Robert Gandt
Black Star
For Brad Gandt,
fellow flyer, adventurer, super son.
Also by Robert Gandt
SEASON OF STORMS
The Siege of Hongkong, 1941
CHINA CLIPPER
The Age of the Great Flying Boats
SKYGODS
The Fall of Pan Am
BOGEYS AND BANDITS
The Making of a Fighter Pilot
FLY LOW, FLY FAST
Inside the Reno Air Races
INTREPID
The Epic Story of America’s Most Famous Warship
THE TWILIGHT WARRIORS
The Deadliest Naval Battle of WWII and the Men Who Fought It
WITH HOSTILE INTENT
ACTS OF VENGEANCE
SHADOWS OF WAR
THE KILLING SKY
BLACK STAR RISING
THE GUY YOU DON’T SEE WILL KILL YOU.
CHAPTER 1 — DYNASTY ONE
Something isn’t right.
The thought kept buzzing like a gnat in Captain Laura Quimby’s head. Again she peered into the monochrome green display.
Nothing. The sky was still empty. No one out there except Dynasty One and the shooters flying cover for him.
Quimby removed her glasses and tossed them onto the console. She was getting a bad feeling about this. Something didn’t compute.
“He’s transmitting again,” said First Lieutenant Pete Clegg, the Raven sitting at the console next to her. “Same guy, south coast of Hainan.”
“What are the linguists getting on him?”
“It sounds like ground controlled intercept stuff. Like he’s vectoring an airborne client.”
Intercept? The thought sent a rush of uneasiness through Quimby. “What client? What are we missing? Do you see anything out there?”
Clegg stared at his own display and shook his head. “Nothing in Dynasty’s threat sector. A couple of bogeys over Hainan — looks like Flankers out of Lingshui. Too far away to be a factor.”
Quimby nodded. She was seeing the same thing. Flankers were Russian-built SU-27 fighters. They were fast and dangerous, but this pair was out of range. There were no radar targets in the South China Sea except the four Navy shooters from the Reagan, and the jetliner — Dynasty One — carrying Li Hou-sheng, the President of the Republic of China.
On Quimby’s display they looked like symbols in a computer game, little yellow triangles all pointed northwest toward Taiwan. The four F/A-18 Super Hornets were in a wide combat spread above and on either side of the Airbus A-300.
Nothing else. No intruders, no uninvited guests.
She tilted back in her high padded stool and gazed around the red-lighted cabin. Pete Clegg and First Lieutenant Matt Ricchi, her two fellow Ravens — electronic warfare officers — were hunched over their consoles. All thirty crew members of the RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance jet— Ravens, linguists, mission coordinators, air intelligence analysts — were preoccupied with tracking Dynasty One.
Another wave of uncertainty descended over Laura Quimby. How many surveillance missions had she flown along the coast of China? Thirty-some, and they had all been predictable, routine. Sometimes the Chinese liked to put fighters up just to let you know they could tag you when they wanted to. They might make a couple of head fakes with their Flankers, or even with the old F-7 fighters, variants of the Russian MiG-21 Fishbed. It was a game they played, nothing more.
Or so it had been until this morning at 1115 hours.
That was the moment when Li Hou-sheng took the podium at the Southeast Asian Nations conference in Kuala Lumpur and delivered a shock to all of Asia. Henceforth, he declared to the delegates, Taiwan was a free and sovereign country. Reunification with the communist government of mainland China was no longer a consideration.
Li’s announcement had the approximate effect, Quimby decided, of sticking a lighted cigar up a bull’s ass. Anyone with a memory knew that Beijing would never accept the notion that Taiwan was anything but an unruly province of mainland China. Despite their differences, Taiwan would always be a part of the People’s Republic of China. If necessary, the PRC would use force to make it happen.
The United States, which had long urged both sides to work toward a peaceful reunification, was caught in the middle. To discourage any overt action against Li’s jet, the USS Ronald Reagan, deployed in the South China Sea, was ordered to supply fighter escort for Dynasty One during its flight back to Taipei. For four hundred miles, the route paralleled the Chinese coastline. When the jet was within fighter range of Taiwan, ROC F-16s would take over and escort the Airbus the rest of the way into Taipei.
“Did you see that?” asked Clegg.
“Did I see what?”
“A contact. Zero-four-zero from Dynasty One, about seventy miles.”
Quimby slid her glasses back onto her nose and peered into her display. She didn’t see anything. Spurious traces were nothing unusual for these sensors. The scanners on the RC-135 were so sensitive, crews liked to say, they could detect birds crapping on a power line.
Clegg was new, still on his first deployment to Kadena. As the senior Raven, Quimby was the tactical coordinator on this mission. It was her job to sort out the spurious stuff from the real.
“Did you get an electronic ID?”
“No. One sweep, very faint, and it was gone.”
“Sun spots. You get that sometimes in late afternoon.”
Clegg looked dubious. “Think we ought to alert the shooters?”
Quimby thought for a second. Everyone was jumpy enough. No sense in transmitting alerts if you didn’t have data.
“No. Not unless we have a valid target.”
“Deep Throat, this is Runner One-one. What’s the picture?”
“No change, Runner,” came the voice of the controller in the RC-135. “Picture still clear. You guys are alone out there.”
From the cockpit of his F/A-18E Super Hornet, Commander Brick Maxwell acknowledged. It was the third time in the past twenty minutes he had checked. From his perch at 35,000 feet, he could make out the dark shadow of the Vietnamese coastline. A patchwork of puffy cumulus lay between his flight of four Hornets and the gray surface of the South China Sea.
Nearly a mile below, silhouetted against the clouds, was the slim, swept-wing shape of a jetliner.
Picture still clear. A dry run. Maybe the Chinese fighters really were staying on the ground.
“Runner One-one,” said the controller on the discrete UHF frequency. “Do you still have a visual on Dynasty One?
“Affirmative,” answered Maxwell. “Nine o’clock low, three miles.”
“That’s your guy. He’ll switch to Manila Control now, maintaining flight level 350.”
It was a pain in the butt, flying fighter cover for an airplane with whom you weren’t talking. The Airbus had only commercial VHF — very high frequency— radios. Though the Hornets were equipped with VHF in addition to the standard military UHF — the ultra-high frequency band — they were deliberately not communicating with the Airbus. Without question, the Chinese were eavesdropping today on the VHF band.