Black Star Rising

by Robert Gandt

  More Sea Sparrows and RIM-116s were launching from the cruisers Bunker Hill and her sister ship, Ticonderoga. More twenty-millimeter lead from the CIWS, which the gunners called the “Sea Whiz.”

  “Splash one Krait!” yelled Chief Lester. “Bunker Hill got one with a Sea Sparrow .”

  Boyce nodded his approval. The Sea Sparrow was a surface-to-air derivative of the air-to-air Sparrow missiles they carried on fighters. But one out of three wasn’t good enough. Two of the ship killers were still coming like meteors from hell.

  Boyce had never felt so exposed. He’d seen his share of combat, but it was always in the air, and he was always armed. Now he felt like an ant on a mound.

  “One minute,” said a voice beside him.

  Boyce turned to look at Hightree. “One minute for what?”

  “In one minute those things will be here. Or they won’t.”

  “You’re making me feel a hell of a lot better,” said Boyce.

  Hightree grinned. “Relax, Red. A walk in the park, remember?”

  Boyce had to shake his head. It was a role reversal, Hightree, the most nervous old lady in the fleet, telling him to relax.

  He felt the deck sway under him. The carrier was in a hard turn to port. Sticks Stickney, the Reagan’s captain, was bringing the maximum number of guns and missile batteries to bear on the northwest quadrant. The formation of escort ships around the Reagan was turning with her.

  “Twenty miles,” called Chief Lester.

  Boyce gazed out through the heavy plate glass. The two surviving missiles had gotten past the Aegis cruisers.

  <>

  6,200 feet, South China Sea

  Stalemate, thought Maxwell.

  The jets were so evenly matched that neither was gaining an angle on the other. With each nose-on pass Maxwell could see the upturned heads of the Dong-jin crew looking at him. Maxwell had a hundred feet altitude advantage on the Dong-jin.

  He remembered the old maxim. Put yourself in your opponent’s mind. It was a rule they hammered into you in every air combat course.

  Maxwell forced himself to think. What would you do in Zhang’s place?

  Zhang had to know he was running out of options. In a few more turns, they would both run out of altitude. But Zhang would run out slightly before Maxwell. He would either hit the water or level his wings and give Maxwell an opportunity to shoot him.

  Zhang knew this, and he wouldn’t wait. While he still had altitude, he would do something unexpected. What?

  He saw the Dong-jin curving toward him again. The Black Star was a hundred feet higher than the Dong-jin. As before, the two jets crossed noses. After the cross, each jet would reverse and come back for the next cross.

  What you do in Zhang’s place?

  The answer came to him.

  Maxwell reversed his turn and craned his neck over his shoulder to pick up the Dong-jin in its own reversal. The Dong-jin wasn’t there.

  “I lost him, Boss!” called Gypsy. “Where’d he go?”

  Maxwell knew, and he could almost admire Zhang’s boldness. Instead of matching Maxwell’s turn, Zhang had rolled his jet inverted and plunged into a split-S—the lower half of a loop. He would pull through the bottom and come back up into a vertical climb. And have the Black Star in his sights.

  “What do we do now?” said Gypsy.

  “Watch.”

  He held the Black Star in its level turn for an agonizing two more seconds. Then he abruptly rolled inverted and pulled, hauling the Black Star’s nose straight down toward the water.

  If he was right, the Dong-jin would be there. If he was wrong—

  “Three o’clock low!” yelled Gypsy. “See him?”

  Maxwell blinked, refocused, and saw it through the green haze of the goggles. There it was. The shimmering bat-shaped craft just bottoming out of its dive.

  He pulled hard, cutting across the Dong-jin’s turn. The extra two seconds he’d waited put him higher and slower than the Dong-jin. Now he was looking straight down at the top of the Dong-jin’.

  But the angle was still too acute. It would be a high deflection shot, something close to sixty degrees. If he missed, they’d finish the fight on the water. His advantage would be gone.

