But not in the air. The fire, he knew, would be creeping along the fuselage from the tail section toward the main cabin. None of the controls seemed to have been damaged, the biplane could still be maneuvered, and the Sukhoi, even with its wings and air brakes hilly extended, was still not able to make the requisitely tough turns to break the stalemate of the scissors.
The Fencer was not an opponent, merely a factor. When the others arrived, they would build an aerial box from which he could not escape. It could be no more than a minute now before that process began… climb!
Mayday.
As the biplane's sluggish nose lifted, the Sukhoi flashed around and beneath, surprised by his disobedience. Then he climbed. The sun behind them reddened the star the fighter made as it rose. The boy pilot would come head-on now, firing everything, because on his screens the others were rushing in like sharks. He wanted the kill.
Villages, huts, settlements below — a long, wide valley, lush beneath snow. From the school atlas on the copilot's seat, this was the target for the signal. Smoke billowed, hardly dispersing in the airflow. The snapshoot missile had ignited without damaging. The plane was being eaten by the fire, but everything still worked.
Here he had to.
Sukhoi, finally swinging up and around to kill.
Altitude just, just enough.
Mayday. Heat in the cockpit, smoke everywhere, billowing and acrid.
"Mayday, Mayday — this is Winter Hawk. I repeat, this is Winter Hawk." Behind his tinted face mask, the young pilot of the Fencer should let his smile grow at the panic of the distress call and the unfamiliar code name. "This is Winter Hawk." In control rooms, cockpits, radio posts, they'd hear it and be satisfied. The American pilot hadn't made it, he'd lost. He was crying for help. He gave his position, over and over, he repeated the code name, the Mayday, then his position again. And because the hunt knew what he had, he ended: "Winter Hawk successful, repeat successful. Mission accomplished/' When he had repeated the final sentence of his message, he flicked off the radio and coughed in the acrid atmosphere. The radio had become irrelevant. The cockpit was hot, stifling. And now the burning…
Vietnam. Pulling at the hood of the ejector seat, the cockpit Plexiglas banging away from above him, the seat exploding out of the Phantom, rotating like a ball so that he saw sky, jungle, sky, the Phantom pursuing its course, streaming dark, oily smoke. Sky, jungle — the seat drifting away from him, then the neck wrench and physical blow of the chute opening above him… then the airplane exploding into bright fragments wrapped in billowing orange. Then dropping toward—
Here he had no ejector seat, only the parachutes stowed in the burning main cabin. He heard the Antonov's automatic fire alarm for the first time, as if it had only begun that moment. He switched to autopilot, and sensed the cockpit alienate him; finish with his services. He unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, dragging off the tight old leather flying helmet, throwing it aside. Bending low he gripped the hot door handle and opened the cabin door. Smoke was opaque, choking. He clutched his handkerchief over his nose and mouth. His last glimpse through the cockpit windshield had shown him new stars winking as they approached and the mountains beginning to loom ahead of the course he had set.
He fumbled in the cabin like a blinded animal. Caught up the kit bag that contained the cassettes of film and videotape. Rifle next, snatched from its mount on the fuselage. Orange fire glowing at the end of the cabin. Smoke everywhere. Now the burning of systems, ailerons, struts, linkages, control mechanisms. At any moment, the Antonov would be unable to respond to the autopilot and begin to fall out of the morning.
Glasses, rifle, spare ammunition clips, cassettes… chute, chute — his mind raced toward being out of control. Emergency pack, compass… the linkages were buckling, beginning to distort-He felt the Antonov lurch tiredly, then resume its illusion of calm passage.
He heaved the chute from its locker and awkwardly, hunched and coughing, wrestled his arms into the harness. Then touched the ripcord. He eased around the chemical tank and reached the door — flung it open. Smoke was torn and hurled around him. The wind cried. The fire leaped nearer. The biplane lurched again, then seemed to decline into a lazy, certain fall, banking over the valley toward the nearest hillside. Brown and snow-streaked. The slipstream tore at Gant's clothing, flapping the parka like stiff folds of tarpaulin. He gripped the edges of the door frame with white hands. Looked down, then quartered the sky as the Antonov's dying fall moved his vision like a lazy camera.
The Sukhoi Fencer was coming head-on now, and he could hear the boom of its engines echoing off the hills. The boy would hang a curtain of shells and rockets just ahead of the biplane, into which the old Antonov would lumber like a weary tiger into a pit. As he squinted into the slipstream, his eyes watering, Gant saw the Sukhoi growing in size, until the ripple of little ignitions beneath its wings indicated the hanging of the curtain. The Fencer was nose up, then it pulled steeply away and banked, slipping behind a creased mountain flank. Two new silver fuselages winked in the sun.
Gant poised himself. The Antonov's fall was almost graceful, delicate. He glanced at the tail plane, then at the fire behind him. He thrust out from the cabin door into the slipstream, feeling it leap on him, buffet and move his body even as he fell away from the Antonov. Altitude, five hundred and fifty feet, no more. It was low to jump — just all right? The mountains loomed — all round him, it seemed — and the biplane curved eerily toward it. He swiveled his gaze but could not see the Fencer.
Impact. Not with the mountainside but with the curtain of shells and rockets. The Antonov disintegrated. Skeletal remains were illuminated like black matchsticks within the ball of orange fire, which became smoke. Debris drifted down—
— like himself.
Ripcord.
Jerk as if someone were wrestling with him and trying to break his back. He looked up. The chute opened slowly, like a demonstration.
Where was the Fencer? how near the closest of the others? how long to fall…?
The snow filled the valley, now wide enough to be a plain. The ^ind drifted him toward the huge mountain. His hands tugged, altering his course minutely. Perhaps two hundred feet up now, no more. Where was the Fencer? How close was the nearest gunship?
The Fencer pilot had not seen him jump. Perhaps the others were too far off to reach him. One hundred fifty feet. He felt himself hanging in the wind like a target in a fairground booth.
The lower slopes of the mountain gave him his best chance. The pall of smoke from the biplane hung above him, as the debris raced him toward the snow. He was too close to the mountainside to reach the flat terrain covered with soft snow. The wind drifted him, and he fought against it, tacking like a sailor with a hundred tiny adjustments to avoid being thrown against the rock face. He was unaware of his own breathing, his mind was at a great distance. Hands only, his weight, the force of the wind, the brown, snow-streaked rocks, the trees below.
And the sky, the silver fuselages taking on distinct shape and proximity. And the first gunship no bigger than a beetle as yet. Mayday. There had been no other way. He could not have survived in the sky.
He jerked on the chute's cords, feeling his body swing away from hard rock, then he seemed to plummet into a narrow crevasse. Feet struck, cold and shock registering together. He rolled, covered at once in snow, his nostrils and mouth filled with it, choking him. It buried him, cutting out all light and air. He could just make out the noise of firing and registered the thud of cannon fire or rocket attack through the rock beneath and around him. Darkness. Suffocation.