by Robert Gandt
“Guns? Why?”
“He can’t get a missile lock, but somehow he has a visual on us. He’s trying to get close enough to use his gun.”
“Suits me,” said Wayne. “If he wants a gun fight, he’s come to the right party. We’ll drag him in close, then break to the right.”
The Dong-jin had an overtake speed of thirty or forty knots, coming from the aft starboard quarter. They could see the Chinese jet pulling its nose ahead of the Black Star’s. A classic pursuit curve.
“He’s close,” said Heilbrunner. “Wait, wait till he’s—oh, shit!”
The trail of cannon fire was coming for them. It looked like a string of glowing golf balls arcing toward them.
Wayne hauled the Black Star into a violent right turn. Heilbrunner’s head almost went into his lap under the weight of the seven Gs.
“Where is he?” called Wayne. “You got him?”
“He’s outside our turn. He couldn’t match our break and he overshot.”
“Sweet. Stay on the display and call the reversal.”
“Roger that.”
This was an unbelievably shitty way to run a dogfight, thought Heilbrunner. Why didn’t the intel pukes back on the Reagan tell them the ChiComs could see the Black Stars? It was like going blindfolded against a guy who already had you in his gun sight.
But they had the display. Whatever that lady scientist had done to the Black Star’s IR sensors, it worked. There was the little red image of the Dong-jin, wiggling like a glow worm on the screen.
And sliding outside their turn radius. The Chinese pilot had thought he had a sure kill and overshot the turn.
“Break left. . .now!” Heilbrunner called.
Again he felt himself slammed down in the seat. With his head leaned to the left side of the canopy, the weight of the helmet was almost too much for his neck.
The hard reversal brought them nose to nose with the Dong-jin. Heilbrunner peered out into the hazy sky. He saw something, a gray wavering object, swimming in and out of his vision.
The Dong-jin was coming at them.
<>
Zhang saw him.
At least, he thought he saw him. He couldn’t be sure, peering through the soup-green murk of the goggles. But the longer he stared through the device, the more sure he became. That wavering, bat-like shape—it had to be the Black Star.
He was only fifteen kilometers ahead, perhaps a thousand meters lower in altitude. The American jet was in a shallow descent, accelerating.
Zhang had been right. This Black Star was on his way to join the fight between Tsan and the other Black Star.
Zhang estimated that he and the Black Star were at the same speed. The American jet would reach the location of the other Black Star and the Dong-jin before Zhang could catch him.
Zhang shoved the nose of the Dong-jin down. The only way to close the gap was to trade altitude for airspeed. He would dive the Dong-jin to an altitude beneath the Black Star, using the energy to overtake him, then zoom upward to a firing position. And if the Black Star turned in either direction, all the better because Zhang could cut him off.
A disturbing thought flashed through Zhang’s mind. How had the Black Star pilot who was fighting Major Tsan managed to see him? Had the Americans also developed goggles that would penetrate the cloaking of the Dong-jin? Or was it something else?
It didn’t matter, he decided. All he had to do was stay in trail of the American jet, keep him in sight, and wait. When he maneuvered to insert himself into the fight ahead, Zhang would pounce on him like a cat.
<>
“Dragon One-one, Dragon Two-one and the bandit are at twelve o’clock, ten miles, angels fifteen.”
“Dragon One-one has both contacts.”
Maxwell had the symbol of Dragon Two-one data linked in his display. On the IR scan he was getting the familiar red squiggle of the Dong-jin. The two jets were turning toward each other—entering a classic scissors duel.
They were six thousand feet beneath Maxwell’s altitude. He would position his own jet above the fight, wait until the Dong-jin had crossed noses with Dragon Two-one, then set up an aft quarter Sidewinder shot.
“Plug is gonna scream like a raped ape,” said O’Toole.
“About what?”
“About us killing his bandit.”
“Tough. He and Duke had their chance. Now we’re gonna bail ‘em out.”
