The Tomahawks were successful, knocking out several AA launchers along the path into Victoria Harbour and beyond.
At 2:04 a.m. there were ten strike aircraft still together in a tight trail formation as they shot through Victoria Harbour in the center of Hong Kong. At an altitude of only three hundred twenty feet they passed the Peninsula hotel at five hundred miles an hour, and the roar of their twenty jet engines broke windows and woke virtually everyone asleep within a mile of the channel.
Their flight path took them through the center of Hong Kong for the simple reason that the hills to the north and the high buildings, as well as heavy sea traffic, would muddle the radar picture in China for a time, and Chinese missile defenses in Shenzhen would not be able to lock on and fire SAMs on the low aircraft until they crossed into the mainland.
But more frontline PLAAF fighters appeared on radar, sending the last two air-to-air fighters peeling off from the trail and heading to the northeast. A flight of six Su-27s engaged them over Shenzhen. Both Marine pilots scored air-to-air kills, and within ninety seconds of the fight starting, the two surviving F/A-18s that had been battling J-5s over the South China Sea joined the fray.
SAMs destroyed two Hornets over Shenzhen, but both pilots ejected safely. Two more Hornets were destroyed by air-to-air missiles; one Marine ejected, but the other pilot crashed into the side of Wutong Mountain and died.
The four Marine aircraft shot down six Chinese planes and slowed the others, putting them precious minutes behind the strike force.
The strike force of ten crossed the border to mainland China, and eight of the ten jets climbed off the deck and to ten thousand feet. Only Cheese and Trash stayed low, flying through the dark, focusing virtually all their attention on the green-hued terrain through their NVGs as it raced by below them.
Adam and Jack sat in their rented apartment in northern Guangzhou. They had been doing exactly the same thing, virtually nonstop, for the past two days: watching the China Telecom building. They had long-distance photos of K. K. Tong on his twelfth-floor balcony, as well as dozens of other personalities, many whom Ryan had been able to identify on the database on his laptop from photo-recognition software.
Jack’s call to Mary Pat Foley the day before, coming on something like his thirty-fifth try to get a satellite call through, had been the culmination of Adam’s work to hunt down the organization Zha had worked for in Hong Kong, an organization, it was clear, that was directing the attacks on America.
Since that time they continued to amass intelligence in the hopes that when Jack returned to Hong Kong and flew back to the United States, he could give it to Mary Pat and increase pressure on the Chinese government to arrest Tong or at least shame them into stopping the attacks.
Ryan had no expectations whatsoever of what was about to happen.
He was only half awake, propped in a chair by the window with the camera on a tripod in front of him and a wool blanket around him, when something caused his heavy eyelids to open. Off to the north, way beyond the China Telecom building by a mile or two, a flash of light came from rooftop level. Jack thought at first it was lightning — there had been rain on and off for days — but a second and a third flash appeared near the same area.
A low rumble made its way to him, and he sat up straighter.
More flashes, now to the northeast, and more noise, louder now.
“Yao!” he said, calling to Adam, who slept on a mat on the floor just a few feet away. The CIA man did not move at first, so Jack knelt down and shook him.
“What’s up?”
“Something’s happening. Wake up!”
Jack went back to the window and now he saw the unmistakable sight of tracer fire, anti-aircraft cannons shooting into the sky. Another flash to his north and an explosion now, and then a clear missile launch from the ground to the north.
“Oh my God!” Jack said.
“You don’t think we’re attacking, do you?” asked Yao.
Before Jack could answer, a sound like the sky being ripped apart came from behind their apartment building. It was a jet engine, or more likely
Jack knew Mary Pat would have tried to warn him before an attack came, but he also knew that sat-phone communications were seriously degraded. He had also told her he was “about a mile” away from the building, which was an exaggeration, but he knew Mary Pat had a near-direct line of communication with his father, and he knew his dad had more important things to worry about than his son’s getting arrested in China near the nerve center of the Chinese cyberattacks.
Now it seemed America was attacking a building less than a half-mile from where Jack Ryan, Jr., was staying.
While Ryan was still trying to process the images and sound around him, Adam Yao grabbed the camera and the tripod and said, “Let’s go!”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know,” Yao said, “but we’re not staying here!”
They were prepared to bug out quickly in the event of a compromise; they had most everything in the apartment packed up in a pair of duffel bags, and Adam’s car downstairs was gassed and ready to go. Together they threw the rest of their belongings in their bags and flipped out the lights, then began rushing to the stairs.
SEVENTY-SIX
The two anti-SAM Hornets had peeled away from the four JDAM-carrying Hornets and fanned out, making themselves sitting ducks, but using their advanced electronic countermeasures and their HARMs to lock on to and destroy SAM sites as they revealed themselves.
Trash and Cheese were as low as they could possibly fly below and behind the eight other jets. They raced up the Pearl River, which went right through the center of downtown Guangzhou; they passed skyscrapers on either side of them, their wingtips sometimes not more than a hundred yards from the wall of a building. Then they broke north, turned over the city, and anti-aircraft guns began firing in their flight path. The sparkling tracers arced and whipped around the sky in front of them. Trash saw SAM launches in the distance, and he knew they were targeting the HARM Hornets above him, but he also knew if he was called in to drop his bombs, he’d have to expose himself and he’d have the worst of both worlds — the anti-air and terrain threats down here at the deck and the SAM threats a little higher.
The four strike fighters with the JDAMs came over the radio now one at a time, and announced they had no GPS signal, which was critical to guide their smart bombs all the way to impact. After just a few more moments Trash heard over the radio the plaintive calls of one of these Hornet pilots; he’d been hit by a SAM and was ejecting. An anti-SAM Hornet launched on the missile battery, but more SAMs raced into the air. Another strike pilot went defensive against a missile launch; he broke out of what remained of the group as he began jinking and diving and firing chaff.
Another pilot carrying JDAMs was forced defensive, and he dropped his weapons stores so he could maneuver. This pilot’s wingman stayed in the flight, and he was the first to line up for a bomb run on the target.
He still could not get the GPS signal in his aircraft, and this told him his JDAM would be flying blind, but he could still drop it dumb and hope for the best.
He began a diving run on the target from fifteen thousand feet.
Four miles south of the China Telecom building, the Hornet was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Trash watched from his position over the river five miles to the south, as the aircraft erupted in a flash of light and then fell off to the side, its left wing tipped down toward the city, and then nosedived toward the buildings below.
