Attack of the Seawolf

Aircraft Commander Chu HuaFeng had looked away from the scene of the helicopters dropping their depth charges just long enough to check his fuel gages and note with dismay that both read empty. He wondered whether he would be airborne long enough to confirm the kill of the submarine. As he looked up from the panel he felt a small jolt, looked out the canopy to starboard and saw his right wing disintegrate and explode into flames — for no apparent reason. It seemed to take a long time for the plane to start falling to the sea below, but after a moment frozen in mid-air, it began to spin toward earth.

Chu’s hands were already grabbing his crotch, where the ejection seat’s D-ring was located, the position of the D-ring designed to keep his arms tight to his body in case of ejection, high-speed ejections tending to cause amputations from the high-speed airstream. He pulled the D-ring nearly up to his waist, felt the ring pulling the pin that would blow off the canopy and ignite the ejection seat’s rocket motors.

He waited … nothing happened. He was about to let go of the ring and pull the canopy off manually when he noticed the view out the window had frozen — a helicopter was engulfed in a ball of fire but the ball was static, unmoving, and the chopper was not falling.

Moreover, Chu’s own jet was no longer tumbling out of control but lazily floating toward the water. As he watched, another piece of the wing detached and flew off into the slipstream, but it looked more like a feather floating in a breeze than shrapnel whipping into a six-hundred-click airflow.

Chu vaguely realized he had gotten such a huge dose of adrenaline that his time-sense had crazily accelerated, nearly stopping time. Now, as he watched, the canopy overhead blew off, leisurely flying upward and away, tumbling gracefully off out of view. Beneath him the ejection seat rockets cut in, and the cockpit of the airplane began to move, the instrument panel slowly moving downward and away as the rockets flew him out of the plane — except to Chu it seemed he was only going at walking speed as his seat left the aircraft.

As soon as his legs cleared the cockpit the airstream hit him and the aircraft faded away in front of him, shrinking slowly as it moved off. Chu stared at his crippled tumbling plane, still spinning gracefully and slowly when it exploded in a violent blooming fireball.

The explosion seemed to kick Chu into normal time, the seat jostling, the sound of the air a roar in his ears, his parachute deploying overhead, the seat falling away, the sea coming up from below while his chute canopy blossomed overhead. He floated toward the water, dimly aware of the fireballs surrounding him as the helicopters of the northern fleet exploded in flames just as his Yak had. It occurred to him that he and Lo might be the only survivors of the attack, since only they had ejection seats. He looked briefly for Lo but saw no other parachute or ejection seat. He was calling his friend’s name as the water came up and smashed into his back. He sank in the lukewarm water, but managed to detach his parachute and swim away from it.

He finally got his head above the water and saw a huge Hind helicopter flying overhead, flying low and fast toward the north as if trying to escape. He pulled a cord, inflating his life vest, took off his flight helmet, and let it sink into the bay. He kept watching as the Hind flew over, and a supersonic missile flew by in hot pursuit.

* * *

Leader Tien Tse-Min looked out the windows of the Hind helicopter at the formation of choppers about to drop their loads of depth charges. He looked south southwest to see if the ships of the surface task forces were nearby; none was visible in the dim moonlight.

He looked back to the sea below and watched as the first helicopter dropped its two depth charges, then flew off. He waited for the explosion from the water, but before it came the helicopter that had dropped the charges vanished in a violent white-and-red ball of flame, the rotor spinning off into the sky, the misshapen airframe spinning down to the water. Its remains hit the water at the same time the depth charges exploded, throwing spray and foam and water into the air, the fan of water from the explosion swallowing the burning helicopter. When the water calmed, there was no trace of the chopper. As Tien watched, stupefied, the other helicopters exploded and crashed to the sea. The lone VTOL jet remaining, the Yak-36A, blew apart, its canopy opening and belching an ejection seat that popped a parachute, the airplane blowing apart and raining shrapnel on the water below. Tien felt the jolt as the pilot of the Hind turned and headed north away from the battle zone.