Slider pulled the handle for his ejection seat, and though the system had been hardened against EMP, the amount of magnetism slamming the airframe was simply too much for the hardware/software interface of the seat’s sequencer. Not that it would have mattered. The shock of ejecting out of an aircraft hurtling toward the ground at twelve hundred knots would have killed Slider instantly.

He shouted as the ocean filled his field of vision. The plane shuddered. The engines were throttled back to zero, and still the F-18 raced earthward, accelerating all the way. The forces acting on the plane went beyond its design parameters, and chunks of its aluminum skin began to tear away. It started spiraling, shedding more of itself. A whole wing ripped free.

Slider mercifully lost consciousness.

The Super Hornet arrowed into the cool waters of the East China Sea with a surprisingly small splash, like a well-executed dive off the high board. The remaining wing and tail fins came off with impact while the streamlined fuselage plummeted a hundred feet mere seconds after impact on momentum alone.

All this had been recorded by the Stennis’s circling AWACS plane. They had seen the fighter’s dramatic flip and quick plunge to the ocean. The controller had tried calling the stricken plane but received no response. The crash was strange on many levels. Normally, if something catastrophic happened to an aircraft, it slowed, and yet Stinger 11 had sped up. It made no sense.

What would have made less sense was if there had been an actual eyewitness to the crash. Because they wouldn’t have seen a thing. One second, a high-performance plane was flying high overhead and, the next, it had vanished as if it had never been there at all. Its snowy white contrail of water vapor streaked across the sky in a straight line, then ended abruptly, as though it had been erased by the hand of God.

The USS John C. Stennis was some sixty miles away from the spot the F-18 went down, and steaming hard.

—

“WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” Max stood behind Cabrillo in the op center. Eric was at the helm, Murph at the weapons station, and Hali and Linda manned communications and the sensor suite. They had all watched the jet crash on radar.

“They screwed up,” Juan replied, a fighter’s gleam in his eye.

“The Chinese’s stealth ship.”

“It looks like the plane experienced the same magnetic pull we felt when we took out Kenin’s first stealth ship. The Chinese are too far out from the Stennis, and this crash means the area will be crawling with rescue choppers and one of the battle group’s ancillary ships.”

“Meaning, he’s going to have to bug out.”

“Stoney, why aren’t we headed to the crash?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.