Maxwell saw in the display that the two jets were on a head on pass, both in a high-G turn toward each other. Through the CFD goggles he had a visual ID on Dragon Two-one. He couldn’t see the Dong-jin through the goggles, but he saw a clear image on the IR scan screen. They were only five miles away. Well within Sidewinder range.
Maxwell selected AIM-9 on the weapons page of his multi-function display. He heard the low growl of the Sidewinder seeker head coming alive.
“Hey, I see him!” said O’Toole.
“See who?”
“The Dong-jin. To the left of Dragon Two-one’s nose, that fuzzy gray blob.”
Maxwell looked, saw nothing, blinked his eyes. And saw it. It was barely visible, like a shape emerging from the fog.
He kept his eyes locked on the apparition. He corrected his own flight path to set up a targeting solution on the Dong-jin as soon as it had crossed noses with Dragon Two-one.
He lost sight of the Dong-jin, then it swam back into view. Then out of view. Maxwell knew where it was—on a nose-on course toward Dragon Two-one. He refocused his eyes on the shimmering Black Star, watching for—
It exploded.
Maxwell stared, too stunned to believe what he saw.
The Black Star was gone. In its place was a roiling fireball. Tentacles of flame were shooting in opposite directions from the core of the explosion. Fragments of airframe and engine were hurtling through space like pieces of shrapnel.
It took several seconds for the thump of the explosion to reach Maxwell’s cockpit. He imagined he could smell the stench of flaming jet fuel, the cordite smell of detonated ammunition.
“Oh, man,” said O’Toole in a hoarse voice. “I can’t believe this shit.”
Maxwell said nothing. They were directly above the spreading cloud of debris. He kept staring at the carnage, trying to make sense of what happened.
He became aware of the persistent voice in his earphones.
“Dragon One-one, Sea Lord. Answer up, Dragon.”
He keyed the mike. “Dragon One-one here.”
“We’ve been calling you, Dragon One-one,” said the controller in the Hawkeye. “We lost the link on Two-one, and we don’t see the trace on the bandit. Do you have a visual on them?”
“Dragon Two-one’s down,” said Maxwell. “Looks like a midair with the bandit.”
There was a heavy silence. “Uh, Dragon One-one, say again. It sounded like you—”
“Dragon Two-one collided with the bandit. They’re both down.”
“Ah, hell.” The controller’s voice sounded dry and croaky. “Do you see chutes?”
“Negative.” And we won’t see any, thought Maxwell. No way did anyone survive a head on collision at a combined speed of 800 knots.
Another silence of several seconds. Maxwell knew that the controller was having a one-sided dialogue with the air warfare commander aboard Reagan. Maxwell wondered if they were going to scramble a search and rescue helo with armed escorts. Would the ChiComs do the same? If so, there would be another fight when they met over the crash site.
Let someone else deal with it, thought Maxwell. He had work to do.
<>
Zhang stared at the fireball.
It was a few kilometers beyond where he’d last seen the Black Star. Zhang had dived below the Black Star’s altitude, closing the distance between them. He had been almost close enough to engage with his gun when the explosion occurred directly in front of him.
The wavering green image of the Black Star was gone, obscured in the spectrum sensing goggles by the brilliant flash of the fireba
ll.
What happened? As Zhang watched, the explosion seemed to swell in size. He could see large pieces of airframe whirling in opposing directions through the sky. Secondary explosions were igniting inside the mushroom cloud.
Stunned, Zhang continued to stare at the roiling bank of smoke and flame. Did the Black Star shoot Tsan’s Dong-jin? Or did Tsan kill the enemy jet? Zhang had seen plenty of air-to-air missile strikes, and this was different.
As he drew nearer to the billowing cloud, Zhang began to assemble the pieces of the puzzle. Tsan was gone. So was the Black Star Tsan had engaged.
“What happened, General?” asked Po from the back seat.
“A collision,” said Zhang. “Tsan and the gwai-lo jet came together.”
Zhang felt a wave of bitterness sweep over him. Major Tsan and his systems officer, Lieutenant Chiu, were his most experienced Dong-jin crew, next to himself and Po.
