Red Cell (41 page)

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?”

“Good question,” Jonathan said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be back.” He moved out into the passageway, looked both ways, then picked one and marched ahead.

Kyra reached the top of the metal ladder, then pressed her body against the bulkhead as a pair of sailors rushed by on their way down. She resumed her stumbling run. The bulkheads were closing around her and she shut her eyes to keep them away, then looked ahead again. She needed air and there was only one place on the carrier she could get outside without getting in the way of sailors carrying out combat operations.

Kyra found the hatch she had been searching for and fumbled with the heavy metal lever. She finally put her weight into it and then her shoulder against the metal door, and it swung open, letting her stumble out into the morning air. The sunlight blinded her for a few seconds, then she rushed forward until she could put her hands on the rail and look down from Vulture’s Row to the flight deck.

Sailors were everywhere, moving in a frenzied mass. In the distance, an F-18 Hornet was lined up and inbound, trailing smoke from an engine, its wings wobbling. The pilot managed to get the fighter’s nose up at the last minute, barely avoiding a ramp strike, or so Kyra thought. The arresting cables caught the tailhook and a fire crew was running toward the plane before it was dragged to a stop.

Not safe.

Kyra couldn’t slow her breathing.
Panic attack,
something told her. She clutched the rail and looked up and away from the carrier deck.

Gettysburg
and
Shiloh
and two other picket ships rode the waves in the distance. All four vessels were firing at random intervals into the sky, and Kyra watched a pair of missiles lift off from
Shiloh.
She followed their contrails as they surged away from the ship, and Kyra realized she could see bits of the dogfights. An explosion flared as one of
Shiloh
’s missiles destroyed some plane, and Kyra saw
Gettysburg
send another one of its own missiles into the air.

Kyra clutched the rail and tried to hold her breath, but her lungs
kept working on their own. She turned her head and only then saw that she wasn’t alone. Another young woman, a seaman apprentice, was hanging on to the rail too. She looked at Kyra, her eyes wide with terror. The seaman was younger than she was, still a kid, she realized. Scared out of her teenage mind enough that the girl had abandoned her post, wherever that was.
We’re at general quarters. Where’s your station?
Kyra thought, suddenly rational.
They’ll throw you in the brig.

Kyra felt a hand on her shoulder and she grabbed it.
Jonathan
, she knew.

The strange plane dove for the water, rolling to one side. Nagin saw its bay doors open. A pair of missiles rolled down, and suddenly the Assassin’s Mace was on his scope. Nagin swung his F-35 around as hard as the avionics allowed, but the Chinese stealth plane was arcing inside his turn.

One of the enemy plane’s missiles flew off its rail with white smoke trailing behind and punched into a thundercloud ahead, where Nagin lost sight of it.

Fighter-BOMBER,
he realized.

The bay doors snapped shut and the Assassin’s Mace disappeared from Nagin’s scope. His AMRAAM went blind and the PLA’s stealth fighter rolled away from Nagin.

Nagin could see the plane with his eyes but his F-35 couldn’t see it on radar.

So that’s what it feels like,
he thought.
Okay, a knife fight it is.

The inbound Yingji missile was twenty-five miles out and moving at Mach 1.6.

The Tactical Flag Command Center and every radio on the carrier exploded with excited chatter. Pollard was proud that everyone wasn’t diving for cover under their stations.

“You have to come inside!” Jonathan yelled.

“Can’t,” Kyra said. Her rapid breathing made it hard to speak. “I can’t.”

“It’s not safe out here!”

“You said . . . you said ‘no safe place on a carrier,’” she finally managed to answer.

“Some places are less dangerous than others.”

Kyra heard the 1MC speaker switch on. “All hands, brace for shock!” Then the chaff launchers fired.

Lincoln
was no destroyer or frigate but she was hardly defenseless. The
Nimitz
-class vessel, like her sisters, had been built to fight a Soviet navy and air force with hundreds of planes, so the designers had assumed that somewhere, someday, a bandit would get close enough to fire on a carrier.
Lincoln
carried her own countermeasures and point-defense weapons.

“Countermeasures.”
Lincoln
’s captain in the CIC held his voice steady. The crew relied on his calm as much as anything to control their own fears.

On the flattop, the carrier began ejecting chaff into the air, port side. The Phalanx guns and Sea Sparrow missile launchers pivoted toward the inbound missile.

“Range nine miles and closing. Sea Sparrows firing.”

Pollard stared at the screen, watching the incoming missile close on his carrier. If it was going to hit anywhere, he would lay money on it striking the carrier island. Right where he was standing.

“Inside, now!” Jonathan yelled. Kyra saw his gaze fixed at the horizon.

“What—?” She turned to look just in time to see
Lincoln
fire its missiles.

The RIM-7 Sea Sparrow launchers put two missiles into the air. The solid propellant motors fired and got the weapons to speed in less than two seconds. They closed the distance to the incoming Yingji in a fraction less than seven.

“Miss!” a tech announced. “Eagle Strike was just outside their kill radius. Distance two miles. Artoos tracking.” The Yingji and Sparrows had closed on each other’s positions at a relative speed of almost four thousand miles an hour, giving the Sparrows too little time to make course corrections before detonation. Each missile had a ninety-pound warhead that pushed shrapnel in a thirty-foot circle, but the Yingji slipped through.

“We do it the old-fashioned way now.” Pollard’s voice was hard steel, but the crew knew he was trying to sound optimistic. The Phalanx guns
were the last resort and considered less effective against high-speed missiles than the Sea Sparrows, which had just missed.

The chaff launchers kept punching aluminum strips into the air, trying to confuse the Yingji, which stubbornly held its course. The port-side Phalanx guns fore and aft spun on their mounts a bit, making a final targeting correction, and the 20 mm Gatlings fired together, sounding like the Devil’s own chainsaw. Streams of lead erupted at the rate of four thousand rounds a minute.