At just three thousand feet Trash reversed direction quickly, pulled himself into an eight-g turn, and switched to guns.
The Chinese aircraft did not recognize what happened, and he kept his downward spiral going for critical seconds while Trash prepared to meet him head-on.
Trash saw the Super 10 at one mile, and he used his rudders to line up for a gun shot. He slammed his feet down, left and right, all the way to the firewall to make the necessary corrections in the very short time he had before the Super 10 passed.
A long burst of tracers from his Vulcan cannon reached out from the nose of his aircraft. He used the laserlike light to guide him toward the enemy.
At five hundred feet the Super 10 burst into a fireball. Trash disengaged, pulled up on the stick violently with a hook to avoid an air-to-air collision or an FOD flameout, because foreign-object damage from the explosion could easily get sucked into his plane and destroy one or both engines.
Once he was clear, he confirmed the kill by going inverted and looking up in the canopy.
Below him the J-10 was nothing but small pieces of black wreckage and burning, smoking debris, all falling toward the water. The pilot would be dead, but Trash’s elation at having survived trumped any sympathy he could possibly feel in this moment.
“Splash three,” he said.
The Super Hornets arrived in time and committed on the three remaining Su-33s attacking from over the centerline, but Magic Flight was not finished. To their south, one of the two Taiwanese Air Force jets under attack by the other pair of J-10s had already disappeared from radar.
Cheese said, “Magic Two-Two, heading two-four-zero, combat spread. Let’s help out that surviving ROC F-16 before it’s too late.”
“Roger that.”
Trash and Cheese raced to the southwest while the Navy Super Hornets chased the Su-33s back over the centerline and back to the Chinese coast.
A moment later, Trash got a radar lock on the J-10s, still forty miles away. He immediately fired an AMRAAM missile.
“Fox three.”
He doubted his missile would hit the Chinese fighter. The pilot of the enemy aircraft would have a hell of a lot of defensive tricks up his sleeve that he could deploy easily with such a distance between them, but he wanted to give the attacker something to focus on other than killing the Taiwanese F-16.
His AMRAAM might not knock the Chinese jet out of the sky, but it would screw with the pilot’s attack.
The attack worked as he had hoped, one J-10 disengaged, but they were not in time to save the Taiwanese pilot. The ROC F-16 was hit by a short-range missile and blown to bits over the western coast of Taiwan.
The two Chinese planes immediately turned and raced back to the mainland before Trash and Cheese could engage them.
The two Marine F/A-18s were low on fuel, so they flew west, then lined up behind a refueler on station over Taipei to gas up before heading back to the carrier. Trash felt the tremors in his hand as he delicately jockeyed his aircraft in position behind the refueling drogue.
He chalked the shakes up to pure exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.
When they were back on the carrier, when their aircraft were chocked and chained and their parking brakes were set, when both men had climbed out of their cockpits, climbed down the stepping platforms on the side of the fuselage, returned to their ready room, and shed the survival gear off to reveal flight suits soaking wet from sweat, only then did the two men shake hands and hug.
Trash’s knees shook now, but he felt good. Happy to be alive, mostly.
They learned only when they got back to the ready room that up and down the Taiwan Strait there had been several air-to-air encounters. Nine ROC aircraft had been shot down, versus five PLAAF fighters.
Trash and Cheese recorded three of those five kills, with Trash getting two Super 10s and Cheese shooting down one Su-33.
No one understood the audacity or aggression of the Chinese, and the squadron commander told his pilots that they could expect to be back up in the skies in combat within hours.
The Marines on the boat treated Trash and Cheese like heroes, but when the two men made it back to their quarters, Major Stilton could tell something was bothering Captain White.
“What’s wrong, man?”
“I should have done better. That phone booth I was in, the second engagement… I can already think of about five things I could have done differently to take that guy down faster.”
“What are you talking about? You got him, and your situational awareness out there this afternoon was outstanding.”
“Thanks,” Trash replied.
But Cheese could tell he was still brooding.
“What’s really bothering you?”
“We should have nailed those other two J-10s before they wasted the F-16s. We took too long with our bandits, and the ROC guys got wasted. We come back here to the
Cheese said, “We did damn good today, bro. Were we perfect? Nope. We’re just men. We do our best, and our best today took down a couple of enemy aircraft, saved our own asses, and showed the Chinks that they don’t own the skies over the strait.” He reached over and flipped off the light to their quarters. “That’s going to have to be enough.”
Trash closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. As he lay there he realized he was still trembling. He hoped like hell he’d be able to get some rest before he headed back into the unfriendly skies tomorrow.
FORTY-SIX
Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan stood in his new glass-enclosed office, looking out over the massive floor of low cubicles, and he decided that he was satisfied with his reconstituted, if temporary, Ghost Ship. He left his office, walked down a short hallway, and exited a locked door that opened to a twelfth-floor balcony. Here, breathing smoggy air that was not nearly as humid as the air he had left behind in Hong Kong, he looked out over a sprawling city, flat and wide around a river that snaked from the southeast to the northwest.
Below him in the parking lot were armored personnel carriers, machine gun emplacements, and troops patrolling on foot and in jeeps.
Dr. Tong and his entire operation had moved from Hong Kong’s Mong Kok neighborhood to Guangzhou’s Huadu district, some one hundred miles to the northwest. They were within the borders of mainland China now, safe from the CIA, and it was clear to Tong that the PLA had spared no expense to protect them and provide them with whatever they needed.
The Ghost Ship had spent the last two years operating under the pretense that it was not part of China’s cyberwarfare infrastructure. The MSS would have liked to keep it that way, but the event in Hong Kong — the exposure of Zha Shu Hai by the CIA and his kidnapping by an American special-mission unit — had necessitated a quick change of plans. Tong had been ordered to move his entire operation up to the mainland and then to increase his cyberkinetic attacks on the United States immediately.
The 14K Triads had failed to keep his operation safe in Hong Kong, and now the 14K were wondering what the hell had happened to their cash cow. Four nights earlier, some sixty Chinese paramilitaries of the Guangzhou Military Region’s “Sharp Sword of Southern China” unit were dispatched into Mong Kok in a dozen civilian vehicles. There was a short standoff at the Mong Kok Computer Centre between the soldiers and the 14K, but a phone call