But they were expendable. The precious Dong-jin was not. Zhang’s squadron—the only stealth jet unit in the PLA air force—had four operational Dong-jins, and he had just lost a fourth of his inventory.
He shoved his anger aside. The brilliant orange fireball was subsiding into a blanket of black smoke. Somewhere out there was the Black Star he had been pursuing. He resumed scanning through the goggles. More than ever, Zhang wanted to kill him.
He was still scanning when Lieutenant Po surprised him.
“I see him,” said Po.
<>
O’Toole saw them first. A trail of glowing balls, evenly spaced, coming up from below, past the left wing tip.
“Oh, shit! Tracers!”
Maxwell yanked the Black Star into a violent left break. He heard O’Toole groaning against the high G load.
In the next moment he felt it. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Like a sledge hammer pounding on the jet’s skin.
“We’re hit,” said O’Toole. “Who the hell’s shooting at us?”
“Who do you think? It’s another Dong-jin.”
And he knew which one. It had to be the one he’d gotten the trace on before they disengaged with the Ilyushin.
“Okay, I’ve got him in the display,” said O’Toole. “He’s close. Only about a thousand yards.”
Welcome to stealth warfare, Maxwell thought. Even with Dana Boudroux’s enhanced IR sensors, the system only worked when it was looking straight ahead. It was marginally okay on the beam, worthless in the rearward view. They were being hosed by an enemy they couldn’t see.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. More sledge hammer blows. They came from the belly and right wing. Despite the five-G turn, the Dong-jin pilot was tracking them well enough to get hits with his cannon.
Maxwell felt a stab of fear. He remembered why he had assigned himself the AWACS. It was because of who he thought would be covering the AWACS.
Zhang. He was there. And he had followed them.
<>
Zhang squeezed the trigger again, holding it for less than a second. The GSh 301 cannon made a satisfying Brrrraaaap, spitting thirty millimeter shells at a rate of 1800 rounds per minute.
There was nothing like a gun kill. Missiles were cold-blooded and efficient killers. You could fire them from great distances—beyond visual range—and kill your adversary without ever seeing him. But for a warrior like Zhang Yu, nothing matched the visceral feeling of the automatic cannon.
The Dong-jin magazine carried only 400 rounds. Zhang was forced to shoot in tiny bursts, watching the tracers, working them like an artist’s brush across the target.
He knew he’d gotten two solid hits on the Black Star. He’d followed the tracers, seen pieces fly off the skin of the American jet.
But the Black Star was still flying. Still in a hard turn that Zhang was finding hard to match. His last burst had gone wide of the target, arcing off his right wing. The American pilot, even though he had been caught from below and behind, was countering Zhang’s attack with great skill.
Was it Maxwell?
His finger closed on the trigger again.
<>
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
This time the hammer blows were outboard on the right wing. The Dong-jin was matching their turn, carving inside enough to pull lead and get hits with his cannon.
Lights were illuminating in the annunciator panel. Two yellow caution lights—one said HYD for the failing hydraulic system. The other—FUEL—told them something was not good in the Black Star’s fuel system.
And then another light, this one red: FIRE.
“We’ve got a problem,” said Maxwell.
“No, shit.” O’Toole’s voice sounded squeezed under the weight of the five Gs. “This guy’s shredding us.”
Maxwell pushed the glowing red warning light, which dimmed the light and automatically pumped flame retardant into the right the right main fuel tank and the supply lines. It was supposed to extinguish the fire.
“Uh, oh,” said O’Toole. “Check our right wing.”
Maxwell looked. The fire wasn’t extinguished. The outer half of the Black Star’s black triangular wing was engulfed in a sheet of flame.
“We’re out of here, Sharp.”
“I’m with you, Boss.”
Only once before had Maxwell ejected from a damaged jet. All he learned from the experience was that using an ejection seat was a lousy way to leave an airplane.
He relaxed the pressure on the stick, removing the five-G load from the jet. The ejection command switch was set to BOTH. O’Toole’s seat would fire an instant before Maxwell’s. The ejection rail of each cockpit was tilted a few degrees from the other to prevent the two rocket-propelled seats from colliding in the air.
