Black Star Rising

by Robert Gandt

  In the cockpit of his F/A-18, Alexander nodded his agreement. The Flankers were northeast of his own position, eighty miles away. “Weeds” meant they were at low altitude, probably making passes at White Tiger.

  “Runner One-one confirms the Flankers,” Alexander radioed. “Say our weapons status.” He needed to know whether they were cleared to arm their air-to-air weapons.

  For several seconds the controller didn’t answer. Alexander knew she was checking with Alpha Whiskey—the Air Warfare Commander who was a two-star aboard USS Ronald Reagan.

  “Runner, your weapons status is yellow and tight,” the controller said.

  Alexander shook his head. Shit. “Yellow and tight” meant there was a possibility of a threat, but none was yet identified. His Master Armament switch was supposed to remain off. Alpha Whiskey was playing it safe. Don’t get confrontational with our Chinese friends. Not until the little bastards had you in their sights.

  “Runner One-one copies yellow and tight.” He knew Alpha Whiskey was monitoring the frequency. He hoped the sarcasm in his voice came through. This was bullshit, giving the Flankers the first shot.

  Alexander’s flight had been vectored from their CAP—Combat Air Patrol—station over the Reagan toward White Tiger, the Vietnamese-owned, American-crewed oil drilling platform in the Spratly Island archipelago. The platform manager had transmitted a Mayday. Fighters with Chinese markings were making threatening passes over the installation.

  Alexander took a quick glance over each shoulder. To his left he saw the gray outline of another F/A-18E Super Hornet, flown by Lieutenant Hozer Miller. Off his right wing was his second section, Lieutenant Commander Flash Gordon and Lieutenant B. J. Johnson.

  He saw that Hozer was flying too far aft and wide. He made a mental note to mention it in the debriefing. Hozer Miller was an okay wingman, but he tended to be a smartass. Hozer needed a little training in humility.

  But Hozer’s attitude was not Alexander’s primary concern. A more important question was inserting itself in Alexander’s mind. What do we do when we intercept the Flankers?

  The Rules of Engagement were clear. Don’t engage Chinese fighters. Don’t light them up with your targeting radar. Don’t go nose hot—point your weapons toward them. Not unless they do it first.

  In other words, bluff.

  The trouble with that, thought Alexander, was they didn’t know what these guys in the Flankers were thinking. All it took was one testosterone-hyped Chinese fighter pilot with a wild hair up his ass and they’d be the lead story on CNN tonight.

  Only three months had passed since Alexander took command of the VFA-36 Roadrunners embarked in USS Reagan. They had just been ordered out of the Middle East and re-deployed to the South China Sea. To Alexander and his Roadrunners, weary of Middle East combat, it seemed like a vacation. No more deep strike missions, no close air support, no air-to-air intercepts.

  Until today.

  The U.S. had decided to back its old enemy, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in a territorial dispute with the mega-power of the Far East, the People’s Republic of China. Like most such disputes in the twenty-first century, it was over energy. Recent discoveries revealed that beneath the Spratly Island archipelago, a cluster of tiny islands in the South China Sea, lay the planet’s fourth largest deposit of oil.

  Ignoring China’s protests, Vietnam planted its flag in the Spratlys. Their first drilling platform—White Tiger—had just been constructed and was being operated under license by Midland Petroleum, a U.S. energy conglomerate. Two more Vietnamese platforms were under construction. More were on the way.

  Which made the Chinese furious. They had already landed troops on the middle cluster of atolls and were claiming ownership of the entire archipelago. The United States—and the Reagan Carrier Strike Group—was trying to keep the peace between the two sides. And it wasn’t working.

  “Runner One-one,” called the controller in the Hawkeye, “Single group, bogey, twenty miles south White Tiger, nose hot, climbing.”

  Alexander squinted at his own display. Nose hot. Bad news. The Flankers knew Alexander’s fighters were inbound. The Chinese jets were turning to confront them.

  Now what?

  He glanced again at his wingmen. “Runners, Runner One-one, take wall.”

  There was no need for his wingmen to acknowledge. Alexander could see them moving into a wall formation—all four jets spread out line abreast to maximize their firepower. Just in case.

