The Red Horseman (33 page)

Where was that fighter?

There-crossing over above in an overshoot.

And Lord, there’s another one at eleven o’clock
honking around hard.

These guys weren’t first team-they came in too
fast and scissored the wrong way. Pray that they
don’t learn too fast!

He checked the compass. He was headed southwest.
He brought the nose more west and punched the nose
down.

He wanted to run right in the weeds until he
found those ravines and valleys that led down to the
Volga. If he could just hide in those …

The fighter high on his left was pulling
so hard vapor was condensing from the air passing over his
wing-he was leaving a cloud behind each wing. Damn-it was
an Su-27!

He had to be in afterburner. That guy was
aggressive enough, no question about that.

And the other one-Jake twisted his body halfway
around, risked flying into the ground just to get a
glimpseat six-thirty, thirty degrees angle
off, nose already down, accelerating.

How much fuel do these clowns have?

The rough ground ahead was his only chance. These
guys could go faster, accelerate faster, and
probably outmaneuver him. A stand-up dogfight
with two of them would be suicide.

Jake was down to fifteen or twenty feet above
the ground now, going flat-out with the throttles against the
stops, doing maybe five hundred knots-the damn
airspeed indicator was calibrated in kilometers
and only God knew the conversion factor.

He was too close to the ground to look behind him,
In fact, he was too close to the ground-he was
sure he had hit a rocky outcrop but somehow
managed to avoid it by this speed would be certain inches.
To kiss the ground at death, yet his only hope
to stay alive was to fly lower than those two
fighter pilots would or could.

There-on the right! The ground dropped away into an
eroded valley.

Quick as thought he had the stick over and was skimming
down into the valley. Turn hard-pull, pull,
pull!-to keep from hitting the sides that rose
steeply above him.

Well into the winding valley, Jake Grafton
eased over to the left side as he pulled the power
levers back and deployed the speed brakes.

His speed bled off quickly. If one of those guys
came into the gorge after him …

Cannon shells went zipping across the top of his
right wing like orange pumpkins.

The right wing fell without conscious thought. Speed
brakes in.

Throttle full forward.

The fighter slid by on his right side, the pilot
climbing and trying to slow.

As the sleek fighter went in front Jake
pulled up hard and squeezed the trigger on the
30mm cannon. No time to aim! Just point and
shoot!

The cannon throbbed and Jake hosed the shells in
front Of the twisting fighter, which flew
into them. A piece came off the Su-27. Fuel
venting aft. A flash.

Jake released the trigger and rolled away as the
fighter exploded.

Where was the wingman?

A blind turn to the fight coming up. Jake pulled
hard to make it and got the nose coming up. As he
went around the turn he climbed the side of the little
valley and popped out on top. He swiveled his
head.

There! Coming in from the left side, shooting.

Nose down hard. Back toward the valley.

The second fighter was going too fast and
overshot.

That’s the problem when you’ve got a really fast
plane: you want to use all that speed the designers
gave you and sometimes it works against you.

This guy pulled Gs like he had a steel
asshole. The fighter tried to turn a square
corner, the down wing quit flying and the plane
flipped inverted. In the blink of an eye the
Su-27 hit the ground and exploded.

Jake got into the valley, retarded his
throttles to about 90 percent RPM and stayed there.

He examined the electronic warfare
panel. Goddamn light still blinking.

He rammed his left fingers under his helmet
visor and swabbed the sweat away from his eyes.

They would find him again. How many more? He had seen
four up there when he and Rita crossed the Volga
a lifetime ago. Two were down, two still flying,
perhaps off chasing Rita, perhaps now up there somewhere in the
great sky above examining their track-while-scan
radars and looking for him, perhaps calling on the radio
to their comrades who would never answer again.

Could they find him in this valley, which was fast ceasing
to be a steep gorge and was spreading out as the creek
flowed its last few miles to the Volga?

There–on the left-another valley coming into this one.

Jake dropped the left wing and pulled the plane
around. He went back up the new valley, still
seeking shelter as the!

