Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “Good question,” Jonathan said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be back.” He moved out into the passageway, looked both ways, then picked one and marched ahead.

  Kyra reached the top of the metal ladder, then pressed her body against the bulkhead as a pair of sailors rushed by on their way down. She resumed her stumbling run. The bulkheads were closing around her and she shut her eyes to keep them away, then looked ahead again. She needed air and there was only one place on the carrier she could get outside without getting in the way of sailors carrying out combat operations.

  Kyra found the hatch she had been searching for and fumbled with the heavy metal lever. She finally put her weight into it and then her shoulder against the metal door, and it swung open, letting her stumble out into the morning air. The sunlight blinded her for a few seconds, then she rushed forward until she could put her hands on the rail and look down from Vulture’s Row to the flight deck.

  Sailors were everywhere, moving in a frenzied mass. In the distance, an F-18 Hornet was lined up and inbound, trailing smoke from an engine, its wings wobbling. The pilot managed to get the fighter’s nose up at the last minute, barely avoiding a ramp strike, or so Kyra thought. The arresting cables caught the tailhook and a fire crew was running toward the plane before it was dragged to a stop.

  Not safe.

  Kyra couldn’t slow her breathing. Panic attack, something told her. She clutched the rail and looked up and away from the carrier deck.

  Gettysburg and Shiloh and two other picket ships rode the waves in the distance. All four vessels were firing at random intervals into the sky, and Kyra watched a pair of missiles lift off from Shiloh. She followed their contrails as they surged away from the ship, and Kyra realized she could see bits of the dogfights. An explosion flared as one of Shiloh’s missiles destroyed some plane, and Kyra saw Gettysburg send another one of its own missiles into the air.

  Kyra clutched the rail and tried to hold her breath, but her lungs kept working on their own. She turned her head and only then saw that she wasn’t alone. Another young woman, a seaman apprentice, was hanging on to the rail too. She looked at Kyra, her eyes wide with terror. The seaman was younger than she was, still a kid, she realized. Scared out of her teenage mind enough that the girl had abandoned her post, wherever that was. We’re at general quarters. Where’s your station? Kyra thought, suddenly rational. They’ll throw you in the brig.

  Kyra felt a hand on her shoulder and she grabbed it. Jonathan, she knew.

  The strange plane dove for the water, rolling to one side. Nagin saw its bay doors open. A pair of missiles rolled down, and suddenly the Assassin’s Mace was on his scope. Nagin swung his F-35 around as hard as the avionics allowed, but the Chinese stealth plane was arcing inside his turn.

  One of the enemy plane’s missiles flew off its rail with white smoke trailing behind and punched into a thundercloud ahead, where Nagin lost sight of it.

  Fighter-BOMBER, he realized.

  The bay doors snapped shut and the Assassin’s Mace disappeared from Nagin’s scope. His AMRAAM went blind and the PLA’s stealth fighter rolled away from Nagin.

  Nagin could see the plane with his eyes but his F-35 couldn’t see it on radar.

  So that’s what it feels like, he thought. Okay, a knife fight it is.

  The inbound Yingji missile was twenty-five miles out and moving at Mach 1.6.

  The Tactical Flag Command Center and every radio on the carrier exploded with excited chatter. Pollard was proud that everyone wasn’t diving for cover under their stations.

  “You have to come inside!” Jonathan yelled.

  “Can’t,” Kyra said. Her rapid breathing made it hard to speak. “I can’t.”

  “It’s not safe out here!”

  “You said . . . you said ‘no safe place on a carrier,’” she finally managed to answer.

  “Some places are less dangerous than others.”

  Kyra heard the 1MC speaker switch on. “All hands, brace for shock!” Then the chaff launchers fired.

  Lincoln was no destroyer or frigate but she was hardly defenseless. The Nimitz-class vessel, like her sisters, had been built to fight a Soviet navy and air force with hundreds of planes, so the designers had assumed that somewhere, someday, a bandit would get close enough to fire on a carrier. Lincoln carried her own countermeasures and point-defense weapons.

  “Countermeasures.” Lincoln’s captain in the CIC held his voice steady. The crew relied on his calm as much as anything to control their own fears.

