Crash Dive

Adrenaline flooded Hawke’s veins as he gripped the bar with his right hand. Being launched violently into space by a modern carrier catapult was as close as any human being can come to the experience of being in a catastrophic fatal car crash and surviving. It was that intense.

Early on, after a lot of expensive hardware had gone into the drink, some aeronautical genius had figured out that most pilots instinctively grabbed the aircraft’s controls too quickly after launch. It’s scary to feel out of control when your wheels separate from the mother ship. Now every fighter had a handhold forward and to the right inside the canopy. You grabbed it just before they pulled the trigger. Thus its name, the oh-shit bar.

During a “cat shot,” the time it took you to remove your hand from that bar and take hold of the controls was precisely, to the nanosecond, the right amount of time needed to elapse before you seized control after leaving the leading edge of the deck.

He was airborne.

He looked back down at the deck lights of the Varyag, the carrier growing rapidly smaller as he gained altitude. He suppressed any feelings of joy over escaping an agonizing death at the hands of the most sophisticated torturers on the planet. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, he told himself, as he climbed upward to join “his” squadron’s flight. Their heading was a northerly course that would take them over the Paracel Islands. Exactly the wrong direction. He needed to be headed south-southeast and he needed to get moving or he’d miss his rapidly diminishing window: the one chance he had to try to defuse a crisis with global implications.

The rim of the earth was edged in violent pink as he slipped into his designated slot at the rear of the tight formation. There was a minimum of radio chat for which he was thankful. There was normally a lot of banter at this stage and he didn’t want to hear any questions or inside wisecracks over the radio that he couldn’t respond to without sacrificing his cover. He needed precious time to remain anonymous until he could figure out how the hell to peel off and head for his mission destination without arousing the slightest suspicion.

He knew what he had to do now, although he didn’t much like it.

* * *

Land on the island airstrip on Xiachuan Island. Meet with this Chinese Admiral Tsang and fulfill C’s back- channel charge as best he could. Find a strategic way to avert the imminent showdown and eliminate another global flash point. He didn’t much like the fact that a high-tech SAM had been launched at him streaking across some dinky little atoll in the middle of nowhere. And that a Chinese carrier just happened to be sailing the sea-lane where he went down? No. He simply couldn’t shake the distinct impression that this might all be an elaborate setup. That the wily Chinese were going to use his violation of their airspace as proof positive that the West was being deliberately provocative.

They’d trot out his blackened corpse and twisted pieces of his American fighter jet on global TV. Use him to justify an even more aggressive posture in the South China Sea. Take retaliatory measures against Taiwan, Japan, or Vietnam. Next step, war. That’s how he saw it, anyway. C might disagree. But C wasn’t sitting in the hot seat with his ass on the line.

He now had little choice. He flew on with the formation, heading north toward the Pacific. He looked at his watch, calculated time and distance to his target. A long way to go and a short time to get there. And suddenly it came to him.

He thumbed the transmit button on his radio.

“Flight leader, flight leader, this is, uh, Passionflower, over.”

“Roger, Passionflower, this is Red Flight Leader. Go ahead, over.”

“Experiencing mechanical difficulties. System malfunctions, over.”

“What’s your situation?”

“I’m flying hot, sir. Engine overheat. It’s getting worse. Running override system checks now. Doesn’t look good.”

“Are you declaring an emergency?”

“Negative, negative. I think I can throttle back and make it home to mother. Request permission to abort and return, over.”

“Permission granted, over.”

“Roger that, Red Flight Leader. Passionflower returning to the Varyag, over.”

Hawke peeled away from the formation and went into a steep diving turn away from his flight. The sun was up now, just a sliver above the horizon, streaks of red light streaming across the sea below. When Red Flight was out of radar range, he corrected course and went to full throttle. By his latest calculations, he’d touch down just in time. He sat back and allowed himself his first smile in hours.

If he didn’t get blown out of the sky, it promised to be another beautiful day in Paradise.

About the Author

TED BELL is the former chairman of the board and worldwide creative director of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Warlord, Hawke, Assassin, Pirate, Spy, and Tsar, as well as the YA adventure novels Nick of Time and The Time Pirate. He is currently writer-in-residence at Cambridge University (U.K.) and visiting scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations.

You can follow Ted Bell on Facebook and at TedBellBooks.com