“Out of Fuzhou?” Pollard asked.
“That course is probable but not confirmed, sir.”
“And not one of ours?” Pollard asked. This contact wasn’t skimming the sea to get lost in the waves. The possible bogey was four miles above the Strait.
“No, sir,” the junior officer answered. “I’ve seen him twice. Unless I’m seeing three different planes or flocks of birds on a parallel course, this bogey came around the fight from the northwest. Constant bearing, decreasing range, distance and time between contacts are consistent with a single fighter.”
“You get that, Grizzly?” Pollard asked.
“Grizzly copies,” Nagin said. “Moving to intercept.” He pulled the stick right, rolled, and pointed his F-35 toward the northwest. He prayed that he would find seagulls.
“How many sailors on Gettysburg?” Kyra whispered to Jonathan.
“Four hundred, give or take.”
“Range ten miles,” someone said over the comm. “Gettysburg is firing.”
No safe place on a carrier, Kyra thought.
Not safe.
Jonathan looked down at his arm as Kyra squeezed it hard. The woman was starting to hyperventilate.
Gettysburg’s computers determined that the remaining Yingji was a threat without any help from the fire control technicians. Once its algorithms determined the Chinese missile was close enough, two rockets ignited and flew out of the deck launcher. They went supersonic, their infrared sensors locked onto the Yingji’s engine, and they closed the distance within seconds. The first RIM-116 warhead exploded within a few meters of the Eagle Strike and scattered a fragment cloud in its target’s path. The metal bits punctured the Chinese missile’s nose cone and damaged the stabilizing wings. In a fraction of a second, it shuddered in flight, yawed, and the airflow threw it into a circular spin off its flight path. The second RIM-116 finished the job an instant later. Its shrapnel punctured the Yingji’s engine and ignited the remaining fuel. The airframe tore itself apart. Chinese missile wreckage hit the Taiwan Strait at almost Mach 1, and bits of metal skipped across the waves for hundreds of yards.
“Lucky,” Pollard muttered. “Won’t get lucky forever.” Lincoln’s pilots were outnumbered and still eating the PLA alive anyway, but it wouldn’t last. Pollard was surprised that the Chinese Air Force hadn’t sent more aircraft after them, but that wouldn’t last either if they stayed in the Strait long enough. Chinese submarines could well have been advancing, but his instincts told him that was not the case. The Chinese seemed content with an aerial fight, which gave Pollard a very sick feeling inside. There was nothing to be gained by throwing older fighters and inferior pilots against the US Navy’s aviators and Tian knew it. The dogfight was holding the carrier in position to retrieve its planes, and now the radar network had picked up a possible hit.
“They’re playing with us,” he announced. “Maybe they wanted to try conventional arms before giving their science project a test run.” He checked the wall chronometer. “We’ve got ten minutes. If the PLA wants to keep fighting after that, Washington’s boys can have some fun.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Kyra muttered. She pushed past Jonathan and ran out into the passageway.
“Wait—,” he started.
“Sir?” the tech spoke up. “That intermittent contact has altered course. Now inbound, inside the outer screen. Thirty miles, constant bearing, decreasing range. It definitely arced around the furball, sir.”
Jonathan stared at the radar track.
The cloud cover at twenty thousand feet was patchy and gray and a brief spray of rainwater washed over his canopy. Nagin lifted the plane’s nose and climbed past the squall, then rolled his plane onto its side to look down. Another MIG-27 pilot died a mile below in a fireball that caught his attention.
“Lincoln, Grizzly. Negative on my scope, negative visual on that contact,” Nagin said. His heart was pounding hard, but years of practice kept his voice calm. “Do you have him?”
“Grizzly, Lincoln, no joy, repeat, no — Contact! Bogey on your four o’clock, one-zero-five, distance fifteen miles!” the radar tech radioed back.
Nagin held back from cursing on the open mic and turned his head. The bogey had passed him on the right, hiding in the cloud banks, and was arcing around behind him toward Lincoln. “No, you don’t,” he muttered. He pulled his stick right and put the F-35 into a hard turn that sent the blood in his body rushing toward his feet. He held the turn until he matched course, and a few seconds on the afterburner made up the distance. He rolled wings-level, the gray wall of vapor fell away, and his target ripped a hole in the cloud bank’s eastern edge.
“Lincoln, Grizzly, I have visual contact,” Nagin said.
The Assassin’s Mace was more beautiful than he had expected. Perhaps the unforgiving math of the Ufimtsev equations had forced the graceful design on Chinese engineers who had shown no aptitude for it before. It was also big, almost twice the size of Nagin’s F-35, big enough to carry any weapon in its bay that the Chinese cared to load. The stealth plane was a coal-black arrowhead, devoid of markings, with a razor blade profile. Its nose, stolen from the B-2, came straight back into a chined fuselage with tapered edges. Its delta wings started their outward spread at the midpoint of the body. Dual stabilizers rose from them, each canted inward at equal angles to the hard curve of the plane’s body. The cockpit windscreen was tinted the same coal-black color as the rest of the Mace, hiding its pilot from Nagin’s view but otherwise giving its pilot no advantage at the moment. In a moonless sky, the aircraft would have disappeared completely. The early morning sun robbed it of the advantage, but the storm clouds darkened the sky more than Nagin would have liked.
Pollard looked up at Burke. “Congratulations.”
“Thank me after he shoots it down,” Jonathan said.
“Where’s your partner?”
“Good question,” Jonathan said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be back.” He moved out into the passageway, looked both ways, then picked one and marched ahead.
Kyra reached the top of the metal ladder, then pressed her body against the bulkhead as a pair of sailors rushed by on their way down. She resumed her stumbling run. The bulkheads were closing around her and she shut her eyes to keep them away, then looked ahead again. She needed air and there was only one place on the carrier she could get outside without getting in the way of sailors carrying out combat operations.
Kyra found the hatch she had been searching for and fumbled with the heavy metal lever. She finally put her weight into it and then her shoulder against the metal door, and it swung open, letting her stumble out into the morning air. The sunlight blinded her for a few seconds, then she rushed forward until she could put her hands on the rail and look down from Vulture’s Row to the flight deck.
Sailors were everywhere, moving in a frenzied mass. In the distance, an F-18 Hornet was lined up and inbound, trailing smoke from an engine, its wings wobbling. The pilot managed to get the fighter’s nose up at the last minute, barely avoiding a ramp strike, or so Kyra thought. The arresting cables caught the tailhook and a fire crew was running toward the plane before it was dragged to a stop.
Not safe.
Kyra couldn’t slow her breathing. Panic attack, something told her. She clutched the rail and looked up and away from the carrier deck.