That holocaust had to be caused by missile fuel stacks burning off. There must have been another Chinese boomer moored in the dock. Bubbles hoped for the sake of everyone downwind that the damn fools had kept their warheads unshipped and stowed elsewhere.
“Okay, Bubbles.” From up front, Digger’s voice sounded totally level, totally controlled, almost uninterested. “Ten miles out from target, four miles from release point. Angle off, point nine. Verify.”
“Verified. We are still in the groove.”
“GPU rechecks?”
“Checked and checked. Checked and checked. Ordnance is up and safeties are off. Intervelometer setting is point five.”
“Looking good, Bub. Two miles out. Enable system to drop.”
Bubbles keyed a sequence on her weapons panel, unlocking the ordnance releases and freeing the fighter-bomber’s firecontrol system to engage the target. Flipping the safety guard up and off the manual bombing trigger on her joystick, she rested her finger against it.
“System enabled.”
It became quiet in the cockpit, the only sound being the soft humming whine of the Sea Raptor’s twin turbofans.
There was quite a fireworks display going on outside of the canopy, however. The air below Moondog 505 scintillated with tracer streams, while above her the shell bursts of heavy antiair fire danced among the clouds like chain lightning.
Running fast at 16,000 feet, she skimmed deftly between the two threats, too high to be reached by the fire of the lighter flak and too low to be trapped within the proximity fused destruction of the larger guns.
The fighter-bomber was cutting almost directly across the heart of urban Shanghai from south to north, the Huangpu River channel off her right wingtip. The fires of the Hudong shipyards were just coming up on their one-o’clock position.
Digger and Bubbles made no effort to aim their aircraft or their weapons at the target. The bombs themselves would take care of that detail when the time came.
Moondog 505 bucked delicately twice. The light patterns on the weapons panel shifted.
“Bombs away,” Bubbles reported quietly.
The weapons released by the Navy strike plane each were named with a tongue-tying acronym: JDAM/CSV (Joint Direct Attack Munitions System/Conformal Stealth Variant). Jacketed in the same radar absorbent material as their carrier aircraft, they had clung remora-like beneath its wings as it had transported them within range of their target. Now, falling free, they set out on the last leg of their journey.
Extending tail fins and glide wings, the airfoil-shaped bomb units peeled off toward their target, steered in by their integral Global Positioning Units. The same essential satellite technology that guided airliners and lost campers around the world now delivered two one-ton charges of high explosives to two specific points — said points being the exact center of the second floor of the central administration building of the Hudong shipyards, precisely fifty feet in from the northern and southern walls.
Moondog 505 was passing the target area now. Bubbles Zellerman kept the FLIR turret locked on the administrations center, recording the images for postmission bomb-damage assessment. “Three … and two … and one,” she murmured.
On the screen, the southern wing of the building spewed light and smoke from its windows and collapsed in upon itself. The central bay followed a half instant later.
Not bad bombing, Bubbles thought judgmentally. Not perfect, but not bad.
“Ordnance is in,” Digger Graves heard his backseater report.
“Good run! In the pickle barrel.”
“Roger. We are outta here!”
Digger rolled his hand controller to starboard and increased pressure on his right rudder pad. Moondog 505 banked away smoothly to the east in response. He came forward on the HOTAS grips as well, kicking the Sea Raptor up into super cruise mode. The g-load of the turn grew and the whisper of the turbofans grew into a rushing roar as the jet accelerated for the sound barrier.
Off the right wingtip, a last lick of firelight glinted off the surface of the Yangtze. In seconds, they would be “feet wet” again, across the Chinese coast and clear.
Combat pilots refer to it as “catching the golden BB.” The shell hadn’t even been aimed at Moondog 505. It was a 100-millimeter round fired blindly into the sky over five miles away. A malfunctioning safety had kept it from detonating as it had reached its peak altitude, and it was actually plunging downward when its trajectory intersected the fighter bomber’s flight path. Its fuse cap just barely ticked the trailing edge of the Sea Raptor’s portside elevator.
Fortunately, Digger Graves blacked out for only a couple of seconds. He regained awareness in a world gone insane. The wild shifting of the gravity vector told him that Moondog 505 was tumbling wildly. He wrenched at the hand controller, instinctively trying to stabilize the aircraft, only to find that he didn’t have any functional control surfaces left.
The few remaining instrument displays were pulsing red or yellow crisis warnings. Orange firelight glared on the canopy, and Graves could hear the moaning and cracking of an air frame breaking up. There was no doubt in hell that their contract to fly this aircraft had just expired.
“Eject!” he screamed. “Eject, eject, eject!”
Digger reached over his head for the combined blast curtain and ejection-seat trigger, groping for a panic-stricken moment against the g-loading until his fingers closed through the wire and plastic loops. Trying to keep his back straight and his limbs centered over the seat, he yanked the curtain down over his face.
The canopy blew off and a tornado’s worth of wind poured into the cockpit, screaming and clawing. Over it, Digger heard the faint ripping thud of Bubble’s ejector seat firing, and he felt the flash of heat from its rockets. Then it was his turn, and Digger lost consciousness for the second time.
Downriver, almost at the mine barrier, Vince Arkady stiffened as a piercing sound stabbed at his ears. An electronic blipping sounded in his helmet phones; shrill, penetrating, specifically pitched to be impossible to overlook or ignore.
It was the herald of disaster, the Emergency Locator Beacon of a downed aircrew.
“Gray Lady, Gray Lady,” Arkady was speaking over the beacon tone on the air circuit. “I’m getting an ELB out here.
Are you guys reading the same?”
“Roger, we got it,” Christine Rendino replied from Raven’s Roost. “We have a bearing on it. Triangulating now. Okay, signal source is to your west. Back upriver.”
“Can you confirm that this beacon is one of ours? Have we just lost a strike bird?”
“Stand by, Zero One. We’re working it.”
From the bridge Amanda had listened to the exchange, tense and silent. Now she keyed her own microphone. “CIC, try and get a skin track or a transponder burst off of that last strike aircraft. Communications, inform Task Flag that we might have a plane down.”
“Sir, the Cunningham reports that Moondog 505 might just have gone down.”
“Goddamn it!” Tallman’s exclamation was explosive and bitter. “When are we due to reacquire that aircraft?”
“She should be clear of the coast now,” the Enterprise’s air boss replied.
“Then try and reestablish commo with her,” Tallman demanded. “Contact the E2D and have them try and lift a return off her radar transponder. Verify if she’s still airborne or not!”
“Sir,” one of the communications ratings looked up from her console, “the Hummer is now confirming that they are receiving two ELB signals on the same bearing as reported by the Cunningham. IFF subsignal codings match those assigned to the aircrew of Moondog 505.”
“That’s it,” the air boss said flatly. “We lost one.”