by Robert Gandt
The Chinese minister said, “There will never be a resolution to the dispute until Vietnam admits its aggressive conduct and withdraws its illegal forces from the Spratly Islands.”
At this, Van Duc Chien sat upright. “Vietnam’s forces are the only legal forces in the Spratly Islands. Our ownership of the territory dates back over a quarter of a century.”
“Planting your flag on a reef does not give you ownership of the entire archipelago.”
“Attacking Vietnam’s oil drilling facilities with military force does not give you ownership of our islands.”
“The occupation of Swallow Reef by Vietnamese forces—with the covert help of the U.S.—is a blatant act of war.”
“So was the invasion of the reef by Chinese forces.”
Back and forth. Ferrone followed the exchange as if he were watching a tennis match. An endless repetition. The Vietnamese president and the Chinese minister were sticking to their scripted lines.
Or were they?
Ferrone sensed a subtle change in the script. Something else was going on. What had the Chinese minister said? Something that seemed to diverge from the script. Ferrone listened more closely.
And the minister said it again: “Vietnam is not entitled to possession of the entire archipelago.”
Ferrone nodded. Possession of the entire archipelago. That was it. The minister was cracking the door open. Just a crack, but there it was.
As if to confirm his meaning, the Chinese minister paused and glanced at Ferrone. Van Duc Chien was gazing at him too. They seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
It was the moment Ferrone had been waiting for since he arrived at the meeting.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Allow me to offer a proposal that may interest you.”
Chapter 27 — Hangfire
28,000 feet
South China Sea
1755 Friday, 4 May
“Bogeys twelve o’clock, thirty miles, angels twenty-two,” said Gypsy Palmer on the intercom.
Maxwell could hear the excitement in her voice. Gypsy was hyped. She sounded like a hunter on opening day of the season.
“Flankers,” said Maxwell. He was getting the EID—electronic ID in his own display. They showed up as little horizontal bars, four of them, and they were definitely SU-27 Flankers.
“What are they doing?” asked Gypsy.
“Turning. They’re defensive.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They’re on a CAP station. Probably covering an AWACS or a surface asset.”
“Are we going to engage?”
“Negative.”
“Why not? We’ve got them cold.”
“You know the ROE,” said Maxwell. He was beginning to wonder if it was a mistake putting Gypsy Palmer back on flight status so soon. Her judgment was warped. She wanted to kill enemy airplanes—any airplanes. Flankers, freighters, Dong-jins. She wasn’t fussy as long as they belonged to the PLA.
After a moment she said, “Yeah, I know the ROE.”
He could hear the frustration in her voice. The Rules of Engagement came from somewhere higher than Boyce in the command structure. The ROE put conventional fighters like SU-27 Flankers off limits unless they displayed hostile intent. Since the Vietnamese re-occupation of Swallow Reef, the PLA had shown no interest in taking further losses in the South China Sea. Not unless a Chinese warplane was targeting friendly aircraft, ships, or surface assets could they be locked up and killed.
The only exception was the Dong-jin. Boyce’s orders at the briefing were, “If it’s a Dong-jin, he’s fair game. I don’t care if he’s delivering milk to orphans. Kill it. If we’re lucky, Zhang will be flying the sonofabitch.”
But not Flankers. At least Flankers that were cruising along like fat geese, showing no hostile intent. These guys were subsonic, cruising in a spread out formation of two separate elements. They showed no indication that they knew the Black Stars were in their space.
Or was it a set up?
Maxwell had an uneasy feeling. The PLA air force had already showed that they didn’t mind sacrificing a few conventional fighters to draw out the Black Star. Did they have a Dong-jin covering the Flankers?
Let’s find out. He reached up and pulled the CFD goggles down from his helmet visor. His view of the world outside turned to a soupy green. The goggles were the enhanced model that Dana Boudroux had produced.
“Fifteen miles,” called out Gypsy Palmer.
