Five Tribes Page 7

  Yet even before the last Stingray was away, the Z-15’s started to react. Hendricks was surprised at how fast their radar picked up the missiles. The gunships broke formation and began to release countermeasures; streams of decoy flares rained down from both sides of each aircraft, like a sudden meteor shower across the African dawn.

  As Hendricks had hoped, the flares were mostly positioned in the rear of the gunships and fell toward the ground. That’s because they were designed to protect the aircraft from ground-to-air missiles. The fact that he was attacking from above meant the Stingrays were less likely to be confused by the decoys. The Chinese pilots began to realize this too. The first Black Widow tried to bank away at the last minute, but the missile struck just beneath the pilot, cracking open the cockpit. The gunship rolled completely over, and the still-spinning blades sucked it quickly to the earth.

  The second missile rushed by its Black Widow, apparently confused by the heat of the decoys, then its searching camera locked on to the silhouette of the aircraft and it zoomed in, smacking hard against the tail boom. The gunship was knocked sideways by the concussion—there was a mist of oil in the air—but it flew on.

  By the time the third missile was homing in on its gunship, the pilot had eight more seconds to react than the first pilot. He dropped rapidly while at the same time deploying the decoys, thus staying under them. The Stingray was fooled and detonated early.

  The fourth pilot did the same and also eluded the Stingray.

  Hendricks couldn’t believe his bad luck. Only one in four!

  But as he watched the remaining Black Widows, he noticed the tail boom of the second Z-15 was beginning to vibrate like a sounding fork. The pilot felt it too. He broke off and began looking for a place to land. Suddenly the entire tail boom broke away, sending the aircraft nose forward. The pilot attempted to rotate the engines to adjust but it was losing too much altitude, and soon crashed and exploded in the trees.

  In the cockpit of one of the two remaining Black Widows, Lieutenant Cheung tried to make sense of it. “Blue Seven, come in? Yu, are you there? Cho, can you hear me?”

  “We have to go and help them,” his gunner said.

  “No,” he countered. “They’re dead.”

  Saying it suddenly made it real and irrevocable.

  Lieutenant Cheng steeled himself to the new reality: in the last five minutes, six of his friends had been killed by American treachery.

  He now had only one thought: revenge.

  Before the Stingray strike he had been pursuing a strange shimmer in the sky. It was gaining altitude, heading for the coast, trying to hide in the clouds. He had not been sure it was the enemy . . . until now.

  “Red Nine to base,” he said into his microphone. “We are under attack. Drone strike has taken out Red Four and Red Two. We are in pursuit of an odd shimmer in the sky, which we suspect is an American aircraft.”

  Chapter Ten

  Shot Down

  Namibia

  Captain Everett: “We need to get those last two gunships.”

  Winfred: “Whiskey Nine Three, respectfully request permission to assist.”

  Everett: “Negative, Whiskey Nine Three. I have four F-35s coming your way. ETA, seven minutes.”

  Winfred: “Yes, sir.”

  Then under his breath, “. . . Might as well be seven years.”

  Eric felt the heat of shame on his face. Everett was refusing to let them help because of him. He was the reason the mission might fail. Two Z-15s against a Valor was not a fair fight, but two Valors and the element of surprise might be enough . . . and definitely enough to last seven minutes.

  Winfred was keeping them on a parallel course with Bailey as they headed for the Gerald Ford. Up and in the distance, Eric could see the two Black Widows as they closed on the fleeing Valor. Bailey was trying to get into the clouds, but Eric could tell she wasn’t going to make it.

  Then he got an idea. He acted on it as soon as the idea occurred to him, before thinking it through. With a flick of a switch, he turned off the ghost program.

  Lieutenant Cheung saw the radar blip immediately. He turned his head to starboard for a visual. “American Valor, five o’clock, distance nine kilometers.”

  But he didn’t turn the aircraft immediately. Instead he looked out at the shimmer of light. For a moment he considered holding the pursuit. But below him was a real target, something he could see, something he could destroy.

