Threat Vector Read online

  Men and women from the street ran up to him on the drive and tried to help him, but he pushed them away, pointing toward the scene of the blast, and they ran on to look for more survivors.

  Adam was on the street a moment later. It felt cool here this morning high on the hill, above the congested streets of Central and the air thick with humidity down by Victoria Harbour. He walked away from his building, down a steep decline; he wiped blood from his face as emergency vehicles raced past him, up the winding roads toward the black smoke now two blocks behind him.

  He had no destination, he just walked.

  His thoughts were on Robert, his friend, a man just about Adam’s own age who had sat down in Adam’s own car and taken the full brunt of the bomb that had clearly been meant not for Robert Kam but for Adam Yao.

  When he was five blocks from home, the ringing in his ears lessened and the pounding from the concussion abated just enough for him to start to put salient thoughts together about his own situation.

  Who? Who did this?

  The Triads? How the fuck would the Triads know who he was, where he lived? What car he drove? The only people who knew his identity and who knew he was CIA, other than CIA, were the Hendley Associates men and 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 close to the centerline in case the bogeys make an incursion.”

  “Roger that,” said Trash, and he followed Cheese’s descent and turn. He did not think for a moment that the two Chinese pilots were going to do anything more than what he’d seen the past four days, and he knew Cheese felt the same, but Trash also knew Cheese was careful enough to not get caught with his pants down, finding himself and his wingman out of position if the Chinese fighters entered Taiwanese airspace.

  The Hawkeye updated Cheese. “Magic Two-One. Bogeys zero-two-zero, four-zero miles, ten thousand . . . climbing.”

  “Magic Two-One, roger,” responded Cheese.

  A moment after this transmission, the Hawkeye air combat officer notified Cheese that the bogeys approaching the Taiwanese F-16s to the south were following a similar flight path.

  Trash said, “Looks like this could be coordinated.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?” replied Cheese. “That’s a different tactic from what they’ve been doing. They’ve been sending up flights of two. I wonder if two flights of two at the same time in adjacent sectors means they are raising the stakes.”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  Cheese and Trash widened their formation and pulled out of their descent at fifteen thousand feet. The Hawkeye divided its time between sending them updates on the two unknown bogeys heading toward them and passing on information to the ROC Air Force F-16s forty miles to the south of the Marines’ sector over the strait.

  Just after the Hawkeye announced that the two bogeys heading toward Magic Two-One and Magic Two-Two were twenty miles away, the ACO added, “They are still heading toward the centerline of the strait. At current speed and heading they will breach in two minutes.”

  “Roger,” said Cheese. He squinted into the distance to try and pick them out in front of the white clouds and gray of the mainland in the distance.

  “Magic Two-One, Hawkeye. New contact. Four bogeys taking off at Fuzhou and approaching the strait. Climbing rapidly and turning south, angels three and climbing.”

  Now things were getting complicated, Trash realized. He had two Chinese fighters of unknown type heading directly toward him and his flight leader, two more threatening the sector just south of him, and now four more bogeys heading in behind the first group.

  The ACO announced he had a flight of four Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets finishing up air-refueling over the east of Taiwan Island, and he would expedite moving them to the Marines’ sector in support just as soon as he could.

  Cheese said, “Trash, I’ve got the bogeys on radar, they are just off my nose. Are you tally?”

  Trash clicked a button and removed most of the digital data projected on his heads-up display and his helmet-mounted cueing system, then squinted as he peered ahead out past the HUD into the sky.

  “No joy,” he said, but he kept looking.

  Cheese said, “Sixty seconds to intercept, let’s fly heading zero-thirty, a twenty-degree offset so they can see we aren’t threatening them.”

  “Roger that,” replied Trash, and he tipped his wing to the right, following Cheese’s turn so that the bogeys were no longer directly on their nose.

  Within a few seconds Cheese said, “Bogeys are jinking left to come back on an intercept course. Descending, let’s speed it up.”

  “Sons of bitches,” said Trash, and he felt a new level of tension instantly. The Chinese pilots were screaming toward the centerline and overtly pointing their noses, which meant their radars and their weapons, directly at the two Marine aircraft.

  With an intercept speed of more than twelve hundred miles an hour now, Trash knew things were about to start happening very, very quickly.

  Cheese said, “Turn heading three-forty; let’s pull away from them again.”

