Now it seemed America was attacking a building less than a half-mile from where Jack Ryan, Jr., was staying.

While Ryan was still trying to process the images and sound around him, Adam Yao grabbed the camera and the tripod and said, "Let's go!"

"Go where?"

"I don't know," Yao said, "but we're not staying here!"

They were prepared to bug out quickly in the event of a compromise; they had most everything in the apartment packed up in a pair of duffel bags, and Adam's car downstairs was gassed and ready to go. Together they threw the rest of their belongings in their bags and flipped out the lights, then began rushing to the stairs.

SEVENTY-SIX.

The two anti-SAM Hornets had peeled away from the four JDAM-carrying Hornets and fanned out, making themselves sitting ducks, but using their advanced electronic countermeasures and their HARMs to lock on to and destroy SAM sites as they revealed themselves.

Trash and Cheese were as low as they could possibly fly below and behind the eight other jets. They raced up the Pearl River, which went right through the center of downtown Guangzhou; they passed skyscrapers on either side of them, their wingtips sometimes not more than a hundred yards from the wall of a building. Then they broke north, turned over the city, and anti-aircraft guns began firing in their flight path. The sparkling tracers arced and whipped around the sky in front of them. Trash saw SAM launches in the distance, and he knew they were targeting the HARM Hornets above him, but he also knew if he was called in to drop his bombs, he'd have to expose himself and he'd have the worst of both worlds-the anti-air and terrain threats down here at the deck and the SAM threats a little higher.

The four strike fighters with the JDAMs came over the radio now one at a time, and announced they had no GPS signal, which was critical to guide their smart bombs all the way to impact. After just a few more moments Trash heard over the radio the plaintive calls of one of these Hornet pilots; he'd been hit by a SAM and was ejecting. An anti-SAM Hornet launched on the missile battery, but more SAMs raced into the air. Another strike pilot went defensive against a missile launch; he broke out of what remained of the group as he began jinking and diving and firing chaff.

Another pilot carrying JDAMs was forced defensive, and he dropped his weapons stores so he could maneuver. This pilot's wingman stayed in the flight, and he was the first to line up for a bomb run on the target.

He still could not get the GPS signal in his aircraft, and this told him his JDAM would be flying blind, but he could still drop it dumb and hope for the best.

He began a diving run on the target from fifteen thousand feet.

Four miles south of the China Telecom building, the Hornet was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Trash watched from his position over the river five miles to the south, as the aircraft erupted in a flash of light and then fell off to the side, its left wing tipped down toward the city, and then nosedived toward the buildings below.

Trash heard a clipped "Ejecting!" and saw the canopy fire off, and then the pilot shoot into the air.

The tracer rounds only increased ahead with the success of the shoot-down. Another strike fighter had to dump his stores and escape back to the south.

- Now Trash realized it was down to him and Cheese. The remaining JDAM Hornet would never get around for another attack run before he too had to dump his weapons and exfiltrate the area now that the frenzy of SAM and AA in the sky, along with a new report of approaching bandits from the east, had turned Guangzhou into nothing more than a threshing machine for American aircraft.

Just as Trash knew that he and his flight lead were up, Cheese's voice came over the radio.

"Magic Flight, commence attack run."

"Magic Two-Two, roger."

Trash and Cheese rose together to one thousand feet, switched to their bomb loadouts, and selected the mode to drop their Mark 84s nearly simultaneously. Trash knew four tons of iron bombs on a single twelve-story building would be devastating, though it would not bring it down to the ground. He just had to follow Cheese's flight in, and together they would slam a total of eight tons of high explosives, a four-ton impact point within a four-ton impact point, and completely devastate the building.

Cheese said, "Ten seconds."

A burst of flak right in front of Trash's canopy caused him to jack his head back reflexively. The wings of his aircraft wiggled and he lost a few feet of altitude, but he pulled back up and leveled off just as Cheese spoke.

"Bombs away." Cheese dropped, and a second later both of Trash's Mark 84s separated with a clunk and the aircraft immediately felt lighter. High-drag chutes deployed from the tail section of each bomb, slowing them and allowing the Hornets to separate to a safe distance before detonation.

Trash raced away from the impending frag pattern.

He saw ahead of him the glowing jet engines of Cheese's Hornet bank hard to the left and head for the deck, trying to put distance between himself and the explosion to come.

A flash to the north caught his attention. "Missile launch!" he said.

Cheese said, "Magic Two-One is defensive! Missile tracking!"

- From the parking lot of the apartment building Jack Ryan watched the dark planes race overhead. Ryan had seen no bombs drop, but almost instantly the China Telecom building a half-mile away exploded in a rolling ball of flame and smoke and debris.

