Black Star Rising

by Robert Gandt

  Two more triangles—Dragon One-one and One-two—were on divergent northwest tracks, to intercept the separate gaggles of Chinese warplanes. Maxwell and O’Toole had been assigned to target the AWACS. Wayne and Heilbrunner would go after the tankers.

  The Ilyushin was turning to the outer leg of its orbit. In a few more minutes, the two groups would be only fifty miles apart.

  He keyed his microphone and called the controller in the Hawkeye. “Sea Lord, Battle-ax. Your signal is Night Train.”

  “Roger, Battle-ax,” answered the controller. “Sea Lord copies Night Train.”

  “Night Train” was the code that signaled they were cleared to conduct the intercepts.

  Boyce tilted back in his padded chair and pulled out a cigar. The operation was now in the hands of the Hawkeye controller and the Black Star crews. All Boyce could do now was watch.

  And worry. “Where the hell are the Dong-jins?” he muttered.

  Chapter 19 — Heat Seekers

  USS Daytona Beach

  South China Sea

  1625 Monday, 30 April

  Sprague clenched the arm rail of his seat.

  He had to make an effort not to betray his emotions. Sprague knew Melbourne’s skipper, a feisty little guy named Mike Duffy. Duffy and Sprague had been rivals and contemporaries since their academy days.

  “Second torpedo in the water,” called sonar. A few seconds later, “It’s an ADCAP.”

  Sprague nodded. Melbourne was countering the Chinese torpedo with a shot of its own. Sprague knew what Duffy was doing—shooting his MK 48 torpedo up the bearing line of the incoming torpedo. That would be Duffy’s style—throw the attacker onto the defensive. But it was a desperation move.

  And it didn’t work.

  “Detonation bearing 233,” said the sonarman. “Torpedo impact,” he added in toneless voice.

  Sprague stared at the display. Despite what he wanted to believe, there was no mistaking the evidence on the screen. Duffy’s MK 48 was still running, but without guidance. The wire connecting it to the mother ship had been snapped.

  The Shkval had struck Melbourne.

  “Sir, it looks like Melbourne—”

  “I see it,” snapped Sprague.

  A torrent of emotions roared through his head. He had an overwhelming desire to accelerate his own boat toward the enemy sub—it had to be a Kilo—and blow it to hell at close range.

  It would be the wrong move. The reality was that Daytona Beach was in deadly peril of its own. At this moment they could very well be the target of another Shkval. And any overt action—accelerating its forward motion, launching more weapons, active pinging with his sonar—would make him an identifiable target.

  Through the sonar came the terrible noises of pressure hulls rupturing, the rending of metal, the tinkling of glass. Some of this emanated from the four Chinese vessels already on their way to the bottom.

  Their death throes had been joined by a new sound. Melbourne was dying with them.

  Sprague felt nauseous. For nearly a minute the sonar carried the lonely sounds of the shattered Melbourne being dragged to the bottom. Mike Duffy and his crew of 130 had just been crushed in an avalanche of water and steel.

  Searching for survivors was out of the question. The odds were immense that anyone escaped the destruction of the Melbourne. If any did, the Chinese would pick them up, along with the survivors of their own sunken vessels.

  “Convoy’s changing course, Captain. Turning northeast.”

  Sprague nodded. It was what they expected. With half their freighters sunk, they were cutting their losses and returning to Guangzhou. The frigates had slowed, apparently to rescue survivors. The Sovremennys were scurrying around like crazed terriers, still undecided whether to run or fight. A dozen active sonars were pinging the water—helicopters, frigates, Sovremennys. Searching for the other American submarine. The pinging was not focused. There was no indication yet that they had a fix on Daytona Beach.

  Sprague knew what his next move must be, and he hated it.

  “Left half standard rudder, steer 265. Make my depth 350.”

  The helmsman acknowledged, and the Daytona Beach commenced its gradual exit from the area and away from the convoy. The maneuver was slow and tedious, while the pinging of the Chinese submarine hunters continued to play like underwater cymbals. With each passing minute, Daytona Beach’s margin of safety increased.

