hell out of here. That information has got to get back.”
There was a long crackling silence on the radio.
“Am I supposed to say ‘yes sir’?” Smitty said finally.
“You’re supposed to get that damn information back. Anything else is up to
you. Now, have you got it?”
“On the tape.”
“Then go. Remember. No matter what happens to me, you’ve got to get that
data home.”
Gilligan watched as his wingman broke off. Since his first day in flight
school he had been drilled that a fighter never, ever, flies alone.
Suddenly it was awfully lonely.
Well, the sooner I do this, the sooner it will be over. Reaching down, he
activated his camera. Then just to be on the safe side he armed the two
Sidewinders hanging under the fuselage. He left the Sparrows unarmed. That
thing might have a fuzzbuster tuned to the targeting radar’s frequencies
and he didn’t want to fight unless he absolutely had to. Finally he
checked the status of his 20mm cannon.
One good pass, Gilligan told himself. One pass so close I can see the
color of their eyes.
It was the sound that first alerted Patrol Two. The hissing roar that
sliced through the eerie silence of the fog banks. The dragon rider had
only a brief glimpse of something moving up behind and to the left.
Something very, very fast and headed straight at them.
To a dragon rider that meant only one thing: Dragon attack! No time to
turn into it and fight fire with fire. Patrol Two grabbed an iron seeker
arrow out of the quiver and brought the bow up with the other hand.
Twisting around in the saddle even as the arrow fitted into the bow and
not waiting for the seeker to get a lock, Patrol Two got off one shot.
Then the rider pressed flat against the beast’s back and yanked the reins
to throw the dragon into violent evasive maneuvers. The dragon, unsettled
by the roaring monster, responded enthusiastically and dropped into a
writhing, spiraling dive into the fog.
The arrow’s spell wasn’t capable of making fine distinctions. It had been
launched at a moving target and that was sufficient. The arrow flew
straight to its mark and hit the plane’s right wing about halfway out
toward the tip.
As soon as the point penetrated the thin aluminum skin the arrow’s death
spell activated. It didn’t know it was trying to kill an inanimate object
and it was as incapable of caring as it was of knowing.
Like most things magic, the spell didn’t work perfectly in this strange
halfway world, but it worked well enough.
“What the fuck?” Mick Gilligan yelled, but there was no one to hear. His
radios, like every other piece of electronic equipment in his Eagle had
gone stone dead.
Unlike the F-16, an F-15 does not have to be flown by computers every
second it is in the air. But everything from the fuel flow to the trim
tabs is normally controlled by electronic devices.
As a result Major Mick Gilligan didn’t fall out of the sky instantly. But
everything on the plane started going slowly and inexorably to hell.
One of the things that went was the automatic fuel control system.
Normally the F-15 draws a few gallons at a time from each tank in the
plane to keep everything in trim. When the electronics died, Major
Gilligan’s plane was drawing from the outboard left wing tank. Rather than
switching, it kept draining that tank, lightening the wing and putting the
plane progressively more out of trim.
Gilligan didn’t notice. He was too busy dealing with the engines. Losing
the electronics meant they were no longer automatically synchronized.
Almost immediately the right engine was putting out more power than the
left. By the time Gilligan had taken stock of the situation, the exhaust
gas temperature on the right engine was climbing dangerously and the left
engine was going into compressor stall.
He didn’t waste time cursing. He put both hands on the throttles and
started jockeying the levers individually, trying to get more power out of
his left engine and cut back the right before the temperature became