Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “This’ll be the craziest furball the Chinese have ever seen,” Pollard muttered. “A dogfight where you can only see half of the planes.” Lincoln could tell where its birds were only by interrogating their transponders. The F-35s reflected radar from Lincoln the same as it did from the Chinese. One of the techs in the TFCC filtered out the transponder returns for a few moments at Pollard’s request so the admiral could see what the PLA would see, and it was bizarre. The carrier’s receivers picked up occasional weak returns from the radars mounted aboard the Hawkeyes, the AWACS, other ships in the fleet, and even the F-35s themselves, but the signals were broken up, and so the CIC screens marked the F-35s sporadically, like fireflies sparkling in a dark field. Washington’s F-18s moved through Taiwanese airspace, flying close to the deck, but Kyra could tell that they were holding their distance and holding down their speed to preserve fuel until they engaged, and she assumed that the second carrier’s F-35s were close to the inbound Hornets. She was impressed by their radio discipline. The pilots were probably crawling out of their flight suits to join the fight.

  “Why are they dropping in and out?” one of Pollard’s aides asked, an ensign whose name Kyra hadn’t bothered to learn. The icons marking the MIGs’ positions were moving in arcs around the screen, steady, bright, and disappearing at a steady pace. More were moving east from the Chinese coast.

  “Stealth works best when radar is monostatic, where transmitters and receivers are near the same location. But if the target sends enough of the radar wave in a different direction, the receivers don’t see anything,” Pollard said. “Putting the Hawkeyes and AWACS around the battle space in a circle to pick up those deflected waves breaks that model. It’s a multistatic radar net. The F-35s are reflecting the beams in different directions, but we have receivers where the radar beams were going to end up instead of where they were created. But when an F-35 makes a course change, it sends radar waves off in different directions from where it was sending them the second before. So no receiver in the net gets a constant reflection off a stealth fighter when it’s juking around. We need more airborne receivers. We’ve tried tuning some of the radars to the lower frequencies. Stealth doesn’t disperse radar waves in the lower bands well, but that’ll open the net up to more clutter—clouds and the like. We’ll never get accurate fixed position returns, but we might get an idea of where to look. It beats waiting for a visual contact on this Chinese stealth plane, assuming they have one.”

  “And assuming they send it out,” Kyra muttered.

  “Sir,” one of the techs called out to Pollard. “We have bandits taking off from the coast.” Multiple icons were appearing on the scope.

  “Keep your eye on Fuzhou,” Pollard ordered. “Turn the Hornets loose.”

  THE TAIWAN STRAIT

  Nagin’s sense of duty alone kept him from pushing the stick forward and diving into the fight. The largest aerial battle since the Second World War had erupted three miles below him, and it made him sick that he had to stay above it. Navy aces were being made, the first since Vietnam, and he wouldn’t be one of them. At most, he would shoot down one plane today. If there was no Assassin’s Mace, the CAG likely would return to Lincoln as the only Bounty Hunter not to score at least a single kill, given the number of MIGs moving out from the coast. The PLA Air Force was offering his squadrons an embarrassment of targets and more were coming from the west.

  He rolled his plane to port to get an expanded view of the aerial battle. A second MIG exploded as a Bounty Hunter AMRAAM penetrated the fuselage at supersonic speed and ignited the jet fuel and ordnance. Nagin saw no parachute and another icon disappeared from his helmet HUD. The MIGs couldn’t even see half their enemies on their own radars, and to his practiced eye their maneuvers showed panic in their ranks. The Chinese pilots were trying to focus on the planes they could see, but the Hornets themselves were an even match in performance for the MIGs, the Hornet pilots more than a match, and the F-35s were a painful overmatch. Every time a Chinese fighter tried to maneuver behind one of the American planes they could see on radar, their wingmen began screaming about an F-35 lining up behind for a kill shot. It was turning into a one-sided slaughter. The Chinese were finding the stealth disadvantage was too great. Their only advantage was numbers. The Americans would start running out of missiles and fuel eventually, which forced the carriers to stagger the rate at which their forces joined the fight. The first wave would return to Lincoln as fighters from Washington moved in. The fight was taking place at the extreme edge of Lincoln’s air defense umbrella, where the ships themselves would began shooting Chinese planes out of the sky if the MIGs came too far east.