  “Extend the flaps,” he ordered in the intercom. It was an old fighter pilot trick, putting out the landing flaps to tighten your turn radius. Never mind that they were a hundred knots over the Black Star’s maximum flap extension speed. He needed Gypsy to extend them so he could stay locked on the fuzzy image of the Dong-jin.

  “What? We’re too fast to put out flaps. They’re going to—”

  “Just goddamnit do it!”

  Gypsy got the message. “Yes, sir.” An instant later the flaps extended.

  It worked. With the tightened turning radius, Maxwell pulled the nose behind the Dong-jin’s tail. Then he reversed and pulled hard in the other direction, working the lead-computing gun sight up to the shimmering image of the Dong-jin.

  He grunted against the high-G load. Rivulets of perspiration streamed from inside his helmet into his eyes.

  The pipper was still behind the Dong-jin. He pulled harder. He felt the Black Star’s airframe shuddering.

  A little more. The flight control computer was overriding his inputs, keeping the jet at its maximum allowable G for the airspeed. But the advantage of the extended flaps was allowing him to pull tighter than the Chinese jet. The pipper of his gun sight was almost touching the tail of the Dong-jin.

  The range was decreasing too fast, less than a thousand feet now. In a few seconds he would overshoot the Dong-jin’s flight path and go outside.

  The gun sight pipper was inching up the tail of the Dong-jin.

  Range eight hundred.

  He nudged the sight a bit further. He had a clear view of the Dong-jin. He saw vapor trails spewing off the wingtips as the jet pulled its maximum G load. Maxwell could see the two helmeted figures in the cockpit. They were looking at him.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  <>

  Zhang wasn’t afraid. The gwai-lo didn’t have a shot. The deflection angle was too great. He would have to pull too much lead—aim his cannon too far in front of the Dong-jin. In any case, the American had just overplayed his hand. His diving pursuit turn would take him deep and outside the Dong-jin’s turn. All Zhang had to do was return to the vertical, reverse and he’d—

  “Tracers!” yelled Po. “He’s firing.”

  Zhang saw them too. It had to be a desperation shot. The gwai-lo had no more than a couple of seconds’ firing opportunity, then it would be over.

  The tracers seemed to be floating downward. It was an impossibly high lead angle. The tracers were arcing toward the tail of the Dong-jin. And missing.

  Exactly as he expected. The deflection was too great to score a—

  Something hit the Dong-jin. It felt like hammer blows against the airframe. The blows were coming from the aft fuselage.

  A red light was flashing on the warning panel. Something in the engine bay was damaged. Zhang had no time to deal with it. He had to escape the gwai-lo’s cannon.

  “We’re hit!” screamed Po in the back seat. “We have a fire in the—”

  Po’s words were cut short. A gelatinous red spray gushed from behind Zhang, splattering his canopy and windscreen. It took a microsecond to comprehend what he was seeing.

  The remains of Lieutenant Po.

  A roaring air noise filled the cockpit. The canopy behind him was shattered, exposed to the wind.

  More red lights flashed on the warning panel. From the Dong-jin’s aft fuselage came a rumbling sound, like the bellow of a wounded beast. An ominous vibration rattled the airframe. The jet was rolling to the left. Zhang tried to counter the roll by shoving the stick all the way to the right. There was no response.

  He had one option left. His hands moved by instinct, reaching for the handle of the ejection seat.

  The Dong-jin was in a nearly vertical bank. Zhang could see the textured su
rface 0f the South China Sea below.

  He pulled the handle.

  <>

  USS Ronald Reagan

  “There they are,” said Hightree. He was pointing through the thick glass to the northwest.

  Boyce didn’t see them. He blinked and looked again. It wasn’t possible to spot something that small. Not at that distance, not moving at over two thousand miles per hour.

  But there they were. They looked like tiny cigars floating in space. They were silhouetted against a tableau of detonating missiles and a gray curtain of twenty-millimeter fire.

  Coming closer.

  Boyce was aware of a deep moaning noise. As he listened, the noise was joined by another, then another. The moaning swelled in his consciousness—until he realized what it was.

