“Roger, moving in a little tighter.”
“Comin’ up on the power,” Ricardo signaled, easing the nose up a tad.”
“I’m with you,” Amanda replied.
Col. Lian Guõ was concerned. The person who had inquired about the call sign had spoken English on the radio frequency for the Chinese air traffic control sector.
Fortunately, she spoke it well enough, certainly as well as any CSA pilot. Unfortunately, she could tell the voice did not believe her, and a moment later, she noticed on her radar screen that the two American jets flying BARCAP twenty-eight miles away were turning toward her.
Showtime, she thought before telling her crew, “Prepare for battle.” The H-6 carried four C-301 supersonic anti-ship missiles in its large payload compartment.
Breathing deeply, she pushed the throttles to the forward stops and dropped the nose as she turned straight for Vinson, seventy miles away.
Vectored by the Advanced Hawkeye, Ricardo and Amanda were twenty-five miles from the mystery jet when it suddenly accelerated to almost the speed of sound and entered a diving turn toward Vinson.
“Whoa, Liberty! Seeing this shit?” Ricardo said. “It can’t be a jetliner.”
“Copy that, Dragon One,” Barlow said. “It’ll reach mother in six minutes. We just tried contacting it again, and there is no reply, so I’m calling it a bandit. Do you have a visual?”
“Negative. We’re in the clouds, and it’s darker up here than nine feet up a bull’s ass. Arming weapons,” he said, going into burner, followed by Amanda.
“Copy that, Dragon One.”
“Deedle, master arm,” Ricardo said, throwing the switch to arm his weapons systems.
“Roger,” Amanda replied.
“Liberty Bell, Dragon One has a lock on the bandit,” Ricardo said when achieving infrared lock with a Sidewinder. “Permission to fire.”
“Permission granted, Dragon One,” Barlow replied. “Splash the bandit.”
Ricardo released the missile from a distance of seventeen miles, watching it flash under his starboard wing before disappearing in the dark clouds.
Lian’s crew had just opened the H-6’s bomb bay doors in preparation to release the C-301s when alarms blared and her electronics officer screamed.
“Missile! Incoming missile! Impact in thirty seconds!” he warned over the intercom.
“Countermeasures,” Lian replied. Dammit.
Her electronics officer released a load of flares from the pods on the tail as Lian cut hard right toward the coast to try to place themselves at a ninety-degree angle from the incoming threat.
The missile closed in on them before abruptly turning toward the red-hot cloud of flares. Unfortunately, this being a subsonic jet, it had not provided her with the speed required to achieve enough separation, and it detonated somewhere off to the bomber’s starboard.
The blast blinded her as shrapnel tore into the right side of the H-6 bomber. Alarms blared inside the cockpit.
“Damage report!” she demanded, wrestling for control of the Xian. Her ears hurt from the rapid loss of cabin pressure, and the control column vibrated in her hands.
“We’ve lost pressurization!” her copilot announced. “The fuselage is breached!”
A scan of her instruments conveyed her predicament. The sturdy Badger was designed to take quite a bit of abuse, but the blast had pierced the fuselage somewhere aft of the right wing.
“Release the missiles!” she ordered. Even though they were not pointing toward the carrier, the C-301s would turn toward their preordained target.
“Weapons system nonresponsive,” the electronics officer replied.
Lian glanced at the array of warning lights between them and saw the red and yellow ones belonging to the system governing their payload.
Cursing under her breath, she pushed the center stick forward and dove below the clouds, back toward the Chinese mainland at just under the speed of sound. She tried to close the payload bay doors to minimize the vibration on the flight controls, but the hydraulics were not responding.
Sorry, Jiujiu, she thought. We tried.
And that’s when she spotted the Super Hornets approaching from her starboard side.
“Definitely not an airliner,” Ricardo said as he came up behind and under what he now recognized as a Xian H-6 bomber, and it had its payload bay doors open. Beyond them, he spotted the long shapes of at least four long missiles.
No, you don’t, he thought, easing his throttles back to give himself some room to use his M61A2 Vulcan 20 mm cannon. Squeezing the trigger for just three seconds, he unloaded almost two hundred armor-piercing incendiary rounds, tearing through the starboard fuselage and the starboard wing.
The dark night blazed with light when the Badger’s right wing exploded in a blinding flash before breaking off the large bomber.
Ricardo flew through the expanding cloud of flaming debris, breaking away as caution lights came alive in his cockpit.
The h-6 spun toward the strait in flames.
Lian watched the ocean rushing toward her but could not move. The rounds that had pierced the cockpit, killing her copilot and electronics officer, had also penetrated her seat from behind, severing her spinal cord.
As the altimeter shot below ten thousand feet, she tried to move her arms to reach between her legs for the dual red handles of her K-36LM ejection seat, but they would not obey her.
Damn you, she thought as the image of General Xiangsui flashed in her mind, along with Hai’s corkboard memorial, before the fire engulfed her.
Amanda watched the bomber explode in midair, a massive cloud of flaming shrapnel raining over the strait like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
“Deedle, when you’re through watching the show, I need you to rendezvous with me and check the jet, see if I have any missing parts. Controls are getting a little nonresponsive.”
“Copy,” she replied, easing under Ricardo’s jet and carefully checking the aircraft fuselage and wings.
“Don’t see anything major, Ricky. You do have some hydraulic fluid leaking, but all the important parts are still attached.
“Okay,” Ricardo responded as they closed in on the carrier. “I’m going to dirty up and see if everything works.”
“Roger that,” Amanda acknowledged, watching for anything unusual as the wing flaps, landing gear, and tail hook dropped into place. “Looks good to me; nothing fell off.”
“Deedle, you take the lead and land first. I’ll extend downwind.”
“That’s a negative,” Amanda replied as she settled her Super Hornet wingtip-to-wingtip with Ricardo. “My turn to hold your hand.”
“Don’t be a hero, Deedle. Get your Rhino on that flight deck.”
“I’m not leaving my wingman. Switching to the LSO,” Amanda replied as the carrier’s wake appeared fifteen hundred feet below them.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Ricardo replied while Amanda drifted five hundred feet off his port wing. Switching to the LSO frequency, he said, “Hornet, ball, losing hydraulics, controls a little sticky.”
“Roger ball,” the LSO replied. “Easy does it, Dragon. Fly a long downwind leg while we rig the barricade.”