A roar shook the ground under his feet, and a rolling mushroom cloud of fire and gray-black smoke rose into the air.

"Holy shit!" Jack said.

Yao screamed at him, "Get in the car, Jack!"

Jack climbed in, and Adam said, "I don't want to be the only guy driving an American around Guangzhou right now."

As he fired the engine, both men looked up in the sky at the soft boom of an explosion miles to the north. In the distance, a burning fighter plane tumbled toward the city.

- Magic Two-One is hit!" Cheese said just moments after Trash dove his aircraft to the deck. "Flight controls not responding! I've got nothing!"

"Punch out, Scott!" Trash shouted.

Trash saw Cheese's aircraft roll to the right and flip upside down, and then the nose tipped down, just eighty feet above the city.

He did not eject.

The aircraft slammed into the street, nose first, at more than four hundred miles an hour, and it broke apart in a cartwheel of disintegrating metal, glass, and composite material. An explosion of jet fuel arced behind it, swirled along with the cartwheel, and only died out when the plane rolled into a drainage culvert and foamy black water engulfed the wreckage.

"No!" Trash screamed. He had not seen an ejection or a chute; his rational mind would have told him there was no way Scott could have punched out without him seeing it, but still Trash looked up in the sky above him as he passed the wreckage at four hundred twenty knots, desperately searching the night sky for a gray canopy.

He saw nothing.

"Magic Two-Two. Magic Two-One is down, at my coordinates, I . . . I don't see a chute."

The call back from the CIC was succinct: "Roger Two-Two. Understood Magic Two-One down at your location."

There was nothing Trash could do now for Cheese; he had to get the hell out of there. He shoved the throttle forward, past the full power detent, all the way to the max. Afterburners kicked in instantly, nearly standing the aircraft on end, and he felt his helmet pressed hard back against the headrest as his thrust increased and the twenty-five-ton jet rocketed into the night sky.

The young Marine's eyes darted around the displays in front of him. Altitude three thousand, four thousand, five thousand. The HUD spun like a slot machine.

He checked next on his vertical moving map display. He watched Guangzhou slip slowly below his aircraft. Far too slowly for Trash's taste. He wanted to put time, space, and altitude between himself and the scene of his action.

Six thousand feet.

At this moment all of Trash's focus was inside the aircraft. His threat indicators were clear at the moment, other than a flight of bogeys seventy miles to his east and heading away, no doubt toward the Navy F/A-18s attacking the ships in the strait.

Seven thousand feet.

He was over the southern part of the city now.

A beep in his headset brought his attention to his HUD.

He glanced down and saw that he had been lit up by a SAM radar to the southeast. Within two seconds another radar painted him from directly below his aircraft.

"Missile launch."

He pulled hard to the left and then the right; he went inverted over downtown Guangzhou, pulled five g's as he leveled out and banked to the right, firing flares and chaff in a long wide arc.

It did not work. A surface-to-air missile exploded twenty-two feet from his left-side wing, sending shrapnel through the wing and fuselage.

"Magic Two-Two is hit! Magic Two-Two hit!"

His left engine fire light flicked on. It was followed instantly by an audio warning. "Master Caution," and then an instant later, "Engine Fire Left. Engine Fire Right."

Trash wasn't listening to Bitching Betty anymore. His HUD flickered off and on and off again, and he struggled to take in as much data as he could read when it was on.

Another SAM was in the air. His displays and his HUD were failing, but the warning came through his headset.

Trash fought to hold the aircraft level, and he pushed the throttle forward to the detent and beyond, trying like hell to gain a little more airspeed.

His stick felt sluggish, and his throttle had no effect.

The dead F/A-18 lost all lift, the nose pitched forward, and the aircraft rolled to port. Trash looked out through the blank HUD, past the canopy glass, and he saw his entire field of view filled with the twinkling lights of a city. As the plane tumbled down through the sky, however, his view out the canopy went dark. The lights were replaced by impenetrable blackness.

Somehow, in the terror of the moment and the fight to keep his head together and do what he had to do, Trash realized his plane was corkscrewing down to earth to the south of the city where the Pearl River Delta splayed out toward the sea.

The lights of Guangzhou and its suburbs.

The darkness of the river, its tributaries, and the farmland of the delta.

"Magic Two-Two is ejecting!"

Trash quickly removed his NVGs from their bracket on his helmet and threw them to the side, then reached between his knees, grabbed the ejection control handle with both hands, and pulled up. This fired two gas impulse cartridges below him, and the gas shot through pipes throughout the cockpit and performed a variety of automatic functions. It turned on thermal batteries in the ejection seat, it pushed a piston to disconnect the emergency restraint system, it flipped internal switches to initiate the canopy jettison system, and it caused another impulse canister to fire, which pulled Trash's shoulder harness tight against his seat, holding him into the proper position to eject safely.

