After another burst of cannon rounds went high, the Marine saw in the small mirror on the canopy next to the towel rack that the Super 10 had closed to under one mile, and he was perfectly lined up to take Trash out with his next volley.

Trash did not hesitate; he had to act. He "got skinny" by turning his aircraft to show the smallest dimension, the side, and as the J-10 closed range, Trash pulled his nose up. His body was shoved down farther, both forward against the straps and deep into his seat. His lumbar spine ached from the maneuver, and his eyes lost focus as they bulged in their sockets.

His last-ditch maneuver had increased the closure on the enemy fighter, not by slowing but by simply turning perpendicular to his line of flight at the perfect moment. He grunted and clenched his teeth, and then looked straight up through his canopy's glass.

The J-10B had been concentrating on his cannon, and he had not reacted to the maneuver in time. He shot past, just one hundred feet above Trash's Hornet.

The Chinese pilot was clearly doing his best to bleed off all his excess speed and to stay in the control zone, but even with his speed brakes on and his throttle back to idle he could not match Trash's deceleration.

As soon as the shadow of the Chinese fighter passed over Trash's aircraft, the American tried to pull into the control zone behind his enemy for a guns solution, but his enemy was good, and he knew better than to make himself an easy target. The J-10 got its nose up and its engine generating thrust once again, and he came off his speed brakes and went vertical.

Trash overshot his target low and instantly found himself in danger. To avoid having the J-10 get behind him, Trash shoved the throttle forward, past the detent and into afterburners, and his F/A-18 reared back like a mustang and launched toward the sun on two pillars of fire.

Trash accelerated upward, gradually getting his nose up to seventy degrees, passing three thousand feet, four thousand, five thousand. He saw the J-10 above him in the sky, saw the enemy's wingtips turning as the pilot tried to find the American plane somewhere below him.

Trash reached ninety degrees of pitch-pure vertical-and shot upward at a speed of forty-five thousand feet a minute.

In sixty seconds, he could be nine miles above the water.

But Trash knew good and well he did not have sixty seconds. The J-10 was up here with him, and the enemy pilot was likely slamming his head all over his cockpit trying to find where the hell in the sky the Hornet had run off to.

At ten thousand feet Captain White brought the throttle out of afterburner and tipped the nose of his jet over. He could tell that the enemy pilot still did not see him, a few thousand feet below and behind. The Chinese pilot rolled inverted and turned back toward the water.

Like a loop on a roller coaster, Trash rocketed in the direction of his enemy; in seconds he saw the Super 10 passing through a cloud below him. The pilot was using a split-S maneuver, trying to turn back toward the F/A-18 with a high-speed nose-low turn.

Trash thumbed a small trackball-like input on his flight stick and switched to his cannon. As soon as the aiming pipper appeared on his HUD, the J-10 descended right into it, just eight hundred yards away.

Trash fired one long and then two short bursts from his six-barreled Vulcan 20-millimeter cannon.

His long burst passed well in front of the Super 10; his second spray of cannon fire was closer but still ahead of the jet.

His last short burst, just a fraction of a second, nailed the enemy jet on the starboard wing. Bits of smoking aircraft broke free. The Chinese pilot broke hard to the right. Trash mimicked the maneuver just six hundred feet away, rolling toward dark smoke.

The Chinese plane dove for the water, and Trash fought to line up the pipper for another gun shot, "hooked" with the hard-jerking g-forces he put on the plane to position himself behind.

In front of him a flash moved his focus from his pipper to his target. Flame poured from the wing and the engine, and almost instantly he knew the plane in front of him was about to die.

The rear of the J-10B exploded and the doomed aircraft spun hard to the right, corkscrewing toward the sea below.

Trash broke off the attack, banked hard to the left to avoid the fireball, and then struggled to level his wings up above the water. He had no time to look for a chute from the pilot.

"That's a kill. Splash one. Pos, Cheese?" "Pos" was a request for the other jet's position.

Before his flight leader responded, Trash looked down at his DDI and saw he was heading toward Cheese. He looked up through several small clouds and saw the glint of sun off gray metal, as Magic Two-One, Cheese's aircraft, shot from right to left.

Cheese's voice came over the radio. "Defensive. He's on my six, about two miles back. He's got me locked. Get him off me, Trash!"

Trash's eyes tracked quickly back to the north and saw the surviving Super 10 just as he launched a missile at Cheese's jet exhaust.

"Break right, Two-One! Missile in the air!"

Trash did not watch the missile, nor did he look back over at Cheese. Instead he switched his weapons to select a Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missile. Trash had a "tally" on the Chinese Super 10, meaning that he could see him through his helmet-mounted sight.

