Waters chambered a round, zipped the kit up, and slung it by a strap over an aching shoulder. All was silent save the steady whistling of the wind past his green flight helmet. It was so unlike the electronic squall of aerial combat. He removed his helmet and let it drop to the dirt as he began his march — at first slow — across the field. “Fuckin’ bastard,” he mouthed under his breath. “Fucking bastard!” he shouted, not content to wait for his feet carry him to the green parachute. He half expected the Chinese pilot to emerge from the trees firing like a gunfighter. Like they had just done in the air. “You think you can come in my country!” Waters shouted despite the pain from his ribs. “Can out-fly—out-fight me?” The effort of rising onto his tiptoes to scream hurt, but his pace grew more determined. “Can you hear me yet, you son of a bitch?” he shouted. “Can you hear me, motherfucker?” he screamed.
No reply came.
He had no idea how many men in his squadron had died that morning — maybe all — but he knew for a fact that one who’d died had been his wing man. They’d returned to the fight — rearmed and refueled — and entered the melee just after dawn. Their first scrape, while carrying a full load of missiles, had gone well. Three times Nick and his wingman had volley-fired eight missiles each. According to the electronic monitoring system, each pilot had made three kills. But they had strayed too close to the coast and barely outrun enemy fleet surface-to-air missiles by burning two-thirds of their remaining fuel on afterburners. As the fast-approaching Chinese missiles had run out of fuel, they had detonated. They had been close enough to buffet his aircraft’s control surfaces, which was fed back to Waters through the artificially generated vibration of his control stick.
His wingman had called out that he had yellow lights in his cockpit, so Waters had maneuvered closer for an inspection. He saw clearly the fine mist trailing his partner’s left wing. The self-sealing tanks should take care of it quickly. As Waters had opened his mouth to inform his buddy of the fuel leak, the F-26 had disappeared in a blinding ball of flame. Waters had flown past the fireball and shaken his head before he believed what his eyes had told him.
Waters dropped his survival kit at the edge of the trees and entered the wooded stand with both hands on his raised pistol. The house showed no signs of forced entry. Waters followed the parachute, still visible in the treetops. Beneath it, the Chinese pilot lay in his harness, on the ground, crumpled, tangled in a web of risers. In his hand he held not a gun, but a green emergency locator transmitter. The beacon would be radioing beeps that would lead combat search and rescue straight to the grievously wounded man.
A single shot from Waters’s 9 mm scattered circuit boards across the grass, destroying the transmitter. The Chinese pilot raised his head halfway, but couldn’t seem to make his contorted body respond. Waters walked right up to him and stood over him looking down through the sights of his pistol. The Chinese pilot’s glassy eyes stared back blankly. Their whites were crimson from burst blood vessels.
“You think you can come into my fucking country?” Waters asked. “You think you’ve got that right? Huh? Huh?” His enemy lowered his helmeted head and said nothing, which infuriated Waters. “Fuck you! Fuck you! I fuckin’ win!”
His trigger finger pulled as fast as it could, and fourteen rounds lit the shaded side yard of the decrepit Alabama farmhouse.
Waters was tackled with a stunning blow. He hit the ground so hard the wind was knocked out of him. He began to struggle, but the man who sat on top of him held his hand over his mouth. It was an American soldier, Waters realized. The grease-painted white man raised his finger to his lips. He could just as easily have slit Waters’s airpipe with the huge black combat knife sheathed on the shoulder of his body armor just above Waters’s face. Ragged breath slowly returned to Waters, and he sat up.
The snake-eater had another huge fucking knife strapped onto his boot.
The flyboy grew more defensive about what he had done the more he calmed down. But Jim Hart was anything but calm. Not only would the sound of all those rounds — almost all wasted — bring any nearby Chinese patrols, but the transmitter beeps, sending location information, might bring heavily-armed heliborne troops from afar. The two Americans hurried across open fields in broad daylight. If they were sighted, they were dead. At least Jim was. He knew every minefield in the area. There would be no Chinese interrogators in his future. That decision, made long before, had been easy.
“That son of a bitch…” the air force guy began, shaking his head and not even paying attention to the treeline. Or the road. Or the horizon. “I lost my wingman this morning,” he explained to an uninterested Hart. “He just… They…”
“I don’t give a shit, okay?” Hart replied. “You shouldn’t have used your pistol.”
“I know,” Waters said. “Shit! I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I shouldn’t have… He probably was going to die anyway.”
“I mean you shoulda had the sense to use a goddamned knife!” Hart chastised. “Now shut up!” They sprinted the last few dozen yards to the safety of the deep Alabama woods. The guy was almost crying.
Hart just looked at him and said, “Reload, Goddammit.”
To the consternation of the naval officers, who had so far flawlessly handled Wu’s shipboard stay, Wu declined the power launch that had been arranged to take him ashore. Wu arrived instead at the crowded well deck wearing full combat gear and carrying an assault rifle. The bright morning sun lit the open end of the supercarrier. Wu looked behind him. He still couldn’t shake his escorts. Soldiers made way and eyed Wu and the senior naval officers in their white summer uniforms that trailed him as they wove their way through the masses.
Wu’s naval escort whispered to an army colonel, whose eyes widened. The colonel shook Wu’s hand and greeted him respectfully, then ushered him to a place in the enclosed, armored landing craft. Wu waited for other troops to join him, but the rear doors closed with only him in the craft. He cursed to himself. The crew — whose legs were visible to Wu as they stood at their controls in the front of the amphibious vehicle — kept ducking from their open hatches to steal glances at him before they closed their hatches, fired up their engine, and drove off the ship’s rear ramp into Mobile Bay.
When the double doors at the rear of the armored craft opened, a camera awaited Wu. The cameraman wore army fatigues. Wu emerged into the sunlight and onto a gravel-covered parking lot. It served a grassy, thinly wooded park with picnic tables, wooden shelters, and barbeque grills that were being bulldozed out of the way. Its sandy beach was now being used as a small beachhead. Amphibious vehicles like Wu’s rose out of the bay with water cascading from their armored hulls. Their steel tracks ground up the sand and sod as jets of black diesel smoke shot straight up from their huge engines. Wu turned. The camera’s eye — from two meters — filmed Wu against the backdrop of the powerful, surging equipment.
A major saluted Wu and escorted him to a waiting limousine. Wu looked at the trees, at the curb markings in English, at the houses across the highway, at the commercial buildings down the road in the distance. He soaked up the sights and sounds of America, the home of the mother he’d never known. He was conducting an experiment on himself.