Red Cell (42 page)

Kyra heard the buzzing of the guns, surprisingly loud over the other deafening noise of the flight deck.

“Get down!” Jonathan grabbed her and pushed her down onto the deck behind the metal shield of the railing. He fell on top of her, then pushed himself up onto one foot to go for the seaman apprentice, who was still frozen in place.

The first gun missed by inches. The second hit the Yingji’s nose cone just off center and ripped it to pieces at a distance of three-quarters of a mile from
Lincoln
. The antiship missile was torn apart by a combination of bullets, stress from the supersonic air ripping into its now-damaged frame, and, a moment later, impact with the Taiwan Strait at just under Mach 2 a half mile from the carrier. At that speed, hitting the water was like diving into a field of concrete. The missile shattered into thousands of pieces, bits skipping across the water like stones. Others flew through the air in a straight line toward the ship.

Kyra heard tiny bits of metal on metal clang on the hull, sharp sounds, like gunshots hitting a steel backstop at supersonic speed.

The seaman apprentice shrieked. Kyra twisted her head to look as she heard the other woman’s body hit the deck plates. Jonathan scrambled over to her, and Kyra hauled herself to her feet. She heard
Shiloh
fire another missile miles away. Another Phalanx gun, probably
Gettysburg
, sounded in the distance.

The sailor was on her back and still conscious, a dark spot expanding on her blue coveralls over the left shoulder. Jonathan pulled the woman’s uniform open and tore her shirt so he could get a look at the wound.

“Vampire down,” the tech announced, his own voice quavering just a hair.

Lucky,
Pollard thought. “We can’t stay here all day.” The admiral looked at the screen. “Sometime this week, Grizzly,” he announced. The mic wasn’t live. Nagin didn’t need to hear the nagging to get on with his job.

Nagin rolled in the opposite direction and approached the other plane almost head-on, certainly inside the Chinese plane’s radar cone, and the enemy fighter hadn’t shot at him. Nagin’s own plane hadn’t detected a radar sweep from the other plane. Even with the help of the AWACS and the entire
Lincoln
battle group, the return was still weak when it did show up. Nagin took a chance, put the F-35’s nose dead on the Mace, opened his missile bay, and switched on his active radar. The Slammers still refused to sound the tone that would have announced their willingness to shred the other plane into burning pieces.

Nagin had never shot at another plane with his guns. He had maybe three seconds’ worth of gunfire, and dogfighting another stealth plane was not something any Navy pilot had ever trained for. In fact, he was pretty sure that the Lockheed engineers had never even studied the possibility.

The Mace pushed hard into a turn and went nose down. Nagin followed, opened up his throttle to keep the distance constant, and pulled the trigger.
I’m gonna pound your brains out.

His gun flashed and the 25 mm rounds missed their moving target as the Chinese arrowhead rolled to the side and braked hard. Nagin cursed as the Mace curved behind.

“No, you don’t,” Nagin muttered again, still loud enough to be broadcast. Nagin lifted his nose and leveled out. The Mace followed and Nagin rolled a quarter turn and went for the sky. The black plane behind him started to follow, but gravity pulled hard as it tried to end its dive and it could not make its climb as steep. Nagin backed off on his thrust, arced over and dove. The Mace flashed across his path, leveled, and dove again for the water. It was a skilled maneuver, and Nagin had expected no less. It only made sense that one of the PLA’s best pilots would be at the stick of their newest plane.

Jonathan reached underneath the woman’s back and felt for blood. There was plenty. “Shrapnel, still in the shoulder. She’s bleeding fast.
Might have nicked the subclavian artery,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Kyra. “Get down to the battle dressing station on the flight deck level. We need a corpsman—”

“I don’t know where that is,” Kyra protested.

Jonathan frowned, then pulled off his jacket and overshirt. He pressed the shirt against the girl’s wound and she cried out in pain. He grabbed Kyra’s arm with his free hand and pushed her hand down on his shirt. “Press here. Don’t let up. I’ll be back.”

She shifted around Jonathan as he stood, lifting his hands off the sailor only when Kyra’s hands were firmly on the girl’s shoulder. “How do you know where it is?” Kyra asked.

“Not my first aircraft carrier,” he said. Then he stepped through the hatch.

“They’re in a rolling scissors,” Pollard said. The other Navy officers grumbled in agreement. Both planes were looping around in a line, trying to get position behind each other. It also meant the Chinese pilot had some real training. Assuming the pilots’ skills were an even match, the winner would be the man flying the better plane.