EW light blinked intermittently.

Jake Grafton had flown his first combat mission
in Vietnam over twenty years ago. He knew
the hard, inescapable.

truth: in aerial combat the first pilot to make a
mistake is the one who dies. The two men who had
died in the Sukhoi fighters had each made fatal
mistakes. The first man pursued too
fast, so he had overshot when his victim
unexpectedly slowed down. The second was
overanxious, had pulled too hard and departed
controlled flight too close to the ground.

He was dead a half-second later, probably
before he even realized what was happening.

The next time Jake might not be so lucky.

He swabbed more sweat from his eyes as he examined
the fuel gauge. Still plenty. Like the A-6, the
engines of this Russian attack bird were easy on
fuel and the plane carried a lot of it. That was the
only advantage he possessed when compared to the
fighters, which sacrificed fuel economy to gain
speed and range to gain maneuverability.

Where were the other two fighters? Chasing Rita?

A flicker of concern for Rita crossed his mind,
but he forced it away.

Rita was a professional, she had been an.

FirstA-18 Hornet instructor pilot for
two years before she went to test pilot school-she
could take care of herself.

He hoped.

No time to worry about her. If only he knew
where she was …

They came in shooting from the rear quarter
on each side. His first inkling that they were there was the
sight of glowing cannon shells passing just in front
of the nose, from left to right. He rammed the stick
forward and his peripheral vision picked up shells
passing just above the canopy from right to left. Just
streaks really, but he knew exactly what they
were.

The negative G lasted only for an instant
before he had to jerk the stick back to avoid going into the
ground. But it was enough. Even as he fought the
positive G he saw the pair of fighters flash
across above his head and arc tightly away for another
pass.

He wouldn’t survive another pass.

Slamming the throttles full forward, he kept
the nose coming up and topped the cliff on the right
side of the valley, then ruddered the nose down. He
pulled hard in a tight turn, trying to turn
inside the faster fighter.

And the fighter pilot wasn’t looking!

The idiot had his head in the cockpit-he was
worried about flying into the ground. That was a serious
threat this close to the earth, the brown land whirling by at
tremendous speed just scant feet below the right
wingtip.

The nose of Jake’s plane passed the fighter
and he began to pull ahead.

Range closing as the aspect angle changed.

The fighter was turning into Jake. Angle off about
seventy degrees, now eighty, ninety as the two
planes flashed toward each other. Jake eased out
some bank. A full deflection shot Now!

He triggered the cannon. The tracers passed in
front of the fighter’s nose, then in an eyeblink the
fighter flew through the stream, which stitched him nose
to tail. His nose dropped and his right wing kissed the
earth.

Jake raised his nose a smidgen to ensure he
didn’t share the same fate, banked and pulled.

If he could get around quickly enough, he would
present the second fighter with a head-on shot, and
if that guy had any sense he would refuse the
invitation and pull up into the vertical, where Jake
lacked the power to follow.

And that is what happened as the two planes
flashed toward each other nose to nose. Jake
wanted to take a snapshot but couldn’t get his nose
up fast enough. He slammed it back down and was
pulling hard to get the plane’s axis parallel to the
canyon when he flashed over the rim. He
let the plane descend on knife edge until the
rock wall shielded him.

His heart was threatening to thud its way out of his
chest.

Talk about luck! Three mistakes, three
dead men who would get no wiser.

But this last guy-he was no overeager green kid
who thought he was bulletproof. He had pulled his
nose up the instant he saw the head-on pass
developing. This guy would take a lot of killing.

And Jake Grafton didn’t know if he had it
in him. Somehow he got his visor up and swabbed
away the sweat that poured into his eyes when he
pulled Gs, this while he threaded his way up the
valley and looked above and aft to see what the
Russian was up to.

What would you do, Jake Grafton?

I’d slow down to almost coequal speed andfollow
along, getting lower and lower, and when my guns came
to bear I’d take my shots. And he would fall.