  Enough of that, Nagin thought. He had a different mission from his brothers and it would be a stupid death if this so-called Assassin’s Mace shot him down while he was off watching the dogfight like a gawking plebe watching his first Army-Navy college football game. He started to roll wings-level when one of the Hornets pulled out of the fight into a high arc, pushing Mach 1, a MIG in close pursuit. The Hornet suddenly began dumping speed and pushing its nose higher. J-turn, Nagin realized. The American pilot—he couldn’t tell who—was forcing his plane into a stall and then would use his flight surfaces to reverse the turn. It was an advanced maneuver, difficult in a Hornet, and one that Nagin wouldn’t have tried in a large fight. Don’t get fancy, come around and let your wingman brush him off. Plenty of targets, you’ll get yours.

  The MIG pilot was better trained than Nagin would have thought. The Chinese aviator recognized the J-turn and moved inside the curve to line up a kill shot. In a moment, the Hornet would be hanging in the air, as close to motionless as a Navy fighter ever got when it was off the ground, like a piñata waiting for a child to smack it with a bat. But the MIG was too close and the pilot overestimated the time he had to close the distance. The Hornet dropped more speed and the arc of his turn shallowed. The MIG pilot finally saw the danger and tried to pull away too late. The MIG-27 just missed the Hornet’s fuselage and the two planes sheared off each other’s wings instead.

  Nagin held his breath, rolled and banked, and began a slow turn to keep eyes on the dead Hornet. Neither plane exploded on impact, but the Hornet was in a fast tumbling spin and the air around it was thick with burning jet fuel for the few moments before it began a death spiral down. The metal husk fell through its own flaming fuel, smoke now pouring from the burning skin of the fuselage.

  Get out, Nagin thought. He hoped the other pilot was still conscious.

  “Jumper is hit!” someone yelled over the comm.

  Every alarm in the dying US fighter was screaming, and Jumper, rookie though he was, didn’t need anyone to tell him it was time to leave. The Hornet pilot reached between his legs, pulled the handle, and then crossed his arms. Explosive bolts in the windscreen fired, blowing the windscreen away from the fuselage. The rocket motors under him fired, driving the Martin-Baker ACES II ejection seat up its rails and out of the plane. The rockets burned off their propellant, the seat fell away, and the chute opened automatically. He wondered if the Chinese ejection seats were as reliable. The answer, it seemed, was no.

  “Lincoln, I confirm one chute,” Nagin said like he was reading the newspaper. Another US naval aviator had just become a lifetime member of the Martin-Baker Fan Club, though the seat’s rocket motors manufactured by that company had shortened the man’s spine by a half inch. The downed pilot would not complain. The Chinese pilot was learning that the alternative was far worse.

  COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  “CSAR, go!” CIC ordered. One of the combat search-and-rescue Sea-hawk helicopters circling the carrier peeled away and rushed forward toward the fight. It would stay a hundred feet off the deck to avoid the Chinese radars as long as possible. They could have flown higher. The MIGs now had more pressing problems than trying to spot helicopters, but if not, the CSAR pilots wouldn’t have been deterred anyway. No Americans would die in the waters of the Taiwan Str
ait if they could prevent it, and enemy fire was not going to stop them from at least making the attempt.

  TACTICAL FLAG COMMAND CENTER

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  A pair of triangles on the master screen moved out of the fight and began arcing far too close to Lincoln’s position. “Two bandits inbound, bearing two-three-zero, range forty miles!” one of the junior officers yelled.

  “They’re going for the escorts. Probably trying to open a hole to the carrier,” Jonathan told Kyra. “Came around the fight from the southwest. Must be riding close to the water.” All of Lincoln’s fighters were out of position to intercept and none would be able to close the gap before the MIGs closed the distance for a missile shot.

  “Worked for us,” Pollard said. The radar return off the two planes was intermittent. Shiloh was closer to the inbound planes but off-axis from their approach vector. Gettysburg was in a direct line. Pollard didn’t bother to radio out to the picket ship. Every captain in the battle group knew his primary job was to protect Lincoln even at the cost of his own vessel.

