“What’s that?” he asked.
“Surveillance search radar,” Roger answered. But his voice was suspiciously calm.
“From what?”
When he didn’t answer, Charlie stole another glance inside the cockpit and turned to look at the green glow on his copilot’s face.
“Roger,” he said. “From what?”
“An HQ-9,” he replied, but quickly added, “But we’re only picking up a side lobe. It appears to be targeting one of the Super Hornets.”
Charlie returned his focus to the pitch black through the forward windscreen, blocking out the little voice in the back of his mind that told him they were easy pickings. It didn’t matter that he’d felt that way his entire career as a special operations helicopter pilot or that the Mi-17 was equipped with state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures designed to defeat even the most robust air defense systems. He was still piloting a leaking four-decade-old helicopter at wave-top height with nothing but hundreds of miles of ocean in any direction.
“Should we start jamming?”
“Not yet,” Roger replied. “If we do it before they know where we are, we could guide them right to us.”
Reluctantly, he nodded. He felt naked without a protective curtain of electronic jamming between them and the searching radar, but Roger was right. Turning the jammer on too early was almost as bad as not having it at all. “How far out is Pedro?”
Two Marine MV-22 Ospreys had launched from the America with a company of Marines and were racing northeast from the amphibious assault ship to take them the rest of the way. Charlie thought the TRAP team was overkill on the uninhabited atoll, but it never hurt to have the most guns in a fight.
“Oh, shit.”
Charlie’s blood ran cold when he heard the tone in Roger’s voice. “What?”
“There are a ton of surface ships out here, and the Reagan’s Hawkeye is picking up another airborne target between us and Scarborough Shoal.”
He shook his head. “What? How? There’s nobody else out here.”
“Apparently there is,” Roger said, before keying the microphone to transmit back to the TOC. “Scar Nine Nine, Dusty One, are you seeing the latest radar picture?”
There was a longer than normal delay in the response. “Affirm. It appears to be a helicopter, but there’s some debate whether it belongs to the PLA Navy or not.”
Charlie already knew. In this part of the world, even the fishing trawlers weren’t out here to fish, and he wasn’t willing to take that chance when they were already in danger of not making it. “Dave!” he shouted. “Get up here!”
For as loud as it was inside the helicopter, he was almost surprised to see the bearded frogman’s head appear over his shoulder a moment later. “What’s going on?” Dave asked.
“We’re going to have company.”
He was focused on the blank canvas of darkness ahead of them and couldn’t see the look on the SEAL’s face, but he knew Dave had to have been just as surprised. “What kind of company?”
“A helicopter.”
“Hostile?”
“Unknown. But we’re going to lower the ramp, and I’ll need you and your guys to man the guns.”
“The guns,” Dave repeated, as if emphasizing that he understood their expected company was the type that might require such a response. “How long do we have?”
Charlie saw Roger manipulating the Toughbook from the corner of his eye and knew the other air branch pilot was measuring the distance between them and calculating their closure. It was a far cry from what the Super Hornets were likely experiencing with the Flankers from Lingshui, but at less than one hundred feet over the water, a closure rate of over one hundred knots seemed insane.
“He’s at twenty miles,” Roger said.
Charlie finished the thought for him. “Not long, mano.”
Dave grunted something indecipherable and disappeared back inside the Hip’s cramped cabin.
Dave turned and looked at the SEALs huddled together on the bench seats along the side of the fuselage. They seemed calm and relaxed, at home in their environment, and stared back at him with flat but determined eyes. He motioned for two to join him, and they quickly popped to their feet and scampered to where he stood just behind the cockpit.
“I need you two to man the door guns,” he said. “I’ll be on the ramp gun.”
On cue, a hydraulic motor whirred to life, and the steel bulkhead at the rear of the helicopter slowly angled down from the ceiling and exposed a tapestry of pitch black behind them. All three SEALs turned to look over the heads of the other passengers.
“What’s going on?” one of the SEALs shouted.
“A helicopter,” Dave replied. “Not sure if it’s hostile, but we have to assume it is.”
“How long?”
Dave echoed Charlie’s assessment. “Not long.”
The SEALs turned for their respective doors and slid them open. With the two side doors and the ramp open, wind whipped through the cabin and jostled those still huddled protectively over the Agency officer. But they ignored the distraction and immediately went to work clipping into their safety tethers and swinging the miniguns out over the water to make them ready.
Dave looked down at Ron caring for his patient, then strode aft to clip into the safety line on the ramp. He removed the pin securing his minigun to its mount, then pivoted it left and right and prepared for a target to appear behind them. He hated that they wouldn’t have advance notice of the enemy helicopter’s approach, but he figured it would become apparent soon enough.
Charlie’s muscles in his upper back tensed up as he continued flying the Hip on toward Scarborough Shoal. The red light on the radar warning receiver flickered occasionally to indicate they were still only detecting the side lobe of the HQ-9’s surveillance radar, but that was no longer the immediate threat. Even the J-15 Flankers from Lingshui had taken a back seat to the rapidly closing helicopter.
Low on fuel, enemy fighters chasing us, a surface-to-air missile targeting us, and now an enemy helicopter? Charlie shook his head. He should have taken the Life Flight job in North Carolina instead of going to the dark side. Closest alligator to the canoe, Charlie.
“Five miles,” Roger said.
“What the hell is it?”
Roger keyed the microphone again to call on their support network operating from the safety of Clark Air Base. “Scar Nine Nine, do you have any tipper on this helo yet?”
The pause was shorter this time. “We’re not certain, but we think it’s likely a Z-10.”
“A what?” Charlie asked.
“It’s an attack helicopter,” Roger said.
“Armed with what?”
“It was designed for the ground forces as an anti-tank helicopter. Think of it like the Chinese version of the Apache. We can count on it having a chain gun, but it’s also capable of carrying air-to-air missiles.”
Super, Charlie thought.
Suddenly, the darkness just left of their nose tore open with the bright staccato of gunfire aimed in their general direction, and brilliant balls of fire streaked past them on their left side. Charlie flinched, but he gripped the controls firmly to avoid driving them into the water — the instinct to duck under the gunfire was almost overpowering.
“Get ready!” he yelled over his shoulder, though he knew the SEALs wouldn’t be able to hear his warning over the wind noise in the cabin. He just hoped they had seen the incoming tracer fire and knew what was coming.
The gunfire stopped, and Charlie angled his nose toward the incoming helicopter in hopes of taking it close aboard to prevent it from articulating its nose-mounted chain gun after the merge. The one advantage they had over the Z-10 were the three Navy SEALs manning the miniguns.