Stephen Coonts - Combat

Elizabeth Vespa had all the time in the world — ten seconds of time in which to trim out her dive, align the sight with the aim point, and track smoothly to the release point. This is good, she told herself. This is very … very … good. She marveled at how … ordinary … it seemed.

At forty-five hundred feet she thumbed the button.

Ostrewski met Gomer One head on — Ozzie going downhill, Gomer headed up. At six thousand feet they passed, slightly offset, and Ozzie pressed the bomb release. With the fuzing switch on SAFE, both Mark 83s slanted toward the water, ridding Papa Three of unwanted weight and drag.

Ozzie honked back on the stick, using his greater momentum to zoom-climb for the perch. He knew that he had the fight in the bag. His opponent, nose-high with energy bled off from the climb, had nowhere to go. The Chinese pilot’s only move was to bury the nose, accelerate away, and try to evade.

That was exactly what Deng Yaobang decided to do.

Gomer One rolled into a diving port reversal, looking for the best cover available. He saw it less than three miles ahead.

Barely a mile away, Zack Delight saw the developing fight. He keyed his mike. “Papa Three or Four, this is Zack. I’ll take the Gomer. You guys finish the ship.”

Without his bombs, Ostrewski could do no more than shoot holes in Penang Princess’s hull. Frustrated at giving up a gun kill — the universal fighter pilot’s wet dream — he recognized the wisdom of Delight’s call. At least I might split the defenses for Liz’s attack. He reversed course, expending some of his excess energy in a high-speed descent back toward the target.

Delight came hard aport, cutting the corner on Gomer One, who was leaving a 350-knot wake on the water. The hostile Skyhawk flashed across the bow of the Catalina Island cruise ship, drawing appreciative responses and Kodak Moments from the passengers. Delight was six seconds back.

Deng banked fifteen degrees left to thread his way through the channel between the Downtown Marina to starboard and Queen Mary to port. Leaving a rooster tail behind him, he flew under Queensway Bridge, popped up long enough to clear the 710 exit, Anaheim Street and Pacific Coast Highway bridges, then bunted his nose down toward the Los Angeles River.

Delight, with his teeth into his former tormenter, followed Deng beneath the Queensway Bridge without thinking about it. Only when the hostile Skyhawk popped up to clear the next three spans did it really occur to him what he had done. Willow Street, Wardlow, and the 405 all disappeared below their white bellies at six and a half miles per minute.

Delight tried to put the TA-4’s tailpipe in his reticle. Down low, with the river channel providing a natural barrier, he thought it might be safe to shoot, but Gomer One’s jet wash made steady aiming almost impossible. Even within the confines of the flood-control channel, Delight knew there would be misses and ricochets. Besides , he told himself, if I do hose the sumbitch, he’s likely to crash on the Long Beach Freeway. Route 710 North lay an eighth of a mile off their port wingtips.

As if reading Delight’s mind, Deng abruptly laid a hard right at the 710/91 interchange. Scooting along the Artesia Freeway, he quickly departed North Long Beach, entered Bellflower at fifty feet altitude, and felt safer in a residential area. Delight followed.

Liz Vespa felt the thousand-pounders fall away, counted One potato , then began a steady, hard pull. She tensed her abdominal and thigh muscles, straining as six times the force of gravity forced her deep onto the unyielding ejection seat. While her vision narrowed, somehow her hearing improved; she heard Hu’s grunts over the hot mike.

With the horizon seemingly descending to meet her jet’s nose, Vespa extended her left arm, locking the elbow. The J52 spooled up from 80 to 100 percent. She regained full vision and scanned the panel. All in the green. Now, where’s the ship?

Vespa kept three G on the aircraft, turning back toward the target so Hu could resume videotaping. Coming parallel to the burning, smoking vessel, the TA-4J was rocked as a white shock wave radiated outward from the hull. One second later the aft sixty feet jackknifed, paused an ephemeral moment, then dropped back in a cascading eruption of smoke, flames, and spray.

Scooter Vespa’s eyes widened behind her visor. “Secondary explosions, Hu! Are you getting this?”

“Yes, miss! Hold this angle.” She thought she heard him laugh. “This is wonderful!” He depressed the zoom button to get a closer view of the conflagration.

Liz shared the laugh. She felt almost giddy. “We have a saying in this country, Mr. Hu.”

“Yes, miss?”

“Film at eleven.”

Delight scanned his instruments. RPM, fuel flow, and tailpipe temperature were in the green, but he felt himself losing ground on Gomer One. He reasoned that the battle damage had torn gouges in his jet’s aluminum skin, imposing a drag penalty. He was down to nine hundred pounds of fuel, and Gomer seemed headed back to El Toro. Nothing I can do there, he thought. Reluctantly, Delight pulled up, briefly wagging his wings in tacit tribute to a bravura low-level performance. As he climbed to a more fuel-efficient altitude, the last he saw of the Juliet was a fast white dart making 400 mph in a 65 zone.

Ozzie called for a joinup; he wanted mutual support in case more bandits arrived. “Papa Four, this is Three. I’ll meet you over Freeman. Angels eight.”

Liz hedged for a moment. “Ah, Four, we’re getting BDA. Please wait one.”

Ostrewski fidgeted on his seat. He understood Vespa’s wish for bomb damage assessment, but the Princess was beyond help. For a moment he wondered about the heat-resistant qualities of bootleg backpack nukes.

From long habit, he turned his head through almost two hundred degrees. Looking upward to his left, he froze for two heartbeats. Coming from seaward was the track of an air-to-air missile streaking inland.

“Missile inbound! Left eleven o’clock!”

“My God! It’s …”

“Tommy, break! Break left!”

The voices on the VHF circuit overlapped in rising octaves and decibels as twelve miles from the burning, sinking Penang Princess, a female section leader screamed at her male wingman. Liz Vespa, hearing the garbled transmissions, fought to make sense of it amid her elation at putting both bombs square amidships.

“Tommy, eject!” The female voice was nearly hysterical now. “My God, oh my God …” The hoarse contralto descended into an audible sob before the thumb slid off the mike button.

Five heartbeats later, the voice was back. “This is Bronco Three-Zero-Four broadcasting on guard. Three Oh Six … exploded. I’m off Palos Verdes. Send a helo!”

Elizabeth Vespa felt a shiver between her shoulder blades. My God … Jen-Jen!

Flying alone in Flanker One at sixteen thousand feet, Igor Gnido had an idea that he was too late. That black smoke roiling off Long Beach looked ominous for the prospects of Penang Princess, and he could only hope that her cargo had been off-loaded. In truth, there had been little chance of making a timely interception.

Furthermore, the R-73M2s and R-77s had necessarily been in deep storage, and it took time to upload the missiles, especially with the Sukhoi factory crew unaccustomed to handling ordnance. Furthermore, Deng and Li obviously had failed to prevent the carrier-based A-4s from attacking.

Gnido glanced again to the south, where the freighter seemed to be burning itself out. He sucked in more oxygen, mentally tipping his hardhat to Miss Scooter. Not long ago he had plans of bedding her; now he might have to kill her. Or maybe it will not be necessary, and I will kill her anyway.