“Look at that sucker burn!”
Coyote circled right, scanning the ground below. The sudden appearance
of the three Tomcats seemed to have scattered the Russian MiGs. “Cat!
Where are the bad guys?”
“On the run, Coyote. I think they’ve had enough!”
“Okay. Did you see where Tombstone landed?”
“Negative. Negative. There’s too much smoke.”
“Okay. We’ll circle back. Hang on.”
1326 hours
Intruder 504
Over the Kola Inlet
“Don’t die on me, Sunshine!” Willis yelled, his voice raw. “Damn it,
don’t die on me!”
A hole the size of his fist had been punched through the starboard side
of the aircraft, just below the canopy and just behind Sunshine’s
ejection seat. Air screamed past the hole, and the Intruder shuddered
heavily.
Something was wrong with his starboard control surfaces too. He
couldn’t see through the smashed canopy at Sunshine’s side, but he
suspected he’d taken some pretty bad damage to his right wing.
Bracing the stick between his knees, he turned in his seat, trying to
find out where all the blood was coming from.
There. The front of Sunshine’s flight suit and undergarment had been
torn open just over her right breast. He could see the thumb-sized,
ragged hole in her chest, centered in a patch of blood-smeared skin. The
blood was frothing with bubbles.
The Intruder thumped hard and Willis had to turn away, concentrating for
the moment on his flying. He was at a thousand feet now, well above the
hills, on a roughly northeastern course, back toward the coast. With
the aircraft stable again, he returned to his clumsy examination of his
bombardier/navigator.
That hole in her chest was an exit wound. Something must have spit
through her ejection seat and up into her right side. Pulling off his
left glove, he reached around in front of her, probing her side. There
it was, a hole as big around as his finger three inches below her right
armpit. He felt broken ribs grate as he pushed against it. She
groaned, then choked. He reached up and pulled her mask off. The
oxygen would do her no good if she drowned in her own blood, and there
was a lot of it on her face, leaking from her nose and mouth.
That bubbling blood in her chest wound meant her lung had been shot
through–which was obvious enough from the trajectory of the shrapnel.
A sucking chest wound would collapse her lung in seconds, would kill her
in minutes if he didn’t plug it tight.
With a blood-slicked hand, he unzipped his flight suit’s shoulder
pocket, then fumbled for the pack of cigarettes inside. Quickly, he
stripped off the cellophane wrapper, discarded the cigarettes, and tore
the now-slippery cellophane in half. One half he pressed down across
Sunshine’s chest wound.
As she drew her next liquid, rasping breath, the cellophane almost
disappeared into the hole, an air-tight seal that would stop her lung
from collapsing.
Reaching over her again, he stuffed the remaining cellophane in the
wound in her side, then pulled her upper arm tightly against her body to
keep the makeshift bandage in place.
And there wasn’t another damned thing he could do for her now, except
get the wounded Intruder down as fast as possible. He could tell from
the feel in the stick that they would never make it all the way back to
the Jefferson …
and Sunshine sure as hell wouldn’t survive ejecting into the sea.
He needed something closer at hand.
1328 hours
Over the Kola Peninsula
Tombstone dangled beneath his chute, watching the snow-patched tundra
rushing up toward his feet. He bent his knees, keeping his feet
together …
… and then the ground swept up into him. He hit, oofed! … and
rolled, coming up with a double armful of parachute risers, gathering in
the chute with swift, pummeling strokes.
He looked up into a contrail-painted sky. He could see Tomboy’s
parachute. She was coming down half a mile to the west. To the east,
vast clouds of smoke piled into the sky from the holocaust in the
Polyamyy Inlet.
With his chute discarded, he gave his survival gear a quick check:
first-aid kit, flares, SAR radio, knife, pistol. Many Navy flyers