  Eric: “Sir, we have a malfunction in the ghost program. I’m trying to reset it now.”

  Crew Chief Bob Hollis: “He can definitely see us.”

  At a distance of three miles the gunfire began.

  Winfred: “Taking evasive action.”

  The Valor surged with renewed speed, rising, then dipping and weaving. Winfred headed south to pull the Black Widows away from Bailey and the others. Eric felt like his internal organs were being slammed to one side of his body, then tossed to the other. Not exactly ideal working conditions. But he was clearly seeing the enhancements to the airframe. It was far beyond anything he’d felt in training. Winfred was taking her to the limit. One moment he looked out and saw only sky, the next second, he was looking straight down at the green blur of the treetops.

  For the first sixty seconds they held their own. The combination of Winfred’s flying, their miniguns blazing out both sides, and the nano­armor meant that they had taken no damage. But Eric knew the Chinese pilot would soon realize that the cannon rounds were having no effect, then he’d switch to the rockets. He could see the hard points on each wing for the unguided missiles as well as two larger rockets, one on each wing. These were likely laser guided and would mean trouble.

  Eric: “I’m ready to reengage the ghost program.”

  Winfred: “On my mark. Three . . . two . . . one . . . now!”

  Eric reengaged the program, and Winfred whipped the Valor to the side and let her drop in the hopes that he could get beneath the Black Widows so they would miss his rotor glare.

  In his own cockpit Lieutenant Cheung’s rage and frustration only grew as he fired away at the Valor. The American pilot was doing things with the aircraft that he didn’t think possible—reverse S-turns, using the terrain then suddenly turning into the sun to blind him. He knew the very best US pilots were called Night Stalkers, and he suspected that this pilot must be one of those. But it wasn’t just that. Somehow his gunner kept missing. He could see their tracer rounds heading straight toward the airframe, but then they seemed to disappear. He was also disappointed in his own aircraft. How could the bulky Valor compete with his sleek Z-15? It didn’t make sense. The American shouldn’t be able to break three hundred knots, but he was easily doing three forty, while Cheung’s own turbines were screaming to keep up. Enough! One Red Arrow rocket would end this.

  But just as he was positioning the laser on his target, the gunship disappeared. One second it was there, the next it was gone. He thought he saw something flash downward, then nothing.

  “Tai, do you have him?”

  “No, nothing.”

  An intense feeling of vulnerability came over him. A moment ago, he was the predator. Now he was the prey.

  “Take evasive action!” He rose up and banked, his eyes straining to see something that had to be there but wasn’t. Then he noticed something momentarily stir the leaves on one of the treetops. A moment later, he saw a strange glare, like the shimmer he had seen before. It was backtracking, heading northwest toward the coast. Trying to get away.

  He pretended not to see it and kept the gunship flying away from it.

  “I’m taking control of armaments,” he told the gunner and he lined up the laser on the target, all the while keeping them flying the other way.

  Major Winfred saw the K-19 Red Hawk launch and he tried to react, but at only nine hundred meters, he had just three seconds before the missile struc
k.

  The swarm took the brunt of the impact, but it wasn’t enough. The Valor was kicked sideways as bits of shrapnel ripped through the aircraft and its crew. The controls turned sluggish in Winfred’s hands. He felt a hot burning sensation in his leg and heard men scream. He tried to close it out of his mind; they would all die if he couldn’t keep the bird in the air.

  “This is Whiskey Nine Three. We are hit. Say again, we are hit but she’s holding together. I’m going to do my best to get her out.”

  He was losing oil and transmission fluid, but the Valor was designed to fly for a while with neither. He tried to accelerate; the airframe shuddered, but held firm. All along the fuselage, tens of trillions of nanosites were working to repair the damage. Patching holes, reconnecting wires, even pulling particles of the leaking fluids from the air and putting them where they belonged.