  The Sea Whiz. He was hearing the combined sound of all the portside CIWS guns. Each six-barrel Gatling gun was spitting 4,500 rounds per minute. They were the ship’s last ditch defense.

  As if on cue, the Kraits entered their programmed evasive maneuvers. The missiles pitched up in a vertical zigzag, then resumed their trajectories to the Reagan.

  The hail of lead from the Sea Whiz followed the zigzagging Kraits. The moaning sound deepened. A volley of Sea Sparrows leaped from their launchers beneath the aft port flight deck. The horizon to the east of the Reagan blurred into a wall of gray.

  The Kraits kept coming.

  Boyce shook his head in wonder. How could anything penetrate that fence of steel?

  Then he saw the answer. It couldn’t.

  One of the Kraits disintegrated. The warhead exploded, spewing a cone of dirty smoke and fire toward the sea. Pieces of the weapon glanced off the surface, then kicked up geysers of spray for several hundred more yards.

  The last Krait was still coming.

  Boyce had a good view of the incoming missile. It was untouched by the defensive fire. It was so close that Boyce could see the ugly brown shape, the blurry torch of its ram jet engine, the large aft guidance fins.

  And he could see now where the Krait was aimed.

  “Don’t forget to duck, Red,” said Hightree.

  Chapter 33 — Projectiles

  1,200 feet

  South China Sea

  0710 Monday, 7 May

  “YeeeeeHaaa!”

  Gypsy Palmer’s cheer hurt Maxwell’s eardrums.

  “You got him! You nailed that sonofabitch.”

  Later, thought Maxwell, in a quieter moment he would replay the cockpit tape for her. He wanted to see her face when she heard herself yelling like a deranged wrestler.

  They bottomed out of the vertical maneuver less than five hundred feet over the water. They had overshot the flight path of the Dong-jin, but it didn’t matter. The Dong-jin was in a rolling dive, streaming flame as it plunged toward the sea.

  Maxwell kept his eyes on it. He wanted to see it die. He wanted visual confirmation that Zhang was dead.

  There was a momentary orange flash. A geyser of water shot into the air, marking the Dong-jin’s crash site.

  Gypsy’s voice came over the intercom. “Hey, boss, check eight o’clock level.”

  He tore his eyes away from the spot where the Dong-jin had crashed. He peered over his left shoulder. He blinked, then shoved the CFD goggles up so that he could see more clearly.

  There was something out there. The pale, hemispherical canopy of a parachute. It was descending through five hundred feet.

  “What are you going to do?” said Gypsy.

  Maxwell didn’t answer.

  <>

  PLAN Submarine Yuanzheng 67

  Capt. Wu Tsien-li was perplexed. What was happening on the surface?

  The U.S. destroyers on the outer screen of the U.S. strike group had lost their contact with Yuanzheng 67. He knew this by the direction and pattern of their active sonar search. Instead of tracking Yuanzheng 67, they had shifted to a systematic sweep of their perimeter.

  But something was different. The destroyers had just changed their formation. Wu’s sonar operator had reported that the American ships were firing surface-to-air missiles.

  Firing missiles at what? Wu was perplexed. Had the war resumed, perhaps escalated to an open sea battle?

  This sparsity of information was frustrating. The PLA navy’s undersea communications network was not as sophisticated as that of the Americans. Wu had no way of receiving updated information from the PLA high command unless he ascended to a shallow enough depth to raise his satellite communications antenna. Such an action would make him an instant contact on surface radar screens.

  Wu’s last orders were to shadow the American carrier strike group, but avoid provocative gestures. Which was causing Wu a feeling of great disappointment. He and the crew of Yuanzheng 67 had covered themselves with glory. His exploits in the South China Sea had earned him huge recognition in the high command of the PLA navy. He was the highest-scoring submarine commander in modern history—six enemy patrol boats, two freighters, and a U.S. submarine.

  “Undersea message traffic,” reported his communications systems officer. “U.S. coded message traffic. It appears to be urgent one-way communication to a submarine in this vicinity, Captain.”