Nagin had dropped his airspeed too far for comfort and still couldn’t stay behind the Mace. The Chinese plane was slower to accelerate despite its second engine but the larger wings gave it more control at slower speeds.
It’s heavier than I am,
Nagin thought. Perhaps the Chinese hadn’t figured out or stolen the methods for manufacturing all the lightweight composites that made up most of his own F-35. It was a question some engineer would have to figure out after the fact. Grizzly’s immediate problem was that the hostile was crossing in behind him.

Tracers ripped by Nagin’s cockpit. He rolled the plane hard while dropping altitude.

Time to bug out of this
. If the Mace was more maneuverable at slow speeds, then the throttle would be the American’s friend today. He pulled out of the roll and into a hard turn away from the Mace, the fighters moving in opposite directions. Nagin pulled back and climbed for the sun.

The Mace came around and started vertical toward the F-35. The hostile plane fired its guns again, the rounds going wide left. Nagin rolled over, turned into the Mace’s path and the two planes rushed past each other close enough that the jet wash rocked both planes. Nagin
lifted his fighter into an Immelmann turn, moving in a half circle until his direction was reversed and he rolled wings-level.

The Chinese pilot was reversing his turn through a wide circle, like a car making a U-turn, leaving his fighter near the same altitude as the F-35.

“Come on, get inside that guy’s turn,” Pollard muttered.

“Sir, our ten minutes are up. Our birds are gonna be getting close to bingo fuel,” one of the junior officers announced.

“Any other bandits in positions to make a run on us?” Pollard asked.

“No, sir,” the junior officer replied. “We’ve got them cordoned off.”

“Contact
Washington
. Tell them it’s their turn to play,” Pollard ordered. “Once they’re in position, recall our people.”

“Aye, sir.”

The seaman apprentice tried to move under Kyra’s hands and screamed as the bit of shrapnel ground against her collarbone.

“Don’t move,” Kyra ordered her. “If you move—”

“I got shot?” It came out almost as a stutter.

She doesn’t know what happened.
Kyra had taken the Agency’s course on trauma medicine, training for officers who were going to serve in war zones, where they might get pressed into service as first responders. Her thinking was suddenly clear and she recognized the symptoms of shock. The girl’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and she was staring straight up at the blue sky, her pupils dilated. “Yeah, something like that.”

“It hurts.”

Kyra had to lean close to the girl’s head to hear her. “I know,” Kyra told her.
Distract her,
she thought. “What’s your name?”

“Cassie.”

Nagin eased back on his throttle the smallest bit and pulled inside the Mace’s turn. The Chinese pilot saw it and throttled up his own plane. He began closing the distance between the two planes, trying to make the American overshoot or slow down again to avoid that error.

Nagin grinned and slammed his throttle full forward. The F-35 jumped forward and crossed the Mace’s turn. He pulled hard right
on the stick, rolled the plane, and came around in a tight circle that threatened to cross the Chinese plane’s turn again.

Gotcha.

The distance between the planes was less than two miles and the Mace couldn’t move any direction fast enough to escape the F-35’s attack vector. Nagin kicked the afterburner, tracked the Mace’s direction for a quarter second, and pulled the gun trigger.

The rounds tore into the Mace’s airframe, shredding wing and stabilizer metal into jagged petals and ripping holes that began to spew fluids in dark contrails as the plane rolled into another corkscrew. Nagin held the gunsight on the black bird until his gun ran dry. He watched his tracers embed themselves in the black plane’s airframe—

A solid red triangle appeared on the radar track. “There!” Pollard yelled. The cheers in the Tactical Flag Command Center were matched by the noise coming over the comm from the crew in the CIC. “Hard to hide from radar with a bunch of jagged holes in your wing.”

“Sir, MIGs are moving to protect the Chinese plane,” someone announced over the comm. “Our birds are in pursuit. Time to intercept, forty seconds.”

“They won’t get them all,” Pollard said over the speaker. “Not enough missiles left to take them all out.
Washington
’s fighters?”

“Two minutes out,” someone said.

“Grizzly, you’ve got thirty seconds and then you’ll have company,” Pollard said.

Twenty more than I need.
The Assassin’s Mace was in a steep dive, trailing black smoke and juking like a nervous insect. The island of Penghu was filling the canopy. Nagin pushed his throttle forward, fired the afterburner, and broke the speed of sound. Everyone on Penghu would hear it. Grizzly ignored the ground and focused on his helmet HUD. The radar in the nose was trying to get enough data on the black fighter for a missile lock, but even wounded, the black diamond was making itself a hard target. The Mace jerked up its nose and leveled out more quickly than Nagin had thought possible. He deployed the airbrakes and pulled back on his own stick and felt his entire body push against his seat harness as gravity pulled hard on him. He came out of the dive
a half mile below the Mace. The Chinese stealth plane banked and turned toward its approaching brothers as it tried to close the distance faster than Pollard’s deadline.

