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.
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 carried revolvers, but Tombstone had always favored the satisfying heft of the M-1911A1. The big.45 automatic was virtually a relic now, replaced years before as the Navy's standard-issue sidearm by the 9mm Beretta, but still carried by some personnel who felt that the Colt was more reliable.
Not that a pistol would do them a hell of a lot of good. They were almost certainly behind enemy lines. Tombstone had two seven-round magazines, one in the pistol, the other in a flight suit pocket. Fourteen shots…
against MVD troops or Naval Infantry with full-auto assault rifles. Still, it was something. Drawing and checking the weapon, he dragged the slide back, chambering a round, then flicked up the safety. "Cocked and locked" now, he hurried toward Tomboy's chute.
"Okay, Navy. You're clear to land, south-to-north. There's only one runway so you shouldn't get lost."
"Thanks, Marine," Willis replied. "Have a corpsman standing by. My B/N's pretty badly shot up."
"That's a roger."
It had been sheer luck that he'd found the place, a Russian airstrip on the coast overrun by the Marines a few hours earlier. They'd been using it as an advance base for their Harriers and Hornets, but they'd cleared it now as an emergency runway for the incoming Navy Intruder.
Sunshine groaned. The blood on her face was bright, bright red.
"Sunshine? Sunshine, you hear me?"
No response. Oh, God, don't let her die!
The vibration was getting worse, and he wasn't getting any response from his right-side flaps. When he flipped the landing-gear switch, he didn't get any response there either. Shit! His wheels were stuck up. He'd have to belly in.
The Marines were sending out a radio beacon for him to home on. He could see the airstrip now, a single runway on the brown tundra, next to a handful of buildings. Smoke stained the sky to the east. There was still fighting going on out there.
His altimeter was reading 650 now. The air controller had already told him that the base he was angling toward was at an altitude of 275 feet, so the ground was sweeping past his belly just 375 feet below. Easing back on the throttle, he kept the Intruder's nose high, balanced just ahead of a stall, dropping now at a thousand feet per minute… lower… lower…
The runway expanded in front of him with breath-taking speed. He tried the air brakes ― no good ― and the flaps again ― still nothing ― and cut the throttles back to nothing, and then he was over the runway and dropping like a stone. His tail struck first with a sound of rasping metal… and then the Intruder's keel struck tarmac, tortured steel and aluminum shrieking, and he was battling the controls, trying to keep sliding in a straight line, but his right wing was coming around anyway, and he was out of control, sliding, sliding, sliding down the runway as flames exploded behind him like the wake of a powerboat.
Stopped! With a final lurch, the Intruder halted, its nose tipped into a rubble-filled crater, smoke boiling away from the aircraft's engines.
He hit the canopy release, praying that it would work, and it did. Then he was fumbling with his own harness and with Sunshine's. The aircraft was on fire, and he had to get the two of them out!
"That's okay, Mac," a gravel voice said beside him. Hands grasped his arms, pulling him from his seat. Fire extinguishers shooshed and hissed as Marines hosed down the flames. "We'll get your buddy."
"Get her out! Get her out! She's hurt bad!"
"Her? Oh, Christ…"
"Quit staring, Mike," another Marine snapped. "Lend a hand!"
"Easy there. Get her into the Stokes."
"For God's sake, take it easy with her," Willis said. "Best fuckin' B/N I ever had…"
His legs gave way as he stepped onto the tarmac. He never did remember being helped away from the plane.
Tombstone saw both the parachute and the man and broke into a run, the heavy Colt clutched in his hand. The guy wore a camo uniform but had a high-peaked cap, and he carried an AKM slung over his back, muzzle down. His back was to Tombstone, and he was bending over Tomboy, who was lying on her back, still in her parachute harness with the chute billowing and tugging in the breeze.
The soldier appeared to be alone. His back was to Tombstone, his total attention on the woman at his feet. Stoney raised the pistol but kept on running, trying to center the sights on a target that bobbed with each step he took.
From fifty feet away, Tombstone fired… a clean miss. The soldier turned, gaping at this apparition charging him with a pistol, then reached for his AKM, fumbling with its strap.
Tombstone fired again. Damn! It looked easy on the TV cop shows, but a pistol was a ridiculously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired while running. The Russian raised the AK's muzzle…
Again, Tombstone squeezed the trigger… miss!
Then there was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered forward, still clutching the AKM. Tomboy, still on her back, had her revolver out. She'd shot up into the Russian's back from a range of four feet. The man tried to raise the AK again…
Tombstone stopped, braced his.45 in both hands, and squeezed the trigger three more times in rapid succession. One of the rounds at least hit the Russian in the chest, pitching him backwards, sending the rifle spinning from his hands.
He dropped to his knees at Tomboy's side. "Tomboy! You okay?"
"Hi… Stoney." Her face twisted with pain. "Bad landing."
Glancing back, he saw her left leg twisted back under her body at an impossible angle. It looked like she'd snapped both her tibia and her fibula just below her knee. There was blood on her leg too, and a gleam of white bone visible through a tear in her flight suit ― a compound fracture, and a nasty one.
Quickly, Tombstone scanned their surroundings. The Russian soldier was dead, and there was no one else in sight. He could just make out the peaked roofs of a small village or settlement some distance to the east. They were sheltered to the north by a low rise, little more than a snow-covered mound on the tundra. Nothing else was visible in any direction but mountains, ground, and sky.
He touched the transmit key on the Search and Rescue radio strapped to his flight suit. "This is Tomcat Two-double-oh, Tomcat Two-double-oh, broadcasting Mayday, Mayday." He stopped, listening intently, but heard only the hiss of static, and once a garbled burst of something that might have been a partial transmission leaking across from a neighboring frequency.