Black Star Rising

by Robert Gandt

  “Which means—”

  “I’m going with you.”

  Maxwell didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. ““That’s swell,” he said. “So when do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow night,” said Boyce. “A C-17 will take the Dragon Flight team as far as Guam, and a pair of C-5s is going to haul our hardware. While it’s being transported by surface out to the Reagan, the three of us are going to take a little side trip.”

  He knew Boyce. Boyce was waiting for him to ask the next question.

  He gave it a beat, watching Boyce play with his olive. “Ah, side trip to where, Admiral?”

  “Where do you think?” Boyce took a sip of his martini. “Hanoi, of course.”

  Chapter 8 — Gwai-lo

  Lingshui air base, Hainan Island

  0615 Thursday, 26 April

  Kill symbols, thought Gen. Zhang Yu. They would be an appropriate touch on the side of his fighter. Too bad that it was not possible.

  General Zhang stood beside the Dong-jin admiring the jet’s oddly beautiful lines. The big bi-fold door was already closing over the entrance to the hangar. Through the narrow space remaining beneath the door Zhang could see the horizon glimmering in the east. He and his wingman, Major Tsan, had landed back at Lingshui air base just before sunrise. The missions were ridiculously easy. Even though he detested low altitude flight over the water at night, killing Vietnamese aircraft made it worthwhile.

  It was a great pity that he couldn’t paint a tally of all his kills on the unblemished skin of the stealth fighter. His total aerial victories—eighteen after this morning’s mission—would cover the entire fuselage beneath the cockpit. The trouble was no one would ever see them. No one except the handful of select technicians allowed to work on the secret Dong-jin stealth jets.

  The hangar door closed, blocking Zhang’s view of the coming dawn. His systems officer, Lieutenant Po, was still climbing down the ladder from his seat in the aft cockpit. As usual, Zhang didn’t bother waiting for Po. He turned and strode across the hangar bay, out the exit and down the long hallway to his office bunker.

  It was not unique in the PLA air force for an officer with the rank of general to fly operational fighters. It was rare, however, that a general like Zhang Yu would not only fly combat missions but he would do it in the air force’s most secret weapon, the Dong-jin.

  But Zhang himself was a unique figure in the PLA. He wore two hats—commander of the secret Dong-jin unit, and the commanding general of the Hainan Island military sector. All the units of the PLA on Hainan—over fifty-thousand troops, air defense batteries, six air force squadrons of SU-27 and F-7 fighters as well as the invisible Dong-jins—all reported directly to Zhang.

  Zhang arrived at his office door, waved away the sentry who quivered at full attention in the passageway, and let himself inside. Not until the door was closed and he was alone did Zhang do what he always did when he returned from a mission in the Dong-jin. He went to the mirror mounted on the wall beside his desk.

  For a full minute Zhang stared at the face. He had to force himself not to turn away in revulsion.

  Hideous. The waxen mask leering back at him was all that remained of what had once been a handsome face. Reconstructive surgery had left him a stub of a nose, which was set above the diagonal slash of his mouth.

  Somehow Zhang’s eyes had been preserved. They glowered back at him now like embers in a bed of ash, reminding him of what happened three years ago.

  Zhang Yu’s ascent through the ranks of the PLA air force had been meteoric. Early in his career, he was assigned the task of ferreting out the politically untrustworthy members of the PLA—dissidents, collaborators, rumor-mongers. His methods were harsh, meant to discourage others from breaking ranks. As a reward for his diligence, his mentor and patron, General Tsin, Chief of Staff of the PLA, had given Zhang command of the vital Dong-jin project, even though he was still only a colonel.

  When the war with Taiwan erupted three years ago, Zhang was ready. His Dong-jin fighters, developed from technology stolen from the United States, were the deadliest weapons in the sky. Zhang alone destroyed eleven Taiwanese aircraft and sank over a dozen warships. Because of his brilliant success, he was assured of future high command in the PLA. Perhaps even a seat in government.

  And then something happened.

