The Mace pushed hard into a turn and went nose down. Nagin followed, opened up his throttle to keep the distance constant, and pulled the trigger. I’m gonna pound your brains out.
His gun flashed and the 25 mm rounds missed their moving target as the Chinese arrowhead rolled to the side and braked hard. Nagin cursed as the Mace curved behind.
“No, you don’t,” Nagin muttered again, still loud enough to be broadcast. Nagin lifted his nose and leveled out. The Mace followed and Nagin rolled a quarter turn and went for the sky. The black plane behind him started to follow, but gravity pulled hard as it tried to end its dive and it could not make its climb as steep. Nagin backed off on his thrust, arced over and dove. The Mace flashed across his path, leveled, and dove again for the water. It was a skilled maneuver, and Nagin had expected no less. It only made sense that one of the PLA’s best pilots would be at the stick of their newest plane.
Jonathan reached underneath the woman’s back and felt for blood. There was plenty. “Shrapnel, still in the shoulder. She’s bleeding fast. Might have nicked the subclavian artery,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Kyra. “Get down to the battle dressing station on the flight deck level. We need a corpsman—”
“I don’t know where that is,” Kyra protested.
Jonathan frowned, then pulled off his jacket and overshirt. He pressed the shirt against the girl’s wound and she cried out in pain. He grabbed Kyra’s arm with his free hand and pushed her hand down on his shirt. “Press here. Don’t let up. I’ll be back.”
She shifted around Jonathan as he stood, lifting his hands off the sailor only when Kyra’s hands were firmly on the girl’s shoulder. “How do you know where it is?” Kyra asked.
“Not my first aircraft carrier,” he said. Then he stepped through the hatch.
“They’re in a rolling scissors,” Pollard said. The other Navy officers grumbled in agreement. Both planes were looping around in a line, trying to get position behind each other. It also meant the Chinese pilot had some real training. Assuming the pilots’ skills were an even match, the winner would be the man flying the better plane.
Nagin had dropped his airspeed too far for comfort and still couldn’t stay behind the Mace. The Chinese plane was slower to accelerate despite its second engine but the larger wings gave it more control at slower speeds. It’s heavier than I am, Nagin thought. Perhaps the Chinese hadn’t figured out or stolen the methods for manufacturing all the lightweight composites that made up most of his own F-35. It was a question some engineer would have to figure out after the fact. Grizzly’s immediate problem was that the hostile was crossing in behind him.
Tracers ripped by Nagin’s cockpit. He rolled the plane hard while dropping altitude.
Time to bug out of this. If the Mace was more maneuverable at slow speeds, then the throttle would be the American’s friend today. He pulled out of the roll and into a hard turn away from the Mace, the fighters moving in opposite directions. Nagin pulled back and climbed for the sun.
The Mace came around and started vertical toward the F-35. The hostile plane fired its guns again, the rounds going wide left. Nagin rolled over, turned into the Mace’s path and the two planes rushed past each other close enough that the jet wash rocked both planes. Nagin lifted his fighter into an Immelmann turn, moving in a half circle until his direction was reversed and he rolled wings-level.
The Chinese pilot was reversing his turn through a wide circle, like a car making a U-turn, leaving his fighter near the same altitude as the F-35.
“Come on, get inside that guy’s turn,” Pollard muttered.
“Sir, our ten minutes are up. Our birds are gonna be getting close to bingo fuel,” one of the junior officers announced.
“Any other bandits in positions to make a run on us?” Pollard asked.
“No, sir,” the junior officer replied. “We’ve got them cordoned off.”
“Contact Washington. Tell them it’s their turn to play,” Pollard ordered. “Once they’re in position, recall our people.”
“Aye, sir.”
The seaman apprentice tried to move under Kyra’s hands and screamed as the bit of shrapnel ground against her collarbone.
“Don’t move,” Kyra ordered her. “If you move—”
“I got shot?” It came out almost as a stutter.
She doesn’t know what happened. Kyra had taken the Agency’s course on trauma medicine, training for officers who were going to serve in war zones, where they might get pressed into service as first responders. Her thinking was suddenly clear and she recognized the symptoms of shock. The girl’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and she was staring straight up at the blue sky, her pupils dilated. “Yeah, something like that.”
“It hurts.”
Kyra had to lean close to the girl’s head to hear her. “I know,” Kyra told her. Distract her, she thought. “What’s your name?”
“Cassie.”
Nagin eased back on his throttle the smallest bit and pulled inside the Mace’s turn. The Chinese pilot saw it and throttled up his own plane. He began closing the distance between the two planes, trying to make the American overshoot or slow down again to avoid that error.
Nagin grinned and slammed his throttle full forward. The F-35 jumped forward and crossed the Mace’s turn. He pulled hard right on the stick, rolled the plane, and came around in a tight circle that threatened to cross the Chinese plane’s turn again.
Gotcha.
The distance between the planes was less than two miles and the Mace couldn’t move any direction fast enough to escape the F-35’s attack vector. Nagin kicked the afterburner, tracked the Mace’s direction for a quarter second, and pulled the gun trigger.
The rounds tore into the Mace’s airframe, shredding wing and stabilizer metal into jagged petals and ripping holes that began to spew fluids in dark contrails as the plane rolled into another corkscrew. Nagin held the gunsight on the black bird until his gun ran dry. He watched his tracers embed themselves in the black plane’s airframe—
A solid red triangle appeared on the radar track. “There!” Pollard yelled. The cheers in the Tactical Flag Command Center were matched by the noise coming over the comm from the crew in the CIC. “Hard to hide from radar with a bunch of jagged holes in your wing.”
“Sir, MIGs are moving to protect the Chinese plane,” someone announced over the comm. “Our birds are in pursuit. Time to intercept, forty seconds.”
“They won’t get them all,” Pollard said over the speaker. “Not enough missiles left to take them all out. Washington’s fighters?”
“Two minutes out,” someone said.
“Grizzly, you’ve got thirty seconds and then you’ll have company,” Pollard said.
Twenty more than I need. The Assassin’s Mace was in a steep dive, trailing black smoke and juking like a nervous insect. The island of Penghu was filling the canopy. Nagin pushed his throttle forward, fired the afterburner, and broke the speed of sound. Everyone on Penghu would hear it. Grizzly ignored the ground and focused on his helmet HUD. The radar in the nose was trying to get enough data on the black fighter for a missile lock, but even wounded, the black diamond was making itself a hard target. The Mace jerked up its nose and leveled out more quickly than Nagin had thought possible. He deployed the airbrakes and pulled back on his own stick and felt his entire body push against his seat harness as gravity pulled hard on him. He came out of the dive a half mile below the Mace. The Chinese stealth plane banked and turned toward its approaching brothers as it tried to close the distance faster than Pollard’s deadline.