It was a threatening flexing of Chinese muscle, and it kept Trash and the rest of the pilots working the strait on their toes and ready for action.
Trash and Cheese were sent to their patrol area by a naval flight officer in the Reagan’s Combat Information Center, known as the CIVIC, and they also received updates on other aircraft in their area of operations from a combat air controller flying in the back of an E2-C Hawkeye airborne early-warning aircraft patrolling far to the east of the strait, with visualization of the area via their powerful radar and computers.
As the distant eyes and ears for the pilots in the strait, the Hawkeye could track aircraft, missiles, and even surface vessels for hundreds of miles in all directions.
Once on station, Trash and Cheese flew a racetrack pattern at twenty thousand feet over the water. Trash manipulated his throttle and stick instinctively to stay in a loose combat formation with his flight lead, and he monitored his radar and listened to the comms from the Hawkeye and the CIVIC.
There were broken clouds well below him, but nothing but brilliant blue sky all around. He could see bits of the Chinese mainland when his racetrack took him to the north, and he could easily make out Taipei and other large cities on Taiwan anytime the clouds broke up enough to the south.
Even though the tension in the strait was palpable, Trash felt good being right here, right now, comfortable in the fact he had the best training, the best support, the best flight lead, and the best aircraft in this entire conflict.
And it was a magnificent aircraft. The F/A-18C was fifty-six feet long, with a forty-foot wingspan. When “slick,” or operating without weapons or extra fuel, it weighed only ten tons, because of its aluminum-steel composite construction. And its two beastly General Electric turbofan engines generated roughly the same amount of power as three hundred fifty Cessna 172 aircraft, giving it an excellent power-to-weight ratio that meant it could hit Mach 1.5—or thirteen hundred miles per hour — and stand on end and fly vertically like a rocket launching off a pad.
Trash’s fly-by-wire aircraft did a lot of the work for him now while he scanned the sky and the screens in front of him — the left data display indicator and the right DDI, the up-front control display, and the moving map display low in front of him, almost between his knees.
There were five hundred thirty switches in his cockpit, but most every input Trash needed to fly and fight could be made from sixteen buttons on his stick and throttle without even taking his eyes off the HUD.
The thirty-million-dollar C was one of the best fighter airframes in the air, but it wasn’t exactly the newest kid on the block. The Navy flew the newer, bigger, and more advanced Super Hornet, which cost a good twenty million dollars more.
Trash had just turned to follow Cheese back to the south, trailing his flight leader in an echelon formation, when his headset came alive with a transmission from the Hawkeye.
“Contact bull’s-eye, zero-four-zero. Forty-five miles, heading southwest, single group, two bogeys, southeast of Putian. Heading, two-one-zero. They appear to be heading toward the strait.”
Cheese’s voice came into Trash’s headset: “Coming our way, brother.”
“Hoorah, aren’t we popular?” Trash responded, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.
The two Marines had heard similar notifications multiple times over the past four days of patrols out here. Each time Trash and Cheese found themselves in the sector where a potential incursion might occur, the Chinese fighters raced toward the centerline only to bank back around to the northwest, and then return to the coast.
The PLAAF was feinting up and down the length of the strait, for what purpose other than to incite some sort of response, no one knew.
Cheese acknowledged the Hawkeye’s transmission, and then immediately listened to a report of a contact just south of the Marines’ sector. Two more bogeys were headed into the strait. This area was patrolled by two ROC F-16s, who were getting their information from the U.S. Hawkeye as well.
Cheese radioed Trash: “Magic Two-Two, let’s descend to angels fifteen, tighten up our pattern so we can be close to the centerline in case the bogeys make an incursion.”
“Roger that,” said Trash, and he followed Cheese’s descent and turn. He did not think for a moment that the two Chinese pilots were going to do anything more than what he’d seen the past four days, and he knew Cheese felt the same, but Trash also knew Cheese was careful enough to not get caught with his pants down, finding himself and his wingman out of position if the Chinese fighters entered Taiwanese airspace.
The Hawkeye updated Cheese. “Magic Two-One. Bogeys zero-two-zero, four-zero miles, ten thousand… climbing.”
“Magic Two-One, roger,” responded Cheese.
A moment after this transmission, the Hawkeye air combat officer notified Cheese that the bogeys approaching the Taiwanese F-16s to the south were following a similar flight path.
Trash said, “Looks like this could be coordinated.”
“Doesn’t it, though?” replied Cheese. “That’s a different tactic from what they’ve been doing. They’ve been sending up flights of two. I wonder if two flights of two at the same time in adjacent sectors means they are raising the stakes.”
“We’re about to find out.”
Cheese and Trash widened their formation and pulled out of their descent at fifteen thousand feet. The Hawkeye divided its time between sending them updates on the two unknown bogeys heading toward them and passing on information to the ROC Air Force F-16s forty miles to the south of the Marines’ sector over the strait.
Just after the Hawkeye announced that the two bogeys heading toward Magic Two-One and Magic Two-Two were twenty miles away, the ACO added, “They are still heading toward the centerline of the strait. At current speed and heading they will breach in two minutes.”
“Roger,” said Cheese. He squinted into the distance to try and pick them out in front of the white clouds and gray of the mainland in the distance.
“Magic Two-One, Hawkeye. New contact. Four bogeys taking off at Fuzhou and approaching the strait. Climbing rapidly and turning south, angels three and climbing.”
Now things were getting complicated, Trash realized. He had two Chinese fighters of unknown type heading directly toward him and his flight leader, two more threatening the sector just south of him, and now four more bogeys heading in behind the first group.
The ACO announced he had a flight of four Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets finishing up air-refueling over the east of Taiwan Island, and he would expedite moving them to the Marines’ sector in support just as soon as he could.
Cheese said, “Trash, I’ve got the bogeys on radar, they are just off my nose. Are you tally?”
Trash clicked a button and removed most of the digital data projected on his heads-up display and his helmet-mounted cueing system, then squinted as he peered ahead out past the HUD into the sky.
“No joy,” he said, but he kept looking.
Cheese said, “Sixty seconds to intercept, let’s fly heading zero-thirty, a twenty-degree offset so they can see we aren’t threatening them.”
“Roger that,” replied Trash, and he tipped his wing to the right, following Cheese’s turn so that the bogeys were no longer directly on their nose.
Within a few seconds Cheese said, “Bogeys are jinking left to come back on an intercept course. Descending, let’s speed it up.”