The Flankers were still loafing along, turning their tails to them, unaware of any threat. Easy targets, thought Maxwell. Too easy. He was glad the ROE put them off limits. Killing the Flankers wouldn’t be an aerial victory. It would be an execution.
He peered out into empty space, in the direction of the Chinese Flankers. They were still too far away to acquire visually. Chances were, nothing was out there with them. They still wouldn’t know whether the goggles worked or—
“IR contact!” called Gypsy.
“Yeah, four Flankers,” said Maxwell. He wondered why she bothered telling him. Each of the Flankers was putting out enough infrared signature to light up a small city.
“Not the Flankers,” said Gypsy. Her voice was excited. “Something else.”
“Where?”
“It’s on your display. Just above the lead element, crossing right to left.”
Maxwell glanced at the display. Yeah, there it was. He peered back outside in the direction of the contact. He blinked, refocusing his eyes to infinity. The Black Star’s onboard infrared sensor—the one Dana Boudroux had tweaked to increase its sensitivity—was picking up a heat signal.
Maxwell felt a stirring in his blood. A Dong-jin. Had to be.
But it wouldn’t be a duck shoot. The Chinese had already demonstrated that they could get a visual on the Black Star. Zhang had seen him well enough to shoot him down with his cannon.
The thought stirred Maxwell’s hopes. There was no way of knowing whether Zhang was flying this jet, but Maxwell wanted to believe that he could spot Zhang by the way he flew. Chinese fighters pilots were predictable and unimaginative. Zhang was different. He was skilled and full of surprises.
“Ten miles,” said Gypsy.
Still no visual ID. The trace was still there, blurring in and out on the display. The Flankers were still turning, placing themselves in position for a potential starboard beam shot from the Black Star.
Maxwell peered through the green haze of the CFD goggles. He saw the wavy specks of the Flankers, still in two elements. He nudged the nose of the Black Star upward, gaining an altitude advantage.
He saw it.
And then he didn’t.
Damn. He blinked, glanced back inside the cockpit to refocus his eyes at close range, then out again. Through the pea soup he saw little specks, the silhouettes of the Flankers, sun spots—
He saw it again.
“Got it,” he called.
It was a thousand feet below them. It looked like a manta ray, wavy and gray, diamond-shaped. It was a Dong-jin, and by the Rules of Engagement it was fair game.
He could take a Sidewinder shot, but he didn’t have any faith that the AIM-9 Sidewinder’s heat seeker head would stay locked on the Dong-jin’s faint IR emission. But that wasn’t the real reason he wasn’t shooting a Sidewinder. He wanted to kill this guy the same way Zhang killed Sharp O’Toole.
Without taking his eyes off the object, he reached forward and toggled the weapons select to GUN.
“Dragon One-one, Battle-ax.”
Maxwell heard the call on the tactical frequency, but he was too busy to answer. He had the Dong-jin in sight. He rolled into a right turn, opening up some space behind the Chinese jet before he reversed and rolled back—
“Dragon One-one, Battle-ax. Answer up, Dragon.”
The voice on the frequency was persistent. And familiar.
“Dragon One-one, do you read Battle-ax?”
“Stand by, Battle-ax. Dragon is engaged, neutral.”
“Remain
neutral and disengage, Dragon. Your signal is Hangfire. Acknowledge Hangfire.”
Maxwell couldn’t believe it. “Hangfire” was the signal for “abort the mission and return to base.”
He kept his eyes on the wavy shape of the Dong-jin. Ten more seconds and he would reverse and roll in on the target. At five hundred yards he would open fire with the cannon.
“Acknowledge, Dragon. Confirm you copy Hangfire.”
Maxwell knew that Boyce was following the engagement in his own data linked monitor. He already knew that in forty seconds the Dong-jin would be converted to a flaming hunk of trash. Why was he aborting the mission?
“Don’t acknowledge, Brick,” said Gypsy. “Not yet.”
