That second or two was all she needed, though, as the Mig continued its
climb, rolling onto its back and twisting clear of its aerial embrace
with the Tomcat.
She’d anticipated his break; ninety percent of being a good tactical
combat flyer was being able to guess what the other guy was going to do
and matching or countering the move almost before he made it. Her port
engine stuttered, dangerously close to a stall, but she nursed the
throttle, felt the engine resume its accustomed thunder, and watched the
Flogger drop across her gun sight.
Tomboy had already shifted to guns, since her M-61A1 was the only weapon
she had left. Reacting instantly, and at a range of less than fifty
yards, she squeezed the firing button on her control stick; the
six-barreled cannon howled, sending a tight-spaced volley of 20mm rounds
into the Flogger’s left wing, sawing through from front to back in a
splintering, slashing burst. The skin of the wing pocked, then shredded;
fuel from the wing tank gushed into the air, then ignited in the hail of
white-hot shells. A fireball erupted scant yards from the nose of
Tomboy’s F-14 as the Flogger disintegrated. Jagged fragments hurtled
past her head; shrapnel pinged and rattled from her aircraft’s skin–and
then she was hurtling through the fireball with a hard jolt and smashing
through into open sky.
“Whee-ooh!” Tomboy exulted, her voice shrill. “Got him!” Then, sobering
as she eased into a gentle turn, she said, “Did you see a chute?”
“Negative,” Hacker told her. “I didn’t see anything but fire.”
“Too bad,” Tomboy replied. “He was good.”
0910 hours (Zulu +3)
Near Arsincevo By now, Tombstone knew that he simply was not cut out for
life as an infantryman. In the sky, strapped into the cockpit of an
F-14, he had an impressive array of sophisticated electronics and
high-powered weaponry at his command, available literally at the touch
of a button. His machine spoke to him, in the warble of warning tones
and flashing threat indicators, in the yellow-green glow of radar blips
scattered across his VDI, in the feel of the aircraft as he pulled it
into a turn or nursed it out of a plunging, hell-bent-for-leather dive
through thirty thousand feet.
Here, in the mud and cold and blood of man-to-man combat, there was
nothing to speak to him but his own pounding heart and his own ragged
fear. Combat, for the aviator, still possessed something of the
romantic, medieval flavor of single combat between knights. Here,
though, there was no glory, no romance of single combat. There was only
stink, pain, fear, and death.
Tombstone and several other naval personnel were huddled inside the
partly wrecked stone building just below the crest of the ridge
overlooking Arsincevo, not far from the spot where Tombstone had first
seen the storage facility. A dead Russian lay face-up in the mud a few
feet away. He was naval infantry, wearing a one-piece light-camo
jumpsuit, his black beret lying by his side. His eyes, wide open and
very, very blue, stared sightlessly at the sky.
Stoney had appropriated the man’s AKM assault rifle and a canvas pouch
with five spare magazines, fully loaded, but his mind was full of images
of the Russian he and Tomboy had killed in Kola. There’d been nothing
romantic about that encounter, either, and he was not eager to get into
a firefight.
Pamela and several members of her ACN crew were sitting on the ground
nearby. No one had been hurt, and all were accounted for, but they
seemed a bit lost now that they didn’t have their van of high-tech
electronics.
He walked over and slumped down at Pamela’s side. “Sorry you came?”
“Are you looking for some kind of victory?” she asked him. “All right.
I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry I ever heard of this godforsaken place.
Satisfied?”
“I wasn’t looking for satisfaction,” he told her.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. I know I wish you’d flown out on that helo.” He
hesitated, wondering if he should say it. “I still love you, you know.”
She didn’t answer, and Tombstone knew that their relationship was truly