  Not until they were several miles removed from where they had engaged the convoy did Sprague let himself relax. They had accomplished their mission. But he could see by the sober, grim expressions that no one in the control room of Daytona Beach was thinking about that. They were thinking about the Melbourne, entombed forever in the South China Sea.

  <>

  South China Sea

  Get over it, Maxwell told himself.

  In his primary IR scan display, the heat emission from the big four-engine Ilyushin looked like a thermal eruption on the sun. By contrast, the emissions from the four SU-27 Flankers covering the Ilyushin AWACS ship were like subdued background lights.

  There was something distasteful about shooting an unsuspecting target. He was a fighter pilot, not an assassin. But that was the nature of warfare. If it wasn’t unsuspecting, it would be shooting back. In any case, the Ilyushin was not undefended. It had Flankers on each side.

  And, probably, a Dong-jin.

  The thought prompted Maxwell to peer again into the screen, then toggle through the secondary sensor displays. Still nothing. No squiggly little red trace to indicate the presence of an invisible jet.

  He’s out there. I know he is.

  When the op order came in that morning, Maxwell and Boyce had analyzed the probable targets—a pair of elderly H-6 refueling tankers, an assortment of SU-27 and J-8 fighters, and the Ilyushin AWACS ship. Maxwell made the Black Star crew assignments.

  “Hey,” O’Toole had said. “The Ilyushin? Why us?”

  “Why not?”

  “The real action is going be with those Flankers heading to Swallow Reef.”

  “The real action,” said Maxwell, “is going to be where the Dong-jins are.”

  O’Toole still looked dubious. “You think they’ll use the Dong-jins to—”

  “To protect their shiny new AWACS ship? Wouldn’t you?”

  “They’ve got more than one Dong-jin. They’ll protect the tankers too.”

  Maxwell had just nodded. O’Toole was right, but there was more to it. It wasn’t just the Dong-jin that Maxwell was after.

  He remembered the face in the plasma screen during the intel briefing. He could still feel the hate-filled eyes of Gen. Zhang Yu gazing back at him.

  From the file they had compiled on Zhang, Maxwell had constructed his own impression of the Chinese general. Zhang was an ambitious, ruthless officer of both the PLA and the secret police. It was Zhang who killed the Hawkeye crew. It was Zhang who shot down Hozer Miller.

  Where was Zhang most likely to show up next?

  Maxwell assigned himself and O’Toole to the Ilyushin because he had a gut feeling. His years as a test pilot had taught him to trust his gut feelings. The Ilyushin was too tempting a target. It had Zhang’s signature on it.

  Maxwell heard the seeker head of his AIM-9 Sidewinder missile emitting its familiar growling sound. It had a good lock on the target, which was now flying almost directly toward them.

  The SHOOT cue was flashing in his HUD. Maxwell waited five more seconds, letting the range decrease to twelve miles. Then he squeezed the trigger.

  <>

  The Dong-jin was high, slightly in trail, flying at the same speed as the Ilyushin AWACS ship.

  “Where is the Black Star?” Zhang said on the intercom. He already knew Po’s answer.

  “I don’t know, General.”

  Of course he didn’t know. Zhang felt a mounting anger. Either the skimpy intelligence report about the American stealth jets launching from the carrier was wrong, or Zhang himself had been wrong about where the
y might appear.

  Or else the new spectrum sensing goggles didn’t work.

  Zhang hated the goggles. It was difficult swinging his helmet from side to side with the heavy, ill-fitting spectrum sensing goggles attached. They were not only heavier than the old model, the view was worse. He felt as if he were peering through a murk of shimmering green soup.

  Zhang scanned the sky for twenty kilometers behind the Ilyushin. He saw nothing. Only empty sky and the pair of SU-27s flying cover for the Ilyushin.

  That thought caused Zhang even more anger. If it turned out to be the case, he knew exactly what he would do when he landed back at Lingshui. In the presence of the entire staff of bumbling technicians, he would put the muzzle of his pistol to the head of that simpering idiot Fong and splatter his brains on the wall of his laboratory.

