Not good, he thought. He was stuck between advancing fighters and a semi-active radar homing surface-to-air missile that had an employment range of close to two hundred miles. And he didn’t have the gas to mess around with either.

“Two zero four, Tiger, single group, seventy miles, hot, bogey, outlaw.”

“Two zero four, commit single group.”

40

Dusty One

Air Branch Mi-17 Hip

Since launching from Passu Keah and turning east for Scarborough Shoal, Charlie had purposely ignored how dark and ominous it looked through his forward windscreen. He nervously scanned the horizon, looking for tracer fire or the tell-tale orange blossom of a missile launch from one of the Chinese outposts on the otherwise uninhabited Paracel Islands. But it was dark. Only a flashing red light on the forward instrument panel drew his attention down into the cockpit.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Surveillance search radar,” Roger answered. But his voice was suspiciously calm.

“From what?”

When he didn’t answer, Charlie stole another glance inside the cockpit and turned to look at the green glow on his copilot’s face.

“Roger,” he said. “From what?”

“An HQ-9,” he replied, but quickly added, “But we’re only picking up a side lobe. It appears to be targeting one of the Super Hornets.”

Charlie returned his focus to the pitch black through the forward windscreen, blocking out the little voice in the back of his mind that told him they were easy pickings. It didn’t matter that he’d felt that way his entire career as a special operations helicopter pilot or that the Mi-17 was equipped with state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures designed to defeat even the most robust air defense systems. He was still piloting a leaking four-decade-old helicopter at wave-top height with nothing but hundreds of miles of ocean in any direction.

“Should we start jamming?”

“Not yet,” Roger replied. “If we do it before they know where we are, we could guide them right to us.”

Reluctantly, he nodded. He felt naked without a protective curtain of electronic jamming between them and the searching radar, but Roger was right. Turning the jammer on too early was almost as bad as not having it at all. “How far out is Pedro?”

Two Marine MV-22 Ospreys had launched from the America with a company of Marines and were racing northeast from the amphibious assault ship to take them the rest of the way. Charlie thought the TRAP team was overkill on the uninhabited atoll, but it never hurt to have the most guns in a fight.

“Oh, shit.”

Charlie’s blood ran cold when he heard the tone in Roger’s voice. “What?”

“There are a ton of surface ships out here, and the Reagan’s Hawkeye is picking up another airborne target between us and Scarborough Shoal.”

He shook his head. “What? How? There’s nobody else out here.”

“Apparently there is,” Roger said, before keying the microphone to transmit back to the TOC. “Scar Nine Nine, Dusty One, are you seeing the latest radar picture?”

There was a longer than normal delay in the response. “Affirm. It appears to be a helicopter, but there’s some debate whether it belongs to the PLA Navy or not.”

Charlie already knew. In this part of the world, even the fishing trawlers weren’t out here to fish, and he wasn’t willing to take that chance when they were already in danger of not making it. “Dave!” he shouted. “Get up here!”

For as loud as it was inside the helicopter, he was almost surprised to see the bearded frogman’s head appear over his shoulder a moment later. “What’s going on?” Dave asked.

“We’re going to have company.”

He was focused on the blank canvas of darkness ahead of them and couldn’t see the look on the SEAL’s face, but he knew Dave had to have been just as surprised. “What kind of company?”

“A helicopter.”

“Hostile?”

“Unknown. But we’re going to lower the ramp, and I’ll need you and your guys to man the guns.”

“The guns,” Dave repeated, as if emphasizing that he understood their expected company was the type that might require such a response. “How long do we have?”

Charlie saw Roger manipulating the Toughbook from the corner of his eye and knew the other air branch pilot was measuring the distance between them and calculating their closure. It was a far cry from what the Super Hornets were likely experiencing with the Flankers from Lingshui, but at less than one hundred feet over the water, a closure rate of over one hundred knots seemed insane.

“He’s at twenty miles,” Roger said.

Charlie finished the thought for him. “Not long, mano.”

Dave grunted something indecipherable and disappeared back inside the Hip’s cramped cabin.

* * *

Dave turned and looked at the SEALs huddled together on the bench seats along the side of the fuselage. They seemed calm and relaxed, at home in their environment, and stared back at him with flat but determined eyes. He motioned for two to join him, and they quickly popped to their feet and scampered to where he stood just behind the cockpit.

“I need you two to man the door guns,” he said. “I’ll be on the ramp gun.”