“Is Zhang dead?” she asked.
“I didn’t see any chutes.”
A moment of silence. “I’m glad.”
Maxwell didn’t need to ask why she was glad. The coldness in her voice told him.
He had a more urgent concern. The fuel quantity indicator was showing less than 700 kilos. For the Black Star’s two thirsty engines, that translated to twenty minutes flying time.
“What’s our distance to Chingchuankang?”
She studied her navigation display for several seconds. “Over four hundred kilometers.”
“No good. How about Kaohshiung?” Kaohshiung was a base on the southwestern coast of Taiwan.
“Still too far, more than three hundred.”
“Chai-Ei?”
“We won’t make it to any field on Taiwan.”
He watched the descending debris from the destroyed Black Star. Against all odds they had stolen a stealth jet from China. If they hadn’t been engaged in the fight with Zhang, they would have made it.
She seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Where are we going to land, Brick?”
He didn’t answer. Manila was too far. So were Hanoi and Camranh Bay. Landing anywhere in China and handing the Black Star back to its former owners was out of the question.
There were no available landing sites anywhere within their range. Except one.
CHAPTER 24 — BARRICADE
Boyce must have heard wrong. He had to have heard wrong.
He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Excuse me, but I’ll swear I heard you say ‘no way.’”
“You heard right,” said Sticks Stickney, skipper of the Reagan. “No way is that thing coming aboard my ship. Not without a tailhook and a direct order from the Strike Group Commander.”
Boyce’s eyes bulged. He fought back the urge to seize Stickney by the collar and shake him till his beady little eyes crossed. Stickney was a good carrier skipper, but he was also a hardnosed, head-up-his-ass military bureaucrat.
They were standing on the flag bridge. They’d just gotten radio contact with Maxwell in the captured stealth jet. He was nearly out of fuel and he needed a ready deck. He’d be overhead the Reagan in five minutes.
To hell with Stickney. Boyce swung his attention to Admiral Hightree, sitting in his padded leather chair. “Sir, Sticks is missing the point here. We can’t afford to lose this jet. Not to mention my best squadron skipper when he punches out with that rinky-dink Chinese ejection seat.”
Hightree looked uncomfortable. Both Stickney, as the carrier captain, and Boyce, who commanded the carrier’s air wing, reported to him. The two officers were equal in rank and responsibility. “It’s Sticks’s ship,” said Hightree. “If he thinks it too great a risk to—”
“Risk?” Boyce said. He knew was exceeding the limits of protocol, but — damn it! — these two weren’t getting it. “With all due respect, Admiral, we just took the mother of all risks when we sent Maxwell in there to grab that thing. Now he’s sitting on the biggest intelligence coup of the decade, and Sticks here wants to dump it in the ocean.”
“Knock it off, Red,” said Stickney. “What I want is to not blow up everything on my flight deck with that flying bomb. We’d have to rig the barricade, and there’s no data, no way of knowing what will happen when it engages the net. It could slice right on through. It could explode on my deck. It could swerve up forward and take out airplanes and people.”
Hightree frowned, seeming to agree with Stickney. Boyce had to admit that Stickney had a valid argument. The barricade — a wall of nylon webbing that could be stretched across the landing deck — was intended to snag carrier-based jets that couldn’t trap in the arresting wires with their tailhooks. No one knew what would happen when the Black Star slammed down on the Reagan’s deck. It might stop. Or it might slice through the nylon like a sword through butter.
What the hell, thought Boyce. This was war — or the next thing to it. You had to take chances.
He glanced from one to the other, gnawing on his cigar, trying to hold down his anger. Jack Hightree was a competent flag officer, but he was new to strike group command. He wasn’t a risk-taker. He had earned his two stars by taking a cautious, non-controversial career path.
Stickney, who had his sights on a star of his own, was following Hightree’s example.
“All right, gentlemen,” said Boyce. He made a show of glancing at his watch. “Five minutes. That’s what we’ve got. Then Maxwell and his systems officer punch out. After that, we can start writing the reports.”
“What reports?” said Stickney, narrowing his eyes.
“About why we let the weapon that was winning the war for China wind up on the bottom of the ocean. About why we were so concerned with saving our asses that we sacrificed the lives of the two heroes in that jet. Right or wrong, we’re going to be judged by what we decide in the next five minutes.”
Stickney wasn’t buying it. “Don’t pull that crap on me, Red. I’m willing to answer for my decisions. You know Admiral Hightree is too.”
Boyce knew he’d touched a nerve. He pressed harder. “Look, gentlemen, the Black Star is the most critical piece of technology to come out of China. We need to know how they got it, what they’re doing with it, how they’ve improved on it. That’s priceless intelligence that we’ll lose if we give up on that jet.”
Hightree was giving him a dubious look, like a gambler eyeing a card shark. “That’s easy for you to say, Red. It’s not your ship.”
“It’s my pilot, and I’m the guy who sent him on this mission. If he gets out of this alive, I want to look him the eye and tell him I did everything I could to back him up.”
Hightree kept his eyes riveted on Boyce for several more seconds. Abruptly, he rose and walked to the bulkhead. He stood there for half a minute, peering through the thick glass. Down below, tugs were hauling jets across the sprawling flight deck. In the distance, spread out in formation, were the ships of Hightree’s strike group.
He turned back to the two officers. His face had taken a hard, determined set. “How long to rig the barricade?”
Stickney looked surprised. “How long? Uh, the last drill, the deck crew put it up in less than ten minutes.”
“Tell them they’ve got five,” said Hightree. “Let’s move, Sticks. We’re gonna recover that thing.”
“Now what are you doing?” she asked from the back seat.
“Seeing how slow we can fly.” Maxwell shoved the throttles up and lowered the nose, recovering from the Black Star’s low speed buffet. “Okay, that’s minimum. No slower.”
The digital airspeed readout indicated 324 kilometers per hour—175 knots. That was as slow as he could fly the Black Star without stalling. Over forty knots faster than a Super Hornet’s carrier landing speed.
Too damned fast to be coming aboard ship.
So what? What’s your alternative?
Only one, and he didn’t want to think about it. Ejecting from the Black Star was a lousy option.
“We’re almost out of fuel, Brick. Four hundred kilos remaining.”
“I know.” He had already done the math. Four hundred kilos equaled 880 pounds. Ten minutes flying time. Maybe more, maybe less. He had no faith in Chinese quantity-measurement technology.
They were twenty miles astern of the Reagan, descending through three thousand feet.