The Ghost War

approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back…”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Bosarelli murmured. He flipped off the radio.

“Thirty seconds to Z.”

“Thirty seconds. Flaps fifty.” Again, Bosarelli extended the plane wing’s flaps. “Now, Jim. Go.”

Keough stepped out of the cockpit. Bosarelli heard a loud whooshas he popped open the crew entry door a few feet behind the cockpit. The plane began to shake. Again the radar alarm rang in his headset.

Now. Bosarelli pushed the power levers past flight idle to turn off the engines. Then he reached over to Keough’s station and flipped off the fuel pumps.

Just like that, the C-130 turned into a sixty-five-ton glider. Alarms began screaming, both in his headset and in the cabin, as the engines lost power. The propellers still had some leftover momentum, so the plane didn’t dive immediately, but Bosarelli knew he didn’t have long. Time to get out. He stepped out of the cockpit. Keough was standing in the open door of the plane, waiting. When he saw Bosarelli, he nodded and stepped out of the plane, hands at his sides. In an instant, he was gone.

Bosarelli flipped on his goggles and stepped to the open hatch. Instead of the normal noise of the turboprops, he heard only the klaxons in the cockpit and the rush of the wind. He looked into the night sky, and for a moment his nerve failed him. He thought of running back to the cockpit and trying to restart the engines. But he knew better. Down was the only way out.

And before he could change his mind again, he pushed himself forward and stepped into the cool night air.

* * *

WITH ARMS AND LEGS EXTENDED, the human body falls at a maximum speed of about 125 miles an hour — a thousand feet every five seconds. Bosarelli was holding his arms tight to his chest and extending his legs straight down, hoping to top out closer to two hundred. He wanted to separate from the Herc quickly to lessen the chances he’d be caught in the plane’s blast wave.

Then a wind gust ripped Bosarelli sideways, twisting his back and throwing his shoulders outward. He raised his arms for balance and instead began to spin, bouncing through the air like a pebble caught in a wave. Suddenly he was in no position to pull his chute. He breathed deeply and tried to remember his training as the seconds ticked by. And then he reached the cloud layer and the air around him turned white and suffocating.

Relax. He extended his arms and legs as far as he could and arched his back to create maximum drag. He emerged from the clouds. He was no longer spinning, but the sea was close beneath him, a couple of thousand feet at most, the water dark and featureless. He could already see two boats chugging west. They’d find him. If he could just get to his chute. Bosarelli reached across his body and grabbed the cord, praying it would open smoothly. He wasn’t sure he had time to get to the reserve.

Then—

His body jerked upward as the chute snatched him from gravity’s grasp. He looked up to see an open canopy, spreading above him like an angel’s wings.

A MILE AHEAD, THE EMPTY C-130 plunged toward the Yellow Sea, its nose tipped nearly straight down, klaxons sounding uselessly in its cockpit. Four thousand feet. The bombs and barrels of gasoline strained against the netting, securing them to the floor of the cargo bay, but the thick nylon held.

Three thousand feet. The C-130 was approaching the speed of sound, six hundred miles an hour, a thousand feet a second. As the plane accelerated, the massive g-forces generated by the dive began to shear the left wing from the hull—

Two thousand feet—

The ghost plane began to break apart, but by then its structural failure no longer mattered. The Herc had done its job.

One thousand feet—

Five hundred—

The altitude fuses on the GBU-29s blew, setting off 3,000 pounds of high explosive. In a fraction of a second, the cargo compartment turned into an inferno, and the jellied gasoline in the oil barrels blew up.

BOSARELLI SAW THE EXPLOSION BEFORE he felt it. The night came alive with a second sun, a yellow-gold cloud that exploded up and out, forming a classic mushroom cloud, like a miniature nuclear bomb. So bright, so beautiful. A couple of seconds later the blast wave hit him, hotter than he’d expected, rich with gasoline and benzene vapor, but by then he was close enough to the water that he knew he’d survive.

He only hoped the bomb had done its job.

38

WELLS THOUGHT HE WAS DREAMING WHEN THE SKY turned white. Then he heard Cao shouting and knew he wasn’t. He started counting, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, waiting for the sound of the explosion to reach them, trying to calculate how far off they were. On his twelfth “Mississippi,” the blast filled his ears. Maybe fifteen seconds — three miles, give or take.

In the last hour the Chinese had put more and more helicopters in the air, and he’d had a bad moment a few minutes before when a helicopter swung by them, its searchlight missing them by no more than a few hundred yards. Now this explosion, which couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Had a Chinese jet or copter exploded? No, this fire was far too large. It looked to be slightly southeast of them, burning in the night like a beacon.

Like a beacon.

Cao was steering the boat north, away from the blast. Wells tapped his shoulder. He pointed to the white fireball, already losing its shape, melding into the clouds, but still burning brightly. “Go toward it.”

“Toward?”

“It’s for us.”

UNFORTUNATELY, THE CHINESE SEEMED TO have come to the same conclusion. Helicopters were buzzing toward the crash site, their spotlights shining over the waves. Jets too. Wells couldn’t see them, but he could hear the whine of their engines. As they made their way west, the sky lightened, the giant fire producing a muddy yellow glare. No way could a helicopter cause such a big explosion. Maybe a 747 had been shot down by accident. Or maybe it wasn’t a plane at all. Maybe it was some kind of oil tanker.

The good news was that the Chinese didn’t seem to have any boats in front of them. And the heat of the blast would make it hard for the helos to get too close.

Not that Wells wanted to get too close either. As they moved toward the site of the explosion, the air grew heavy with the stench of burning gasoline and something else too, some kind of plastic, though Wells couldn’t figure out exactly what. Farther on, the air was alive with burning embers that looked like sparks from a backyard barbecue. The strange part was that they kept burning when they landed on the water. As Wells shielded his eyes and looked toward the fireball, he saw patches where the sea itself seemed to have caught fire.

“Napalm,” he said aloud.

Cao swung the boat hard left, north. Wells braced himself against the side of the hull and gritted his teeth as his ribs reminded him they were still broken.

Then a huge secondary explosion, maybe a fuel tank, lit the night. The boat rocked in the blast wave and Wells covered his mouth against the fumes. In the sudden glow Wells knew they were obscenely visible. Even as the firelight faded, a jet swooped toward them, hard and low, its running lights blinking red, the wash from its engines kicking up waves and rattling the boat.

“Close,” Cao said.

The fighter screamed off.

Three minutes later it came back for another pass. This time red flares popped off the wings, not directly