The Hot Pilots (33 page)

Steve ignored him.
Greedy bastard wants them both
, Robbie thought.

Donnonononononog
—

“Jesus Christ! SAM launch—” Robbie bellowed.

Donnonononononog
—

The droning electronic tone reverberating in Robbie’s headphones was coming from the anti-SAM, Electronic Countermeasure gear
mounted in his Thud. The ECM gear was sensitive to the SAM’s radar tracking signal, which the SAM crews switched on a few
seconds before firing.

Robbie looked for the telltale dust cloud that would indicate a launch but couldn’t find one. He realized why he hadn’t seen
the launch as a trio of SAMs trailing fiery exhausts spiraled crazily from out of the smoky haze over the village—
that fucking village
—running like a pack of hungry wolves up toward the belly of Steve’s Thud.

“Steve, three-ring circus at four o’clock!” Robbie urgently called as he watched Steve continue spraying the fleeing MIG with
cannon fire.

“Just another second …” Steve muttered. “I almost got this sucker…”

“There’s no time, dammit!” Robbie cried. “Break now!”

“Got ‘em!” Steve cried triumphantly as the MIG’s tail section blew off. The enemy fighter slashed a bold back line of smoke
across the blue sky as it fireballed toward the earth.

And SAM has you
, Robbie thought sadly, knowing from experience that Steve had waited too long to begin evasive tactics.

The SAMs, each thirty feet long and carrying 350 pounds of explosives, had separated from their boosters. The missiles began
to accelerate on their stubby little wings as they tracked Steve, their heat-seeking guidance systems zeroing in on his tail
pipe. Steve broke hard left, going to afterburn to try to gain some altitude, but it was too late; the SAMs were already above
him and were now arcing down for the kill. Steve racked another hard left, and then a right, jinking like crazy. The SAMs
coming down at him from out of the sky followed relentlessly.

Oh, he’s good, Robbie thought in admiration. He’s turning on two planes at once in order to confuse the SAMs’ tracking systems.
He’s doing everything he’s supposed to, but there’s three of them boxing him in. If he manages to throw off one, another can
easily take over
.

Only seconds had passed since the electronic SAM alarm had sounded in Robbie’s ears, and it would only be a few more seconds
before this duel between man and machines was decided.

Robbie fired off a Sidewinder, thinking that there was a slim hope that the Sidewinder’s trail of fiery exhaust cutting across
the dwindling bit of sky between Steve and the trio of Sams might jam or confuse the latter’s infrared gear.
Yeah, it was a long shot, but what the hell
, Robbie thought. Again, the odds were long that the Sidewinder’s own heat-seeking guidance system would lock onto Steve’s
tail pipe. Anyway, at the moment, Steve didn’t have much to lose.

The Sidewinder hurtled forward on its thrashing tail of fire. Robbie watched it dwindle in size, seeming to dip, and then
arc up on a general course toward the SAMs. Soon the Sidewinder’s exhaust was only a glowing speck, and then even that faded
from view in the sunny sky.

Steve’s frantic maneuverings had dropped him to ten thousand feet and the SAMs were coming down at him. One was angling in
toward his nose, one in the general direction of his midsection, and one was converging on his tail pipe. The enemy missiles
looked like three fiery fingers spread to scratch Steve out of the sky.

There was a brilliant burst of light as the SAMs on Steve’s six o’clock exploded prematurely.
My fucking Sidewinder must have locked onto it
, Robbie thought, grinning despite the seriousness of the situation as he watched tendrils of black smoke radiating out from
the blast’s center.
I may be the first pilot in history to have shot down a SAM
—

Meanwhile, Steve seemed to be outracing the remaining two SAMs dropping down on him. The one on his nose abruptly flamed out
and hurtled past well ahead of him, on an irrevocable course to the ground. The SAM his tail was struggling to make the course
corrections necessary to stay locked on his exhaust.

He’s gonna make it
, Robbie thought.
The lucky sonofabitch has more life than a fucking cat. Gomer’s going to miss his bull’s-eye
—

The SAM site’s radar must have revealed that their target was on the verge of escaping because the enemy controllers chose
that instant when Steve was sandwiched between the two SAMs to detonate the missiles.

