Maclachlan responded by saying that an invasion of Taiwan would amount to a declaration of war with America. And besides, China’s control of the Strait didn’t amount to a hill of beans, said Maclachlan; not with the U.S. carriers, and F-15s in Okinawa, ready to join the action.
Anyhow it didn’t seem likely the Chinese could secure a beachhead, even without the U.S. coming to the aid of Taiwan. And a failed invasion could cost fifty percent casualties.
But the Chinese had nukes, and ICBMs. They could simply wipe Taiwan off the face of the Earth.
Nobody was too sure about what the U.S. would do in that circumstance. Did the Americans, asked the Great Helmsman, care as much about Taiwan as about Los Angeles?
The Chinese would have to be dumb, or desperate, to take such a step. But they were indeed desperate, Deeke thought.
For decades they had watched the U.S. cozying up to India, recognizing Vietnam, selling F-16s to Taiwan, forging alliances with Japan, trying to work for a united Korea under Seoul allied to the U.S.
From the Chinese perspective, it looked like a ring around China. Which, of course, it was.
And besides, there was one way the Chinese could win… Which was why Deeke was here.
So matters stood. Now, they were all waiting.
Deeke emerged in his flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute on his back, survival kits for several environments tucked into pockets, emergency oxygen, intercoms.
He walked up to the F-28.
Close to, the plane looked something like a miniature Shuttle orbiter, with the underside of its fat delta wing coated with black silica-based thermal protection tiles, and the upper hull layered with a gleaming white felt blanket, patched with black around the attitude control nozzles. The felt blanket gave the plane an oddly clumsy look, he thought; it lacked the metallic sleekness of the hulls of conventional aircraft. But that blanket was plastered with USAF logos, and his own name and rank, picked out under the canopy.
The F-28 looked what it was: a plane built for space, America’s first rocket plane since the X-15.
Although the basic rocketry would have been recognized by von Braun, in every other way the F-28 was a child of the twenty-first century.
The concept was based on proposals touted in the 1990s by space enthusiasts for a fast-turnaround, relatively cheap, single-stage-to-orbit military spaceplane. When Xavier Maclachlan came to power, and after extensive lobbying by the USAF, he wasted no time in pulling Lockheed Martin out of NASA’s doomed RLV development, and ordering the accelerated development of what became the F-28 for the Air Force.
Needless to say, it had come in way over budget. But even so the cost was manageable. The F-28 was designed to work with existing runways, fuel distribution systems, non-specialized hangars and standard handling equipment… The only novelty was the use of kerosene and concentrated hydrogen peroxide to burn in the plane’s five engines, to give the F-28 a high power to weight ratio.
The cost of the whole project had been about equivalent to two Delta IV launches, less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch. For that price, the USAF had gotten itself a whole new aerospace craft.
Gareth Deeke was just grateful that a new chain of command — via Hartle, up to President Maclachlan — had brought him and his skills and experience here, to head up the USAF’s newest battle wing. The USAF didn’t have so many rocket-plane pilots that it could afford to ignore a man like Gareth Deeke, age or not.
Two techs helped him climb up and lower himself into the cockpit of the F-28. The rocket plane’s white-tiled walls were only just wide enough for him to squeeze in.
The elemental countdown dialogue with his controller inside the carrier began as soon as he strapped into his seat; around the plane, the stubby, shielded fuelling tankers withdrew.
“Data on,” he said. “Generator reset. Hydraulic pressure, check. Electrical pressure, check. Rudder, check…”
“One minute, Gareth.”
“Rog. Master arm is on, system arm light is on…”
“Ready for the prime.”
“Prime, igniter ready. And precool, igniter and tape…”
“Thirty seconds.”
Inside the craft, there was little similarity with 1970s Shuttle technology. This cockpit was high-tech: the walls were coated with softscreens, which reconfigured to suit each successive flight phase, and his helmet offered head-up and virtual imaging, overlaid on his view through the canopy. Now, the systems worked him calmly through the final preparations.
“…Fifteen seconds.”
“Pump on,” Deeke said. “Good igniter.”
“Five seconds. Looks good here, Gareth. And three, two, one.”
Deeke braced.
The noise of the F-28’s five rockets rose to a roar.
In his glass bubble Deeke was slammed in the back, suddenly cocooned in light and noise and vibration. The carrier deck whipped away, exposing the grey, bone-hard surface of the ocean. The plane swivelled back, pitching suddenly upwards, so that he lost sight of the ocean.
The F-28 rose almost vertically. Twisting his head, he glanced down: the carrier was already lost, remote, a patchwork of blue grey adrift on the wider hide of the ocean.
Then, in a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep pearl blue.
At thirty-five thousand feet he levelled off. The plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming white felt and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky.
There was a tanker aircraft waiting for him here. The F-28 carried a full load of fuel, but it needed replenishment of its heavy oxidizer for its final leap into space. With practiced ease, he slid the replenishment nozzle mounted in the nose of the plane into the dangling cup trailed by the tanker. The replenishment took just three minutes.
When it was done, the tanker pulled away.
Deeke hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The rockets howled again, and the Gs rammed him hard into his seat; his head was pushed into his shoulders, and his vision tunnelled, walled by darkness.
There was the mildest of vibrations as the craft went supersonic, and then the ride got a lot smoother, the noise of the rockets dying to a whisper. The cockpit now was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, he knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ocean below.
Eighty thousand feet. He moved the throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. He was already so high he could see stars above, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.
Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Pacific spread out beneath him, the shining skin of the world.
There was a rattle of solenoids, a brief squirt of gas beyond the cockpit. His reaction control thrusters had activated.
The rockets shut down with a clatter.
He was thrust forward against his restraints as the acceleration cut out, and then he drifted back again.
He had gone ballistic. He was weightless inside the cabin, and it felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck. Up here, coasting in near-silence, he lost all sensation of speed, of motion.
He was fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the softscreen displays gleamed brightly. He could see the eastern coast of Asia all the way from Japan to the Philippines, with the distinctive teardrop shape of Taiwan directly beneath him; it was all laid out under him like some kind of relief map. Up ahead the Earth curved over on itself, looking huge and pregnant, and at the horizon’s rim he could see the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed.
Just like the old days.