  One night a Taiwanese commando force, guided by traitors from within the PLA, struck the Chouzhou air base where Zhang’s three completed Dong-jins were hidden. One of the precious jets was destroyed inside its protected hangar. Zhang managed to get airborne in another. The third Dong-jin was commandeered by an enemy pilot, who somehow possessed the skill and knowledge to take off and fly the exotic jet.

  The stolen Dong-jin was halfway across the strait when Zhang intercepted it. In a swirling, fuel-consuming, low altitude duel over the water, the enemy pilot managed to bring his cannon to bear on Zhang’s jet.

  With the Dong-jin exploding around him, his cockpit filling with a torrent of flame, Zhang ejected. Seconds later he was in the water, horribly burned, more dead than alive. He drifted for half an hour before a PLA navy vessel rescued him. No trace was found of his weapons systems officer, Captain Yan.

  During the months of rehabilitation and surgery, Zhang had time to reflect on what happened. A thousand times in his memory, the dogfight with the stolen Dong-jin replayed itself. The questions kept repeating themselves like an endless tape.

  Who was the pilot?

  How did he know enough about the Dong-jin to fly it in combat?

  Was he a PLA defector? Or a Taiwanese?

  Or was he a gwai-lo—a westerner?

  The pilot who stole the Dong-jin almost certainly had experience in a similar aircraft. And the only similar aircraft in the world was the one from which the Dong-jin was copied—the secret American stealth jet called the Black Star.

  In tiny increments, like the dripping of water into a vessel, the level of knowledge began to rise. Chinese operatives in the U.S. supplied facts about secret projects and those who worked on them. PLA agents planted inside the Taiwanese military high command brought back snippets of information about American activity during the short war between China and Taiwan.

  What happened to the stolen Dong-jin? Extensive computer simulations of the flight path, time aloft, and available fuel aboard the jet proved that the Dong-jin could not have reached an air base in Taiwan. An exhaustive search turned up no evidence that it crashed at sea.

  Which led to only one ominous likelihood. Cruising in the eastern strait, within range of the fuel-starved Dong-jin, was an American aircraft carrier—the USS Ronald Reagan. It would be technically very difficult to land such an aircraft aboard a carrier—the Dong-jin had no tailhook or high lift devices to give it a slow landing speed—but it was theoretically possible if the pilot were an exceedingly skilled carrier aviator.

  The Americans captured the Dong-jin.

  Then came more tantalizing clues. A U.S. Navy pilot was observed by a PLA agent at the Chingchuankang commando base in Taiwan during the time of the raid on Chouzhou. If the reports were true, he was an experienced carrier aviator, the commander of a fighter squadron aboard USS Reagan. Even more tantalizing was his background. He had once been a test pilot assigned to a secret project at the U.S. base called Groom Lake. The place where the American Black Star—and its Chinese sibling, the Dong-jin—were developed.

  The war between Taiwan and China abruptly ended only a few days after Zhang’s crash. In the purge that followed, Zhang’s former patron in the PLA, General Tsin, was arrested and executed. Zhang himself escaped the recriminations. He continued his fast track to high command. Though his facial disfigurement would have disqualified him for a more public role in the PLA, it didn’t matter in the invisible world of the Dong-jin.

  Zhang’s promotion to general and his appointment to command the Hainan military sector were not without controversy. During his year of convalescence, two of his rivals, both air force colonels, had
risen to prominence in the PLA high command. Just as he had done in the old days when he led the purge of the PLA’s dissidents, he eliminated these threats to his further ascent in the PLA rank structure.

  The first was easy. Using his old connections in Te-Wu—the PLA secret police—Zhang exposed a classic case of corruption and bribe-taking by his arch rival. The man, a newly minted general, was summarily removed from his command. A few days later it was reported that he had committed suicide.

  Eliminating the second rival took a bit longer. Again using agents of the Te-Wu, Zhang planted evidence linking the officer, also a new general, to a dissident group with links to Taiwan. It didn’t matter that the charges were never proved. The officer disappeared from view and was also reported to be a suicide.

  Now Zhang commanded the Dong-jin squadron, the most elite unit in the PLA air force. Even better, he was responsible for all military operations on the island of Hainan, which was the hinge point of the war in the South China Sea.

