"I got one!" Steele shouted exultantly. "Where's your kill?"
There was no answer from his wingman. "Stockbridge. Do you copy?"
Captain Stockbridge didn't copy. He would never copy anyone again. Steele realized this when two jets formed up and jinked back on him like darts at a target. Both were F-16's. Stockbridge was the one going down. "They got Stockbridge," Steele said in an arid voice. "Aw damn," the wingman said hoarsely.
Steele saw the F-15 Eagle auger in as he tried to get a radar tone on the approaching bogeys. It hit the desert floor in a splatter of boiling flame.
"Any parachutes?" he asked his backseat anxiously. The reply was subdued.
"No, no chutes. Sorry."
"Not as sorry as those two are going to be," Steele promised when he finally got a tone signal. "Fox-2!"
A Sparrow rocket cut loose for the approaching attackers. They split, but not before a boil of fire spat from one wing tip.
"He got a missile off," Steele warned. He threw the plane into an evasive turn, and G-forces smashed him against his seat. The blood drained from his head faster than his constricting G-suit could fight it. His vision went gray, then black. He fought to stay conscious.
He pressured the fly-by-wire stick right. His vision went gray again. Then black. He risked joining his wingman as a smoking hole in the desert, but Steele had no choice. He had to lose that missile.
The desert floor spun under the F-15's nose as it fell into a tailspin, a heat-seeking missile fixed on its tailpipe. Steele recovered. He leveled off hard, skimming the ground. The Sparrow, not as maneuverable, kept going. It kicked up a cloud of dust when it hit.
"Still with me, guy?" Steele called.
"Barely," the radar man said.
"Where are they? Do you have them on visual?"
"I'm looking, I'm looking. There! I see them. They're banking. Jesus Christ!"
"What?"
"I see markings."
"Identify."
"You're not going to believe this, but they're Zero markings."
"Say again. I don't read you."
"Zeros. You know. Like the Japs used to fly." Steele's mind raced. He was so focused on his flying that his brain refused to sort out the chatter of his radar man. Did he say they were Zeros? They were F-16's. Steele had seen that as plain as day.
Then the radar man was shouting. "They're diving!" Captain Curtis Steele couldn't go down. There were mountains on his right. So he climbed.
His F-15 stood on her tail and strained toward the sun.
"Lock him up!" the backseater cried. "I can't get a tone," Steele said. "There're two of them. You gotta."
"I can't get a fucking tone," Steele shouted, pounding on his instrument board. "I'm gonna go through them if I can."
Steele held the stick steady. He let them lock on him. He intended to bluff his way through. It would take nerve, but anyone willing to strap on forty thousand pounds of careening machinery and go head-to-head with another jet had that in spades.
The paired F-16's were diving now. Steele focused on the space between their wings. If only they didn't launch too soon....
Then, sickeningly, his afterburner flamed out and Steele felt himself lifted out of the nearly horizontal seat back as the powerless F-15 Eagle began to fall back like a dart thrown up into the air.
"I've lost it! I've lost power!" Steele was shouting. He clawed at the restarter. The engine whined. Nothing. The nose of the jet was tipping earthward again and there was the desert floor spinning like a plate.
"Eject! Eject!" he called, hitting his ejection button. The canopy popped. Then he felt a gorge-lifting kick in the butt as the ejection-seat charge exploded. Then everything exploded. The F-15 burst like a pressurized can in a microwave, going in an instant from magnificent winged metal bird into so much slicing shrapnel.
A section of wing decapitated Captain Steele before he realized what had happened. His backseater was too slow hitting his ejection button. He went down with the plane.
High above, two F-1S Fighting Falcons with Rising Sun markings streaked away like fugitive arrows. When Davis-Monthan Air Force Base informed the Pentagon that they had lost contact with their scout planes, the joint Chiefs of Staff were assembled. Admiral- William Blackbird, chairman of the joint Chiefs, ordered two Marine F/A-18 Hornets to the Yuma Marine Air Station, which had also stopped communicating with the outside world. Then he put in a call to the President of the United States.
He was told by the President's chief of staff that the President was pitching horseshoes in the new White House pit and would he mind waiting for a callback.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the chief of staff that a callback would be just fine. Then he turned to the assembled Joint Chiefs.
"It's ours. That idiot chief of staff must think that if we don't scream emergency, then the Pentagon can wait. So what's the situation on those Hornets?"
The commandant of the Marine Corps held up an annoyed hand. Then he clapped it to an ear while he listened to a voice on the other end of the telephone line. When he lifted-his head, his face was pale.
"We've lost contact with the Hornets."
"What happened?"
"The Air Force shot them down."
The silence in the room was palpable.
"Check all bases," Admiral Blackbird ordered. "Find out what's going on."
"We're doing that, Admiral." All around the room, the combined leaders of America's military command structure were doing what they did best: making phone calls.
One by one, they updated the chairman. All other bases and units reported normal situations.
"It seems to be confined to the Yuma area," suggested the chief of Naval Operations.
"This could be a diversion. I want a worldwide status report. "
The order was carried out at once. All over the continental United States and Europe, U.S. bases were contacted. KH-11 recon satellites shifted in their orbits.
Telephone and telex activity centering on the Pentagon grew frantic. It threatened to jam the phone lines of official Washington.
As the hours passed, word came back that there were no unusual events anywhere in the world. There was only Yuma.
And out of Yuma, there was only silence. Remo Williams closed his eyes.
It was not to block out the macabre bouncing of the airmen's bodies as they struck the desert floor. Too many of them had hit like rag dolls for it to hold meaning anymore. The screams were faraway in his ears, masked by the rushing of air as Remo fell in the so-called "dead-spider" free-fall position.
Remo closed his eyes to better focus on his breathing. For in Sinanju breathing was all. It unlocked the reservoirs of potential that lay in every man. Some men, when faced with a crisis, could summon up a portion of that inner power. Great strength, inhuman speed, impossible reflexes-all were within the spectrum of human ability. Remo, because Sinanju training put him at one with the universe, could utilize every aspect of that spectrum in simultaneous harmony.
People had fallen out of airplanes before and survived, Remo knew. Usually they shattered every bone in their bodies. And those were the lucky ones.
Remo intended to survive. He shut his eyes, the better to attune his breathing to the universe. He locked out all sound and sensation and looked within himself.
And somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach, a cold fire began to burn. Remo willed himself into that point. He willed every essence of his being to compress into a pinpoint of icy fire. The wind roaring in his ears cut off as if they had been shuttered. He felt his fingertips go numb. And his toes lose feeling.
The feeling drained from his limbs and rushed, like blood, to his stomach-according to Sinanju teaching, the seat of the human soul.
Remo felt lighter, as light as a snowflake. But even a snowflake fell. Remo dared not strike the desert with the force of a falling snowflake, for in this state, his bones were too fragile to survive. All his mass was concentrated in one point. He weighed no more than a snowflake. His bones were as hollow as a snowball. But, like a snowball, he was bound by the irresistible pull of gravity.