Damn. He longed for the HOTAS — Hands On Throttles and Stick — design of American fighters. That was one thing the Chinese hadn’t figured out how to copy. He also wished he had a real systems officer in the back seat.
He took his eyes off the Black Star long enough to find the icon on the armament screen. He touched it, saw it blink obediently and change color. He felt a slight rumble in the airframe as the bay door opened. The Archer missile was exposed, ready to fire.
Finally.
Peering through the HUD, he superimposed the seeker circle over Zhang’s jet and uncaged it. The missile chirped in his headset, signaling target acquisition.
He squeezed the trigger.
Whoom! The missile was a hell of a lot noisier than the American-built Sidewinder, he noted, watching the heat seeker roar ahead of the jet. And a hell of a lot faster.
Zhang sensed the danger and broke right. A trail of decoying flares spewed in his wake. The Archer missile lost its lock on the stealthy jet and exploded harmlessly into the trailing flares.
Zhang continued pulling hard in a right turn, trying to force Maxwell into an overshoot.
Instead of following, Maxwell rolled out, taking his nose off the Black Star, lagging the turning stealth fighter, opening up the angle between them. The changed geometry would quickly put him in position to fire another Archer. Unless Zhang—
Went up.
Yes, damn it, that’s what he was doing. The Black Star’s nose was pitching upward, going vertical. Maxwell had to give the guy credit. It was a desperate move, but a smart one.
Maxwell had no choice except to match the vertical pull. He hauled the nose of his Black Star up, grunting against the G load, countering Zhang’s move. He had both an airspeed and an angular advantage, but he knew Zhang was betting that he would overshoot the top of the vertical cross.
Guns. He needed the cannon for a raking gun shot when they merged at the top.
“Switch to guns on the armament panel,” he ordered on the intercom. He almost said please, but caught himself.
There was no argument this time. A second later, he saw a gunsight appear in his HUD. The cannon was armed, ready to fire. “Thank you,” he said.
The airspeed was diminishing rapidly. The Black Star was definitely not an optimum air-to-air fighter. It turned and climbed like a pig.
Opposite him, on the other side of the vertical circle, Zhang was pulling toward him, trying to cut him off, trading airspeed for angles, going for the first guns shot.
Approaching the apogee of the vertical maneuver, Maxwell pulled, eking the last bit of energy from the nearly-stalled jet. He felt a shudder—there it is—and eased off on the stick pressure. He didn’t know how slow the Black Star could fly before it departed from controlled flight, but he was close.
Through the top of the canopy he saw the diamond profile of Zhang’s jet. He was cranking hard toward him, pulling for his own firing solution. Zhang’s nose was almost in the firing cone, almost pointed at Maxwell’s fighter.
Maxwell saw a pulsing strobe from the Black Star. He felt a stab of fear. The cannon. Tracers streamed upward, arcing wide.
Missing, arcing below him. Zhang didn’t yet have the angle.
Another mistake.
Turn, Maxwell implored his own sluggish fighter. Get inside his turn. He was already pulling maximum Gs, willing the nose of his own Black Star to knife inside Zhang’s turn. Both jets were nearly stalled, about to drop out of the sky like flightless birds.
Almost. Another ten degrees of deflection.
Now.
The image of Zhang’s Black Star appeared in his HUD. It would be a snap shot, nothing more. He squeezed the trigger.
The hammering of the single-barrel cannon rattled the airframe, coming up through his seat, through the stick in his hand.
He kept the trigger depressed. The tracers arced forward, streaming thirty feet in front of the Black Star.
He nudged the right rudder pedal, walking the tracers toward Zhang’s jet.
He felt the Black Star shudder, trying to drop from beneath him. Don’t stall, don’t lose it. If he let the Black Star depart — stall and go out of control — Zhang would pounce like a hunting animal. The fight would be over in seconds.
He nudged the right rudder pedal some more, working his stream of cannon fire toward the center of the diamond-shaped jet. The tracers had a slow, lazy appearance, like the stream of a squirt gun. They found the top of Zhang’s wing. Black puffs of debris — shattered metal, composite material, fuel — streamed behind the jet.
The range was less than five hundred yards and closing. Maxwell could see two helmeted, goggled figures in the cockpit staring back at him as the tracers ate into them. The image lasted less than a second.
Zhang’s Black Star exploded.
Maxwell kicked in left rudder to avoid the fireball.
“You got him!” yelped Mai-ling. “He’s going down—Oh, damn!”
The Black Star pivoted on its left wingtip and cartwheeled out of control. The gray surface of the Taiwan Strait blurred across Maxwell’s windscreen, then the pink and blue morning sky. The jet’s nose rose level while it rotated around the horizon, then plunged again.
A classic departure. The Black Star’s nose yawed to the left, bobbing down, then back up in a flat spin. Maxwell fought the jet, trying to regain stability. He pulled the throttles back and shoved the stick forward.
His test pilot training kicked in. Abrupt departure with adverse stall characteristics. Apply recovery inputs. Unload the wing.
It wasn’t working. The jet continued to spin.
Counter the yaw. Regain stable flight. He shoved in the right rudder pedal, trying to stop the hard left rotation of the nose.
That didn’t work either. The Black Star was still out of control. Pitching up and down like a deranged mule. Highly oscillatory departure characteristics. Another undesirable attribute.
“Stop it, Brick. I don’t like this.”
“I’m working on it.”
He glimpsed the altimeter read-out clicking through two thousand meters. Now what, smart guy? It was crunch time. Recover or eject. He had done all the right things. How the hell did you stop autorotation in a jet without a tail?
An old test pilot’s technique came to mind. When everything else fails, turn loose.
He released his tight grip on the stick, putting it in a neutral position. He removed his feet from the rudder pedals.
The whirling fighter continued to spin. One more violent revolution. Another. Time to go. Maxwell reached for the mike button to order Mai-ling to eject.
Abruptly, the jet stopped spinning. In a forty-five degree nose-down attitude, the fighter’s wings were level. Flying again.
The altimeter readout was winding through a thousand meters — about three thousand feet. The airspeed indication was increasing, going through 250 kilometers per hour.
Gently, so as not to initiate another departure, Maxwell nudged the stick back and advanced the throttles. The Black Star’s nose lifted back to level flight. The altimeter bottomed out at 200 meters. He could see the white streaks on the wave tops.
“What was that all about?” Mai-ling asked. Her voice sounded tiny.
“Nothing. Just a spin.” Just a slight loss of control that nearly dumped us in the ocean.
“I’m going to barf.”
“Not allowed. No barfing on this jet.”
Over his shoulder Maxwell saw the debris field of the destroyed Black Star. Pieces were falling like black confetti toward the sea. The oily gray cloud was already dissipating in the atmosphere.