Inside his headset he heard a loud electronic buzz indicating that his Sidewinder was searching for a suitable heat signature.

The buzz changed to the high-pitched lock tone as the J-10 passed by just three miles off Trash's nose, indicating the AIM-9's infrared homing system had found the hot engine of the Chinese aircraft and was tracking it.

Trash pressed the air-to-air launch button on his stick and fired the AIM-9 Sidewinder. It streaked away on a trail of smoke and homed in on the Super 10.

The missile was fire and forget, so Trash turned to the left to position himself behind the enemy fighter if the Sidewinder missed.

Quickly he found Cheese in the sky. Trash's flight leader was banking hard to the south; behind him his automatic flares deployed out of both sides of his aircraft and arced to the earth.

The Chinese missile dove into the hot flares and exploded.

Trash looked back to his target and saw the J-10 launch his own flares as he banked hard to the left. "Get him, get him, get him," Trash said aloud, urging his missile toward the flaming engine of the Chinese aircraft. But the Sidewinder was duped by the flares fired by the Super 10.

"Shit!"

Trash switched back to guns, but before he could get his pipper on his target, the enemy jet dove for the deck.

Trash followed him down, hoping to get behind him for another kill.

In his headset he heard, "Magic Two-One is engaging bandits approaching from the north. Fox three."

Trash had not even had time to check what happened to the four other approaching aircraft, but clearly Cheese was firing radar-guided missiles at them from a distance.

"Cheese, I'm engaged, pushing this guy to the deck."

"Roger, Trash, Navy Super Hornets two minutes out."

Trash nodded, then focused intently on his enemy, the Chinese pilot and his aircraft.

"Fox three!" said Cheese as he fired another AIM-120 AMRAAM at the bandits approaching from the north.

Trash and the Super 10 he had engaged spent the next sixty seconds in a tight, wild chase, each pilot jockeying to get in position to fire on the other while, at the same time, doing everything in his power to prevent his enemy from getting position on him.

This was known, in the lexicon of air-to-air combat, as a "phone booth." It was a small area to operate in, and getting smaller with the corrections both pilots made to jockey for advantage in the air.

Trash felt the bone-crushing pressure of high positive-g turns and the eye-popping, nausea-inducing dives of negative g's.

A minute into the dogfight White slammed the stick to the right, following the enemy's high-g turn above the water. Trash got his nose inside the turn slightly, but the PLAAF man reversed course suddenly and removed Trash's advantage.

The sheer number of inputs entering Trash's brain was unimaginable. His aircraft moved on three axes as he tried to remain in an offensive position against another aircraft moving on three axes. His mouth delivered information to his flight lead and the Hawkeye as he tracked the targets and the deck below, and both of his hands moved left, right, backward, and forward as his fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons on his throttle and stick. He read a dozen different readouts on his constantly moving HUD, and he occasionally brought his focus inside the cockpit to give quick glances to his navigational display to see where he and his lead were in relation to the centerline over the strait.

Sweat poured down the back of his neck and the muscles in his jaw quivered and spasmed from the tension of the moment.

"Can't get a bite on him!" Trash announced into his mic.

"I'm engaged, Magic Two-Two. He's yours."

Cheese had fired a third missile at the inbound fighters, which he had determined to be Russian-built Su-33s. One of the three AMRAAMs hit its target, and Cheese announced, "Splash two."

The PLAAF fighter banked left and right, spun upside down, and performed a high reverse-g maneuver that Trash replicated, causing his eyes to bulge and his head to fill with blood.

He tightened his core muscles, his abs and low back turned to rocks, and he "hooked" over and over.

He forced himself to lessen his turn angle, helping his body but causing him to lose his position behind the enemy.

"Don't lose sight. Don't lose sight," he told himself as he tracked the J-10 through white puffy clouds.

The other pilot kept the bank going, however, and Trash craned his neck all the way behind him, then spun it back to check the mirrors high on the canopy.

The other jet was getting in behind him for a kill shot. Trash had lost his offensive advantage.

Not good.

The Chengdu J-10 pilot did make his way behind Trash and fired a short-range PL-9 missile at his tail, but Trash managed to defeat it with his automatic flare deployment and a seven-point-five-g bank that nearly knocked him out cold.

He needed his speed, but it was bleeding off on the turn. "Don't bleed it! Don't bleed it!" he shouted to himself between grunting through the g-forces.

The two planes were corkscrewing down through the sky. Seven thousand feet, six thousand, five thousand.

At just three thousand feet Trash reversed direction quickly, pulled himself into an eight-g turn, and switched to guns.