Nagin got inside the Mace’s turn and put the Joint Strike Fighter’s nose directly on the Chinese fighter’s underbelly. The HUD in his helmet sounded a tone.

“Fox three!” Nagin said, trying not to shout.

The weapons bays under the F-35 snapped open. One of the two AMRAAMs mounted on the doors dropped out. Its rocket motors ignited and the bay doors snapped shut in less than a second.

The missile closed the distance to the Assassin’s Mace in four seconds. The Chinese pilot rolled hard left and deployed chaff and flares. The aluminum strips and pyrotechnics scattered behind did nothing to confuse the weapon tracking his ruptured airframe. The missile punched through the metal cloud and arced in toward its target.

The Assassin’s Mace had a lifespan that could now be measured in single seconds. The pilot knew it and reached for the ejection handle.

The missile exploded ten feet off the Mace’s right aileron, showering the rear quarter of the plane with shrapnel that tore into the prototype plane’s nose and forward body. The shock wave tore off the port wing and ignited a ruptured fuel tank. The rear half of the stealth plane’s airframe was shredded, with black smoke and flames leaking from every hole. The aircraft pinwheeled clockwise and the metal screamed as it began to tear itself apart.

Explosive bolts around the canopy fired. The plastic bubble tumbled away and the Chinese pilot’s ejection seat rocketed out of the dying plane.

Nagin arced around the dead plane and watched as it tumbled through the gray sky, flames and smoke marking its path down toward Penghu.

“I’m thirsty,” Cassie said. Her blood had soaked through Jonathan’s shirt and Kyra’s hands were covered with it. The average human body had five liters of blood. Kyra knew the girl had lost at least one, but it was easy to overestimate blood loss.

“They’re coming,” Kyra said. “They’ll patch you up and you can have all the water you want.”
Hurry up, Jon,
she thought.

Kyra saw the hatch open out of the corner of her eye. She twisted
around and saw a corpsman step through carrying a duffel bag, then a second, and Jonathan behind.

“MIGs are bugging out!” one of the pilots announced. With nothing left to defend and fresh US fighters inbound, someone had given the order to retreat. The icons on the master screen showed the remaining Chinese planes turning west.
Lincoln
’s CIC exploded in shouts and yells. It would have been a moment for hard drinks and tall beers if the Navy didn’t ban alcohol aboard its vessels.

“Nothing left to protect,” Pollard said. “Call
Washington
. Tell them no pursuit. They won’t like that but I’ll buy Admiral Leavitt a few rounds to smooth things over.”

The staff could hardly understand him over the cheers coming through the 1MC.

THE ASSASSIN’S MACE CRASH SITE
PENGHU, TAIWAN

The SH-60B Seahawk helicopter set down on a hill that offered Kyra a high view of the crash site. The artificial wind clawed at Kyra’s eyes as the Navy airman slid the door aside and he yelled at her to keep her head down. Stepping out onto grass that whipped at her feet, she landed off balance. She almost fell onto her knees as the air pushed her from all sides. Kyra balanced herself, ran out from under the helicopter, and straightened up once she passed outside the rotor wash.

Taiwanese soldiers had roped off at least fifty acres of the valley expanse below the hill. The zone inside the rope line was overrun with Taiwanese and US Naval Intelligence officers and civilians from who-knew-where. It looked like an archeological dig with grids of stakes connected by twine to allow for mapping the precise locations of recovered pieces. Men in jumpsuits with gloves and masks were carefully bagging and tagging debris that was still lying about. Dozens of parts, twisted and charred with serrated and ragged edges, were sticking out of the dirt like steel plants in an alien garden ready for harvest. A portable hoist had one large piece—part of the plane’s nose, she thought—suspended from a harness. Two men were guiding it onto a flatbed truck. There was a hangar somewhere at the Makung airport where those men would crate up the remains for reassembly at some US air base. No one would tell Kyra where. She suspected no one had made that decision yet. Usually a postcrash assembly was meant to determine the cause of a crash, but in this case that was known. This reconstruction would be a perverse kind of reverse engineering. Engineers would rebuild the metal corpse to see if they could discern its design and estimate its capabilities. It would take years. Doubtless, some CIA officers who’d played no part in the plane’s discovery would make their careers on the project.