“It’s now or never,” Kurt said. “Dive hard and come up from underneath him.”
Joe pointed the nose down and dove as Kurt suggested. The old Starlifter picked up speed rapidly and was soon shaking as it approached its maximum safe airspeed.
“Come on, you bucket of bolts,” Joe said. “Go.”
Aboard Saber One the danger became patently clear. “They’re going to hit us from below,” the laser tech said.
“Shoot them down!”
“They’re still underneath our firing plane.”
Ahab’s mind spun. There was only one answer. “Take us down,” he shouted. “If they want to stay low, we will go lower.”
Chen shoved the controls forward. Saber One pitched down, racing to stay ahead of the old Starlifter.
As the plane picked up speed, the weapons tech looked at his screen. The Starlifter was so close, it couldn’t be seen on radar, but through an optical tracker it appeared near enough to block out most of the sky.
He held his breath. After all the sudden maneuvers, he was just trying hard not to throw up. Slowly, incrementally, the cargo plane drifted back. Saber One was winning, but only by trading altitude for speed.
A flashing icon and a beeping sound in his headset told him a new target had appeared on the screen. Not directly behind them or across the gap where the last American fighters were, but out in front of them at the very edge of radar range, nearly two hundred and forty miles away.
The computer soon marked the target based on the radar return.It was identified as a 747-800. Its designation was denoted as Air China 3701: the Chinese premier’s plane.
The specialist tapped the screen to lock on. The targeting system focused. The data was confirmed. He pressed the fire button, but nothing happened. To his surprise the target had vanished from the screen.
“What?”
The technician cycled the screen, but it didn’t help. The premier’s plane was gone.
Saber One had dropped too far from its perch to see over the curvature of the earth. With each thousand feet of altitude it lost, the maximum range of the laser shrank by miles. Air China 3701 was still out there, somewhere over Shanghai, but Saber One could no longer see it. And it couldn’t hit what it couldn’t see.
The weapons officer was gutted. Their chance had come and gone. And with the steep dive continuing at full speed, it wouldn’t come around again.
Chapter 67
Joe kept the Starlifter’s nose pointed down even as the plane threatened to shake apart. With Saber One diving as well, the two aircraft were now engaged in a massive game of chicken from which neither could safely exit.
If Joe pulled up first, Saber One would fry them from close range. If Saber One’s pilot got cold feet and leveled off, Joe would have the speed to slingshot forward and rip into Saber One from below.
Glancing at the dials on the instrument panel, Joe saw the airspeed indicator above the redline, the engines hitting an overspeed condition, and the altimeter unwinding like a broken clock. Thirty thousand feet had already become twenty thousand, it would be fifteen thousand in less than a minute.
He pulled back on the throttles a fraction. He wasn’t sure how much the old plane could take.
They crossed the Chinese coast in a pair of matching dives. Two huge planes streaking toward destruction at the steepest of angles.
They closed in on ten thousand feet. Alarms began to go off. Joe had no idea what they were, but they couldn’t possibly mean anything good.
They passed eight thousand feet without either pilot letting up.
“Kurt?” Joe asked.
“He’s going to pull up,” Kurt insisted.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because if he doesn’t, we win.”
Win?