  Lieutenant Cheung watched as the Red Hawk struck the Valor. It looked like it was going to hit it perfectly broadside. There was a muffled blast, much smaller than a Red Hawk should make. This was an antitank missile that had been redesigned for air-to-air use. It should have obliterated the Valor. But out of the explosion the Valor appeared once more, its incredible camouflage gone. Almost immediately it began to disappear again, in sections, like skin growing over muscles and bones. But one section, aft of the bay door where the missile struck, stayed visible, as if the skin could not grow there. Amazingly she was not only still airborne, she was picking up speed.

  Eric had been thrown hard toward the bulkhead when the missile struck. His five-point harness held his body, but his neck whipped hard forward and he felt the vertebra pop. He was relieved to find his neck still moved. Think! Find a way to take down those choppers!

  Then it came to him.

  “Swarms two, four, and six, come to me.”

  He should have thought about this before. He didn’t need a complicated program to take down the gunships, he only needed to disassemble them. And not even the whole aircraft. He pulled up a diagram of the gunship and outlined the tail boom. That was all he needed.

  But the swarms had not responded to his command. Shit! How far away was he? Probably as much as forty miles now. He had lost the link. They couldn’t hear him.

  The fog of war was now on him, suffocating his thoughts, making him freeze. Think! Do something. There was only one swarm that was close enough to help.

  He opened up a direct channel to Winfred, already knowing what Captain Everett would say to the idea. “Dave, it’s Eric, I have an idea that can take out both Black Widows, but it will mean we lose our armor for about thirty seconds.”

  “Do it!” Winfred said. “I’ll keep them off as best I can.”

  In less than a minute he had set up the crude program using an image of the Z-15. When he was ready, he called Winfred again.

  “We are losing our protection . . . now.”

  God, I hope it works.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  At that moment he realized someone was pounding on the door to the egg, trying to get his attention. He had been so engrossed in his work, and the egg was almost soundproof, that he wasn’t even sure how long the man had been pounding.

  There was nothing more he could do with the swarms—either they would save them or they wouldn’t—he unstrapped himself and opened the door to a horrific scene. The floor of the aircraft was slick with blood, and there was a strange mass of messy clothes in the corner. Moynihan, one of the crew chiefs, was stretched out on the floor, trying to reach for something outside of the aircraft . . . out the bay door. “Help me!” He commanded. But there was something not right about the man.

  Oh, Jesus.

  The bundle of bloody clothes was Moynihan’s leg, blown off just above the knee. Blood was spewing from the wound, but the man stayed focused, reaching for the thing outside. At just that moment, the Valor tipped hard to the right. The severed leg slid across the floor and out the opposite door. As the aircraft righted itself, cannon fire swept through the cabin. Moynihan gave a guttural grunt and went still.

  Eric strapped his harness to the rappel line and went to help him, but as he turned him over he realized he was dead, there was a gaping wound in his neck; the eyes were wide and rolled white.

  “You! Get me that ammo feed!” It was the other crew chief, trying to work the minigun. Eric leaned out and saw what Moynihan had been trying to do—the ammunition feed tube for the minigun had broken off. Eric went to grab it, but his harness held him back. He unfastened it, gripped the rappel cable near the ceiling and grabbed the tube. Just as he handed it to the crew chief, he heard the copilot. “Here they come.” Eric looked out and saw the Chinese gunships only three hundred yards away.

  Suddenly, the closest Black Widow’s tail boom disappeared. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. The gunship began to do somersaults then plummeted to the earth. “Yes!” he heard Winfred say.

  But then the remaining Z-15 raked the side of the Valor with cannon fire once more. The aircraft dropped suddenly, and Eric felt a dizziness as the blood rushed to his head. There was a warning sound, a persistent alarm coming from the cockpit.

  “Port engine hit.”

  “Oil pressure dropping,” responded the copilot. “We are looking at a transmission fail.”

  The aircraft was listing to one side and losing altitude, but it was not in free fall. The treetops went by underneath them in a blur.

