“Diamond one hundred, Tiger, status?”
Colt shook his head to clear away the memories. “Tiger, I’m declaring an emergency,” he said, keeping his tone calm and measured. “We hit something and took damage to our left motor. I’ve shut it down.”
“Copy,” the Hawkeye controller replied.
As Colt continued climbing away from the water, he noticed long lines of contrails made by commercial jets arcing across the sky from the east, destined for China’s most populous cities, like Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou. Shaking away the thought that the airlines’ passengers were oblivious to the dangers lurking beneath them, he glanced back over his shoulder at the blue-and-white fishing trawler and noted that it looked almost identical to the others they had rigged during their SSC mission. Maybe it was coincidence, but it sure looked like there was truth to the claims that China was flooding disputed waters with a fleet of fishing vessels.
“What did you hit?” the controller asked.
Colt didn’t answer right away. “Doc, what did you see?”
“Not much. Just a speck, really.”
“Was it a bird?”
“I don’t think so,” the flight surgeon replied.
Colt keyed the microphone switch on his right throttle. “Tiger, we think it was a small commercial drone.”
“Copy,” the controller replied again.
“Why do you think there was a drone flying way out here?” Doc asked.
But Colt didn’t have a definitive answer for her. On the one hand, it was entirely possible that fishermen were now using drones to help guide them onto a school. But, on the other, if the fishing trawlers were employed in a military or intelligence-gathering capacity, the drones could be used in a more nefarious manner.
Like the ones around the Mobile Bay?
“I don’t know,” Colt replied. “I’ll let intel figure that one out. How about we focus on getting ourselves back to the ship in one piece?”
“You don’t think they’ll divert us?” Doc asked with a slight tremor in her voice.
Honestly, Colt thought it was fifty-fifty and depended on who was in the tower and had the Air Boss’s ear. Ultimately, it would be the captain’s decision to either recover them aboard the carrier or send them to the divert at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.
But before he could answer, the Hawkeye controller spoke again. “Diamond one hundred, push button twenty for your rep.”
“One hundred,” Colt replied, then reached up to select the right channel on his secondary radio.
“Colt, it’s Rucas. You up?”
“Yeah, go ahead,” he replied.
“What’s going on?”
Colt ran him through what had happened, including each of the cautions that had appeared on his display.
“Has the compressor stall cleared?” Rucas asked.
“Affirm,” Colt replied. After shutting down the left engine, the RPMs had dropped and the banging and accompanying vibration stopped.
“Copy that. Do you feel comfortable bringing her back single engine?”
“No problem,” he said, adding a touch of bravado for Doc’s sake.
“Okay, I’ll let the Air Boss know. He wants to bring you back, but he’s talking it over with CAG and the captain now.”
Colt understood that the decision was out of his hands. If either the commander of the air wing or the carrier’s commanding officer felt it was safer to divert him, they wouldn’t hesitate to send him to Kadena. It was almost a certainty that if he had been a first-tour nugget, that decision would have already been made.
But Colt was a senior lieutenant with several hundred traps under his belt. Aside from the deployments he had made during his first sea tour, he had volunteered to support air wing training while instructing at TOPGUN — the US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School — and had flown from aircraft carriers in both the legacy and Super Hornet as well as the new Joint Strike Fighter.
“Standing by,” Colt said.
“Diamond one hundred, Tiger. Switch strike.”
“Diamond.” Colt switched from the Hawkeye’s control frequency to check in with the ship. “Strike, one zero zero, Mother’s two eight zero for fifty-five, angels twelve, state nine point oh. Emergency aircraft, single engine.”
On board the carrier, a sailor took note of his side number and annotated his fuel state as nine thousand pounds while another sailor interrogated his transponder code. Only after ensuring he was squawking a friendly Mode IV code and that his side number matched the transponder’s Mode II would they permit him to enter the fifty-nautical-mile Carrier Control Area.
“One zero zero, sweet, sweet. Mother is VFR, case one. Contact Marshal.”
“One zero zero,” Colt replied, then switched to the Marshal frequency.
He reached up with his right fist and slapped down on the handle near his right knee to extend his tailhook as he repeated his check-in with the Marshal controller.
The controller’s reply sounded rote. “One zero zero, case one. BRC is zero one five, expect to Charlie on arrival. Report see me.”
He reached down to the Course Select switch and held it to the right, watching a needle swing through the symbol for the ship’s TACAN — or tactical air navigation station — on the display between his legs and steady up on the ship’s heading, or Base Recovery Course, pointed north-northeast. Then, he pointed directly at the ship and scanned the ocean’s choppy surface for the speck of gray they expected him to land his seventy-million-dollar fighter jet on.
He leveled off at two thousand feet and angled his jet to the right to enter the holding stack above the carrier on the downwind leg. Crossing inside ten miles, he spotted the aircraft carrier and reported it to Marshal. “One zero zero, see you at ten.”
“One zero zero, switch Tower.”
Colt switched to the tower frequency.
The voice of the USS Ronald Reagan’s Air Boss boomed over the radio. “One zero zero, Tower.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“Charlie.”
2
Lisa’s ears popped as she chewed a stick of spearmint gum.
She sat buckled into the R4 jump seat on the starboard side of the aft galley as she tugged at the hem of her dress and inched it toward her knees. The last time she had worn the uniform, they were referred to as stewardesses, but she doubted the dresses had gotten shorter over the years. Or even that she had become more modest. More than likely, it was just the sheathed ceramic blade strapped to her inner thigh that made her self-conscious.
She glanced over her shoulder at the other flight attendant. The perky twenty-something-year-old brunette had her phone pressed to the door’s tiny window and snapped pictures of Shanghai, oblivious that she was sharing her galley with a spook.
Instagram or TikTok? Lisa wondered, then turned back to her own window to look down on the largest city in the People’s Republic of China. As usual, smog blanketed the city, but even through the haze at five thousand feet, she could tell Shanghai had changed over the last quarter century since she’d first visited. China had been a sleeping dragon then.
And now, the dragon was stirring.
The Airbus A330-900neo continued its descent into Shanghai Pudong International Airport, located on the coast, nineteen miles east of the city’s center. She leaned back from the window and mentally ran through her emergency procedures, doing her best to fulfill her flight attendant duties, even if it was only just a cover.
She continued chewing her gum, and her ears popped one last time as the Airbus’s main landing gear touched down on the asphalt runway. She felt the auto brakes engage and the thrust reversers spool, pressing her back into her seat. Within seconds, the jet slowed and exited on the high-speed turnoff to taxi between the parallel runways on the east side of the airport.