  On the flattop, the carrier began ejecting chaff into the air, port side. The Phalanx guns and Sea Sparrow missile launchers pivoted toward the inbound missile.

  “Range nine miles and closing. Sea Sparrows firing.”

  Pollard stared at the screen, watching the incoming missile close on his carrier. If it was going to hit anywhere, he would lay money on it striking the carrier island. Right where he was standing.

  “Inside, now!” Jonathan yelled. Kyra saw his gaze fixed at the horizon.

  “What—?” She turned to look just in time to see Lincoln fire its missiles.

  The RIM-7 Sea Sparrow launchers put two missiles into the air. The solid propellant motors fired and got the weapons to speed in less than two seconds. They closed the distance to the incoming Yingji in a fraction less than seven.

  “Miss!” a tech announced. “Eagle Strike was just outside their kill radius. Distance two miles. Artoos tracking.” The Yingji and Sparrows had closed on each other’s positions at a relative speed of almost four thousand miles an hour, giving the Sparrows too little time to make course corrections before detonation. Each missile had a ninety-pound warhead that pushed shrapnel in a thirty-foot circle, but the Yingji slipped through.

  “We do it the old-fashioned way now.” Pollard’s voice was hard steel, but the crew knew he was trying to sound optimistic. The Phalanx guns were the last resort and considered less effective against high-speed missiles than the Sea Sparrows, which had just missed.

  The chaff launchers kept punching aluminum strips into the air, trying to confuse the Yingji, which stubbornly held its course. The port-side Phalanx guns fore and aft spun on their mounts a bit, making a final targeting correction, and the 20 mm Gatlings fired together, sounding like the Devil’s own chainsaw. Streams of lead erupted at the rate of four thousand rounds a minute.

  Kyra heard the buzzing of the guns, surprisingly loud over the other deafening noise of the flight deck.

  “Get down!” Jonathan grabbed her and pushed her down onto the deck behind the metal shield of the railing. He fell on top of her, then pushed himself up onto one foot to go for the seaman apprentice, who was still frozen in place.

  The first gun missed by inches. The second hit the Yingji’s nose cone just off center and ripped it to pieces at a distance of three-quarters of a mile from Lincoln. The antiship missile was torn apart by a combination of bullets, stress from the supersonic air ripping into its now-damaged frame, and, a moment later, impact with the Taiwan Strait at just under Mach 2 a half mile from the carrier. At that speed, hitting the water was like diving into a field of concrete. The missile shattered into thousands of pieces, bits skipping across the water like stones. Others flew through the air in a straight line toward the ship.

  Kyra heard tiny bits of metal on metal clang on the hull, sharp sounds, like gunshots hitting a steel backstop at supersonic speed.

  The seaman apprentice shrieked. Kyra twisted her head to look as she heard the other woman’s body hit the deck plates. Jonathan scrambled over to her, and Kyra hauled herself to her feet. She heard Shiloh fire another missile miles away. Another Phalanx gun, probably Gettysburg, sounded in the distance.

  The sailor was on her back and still conscious, a dark spot expanding on her blue coveralls over the left shoulder. Jonathan pulled the woman’s uniform open and tore her shirt so he could get a look at the wound.

  “Vampire down,” the tech announced, his own voice quavering just a hair.
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  Lucky, Pollard thought. “We can’t stay here all day.” The admiral looked at the screen. “Sometime this week, Grizzly,” he announced. The mic wasn’t live. Nagin didn’t need to hear the nagging to get on with his job.

  Nagin rolled in the opposite direction and approached the other plane almost head-on, certainly inside the Chinese plane’s radar cone, and the enemy fighter hadn’t shot at him. Nagin’s own plane hadn’t detected a radar sweep from the other plane. Even with the help of the AWACS and the entire Lincoln battle group, the return was still weak when it did show up. Nagin took a chance, put the F-35’s nose dead on the Mace, opened his missile bay, and switched on his active radar. The Slammers still refused to sound the tone that would have announced their willingness to shred the other plane into burning pieces.

  Nagin had never shot at another plane with his guns. He had maybe three seconds’ worth of gunfire, and dogfighting another stealth plane was not something any Navy pilot had ever trained for. In fact, he was pretty sure that the Lockheed engineers had never even studied the possibility.

