Enough of that, Nagin thought. He had a different mission from his brothers and it would be a stupid death if this so-called Assassin’s Mace shot him down while he was off watching the dogfight like a gawking plebe watching his first Army-Navy college football game. He started to roll wings-level when one of the Hornets pulled out of the fight into a high arc, pushing Mach 1, a MIG in close pursuit. The Hornet suddenly began dumping speed and pushing its nose higher. J-turn, Nagin realized. The American pilot — he couldn’t tell who — was forcing his plane into a stall and then would use his flight surfaces to reverse the turn. It was an advanced maneuver, difficult in a Hornet, and one that Nagin wouldn’t have tried in a large fight. Don’t get fancy, come around and let your wingman brush him off. Plenty of targets, you’ll get yours.
The MIG pilot was better trained than Nagin would have thought. The Chinese aviator recognized the J-turn and moved inside the curve to line up a kill shot. In a moment, the Hornet would be hanging in the air, as close to motionless as a Navy fighter ever got when it was off the ground, like a piñata waiting for a child to smack it with a bat. But the MIG was too close and the pilot overestimated the time he had to close the distance. The Hornet dropped more speed and the arc of his turn shallowed. The MIG pilot finally saw the danger and tried to pull away too late. The MIG-27 just missed the Hornet’s fuselage and the two planes sheared off each other’s wings instead.
Nagin held his breath, rolled and banked, and began a slow turn to keep eyes on the dead Hornet. Neither plane exploded on impact, but the Hornet was in a fast tumbling spin and the air around it was thick with burning jet fuel for the few moments before it began a death spiral down. The metal husk fell through its own flaming fuel, smoke now pouring from the burning skin of the fuselage.
Get out, Nagin thought. He hoped the other pilot was still conscious.
“Jumper is hit!” someone yelled over the comm.
Every alarm in the dying US fighter was screaming, and Jumper, rookie though he was, didn’t need anyone to tell him it was time to leave. The Hornet pilot reached between his legs, pulled the handle, and then crossed his arms. Explosive bolts in the windscreen fired, blowing the windscreen away from the fuselage. The rocket motors under him fired, driving the Martin-Baker ACES II ejection seat up its rails and out of the plane. The rockets burned off their propellant, the seat fell away, and the chute opened automatically. He wondered if the Chinese ejection seats were as reliable. The answer, it seemed, was no.
“Lincoln, I confirm one chute,” Nagin said like he was reading the newspaper. Another US naval aviator had just become a lifetime member of the Martin-Baker Fan Club, though the seat’s rocket motors manufactured by that company had shortened the man’s spine by a half inch. The downed pilot would not complain. The Chinese pilot was learning that the alternative was far worse.
“CSAR, go!” CIC ordered. One of the combat search-and-rescue Sea-hawk helicopters circling the carrier peeled away and rushed forward toward the fight. It would stay a hundred feet off the deck to avoid the Chinese radars as long as possible. They could have flown higher. The MIGs now had more pressing problems than trying to spot helicopters, but if not, the CSAR pilots wouldn’t have been deterred anyway. No Americans would die in the waters of the Taiwan Strait if they could prevent it, and enemy fire was not going to stop them from at least making the attempt.
A pair of triangles on the master screen moved out of the fight and began arcing far too close to Lincoln’s position. “Two bandits inbound, bearing two-three-zero, range forty miles!” one of the junior officers yelled.
“They’re going for the escorts. Probably trying to open a hole to the carrier,” Jonathan told Kyra. “Came around the fight from the southwest. Must be riding close to the water.” All of Lincoln’s fighters were out of position to intercept and none would be able to close the gap before the MIGs closed the distance for a missile shot.
“Worked for us,” Pollard said. The radar return off the two planes was intermittent. Shiloh was closer to the inbound planes but off-axis from their approach vector. Gettysburg was in a direct line. Pollard didn’t bother to radio out to the picket ship. Every captain in the battle group knew his primary job was to protect Lincoln even at the cost of his own vessel.
Two icons appeared, both moving away from the approaching MIGs and toward the carrier group. “Two vampires inbound on Gettysburg! Range thirty-five miles!”
“Helm, evasive. Fire control, stand by,” Kyra heard someone from Gettysburg order over the comm. She supposed it was the captain. Seven miles ahead of Lincoln, Gettysburg’s four General Electric gas turbine engines surged to full power, using all eighty-thousand horsepower to drive the ship into a hard turn through the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait.
“Range, twenty-five miles. Shiloh is firing,” one of the Lincoln’s techs said. The cruiser was off angle from the inbound missiles but was three nautical miles closer to the missiles and had the first shot.
The antiship missiles were Yingji-82 Eagle Strikes. The solid rocket boosters pushed the missiles to their maximum speed, then fell away into the sea, and the Yingjis’ turbojet engines kicked in. Both missiles settled at three meters above the Strait and pushed forward at just under Mach 1.
The two Jian-10B planes had dropped toward the sea once they broke away from the fight. They aimed for fifty feet above the waves, first hoping to get lost in the sea return to evade the AWACS and E-3A Sentry radars when they fired on Gettysburg, then to evade the picket ships’ fire control radars. It didn’t help. Both planes took direct hits from RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missiles. The pilots died instantly as they and their aircraft were almost vaporized between the missile warheads and their own flaming jet fuel.
“Hit!” Shiloh had knocked down one of the Yingji with a Phalanx Close-In Weapons Systems gun, which cut the odds in half for Gettsyburg, but her sister ship now had to defend itself. “One vampire inbound on Gettysburg, range seventeen miles, Mach point nine. Sir, it’s passed inside Shiloh’s firing envelope,” the tech observed. “CIWS guns didn’t have time to take the other one, and her RAMs won’t be able to catch it.”
“Deploy countermeasures.” Kyra heard Gettysburg’s commanding officer give the order over the comm. The man sounded like he was announcing the weather. Gettysburg’s chaff launchers began firing clouds of aluminum strips in front of the carrier, hoping to confuse the Yingji’s radars.
“Tracking,” Gettysburg’s Fire Control tech said. “The Artoos will get ’em.” The Ticonderoga-class cruiser’s Phalanx guns looked like the famous robot but were far more lethal.
“Hope you’re right,” Kyra heard Jonathan mutter.
One of Lincoln’s radar watch cut into the conversation. “Sir, I have an intermittent radar contact, bearing three-four-five, altitude twenty thousand feet, distance thirty miles.”