Nagin got inside the Mace’s turn and put the Joint Strike Fighter’s nose directly on the Chinese fighter’s underbelly. The HUD in his helmet sounded a tone.
“Fox three!” Nagin said, trying not to shout.
The weapons bays under the F-35 snapped open. One of the two AMRAAMs mounted on the doors dropped out. Its rocket motors ignited and the bay doors snapped shut in less than a second.
The missile closed the distance to the Assassin’s Mace in four seconds. The Chinese pilot rolled hard left and deployed chaff and flares. The aluminum strips and pyrotechnics scattered behind did nothing to confuse the weapon tracking his ruptured airframe. The missile punched through the metal cloud and arced in toward its target.
The Assassin’s Mace had a lifespan that could now be measured in single seconds. The pilot knew it and reached for the ejection handle.
The missile exploded ten feet off the Mace’s right aileron, showering the rear quarter of the plane with shrapnel that tore into the prototype plane’s nose and forward body. The shock wave tore off the port wing and ignited a ruptured fuel tank. The rear half of the stealth plane’s airframe was shredded, with black smoke and flames leaking from every hole. The aircraft pinwheeled clockwise and the metal screamed as it began to tear itself apart.
Explosive bolts around the canopy fired. The plastic bubble tumbled away and the Chinese pilot’s ejection seat rocketed out of the dying plane.
Nagin arced around the dead plane and watched as it tumbled through the gray sky, flames and smoke marking its path down toward Penghu.
“I’m thirsty,” Cassie said. Her blood had soaked through Jonathan’s shirt and Kyra’s hands were covered with it. The average human body had five liters of blood. Kyra knew the girl had lost at least one, but it was easy to overestimate blood loss.
“They’re coming,” Kyra said. “They’ll patch you up and you can have all the water you want.” Hurry up, Jon, she thought.
Kyra saw the hatch open out of the corner of her eye. She twisted around and saw a corpsman step through carrying a duffel bag, then a second, and Jonathan behind.
“MIGs are bugging out!” one of the pilots announced. With nothing left to defend and fresh US fighters inbound, someone had given the order to retreat. The icons on the master screen showed the remaining Chinese planes turning west. Lincoln’s CIC exploded in shouts and yells. It would have been a moment for hard drinks and tall beers if the Navy didn’t ban alcohol aboard its vessels.
“Nothing left to protect,” Pollard said. “Call Washington. Tell them no pursuit. They won’t like that but I’ll buy Admiral Leavitt a few rounds to smooth things over.”
The staff could hardly understand him over the cheers coming through the 1MC.
CHAPTER 18
The SH-60B Seahawk helicopter set down on a hill that offered Kyra a high view of the crash site. The artificial wind clawed at Kyra’s eyes as the Navy airman slid the door aside and he yelled at her to keep her head down. Stepping out onto grass that whipped at her feet, she landed off balance. She almost fell onto her knees as the air pushed her from all sides. Kyra balanced herself, ran out from under the helicopter, and straightened up once she passed outside the rotor wash.
Taiwanese soldiers had roped off at least fifty acres of the valley expanse below the hill. The zone inside the rope line was overrun with Taiwanese and US Naval Intelligence officers and civilians from who-knew-where. It looked like an archeological dig with grids of stakes connected by twine to allow for mapping the precise locations of recovered pieces. Men in jumpsuits with gloves and masks were carefully bagging and tagging debris that was still lying about. Dozens of parts, twisted and charred with serrated and ragged edges, were sticking out of the dirt like steel plants in an alien garden ready for harvest. A portable hoist had one large piece — part of the plane’s nose, she thought — suspended from a harness. Two men were guiding it onto a flatbed truck. There was a hangar somewhere at the Makung airport where those men would crate up the remains for reassembly at some US air base. No one would tell Kyra where. She suspected no one had made that decision yet. Usually a postcrash assembly was meant to determine the cause of a crash, but in this case that was known. This reconstruction would be a perverse kind of reverse engineering. Engineers would rebuild the metal corpse to see if they could discern its design and estimate its capabilities. It would take years. Doubtless, some CIA officers who’d played no part in the plane’s discovery would make their careers on the project.
The still-smoldering crater was larger than she’d imagined on the flight over. The rough oval was two dozen yards long, half as wide, and deeper by at least ten feet than the tallest man in the hole. The fire had burned the nearby vegetation to its roots, and the surface was an odd mix of blackened rock and light-brown earth. It felt stiff. Only a few sections of the plane were still visible, all black, whether from the original RAM-absorbing topcoat paint or the heat of the fire now extinguished, she didn’t know. Some of both, she supposed. The plane had hit the ground at a sharp angle and set off a wide-reaching fireball, judging by the burn radius. Kyra realized then that some of the pebbled detritus under her feet was shrapnel from the plane. Small wisps of smoke were still rising from the pit. She hoped it was not carcinogenic but knew chances were not good. The stiff wind carried most of it away as it came over the crater’s lip, but the men inside had filter masks on their faces.
Jonathan was standing at the crater’s edge staring down into the pit. She reached his position and stood next to him. He didn’t turn. “Any word on the pilot?” he asked.
“Taiwanese Army picked him up in the woods outside Baisha Township. There was no sign of PLA search-and-rescue in the air over the Strait,” Kyra said.
“Surprising,” Jonathan said. “I would think they would want their test pilot back.”
“I would,” Kyra said. “They’ll find a way to spin his detention in their favor.”
“That seems likely,” Jonathan agreed. “What about that seaman apprentice?”
“Her name’s Cassie,” Kyra said.
“Did a little sisterly bonding, did we?”
“A little,” Kyra admitted. “Spent some time talking to her down in sickbay after surgery. Turns out she’s from Virginia too. A place called Dillwyn in Buckingham County, not thirty miles from my parents’ place. Anyway, they got the shrapnel out. It missed the artery but managed to cut up some muscles and other blood vessels. She’ll be in rehab for a while. Probably get transferred to shore duty.”
Jonathan nodded. “You called Cooke?”
“Yeah,” she said. “There’s a team on its way here to help the Taiwanese go over the wreckage. She’s expecting us back tomorrow. The Navy is going to fly us to Pearl Harbor in a few hours and we’ll catch a commercial flight to Dulles. I thought we were going to get a day in Honolulu to sleep off the jet lag, but I guess not.”
“The president needs some answers sooner,” he said. “He still has to talk Tian down.”
“You don’t think this is over?” Kyra asked.
“I suspect the shooting is finished, but there are always the diplomatic rituals to follow,” Jonathan said.
“Do you think the PLA would have gone after Taiwan if that thing had crippled the Lincoln?” Kyra asked.