Choke Point

superstructure as the huge airfield kept plowing into the Taiwan Strait at 32 knots. The planes parked on the flight deck were chained down as tightly as those in the hangar deck, the huge, gray ship trembling in its lower regions from the reverberations of its four nuclear-generated steam engines, which were driving the four massive shafts of the carrier and all aboard her into harm’s way.

The four Super Hornets of McCain’s Combat Air Patrol peeled off high above the bogey. It was still flying so low that as Lieutenant Commander Chipper Armstrong’s F-18 Super Hornet broke through the thick gray nimbostratus that was preceding Typhoon Jane by 230 miles, he made visual contact with the speck moving southeast toward the carrier’s battle group. The blip on his radar and its concomitant altitude reading seemed at odds, however. His radar was telling him the bogey was 150 feet above the deck, or sea level, his eyes looking through the sun visor of his helmet telling his brain that the unidentified craft was within arm’s reach of the wrinkled gray sea. In the backseat of the Hornet, Chipper’s RIO — Radar Intercept Officer “Eagle” Evans, so-called because of his exceptional daytime vision — flicked on his digital reconnaissance camera, selecting zoom and link-up to Chipper’s right-hand digital display indicator so that Chipper could now receive real-time images of the bogey.

“It’s an ROC,” said Evans. “Taiwanese. An F-16. That’s a Fighting Falcon to you.”

“What the hell’s it doing here?” asked Chipper.

“Lost his way?” proffered Evans. “Check out its left wing’s flaperons.”

“I see ’em,” said Chipper Armstrong, his eyes following the line of dime-size bullet holes that extended all the way forward of the Fighting Falcon’s rear ventral fins to the leading edge of the fighter’s cropped delta wing and up to the plane’s big telltale bubble cockpit. The Hornet’s zoom caught a blinding flash from the Falcon’s bubble, which was the “gold” sprayed inside to stealth the aircraft from radar waves.

“That gold just freaked out the zoom,” RIO Evans commented, the presence of the pneumonic gray stratus doing little to reduce the gold bubble effect. “I think his nav equipment’s shot to hell, Chipper.”

“Could be,” responded Armstrong. “From those holes forward of his ventrals, I’d say he took a full burst in the kidneys.”

“Can you see him?” asked Evans.

“Negative, but it’s the damned gold cockpit.”

Armstrong moved the stick hard left to give the Hornet’s disc camera a less direct angle of approach, the Falcon looking to Armstrong as if it was still on a straight, perhaps auto-controlled flight path. His assumption was confirmed by the Hornet’s left digital display, telling him the Falcon was 108 feet above the sea and three miles below the McCain’s CAP, its speed 914 mph. Armstrong’s four Super Hornets, descending at Mach 1.1, simultaneously moved out of their line-abreast combat pairs into the more open fluid four formation, its two leaders — Armstrong on the left, “Rhino” Manowski on his right, scanning forward, each of their wingmen behind them and off to the side, their responsibility being to watch fore and aft of the four Hornets’ formation.

Chipper Armstrong and his RIO, on the front left of the formation, were ten thousand feet from their CAP’s right-hand leader and his RIO. The distance between each leader Hornet and wingman, however, was much closer, this spread between leader and minder no more than a thousand feet. This left Chipper Armstrong and Rhino Manowski as the front pair of the fluid four formation, freer to concentrate on the ROC Taiwanese Fighting Falcon that seemed devoid of human guidance.

“He’s moving,” announced Eagle Evans, Chipper’s RIO, Chipper fighting a sudden wind shear that was shooting up in excess of 200 knots per hour. It violently buffeted Armstrong and Evans’s Hornet for four seconds, the strength of the phantom’s “upblast” no doubt having enveloped the Fighting Falcon with such force that Armstrong and his wingman aft left of him came to the same conclusion — that any movement they’d glimpsed in the Falcon’s cockpit almost certainly had been due to the ROC pilot’s body being shaken by the hammerlike blows of the wind shear column colliding with the Falcon’s air drag, putting the Falcon momentarily into “bone-shake” mode before its autopilot computer effected flap and “Hi” stabilizer corrections.

“I dunno, Chipper,” said Evans hesitantly. He thought he’d seen the ROC pilot move forward from the Falcon’s maximum thirty-degree recline position. But he wasn’t sure, which meant he wasn’t sure whether the pilot was alive.

