Charlie heard Roger’s calls but had tuned everything else out. He even ignored the klaxon sound of the radar warning receiver that indicated the HQ-9 had activated its fire control radar to guide the Mach 4 surface-to-air missile. None of it mattered now. Everything but the shoal on their left side and the water beneath them was a distraction from what he needed to do.

“Missile launch!” Roger shouted.

But Charlie ignored him.

Just one hundred feet more.

47

Wizard 323

Navy P-8A Poseidon

South China Sea

Ashley knew she was pushing the limits of their engines and endurance, but she wasn’t about to sit idle while a Chinese surface-to-air missile shot down an American helicopter. “What’s our status, Ed?”

“Just finished loading it,” he replied.

“Fire,” she commanded.

If her tactical coordinator had any reservations about launching the three-million-dollar weapon, he didn’t show it. The fifteen-hundred-pound missile dropped free from its external hard point before the turbojet engine propelled it toward the target.

“Op away,” Ed said.

Ashley immediately banked away from the target, turning to put the disputed Chinese territory at their six o’clock. When she had gone through one hundred and eighty degrees, she reached up and turned on the autopilot, letting the Boeing jet fly itself away from hostile waters.

“You have the aircraft,” Ashley said to Logan, not waiting for the required response before unstrapping and climbing out of her seat to walk aft from the flight deck.

Lieutenant Ed Turner was standing behind Petty Officer Delgado at his console on the port side of the plane when Ashley walked up. Both men were focused intently on the screens that displayed telemetry data for the SLAM-ER missile as it made its way along a preprogrammed nap-of-the-earth profile bound for Woody Island.

“How much longer?” she asked.

“We should start receiving datalinked images in…”

A flicker on the screen cut off Tony’s response, and three sets of eyes stared at what looked like a grainy black-and-white movie of the ocean surface taken from a shaking cameraman. Tony immediately grabbed the control stick next to his station and made a subtle adjustment to the crosshairs. After a slight delay, the camera shifted and centered on the new target.

“Good control,” he said.

The AGM-84K SLAM-ER was known as the Frankenstein of weapons. Based on the Harpoon missile platform, the SLAM-ER added an infrared seeker from the AGM-65F Maverick and a modified Walleye datalink. Though it could fly autonomously using GPS and infrared terminal guidance, the datalink allowed for a “man in the loop” feature that gave the operator the ability to fine-tune its guidance.

In this case, Tony used the joystick at his console to adjust the crosshairs in the last few seconds of flight to ensure it hit the desired target.

“Is that it?” Ashley asked, pointing at a bright spot on the screen.

Ed leaned in close, but Tony answered, “Yes, ma’am. That looks like the HT-233.”

“That’s the radar?”

Tony ignored the question and continued adjusting the crosshairs to keep them centered on the large rectangular hot spot in the middle of the screen. She couldn’t help herself and held her breath as the missile raced toward the target at over five hundred miles per hour. As the seconds ticked closer to impact, Tony refined the aim point several more times until the target filled the camera’s entire field of view.

The screen went dark, and Ashley exhaled.

Dusty One

Air Branch Mi-17 Hip

Silence filled the cockpit, but Charlie had already committed himself to ignoring everything but the landing. As the Hip neared the dry land of South Rock, he slowed their forward movement and hovered over the shoal while peering down at the rocky and uneven terrain.

“Do you see a good spot?” he asked Roger.

He pivoted the helicopter to give his copilot a better view through the windows on their left side, keenly aware that every second he delayed setting the helicopter down brought them closer to running out of fuel. Then he’d have no say in the landing spot whatsoever.

“Nope,” Roger replied. “It’s all uneven.”

With a silent curse, Charlie pivoted back to the left and slowly inched the helicopter forward over South Rock. He debated setting down on the highest point, but without a flat piece of ground to set down on, they ran the risk of the helicopter tipping over and falling into the water. Even though most of the people in the back had trained for an underwater helicopter egress, he wasn’t eager to end the mission that way.

“I’m going to put us down in the shallows,” he said.

They drifted north to the lagoon side of the reef, and he pivoted once more to align them with what looked like a large stretch of shore. Even though it would be a wet landing, he hoped it was shallow enough that they could at least have a stable and flat piece of earth to rest the twenty-thousand-pound helicopter.