  “Runner One-one, Sea Lord. New weapons status. Red and free. Repeat, red and free.”

  Alexander felt his pulse quicken. Alpha Whiskey had finally decided he didn’t want to lose any of his jets. “Runner One-one copies red and free.” Then he transmitted to his flight, “Runners gate.” “Gate” meant to select full afterburner.

  The flight of Super Hornets accelerated through Mach one, the speed of sound. Alexander toggled the Master Armament switch to ON.

  Red and free. Cleared to engage. Cleared to fire.

  <>

  “They’re leaving,” said Evans, the platform shift manager.

  Weaver didn’t answer. He kept the Zeiss field glasses trained on the last fighter as it skimmed eastward, only a couple hundred feet above the sea. The others were gone now. Maybe they weren’t coming back.

  Weaver was already feeling embarrassed for having transmitted the Mayday call. A buzz job by a few hot dog Chinese fighter pilots wasn’t a life-threatening emergency. But damn it, he was the OIM—Offshore Installation Manager. He was boss of the White Tiger platform, and it was his job to worry about these things.

  In nearly thirty years of working offshore oil rigs, Buck Weaver had seen his share of trouble. Typhoons, tsunamis, ice storms. . . In the Malacca Strait he had even encountered pirates. He blew them out of the water with grenade launchers and submachine guns. Running an offshore platform was a lot like commanding a warship. You had to have the right firepower.

  But there was something about this new threat that unnerved him. When an outfit like China went after you, you didn’t chase them away with a few automatic weapons. Sure, he was being paid heavy bucks for taking this job, but now he wished he had stayed back on the ranch in Odessa. Let the Viets and the Chinks fight over the oil. He was too old for this shit.

  “Okay to bring the chopper in, Buck?”

  Weaver lowered the glasses. He had nearly forgotten about the supply helo. When the Chinese fighters showed up, he’d ordered the helicopter—a Sikorsky S-61 from Cam Ranh Bay—to stay clear and wait for orders.

  “Yeah, bring ‘em in. The crisis is over.”

  Evans went back to his radio panel and picked up the microphone. Weaver heard him telling the chopper pilot to bring it in, the landing deck was clear.

  While he waited for the helo to come into view, Weaver peered out the glassed windows of his top deck command post and drummed his fingers on the control console. A quarter mile away, he could see the dark outline of the Vietnamese gunboat, and he could make out the figures on the deck watching them. The red Vietnamese flag with the gold star was clearly visible at the stern.

  The gunboat was supposed to be there to protect them from the Chinese, but it just added to Weaver’s uneasiness. Putting a Vietnamese warship out here was like sticking a cigar up a bull’s ass. It was asking for trouble.

  “Here comes the chopper,” said Evans.

  From the glassed-in top deck of the platform, Weaver and Evans had a panoramic view of the helipad and the approaching helo. The S-61 was a big bird, able to carry over three tons of supplies or passengers. It was White Tiger’s lifeline to their home base.

  Weaver kept his eyes on the helicopter. It occurred to him that he should call off the Mayday he had transmitted. The emergency was over. The U.S. Navy might even have scrambled rescue aircraft. He’d get around to it in a few minutes, after they’d recovered the chopper.

  The helicopter was slowing almost to a hover, swinging around to approach the platform upwind. Weave
r watched it closely. Something didn’t look right.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” said Evans.

  “Behind the helicopter. I thought I saw something.” Weaver blinked against the morning glare off the sea. He had seen what appeared to be a blurry streak of light, then it was gone. Whatever it was, it had—

  The helicopter exploded.

  “What the fuck!” Evans cried out.

  Weaver stood frozen in place, too stunned to react. He watched the orange ball of fire pulse outward from the engine compartment of the Sikorsky. The long fuselage folded behind the rotor hub. Pieces of shattered blades sliced like shrapnel across the water, clanging into the skeletal structure of the oil platform.

  The front wheels of the destroyed helicopter caught the edge of the helipad. For what seemed an eternity to Buck Weaver, the wheels clung to the deck. He could see the stricken faces of the two pilots staring at him through the cockpit glass.