  Wu frowned. This was bad news. It meant there definitely was a U.S. submarine somewhere close, probably an SSN fast attack submarine. The Americans wouldn’t use the noisy extra low frequency communications band in a possible combat situation unless it was an urgent one-way signal to the submarine’s captain.

  Wu was getting an uneasy feeling. In their game of hide-and-seek, he could locate each of the American surface ships. If he chose, he could put a torpedo into each of them. But he was unable to locate his most dangerous adversary—the U.S. submarine. It was the reverse of the situation when he had detected the American submarine that was stalking the convoy out of Guangzhou. He remained undetected until he fired the Shkval, and then it was too late for the Americans. Their slower-moving Mk 48 torpedo could not cover the distance between the submarines before the Shkval struck home.

  Wu loved the Shkval rocket torpedo. Its guidance system was primitive, more on the order of an unguided missile, but it was deadly at close range. The Russians called it the “revenge weapon” because it could be fired down the bearing line of an incoming torpedo. It would either kill the torpedo or the submarine that launched it.

  All this was on Wu’s mind when he heard the high pitched voice of the sonar operator. “Torpedo! Bearing 050, incoming.”

  Wu’s mind snapped back to the present. He had rehearsed this moment a hundred times in training. He was on the defensive, and there was only one appropriate response.

  “Stand by tube number two. Set target bearing 050, and update on the incoming contact.”

  “Yes, Captain, tube number two ready.”

  “Update bearing and fire when ready. Hard left, steer 230, depth eighty meters, full ahead.”

  The fire controller and the helmsman both acknowledged.

  A rumble shook the frame of the Yuanzheng 67.

  “Tube two fired, Captain.”

  The Shkval was on its way. And the Yuanzheng 67 was barreling away at full speed in the opposite direction. It was contrary to the old PLA navy and Russian doctrine, which taught that you should turn toward your opponent, trying to force his torpedo to overshoot. But that was before the Shkval. They were in a race now, and the Shkval was the fastest of the competing weapons. Wu wanted to get as far away as he could from the incoming Mk 48 while the Shkval closed the distance on the American submarine.

  A new, relentless pinging came over the sonar. It was audible through the steel frame of the submarine.

  “Active homing,” said the sonarman. “The torpedo is tracking us.”

  Wu could see the incoming torpedo on the master display. It was close, less than two thousand meters, moving at twice the speed of the Yuanzheng 67. Everything depended now on timing. At the last moment, he would evade and deceive the enemy torpedo.

  He watched the relentless, on
coming blip on the display. He waited until it was within a thousand meters.

  “Hard left, full rudder, 140. Deploy decoys.”

  Behind the hard-turning Yuanzheng 67 streamed a trail of acoustic decoys. The torpedo would track one of the decoys. Or else it would turn to pursue the Yuanzheng 67.

  <>

  500 feet, South China Sea

  A miracle, thought Zhang.

  The Russian-built Zvezda K-36 was the best ejection seat in the world. For the second time in his career, it had saved him from a destroyed Dong-jin. The device had functioned perfectly—the chest protector deploying in front of him, the two stabilizing booms behind. He had separated from the seat cleanly.

  Now he hung suspended in the harness. He was less than a minute from splashing into the sea. The sea state didn’t appear rough, waves less than a meter in height. The survival pack attached to his harness included a life raft and signaling equipment. The PLA navy would come to rescue him.

  Only seconds after his parachute deployed, Zhang had watched his jet crash into the sea. A feeling of intense bitterness swept over him. He no longer had any doubt about the identity of his adversary. From the moment their engagement began, he knew it was Maxwell.

  The descending parachute made a rustling noise in the thick air. The shroud lines were vibrating softly like the strings of an instrument. The gentle sounds were peaceful after the din and roar of the air battle. Zhang was close enough to the surface to hear the lapping noise of the waves.

  And something else.

  He cocked his head, listening. A deeper noise, not from the sea. Definitely not from the nylon canopy of his parachute.

  Jet noise.

  A jolt of anxiety shot through him. The Black Star. It was still out there. And Zhang couldn’t see him.