  Zhang returned his attention to the sky behind the AWACS. He saw the same greenish shadows and waves of shimmering soup. Nothing else. Nothing that suggested the presence of a—

  “Missile!” screamed a hysterical voice on the radio. “Missile in the air. Coming toward us.”

  Zhang recognized the voice. It was the controller in the Ilyushin.

  “Where?” Zhang demanded. “Say the bearing and range. Where is the missile?”

  It was the first radio communication he had exchanged with the Ilyushin. Their tactical radio channels were supposedly secure. Still, they couldn’t be sure that the Americans weren’t intercepting and unscrambling their transmissions. But this was not a time to be concerned with intercepted communications.

  “Two o’clock!” blurted the controller. “No, no, ten o’clock. High, ten kilometers.”

  Ten o’clock? Two o’clock? Zhang cursed to himself. It didn’t matter. The reason he hadn’t been able to detect the American stealth jet in the sky behind the AWACS was because he wasn’t there. Zhang had made the fatal error of assuming the Americans would take the easy and traditional shot from the rear quarter of the AWACS.

  He was attacking from the forward quarter. A more difficult attack, particularly for a short-ranged heat seeking missile. But the American AIM-9 was perfectly capable of obtaining a lock on a target’s frontal area, even though it emitted a far smaller heat signal. The big four-engine Ilyushin was an easy target from all angles.

  Zhang shoved his throttles forward and swung the nose of the Dong-jin hard to the right, in the direction of the threat. Through the gloom of the spectrum sensing goggles he saw the Ilyushin rolling into a severe evasive turn to the left. Flares were spewing from the big jet’s tail.

  Useless, thought Zhang. A missile coming at your nose wasn’t distracted by flares pouring out your tail. The AWACS’s only hope was the SU-27s, and Zhang saw that they were already moving. Both the twin-finned fighters were accelerating, twin plumes of flame torching from their afterburners. If they were lucky—and incredibly brave—one of them might be able to sacrifice himself to the oncoming missile and spare the more valuable AWACS.

  Zhang was four kilometers behind the AWACS, which was still plowing through its hard left turn. The trail of flares looked like the tail of a comet. The SU-27s, one high, one low, were crossing in front of the AWACS.

  And then Zhang spotted something, several kilometers ahead of the SU-27s. A dark shape in the greenish field of the spectrum sensing goggles. It was pulsing in and out of view like a fish in a cloudy sea.

  The Black Star. Zhang could see it.

  In the next instant, the missile detonated.

  <>

  Sixty miles away, Plug Heilbrunner had the lead H-6 tanker in his targeting display.

  It would be a high energy, descending aft quarter shot. A classic training command set up, thought Heilbrunner. You rolled in on the towed target and locked it up with your Sidewinder seeker head, shot it from behind. A piece of cake. A big fat target floating there in the front windscreen, begging you to shoot it.

  Just like this big H-6 tanker.

  “Target twelve o’clock,” Heilbrunner called from the back seat. “We shoot the tanker, then the two fighters on his starboard side.”

  “That checks,” said Wayne.

  Heilbrunner had all three AIM-9 Sidewinder missile stations armed and ready to shoot. His eyes went back to the left console, which had a repeater display of Duke Wayne’s HUD in the front cockpit. He could see the Sidewinder seeker circle superimposed over the shape of the H-6. Off the right wing of the tanker were the two SU-27 Flankers.

  In his earphones, Heilbrunner heard the squall from the Sidewinder’s seeker head. It was signaling that it had acquired a heat signal from the target.

  Twelve miles. Close enough to shoot, but he knew Wayne wanted to get closer.

  Heilbrunner wished they weren’t shooting Sidewinders. The AIM-9 Sidewinder was a fine close-in weapon, good in a turning fight with a high performance fighter that knew you were after him. What they should be shooting was the AIM-120 AMRAAM—advanced medium range air-to-air missile. You could shoot the radar-guided AMRAAM from beyond visual range—a good thirty miles away— and forget it. The missile went on its own seek-and-destroy mission and took out your target while you made your egress.

  The Rules of Engagement were explicit. No AMRAAMs. Someone with a brain the size of a walnut had decided that radar-guided missiles, being controlled initially by the fighter’s acquisition radar and then by the missile’s onboard tracker, were too overt. They didn’t meet the requirements of a stealth war. Dragon Flight would only fire passively-guided weapons.

