She could be anywhere.
She reached the structure at the top and darted for it, spinning to place her back against the smooth concrete wall as she scanned north in the direction she had come. Satisfied that she hadn’t yet been spotted, she inched her way to the corner and paused, sticking her head out briefly to take a mental snapshot before quickly pulling it back behind cover. The assessment took less than a second, and she rolled out into the open with her pistol up in front of her.
On the opposite side of the building, she saw an array of solar panels angled up at the sky south of the island, and she sighted in on each one, scanning their shadows for a hidden threat. But the area in every direction appeared clear, and the ridge seemed deserted.
Where are you?
Punky stepped away from the building and crept between the solar panels, listening to the sound of darkness being carried up to her by the wind. Over the pounding of her heart, she heard the distant sound of the Navy helicopter’s rotors echoing across the island, but she heard nothing that gave her a clue as to where Rick’s murderer was hiding.
She dropped low to the ground and counted her breaths, alone with her ghosts.
South of Santa Cruz Island, Colt ignored his decreasing fuel quantity and watched his airspeed increase through Mach 1.0 as he gave chase to Jug’s fleeing JSF. He didn’t need to consult his moving map to know the other jet was flying closer to the Abraham Lincoln and that time was running out before it would be in a position to launch its Joint Strike Missiles at the carrier.
“What are you seeing, Jug?” Colt asked while tweaking his radar to maintain a radar lock. So far, his jet’s jammer didn’t seem to be having any effect on the hack, but at least the opening separation between the two aircraft had slowed, then stopped as Colt matched his speed.
“I don’t like this,” he replied with obvious tension dripping from each word.
“I know, buddy, but I’m working on it.” He pulled up the display for the AN/ASQ-239 EW suite to verify he had loaded the program China Lake thought might have a chance at jamming the hack’s waveform. “But you need to tell me if you go into air-to-surface mode, okay?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Colt saw the faint blue flame in the distance disappear as the other jet came out of afterburner, and he resisted the temptation to pull back on his own throttle. Without even looking, he knew he wouldn’t have enough gas to make it back to Point Mugu, but fortunately there were still plenty of suitable divert airfields along the Southern California coast.
Closest alligator to the canoe, Colt, he thought, reminding himself to prioritize and execute. He saw the icon for Devil One passing south of San Nicolas Island and decided it was time to share his fears with his friend. “I think whoever is controlling this is going after—”
“It just switched to air-to-surface mode, and the surface search radar is active,” Jug said in a panicked voice.
Colt cursed at the advanced EW suite for not breaking the hack, knowing it left him with only one choice. “Listen to me, Jug,” he said in an overly calm voice. “I’m going to need you to eject.”
“Eject?”
“I think they’re going after the Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “I can’t let that happen.”
Jug was silent for a minute as he considered the new information. “Colt… I’m going supersonic.”
He glanced at his own airspeed and blanched at the number, knowing exactly what Jug meant. During all their years of training in ejection seat aircraft, they’d heard horror stories about pilots who ejected while going too fast. The first pilot to survive a supersonic ejection was an Air Force test pilot in 1955, but his experience was one no pilot ever wanted for themselves.
His body had been subjected to a rapid deceleration upon ejection, instantaneously increasing his relative bodyweight eight thousand pounds. His internal organs pressed against the tissue holding them in place, the air pressure forced blood from his ears, and his eyes hemorrhaged as they very nearly burst from his skull. The force of the ejection ripped his helmet, gloves, boots, socks, and wristwatch off, and he was only saved by a lucky gust of wind that inflated his tattered parachute. He woke up five days later, badly bruised from head to toe, but alive.
Colt didn’t blame Jug for not wanting to eject.
“I know, buddy. But I’m going to have to shoot you down.”
He couldn’t believe the words that came out of his mouth. His stomach turned at the thought of watching the AIM-120D AMRAAM streak through the night at the F-35C on his nose and blast his friend out of the sky.
“Colt.”
“I don’t want to, Jug—”
“No!” he shouted, interrupting Colt’s plea. “The radar found a surface contact one hundred miles away, and the data is being fed to the Joint Strike Missiles.”
“Shit. The carrier must have moved north in the working area. We don’t have much time, Jug.”
Whether or not his friend decided to eject, he was going to have to fire on him. He took a lock on the MADL track file, hoping that even if the other jet’s defensive jamming prevented the missile’s active seeker from guiding it to the target, the datalink would provide enough guidance to complete the intercept.
Complete the intercept, Colt thought. That’s a cold way of saying, ‘Shoot down your friend.’
“What about your jammer?” Jug implored.
“It’s not doing anything.”
“Give it time…”
“We don’t have time, Jug!”
Colt flipped the master arm switch up to activate his weapons, then placed his finger on the trigger, prepared to fire the AIM-120D at his friend’s jet, wishing the test birds had been loaded with the newer AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile that had increased capabilities against jamming. But at a maximum intercept velocity of Mach 4, the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile would detonate before the hijacked jet could defend itself.
“Colt?”
He said a silent prayer and squeezed the trigger.
49
“He’s shooting at me!” Chen hissed in response to the high-pitched tone warning her of an enemy radar lock. She frantically swiped and slapped at the air in front of her, manipulating the Joint Strike Fighter’s controls through the virtual interface to evade the very real missile.
Beads of sweat trickled down the sides of her face, and her heart raced with fear as if she were actually in the jet fifty miles out over the Pacific Ocean instead of on a small island. She slapped her left hand back, retarding the virtual throttle, while twisting her right hand to the left to break back into the missile. Craning to look over her left shoulder, she thumbed rapidly at the handheld controller, spitting out countermeasures to disrupt the radar lock.
“There you are,” she said, staring at the digitally created symbol overlaid atop the missile plume being tracked by the hacked jet’s Distributed Aperture System’s infrared cameras.
She glanced forward for a brief instant, then back over her shoulder to regain sight of the missile. At the last possible moment, she yanked her right hand back toward her chest and pulled as many Gs as possible, hoping it was enough to cause the missile to overshoot.