The last function of the gas was to spray through the inlet of the catapult manifold valve to fire the .75-second-delay cartridge-actuated initiator housed there.

This delay cartridge released its gas, which was piped to the ejection gun initiator.

The initiator fired the ballistic latches on the canopy and the catapult, and it pushed the seat up guide rails. The movement upward caused another impulse cartridge to be exposed, and this was fired by the head of the ejection gun initiator gas.

As Trash and his seat shot up the rails, his emergency oxygen turned on, his emergency beacon switched on, and leg restraints clamped down around his shins.

Till now, Trash had been propelled up by gases, but as his seat reached the top of the guide rails the rocket motor below him fired, shooting him out of his cockpit and launching him upward more than one hundred fifty feet.

A drogue chute deployed, pulling out the main canopy, which whipped in the cool air as Trash and his seat reached maximum altitude, hung there for a moment, and began to fall.

Trash spun through the air with his eyes clenched shut; a scream left his lips because he felt only falling, falling, and he knew he was too low to fall much farther. If his chute did not deploy in the next second he would slam into the hard earth at one hundred miles an hour.

He squeezed every muscle in his body tight to prepare for an impact that, his rational brain knew, would kill him instantly.

Please, God, help- The jolt of the harness arresting his fall grabbed at his balls and his chest and his back. He went from free-fall spin to swinging ramrod straight under his chute in the space of two seconds, and the shock of it blew the air from his lungs.

Before he'd even had time to suck a fresh breath of air into his lungs he crashed sidelong onto a metal building. It was a small tin-roofed fishing shack at the waterline, and the entire structure moved along with the force of his impact.

The momentum of his body and the pull of the chute yanked him across and then off the roof and he fell three meters to asphalt. He landed on his right side and heard the sickening sound of cracking bones in his forearm and wrist.

Trash screamed in pain.

A breeze pulled his chute taught, and he fought with it, his right arm hanging low by his side.

The chute pulled him onto a reedy bank, he rose to his knees, and a gust of wind pulled him forward, off his knees, and into the water. Once sensors in his harness detected water, the harness separated from his body, a lifesaving feature that had been built into his chute, but it did not free him in time to prevent him from being swept away by the river current.

As he plunged into the cold water, he heard the sound of sirens.

SEVENTY-SEVEN.

Adam Yao and Jack Ryan had been racing south through the city when they saw the Hornet hit by a SAM. They watched the plane fly on to the south, leaving the electric glowing haze over Guangzhou and entering the darkness over the Pearl River Delta, then it pitched down, and then they just barely caught a glimpse of the ejection at a distance of one mile before the pilot disappeared below the buildings between them and the aircraft.

Adam increased speed on Nansha Gang, desperate to get to the downed flier before the police or military, who would certainly be on their way. There were a few vehicles out at this time, but not many. Adam liked the wide-open road for purposes of making good time, but he worried that his little two-door stuck out like a sore thumb on the nearly empty streets.

This was a fool's errand and they both knew it, but they agreed they could not just leave without knowing the man's fate.

The PLA was out all over the city, as well as the local police, and this made the two Americans nervous, although there were no roadblocks or other barriers to travel. The attack was over now, and it was an attack the city had clearly been surprised by, so the military and police did little more than drive around, looking for the pilot or hassling pedestrians who came out into the streets to see what was going on.

But Adam and Jack had a head start on the civilians; they were out of the city now.

Big transport helicopters passed them, raced on to the south, and disappeared in the night.

"They're going the same place we're going," Jack said.

"Guarantee it," agreed Yao.

- Twenty minutes after the jet crashed and the pilot ejected, Yao and Ryan rolled past the location of the crash, a field that ran along a tributary of the Pearl River. The helicopters had landed there, and troops had fanned out into a large copse of trees to the east. Ryan saw flashlight beams all through the trees.

Adam drove on by the crash site. He said, "If the pilot is in those trees, they've got him. There's nothing we can do. If he made it to the river, though, he would have floated downstream. We can check it out at least."

Adam turned at the river, passed row after row of storage sheds where the locals kept grains and fertilizer and other equipment for the nearby rice fields, and then they drove onto a narrow dirt road. Yao looked at his watch, saw it was just after three in the morning, and he knew it would be a miracle if they saw anyone or anything down here at all.

After ten minutes of driving very slowly along the water, the men noticed flashlights shining from a bridge just a few hundred meters on. Jack pulled Adam's binoculars out of his pack and looked at the scene, and saw there were four civilian cars on the bridge, and a group of men in civilian clothing were scanning intently into the water.