Extinction Machine

Chapter Fifty-one

The Taiwan Strait, South China Sea

Sunday, October 20, 10:22 a.m. eastern standard time

The Seventh American Fleet was spread out across the dark waters of the Taiwan Strait. Thirty-eight of its sixty ships were moving into position, carrying with them more than half of the fleet’s sixty thousand men and three hundred and fifty aircraft. Even without the rest of the fleet, this was a show of sea power that could conquer most nations on Earth. Some of the ships possessed the potential for more destructive power than all the bombs used in World War II, and that did not include the missiles with nuclear warheads.

Miles away, China sprawled, vast and powerful, secure in its personal power. Or, so it wanted the world to believe. Most of the civilian world believed that the Chinese military machine was only a half step behind America’s, but that was a by-product of China’s disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Whereas they could put a far larger army on the ground than anything America could hope to match, every military strategist in the world knew that such a ground battle would never be fought. Not directly. Not without intermediaries like the Koreans, the Vietnamese …

The real fight, if it ever came to it, would be with sea and air power.

The Seventh Fleet did not have an equal in China.

Not yet.

China had two aircraft carriers to America’s eleven. Twenty-one destroyers to America’s fifty. A defense budget of sixty billion compared with the U.S. commitment of over five hundred billion. The only area where they were nearly on a par was in the number of submarines. China claimed sixty-eight and America admitted to seventy-five.

This is what the generals and the admirals knew. This is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew every bit as well as the chief of PLA General Staff.

Knowing this, seeing the demonstration of potentially overwhelming force riding the waves within fist strike of mainland China, it would be stupidity or madness or naïveté to put fighters in the air.

Philosophers have long suggested that all men are fools. Not all the time, but often enough. Else why would wars ever start?

The Shenyang J-15 is a carrier-based jet fighter aircraft based on the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-33. Twenty of them crouched on the deck of the ROCS Hu Yaobang, the second of Chinese domestically built aircraft carriers. The jets were all primed, the pilots on deck, the flight and deck crews ready.

No one is certain—or will admit—who gave approval for Pilot Deng to climb into the cockpit of his J-15, belt in, fire up the engines, and launch his craft. No one on the deck crew tried to stop the action. It was as if they were all complicit, although in interviews following the incident, each man claimed to have received orders. They could not, however, remember who gave those orders, and there was no entry in any log that authorized the launch.

And yet Deng’s J-15 leaped into the air and drove toward the Seventh Fleet.

Within minutes a swarm of Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets had been scrambled and they screamed out to meet the J-15.

Although these two jet types had never before been pitted against one another in real combat, analysts theorized that the J-15 had superior aerodynamic capabilities to all other known fighter aircraft with the possible exception of the F-22. It had 10 percent greater thrust to weight ration and a 25 percent lower wing loading than the Super Hornets. In a one-to-one contest, it should have been a turkey shoot for the Chinese fighter.

But there was only one of them in the air, and five of the Hornets.

The J-15 picked the fight, everyone was clear on that. It flew straight at the Hornets, playing a crazy game of chicken, thrusters punching it to Mach 1 for no sane reason. The Hornets spread apart to let the fighter pass, but then they rolled and turned and followed because the Chinese pilot was still moving forward toward the fleet. Toward the lead carrier.

The game of chicken became a chase.

Politicians will argue for years over who fired the first shot. It is not even clear what Pilot Deng’s intentions were. To buzz the tower on the carrier? To make a statement? To provoke a first shot?

Or to attack the carrier with missiles and a death run.

All calls went unanswered. Calls to the plane, calls to the Chinese carrier.

The gap between the J-15 and the fleet was decreasing at incredible speed. There was a stopping point, a line of sanity, where everything could have been dialed down. But that point came and went with a scream of jet engines. And then there was a second stopping point when the pursuit craft locked on to their targets and went weapons hot.

Even then, the J-15 could have peeled up and away and everyone would be able to breathe.

But that stopping point melted away.

“This is Bloodhound Five,” said the lead Hornet pilot. “I have a sweet lock on the joker.”

There was only a moment of hesitation from the carrier. “Bloodhound Five, you are cleared to fire.”

“Bloodhound Five, fox three.”

A simple code for the firing of an AIM-120D AMRAAM missile.

The missile burst from under the Hornet’s wing and drove above the choppy sea toward its target.

It was exactly halfway there when the missile exploded.

The Hornet pilot said, “What—”

“We have a missile malfunction,” said the pilot. “Bloodhound Five, fox three.”

The second AMRAAM blew up so close to the Hornet that the shock buffeted the jet into a dangerous tilt. It took every ounce of the pilot’s skill to keep from stalling.

“Missile system failure,” he bellowed. “Disengaging.”

Ahead of him, the J-15 was still closing on the carrier with the rest of the Bloodhound team in close support. The Hornets had to cut wide and change angle to keep the ships out of the line of any misfire.

Bloodhound Two and Three fired missiles.

The missiles exploded almost immediately.

Shock waves swatted the jets away and they wobbled like wounded birds, trying to regain a measure of control.

Suddenly the J-15’s angle of approach made a radical change. The pilot peeled up and away and as soon as he had a clear line of escape he hit the afterburners and scorched his way out of there. In seconds he was a dot on the horizon, heading away from the fleet.

“What the hell was that all about?”

The radar man from the carrier cut in. “Bloodhound Squadron be advised, there is a second bogey coming low and fast out of the—”

But the pilot of Bloodhound Five saw it before the radar man could finish his sentence. It moved in an arrow-straight line, coming back along the path the J-15 had taken, but moving many times faster.

Many times.

“Holy moly look at that mother move.”

The T-craft closed the distance from the horizon to the fleet in seconds.

“He’s clocking Mach fifteen,” cried Bloodhound Three.

But he was wrong.

The T-craft cut through the center of the fleet at Mach 20, shooting between a destroyer and a cruiser, pulling behind it an air mass that rocked both ships. It bore down on the carrier too fast for any practical reaction. There was only time to cut in the collision sirens as the gray mass of it hurtled toward a certain impact.

And then it turned.

At Mach 20, it turned.

In its own length it went from a lateral glide path to a straight vertical rise. A ninety-degree turn. It rose one thousand feet into the air and turned again.

Another ninety-degree turn. As precise as if written onto the moment with a ruler.

As thousands of men watched—through binoculars, goggles, portholes, the windscreens of jets, and with naked eyes—the T-craft became a blurred dot and then vanished.

Over mainland China.

Bloodhound Five opened his mouth to make a report, but any words he might have said died on his tongue, replaced by a single word.

“God…”