“What are we going to do about it?”

“You mean what are you going to do about it, dear boy. That’s why I’m springing for lunch.”

“No free lunch, as they say.”

“Never.”

“How can I help, sir? I’ve been deemed fit for active service as of yesterday morning.”

C looked around to establish if anyone was within earshot and then said, “We at Six have established a back-channel communication with a high-ranking Chinese naval officer. Someone with a working brain in his head who doesn’t want to go to war over his government’s deliberate and insane maritime provocation any more than we do.”

“This sounds good.”

“It is. Very.”

Hawke leaned forward and quietly said, “The Chinese are well aware that they cannot possibly afford to go to war with the West now. In a decade, perhaps, but certainly not now.”

“Of course not. It’s an obvious political ploy, albeit an extremely dangerous one. They wish to divert attention from their burgeoning internal domestic turmoil, particularly Tibet, with a bellicose show of force. Show the peasant population and the increasingly restive middle class just how powerful they now are.”

“Sheer insanity.”

“But you’re going to put a stop to it, Lord Hawke. I’ve arranged a secret rendezvous for you with Admiral Tiao Tsang on a small island in a remote quadrant of the South China Sea. It was formerly a Japanese air force base, now abandoned because of the territorial dispute. There’s an eight-thousand-foot airstrip there that should accommodate you nicely.”

“What kind of bus am I driving?”

“An American F-16 Viper. One of ours. Especially modified for nighttime insertions. All the latest offensive and defensive goodies, I assure you. Kinetic energy weapons and all that sort of thing.”

“Lovely airplane. Always wanted a crack at one.”

“You’ll get one first thing tomorrow morning at Lakenheath RAF. Three days of intensive flight training with a USAF chief instructor off your wingtip. Then off you go into the wild blue yonder.”

“This Admiral Tsang. How high ranking is he, exactly? I mean to say, is he actually powerful enough to defuse this thing?”

“Very high. Chinese chief of naval operations. You’ll find an obsessively complete dossier waiting for you when you get home. Memorize it and burn it. Now then, Alex, what will you have for lunch?”

A keening wail suddenly filled the Viper’s cockpit. Holy God, he’d just been painted by enemy radar! He whipped his head around and saw the Chinese SAM missile’s exhaust flame streaking toward his Viper’s afterburner. A HongQi 61A. Where the hell had it come from? Some kind of Chinese radar-proof shore battery on a nearby atoll? None of his so-called sophisticated gadgetry had even picked the damn thing up!

He hauled back on the joystick and instantly initiated a vertical climb, standing the Viper on its tail and rocketing skyward. He deployed chaff aft and switched on the jamming devices located in the airplane’s tail section. He was almost instantaneously at forty thousand feet and climbing, his eyes locked on the missile displayed on his radar screen. Its unverified speed, Hawke knew, was Mach 3. It was closing fast.

The deadly little bastard blew right through his chaff field without a single degree of deviation. The Chinese were not behaving according to MI6’s assessment of their military capability. With every passing second, his appointment with death went from possible to probable. He’d have to depend on the aircraft’s jamming devices and his own evasive maneuvers to survive.

He nosed the Viper over and put it into a screaming vertical dive, gaining himself precious seconds. The HongQi would have to recalculate before altering course and getting on his six again. He’d known from the second the SAM missile appeared on his screen that there was only one maneuver that stood a gnat’s chance of saving him.

A crash dive straight down into the sea.

Hairy, but sometimes effective. To succeed, however, he had to allow the deadly weapon to get dangerously close to impacting and destroying the Viper. So close in fact that when he pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant, he would be so near to the water’s surface that the missile would have zero time to correct before it hit the water doing Mach 3.

The missile nosed over as Hawke had and honed in. It was now closing at a ridiculous rate. His instrument panel told him he was clearly out of his bloody mind. The ingrained human instinct to run, to change course and escape, clawed around the edges of his conscious mind. But he’d erected a firewall around it that was impenetrable in times like this.

It was those few precious white-hot moments precisely like this one that Alex Hawke lived for. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a warrior to the bone and he was bloody good at it. His focus at this critical moment, fueled by adrenaline, was borderline supernatural. His altimeter display screen was a blur, but he didn’t see it; the collision-avoidance alarms were screaming in his headphones, but he didn’t hear them. His grip on the stick was feather light, his hands bone dry and surgeon steady.

His mind was calmly calculating the differential between the seconds remaining until the missile impacted the Viper and the seconds until the Viper impacted the sea. Ignoring his immediate surroundings, all the screeching alarms and flashing electronic warnings, Alex Hawke began his final mental countdown. The surface of the sea was approaching at a dizzying rate . . .

Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

NOW!

He pulled back on the stick and brought his nose up. He noticed beads of water racing across the exterior of his canopy and figured he might have caught the top of a wave coming out of the dive. . . .

You can’t get any closer in this kind of situation than when you get your nose wet. Some smart-ass RN combat instructor had said that lo those many years ago. He barely heard the impact of the missile over the roar of his afterburners, but he did. He was in the clear and could easily visualize it, vaporizing upon contact with the concrete hard water at that speed. . . .

G forces were fierce as he initiated his climb back to his former below-the-radar altitude. That’s when his starboard wingtip caught a cresting wave that sent his aircraft out of control. He was skimming over the sea like a winged Frisbee. He felt a series of jolts as the fuselage made contact a couple of times and instinctively understood that the aircraft was seconds away from disintegrating right out from under his arse.

He reached down and grabbed the red handle to his right, yanked it, and the canopy exploded upward into the airstream and disappeared. The rocket motors beneath his seat instantly propelled him out of the spinning cockpit and straight up into the black sky. Seconds later, his chute deployed and he had a bird’s-eye view of his airplane turning into varying sizes of scrap-heap metal and disappearing into the deep.

He yanked the cord, which disengaged him from his seat, watched it fall, and moments later his boots hit the water. It was cold as hell, but he started shedding gear as quickly as he could. He was unhurt at least and able to tread water until his life jacket inflated. So far so good, he thought, keeping his spirits up surprisingly well for a downed airman all alone.

Normally, there’d be an EPIRB attached to his shoulder harness. Upon contact with water, it would immediately begin broadcasting his GPS coordinates to a passing satellite. He could hang out for a while here in the South China Sea and wait for one of Her Majesty’s Navy choppers to pluck him out of the water and winch him up. But of course he had no distress radio beacon, no EPIRB.

He figured the water temperature was cold enough to kill him eventually, but the thermal body suit he wore would stave off hypothermia long enough for him to have a shot at survival.