Jake got a glimpse of his opponent. He was
high up and well aft, on a parallel course, his
nose down. He must have lost sight for a moment and
allowed Jake to extend out.

But now he was closing.

You’ve had a good life, Jake. You’ve known
some fine men, loved a good woman, flown the hot
jets. Maybe your life has made a difference
to somebody. And now it’s over’ That man up there is
going to kill you.

He’s going about it just right, slowly and
methodically; he isn’t going to make any
mistakes. And you are going to die.

The Russian was throttled back, coming down like the
angel of doom.

What’s ahead? I’ll out-fly the bastard.
I’llfly that son of a bitch into the ground.

Even as the thought raced through his mind, he knew it
wouldn’t work.

This guy wasn’t going to make any mistakes
unless Jake forced the action. If he were allowed
to play his own game he would win.

Jake Grafton risked another over-the-shoulder
glance to see if he had room. Maybe. It was
going to be tight.

He kept the wings level and pulled the stick
straight aft.

The throttles were up against the stops. A nice
four-G pull so he would have something left on top.
If this guy were wise and had plenty of
fuel, he would light his burners and climb, avoid
the head-on that was developing. A head-on pass that
gave each guy a fifty-fifty chance-that was the best
Jake could play for when the other pilot had every
performance edge.

But the Russian pilot accepted the challenge!

Upside down at the top of the loop, Jake fed
in forward stick and placed the pipper in the reticle
high to allow for the fall of his shells, then pulled the
trigger. The Russian was already shooting. Strobing
muzzle blasts enveloped the nose of the opposing
fighter as Jake pulled his trigger.

Jake felt the trip-hammer impacts as
cannon shells ripped into his plane. Then the
Russian blew up.

Jake knifed through the falling debris and tried
to right his machine.

Fuel was boiling out the left wing and the left engine
was unwinding. He shut it down. A big red light
on the left side of the bombsight was
illuminated-fire. fie needed a lot of right rudder
to control his plane.

Now he was level. And alive.

For how long?

That depended on the fire warning light.
It flickered Several ” times, then went out.
Maybe he had a chance after all.

He glanced at the compass. He was heading east.
He dropped the right wing into a gentle turn and let
the nose drift down as he juggled the rudder
to maintain balanced flight. He had to get low again,
avoid the radar that was probing this sk3-.

He steadied up heading south, descending. One of the
Russian’s cannon shells had impacted the
second weapons pylon on the left wing, shattering
it and twisting it so badly fuel was coming out of the wing.

Even as Jake stared at the damaged pylon the
last of the wing fuel rushed away into the slipstream.
Primary hydraulic pressure was on its way
to zero. If that was the primary system gauge.

The warning lights seemed predictable. The
damaged engine hadn’t blown up-if it did there was
nothing he could do but die. His heart was still beating,
thud, thud, thud.

He was still alive!

That Russian must have been low on fuel. In a
hurry.

Too bad for him.

Jack Yocke tapped aimlessly on his laptop
computer and from time to time glanced at Toad
Tarkington sitting in the big chair. Toad had a
pistol in his hand and kept looking at it, turning it
this way and that, wrapping his fist around the grip and
hefting it.

Herb Tenney lay on the couch with his hands taped
together behind his back, his ankles taped together, and a
strip of tape over his mouth.

Herb seemed calm.

Jack Yocke had done the taping with a roll from the
first aid kit when Toad brought him into the room at
gunpoint.

Now the three of them sat-Herb calm, Yocke
full of questions, Toad playing with that goddamn
pistol.

“Did he come willingly?” Jack asked,
breaking the silence.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where did you find him?”

“in the cafeteria. Waited until he had
finished his coffee and followed him out.”

“Would you have shot him if he didn’t come along?”

Toad merely glanced at Yocke, then turned
his gaze back to the pistol in his hand. The reporter
saw the same thing that Herb Tenney must have seen
fifteen minutes ago. Toad would have
pulled the trigger with all the remorse he would have had
swatting a fly.