Mike Maden - Drone Command

Pearce held his course steady until they passed directly over the drillship. His palms sweated. The radio call signal flashed again. Myers nodded for him to take it.

Pearce put the incoming call on both headsets. An angry voice in broken English screamed in their ears. The Kunming ordered them to return to their airspace immediately or risk being fired upon.

“Better do what the man says,” Myers said. “He sounds very displeased.”

Pearce snapped off the radio, then banked the aircraft to the northeast in the general direction of Japan.

“Think that will calm him down?”

“We’ll see,” Myers said.

Pearce held the long, looping bank steady, dropping his altitude at the same time. The wide blue ocean grew larger. Soon, the red-hulled Tiger II filled the lower half of the windscreen.

“This idea feels dumber by the minute,” Pearce said.

The HondaJet roared directly over the derrick again. They were low enough to see the crew scrambling over the deck. Pearce hoped it was out of sheer terror.

“I should’ve been a fighter pilot,” Pearce said. “Get to fight sitting down.”

“You might get your chance,” Myers said. She pointed at the radar screen. A red blip was screaming toward them at Mach 2. More than fifteen hundred miles per hour.

Pearce slammed the throttles into the firewall and banked hard right and down, straight toward the deck.

“Troy—”

Pearce put the HondaJet twenty feet above the water, low enough that he’d slam into the side of an oil tanker if one got in his way. Luckily, nothing in sight. He glanced at the radar just in time to see the red blip directly on his six a half mile back—

The air exploded like a shotgun blast as a twin-tailed Shenyang J-16 Red Eagle strike fighter rocketed past them, five hundred feet above their heads. Pearce felt the tiny HondaJet buck in his hands from the turbulence above. He and Myers watched the Chinese fighter pull into a near vertical climb and disappear into the late morning sun.

“That was too close for comfort,” Myers said.

“Maybe being a grunt isn’t so bad after all.” He kept his eyes on the radar scope. The blip reversed direction, heading back toward where it came from at a high rate of speed. “We just might be out of the woods.”

“That was reckless,” Myers said.

“Me or them?”

She glared at him. “Both.”

Pearce tapped the HondaJet’s yoke. “We needed a Buick. At least I didn’t hit anything.”

“Is that—” Myers pointed at the radar screen.

The red blip reappeared behind them again.

And gaining.

Pearce tapped a video screen. A rear-facing camera pulled up. Incredible. The Chinese fighter flew just above the deck, trailing a vapor cone as it cut deep trenches of water behind it. His computer said the bogey was subsonic.

Pearce made a quick calculation, speed and distance. He held direction for three seconds, cut his throttles back to near stall speed, banked right.

Wrong move.

The big J-16’s afterburners exploded again, roaring past them at supersonic speed, pulling a wall of pressure in its wake. The turbulence was too great this time. It grabbed one of the HondaJet’s wings and flipped it as if it were tossing a coin. Pearce fought the yoke and rudder pedals, got it righted. The stall alarm screamed. The plane yawed and pitched. Pearce fought the controls, but before he could slam the throttle forward, the engines died. He keyed the radio.

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

He kept the nose up as long as he could. Sixty knots and falling. He pointed the jet at a distant trawler. Prayed it was Japanese.

“BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

They hit the water.

Hard.

The plane skipped like a flat rock on a rippling pond. Seawater sprayed over the windscreen as they jerked against their safety belts. The HondaJet shuddered until it finally came to a halt.

Judy taught Pearce that ditching a plane on smooth water was as likely a survivable event as a crash landing on flat dirt. The trick was to get out fast.

“We’ve got thirty seconds. Go!” Pearce shouted, as he unbuckled the safety straps. He wasn’t sure if that was all the time they had, but he didn’t want to wait around to find out.

Myers quickly popped her safety-strap releases and climbed out of her seat, racing for the exit door. Pearce pointed at the life jacket strapped to the bulkhead, a safety regulation for commercial jets flying over open water.

“Strap that thing on. I’ll grab the raft.” Pearce felt the plane bobbing in the water but didn’t get the sense it was sinking.

Yet.

“Got it,” Myers said, pulling the jacket out of its harness. She tossed one to Pearce then grabbed one for herself.

“Thanks.” He pulled it on as he scrambled for the emergency locker. He yanked it open and found the inflatable raft folded into a solid yellow square.

Myers struggled to pull on her life vest.

“Need help?”

“No, I got it,” Myers said. “But I should’ve paid more attention when the flight attendant was demonstrating it.”

“I thought you were the flight attendant.”

She laughed, snapping the buckles into place. “That’s the other problem.”

Pearce grabbed the raft out of its container and stepped toward the cabin door.

“All set?”

Myers nodded. “Good thing for you I like to swim.”

“May not have to,” Pearce said, patting the heavy yellow rubber. He dropped the uninflated raft at his feet and grabbed the lift handles on the cabin door and raised them. The door swung open easily, the bottom of it still a few inches above the water.

“So far so good,” Myers said.

Pearce grasped the raft’s red inflation handle in one hand and tossed the square out with the other. It splashed in the water several feet away and Pearce tugged on the inflation handle, activating a compressed-air cylinder that instantly inflated the raft. Pearce secured the tether line to the door handle and pulled the raft back close to the door. The plane had already sunk five inches and the raft was now even with the cabin door opening. Water began lapping into the entrance.

“After you, Madame President.”

“Don’t forget to bring the peanuts and sodas,” Myers said, stepping gingerly into the bobbing raft.

Once she was securely in, Pearce leaped in after her and cut the rope with a utility knife provided in the raft kit. He handed her one of the two short paddles and they pushed away as fast as they could from the plane to avoid getting dragged down with it.

The plane remained relatively stable, the nose sinking by degrees as water flooded in. Pearce pulled out his emergency satellite phone and dialed up the air traffic controller at Ishigaki Airport, which was located on a small island about a hundred miles south of his position. The controller informed him that they had been tracking their flight since leaving Narita International Airport and that a JMSDF rescue helicopter was already on its way.

“Now all we have to do is wait,” Pearce said.

Suddenly, Myers was overwhelmed with the magnitude of what had just happened. A Chinese fighter jet had just thrown them out of the sky, nearly killing them. She shuddered violently, as if badly chilled.

Pearce gathered her up in his arms, shielding her from the ocean breeze.

But she wasn’t cold.

“Won’t be long,” he promised.

She nodded, happy to be held in his strong embrace.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Pearce asked.

“And then some. That sonofabitch could’ve killed us.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Thanks to you,” Myers said. “If only that pilot knew he just did us one hell of a favor.”