Robbie watched horror-struck as the twin blasts—one just a few hundred feet beneath Steve’s airplane, and one just a hundred
yards behind—engulfed Steve’s Thud in a smoky, blood red fireball, totally blotting his airplane from view.

It’s all over
, Robbie thought in shock, but then, incredibly, he saw Steve’s Thud arrowing up out of that spreading hell of smoke and fire.

“You fucking made it, you wild man!” Robbie crowed, but he shut up fast. He could see from the way Steve’s Thud was handling
that something was wrong.

“Steve, come in!” Robbie frantically transmitted. “Steve —”

There was no reply.
Had something happened to Steve’s radio?

Robbie looked around for the rest of the flight, but they’d gone.
We’re all alone, over enemy territory
, he realized. He checked his fuel situation: not good …

He glanced back toward Steve in time to see his Thud still climbing, but then it faltered as its engine flamed out. The Thud
dropped into a stall, and then the sleek war bird was transformed into almost twenty-five tons of flying brick as it began
to fall out of the sky.

“Steve, you’re out of control. Get out!” Robbie cried, hammering his mike button.

Maybe Steve was only semiconscious
, he thought.
Maybe his radio could receive, if not transmit. If he were only a little stunned, Robbie’s voice in his ears might snap him
awake
.

“Get out, Steve!” Robbie screamed hoarsely. “Get out! GET OUT!”

Robbie saw the Thud’s canopy blow, and then Steve, punching out. As his chute blossomed its beeper began emitting its doleful,
electronic cry of despair. The high-pitched wailing seemed transformed in Robbie’s earphones into a keening:
don’t-leave-meldon’t-leave-meldon’t
—

I won’t
, Robbie vowed silently. He was already on the horn, broadcasting a Mayday.

Call it bravery, or call it defiance, but Steve Gold knew as soon as he’d spotted those MIGs that he was going after them.
Shooting down enemy airplanes was what he did best. Not dropping bombs, or giving pep talks to hotshot young jet jockies who
thought he was a prehistoric relic, or trying to make sense out of his future as past choices inexorably closed in—

Steve knew what was right for him, and what was wrong. He knew he really
didn’t
have the kind of smarts it took to make it at war college, and that once this tour was over he really would have to make
good on his threat to leave the Air Force. But that was all in the future. What was here and now were these two fat, juicy
MIGs that the good Lord had seen fit to put within reach of his gun.

Wax those two birds
, Steve thought,
and you will have counted coup on the enemy in three wars
…

“Be right back,” he told the flight, arming his cannon as he banked his Thud toward his prey.

“Steve, no!” he heard his nephew cry out.

“Negative, Rio four!” Major Wilson ordered him. “Four, you get back here—”

Steve ignored them. Ahead stretched a long future during which the world could tug and prod him to its heart’s content, but
this was
his
moment. Here in the cockpit of his war bird, with his finger resting lightly on his cannon’s trigger, he was supreme.

There were various electronic shrieks, beeps, and drones coming from his ECM and navigational gear, competing for his attention
with the multiple, garbled exchanges from the other pilots on the airwaves, and the controllers back in Thailand. Steve flicked
the switches to silence the electronic bedlam, until only his radio was left on.
What a relief! How’d they expect a pilot to hear himself think through all that black-box racket?

It was time to get back to basics
, Steve thought. To remember that first and foremost a fighter plane was a platform for its weapons systems. All the black
boxes in the world couldn’t take the place of a man who knew how to shoot …

The MIGs were now about a mile away.
Hold on
, Steve thought.
Don’t get overeager; a thousand feet is optimum range
.

So far, so good: The MIGs still seemed unaware of his presence. His cherry red, notched circle gunsight was closing in on
them like some luminous UFO intent on joining their formation.

The MIGs were 17s. With their short, swept wings, blunt, piglike air-intake snouts, and bubble canopies they looked a lot
like the Commie birds Steve had tangled with almost fifteen years ago in Korea. He knew that the 17s usually carried a pair
of cannons in a chin pod. They were a lot slower than his Thud, but much more maneuverable. Going up against them without
a wingman was risky. If they got behind him his only alternative would be to go to afterburn and get out of here.

He glanced at his fuel gauges. At least he could run as far as he could on what little gas was left in his tanks.

