Gettysburg and Shiloh and two other picket ships rode the waves in the distance. All four vessels were firing at random intervals into the sky, and Kyra watched a pair of missiles lift off from Shiloh. She followed their contrails as they surged away from the ship, and Kyra realized she could see bits of the dogfights. An explosion flared as one of Shiloh’s missiles destroyed some plane, and Kyra saw Gettysburg send another one of its own missiles into the air.
Kyra clutched the rail and tried to hold her breath, but her lungs kept working on their own. She turned her head and only then saw that she wasn’t alone. Another young woman, a seaman apprentice, was hanging on to the rail too. She looked at Kyra, her eyes wide with terror. The seaman was younger than she was, still a kid, she realized. Scared out of her teenage mind enough that the girl had abandoned her post, wherever that was. We’re at general quarters. Where’s your station? Kyra thought, suddenly rational. They’ll throw you in the brig.
Kyra felt a hand on her shoulder and she grabbed it. Jonathan, she knew.
The strange plane dove for the water, rolling to one side. Nagin saw its bay doors open. A pair of missiles rolled down, and suddenly the Assassin’s Mace was on his scope. Nagin swung his F-35 around as hard as the avionics allowed, but the Chinese stealth plane was arcing inside his turn.
One of the enemy plane’s missiles flew off its rail with white smoke trailing behind and punched into a thundercloud ahead, where Nagin lost sight of it.
Fighter-BOMBER, he realized.
The bay doors snapped shut and the Assassin’s Mace disappeared from Nagin’s scope. His AMRAAM went blind and the PLA’s stealth fighter rolled away from Nagin.
Nagin could see the plane with his eyes but his F-35 couldn’t see it on radar.
So that’s what it feels like, he thought. Okay, a knife fight it is.
The inbound Yingji missile was twenty-five miles out and moving at Mach 1.6.
The Tactical Flag Command Center and every radio on the carrier exploded with excited chatter. Pollard was proud that everyone wasn’t diving for cover under their stations.
“You have to come inside!” Jonathan yelled.
“Can’t,” Kyra said. Her rapid breathing made it hard to speak. “I can’t.”
“It’s not safe out here!”
“You said… you said ‘no safe place on a carrier,’” she finally managed to answer.
“Some places are less dangerous than others.”
Kyra heard the 1MC speaker switch on. “All hands, brace for shock!” Then the chaff launchers fired.
Lincoln was no destroyer or frigate but she was hardly defenseless. The Nimitz-class vessel, like her sisters, had been built to fight a Soviet navy and air force with hundreds of planes, so the designers had assumed that somewhere, someday, a bandit would get close enough to fire on a carrier. Lincoln carried her own countermeasures and point-defense weapons.
“Countermeasures.” Lincoln’s captain in the CIC held his voice steady. The crew relied on his calm as much as anything to control their own fears.
On the flattop, the carrier began ejecting chaff into the air, port side. The Phalanx guns and Sea Sparrow missile launchers pivoted toward the inbound missile.
“Range nine miles and closing. Sea Sparrows firing.”
Pollard stared at the screen, watching the incoming missile close on his carrier. If it was going to hit anywhere, he would lay money on it striking the carrier island. Right where he was standing.
“Inside, now!” Jonathan yelled. Kyra saw his gaze fixed at the horizon.
“What—?” She turned to look just in time to see Lincoln fire its missiles.
The RIM-7 Sea Sparrow launchers put two missiles into the air. The solid propellant motors fired and got the weapons to speed in less than two seconds. They closed the distance to the incoming Yingji in a fraction less than seven.
“Miss!” a tech announced. “Eagle Strike was just outside their kill radius. Distance two miles. Artoos tracking.” The Yingji and Sparrows had closed on each other’s positions at a relative speed of almost four thousand miles an hour, giving the Sparrows too little time to make course corrections before detonation. Each missile had a ninety-pound warhead that pushed shrapnel in a thirty-foot circle, but the Yingji slipped through.
“We do it the old-fashioned way now.” Pollard’s voice was hard steel, but the crew knew he was trying to sound optimistic. The Phalanx guns were the last resort and considered less effective against high-speed missiles than the Sea Sparrows, which had just missed.
The chaff launchers kept punching aluminum strips into the air, trying to confuse the Yingji, which stubbornly held its course. The port-side Phalanx guns fore and aft spun on their mounts a bit, making a final targeting correction, and the 20 mm Gatlings fired together, sounding like the Devil’s own chainsaw. Streams of lead erupted at the rate of four thousand rounds a minute.
Kyra heard the buzzing of the guns, surprisingly loud over the other deafening noise of the flight deck.
“Get down!” Jonathan grabbed her and pushed her down onto the deck behind the metal shield of the railing. He fell on top of her, then pushed himself up onto one foot to go for the seaman apprentice, who was still frozen in place.
The first gun missed by inches. The second hit the Yingji’s nose cone just off center and ripped it to pieces at a distance of three-quarters of a mile from Lincoln. The antiship missile was torn apart by a combination of bullets, stress from the supersonic air ripping into its now-damaged frame, and, a moment later, impact with the Taiwan Strait at just under Mach 2 a half mile from the carrier. At that speed, hitting the water was like diving into a field of concrete. The missile shattered into thousands of pieces, bits skipping across the water like stones. Others flew through the air in a straight line toward the ship.
Kyra heard tiny bits of metal on metal clang on the hull, sharp sounds, like gunshots hitting a steel backstop at supersonic speed.
The seaman apprentice shrieked. Kyra twisted her head to look as she heard the other woman’s body hit the deck plates. Jonathan scrambled over to her, and Kyra hauled herself to her feet. She heard Shiloh fire another missile miles away. Another Phalanx gun, probably Gettysburg, sounded in the distance.
The sailor was on her back and still conscious, a dark spot expanding on her blue coveralls over the left shoulder. Jonathan pulled the woman’s uniform open and tore her shirt so he could get a look at the wound.
“Vampire down,” the tech announced, his own voice quavering just a hair.
Lucky, Pollard thought. “We can’t stay here all day.” The admiral looked at the screen. “Sometime this week, Grizzly,” he announced. The mic wasn’t live. Nagin didn’t need to hear the nagging to get on with his job.
Nagin rolled in the opposite direction and approached the other plane almost head-on, certainly inside the Chinese plane’s radar cone, and the enemy fighter hadn’t shot at him. Nagin’s own plane hadn’t detected a radar sweep from the other plane. Even with the help of the AWACS and the entire Lincoln battle group, the return was still weak when it did show up. Nagin took a chance, put the F-35’s nose dead on the Mace, opened his missile bay, and switched on his active radar. The Slammers still refused to sound the tone that would have announced their willingness to shred the other plane into burning pieces.
Nagin had never shot at another plane with his guns. He had maybe three seconds’ worth of gunfire, and dogfighting another stealth plane was not something any Navy pilot had ever trained for. In fact, he was pretty sure that the Lockheed engineers had never even studied the possibility.