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One instant Whitworth was strapped into a howling fighter jet held restrained on the deck. The next she was slammed into her seat and traveling upward through a vertical tunnel with the blood roaring through her ears. The feeling of sitting in a horizontal plane changed to that of sitting on an upright rocket, the g-forces making it seem to her brain as if the carrier deck was a wall and she was flying straight up. The stick came into her waiting right hand, her left still fighting the g’s on the keys, and the airframe shook as the catapult disconnected. The tunnel of the carrier deck flying toward her melted into the dark sea and the slightly lighter starlit sky. The fighter’s ride was suddenly smooth after the hellish catapult shot, struggling for altitude as it left the carrier behind. Whit worth pulled up and the sea vanished. Only the stars were visible. She glanced in the side mirror at the dimly lit carrier behind them, the deck becoming smaller as the fighter climbed, the jets shrieking behind them. The instrument panel’s display of altitude wound up as the fighter climbed through a thousand feet and higher. Whitworth put the jet into a left turn, orbiting the John Paul Jones until she leveled off at forty thousand feet. She flew to the coordinate of the hold position, awaiting the launch of the rest of the squadron.

It didn’t take long. The carrier’s catapults pumped out fighter after fighter until all but the reserve force was airborne. Whitworth’s squadron formed up behind her, and without a radio transmission, she wiggled the wings of the F-22 and headed northwest at full throttle. The fighter sped up to Mach 1 and went supersonic, the squadron on her wings. In the next hour she expected to engage the Red Chinese Panda strike fighters and their Cobra antiair missiles. Once both threats were burning on the waves below, the squadron would head in and put their large load of Mark 80 JSOW Joint Standoff Weapons into the Red carrier, the Beijing-class battle cruisers and the assorted heavy cruisers of the Red fleet.

“You with me, Bald?”

“Looking good, Fuzz,” the interphone crackled. “So far we’re alone. The Jolly Rogers own the skies.”

In the air operations gallery of the John Paul Jones, Admiral Ericcson watched in satisfaction as the last jets were launched. The reserve jets were attached to the catapults, their engines at idle. They would wait out the battle here, waiting to guard the carrier. Ericcson put out the cigar and walked back into air ops, lighting a second Partagas as the squadrons flew toward the Red force.

“Port Royal, Sea of Japan, Coral Sea, and Atlas Mountain are commencing Equalizer cruise missile launch, Admiral,” Commander Weber said, looking over from his display. The heavy supersonic large-bore cruise missiles would fly horizontally off the short decks of the cruise missile carriers, then climb at a thirty-degree angle for the heavens as their solid rocket first stages pushed them to fifty thousand feet and their ramjet engines came on-line for the trip to the Red fleet.

“Oh, God, smash the teeth in their mouths,” Ericcson muttered around the cigar clamped in his teeth to no one, thinking of the Red fleet. “Break the jaw-teeth of these lions, Lord. Let the whirlwind snatch them away. Then the just shall rejoice to see the vengeance and bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” Ericcson looked up to see Pulaski staring at him, and shrugged. “Psalm fifty-eight,” he said.

Eighty-two miles ahead of the John Paul Jones and five hundred feet below her keel, the fast-attack nuclear submarine making full turns at fifty percent reactor power made way swiftly toward the Red Chinese Battlegroup Two while screening the Jones task force, without the knowledge of the fleet she protected.

The control room of the USS Hornet, a Virginia-class submarine never truly finished by the Pearl Harbor DynaCorp Naval Shipyard, was rigged for black on the orders of Commander Browning “B.D.” Dallas, the submarine’s commanding officer. Dallas had been chain-smoking since local nightfall, the ship’s clocks showing just after eight in the evening Zulu time. There was no doubt, Dallas thought as he coughed, he would have to give these things up, but better health would have to wait until the end of his command tour. Dallas had a heavyset medium height frame, and had been gaining forehead real estate for some years. Dallas was Squadron Seven’s top commander. Dallas stood on the conn talking quietly to the officer of the deck, young Dick Jouett.

“Cyclops has the Jones task force, even with her in the baffles,” Jouett said. “The onion array is updating the battle space and the aft acoustic daylight array has the wider dispersed ships of the formation.”

“How good is the solution to the target battle group Dallas asked in his harsh somewhere-west-of-Chicago accent.

“USubCom’s updated us with a snapshot telemetry picture from Jones’s Predators. It would have been better in real time,