Two distant pops, and the long burp of aircraft cannon high in the sky overhead woke Captain Jim Hart from a fitful sleep. High above the clouds came the whining engines of a rare dogfight. Both pilots were taking a terrible risk in the missile-rich environment.
The grunt of U.S. Air Force Captain Nick Waters became a continuous growl as he held his F-26 in a 6-G turn. His prey — a Chinese fighter — dove down into the cloud cover, but the head-up display projected his position onto Nick’s windshield. Blood rushed to his head as he sticked over into a 9-G outside roll. He spun the aircraft upside down to turn the maneuver into an inside roll, but still he had trouble maintaining his focus, and he blinked his eyes repeatedly. With his face set firmly in a grimace, he dove into the clouds. His vision tunneled, but at the center of the tunnel was the wildly turning image of the Chinese fighter at which he’d already fired his last air-to-air missile.
Waters had been in his cockpit for almost nine hours. That included two landings to rearm and refuel during which he had kept his engines running in preparation for a hasty takeoff. Even on the ground, Waters’s defensive suite blared threat tones into his ears. But that beat the hell out of the brief screams over the radio in the past six months of air war that had accompanied the deaths of a dozen of his squadron’s original twenty-two pilots. The Americans gave more than they got, but each time they swept the southern sky clear of Chinese aircraft, huge numbers of hypersonic Chinese missiles lit up their radar screens as they hurtled toward them from over the horizon.
But for a day — maybe two — it would be different. The Chinese hadn’t yet disembarked their ground-based missiles, so both pilots were out of range of Chinese fleet-based missiles to the south and American land-based missiles to the north. The result was that pilots did battle in old-fashioned dogfights. It was for just this moment that Waters had joined the air force. This wouldn’t be his first kill of the war. He had six over the Gulf, and three more that morning alone. But every kill was personal to Waters. Every kill was different. “Die, you motherfucker, die!” he shouted as he lined up the crosshairs and gripped the stick’s trigger ever tighter. This would be his first kill with guns.
“Damn!” he shouted as the Chinese jet rolled sharply and got away. Waters panted for breath as he pulled straight up in an 8-G inside loop. Cuffs in his G-suit painfully squeezed every inch of his body below his neck to force the blood back to his head. He swam through a sea of dizziness, nausea, and sweat. He breathed in great pants like a weight lifter. Biomed sensors strapped to his chest and scalp triggered a blaring, “Black out!” warning.
He leveled, and it took him several pounding heartbeats to realize that he was head-to-head. Waters squeezed the trigger. His F-26 shuddered from the recoil of the .30-mm buzz saw directly beneath his rudder pedals.
A flick of the stick raked 300 rounds over his enemy’s nose.
The Chinese fighter veered into an out-of-control roll.
The computer coolly announced, “Auto-eject. Auto-eject. Auto-eject.”
As the three words were spoken, an automated sequence jerked traps around Waters’s helmet, arms and legs, pulling him painfully to the chair. The canopy slipped away from the aircraft, and wind assaulted the cockpit.
Bam-BAM! came two explosions. Waters shot out of a fireball. The high-thrust rocket on the armored bottom of his seat jettisoned him through the explosion that consumed his cockpit and then his entire F-26. The computer, knowing of humans’ slow reaction times, hadn’t bothered alerting Waters to the exact nature of the threat. It had simply punched him out.
His body slammed into a howling 500-mph wind before the rocket motor rotated the seat and doubled its thrust. His body weighed a ton during two seconds at 13 Gs. The seat steadied in an upright position — Waters sitting atop a rocket shooting skyward — for its seven-hundred-foot ascent. The motor abruptly shut off. The straps released Waters. Despite his deep sink into the form-fitting cushions, the seat fell away.
He was in free fall. Down, up, down, up. Gotta…
A loud snap and violent jerk ended his plummet. His chin smacked into his chest, and his teeth cracked together. Pains warned of major damage to his body. He took a deep gulp of air. His head flopped backwards.
His parachute above him was deployed in a perfect, open blossom. He took another breath. That was up. He filled his lungs, but his head still spun. From two miles below came the crump of the enemy jet hitting the ground. That was down — toward the ground — he decided.
Waters fumbled with his helmet and finally raised his dark visor and checked his risers, which weren’t tangled.
He was descending through the altitude of his aerial battlefield. Two puffs of black smoke — one the Chinese he’d killed, the other the scene of his aircraft’s destruction — were separated by a gently curving white trail. It was the contrail of the Chinese missile fired at point-blank range. He could smell the smoke as he descended between the nearly simultaneous mutual kills. He wiggled and wormed in the harness to take a last look at the ghostly history of his battle, then to get comfortable, then to see if he was hurt. The effort brought grunts and groans of pain. He was battered and bruised by his collision with a brick wall of thin air. He finally settled — limp — and got on the radio to report his ejection. He got no reply. He had no idea if anyone heard him.
Waters drifted down into a solid cloud, and his mind went blank. It was misty, gray, cool — then the ground reappeared.
Flames rose from the brown farm field eight hundred feet beneath him. It was the wreckage of the Chinese jet. Waters instantly grew angry. Pain burst from a hundred places when he shouted at the top of his lungs, “F-fuck you, you son of a bitch!” He dangled underneath his nylon parachute and stared at the flames with grinding teeth.
That makes ten, he thought, keeping score.
All of the sudden, he saw the green plume of another parachute draped over the few trees that provided shade around a farmer’s house. The bastard who’d shot him down hadn’t even died! Waters raged. He kicked and cursed and twisted in air. He ground his teeth until a stab of pain shot into both jaws. He didn’t have ten kills, yet, even though the air force only counted planes. His fight wasn’t over.
He was so focused on the sight of the offending parachute that he was caught by surprise at the ground rush. He went from looking down at the earth to around at it. His survival kit landed like an anchor on a tether twenty feet beneath his feet. His ground speed was too great to try to stick it standing. At the last instant he firmed and angled his shock-absorber legs and plowed into the straight rows of brown dirt. The dozen deep bruises he’d gotten from ejection were punched all at once. He crashed into the dirt on his side and he had time to moan just once before a gust of wind tightened the risers.
With a snap, his harness yanked him face-first into the dirt and began dragging him across the dry furrows at ten knots. His mouth filled with dry dirt, but the thing that pissed him off the most when he finally succeeded in hitting the harness release was that he’d been dragged farther away from the farm house.
He rose to his knees with his head swimming, braced his hands on his thighs, and spit over and over, all the while staring at the distant copse of trees, looking for movement. His survival kit lay at the end of its tether. Waters rose unsteadily and in pain and stumbled over the plowed ridges to the tight pack. He unzipped pockets till he found the canteen. He swished and gargled then drank half of its contents. Still no movement at the house. When he returned the canteen to his kit he grabbed the butt of his automatic and pulled it from its green nylon holster.