  The Mace pushed hard into a turn and went nose down. Nagin followed, opened up his throttle to keep the distance constant, and pulled the trigger. I’m gonna pound your brains out.

  His gun flashed and the 25 mm rounds missed their moving target as the Chinese arrowhead rolled to the side and braked hard. Nagin cursed as the Mace curved behind.

  “No, you don’t,” Nagin muttered again, still loud enough to be broadcast. Nagin lifted his nose and leveled out. The Mace followed and Nagin rolled a quarter turn and went for the sky. The black plane behind him started to follow, but gravity pulled hard as it tried to end its dive and it could not make its climb as steep. Nagin backed off on his thrust, arced over and dove. The Mace flashed across his path, leveled, and dove again for the water. It was a skilled maneuver, and Nagin had expected no less. It only made sense that one of the PLA’s best pilots would be at the stick of their newest plane.

  Jonathan reached underneath the woman’s back and felt for blood. There was plenty. “Shrapnel, still in the shoulder. She’s bleeding fast. Might have nicked the subclavian artery,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Kyra. “Get down to the battle dressing station on the flight deck level. We need a corpsman—”

  “I don’t know where that is,” Kyra protested.

  Jonathan frowned, then pulled off his jacket and overshirt. He pressed the shirt against the girl’s wound and she cried out in pain. He grabbed Kyra’s arm with his free hand and pushed her hand down on his shirt. “Press here. Don’t let up. I’ll be back.”

  She shifted around Jonathan as he stood, lifting his hands off the sailor only when Kyra’s hands were firmly on the girl’s shoulder. “How do you know where it is?” Kyra asked.

  “Not my first aircraft carrier,” he said. Then he stepped through the hatch.

  “They’re in a rolling scissors,” Pollard said. The other Navy officers grumbled in agreement. Both planes were looping around in a line, trying to get position behind each other. It also meant the Chinese pilot had some real training. Assuming the pilots’ skills were an even match, the winner would be the man flying the better plane.

  Nagin had dropped his airspeed too far for comfort and still couldn’t stay behind the Mace. The Chinese plane was slower to accelerate despite its second engine but the larger wings gave it more control at slower speeds. It’s heavier than I am, Nagin thought. Perhaps the Chinese hadn’t figured out or stolen the methods for manufacturing all the lightweight composites that made up most of his own F-35. It was a question some engineer would have to figure out after the fact. Grizzly’s immediate problem was that the hostile was crossing in behind him.

  Tracers ripped by Nagin’s cockpit. He rolled the plane hard while dropping altitude.

  Time to bug out of this. If the Mace was more maneuverable at slow speeds, then the throttle would be the American’s friend today. He pulled out of the roll and into a hard turn away from the Mace, the fighters moving in opposite directions. Nagin pulled back and climbed for the sun.

  The Mace came around and started vertical toward the F-35. The hostile plane fired its guns again, the rounds going wide left. Nagin rolled over, turned into the Mace’s path and the two planes rushed past each other close enough that the jet wash rocked both planes. Nagin lifted his fighter into an Immelmann turn, moving in a half circle until his direction was reversed and he rolled wings-level.

  The Chinese pilot was reversing his turn through a wide circle, like a car making a U-turn, leaving his fighter near the same altitude as the F-35.

  “Come on, get inside that guy’s turn,” Pollard muttered.

  “Sir, our ten minutes are up. Our birds are gonna be getting close to bingo fuel,” one of the junior officers announced.

  “Any other bandits in positions to make a run on us?” Pollard asked.

  “No, sir,” the junior officer replied. “We’ve got them cordoned off.”

  “Contact Washington. Tell them it’s their turn to play,” Pollard ordered. “Once they’re in position, recall our people.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The seaman apprentice tried to move under Kyra’s hands and screamed as the bit of shrapnel ground against her collarbone.

  “Don’t move,” Kyra ordered her. “If you move—”

  “I got shot?” It came out almost as a stutter.

