Was it Zhang?
The uncertainty hung over her like a leaden weight.
Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he was still here.
She decided to cling to that hope. It was the only way she could go on. With that thought planted in her head, she turned and trudged along in the darkness behind Chiu and his team.
Perhaps they would find another Black Star in the shelter. She no longer cared. She had already decided that she would surely die whether she found Zhang or not. If the PLA didn’t kill her, Chiu would. She would not be allowed to leave Chouzhou, and that was all right too. It meant that she would be joining Shaomin in eternity.
They were thirty meters from Shelter Number Three, still in the shadow of the second shelter, when Chiu signaled for them to take cover. The petroleum fire was casting a greater flood of orange light over the shelters. Even without NVG, Mai-ling could see details and objects around the third shelter.
“I’m not wasting any more time looking for sentries,” Chiu said.
While the others watched, wondering what he meant, he pulled a grenade from his belt. Motioning for them to remain in place, he crawled on his belly another ten meters toward the corner door of the shelter — the location where the sentries at the other two shelters had concealed themselves. A low wall jutted from the door, just as it had in the other shelters.
Chiu stopped and rose to a kneeling position. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade. It skipped off the concrete and slid to the edge of the wall.
Chiu rose to his feet. He turned on a flashlight and waved it like a wand. He yelled in Chinese. “Ho! Soldiers of the PLA sleep with pigs. Look over here, you pig fuckers!”
A head appeared over the wall. Then another. The sentries rose, swinging their weapons toward Chiu—
The grenade exploded.
In the flash and shower of debris, the sentries were flung back behind the wall. Even before the dust had cleared, Chiu covered the distance in a dead run. The muffled burp of his muzzle-suppressed MP-5N echoed from the shelter wall as he finished the sentries.
He waved to the fire team. “What are you waiting for? Move! We have work to do.”
Rising to their feet, Bass and Maxwell looked at each other.
“Is that guy the meanest sonofabitch in the world,” said Bass, “or is he just crazy?”
“Both,” said Maxwell.
Following Chiu’s hand signals, Maxwell stationed himself at the left of the shelter door. He kept the MP-5N submachine gun at the ready. On the opposite side, Bass was hunkered down with his assault rifle.
When Chiu gave the nod, Lieutenant Kee flung the door open. Chiu tossed an IR Chemlite flare through the opening, then pulled the pin on another and tossed it inside. With the NVG tilted down and SMGs mounted at the shoulder, he and the two commandos charged inside, followed by Maxwell and Bass.
As Chiu had instructed him, Maxwell broke to the left and ran toward the front of the hangar, aiming the barrel of his SMG like an extended antenna. The two Chemlites cast a flickering infra-red glow through the hangar, giving it the appearance of a witch’s cave.
Not until he reached the front of the hangar, finding no armed PLA troops, did Maxwell stop. He allowed himself to stare at the object that filled the center of the hangar.
He had gotten only a brief glimpse of the first jet that nearly ran over them when it burst from Shelter Number Three. The crew had already activated cloaking, and he couldn’t make out the details of the airframe. He hadn’t even seen the shape of the fighter before it was gone.
Over five years had passed since he flew the original Black Star at Groom Lake. He had already forgotten some of the exotic nuances in the jet’s design, the peculiar geometry of its airframe that absorbed and distorted and shed radar emissions and made it invisible on air defense displays. Now it came back to him.
Its wings were flat, no dihedral, sharp as a knife along its leading edges, swept back in a delta plan form. The two jet exhausts were embedded in the aft, triangular tail section. No vertical surfaces protruded to interrupt the flatness of its shape.
Beautiful.
No, he corrected himself. Not beautiful. The Black Star didn’t possess the slick, streamlined shape of a supersonic fighter. It was all angles, thick and flat, swept back like a manta ray.
Exotic. That was it. An exotic killing machine.
He heard a commotion in the back of the hangar where Chiu and one of the commandos had gone. He swung the submachine gun around and squinted through the night vision goggles.
A sentry? Another gun-wielding crew chief?
Holding the MP-5N extended in front of him, Maxwell slipped beneath the wing of the Black Star and moved toward the rear of the hangar. Next to a long workbench and a row of cabinets, Chiu and the two commandos had seized a man in coveralls. His wrists were already strapped with a plastic tie-wrap. The man was nearly blind in the infrared-lighted hangar.
Chiu looked at Maxwell. “He says he’s the crew chief. He was preparing the jet for a mission.”
“Where are the pilot and weapons officer?”
Chiu prodded the man with the muzzle of his MP-5N and said something in Mandarin. The crew chief blinked in the dim light, keeping his eyes locked on the submachine gun. He stammered an answer.
“Gone,” said Chiu. “He says they ran away when they heard the grenade explode outside.”
“Is it fueled and ready to fly?” Maxwell asked.
Chiu repeated the question for the crew chief. The man answered in Mandarin, his eyes firmly fixed on the MP-5N.
“Yes,” said Chiu. “The Black Star — he calls it Dong-jin—has full tanks and had been preflighted. It’s ready.”
Maxwell looked around for Bass. The Air Force pilot was standing beneath the cockpit, staring at the black mass of the fighter. His mouth was agape. “Holy shit,” he said. “That thing doesn’t look like any airplane I ever flew.”
“It’s not supposed to,” said Maxwell.
“How does it fly without any tail surfaces?”
“Same way the B-2 does it. Computerized flight control system, no aerodynamic stability of its own.”
“Like a big airborne video game.”
“Yeah. Just made for a guy like you.”
Chiu walked up to them. “What are you standing around for? You should be getting ready to fly.”
“I need Mai-ling to help with the cockpit setup,” said Maxwell. “She knows the switch logic and the display functions. And we need the crew chief to cooperate. He can work the access ladder and open the hangar bay door when we’re ready to launch.”
“He will cooperate,” said Chiu, hefting the MP-5N. “So will the woman.” He peered around the big hangar. A deep frown passed over his face. “Where is she?”
They counted heads. There were five of them — Maxwell, Bass, Chiu, and the two remaining commandos. They scanned the cavernous space of the shelter.
Mai-ling was missing.
An ominous silence fell over the group.
“I knew she was a traitor,” snapped Chiu. He whirled and headed for the side door, slipping his pistol from its holster. “I will deal with her.”
Let him be there, she silently implored. Let Zhang be there. For Shaomin’s sake.
Mai-ling slipped across the tarmac behind the shelter as quickly as she could without making undue noise. The towering petroleum fire was casting an orange glow over the entire expanse of concrete. She knew she made an easy target for an alert sentry. Caution was no longer an option.
The crew briefing room, if she remembered correctly, was in the row of spaces in back of Hangar Number Four, the next shelter across the tarmac. She hadn’t told Chiu about the briefing room. He would want to go there first. And ruin her plan.