Threat Vector

whoever was managing to compromise cable traffic out of Hong Kong and China.

No way in hell the Triads were getting intel directly from the CIA. The Triads ran hookers and pirated DVDs, they did not assassinate CIA officers and compromise tier-one intelligence agencies.

If it wasn’t the Triads, then it had to be the PRC. Somehow, for some reason, the PRC wanted him dead.

Had FastByte been here in China working with the Triads for the PRC?

None of that tracked with anything Adam understood about the way these organizations worked.

As confused as Adam was about what had just happened and what he’d stumbled onto, there was one matter on which the bruised and bloodied CIA operator was crystal fucking clear.

He wasn’t calling in to CIA; he wasn’t saying one damn thing to anybody about anything. Adam was a one- man band, and he was getting the fuck out of here on his own.

He continued staggering down the hill, toward the harbor, wiping blood out of his eyes as he walked on.

FORTY-FOUR

Brandon “Trash” White checked the seal of his oxygen mask over his mouth, saluted the catapult officer on the deck to his right, then placed his gloved left hand on the throttle of his F/A-18 Hornet. With some reluctance he wrapped his right hand around the “towel rack,” a metal bar handgrip high on the canopy in front of his head. He was just seconds from being airborne, and it was his natural inclination to keep his hand on the controls of his aircraft, but carrier rules were different. The catapult shot would shove Trash’s body back hard against his seat, and if his hand was holding on to his stick, there was a high probability his hand would fly back with the high g-forces, pulling the stick along with it and pitching the airplane up and out of control on takeoff.

So Trash held on to the towel rack and waited to be shot off the boat like a marble from a slingshot.

To his immediate right, the F/A-18 of Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton, call sign “Magic Two-One,” sprang forward toward the bow ahead of the steaming catapult track and flame-red engines. He was flying an instant later, banking to the right and climbing into a beautiful blue sky.

And then Trash was moving. Really moving. He went from zero to one hundred sixty-five miles an hour in two seconds along a three-hundred-foot-long cat-track toward the end of the boat. His helmet pressed into the headrest and his raised right arm pulled back to him, but he held on, waited to feel the thump of his nose wheel popping up at the end of the deck.

The thump came and he was over water, hurled screaming from the deck with no control over his aircraft. He quickly reached down for the stick, pulled his nose up slightly, and banked gently to the left for a clearing turn.

“Trash is airborne. Hoorah,” he said coolly into his interflight-comm radio, letting Cheese know he was in the air and flying, and he climbed into the sky on his way to the strait one hundred miles to the northwest.

* * *

The F/A-18s of the Ronald Reagan had been patrolling the Taiwan Strait for four days now, and Trash and Cheese had flown two sorties each of those days. Fortunately for Trash’s blood pressure, all his flights so far had been during daylight hours, but he doubted his luck would hold in that regard.

His blood pressure had spiked a few times from close encounters with PLA pilots. Trash and Cheese had been flying combat air patrols on the Taiwanese side of the strait, manning a sector just offshore of Taipei, at the northern part of the island. Republic of China F-16s flew most of the sorties over the rest of the strait, and they, just like the aircraft from the Reagan, were careful not to pass over the centerline of the strait into Chinese territory.

But the Chinese were not playing by the same rules. Some sixteen times in the past four days flights of PLAAF Su-27, J-5, and J-10 jets took off from their air base in Fuzhou, directly across the hundred-mile-wide strait from Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and then raced directly toward the centerline. A dozen times so far the Chinese fighters actually locked on to American or Taiwanese aircraft with their radars. These “spikes” were considered aggressive, but even more aggressive were the three instances where Chinese Su-27 and J-5 fighters actually flew over the centerline before returning to the north.

It was a threatening flexing of Chinese muscle, and it kept Trash and the rest of the pilots working the strait on their toes and ready for action.

Trash and Cheese were sent to their patrol area by a naval flight officer in the Reagan’s Combat Information Center, known as the CIVIC, and they also received updates on other aircraft in their area of operations from a combat air controller flying in the back of an E2-C Hawkeye airborne early-warning aircraft patrolling far to the east of the strait, with visualization of the area via their powerful radar and computers.

As the distant eyes and ears for the pilots in the strait, the Hawkeye could track aircraft, missiles, and even surface vessels for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Once on station, Trash and Cheese flew a racetrack pattern at twenty thousand feet over the water. Trash manipulated his throttle and stick instinctively to stay in a loose combat formation with his flight lead, and he monitored his radar and listened to the comms from the Hawkeye and the CIVIC.

There were broken clouds well below him, but nothing but brilliant blue sky all around. He could see bits of the Chinese mainland when his racetrack took him to the north, and he could easily make out Taipei and other large cities on Taiwan anytime the clouds broke up enough to the south.

Even though the tension in the strait was palpable, Trash felt good being right here, right now, comfortable in the fact he had the best training, the best support, the best flight lead, and the best aircraft in this entire conflict.

And it was a magnificent aircraft. The F/A-18C was fifty-six feet long, with a forty- foot wingspan. When “slick,” or operating without weapons or extra fuel, it weighed only ten tons, because of its aluminum-steel composite construction. And its two beastly General Electric turbofan engines generated roughly the same amount of power as three hundred fifty Cessna 172 aircraft, giving it an excellent power-to-weight ratio that meant it could hit Mach 1.5—or thirteen hundred miles per hour — and stand on end and fly vertically like a rocket launching off a pad.

Trash’s fly-by-wire aircraft did a lot of the work for him now while he scanned the sky and the screens in front of him — the left data display indicator and the right DDI, the up-front control display, and the moving map display low in front of him, almost between his knees.

There were five hundred thirty switches in his cockpit, but most every input Trash needed to fly and fight could be made from sixteen buttons on his stick and throttle without even taking his eyes off the HUD.

The thirty-million-dollar C was one of the best fighter airframes in the air, but it wasn’t exactly the newest kid on the block. The Navy flew the newer, bigger, and more advanced Super Hornet, which cost a good twenty million dollars more.

Trash had just turned to follow Cheese back to the south, trailing his flight leader in an echelon formation, when his headset came alive with a transmission from the Hawkeye.

“Contact bull’s-eye, zero-four-zero. Forty-five miles, heading southwest, single group, two bogeys, southeast of Putian. Heading, two-one-zero. They appear to be heading toward the strait.”

Cheese’s voice came into Trash’s headset: “Coming our way, brother.”

“Hoorah, aren’t we popular?” Trash responded, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

The two Marines had heard similar notifications multiple times over the past four days of patrols out here. Each time Trash and Cheese found themselves in the sector where a potential incursion might occur, the Chinese fighters raced toward the centerline only to bank back around to the northwest, and then return to the coast.

The PLAAF was feinting up and down the length of the strait, for what purpose other than to incite some sort of response, no one knew.

Cheese acknowledged the Hawkeye’s transmission, and then immediately listened to a report of a contact just south of the Marines’ sector. Two more bogeys were headed into the strait. This area was patrolled by two ROC F-16s, who were getting their information from the U.S. Hawkeye as well.

Cheese radioed Trash: “Magic Two-Two, let’s descend to angels fifteen, tighten up our pattern so we can be