Trash heard a clipped “Ejecting!” and saw the canopy fire off, and then the pilot shoot into the air.
The tracer rounds only increased ahead with the success of the shoot-down. Another strike fighter had to dump his stores and escape back to the south.
Now Trash realized it was down to him and Cheese. The remaining JDAM Hornet would never get around for another attack run before he too had to dump his weapons and exfiltrate the area now that the frenzy of SAM and AA in the sky, along with a new report of approaching bandits from the east, had turned Guangzhou into nothing more than a threshing machine for American aircraft.
Just as Trash knew that he and his flight lead were up, Cheese’s voice came over the radio.
“Magic Flight, commence attack run.”
“Magic Two-Two, roger.”
Trash and Cheese rose together to one thousand feet, switched to their bomb loadouts, and selected the mode to drop their Mark 84s nearly simultaneously. Trash knew four tons of iron bombs on a single twelve-story building would be devastating, though it would not bring it down to the ground. He just had to follow Cheese’s flight in, and together they would slam a total of eight tons of high explosives, a four-ton impact point within a four-ton impact point, and completely devastate the building.
Cheese said, “Ten seconds.”
A burst of flak right in front of Trash’s canopy caused him to jack his head back reflexively. The wings of his aircraft wiggled and he lost a few feet of altitude, but he pulled back up and leveled off just as Cheese spoke.
“Bombs away.” Cheese dropped, and a second later both of Trash’s Mark 84s separated with a clunk and the aircraft immediately felt lighter. High-drag chutes deployed from the tail section of each bomb, slowing them and allowing the Hornets to separate to a safe distance before detonation.
Trash raced away from the impending frag pattern.
He saw ahead of him the glowing jet engines of Cheese’s Hornet bank hard to the left and head for the deck, trying to put distance between himself and the explosion to come.
A flash to the north caught his attention. “Missile launch!” he said.
Cheese said, “Magic Two-One is defensive! Missile tracking!”
From the parking lot of the apartment building Jack Ryan watched the dark planes race overhead. Ryan had seen no bombs drop, but almost instantly the China Telecom building a half-mile away exploded in a rolling ball of flame and smoke and debris.
A roar shook the ground under his feet, and a rolling mushroom cloud of fire and gray-black smoke rose into the air.
“Holy shit!” Jack said.
Yao screamed at him, “Get in the car, Jack!”
Jack climbed in, and Adam said, “I don’t want to be the only guy driving an American around Guangzhou right now.”
As he fired the engine, both men looked up in the sky at the soft boom of an explosion miles to the north. In the distance, a burning fighter plane tumbled toward the city.
Magic Two-One is hit!” Cheese said just moments after Trash dove his aircraft to the deck. “Flight controls not responding! I’ve got nothing!”
“Punch out, Scott!” Trash shouted.
Trash saw Cheese’s aircraft roll to the right and flip upside down, and then the nose tipped down, just eighty feet above the city.
He did not eject.
The aircraft slammed into the street, nose first, at more than four hundred miles an hour, and it broke apart in a cartwheel of disintegrating metal, glass, and composite material. An explosion of jet fuel arced behind it, swirled along with the cartwheel, and only died out when the plane rolled into a drainage culvert and foamy black water engulfed the wreckage.
“No!” Trash screamed. He had not seen an ejection or a chute; his rational mind would have told him there was no way Scott could have punched out without him seeing it, but still Trash looked up in the sky above him as he passed the wreckage at four hundred twenty knots, desperately searching the night sky for a gray canopy.
He saw nothing.
“Magic Two-Two. Magic Two-One is down, at my coordinates, I… I don’t see a chute.”
The call back from the CIC was succinct: “Roger Two-Two. Understood Magic Two-One down at your location.”
There was nothing Trash could do now for Cheese; he had to get the hell out of there. He shoved the throttle forward, past the full power detent, all the way to the max. Afterburners kicked in instantly, nearly standing the aircraft on end, and he felt his helmet pressed hard back against the headrest as his thrust increased and the twenty-five-ton jet rocketed into the night sky.
The young Marine’s eyes darted around the displays in front of him. Altitude three thousand, four thousand, five thousand. The HUD spun like a slot machine.
He checked next on his vertical moving map display. He watched Guangzhou slip slowly below his aircraft. Far too slowly for Trash’s taste. He wanted to put time, space, and altitude between himself and the scene of his action.
Six thousand feet.
At this moment all of Trash’s focus was inside the aircraft. His threat indicators were clear at the moment, other than a flight of bogeys seventy miles to his east and heading away, no doubt toward the Navy F/A-18s attacking the ships in the strait.
Seven thousand feet.
He was over the southern part of the city now.
A beep in his headset brought his attention to his HUD.
He glanced down and saw that he had been lit up by a SAM radar to the southeast. Within two seconds another radar painted him from directly below his aircraft.
“Missile launch.”
He pulled hard to the left and then the right; he went inverted over downtown Guangzhou, pulled five g’s as he leveled out and banked to the right, firing flares and chaff in a long wide arc.
It did not work. A surface-to-air missile exploded twenty-two feet from his left-side wing, sending shrapnel through the wing and fuselage.
“Magic Two-Two is hit! Magic Two-Two hit!”
His left engine fire light flicked on. It was followed instantly by an audio warning. “Master Caution,” and then an instant later, “Engine Fire Left. Engine Fire Right.”
Trash wasn’t listening to Bitching Betty anymore. His HUD flickered off and on and off again, and he struggled to take in as much data as he could read when it was on.
Another SAM was in the air. His displays and his HUD were failing, but the warning came through his headset.
Trash fought to hold the aircraft level, and he pushed the throttle forward to the detent and beyond, trying like hell to gain a little more airspeed.
His stick felt sluggish, and his throttle had no effect.
The dead F/A-18 lost all lift, the nose pitched forward, and the aircraft rolled to port. Trash looked out through the blank HUD, past the canopy glass, and he saw his entire field of view filled with the twinkling lights of a city. As the plane tumbled down through the sky, however, his view out the canopy went dark. The lights were replaced by impenetrable blackness.
Somehow, in the terror of the moment and the fight to keep his head together and do what he had to do, Trash realized his plane was corkscrewing down to earth to the south of the city where the Pearl River Delta splayed out toward the sea.
The lights of Guangzhou and its suburbs.
The darkness of the river, its tributaries, and the farmland of the delta.