Maxwell kept his eyes on the Dong-jin. Boyce knew something that they didn’t. “Dragon One-one copies Hangfire.” He removed his thumb from the mike button and said on the interphone, “Sorry, Gypsy.”
No reply from the back seat. He could tell by the sound of Gypsy’s breathing over the hot mike—rapid and forced—that she was furious. More than furious. At this moment Gypsy Palmer hated Maxwell and Boyce more than she hated Zhang.
He left the master armament switch hot, just in case. He rolled away from the Dong-jin, keeping his eye on the enemy jet. Turning your tail to an enemy fighter was a good way to get your butt flamed. But the Dong-jin appeared not to have spotted the Black Star. He was in a shallow bank, still covering the flight of Flankers.
Maxwell dropped the nose of the Black Star and nudged the throttles forward. He watched the airspeed swell as the altitude decreased. As the distance between the Black Star and the Chinese jets opened up, he began to relax. They were out of range of the Dong-jin’s missiles and its deadly cannon.
They flew back to the Reagan in silence. Gypsy sulked in the back seat, saying nothing.
Their Black Star was the only aircraft airborne from the Reagan except for a Hawkeye, still on station, a CAP flight of Super Hornets from the Roadrunner squadron, and the plane guard SH-60 hovering off the starboard side.
Maxwell landed the Black Star aboard. An okay pass to a two wire.
The deck crew chained the Black Star to the deck. While the elevator was still descending to the hangar deck, Gypsy climbed down from the cockpit. She didn’t wait for Maxwell. When the elevator clunked to a stop, she was gone. Maxwell could hear the heels of her boots pounding the steel deck.
<>
U.S. Consulate, Hong Kong
Ferrone paused to take another hit on his Scotch. After all that owl piss tea, he needed a real drink.
He looked back at the videoconferencing screen. “It’s not a done deal, Mr. President.”
“Sound like it’s as good as done,” said Hollis Benjamin.
“The President of the PRC still has to sign off on it. And you too, of course.”
“No problem on this end, Skipper. As far as President Xiang is concerned, he assures me he’s on board.”
Ferrone took another pull on the drink, a Dewar’s on the rocks, and tilted back in the leather chair. He felt a mixture of elation and fatigue. The negotiating session with the Vietnamese and Chinese had dragged on for nearly eight hours. In the end, neither side had gotten as much as they wanted from the other. But each had agreed to cease hostilities. Ferrone’s proposal to apportion the oil drilling rights between the two countries was met by outright rejection, heated debate, and then a grudging acceptance. The matter of sovereignty over the islands was solved by their agreement to appoint an international commission to govern the area and to administer the oil rights pact.
All in all, thought Ferrone, an elegant solution to a messy problem.
From the Bank of China building he and Trunh had driven directly to the U.S. Consulate on Garden Road. There he availed himself of the consulate’s excellent VIP lounge, made himself a drink, then used the secure videoconferencing to report the status of the negotiations to the President.
Beaver Benjamin was grinning at him from the screen.
“I knew I could count on you, Skipper. The accord you just negotiated will spare the world another war. It just might also spare my presidency.”
“Thanks for the generous words, Mr. President. But you and I know who deserves the real credit. The guys who brought the players to the table.”
“Don’t worry, Skipper. I haven’t forgotten them.”
The consulate’s videoconferencing net was not considered secure enough for highly classified discussions. They wouldn’t discuss the role of U.S. Navy submarines or Black Star jets during the recent action in the South China Sea. But Ferrone had no doubt that without them, China would have rolled like a tsunami over the Vietnamese installations in the Spratly Islands.
“When do hostilities cease?” said Ferrone.
“I have already issued a stand down order to Red Boyce’s unit. Your friend, the Vietnamese president, has ordered his forces to stand down, and President Xiang has agreed to do the same.”
“What are my orders now, Mr. President?”
“Go home. Give your bride a hug for me. Tell her that in a couple of weeks the two of you will be flying to Washington to have a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to you.”
Ferrone shook his head. “I have enough medals, thank you.”