  Then the flaming hulk rocked backward, slid down the side of the platform structure, and plunged inverted into the sea. Smoke and steam leaped from the surface. Within seconds the wreckage had vanished beneath the waves.

  Weaver stared at the spreading oil slick where the helo had disappeared. “I don’t believe this shit.”

  Something inside his numbed brain told him it wasn’t finished. There was more. He forced himself to take his eyes off the carnage beneath the landing deck.

  He gazed back out to sea.

  The gunboat was scrambling into action. A rooster tail of spray was kicking up behind the boat’s stern. Weaver saw sailors scrambling over the deck.

  “What the hell do they think they’re going to do?”

  Weaver saw the boat’s bow tilt high in the water as its powerful engines thrust it forward. The gunboat swung around and pointed directly toward the cloud of steam and smoke that marked the crash site of the helicopter.

  Then it stopped. From beneath its waterline appeared a brilliant fireball. As if in slow motion, it levitated from the water. The boat’s hull rose upward on a cascade of seawater. A column of fire and debris shot upward through the superstructure, cleaving the boat neatly in half. The long tapered bow pointed downward and dived beneath the surface. The aft section rotated backward and sank from view.

  Weaver saw Evans staring at him. Neither man spoke. Evans looked like a man waiting for his own execution. And, thought Weaver, he probably was. They both were.

  “Sound the emergency alarm,” Weaver ordered. “Get everyone on deck.”

  Evans kept staring. He seemed paralyzed.

  “Move, damn it! Sound the alarm.”

  Evans turned back to his console and pushed a red, mushroom-shaped plunger. Klaxon horns blared from speakers mounted throughout the installation.

  It would take several minutes, Weaver knew. Nearly a hundred men and women were working on the platform. They would be skeptical, unwilling to move in a hurry. Another damned drill.

  Weaver thought that he should get on the radio, tell the world what was happening out here. Yeah, right. What the hell was happening? He had no fucking idea. Nothing was making sense. First the fighters buzzing them. Then the supply chopper blowing up. Then the gunboat.

  What else?

  In the next instant, he knew. From somewhere below came a muffled Whump. He felt the deck lurch beneath him, nearly throwing him off his feet.

  Another Whump, followed seconds later by yet another.

  The deck tilted at a steep angle. Weaver grabbed the edge of his console but he lost his grip. He felt himself sliding across the teetering deck, colliding with Evans and taking him with him. They slammed into the far bulkhead, which was now almost horizontal.

  The floats are going, he realized. A mobile offshore platform rode on an array of undersea cylindrical floats. Without them, the rig would capsize.

  Weaver tried to resist the panic that was seizing him like a wild animal. Dimly he sensed the windows crashing inward, a gush of seaward flooding the compartment. As the water enveloped him, he glimpsed Evans wildly flailing his arms, eyeballs bulging, trying to find air.

  Weaver felt the pressure building in his ears. As consciousness slipped from him, he wished for the last time that he had not taken this damn job. He should have stayed in Odessa.

  <>

  “Runner One-one, single group heavy, thirty south White Tiger, climbing, hot.”

  “Runner One-one, roger.”

  It was the same picture Bullet Alexander was seeing in his display. His fighters all had Dolly—radar-data linked information—in the cockpits. Each pilot could see the others’ speed, altitude, and heading. They could also see the four Chinese Flankers, whose tracks were being data linked from the Hawkeye.

  The Chinese fighters were climbing and accelerating. Coming at them.

  Alexander’s RWR—radar warning receiver—began a steady chirping.

  “Runner One-one spiked at twelve o’clock,” he called. His RWR screen was showing the signature of a Phazotron Zhuk-M-S pulse Doppler radar.

  The Flankers were targeting them.

  Alexander didn’t like this. It was four versus four, but in a matter of seconds the Flankers would have a near-certain kill probability with their Alamo or Archer missiles.

  He made a private decision. At the first indication of a missile in the air, he was going to command a volley of AMRAAM—Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile—shots. The supersonic, radar-guided AMRAAMs were the big equalizer. They were a fire-and-forget weapon. Alexander’s flight would shoot, then go defensive against the incoming Chinese missiles.