Maxwell grasped the handle on the seat between his legs. He slammed his head back against the headrest, drew his elbows in close to his body, and yanked the handle.
He was vaguely aware of the canopy leaving the aircraft. A freight train roar of slipstream noise filled the open cockpit. He heard a bang from the cockpit behind him.
O’Toole was gone.
Another bang. Maxwell’s seat fired.
The 300-knot wall of air hit him. The force of the blast slammed the breath from his lungs. Dimly he sensed the drogue chute deploying, stabilizing the seat while it decelerated in a long downward arc.
The automatic sequence of the SJU/5A Martin-Baker seat occurred precisely on schedule. The drogue chute released from the seat. Another small rocket fired from the top of the seat, extracting the main parachute. With a violent jolt, the main chute popped open, snatching Maxwell like a rag doll out of the seat.
He swung beneath the sprawling canopy of the parachute. Gone was the roaring freight train noise. He heard only the rustle of wind over nylon.
For several seconds Maxwell hung limp in the harness, too stunned to think. He tried moving his arms, then his legs. Everything worked. He released his oxygen mask and looked around.
He guessed that he was passing through about 8,000 feet. A couple of miles away he saw a black-and-orange cloud. The exploded carcass of the Black Star was falling to the sea. He’d made the decision to eject just in time.
About a mile away was an island. Swallow Reef? No, not large enough. Wrong shape. It was one of the atolls in the northern group. One the Chinese occupied? He’d soon find out.
And then he remembered O’Toole. Oh, hell, what happened to—
There he was. O’Toole was at a lower altitude, about a quarter mile away. He had a good chute, and Maxwell could see him waving his arms. They would be able to communicate with their emergency radios.
Maxwell was groping in the pocket of his SV-2 survival vest for the radio when he heard it. A new sound.
The whine of a jet engine.
He swung himself around in the harness. He saw only empty sky.
The whine of the jet swelled. Coming closer.
Chapter 21 — Muzzle Flash
8,000 feet
South China Sea
1705 Monday, 30 April
“We are approaching minim
um fuel state,” announced Lieutenant Po.
“Five minutes,” said Zhang. “Then we return to Lingshui.”
Zhang pulled the throttles back to idle thrust. Slowing the Dong-jin to 400 kilometers per hour—216 miles per hour—would conserve fuel. He didn’t want extra speed. What he wanted was the maximum time to strafe. He had expended most of the GSh 301 automatic cannon’s ammunition. With only about fifty rounds left, he had to make every shell count.
Zhang was still filled with the elation of victory. Of his nearly two dozen kills, none had been as glorious as the downing of the Black Star. The only thing that would have made it more glorious was if the jet had exploded before the crew ejected. But then, of course, he would not have had this opportunity.
Two parachutes. They were descending toward Northeast Cay, which was occupied by PLA troops. Before the ignorant ground troops used the captured gwai-los for target practice, Zhang would shred them like paper dolls.
There wasn’t much time, a few minutes at the most. Zhang could see that the chutes would land on the shore of the atoll, or in the surf along the shoreline.
He swung the nose of the Dong-jin toward the parachutes. The airspeed was back to just under 400 kilometers per hour. A good strafing speed.
Which one is Maxwell?
The pilot-in-command’s chute, at least in theory, would be the higher. In tandem-place jets, the front seat was the last to eject so that the backseater wouldn’t be injured by the blast of the rocket in front of him. But there were other factors—rate of descent during ejection, body weights, timing of the seat separation and chute deployment.
There was one way to be sure. Kill them both.
The higher of the two chutes was positioned in Zhang’s head up display, encircled by the reticules of his gun sight. The dangling man looked like a puppet suspended by its strings.
Zhang took a deep breath, held it, forcing himself to hold his fire. Wait. Wait until you see his face.
<>
Maxwell heard it coming.
It was a low whine, not the full-throated roar of a jet at high thrust. He hauled down hard on the right hand riser—one of the long straps connecting his harness to the parachute—swinging the chute around so that he was facing the oncoming sound.