  Two icons appeared, both moving away from the approaching MIGs and toward the carrier group. “Two vampires inbound on Gettysburg! Range thirty-five miles!”

  “Helm, evasive. Fire control, stand by,” Kyra heard someone from Gettysburg order over the comm. She supposed it was the captain. Seven miles ahead of Lincoln, Gettysburg’s four General Electric gas turbine engines surged to full power, using all eighty-thousand horsepower to drive the ship into a hard turn through the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait.

  “Range, twenty-five miles. Shiloh is firing,” one of the Lincoln’s techs said. The cruiser was off angle from the inbound missiles but was three nautical miles closer to the missiles and had the first shot.

  The antiship missiles were Yingji-82 Eagle Strikes. The solid rocket boosters pushed the missiles to their maximum speed, then fell away into the sea, and the Yingjis’ turbojet engines kicked in. Both missiles settled at three meters above the Strait and pushed forward at just under Mach 1.

  The two Jian-10B planes had dropped toward the sea once they broke away from the fight. They aimed for fifty feet above the waves, first hoping to get lost in the sea return to evade the AWACS and E-3A Sentry radars when they fired on Gettysburg, then to evade the picket ships’ fire control radars. It didn’t help. Both planes took direct hits from RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missiles. The pilots died instantly as they and their aircraft were almost vaporized between the missile warheads and their own flaming jet fuel.

  COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER

  USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  “Hit!” Shiloh had knocked down one of the Yingji with a Phalanx Close-In Weapons Systems gun, which cut the odds in half for Gettsyburg, but her sister ship now had to defend itself. “One vampire inbound on Gettysburg, range seventeen miles, Mach point nine. Sir, it’s passed inside Shiloh’s firing envelope,” the tech observed. “CIWS guns didn’t have time to take the other one, and her RAMs won’t be able to catch it.”

  “Deploy countermeasures.” Kyra heard Gettysburg’s commanding officer give the order over the comm. The man sounded like he was announcing the weather. Gettysburg’s chaff launchers began firing clouds of aluminum strips in front of the carrier, hoping to confuse the Yingji’s radars.

  “Tracking,” Gettysburg’s Fire Control tech said. “The Artoos will get ’em.” The Ticonderoga-class cruiser’s Phalanx guns looked like the famous robot but were far more lethal.

  “Hope you’re right,” Kyra heard Jonathan mutter.

  One of Lincoln’s radar watch cut into the conversation. “Sir, I have an intermittent radar contact, bearing three-four-five, altitude twenty thousand feet, distance thirty miles.”

  “Out of Fuzhou?” Pollard asked.

  “That course is probable but not confirmed, sir.”

  “And not one of ours?” Pollard asked. This contact wasn’t skimming the sea to get lost in the waves. The possible bogey was four miles above the Strait.

  “No, sir,” the junior officer answered. “I’ve seen him twice. Unless I’m seeing three different planes or flocks of birds on a parallel course, this bogey came around the fight from the northwest. Constant bearing, decreasing range, distance and time between contacts are consistent with a single fighter.”

  “You get that, Grizzly?” Pollard asked.

  “Grizzly copies,” Nagin said. “Moving to intercept.” He pulled the stick right, rolled, and pointed his F-35 toward the northwest. He prayed that he would find seagulls.

  TACTICAL FLAG COMMAND CENTER

  “How many sailors on Gettysburg?” Kyra whispered to Jonathan.

  “Four hundred, give or take.”

  “Range ten miles,” someone said over the comm. “Gettysburg is firing.”

  No safe place on a carrier, Kyra thought.

  Not safe.

  Jonathan looked down at his arm as Kyra squeezed it hard. The woman was starting to hyperventilate.