  Forty miles. Instinctively Alexander peered out through the windshield, trying to pick out the telltale dots of the Flankers. Still too far out. He saw only cumulus puffs and distant shadows of the Spratly atolls.

  He went back to his situational display. The yellow data-linked images of the Flankers were marching like glow worms across the screen. Still coming at them, still—

  No, they weren’t. What was this? The picture was changing.

  “Runner-One-one, Sea Lord,” called the controller. “Tactical range now thirty-five miles. Bogeys in a turn, possible flanking maneuver west.”

  Alexander studied the display. Maybe they were just leaving. The closure rate of the merging fighters had abruptly reduced. The yellow images were flanking to the west, perpendicular to the track of the oncoming Super Hornets.

  The glow worm tracks in the display continued their turn to the north. The Flankers were bugging out, returning to their base on Hainan Island.

  Well, give them credit, thought Alexander. The ChiComs were smartening up. Instead of starting a furball that would get their asses flamed, they were calling it a day.

  “Runner One-one, Sea Lord. Take heading one-one-five for White Tiger, distance now sixty-five miles. Alpha Whiskey wants you to overfly White Tiger, check it out. They’re not communicating.”

  Alexander acknowledged. No radio communications? Something wasn’t right down there.

  He had seen White Tiger a couple of times from the air. The big offshore platform stood out like a silo in a wheat field. You could spot it from fifty miles away.

  The Flankers were exiting the sector. Alexander watched the yellow images squiggle toward the far edge of the display. There were no other threats in the White Tiger sector.

  Or were there?

  Just to be sure, he called the controller again. “Sea Lord, Runner One-one. Say the picture.”

  She came right back. “Picture clear, Runner. No contacts.”

  Alexander gave a terse acknowledgment. Okay, the picture was clear, meaning no threats were showing on the controller’s screen. Pilots joked that the Hawkeye had scanners so sensitive they could detect birds crapping on a rock. The Hawkeye was also linked to the Purple Net, an integrated real time feed from Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft, Air Force RC-135 intelligence-gathering jets, and spy satellites.

  So the threat sector was clear of bogeys. Something was st
ill bothering Alexander. He felt a nagging uneasiness somewhere in the back of his brain.

  He glanced around. His fighters were still spread out in a wall formation.

  On his back radio, which was channeled to the squadron common frequency, he called his wingmen. “Runner One-three and One-four, detach and stay high, above ten thousand, keep us in sight. Hozer and I will drag the surface and have a look at White Tiger. Copy?”

  “Runner One-three copies. Do we keep the switches hot, Bullet?”

  Alexander thought for a moment. The Flankers were gone from the display. No more threats existed in the sector. Technically, they should go switches safe.

  He still felt something tugging at his subconscious. Something about this he didn’t like.

  “Switches hot. Keep us covered, check for spitters.” Spitters were unexpected intruders. It would be Gordon and Johnson’s job to confront any Flankers who tried to rejoin the party.

  “One-three copies, switches hot.”

  Alexander watched the two fighters on his right wing pull up and away from the formation. He glanced again at his display. They were forty miles from White Tiger’s geographic coordinates. Nothing was showing yet on the radar. Peculiar, he thought. The platform should be making a distinct reflection on the radar.

  He nudged the nose of his Super Hornet over, starting his descent to low altitude. He saw Hozer Miller’s jet sliding to a loose formation on his left wing.

  “Hozer, stay a quarter mile abeam and slightly high. Keep me clear of conflicts.” Exactly what conflicts he didn’t know. He only knew that wanted another set of eyes looking out for him.

  Miller acknowledged.

  Alexander’s radar was painting the chain of tiny atolls directly ahead, hardly more than rocks sticking up in the water. He was even picking up a small rain shower to the right of the track. Still no platform. The thing was all metal. It ought to be glimmering in the radar like a giant reflector. And where were the ships that tended the platform?

  Nothing. The screen was empty. Damn. Maybe they had the wrong coordinates.

  Alexander stopped his descent at a thousand feet. Ten miles to White Tiger’s position. Still no image on radar.