  But his face was still hideous.

  Abruptly Zhang swung away from the mirror. He could feel the same old pounding in his temples, his scalp tingling as it always did he when he thought of the gwai-lo who shot him down.

  Zhang sat at his desk and pulled out the sliding wooden tray beneath the desk top. On it was taped a clipping from a magazine. As he had done a hundred times before, Zhang stared at the photograph in the clipping.

  A smiling Caucasian man was wearing a blue naval uniform with three stripes on the sleeves. He was shaking hands with another officer, a burly black man who also wore three stripes. The smiling man appeared to be taller than average, with the lean build of an athlete. He had a dark mustache and the angular, oversized nose that uncivilized gwai-los considered attractive. Judging by the expression, Zhang could see that this man was confident, proud of his looks, accustomed to being admired by other men and, probably, desired by women.

  But the most telling item in the photograph was parked in the background. It was an F/A-18 Super Hornet. Visible on the fuselage beneath the canopy were three silhouettes.

  MiG-29s. Kill symbols.

  In lettering just below the canopy rail was a name: CDR Brick Maxwell.

  Zhang stared at the photograph, his eyes blazing. He knew the caption by heart:

  Aboard USS Ronald Reagan, Commander Samuel J. Maxwell USN, CO of VFA-36, is relieved by Commander Felix B. Alexander. In an earlier ceremony, Commander Maxwell was presented the Distinguished Service Medal by Commander, Carrier Strike Group Three, Rear Admiral John H. Hightree.

  Prior to assuming command of VFA-36, Commander Maxwell served as the squadron’s operations officer and executive officer. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, he was assigned as a special projects test pilot before receiving orders to NASA, where he trained as a space shuttle pilot and flew one orbital mission aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

  Commander Maxwell’s new duty station will be the U.S. Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center at NAS Fallon, Nevada.

  Zhang shoved the tray with the photo back inside the desk. Maxwell. Learning the man’s identity had taken nearly a year of intelligence harvesting. The scraps of circumstantial data gradually came together like pieces of a complicated mosaic. But it was still circumstantial. There was no hard evidence to prove that it was Maxwell who stole the Dong-jin and shot Zhang down.

  Zhang no longer required hard evidence. If he had gained anything from the terrible agony of the crash, it was a new and intuitive vision. Zhang needed only to look at the cocky, unscarred face of this gwai-lo to know.

  It was Maxwell.

  And now the PLA’s intelligence service had just presented Zhang with another tantalizing scrap of information. The man who stole the Dong-jin was back. According to a report from a reliable and highly placed source in Vietnam, a man fitting the profile of Commander Samuel J. Maxwell had just arrived in Hanoi.

  Why?

  It was too much of a coincidence that he would choose this moment to visit Vietnam. But it didn’t matter. It was an opportunity Zhang did not intend to pass up.

  <>

  Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

  “I told you help was on the way,” said the President.

  Joe Ferrone looked at the grinning face in the videoconferencing screen. “You didn’t tell me it was Red Boyce and his gang of burglars.”

  “I wanted to be sure they had their act together before they went out there. You do have it together, don’t you, Red?”

  Red Boyce, seated on the couch next to Ferrone, said, “You bet your ass we do, Mr. President.”

  President Hollis Benjamin laughed. “I still don’t know how a guy like you ever made admiral in the U.S. Navy, Red.”

  “Same way Joe Ferrone did. Baffled them with bullshit. It just took me longer.”

  Watching the exchange, Ferrone had to shake his head. He was sure that no one else got to talk to the President of the United States this way. No one except the President’s old Navy buddies.

  “And it’s good to see you again, Brick,” said the President. “How’s your old man? Still full of piss and vinegar?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Maxwell, sitting on Ferrone’s right. “I spoke with him just before I left the States. He’s doing fine, puttering with his old cars, rebuilding a Porsche now.”

  The President smiled, then his face took on a sober expression. “It was my idea to get you guys together in Hanoi. I want everyone reading from the same page before we start the next phase of this, ah, operation. And I wanted Red and Brick to get their feet on the ground in the country we’ve befriended in this dispute.”