The Chinese aircraft did not recognize what happened, and he kept his downward spiral going for critical seconds while Trash prepared to meet him head-on.

Trash saw the Super 10 at one mile, and he used his rudders to line up for a gun shot. He slammed his feet down, left and right, all the way to the firewall to make the necessary corrections in the very short time he had before the Super 10 passed.

There. At two thousand feet separation and a closing speed of more than one thousand miles per hour, Trash slammed his right index finger down on the trigger on his stick.

A long burst of tracers from his Vulcan cannon reached out from the nose of his aircraft. He used the laserlike light to guide him toward the enemy.

At five hundred feet the Super 10 burst into a fireball. Trash disengaged, pulled up on the stick violently with a hook to avoid an air-to-air collision or an FOD flameout, because foreign-object damage from the explosion could easily get sucked into his plane and destroy one or both engines.

Once he was clear, he confirmed the kill by going inverted and looking up in the canopy.

Below him the J-10 was nothing but small pieces of black wreckage and burning, smoking debris, all falling toward the water. The pilot would be dead, but Trash's elation at having survived trumped any sympathy he could possibly feel in this moment.

"Splash three," he said.

- The Super Hornets arrived in time and committed on the three remaining Su-33s attacking from over the centerline, but Magic Flight was not finished. To their south, one of the two Taiwanese Air Force jets under attack by the other pair of J-10s had already disappeared from radar.

Cheese said, "Magic Two-Two, heading two-four-zero, combat spread. Let's help out that surviving ROC F-16 before it's too late."

"Roger that."

Trash and Cheese raced to the southwest while the Navy Super Hornets chased the Su-33s back over the centerline and back to the Chinese coast.

A moment later, Trash got a radar lock on the J-10s, still forty miles away. He immediately fired an AMRAAM missile.

"Fox three."

He doubted his missile would hit the Chinese fighter. The pilot of the enemy aircraft would have a hell of a lot of defensive tricks up his sleeve that he could deploy easily with such a distance between them, but he wanted to give the attacker something to focus on other than killing the Taiwanese F-16.

His AMRAAM might not knock the Chinese jet out of the sky, but it would screw with the pilot's attack.

The attack worked as he had hoped, one J-10 disengaged, but they were not in time to save the Taiwanese pilot. The ROC F-16 was hit by a short-range missile and blown to bits over the western coast of Taiwan.

The two Chinese planes immediately turned and raced back to the mainland before Trash and Cheese could engage them.

The two Marine F/A-18s were low on fuel, so they flew west, then lined up behind a refueler on station over Taipei to gas up before heading back to the carrier. Trash felt the tremors in his hand as he delicately jockeyed his aircraft in position behind the refueling drogue.

He chalked the shakes up to pure exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.

When they were back on the carrier, when their aircraft were chocked and chained and their parking brakes were set, when both men had climbed out of their cockpits, climbed down the stepping platforms on the side of the fuselage, returned to their ready room, and shed the survival gear off to reveal flight suits soaking wet from sweat, only then did the two men shake hands and hug.

Trash's knees shook now, but he felt good. Happy to be alive, mostly.

They learned only when they got back to the ready room that up and down the Taiwan Strait there had been several air-to-air encounters. Nine ROC aircraft had been shot down, versus five PLAAF fighters.

Trash and Cheese recorded three of those five kills, with Trash getting two Super 10s and Cheese shooting down one Su-33.

No one understood the audacity or aggression of the Chinese, and the squadron commander told his pilots that they could expect to be back up in the skies in combat within hours.

The Marines on the boat treated Trash and Cheese like heroes, but when the two men made it back to their quarters, Major Stilton could tell something was bothering Captain White.

"What's wrong, man?"

"I should have done better. That phone booth I was in, the second engagement . . . I can already think of about five things I could have done differently to take that guy down faster."

"What are you talking about? You got him, and your situational awareness out there this afternoon was outstanding."

"Thanks," Trash replied.

But Cheese could tell he was still brooding.

"What's really bothering you?"

"We should have nailed those other two J-10s before they wasted the F-16s. We took too long with our bandits, and the ROC guys got wasted. We come back here to the Reagan and everybody is acting like we're fucking rock stars. Those two ROC pilots are dead, and I'm just not feeling the joy."

Cheese said, "We did damn good today, bro. Were we perfect? Nope. We're just men. We do our best, and our best today took down a couple of enemy aircraft, saved our own asses, and showed the Chinks that they don't own the skies over the strait." He reached over and flipped off the light to their quarters. "That's going to have to be enough."

Trash closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. As he lay there he realized he was still trembling. He hoped like hell he'd be able to get some rest before he headed back into the unfriendly skies tomorrow.