And if these MIGs do bag me, so be it
, Steve told himself, brooding on how poor old Howie Simon had been forced to retire to Texas to spend the rest of his life
with nothing to keep him company but his aching ulcers and bum heart. Hell, if that was what a man’s future held once the
Air Force was done with him, Steve could think of worse ways to die than with his finger on the trigger of the baddest-assed
popgun in the history of breech-loaders, riding 49,000 pounds of war bird into the afterlife …

I may be afraid of a classroom
, Steve thought, still smarting from the memory of the look in Robbie’s eyes during last night’s argument,
but I am not afraid to fight, and if necessary, die for my country
—

Something began tickling the hairs on the back of Steve’s neck. Someone—he hoped without fish sauce and rice on his breath—was
on his six o’clock.

He punched his mike button. “Trust that’s you behind me, Three?”

“Rog—”

Robbie was sounding a mite pissed off, Steve noticed, but the important thing was that he was there.

That’s my boy
, he thought fondly. He’d always believed that Robbie would be there to back him up. “Closing on the rear MIG now,” Steve
said. “You hang back, make sure I’m not being boxed in.”

It had crossed his mind that this might be a trap. That the MIGs he was chasing were the lambs staked out to lure the tiger
into an ambush.

“Three, we’ve got to leave the vicinity,” Wilson called, sounding harried.

Steve chuckled, thinking that the major was probably too pissed at him to address him, as well.

“Two and I are both getting low on fuel—” Wilson was saying.

“Rog,” Robbie replied. “You guys go on, and ask that tanker to alter its course to meet us as close to hostile territory as
it dares to come.”

Good idea
, Steve thought, nervously eyeing his fuel indicators. With all the afterburn he’d been doing, that tanker was going to have
to meet him more than halfway…

“… I’m gonna be flying on farts by the time I manage to rope in my crazy uncle,” Robbie added.

“I heard that,” Steve said absently, grinning as the red dot pipper floating in the center of his gunsight’s red circle moved
into position on the rear MIG, just behind the canopy, smack between the wings. “Don’t worry,” he added. “This won’t take
long.”

“The colonel’s closed on the rear MIG!” Steve dimly heard somebody shouting as he squeezed the trigger, feeling the recoil
reverberating up through the cockpit floor as the Vulcan’s six revolving barrels began spitting 20-millimeter rounds. The
individual tracers looked like glowing orange beads as the cannon spewed a fiery rope that ran between the nose of Steve’s
Thud to the backbone of the thrashing MIG.

“Mississippi one, Mississippi two,” Steve counted out loud to himself as he held down his trigger. He was aware that his cannon
could empty its thousand-round ammo drum in ten seconds. He still had another MIG to wax.

The 20-millimeter rounds were pelting the MIG. The multiple hits raised sparks and left ugly black pockmarks on the enemy
plane’s drab silver aluminum exterior.

“Mississippi three, Mississippi four—”

The MIG banked hard to starboard, trying to escape the lethal circle of Steve’s gunsight. Steve let the red pipper in the
center of the circle slide onto the MIG’s port wing, and watched his cannon shear it clean off at the root. He released the
trigger as his first kill dropped away, knitting its own mourning shawl of thick black smoke. Steve shifted to the lead MIG,
which was now rolling and jinking in the general direction of that little village they’d passed some time ago.

“Steve, get out of range and I’ll fire off a Sidewinder,” Robbie called.

Steve ignored him.
No way am I surrendering a kill to a fucking machine, not while I’m in control of this airplane, with ammo in my gun. Watch
and learn, li’l nephew
—

His bright red gunsight was chasing the MIG.
Just a little too low
, Steve mused. He eased back a hair on the stick. The Thud’s nose lifted. The retreating MIG was framed like a cameo in the
gunsight’s circle. The red pipper became lost in the glowing exhaust emanating from the MIG’s tail pipe.

“Got’cha!” Steve laughed. He mashed the trigger. The Vulcan gun chattered maniacally. The MIG went to after-burn, writhing
as flaming 20-millimeter gunfire tore relentlessly at its red-painted tail.

“Jesus Christ! SAM launch—” Robbie abruptly bellowed.

Huh—? Where—?
Steve guiltily pondered the ECM gear that he’d muted.
Spilt milk
, he thought. He did not take his eyes off the MIG in his gunsight.