"Blue flight," he said, "engage burner, switch to emergency procedure. I'm going to try to haul out as far as I can. Two, get RESCAP on the radio, tell them what's happening."
He switched to the intercom to talk with his backseater. "Larry, I'll ride this, get us a better ditch spot."
"I'm with you."
He lit the burner. The plane jammed forward. Yes, he thought, blast me out of here, burn me home. The shimmering torch appeared in the tail of the plane next to him. Here we go. Then three red lights blinked on. The hydraulics were losing pressure, leaks in the primary and redundant systems. Without them, he couldn't maneuver the plane. He was flying an unguided plane at a thousand knots an hour, a roaring perversion.
"Blue flight. Hydraulics gone. Check ground position. I'll be punching out." The jungle rushed beneath him. He felt for the ejection ring between his thighs, so placed because in a falling plane the increased G-forces made it impossible for a pilot to raise his arms.
"Blue lead. RESCAP notified."
"Get ready, Larry." The main panel went dead. Primary electrical system out. Perhaps he'd passed over into the DMZ. The stick froze in his hands. The fire was moving internally through the fuselage. Was South Vietnam below? If so, he had a chance. He couldn't recognize the mountain formations. Estimated speed Mach 1.1 and slowing. Six seconds a mile. The ground below blurred by.
"Blue lead, Blue lead, your wing is breaking up. Get out." He felt the plane go sloppy. Slowing. Hold. Just hold. South past the DMZ. Every six seconds… they were losing speed, don't spin, don't spin, he counted one, two, three, four… you had to duck during ejection, design fault, tall men sometimes decapitated… eight
… don't flail on ejection, easy to break arms… nine-
"Charlie, get the fuck-"
He blew the canopy. Then ejected-into a wall of wind he hit at four hundred knots, driving his heart into his spine, jamming his shoulders against the seatback, compressing his trachea, the air burning over the exposed skin at his wrist and neck, spinning him heels over head. The roar, the silence. His blood could not catch up with his spinning body, his guts were in his mouth. Still moving a hundred knots. His ejection seat dropped off, and the parachute riffled noisily above him. Straps tightened around his chest and thighs, he took quick breaths in the thin air, felt his heart catching up. Okay, okay. A mile away the Phantom dropped in a violent spin, a long plume behind it. He looked around for his backseater, who had ejected simultaneously. Where's the chute? he wondered. C'mon. He looked between his feet and saw a flailing, helmeted figure below him, still strapped to the ejection seat, falling like a stone. Negative chute on Larry. Jesus.
He'd be in the air another thirty seconds. He turned his beeper off to conserve the battery, give the North Vietnamese a harder time tracking him, if they were around. A low haze hung over the forest, which rose toward him, a green floor. He maneuvered his parachute toward a knoll that looked as if it had recently taken some fire; perhaps RESCAP knew the terrain. In a few minutes Blue flight would hook up with the KC-135 refueling tankers that circled in a racetrack oval in a safe area, then would return to establish radio contact. A-1 Skyraiders and a RESCAP AC-47 would come in for flak suppression, if there was any, while a chopper would drop straight down on the knoll to pick him up. Sometimes it worked, other times went wrong. A pilot's beeper failed, the sky got dark, chopper failure, navigation error, heavy ground fire.
The wind ripped at his parachute lines. Under his feet the trees became distinct. No fire. He tensed and relaxed his calves, awaiting the shock of the ground. The knoll came up quickly now, and he picked out a place to hide the parachute. Then, toward the west, the sun glimmering off their rifles, he saw a Vietcong patrol cutting through ground vegetation. They didn't want just him, they wanted to position themselves for a flak trap on the rescue attempt. Rescue pilots were taught to troll for fire to expose ground forces. But the VC were capable of unholy restraint, willing to use a dead pilot's beeper to draw a rescue attempt and then wait out a cautionary rocket attack by the Americans. Now one of the VC watched him with binoculars and told the others which direction to go.
He landed, rolled, stood up. He tore off his helmet but couldn't remove the cumbersome G suit without staying in the open for a minute, too dangerous to do. He stepped out of his parachute and ran to the edge of the knoll, pulling the chute with him. He found a low place covered with vines and wriggled inside, then sat sweating in the leaves and insect hum. He checked his flight watch, took the safety off his pistol. Either the patrol had encountered difficulty hacking through the underbrush or it was waiting for the rescue effort. He spied a blackened crater ten yards away. Probably caused by a stray rocket or mortar round and better cover in a firefight-better, anyway, than vines and leaves. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees over blackened roots, rolled into the hole.
It contained a charred corpse, eyes burnt out, face cooked tight over the skull. Judging by the sandals, VC. Hey, buddy, he thought, fuck you. The air was hot. So quiet. It seemed he could just stand up and wait. He checked his watch again. Larry. Larry's wife. The arrival of the Air Force sedan outside the base housing, the two officers easing slowly from the car-the wives knew what that meant. Ellie would whisper, "Oh no." Then he saw the Phantoms high up in the sky. He turned on his beeper. They would establish a circling pattern at about six thousand feet and direct the slower craft to the knoll. The RESCAP prop plane came grinding over the jungle, an ugly, blunt-nosed piece of machinery. It would establish a tight orbit at about two thousand feet and be the middle tier of the rescue operation.
A low rumble over the earth, choppers. He'd have to show himself. At that moment the RESCAP gunship started to circle, continuously firing its 20-millimeter cannons. He put his head against the burnt soil and counted to thirty. The two airmobile choppers, big green insects, rose above the edge of the forest. Took a certain kind of guts to fly air rescue. The door gunners sat behind their miniguns. He pulled on his helmet, jumped out of the hole, and ran to the middle of the clearing. One of the choppers dropped over the trees and lifted its nose, readying to land.
From the other side of the clearing came a flash. A shadow movement in the green foliage. One of the door gunners lurched backward, clutching his neck. The chopper lifted up to suppress the ground fire. He retreated to the edge of the jungle. The choppers gained altitude, under steady fire from the Vietcong, then banked back toward the clearing, machine guns and pod rockets blasting. They raked the other side of the clearing. The RESCAP plane lifted up. A flight of A-1 Skyraiders dropped low in front of him and began to release a string of rockets. They came right at him, buzzed within forty yards on either side. The explosions caught up-thumping the air. He lay against the earth, his head buffeted by the shock waves. The Skyraiders lifted up, tipping their wings. Smoke rose from the jungle. Time to move. He couldn't believe the Vietcong had survived.
One chopper descended and the other circled the clearing at high speed, door gunner firing. He ran through the flattened elephant grass toward the first chopper as it hovered waist-high off the ground. The door gunner aimed the gun, then motioned him to duck. Rounds whipped over his head. He scrambled forward on hands and knees, thirty yards to go. Fire came from all directions, rounds ping-pocking the side of the chopper. He glanced back to see a Vietcong soldier step forward from the jungle with a rocket-powered grenade launcher on his shoulder. The chopper's gunner signaled to the pilot to lift up. Now he stood up to run the last fifteen yards. Something whistled by him and fire billowed out of the chopper, blowing the pilot door open, shattering the windscreen. He fell to his knees. The chopper blades slowed in a ball of flame and the whole rig sagged to the ground. Burning men leapt to the grass and flailed about. The heat pushed against him and he scrambled away from the fire. Then the chopper's gas tanks exploded and he was slapped to the ground, a burning wheel landing next to him.