  He looked out at the menacing form of the Black Widow.

  Come on!

  At that very instant, the nanosites attacked the Z-15’s tail boom, but before they could finish their work, it fired its last Red Hawk missile. The missile came zooming at them even as the Black Widow began to spin and fall.

  Eric knew they were dead. Without armor, the missile would annihilate them. He looked down at the jungle racing by just inches below their feet. There was a blinding flash. Something smacked him in the chest, and he fell backward into nothingness, the propeller wash momentarily flattening his uniform to his skin. He was overcome by the nausea of feeling nothing beneath him. Swimming in the air. Falling to earth.

  Xiao-ping looked out from the door of his own aircraft as the Chinese gunships pursued the other Valor. It had been a deadly aerial dance, as the strange planes darted and swung about each other, the American aircraft disappearing then reappearing. Just as it looked like the Americans were finished, their aircraft smoking and listing, one of the Chinese gunships had suddenly fallen. A moment later, the second one did the same, but not before it had fired one more missile. Xiao-ping watched as someone fell from the American aircraft just at the moment of impact. There was flash of white, then the carcass of the plane slammed into the jungle.

  The old soldier they called Sawyer was standing next to him. “Whiskey Nine Three, do you read? Zulu Five one, come in . . . Dave? Eric, can you hear me?” Then he slammed his fist against the bulkhead. “Eric Hill, come in!”

  That was when Xiao-ping realized that the owner of the voice in his head had been in the crashed plane. Xiao-ping felt his stomach drop. Even though it had been only an hour ago that he had first heard the voice, he felt an incredible debt to the man who had rescued him.

  A moment later Xiao-ping felt a cool mist on his face, a delicious sensation. The Valor had reached the clouds and was quickly consumed inside, now invisible to all eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  MIA

  11:54 p.m., November 4, 2026

  Washington, DC

  It was a quarter-mile walk from Admiral Curtiss’s office to his bungalow along River Drive. Walking the distance alone each night was part of his daily routine, a way for him to decompress before he entered his home and changed from being a soldier to being a father and husband. But then he realized, there would be no need for such a transition tonight. Once again, he had stayed at work so late that everyone would likely be asleep when he arrived.
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  The officers’ quarters sat in perfect symmetry along the street—nearly identical white clapboard houses with navy blue awnings on each porch. The lawns were neatly manicured with a single gas light at the bottom of each walkway. Curtiss mused that if you stood at the correct angle, the uniformity of it seemed to go on forever.

  It was a crisp fall night, and there was a slight breeze that rustled through the maple and poplar trees. Curtiss tried to get his mind off his work—and particularly the problem of Chip Walden—and focus on his home life.

  His youngest son, River, had stayed home sick from school today, putting an extra burden on his wife, Evelyn. She would understandably grumpy about it in the morning. His eldest, Logan, was taking the SATs in a few weeks, and Curtiss was supposed to be helping him review his math. He’d have to make time for that tomorrow or he’d get an earful from Evelyn.

  His phone rang.

  He knew instantly who it was.

  Another reason he was infuriated with Walden was because his “mandatory briefing” meant that he couldn’t follow the African rescue op. He looked at the phone. As he suspected, it was Adams, his aide-de-camp.

  “Curtiss.”

  “I’d better give you the good news first . . .”

  Jane and Lili had finished their movie and were foraging through the refrigerator for food. Jane was opening up a carton of coconut milk when Lili’s phone rang.

  Jane felt a rush of adrenaline, and a shiver run down her back.

  Please be good news. Please be good news.

  Lili scrambled for the phone.

  “Hello? Yes, yes, it’s me. Yes, I’ll wait.” She flashed Jane a smile.

  Jane exhaled with deep relief. Thank God.

  “Panda Bear? Oh, God I can’t believe it!” Lili squealed with joy. Then she switched to Chinese, and Jane could not understand them. But she didn’t care, she could feel the woman’s happiness in any language.