Crash Dive

He made a beeline straight for the sole unoccupied fighter, then saluted the two attending crewmen who stood aside for him to mount the cockpit ladder.

“Lovely night for flying, boys,” he muttered in guttural Chinese, sliding himself down into the seat. After strapping himself in, he reached forward and flipped the switch that lowered the canopy. Then he studied the instrument array and illuminated controls, quickly deciding exactly what did what. The Chinese had stolen so much aeronautical technology from the West that getting the hang of things was embarrassingly easy.

He gave a hand signal to the crewmen below, lit the candle, and taxied into position behind the last jet in line for the center catapult. The blast shield had already risen from the deck behind the first jet in the squadron, and Hawke watched as the fighter was flung out over the ocean, afterburner glowing white hot.

He must have been daydreaming because he suddenly heard the air boss screaming at him in his headphones, telling him to get his ass moving. The aircraft in front of him had advanced into position and he’d not followed immediately. Now he added a touch of power and tucked in where he belonged. There remained only three planes ahead of him.

“So sorry, Boss,” he muttered in the time-honored traditional communicative style of fighter pilots all over the world. On a carrier, the air boss is God himself.

“Don’t let it happen again, Passionflower, or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Shanghai.”

“Roger that, sir,” Hawke said, advancing once more.

“You forget something in your preflight, Passionflower?”

“No, sir,” Hawke said.

“Yeah? Check your fucking nav lights switch for me, just humor me.”

Shit. He hadn’t turned them on. Dumb mistake and he couldn’t afford to be dumb at this point, not in the slightest.

“You awake down there, son? I’m inclined to pull your ass out of line.”

“Sir, no sir. I’m good to go.”

“Yeah, well, you damn well better be. I’ve got my eye on you now, honey. You screw up even a little bit on this mission this morning and your ass is mine. You believe me?”

“Sir, I always believe you. But I’ll come back clean, I swear it.”

“Damn right you will. Now get the hell off my boat, Passionflower. I got more important things than little pissants like you to worry about. You’re up.”

Hawke moved forward and engaged the catapult hook inside its buried track. He heard the blast shield rumble up into position behind him and looked to his left, nodding, a signal to the launch chief that he was poised and ready. The man raised his right arm and dropped it, meaning any second now. Hawke’s right hand automatically went to the “oh-shit bar” on the right-hand side of the canopy.

Adrenaline flooded Hawke’s veins as he gripped the bar with his right hand. Being launched violently into space by a modern carrier catapult was as close as any human being can come to the experience of being in a catastrophic fatal car crash and surviving. It was that intense.

Early on, after a lot of expensive hardware had gone into the drink, some aeronautical genius had figured out that most pilots instinctively grabbed the aircraft’s controls too quickly after launch. It’s scary to feel out of control when your wheels separate from the mother ship. Now every fighter had a handhold forward and to the right inside the canopy. You grabbed it just before they pulled the trigger. Thus its name, the oh-shit bar.

During a “cat shot,” the time it took you to remove your hand from that bar and take hold of the controls was precisely, to the nanosecond, the right amount of time needed to elapse before you seized control after leaving the leading edge of the deck.

He was airborne.

He looked back down at the deck lights of the Varyag, the carrier growing rapidly smaller as he gained altitude. He suppressed any feelings of joy over escaping an agonizing death at the hands of the most sophisticated torturers on the planet. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, he told himself, as he climbed upward to join “his” squadron’s flight. Their heading was a northerly course that would take them over the Paracel Islands. Exactly the wrong direction. He needed to be headed south-southeast and he needed to get moving or he’d miss his rapidly diminishing window: the one chance he had to try to defuse a crisis with global implications.

The rim of the earth was edged in violent pink as he slipped into his designated slot at the rear of the tight formation. There was a minimum of radio chat for which he was thankful. There was normally a lot of banter at this stage and he didn’t want to hear any questions or inside wisecracks over the radio that he couldn’t respond to without sacrificing his cover. He needed precious time to remain anonymous until he could figure out how the hell to peel off and head for his mission destination without arousing the slightest suspicion.

He knew what he had to do now, although he didn’t much like it.

Land on the island airstrip on Xiachuan Island. Meet with this Chinese Admiral Tsang and fulfill C’s back-cha

They’d trot out his blackened corpse and twisted pieces of his American fighter jet on global TV. Use him to justify an even more aggressive posture in the South China Sea. Take retaliatory measures against Taiwan, Japan, or Vietnam. Next step, war. That’s how he saw it, anyway. C might disagree. But C wasn’t sitting in the hot seat with his ass on the line.

He now had little choice. He flew on with the formation, heading north toward the Pacific. He looked at his watch, calculated time and distance to his target. A long way to go and a short time to get there. And suddenly it came to him.

He thumbed the transmit button on his radio.

“Flight leader, flight leader, this is, uh, Passionflower, over.”

“Roger, Passionflower, this is Red Flight Leader. Go ahead, over.”

“Experiencing mechanical difficulties. System malfunctions, over.”

“What’s your situation?”

“I’m flying hot, sir. Engine overheat. It’s getting worse. Ru

“Are you declaring an emergency?”

“Negative, negative. I think I can throttle back and make it home to mother. Request permission to abort and return, over.”

“Permission granted, over.”

“Roger that, Red Flight Leader. Passionflower returning to the Varyag, over.”

Hawke peeled away from the formation and went into a steep diving turn away from his flight. The sun was up now, just a sliver above the horizon, streaks of red light streaming across the sea below. When Red Flight was out of radar range, he corrected course and went to full throttle. By his latest calculations, he’d touch down just in time. He sat back and allowed himself his first smile in hours.

If he didn’t get blown out of the sky, it promised to be another beautiful day in Paradise.

Keep reading for an excerpt from

Ted Bell’s upcoming novel

Phantom