  The three men watching the screen nodded their understanding.

  The President went on. “Ambassador Ferrone is doing his utmost to bring both sides in this disagreement to the negotiating table. The mission of Red Boyce’s STOU team will be to discourage, ah, certain parties from overstepping the limits of. . . let’s just say, ah, acceptable behavior.”

  Ferrone understood that the President was being deliberately vague. Even Ferrone didn’t know exactly what Boyce and his STOU team were tasked to do, or what kind of exotic equipment they brought with them. Only that they were staging from the USS Reagan, on station now in the South China Sea. Ferrone had been around long enough to know how covert operations worked. No one was supposed to possess all the pieces of the puzzle. Especially an old civilian bureaucrat like Joe Ferrone.

  But another side of Joe Ferrone objected to being left out of the picture. He was, at heart, a military officer. He had commanded an aircraft carrier, a battle group, and for a while an entire fleet. At his fingertips had been enough firepower to demolish an entire nation. Now he was an outsider.

  But he had already figured out most of the obvious stuff. It didn’t take an intelligence expert to deduce that the Chinese were employing some kind of stealth aircraft. The ChiComs were indulging in invisible warfare, both above and below the surface. Ferrone knew too that the U.S. possessed advanced stealth aircraft of its own.

  The arrival of Boyce and Maxwell supported his belief. Boyce was running a black ops unit out in Fallon. He knew that young Maxwell, who worked for Boyce, had once been a test pilot on one of the spook projects at Groom Lake. And he knew that a supply ship from Guam had just loaded some large items cloaked in wraps aboard the Reagan at sea. It had to be stealth jets.

  Ferrone wished he could see. Someday the wraps would come off, and he intended to get a close look at the thing that Maxwell was flying. Old pilots never got over their love for exotic toys.

  On the video screen, a young woman in a business suit was whispering something in the President’s ear. Benjamin nodded, then looked back into the video cam.

  “They’re nagging me about another damned meeting I’m late for. The truth is I’d rather spend the time with you guys telling war stories.”

  He pushed himself away from the console and tossed a salute to the video cam. “Carry on, gentlemen. Good luck to you.”

&n
bsp; The camera remained focused on the empty chair. Then the screen flickered and filled with snow.

  Boyce said, “I still have trouble picturing Beaver Benjamin as the Commander in Chief. Back in flight training, the guy was a social klutz. He was too tongue-tied to ask a girl for a date.”

  “I think he’s gotten over that,” said Ferrone.

  Ferrone led them out of the videoconferencing room back toward the embassy reception room. As he walked, he had to force himself not to limp. The goddamn leg again. Aching like a sonofabitch.

  Two women, deep in conversation, looked up as the men entered the reception room. One was a slender Vietnamese woman with swept-back black hair, brown eyes set above high cheek bones. She wore the traditional ao-dai—a slitted dress over long silk pants. The second woman was taller. She had red hair and tortoise shell glasses. She wore a yellow pant suit, clasped at the waist to reveal a slim, athletic figure.

  “There you are, Kim,” Ferrone said to the Vietnamese woman. “I see you’ve met Dr. Boudroux.”

  Chapter 9 — Magic Sword

  Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

  1545 Thursday, 26 April

  Lime?” said Ferrone.

  “A twist,” said the American woman. “Just one.”

  Ferrone applied the lime, then slid the vodka tonic across the bar to her. The white coated bartender—the real bartender—watched indulgently while the ambassador mixed drinks for his guests.

  Ferrone was enjoying himself. Playing bartender was something he had done when he was a flag officer with stewards assigned to his staff. It lowered barriers, he believed, allowing junior officers to communicate with him on an informal level.

  They were in the lounge wing of the reception hall where Ferrone received visiting dignitaries. Dark wooden panels covered the walls. On all sides of the room were tapestries, displays of Vietnamese art, vases and urns in each corner. Ferrone’s cat, an overweight Tabby named Maynard, observed the gathering from his own stool at the end of the bar.