Red Cell (40 page)

The F-35s were in near-vertical climbs. All of them found a missile lock on a dancing MIG and began maneuvering to keep the Chinese fighters within their firing envelope. One of the PLA pilots pulled his aircraft around toward the ascending stealth fighters and the lead F-35 roared past the Su-27’s nose less than two hundred feet out. The Chinese aviator reacted on instinct and pulled the trigger on his gun for a half second before realizing what he’d done. The rounds missed, but the tracers were visible.

“We are taking fire!” someone announced over the comm.

“Weapons free,” Nagin ordered.

The targeted F-35 pulled left, banked over, and rolled to wings level. The AMRAAM in his open bay dropped out and shot forward. The rocket motor burned for less than two seconds before the warhead struck the MIG’s airframe and ripped the plane in half. The stealth
fighter’s weapons bay snapped shut, restoring the plane’s stealth profile. The dead Su-27’s wingman was maneuvering for a shot when the F-35 suddenly dropped off his radar track. The Chinese pilot screamed Mandarin curses into his microphone.

The Battle of the Taiwan Strait had begun. The Chinese had fired first. The Americans had drawn first blood.

TACTICAL FLAG COMMAND CENTER
USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The TFCC was not designed for beauty. Exposed cables and pipes ran through the ceilings and electronics were sticking out of the walls in almost random fashion. Kyra couldn’t find any logic or order to the layout, but she was sure that the design made sense to somebody. And it was
cold,
which did make sense when she thought about it.
Nuclear-powered air conditioning
, she realized.

Pollard had left the line open to CIC. “Fire up the network.”

Every vessel in the
Lincoln
fleet turned on its air-search radar almost simultaneously and flooded the air with electromagnetic radiation. The Hawkeye and AWACS rotodomes added their own radar beams to the sweeps running across the battle zone.

The first waves reached the MIGs and struck every surface in direct line of sight of a radar transmitter. The flattened surfaces of the Su-27s reflected huge amounts of energy back to their points of origin. The radar energy traveled at light speed; every transmitter afloat and in the air received solid hits from the Chinese planes in microseconds. The MIGs’ onboard computers screamed as they detected the energy emissions and their pilots had a new problem to worry about.

The same radar waves reached the F-35s. The stealth planes’ airframes absorbed much of the energy and the nonmetal composites under the skin let more through unhindered to pass out the other side and into space. The minimal energy that remained struck the carefully curved surfaces and rebounded in every direction possible away from their transmitters. None of the ships and planes scanning the air received more than an unmeasurable fraction of its own radar energy back from the stealth fighters.

“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 Strait 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.