for the frontlines. Adams heard Jacobsen yelling at the workers to prioritize the M1128 Stryker mobile-gun systems. Damn, that boy was good. The eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles each mounted a 105 mm tank gun, which meant Adams could soon start punching back, hard.
The most lethal supplies to come in on the pallets, though, were what looked like two ordinary fuel-tank trucks. In fact, the tanks were filled not with fuel but with a mix of resin-based binders. When sprayed down and smoothed out over the base of the old runway, the substance would form polyurethane polymer concrete. After just thirty minutes of drying time, he would own the only operative airfield on the island.
Adams smiled at the thought, the first smile he’d allowed himself in months. It quickly died, though, when Jacobsen reached over with a handkerchief to dab away a thin trickle of drool dripping from the corner of the general’s still-numb mouth.
Boneyard Flight, Pacific Ocean
Roscoe fired a pair of AIM-120E AMRAAM air-to-air missiles well before he could see the enemy planes. The twelve-foot-long missiles came cleanly off his plane’s fuselage stations and disappeared into the blue sky ahead. With so much radar and communications interference, these were the long shots. Shoot two, hope maybe to hit one. More usefully, they’d create a cover of fast-moving death for his jets to come in behind, throwing off whatever formation the enemy had planned.
He pushed the plane to afterburners, noticing a faint vibration in his ejection seat as his F-15C’s speed passed Mach 2. With no stealth features, the older planes would be at a disadvantage until they made this an up-close-and-personal knife fight. Plus the F-15C’s speed meant they could start their kill count before the slower Shrike drones arrived.
It all happened in seconds: a few explosions in the distance and alongside him as others in Eagle Flight were hit by the enemy’s counterfire, and then a swirl of smoke and contrails as fighters from three nations mixed it up.
Roscoe could focus only on his part of the fight, quickly firing a pair of AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles at two Russian MiG-35s less than a mile away, both of them banking hard as they tried to get inside the turn circle of another F-15. One missile went astray but the second smashed into the trailing jet’s tail section with an explosion that pitched the MiG’s nose skyward and then left a smoky scar in the sky. The other MiG fighter jet turned to escape, Roscoe following. As he turned, a faint puff of tracer rounds crossed in front of him; a Chinese J-31 fighter was boring through the chaos, its nose trained on Roscoe’s F-15. Before Roscoe could evade, one of the incoming rounds blew off the top of his left vertical stabilizer.
The F-15 shuddered and buffeted as the J-31 bird-dogged Roscoe, staying on his rear. Instinctively, the experienced pilot unloaded the jet. While one way to gain speed was to max engine power, the most effective way was essentially to trick physics into working for you. Roscoe slid the stick forward and put the aircraft into a shallow ten-degree dive. As the plane dipped slightly, it created a zero-g condition, essentially “unloading” weight from the plane, akin to going over the crest of a small hill in a bicycle and coming out of your seat. Acceleration is a matter of thrust and weight, and in that weightless moment, Roscoe’s F-15 powered ahead rapidly, leaving his attacker behind.
As Roscoe saw the airspeed indicator approaching Vmax, the highest speed possible within the structural design limits of the plane, he felt a sharp shudder, the damaged tail wing starting to crack. The engineers who had set the plane’s Vmax hadn’t counted on the effect of a 30 mm cannon. As Roscoe pulled the stick up to lose speed, his radar-warning receiver howled: the J-31 was catching up to finish him off.
He pushed the throttles all the way forward, rolled the plane onto its back, and pulled the stick back into the seat pan. He hoped that the Directorate pilot would get greedy, cut across his turn circle, and provide him a reversal opportunity. It was a classic move, which, unfortunately, meant it was one the J-31 pilot had been trained to counter. Roscoe snuck a look over his shoulder and saw the Directorate plane stabilized at his deep six o’clock, between his tail.
Roscoe swung the plane back and forth, straining against the force of the turns, trying to ruin the J-31’s firing solution but knowing his bag of tricks was empty. His plane groaned with the turns. If a Chinese missile didn’t kill him, his jet would.
His flight suit compressed and fought the g-forces just as Roscoe pulled into another tight turn. The tunnel vision started, the perimeter of his field of vision beginning to shade inward from the massive pressure on his body. A gray form entered on the right side of his line of sight, just above his canopy, and then disappeared as the tunnel around him grew smaller and smaller. He was blacking out; he knew it.
Roscoe pulled out of the turn; the tunnel widened, and the heavy weight on his body lifted. His plane’s radar-warning receiver abruptly went silent. He craned his neck to see where the J-31 was. He couldn’t find it at first, and then he saw the matte-gray-and-blue Chinese fighter falling end over end toward the ocean below, trailing a thick plume of smoke and flame. Flying away was a Shrike. The wedge-shaped drone pulled an insanely tight turn that would have knocked out any human pilot, firing a missile at a MiG-35 in the midst of it. Even before that MiG exploded, the Shrike was already off hunting its next target, its autonomous programming relentless in its computerized efficiency.
“Little bastard didn’t even stop to see if I was okay,” said Roscoe, silently thanking the drone’s designers.
He checked his radar display, which was momentarily free of jamming strobes. He felt sick when he saw how empty the sky was of aircraft. In less than a minute, at least a hundred lives had been lost.
“Longboard, Longboard, this is Boneyard Leader. We’ve serviced most of your visitors, but I show eight leakers made it through our picket line. MiG-35s,” he said, trying to steady his voice as his plane bucked. “We’re going to run them down, but it looks like some bogeys are going to make it to you first, over.”
The four F-15s remaining in Eagle Flight took off in pursuit at almost nine hundred miles an hour, their maximum at low altitude. The low-fuel warning flashed in Roscoe’s cockpit. Going to afterburner so much would cost him the chance to get home, he thought, but that was beside the point at this stage of the game.
He visually picked up the Russian MiGs by the telltale signs of their missile launches. The remains of Eagle Flight had arrived too late.
“Jesus, that’s a lot of hurt,” said Roscoe to the other three pilots. “I count at least two dozen missiles.”
“At least thirty,” said Squiggle, the pilot in the F-15C flying off Roscoe’s right wing.
“Fire everything you have left. Use ’em or lose ’em!” Roscoe ordered.
He fired off his remaining AIM-9X, visually following it as it locked on one of the MiGs trailing the formation. The MiG was breaking upward, climbing for more altitude after launching its anti-ship missiles, when the Sidewinder exploded just aft of the jet.