They’d run along the coast for more than an hour, maybe a half-mile from land, Cao handling the tiller. Wells didn’t have much to do. They’d heard helicopters overhead and seen the lights of a boat in the distance, but so far no one had been within hailing distance. They were running the engine full-out, and despite its peeling paint and rusty engine, the boat seemed seaworthy. It wasn’t leaking, anyway, which was the only way Wells could judge. His naval experience was limited to the occasional bath with Exley.
To the south, the coast grew rockier. During the day, the development was probably obvious. But tonight, under the weak light of a quarter-moon, the land looked surprisingly unspoiled. Wells supposed that even China had a few places that hadn’t been overrun.
The lights of the coast grew sparser and sparser, then faded entirely.
“Tianjintou,” Cao said. He pointed south. In the distance, the land ended in a rocky spit, waves kicking up narrow white flumes around it.
“Tianjintou?”
“Means ‘end of the world.’ Farthest east place in Shandong. Only water now.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to swim.”
A HALF-HOUR LATER, Wells’s line looked more like a prophecy than a joke. Two helicopters shined their spotlights along the coast behind them. And in the distance to the west, Wells saw the lights of three boats. At least one was a destroyer or a frigate, something big. The boats were heading east, into the open water. Chasing Wells and Cao, even if they didn’t know it yet.
Then, to the south. Two boats. Small and fast. Wells couldn’t hear them, not yet, but he could see their spotlights. He tapped Cao’s shoulder, pointed. Cao just shrugged.
They weren’t going to make it, Wells thought. With the cloud cover helping them, they would last until sunrise. But once the sun came up, they wouldn’t be able to hide. They’d be caught far before Incheon.
Wells focused on the rolling dark water ahead of them, stale and brackish. In college, he had been a decent swimmer. Not his favorite sport, but he’d liked it in the winter, as a way to rebuild his muscles after the pounding of football. But even if he hadn’t had a chestful of broken ribs, swimming two hundred miles to Korea would have been a hopeless fantasy. Like the rest of this mission, Wells thought. But he didn’t regret taking the chance. He knew the secret now, the reason for this war. If only he and Cao could survive, they could stop it.
Anyway, he’d been playing with house money ever since Exley had saved him in New York. He didn’t want to die, not like this, but some part of him had accepted the fact that he would. If not today, soon enough. He would push his luck until it snapped. He could excuse himself for risking this mission, because it meant so much. But what was his excuse for screaming down 1-95 at 125 miles an hour? How could he ask Exley to trust him?
He remembered an old joke from an intro philosophy class in college:
AT 22,000 FEET THE NIGHT AIR was smooth, though the clouds were thickening quickly beneath the C-130. Bosarelli eased back on the engines, slowing the plane to 180 knots. Osan had asked him to slow down, give the flotilla on the water beneath him a chance to get a few miles farther west.
“Ninety-five hundred rpm,” Keough said. “One hundred eighty knots, heading two-seven-zero.” Straight west.
“Taking us down to sixteen thousand.” Bosarelli extended the wing flaps to begin the descent. As he did, an alarm briefly sounded and the flat-panel display before Bosarelli flashed red before returning to its normal black background. The Chinese J-10s were now within a hundred nautical miles — less than eight minutes on afterburner.
For now Bosarelli wasn’t too worried about them. He was over international waters and flying slow and straight — hardly signs of hostile intent. He looked down through the cockpit’s glazed windows, and through the clouds he saw the lights of a ship beneath him, heading west. A friendly, he hoped. “Everything set back there?”
“Sure hope so,” Keough said.
Bosarelli leveled them out when they got to 16,000 feet, and for another fifteen minutes the plane cruised steadily. Bosarelli and Keough hardly spoke. After thousands of hours in these C-130s, Bosarelli could fly them, almost literally, in his sleep. And there wasn’t much to say anyway. Beneath them the clouds became an unbroken white mass, glowing under the moon and the stars like a little girl’s dream. Under other circumstances, Bosarelli would have considered the clouds beautiful. Tonight he would rather have seen the water. A crosswind kicked up, lightly rocking the plane.
“One hundred NM west of Incheon,” Keough said. “Two minutes to centerline.” Incheon was about 210 nautical miles west of the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. In two minutes, the plane would be closer to China than Korea, a fact that would set off alarms for the Chinese jets.
“Two minutes to centerline, twelve minutes to Z point.” Bosarelli throttled back again, to 150 knots, not much above the plane’s stall speed.
Their last F-16 escorts peeled off, one turning north, the other south, looping back toward Osan. Now Bosarelli and Keough had no cover at all, though for the moment the sky ahead was clear. For some reason — maybe the same reason that they were on this mission — the Chinese J-10s had swung back west, toward the Shandong coastline, and dropped to about 4,000 feet.
But Bosarelli knew the Chinese fighters could easily reverse course again and tag the C-130, which wouldn’t have a chance, especially with this payload. Here pilots liked to joke that the plane’s antimissile system consisted mainly of an alarm to let them know that their ride was about to explode.
Bosarelli hadn’t been this scared since his first roller-coaster ride, at the Six Flags in Arlington, Texas. He was seven. His older brother had spent a whole week telling him how great it was. Bosarelli had pleaded to go until his dad finally took him. But when the coaster had clanked slowly up over the flat Texas plains, getting ready for that first drop, Bosarelli had wanted to puke his guts out. He hadn‘t, though. And once they’d finally gotten over the hill, he’d had a blast — though that probably wasn’t the best choice of words right now.
“FIVE MINUTES,” KEOUGH SAID.
“Five minutes.” Again Bosarelli extended the flaps. “Taking us to twelve thousand.”
At 12,000 feet, Bosarelli again leveled out. “Chutes and helmets on.”
Bosarelli reached for his parachute and pulled it onto his shoulders. Keough did the same. They’d packed their chutes themselves at Osan, watched over by a Special Forces major who had completed 250 jumps. Now Bosarelli had to stand over the control panel, since he couldn’t fit in his seat anymore. The designers of the C-130 hadn’t expected that the plane’s pilots would be wearing parachutes.
“Check your transponder.” They were both carrying emergency beacons, black plastic boxes attached to their waists.
“Check.”
“One twenty-five NM from Incheon,” Bosarelli said. “Twenty NM west of the centerline.”
“Two minutes,” Keough said. His screen flashed red and an alarm beeped loud and fast in his headset. Just in the last fifteen minutes the Chinese had a half-dozen more fighters in the air. Two of them had now decided to check out the C-130.
Now another alarm went off, higher-pitched and more urgent than the first. One of the Chinese fighters had painted the Here with its targeting radar, a wordless warning that if it broke into Chinese airspace it could expect to be hit with an air-to-air missile.
“One minute to Z point,” Keough said.
“One minute.” Bosarelli flicked the Here’s transponder to 7700, the signal for an aircraft emergency.
“Ready, Jim?”
“Ready.”
The radar warning alarm sounded again, for a full fifteen seconds this time. “I’ll get it,” Bosarelli said. He flipped the Here’s radio to the Military Air Distress band, 243.0 MHz. The warning, in heavily accented English, was what he expected: “You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back or face immediate action.” Pause. “You are