  “Ten miles, Duke.”

  “I know.”

  Heilbrunner didn’t like this. They could fire from this range and still get a kill. The trouble was, once the first missile was in the air, all bets were off. The chickens would know the fox was there.

  Then he saw it. On the right console display, the one showing the IR scans from the sensor array. It was close, maybe only three miles abeam.

  A squiggly red trace.

  “Oh, shit,” said Heilbrunner. “We’ve got a Dong-jin out there.”

  <>

  Maxwell recognized Heilbrunner’s voice.

  “Sea Lord, Dragon Two-one is engaged, defensive!”

  At almost the same instant Maxwell saw the Sidewinder he had just fired strike a target. But it wasn’t the Ilyushin. Damn. The missile had locked on to one of the Flankers. In his IR display he saw the big Ilyushin in a hard turn, streaming flares.

  He was toggling his weapons page, setting up another Sidewinder shot, when he saw something new in his IR display—a squiggly red trace.

  Something out there behind the Ilyushin. A Dong-jin?

  The trace vanished. The fireball of the destroyed Flanker was flooding the screen, erasing all other traces.

  The voice of the controller in the Hawkeye burst through the silence on the frequency. “Dragon One-one, snap vector, tactical, two-two-zero, thirty-five miles. Buster.”

  A snap vector was an immediate turn to a hot contact. Buster was the signal for maximum speed. It meant that Wayne and Heilbrunner were engaged with a bogey.

  It had to be a Dong-jin.

  He hesitated a moment. He could still shoot the Ilyushin. And the squiggly red trace he had seen—what was it? Another Dong-jin? It meant that at least two were out there.

  Was Zhang flying one of them?

  It didn’t matter at the moment. Dragon Two-one was in trouble.

  He rolled the Black Star inverted and pulled hard, grunting against the sudden G-load.

  “Dragon One-one is on the way.”

  <>

  Zhang watched the shattered pieces of the SU-27 whirl through space.

  He didn’t see a chute, and he was not surprised. When a supersonic fighter took an oncoming missile straight down the intake, it was like a collision of asteroids. There were seldom any survivors.

  What was the pilot’s name? Zhang didn’t know, nor did he care. The enemy missile had been intended for the Ilyushin, which was still intact and in a hard turn back toward the Hainan. The sui
cidally brave SU-27 pilot had flown into the course of the oncoming missile.

  Where was the Black Star?

  Zhang’s spectrum sensing goggles had been blurred by the glare of the exploding SU-27. When his vision returned, the enemy stealth jet was gone.

  Where? Still pursuing the AWACS?

  Zhang maneuvered in a swooping, criss-cross pattern above and behind the big Ilyushin. He swept the area—high, low, ahead and behind the AWACS—with the spectrum sensing goggles.

  And then Zhang heard the voice of Major Tsan, flying the Dong-jin covering the refueling tankers a hundred kilometers to the southeast. Tsan declared that he was engaged with an enemy stealth jet. A Black Star.

  It was suddenly clear to Zhang. The enemy jet that had just killed the SU-27 had broken off to join the other engagement.

  Zhang didn’t hesitate another second. He rolled his jet into a hard turn to the southeast.

  Chapter 20 — Gun Kill

  17,000 feet

  South China Sea

  1650 Monday, 30 April

  The enhanced infrared sensors on Black Star were working.

  “I’ve got him!” yelled Heilbrunner. “He’s in our display, four o’clock, a quarter mile.”

  “So why hasn’t he taken a shot?” said Duke Wayne. “He could have popped us already with a missile.”

  Heilbrunner didn’t have a good answer for that one. He only knew that they were in trouble. Maxwell was on his way to help. It might not be soon enough.

  He stared at the display, watching the red trace. It wasn’t squiggly now, more of a solid pulsing triangle. He saw the arcing pursuit curve, the Dong-jin trying to get his nose inside their flight path. As if he were leading them.

  It came to him.

  “Guns,” said Heilbrunner. “He’s engaging us with guns.”