Evans’s hesitation was a manifestation of the doubt born the day after he and Armstrong had completed their six-week-long cadet Aviation Preflight Indoctrination course at Pensacola, Florida. Both men, along with dozens of other hopefuls, passed their rigorous Aerodynamics, Survival, Physiology, Escape, and Navigation training tests. But Evans learned that while he’d been rated “above average,” he’d flunked the test for Navy aviator nighttime vision. At twenty-three, he saw it as a colossal personal failure, despite the instructor’s slap-on-the-back advice that the responsibility in the backseat was huge. “Damn pilot can’t do much if he doesn’t know where the hell he is, Evans.”

Evans had given the appropriate “Right Stuff” smile.

“ ’Sides,” added the instructor, “once your tours are up, you’re gonna be one helluva lot more employable than an aviator. Fighter pilots aren’t in big demand among civilian airlines. You will be.”

Evans had nodded, remaining unassuaged. For Navy aviators, pilots, and RIOs, flying a civilian airliner was referred to disparagingly as “flying a bus.”

Back in the present, Evans thought that maybe Chipper was right. Perhaps the ROC pilot hadn’t moved and had the Falcon on full auto. He hoped so, because if the pilot was hurt too badly to eject, then the auto was his only hope, at least as long as his fuel lasted.

By now the blue screens in McCain’s inner sanctums were showing first four, then eight … twelve … sixteen … twenty-four bogeys entering the McCain battle group’s no fly combat zone at a point fifty-six miles east of Oluanpi, Taiwan’s most southerly point. Neither Admiral Crowley nor his battle group staff had any idea why Taiwan’s air force would be there, when Taiwan’s ROC pilots were committed to protecting their island’s western approaches, particularly at Kinmen Island. If the bogeys turned out to be Taiwanese, they would be classified as friendlies and nothing to worry about, either for Chipper Armstrong’s CAP, 170 miles northwest of the carrier, or for the battle group itself. But then the McCain’s SSES — the Ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, the innermost sanctum — reported detecting, via Satellite Infrared Data Uplink, an unmistakable Triple E — enemy electronic emission — pulsing from the twenty-four bogeys that were now directly south of Oluanpi.

Crowley knew this could mean only one thing — that the bogeys were now indisputably “hostiles,” ChiCom aircraft completing an end run down Taiwan’s east coast and around its southernmost point in order to sandwich the Taiwanese pilots who, low on gas, would be returning from the combat zone over Kinmen. Which meant the twenty-four ChiComs had refueled while in the air, a feat that, given the high advance winds of Typhoon Jane, was not only gutsy, but evidenced an in-flight fueling capability that neither the McCain’s battle group nor Taiwan’s air force had thought the PLA air force was capable of. This, despite an intel report that some illiterate mushroom digger up in Shihmen had claimed he’d seen “glints” of what he thought might have been low-flying aircraft out to sea.

Admiral Crowley ordered his remaining eight Hornets aloft, to be followed by a fourteen-plane FITCOMPRON — Fighter Composite Squadron. This included twelve F-14 Tomcats and an EA-6B Prowler, already overhead, as was an E-2C Hawkeye, which could continue to act as an adjunct for McCain’s ultrasecret signals exploitation space. The Prowler’s crew of four could jam enemy signals and in general cause electronic chaos among the twenty-four hostiles.

Crowley ordered Armstrong and his wingman Rhino Manowski to stay and shepherd the ROC Falcon, while the two other Hornets in the fluid four were to break off and head northeast to join the McCain’s Hornets and Tomcats. The squadron’s mission was to get between the returning ROC fighters low on fuel and the ChiCom hostiles.

“Shit!” complained Eagle Evans, who, like Rhino Manowski and his RIO, had been left out of the FITCOMPRON. “I want to be in the fight.”

“What fight?” said Chipper Armstrong. “Rules of Engagement, Eagle. Remember? Our boys are supposed to get in between the two Chinas, to be peacemakers — airborne referees. Who wants that job? End up getting shot at by both sides if you’re not careful.”

“Well,” came in Manowski, “I’d rather some action than being a shepherd!” His RIO was of the same mind, and they both glared jealously as the other pair of the fluid four peeled off and went to afterburner, racing to rendezvous with McCain’s composite fighter squadron. But the