  Gettysburg’s computers determined that the remaining Yingji was a threat without any help from the fire control technicians. Once its algorithms determined the Chinese missile was close enough, two rockets ignited and flew out of the deck launcher. They went supersonic, their infrared sensors locked onto the Yingji’s engine, and they closed the distance within seconds. The first RIM-116 warhead exploded within a few meters of the Eagle Strike and scattered a fragment cloud in its target’s path. The metal bits punctured the Chinese missile’s nose cone and damaged the stabilizing wings. In a fraction of a second, it shuddered in flight, yawed, and the airflow threw it into a circular spin off its flight path. The second RIM-116 finished the job an instant later. Its shrapnel punctured the Yingji’s engine and ignited the remaining fuel. The airframe tore itself apart. Chinese missile wreckage hit the Taiwan Strait at almost Mach 1, and bits of metal skipped across the waves for hundreds of yards.

  “Lucky,” Pollard muttered. “Won’t get lucky forever.” Lincoln’s pilots were outnumbered and still eating the PLA alive anyway, but it wouldn’t last. Pollard was surprised that the Chinese Air Force hadn’t sent more aircraft after them, but that wouldn’t last either if they stayed in the Strait long enough. Chinese submarines could well have been advancing, but his instincts told him that was not the case. The Chinese seemed content with an aerial fight, which gave Pollard a very sick feeling inside. There was nothing to be gained by throwing older fighters and inferior pilots against the US Navy’s aviators and Tian knew it. The dogfight was holding the carrier in position to retrieve its planes, and now the radar network had picked up a possible hit.

  “They’re playing with us,” he announced. “Maybe they wanted to try conventional arms before giving their science project a test run.” He checked the wall chronometer. “We’ve got ten minutes. If the PLA wants to keep fighting after that, Washington’s boys can have some fun.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Kyra muttered. She pushed past Jonathan and ran out into the passageway.

  “Wait—,” he started.

  “Sir?” the tech spoke up. “That intermittent contact has altered course. Now inbound, inside the outer screen. Thirty miles, constant bearing, decreasing range. It definitely arced around the furball, sir.”

  Jonathan stared at the radar track.

  The cloud cover at twenty thousand feet was patchy and gray and a brief spray of rainwater washed over his canopy. Nagin lifted the plane’s nose and climbed past the squall, then rolled his plane onto its side to look down. Another MIG-27 pilot died a mile below in a fireball that caught his attention.

  “Lincoln, Grizzly. Negative on my scope, negative visual on that contact,” Nagin said. His heart was pounding hard, but years of practice kept his voice calm. “Do you have him?”

  “Grizzly, Lincoln, no joy, repeat, no—Contact! Bogey on your four o’clock, one-zero-five, distance fifteen miles!” the radar tech radioed back.

  Nagin held back from cursing on the open mic and turned his head. The bogey had
passed him on the right, hiding in the cloud banks, and was arcing around behind him toward Lincoln. “No, you don’t,” he muttered. He pulled his stick right and put the F-35 into a hard turn that sent the blood in his body rushing toward his feet. He held the turn until he matched course, and a few seconds on the afterburner made up the distance. He rolled wings-level, the gray wall of vapor fell away, and his target ripped a hole in the cloud bank’s eastern edge.

  “Lincoln, Grizzly, I have visual contact,” Nagin said.

  The Assassin’s Mace was more beautiful than he had expected. Perhaps the unforgiving math of the Ufimtsev equations had forced the graceful design on Chinese engineers who had shown no aptitude for it before. It was also big, almost twice the size of Nagin’s F-35, big enough to carry any weapon in its bay that the Chinese cared to load. The stealth plane was a coal-black arrowhead, devoid of markings, with a razor blade profile. Its nose, stolen from the B-2, came straight back into a chined fuselage with tapered edges. Its delta wings started their outward spread at the midpoint of the body. Dual stabilizers rose from them, each canted inward at equal angles to the hard curve of the plane’s body. The cockpit windscreen was tinted the same coal-black color as the rest of the Mace, hiding its pilot from Nagin’s view but otherwise giving its pilot no advantage at the moment. In a moonless sky, the aircraft would have disappeared completely. The early morning sun robbed it of the advantage, but the storm clouds darkened the sky more than Nagin would have liked.

  Pollard looked up at Burke. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank me after he shoots it down,” Jonathan said.

  “Where’s your partner?”