  She doesn’t know what happened. Kyra had taken the Agency’s course on trauma medicine, training for officers who were going to serve in war zones, where they might get pressed into service as first responders. Her thinking was suddenly clear and she recognized the symptoms of shock. The girl’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and she was staring straight up at the blue sky, her pupils dilated. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “It hurts.”

  Kyra had to lean close to the girl’s head to hear her. “I know,” Kyra told her. Distract her, she thought. “What’s your name?”

  “Cassie.”

  Nagin eased back on his throttle the smallest bit and pulled inside the Mace’s turn. The Chinese pilot saw it and throttled up his own plane. He began closing the distance between the two planes, trying to make the American overshoot or slow down again to avoid that error.

  Nagin grinned and slammed his throttle full forward. The F-35 jumped forward and crossed the Mace’s turn. He pulled hard right on the stick, rolled the plane, and came around in a tight circle that threatened to cross the Chinese plane’s turn again.

  Gotcha.

  The distance between the planes was less than two miles and the Mace couldn’t move any direction fast enough to escape the F-35’s attack vector. Nagin kicked the afterburner, tracked the Mace’s direction for a quarter second, and pulled the gun trigger.

  The rounds tore into the Mace’s airframe, shredding wing and stabilizer metal into jagged petals and ripping holes that began to spew fluids in dark contrails as the plane rolled into another corkscrew. Nagin held the gunsight on the black bird until his gun ran dry. He watched his tracers embed themselves in the black plane’s airframe—

  A solid red triangle appeared on the radar track. “There!” Pollard yelled. The cheers in the Tactical Flag Command Center were matched by the noise coming over the comm from the crew in the CIC. “Hard to hide from radar with a bunch of jagged holes in your wing.”

  “Sir, MIGs are moving to protect the Chinese plane,” someone announced over the comm. “Our birds are in pursuit. Time to intercept, forty seconds.”

  “They won’t get them all,” Pollard said over the speaker. “Not enough missiles left to take them all out. Washington’s fighters?”

  “Two minutes out,” someone said.

  “Grizzly, you’ve got thirty seconds and then you’ll have company,” Pollard said.

  Twenty more than I need. The Assassin’s Mace was in a steep dive, trailing black smoke and juking like a nervous insect. The island of Penghu was filling the canopy. Nagin pushed his throttle forward, fi
red the afterburner, and broke the speed of sound. Everyone on Penghu would hear it. Grizzly ignored the ground and focused on his helmet HUD. The radar in the nose was trying to get enough data on the black fighter for a missile lock, but even wounded, the black diamond was making itself a hard target. The Mace jerked up its nose and leveled out more quickly than Nagin had thought possible. He deployed the airbrakes and pulled back on his own stick and felt his entire body push against his seat harness as gravity pulled hard on him. He came out of the dive a half mile below the Mace. The Chinese stealth plane banked and turned toward its approaching brothers as it tried to close the distance faster than Pollard’s deadline.

  Nagin got inside the Mace’s turn and put the Joint Strike Fighter’s nose directly on the Chinese fighter’s underbelly. The HUD in his helmet sounded a tone.

  “Fox three!” Nagin said, trying not to shout.

  The weapons bays under the F-35 snapped open. One of the two AMRAAMs mounted on the doors dropped out. Its rocket motors ignited and the bay doors snapped shut in less than a second.

  The missile closed the distance to the Assassin’s Mace in four seconds. The Chinese pilot rolled hard left and deployed chaff and flares. The aluminum strips and pyrotechnics scattered behind did nothing to confuse the weapon tracking his ruptured airframe. The missile punched through the metal cloud and arced in toward its target.

  The Assassin’s Mace had a lifespan that could now be measured in single seconds. The pilot knew it and reached for the ejection handle.

  The missile exploded ten feet off the Mace’s right aileron, showering the rear quarter of the plane with shrapnel that tore into the prototype plane’s nose and forward body. The shock wave tore off the port wing and ignited a ruptured fuel tank. The rear half of the stealth plane’s airframe was shredded, with black smoke and flames leaking from every hole. The aircraft pinwheeled clockwise and the metal screamed as it began to tear itself apart.

  Explosive bolts around the canopy fired. The plastic bubble tumbled away and the Chinese pilot’s ejection seat rocketed out of the dying plane.