“None that I had the honor of pinning on, Skipper. Hey, humor me. This is my treat, not yours.”
Ferrone grinned tiredly at the screen. Beaver Benjamin. Pushy as ever. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Benjamin congratulated him again and signed off. The screen went blank. Ferrone rose from the videoconferencing console and signaled the steward for another Scotch.
A State Department C-20 Gulfstream was waiting at Chek Lap Kok airport to fly him back to Hanoi. President Van Duc Chien and his staff had already departed aboard the chartered Vietnam Airlines Airbus. Ferrone’s aide, Trunh Bao, would stay another day in Hong Kong.
Ferrone accepted a fresh Scotch from the smiling Chinese steward. It suited him to be alone now. He wanted to reflect on the day’s events, make some notes, sip a couple more Scotches, maybe take a nap. Then he would ride in the back of a plushly appointed executive jet as if he were somebody important.
Chapter 28 — Gia Lam
Lingshui air base, Hainan Island
1910 Friday, 4 May
“Yes, of course I understand the order,” said General Zhang. “Do you think I am an imbecile?”
Without waiting for a reply, Zhang slammed the phone down. He slammed it so hard that the black plastic receiver cracked in half.
For several minutes Zhang sat at his desk. He stared at the shattered telephone. His temples were pounding and his chest heaved. The fury coursed through his veins like molten lava.
The thought passed through his mind that an officer, even a general officer like himself, was not supposed to speak in such a manner to the commander of the PLA air force. Zhang didn’t care. General Han Jianli was a spineless hack. But what was infinitely worse, so was Xiang Fan-lo, the President of the People’s Republic of China. In Zhang’s opinion, the President had just committed a heinous act of treason. He had entered into an agreement with the United States and its puppet state, Vietnam, to cease hostilities in the South China Sea.
Adding to Zhang’s rage was the botched mission this morning. One of his Dong-jins had just returned from a mission escorting a flight of SU-27s. The crew—Major Tsan and his weapons officer—had reported no contact with enemy aircraft. Zhang was furious with Tsan. He was sure that at least one U.S. Black Star had been airborne and probably in the area. An Ilyushin AWACS ship had reported the unmistakable signs of a catapult launch from the American carrier, Reagan, but no radar-identifiable aircraft departing the ship.
Could it have been Maxwell?
The possibility caused Zhang’s scalp to tingle. He reached for the photograph that had been delivered to him this morning. It was a digital photo taken by the commander of the unit assigned to recover the crew members from the Black Star that Zhang had shot down.
Zhang held the photograph under the direct light of his desk lamp. The photo was of a dead man, an American whose body had been shattered by the shells of an automatic cannon. He had dark hair and he was clean shaven. He appeared to be in his early thirties, and the emblems of rank on his flight suit identified him as a major or lieutenant commander.
It wasn’t Maxwell.
Two PLA commandos who survived the battle with the American special operations units described the pilot who escaped. He was a tall man with a dark mustache, about forty years old.
Zhang shook his head. He could almost admire such a warrior if he didn’t hate him with every fiber of his being. This man Maxwell possessed an uncanny ability to survive anything, even being strafed in a parachute. Until the telephone discussion a few minutes ago with the idiotic commander of the PLA air force, Zhang had fully expected to confront Maxwell in the sky again. One last time.
Now the cowardly President of the People’s Republic of China had agreed to a peace. Just when the PLA was poised to eradicate all the Vietnamese presence in the Spratly Islands. The American stealth jets had proven themselves to be ineffective. And although the U.S. submarines had caused serious disruption to the Chinese invasion schedule, it was only a matter of time before the PLA navy neutralized the threat.
A red blinking light on his telephone console caught Zhang’s eye. For a while he ignored it. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Then he noticed on the console screen that the call was not from a PLA mainland switchboard. It came from Hong Kong, on the secure wireless net.
He didn’t bother trying to use the smashed handset. He pressed the speaker button.