Red Tide Excerpt from Chapter Sixty-Five His enemy''s speed forced the Flanker into a wide turn. Henry sensed the opportunity to cut the Chinese pilot off, turning inside his arc. The Sidewinder under his wing growled again. Henry closed in, his finger hovering over the launch button. But just as he was about to fire, the Flanker''s nose kipped up, the aircraft seemed to stop in midair. He grunted in shock. The maneuver was known as a cobra, well suited to the Flanker''s wide wings and long fuselage. Lieutenant Commander Henry Cole had trained against it out at Fallon, Nevada, where veteran pilots flew against him with Russian aircraft acquired on the black market.
The moment he recognized the cobra, Henry slowed his speed and raised the Hornet''s nose, anticipating where the Flanker would end up. The enemy aircraft was suddenly so close he thought he might spear it. Reacting instantly, Henry switched the rocker to the gun position and crushed the red button on the stick. His twenty-millimeter Vulcan Gatling gun roared, riddling the Chinese fighter with a burst of white-hot lead that spewed from the Hornet''s nose at a hundred rounds per second. The Flanker canopy shattered as Henry shot by. He turned and watched it fall into a flat, tumbling spin. "Splash three!" he hollered excitedly into his mask. He had taken out two.
Gator had bagged one. Razor and Tuna were gone. An ejection seat had rocketed away from Tuna''s dying Hornet. Razor had no such luck. But it was two Hornets against one Flanker now. Henry''s HUD showed the enemy at twenty degrees, coming in hot for him. "Gator!" he called. "You see this guy?" The radio was stuffed with crosstalk chatter from the air battles raging farther to the west, where the Air Force, Lincoln ''s air wing, and the Marine F-35s tangled with the Chinese land-based bombers and fighters.
In stray remarks here and there, Henry sensed the Chinese were taking a beating. Deprived of their satellites and data links, the air battle had come down to individual pilot training. "Gator!" Henry repeated, ignoring the crosstalk. The incoming Flanker blinked red in his HUD. "Gator''s gone," the Chinese-accented voice answered clearly. "Looks like it''s just you and me, Hammer." Without acknowledging the call, Henry dove for the low, purple cloud layer, buying time. The Chinese Flanker was a bigger, heavier aircraft than his F-18.
The first objective was to hide from it. The HUD indicated the enemy was closing in on his six. While the clouds visually obscured him, they did nothing for air-to-air radar. And his hot exhaust would form an intense contrast to the cool airborne vapor. "I can still see you," the voice goaded, confirming what had been running through Henry''s mind. The American didn''t answer. Verbal jousts were fine for needling an adversary in peacetime. But this was combat.
Though he hadn''t been able to keep track of all the weapons exchanged, Henry suspected his pursuer''s long-range radar-guided weapons were gone. When the American and Chinese fighters initially converged, the Flankers launched a swath of them from a hundred miles away, knocking Tuna down immediately. Since then, even when the Flankers had veered wide after a kill, they fought to close the distance. "Ready or not, Hammer, here I come," the voice goaded. The furball had taken him far from the American fleet. Even the controllers in the E-2 ignored him, preoccupied as they were with the raging battles closer to the ships. Henry felt very alone as he studied the red pip in his HUD that represented the menacing enemy aircraft. It was diving directly at him, aiming for an intercept point behind him to use its heat seekers.
He would be easy prey while he scudded through the cool cloud layer. His magazine of flares was nearly empty. He had one burst left, and even that would be a short one. "Where are you going?" the voice asked. "Your fleet''s the other way. Are you trying to defect to China? You''re already in our airspace." The HUD''s green fuel indicator showed twenty-nine hundred pounds, close to bingo , the point where Henry would have to turn back to Lincoln . But with the Flanker bearing down on him, the thought of a three-wire trap on the carrier was little more than a faint abstraction.
Depleted and alone, he could think of only one defense against his pursuer. He wasn''t sure it would work. He thought of the enemy''s cobra maneuver and the way he had relied on his training to counteract it. The Fallon instructors had drilled the maneuvers into him the Flanker was well known for the cobra--the Russians had perfected it with their version of the aircraft. Henry''s F-18 could also perform it, though the Navy strictly forbade it as a stunt that was too taxing on the airframe. Making matters worse, the old laser-guided bombs under his wings might fold with the added strain. Though he should have dropped the ordnance the moment they engaged in the furball, Henry hadn''t. Scarred from Stennis''s sinking, he worried a PLA Navy surface ship might be loitering in wait, ready to fire her missiles at the strike group.
Should the powerful Aegis search radar spot a blip, he was determined to go on the attack, to deliver justice for his squadron maters--for Ripper. With the purple clouds swirling over his canopy and the red dot blinking in the HUD, he flipped through the multifunction display and switched off the angle-of-attack protector that would automatically prevent a stall. He pictured the Flanker racing down, closing the distance with him to put its heat-seekers in range. His fuel was down to twenty-five hundred pounds. There was a minor advantage in that--his aircraft was lighter, partially offsetting the dead weight of the bombs. He reduced his throttles, slowing to three hundred knots while the pilot in the Flanker shallowed his dive, aiming to level out behind Henry at the same altitude. But the closing aircraft would need to bleed speed after its long descent. It would be fast--and Henry could use that to his advantage.
He pictured the aerial geometry, waiting, thinking of the enemy pilot''s taunts, his cocky attitude. Whoever the enemy pilot was, he knew how to execute a cobra maneuver. But had the enemy trained against it? Henry waited, mentally rehearsing the combination of maneuvers he would need to execute in the blink of an eye, picturing the Flanker racing behind him. Now. He jerked his throttles to idle. He slammed the lever for the speed brake and batted down the landing gear handle. He brought his flaps to forty degrees and tugged his stick into his crotch. He grunted against the sudden loss of speed, his limbs heavy, his neck failing under the eight-fold increase in gravity.
The wings thudded and popped with the strain. Weighed by the bombs, Henry could only pray they wouldn''t snap right off. Tones rang out insistently in his helmet speakers but the blood flowing from his head dimmed his hearing. Stall, stall, stall, the female voice warned. Robbed of airflow over its wings, they had ceased to plane the air. The Hornet hung tilted in the sky, its nose aimed at space for a pregnant second before teetering seaward. With the ocean suddenly filling his windscreen, Henry stabbed the flare button. A fountain of burning magnesium shot up from his tailpipe, a hundred times hotter than the rapidly cooling metal.
The Chinese heat-seeking missile exploded above him. A beat later, the enemy Flanker pierced the yellow smoke, its engine cones red hot from the blistering chase. With flaps, landing gear, and speed brakes extended, Henry''s jet fell through the sky with all the aerodynamic grace of a dump truck. If his plan worked, the enemy''s radar, juiced with a million artificial intelligence algorithms, would inform its pilot that the Hornet was hit, tumbling to earth. The Flanker whipped forward and down, racing away. It snapped into a victory roll. Henry shoved his left boot into the rudder pedal. He pressed the throttles forward with his left hand.
As soon as he was able, he snapped the stick to the right, nudging the Hornet into a spin. The jet''s nose yawed left and down. The seeker head growled. Henry stabbed the button that would launch his final Sidewinder. Commander Guo Zhiyu''s Flanker had leveled from its victory roll when the missile sped into its engine cockles and exploded. The Russian-designed fighter broke into pieces, spreading a ten-mile debris field across the cold gray sea.