  Trash banked with Cheese back to the left, and within ten seconds he could see on his radar that the Chinese were mirroring the maneuver. He reported, “Bogeys are jinking back to us, bearing oh-one-five, two-eight miles. Fourteen thousand.”

  Trash heard the Hawkeye ACO acknowledge this and then immediately divert his attention back to the ROC F-16s, who were seeing similar moves from their bogeys.

  “Spike,” said Cheese now, indicating that one of the bogeys had locked on Cheese’s plane with his radar.

  Trash heard the spike warning for his own jet just a moment later.

  “I’m spiked, too. These guys aren’t fucking around, Cheese.”

  Cheese gave the next order with a tone of seriousness that Trash seldom heard from the major: “Magic Two-Two, Master Arm on.”

  “Roger,” said Trash. He flipped his Master Arm into the armed position, ensuring all his weapons were hot and he had the launch of his air-to-air missiles at his fingertips. He still did not think he was about to get into a fight, but the level of threat had gone up precipitously with the enemy’s radar lock, and he knew he and Cheese needed to be ready in case this devolved from an incident into a fight.

  The ACO announced almost simultaneously that the Taiwanese had reported a spike.

  Trash followed Cheese’s turn yet again, away from the centerline and away from the approaching aircraft. He looked out the side of his canopy now, using his “Jay-Macks,” his joint helmet-mounted cueing system, a smart visor on his helmet that gave him much of his heads-up information even when he looked left, right, and above his HUD. Through it he saw two black specks streaking in their direction over a backdrop of a puffy white cloud.

  He spoke quickly and energetically, but he was a pro, there was no unnecessary excitement in his voice. “Magic Two-Two. Tally two bandits. Ten o’clock, just slightly low. Possible Super 10s.” No American had ever come up against China’s most advanced operational frontline fighter, the Chengdu J-10B Super 10, a newer version of the J-10 Annihilator. Trash knew the J-10 airframe used composite materials just like his own and its reduced radar signature was designed to make a radar missile lock difficult. The B model supposedly had an upgraded electronic warfare suite that helped in this regard as well.

  It was a smaller aircraft than the F/A-18 and it possessed only a single engine to the Hornet’s two, but the Russian-built turbofan gave the nimble fighter plenty of power for air-to-air engagements.

&nbs
p; “Roger that,” said Cheese. “Guess it’s our lucky day.”

  The Chinese had more than two hundred sixty J-10s in service, but probably fewer than forty B variants. Trash did not respond; his game face was on.

  Cheese said, “They are turning back hot! Thirty seconds from the centerline and displaying hostile intent.”

  Trash expected to hear the Hawkeye ACO acknowledge Cheese’s transmission, but instead he spoke in a loud voice, “Magic flight, be advised. ROC flight south of you is under attack and defensive, missiles in the air.”

  Trash spoke with astonishment into his radio: “Holy fucking shit, Scott.”

  Cheese saw the J-10s in front of him now and reported that he had visual. “Tally two on my nose. Confirmed Super 10s. Hawkeye, are we cleared hot?”

  Before the Hawkeye answered, Trash said, “Roger, two on your nose. Tell me which one to take.”

  “I’ve got the one on the left.”

  “Roger, I’ve got the guy on the right.”

  Cheese confirmed, “Roger, Two-Two, you have the trailing aircraft on the right.”

  Now Trash’s HUD and his missile warning system announced that a missile launch had been detected. One of the J-10s had just fired at him. He saw in his HUD that the time-to-target of the inbound missile was thirteen seconds.

  “Missile in the air! Missile in the air! Breaking right! Magic Two-Two defensive!” Motherfucker! Trash banked his aircraft away from Cheese and went inverted. He pulled back on his stick, and with his canopy showing nothing but blue water, he increased his speed and descent.

  The legs of his g-suit filled with air, forcing the blood in the upper part of his body to stay there so his brain would continue to think and his pounding heart would continue to pound.

  He grunted against the g-forces.

  The Hawkeye announced belatedly, “Magic flight, you are cleared to engage.”

  At this stage of the game Trash didn’t give a rat’s ass if someone safe over the horizon line gave him the authorization to shoot back. This was life and death, and Trash had no intention of doing peaceful lazy-eights out here until he was blown out of the sky.