“Steer 170 degrees, maintain speed. Remain on battle stations until—”
“Radar contact! Incoming, low altitude, low speed.”
Low speed? What could it be? “Do you have an electronic ID?”
“I’m checking with the Hawkeye. It must be a—” The technician’s voice cracked. “Another contact! Two-five-zero, range a thousand meters. The track looks nearly vertical.”
Lei snapped his attention to the situational display. What the hell was going on? A slow-moving contact, low on the water. A helicopter? And then something else — inbound and nearly vertical.
Vertical? It could only be one thing. But that didn’t make sense.
Three seconds later, he heard the technician’s voice again. “Incoming weapon,” said the technician. “A missile or a bomb.”
“From where? That’s impossible. Is there an aircraft up there?”
The technician shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing.”
Lei tried to make sense of the situation. What kind of bomb? Radar guided? No, they’d have picked up the emissions from the guidance unit. It had to be infra-red or GPS.
“Hard to starboard!” he commanded. “Flank speed. Ready the Phalanx batteries.”
He knew it was futile, trying to evade a precision guided bomb, trying at the same time to get a snap lock on a vertical target with the CIWS — Close In Weapons System. But he had to try.
How could a bomb suddenly appear from an empty sky? It had to have been released by an aircraft. Why hadn’t they gotten an alert from the multitude of air defense radars scanning the area?
By now, each head on the bridge was tilted up, peering toward the southwest. From both Phalanx turrets came the deep moan of the Gatling guns putting up a hail of penetrator shells.
Lei knew it was a gesture of defiance. A feeling of inevitability had settled over him. They had been luckier than they had any right to expect. Now their luck had run out.
He gripped the handrail and waited for the bomb to hit his ship.
CHAPTER 22 — ONE-VEE-ONE
Okay, Maxwell, you’re a test pilot. Make this thing fly.
He took a deep breath, then advanced the throttles. The dull hum of the two turbofans deepened to a throaty rumble. A quick check of the gauges — the indications meant nothing, but at least he could see that the two engines were making the same numbers — and he released the brakes.
The sudden acceleration surprised him. The nose bobbed up once on its long slender strut, and he felt himself shoved back in the seat.
The Black Star surged down the runway.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. The runway felt as rough as a logging road. As the Black Star sped down the strip of concrete, the nose wheel clunked over the grooves in the uneven surface. The jet was accelerating faster than Maxwell expected.
“A hundred kilometers per hour,” Mai-ling called out, giving him the airspeed.
He had to make quick conversions from metric. A hundred kilometers per hour equated to fifty-four knots — nautical miles per hour. If this jet flew like the Black Star at Dreamland, he should keep the nose wheel on the concrete until he had 140 knots. That was — how much? Almost 260 kilometers per hour.
Unless he ran out of runway. Then he was in no man’s land. He’d do what he had to do.
“A hundred fifty.”
Eighty-one knots. They had gobbled up half the available runway. Come on, baby, accelerate.
“Two hundred.”
A hundred-eight knots. The thunking of the nose wheel on the rough concrete had become a steady rumble. The vibration from the rough runway resonated through the airframe, into Maxwell’s cockpit, making it difficult to read the instruments.
In the greenish twilight, he could see the end of the runway rushing toward them.
“Two-twenty.” Mai-ling’s voice was rising in pitch.
A hundred-eighteen knots. Not enough.
“Two-forty.” Her voice cracked.
The end of the runway was disappearing beneath the Black Star’s nose. The moment of truth. He nudged the stick back. The Black Star would either fly or it would become a smoking hulk at the end of runway one-six.
The nose of the jet lifted. The main gear stayed rooted to the concrete.
Come on, fly! He pulled the stick back further.
Still on the ground.
The end of the runway was under him, gone from sight. The digital read out, blurred from the intense vibration, read 238 knots. He felt a violent clunking as the main gear rolled into the rough overrun.
Maxwell hauled the stick back in his lap. The jet’s nose rotated to a steep upward angle.
Come on, damn it…
Zhang could see it clearly, a dark shape against the slate gray sea.
The IR tracker had already locked onto its surface target. Hot stacks over hot boilers against the cool ocean background. No challenge at all.
The laser designator would illuminate the centroid of the heat source for the final fifteen seconds of the bomb’s fall time. Only then would the frigate have any hint that it was targeted. Their radar might pick up the descending laser guided bomb, but it wouldn’t matter. They would receive no return from the Dong-jin, not even in the second-and-a-half that the bomb bay doors were open and the five-hundred-kilogram laser-guided bomb kicked out.
Colonel Zhang was eager to destroy the Taiwanese frigate. It was a devil ship, according to the preflight intelligence briefing. If the report was to be believed, this vessel had inflicted unbelievable losses on the PLA navy — at least two submarines, an amphibious landing craft, and three destroyers, and was trying to sink one of the PLA navy’s prized Sovremenny class destroyers. All in three days. The Dong-jin would balance the score. Already it had changed air warfare, and now it would revolutionize sea warfare. With this weapon, he would shift the balance of power in Asia. He would be recognized as a great national hero. Zhang Yu’s place in the history was assured.
But he was running out of time. An urgent matter required his attention. His squadron of super-secret stealth jets had been detected and attacked by an enemy commando unit even as he took off. Because of the base commander’s stupidity the commandos had apparently destroyed one Dong-jin. Much worse, they had captured the remaining Dong-jin. Stolen it from under their noses. He wondered what other havoc the rebel commandos had wreaked at Chouzhou. He had warned them about this very possibility.
Idiots! “Twenty-five seconds to impact.”
On the cockpit IR screen Zhang could see the frigate in a hard right turn. They had detected the incoming bomb. It would make no difference.
“Ten seconds, laser on.”
A bright flash blanked Zhang’s screen. When the picture returned, he saw that the entire aft end of the ship was engulfed in fire and black smoke.
“A good hit.” He shoved the throttles up and hauled the nose of the jet up in a climbing turn to the left. “Now we hunt for the thieves.”
The clunking from the main gear abruptly ceased. Maxwell sensed a blur of earth and trees and buildings beneath them. Finding air beneath its wings, the Black Star lifted into the morning sky.
He raised the landing gear. The airspeed indicator was slowly ticking upward. Two-fifty. Three hundred. The altitude read out — also metric — had left zero and was slowly increasing. Carefully he raised the flaps.