Rock noted, remained at his own higher altitude. Lobo roared past the helo, well above and in front of it, but plainly within the pilot’s sight. This was obvious because the helo immediately raised its nose in a hard braking action and swiveled partly to its left as it halted.
Hot Rock felt an electrical prickle on the back of his neck. What Lobo had just done could, arguably, be interpreted as a highly aggressive act. He waited to hear the sharp warbling tone in his helmet that would indicate a fire-control radar lock on his aircraft… but it didn’t happen. So far, everything was still cool.
Hot Rock increased his own angle of bank and let the Tomcat slip down along the same path Lobo had taken. He felt the slight bumping of disrupted air where her plane had been, although the harsher turbulence of its wingtip vortices were well below him, hammering down on the water.
He was beginning to level out for his close pass on the helo when he heard Two Tone shout: “Hot Rock! He’s going guns! Going guns! Gunfire in the water!”
Later, Hot Rock would review that moment over and over again in his mind. The helo was dead ahead, its tail pivoted somewhat toward him, but not at such an oblique angle that Hot Rock couldn’t see the open side hatch and the machine gun mounted there. He was sure, later, that he’d seen those things. He also plainly saw gouts of orange flame ripping into the air. That wasn’t just his imagination, or an illusion caused by sunlight flaring off passing swells. No way.
In fact, the sight of the flames was so startling he hesitated a moment, as if he wanted to convince
“Hot Rock!” Two Tone’s voice, sharp, so much like an older man’s voice. Disappointed, commanding. “Get on it!”
Hot Rock flicked his weapons selector switch to the Sidewinder position. “Fox Three,” he said.
From water level, everything that had been happening so dreadfully slowly suddenly accelerated to unbelievable speed. For what seemed like hours, Dr. George had been switching his attention between the circling jets, the approaching Chinese helicopter — and the water beneath his feet. The tiger shark kept disappearing and then coming back again, moving with increasing speed on each pass, as if making up its mind about something. Once it came so close George actually kicked it, after which it became more wary. But it was still around, or maybe there were more than one of them. It was hard to tell. The setting sun no longer cut its light into the water, showing him what lurked below. Soon he wouldn’t be able to see his legs at all.
The sharks would be under no such restrictions.
So, let the Chinese pick him up. He didn’t care anymore. He just wanted to be warm and dry and safe.
The helicopter was perhaps a hundred yards away when it halted. The jets continued to circle overhead, so low now that George could see the shapes of the pilots’ heads through the canopies. Two American jets, and two Chinese, cruising around together in a big, roaring circle. What the hell was going on?
Just then there was a brilliant flash from one of the American jets, and a sound like high-pressure water shooting from a hose. A rope of white smoke abruptly connected the American jet to the helicopter. The helicopter exploded. It broke in half like an egg, but the bright-yellow yolk rose up and up instead of falling. The shells of the fuselage dropped. Spinning rotor blades hit the water and broke free, skipping across the surface for some distance before vanishing in sheets of spray.
Where the fuselage vanished into the water, a roiling dome of bubbles and smoke boiled up, hissing and crackling.
Dr. George felt something nudge his foot, and started to kick.
Tai Ling saw the fireball light up the dark waters below, and heard the radio chatter erupt from the two SU- 27 pilots down at sea level. Their message was shocked and furious: One of the Americans had just taken an unprovoked missile shot at the PLA helicopter arriving to rescue the person in the water. The helo was down.
If that wasn’t the signal Tai had been waiting for, nothing was.
“Weapons free!” he cried over the tactical circuit, and reached for his own weapons selector switch. “All aircraft, weapons free!”
“Holy shit!” Handyman yelled, a vast expression of emotion for him. “What the hell — ”
Lobo had her back to the helo and Hot Rock, but she heard him signal the firing of a Sidewinder, and simultaneously saw the fiery reflection of an explosion reflecting from the inside of her canopy. Her response came long before thought: She slammed the throttle quadrant full forward, and as the afterburners gave their mule kick, she hauled back hard on the stick. In a heartbeat of time, the Tomcat went from cruise mode into a neck-snapping climb out.
Lobo cranked her head around, searching for the Flanker that had been roofing her. Gasped as it flashed past to the left, showing its belly in a hard bank that had to have been initiated simply to avoid a collision.
“Well,” Handyman drawled, his voice back to normal, “that worked.”
Lobo eased the stick forward an inch, putting the Tomcat into a marginally more relaxed, sustainable angle of climb. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where did he go?”
“Coming up behind us, babe.”
On her radar, Lobo saw the lozenge-shaped return of the Flanker coming around hard on her tail. A moment after that, she heard the warbling signal that indicated she was being painted with fire-control radar.
Radar or not, at this range the bogey was inside missile range; he’d be going to guns. Leaving the stick where it was, Lobo kicked the Tomcat over on one wingtip, rotated over like a gymnast doing a one-handed cartwheel, then dove back toward the deck. At the same time, the white-hot flare of tracers swept past her inboard wing.
The Flanker was right below her, from this angle nothing but a round fuselage, a couple of rectangular air intakes and the blazing flower of its cannon.
“Recommend guns,” Handyman said even as Lobo hit the trigger.
Her tracers ripped beneath the Flanker, a miss of only a few feet — but there was no room for a pull-up to bring the shells on target, not unless she wanted a certain head-on collision.
She jammed the stick forward instead, initiating the start of an inverted loop.
As her head filled with pressurized blood, she held her breath and grunted loudly, holding off unconsciousness as she mentally tracked the Flanker’s likely behavior. He should be rounding out of his vertical climb right about now, gleefully expecting to be right above her, in perfect position for a kill. Lobo snapped the stick to the right, then back, flipping the Tomcat right side up and simultaneously reversing its direction. Now the blood drained out of her head and she was struggling for consciousness against a different enemy. At the same time she found herself staring directly at the boiling patch of water where the helo had gone down… staring as it grew larger and larger, the Tomcat’s weight fighting her attempt to pull out, its engines fighting gravity and momentum, Lobo’s will fighting the same things… fighting…
And then she felt the wings grab air with authority and the surface of the South China Sea was blurring by beneath her.
“You just love this low-altitude shit, don’t you?” Handyman grunted.
“Man, did you ever screw up,” Thor said as he put his Hornet into a tight left turn. His scorn was not directed at the two Flankers left up here to fight him and Reedy; rather, it was aimed at whoever had ordered them to do so. Could anyone really be dipshitty enough to believe that a one-on-one ratio represented good odds for the Chinese pilots?
Not that things started out so hot for him and Reedy. The Flankers were a few thousand feet higher than the Hornets when the shooting started, and immediately came hurtling down, missiles streaking off their wings. That took some fancy flying to get out of. And Thor had to admit that at least some of the grim intel on these new birds was true; big as they were, the Flankers turned like plastic models tugged on a wire.
But Thor and Reedy flew in perfect harmony, using the high-low loose deuce formation, and the damned Chinese were overconfident; when they took the bait and converged on Reedy, Thor swooped over and in, crying “break right!” on his radio. Instantly Reedy’s Hornet showed the Flankers its belly. At the same moment Thor triggered a Sidewinder. Since the Flankers were displaying the most tailpipe, real sex to a Sidewinder, the missile selected the brighter of the two and drove itself home. Thor grinned to see a pillow-shaped eruption of smoke and
