scent, unable to follow the MIG around. As David hauled the Mirage
round after the Russian, he saw the missile destroy itself in a burst of
greenish smoke, far out across the valley of clouds.
The Russian was in a hard right-hand turn, and David followed him.
Staring across the imaginary circle that separated them, he could see
every detail of the enemy machine; the scarlet helmet of the pilot, the
gaudy colours of its rounders, the squiggle of Arabic script that was
its identification markings, even the individual rivets that stitched
the polished metal skin of the MIG.
David pulled back with all his strength against his joystick, for
gravity was tightening the loading of his controls, opposing his efforts
to place additional stress on the Mirage lest he tear its wings off the
fuselage Gravity had hold of David also, its insidious force sucked the
blood away from his brain so that his vision dimmed, the colour of the
enemy pilot's helmet faded to dull brown, and David felt himself crushed
down into his seat.
About his waist and legs his G-suit tightened its coils, squeezing
brutally like a hungry python, attempting to prevent the drainage of
blood from his upper torso.
David tensed every muscle in his body, straining to resist the loss of
blood, and he took the Mirage up in a slidin& soaring yo-yo, up the side
of an imaginary barrel.
Like a motor-cyclist on a wall of death he whirled aloft, trying once
more for the advantage of height.
His vision narrowed, greyed out, until his field was reduced to the
limits of his cockpit, and he was pinned heavily to his seat, his mouth
sagging open, his eyelids dragging downwards; the effort of holding his
right hand on the control column was Herculean.
In the corner of his vision the stall indicator blinked its little eye
at him, changing from amber to red, warning him that he was on the verge
of catastrophe, courting the disaster of supersonic stall.
David filled his lungs and screamed with all his strength, his own voice
echoing through the grey mist.
The effort forced a little blood back to his brain and his vision
cleared briefly, enough to let him see that the MIG had anticipated his
yo-yo and had come up under him, sliding up the wall of death towards
his unprotected flank and belly.
David had no alternative but to break out of the turn before the MIG's
cannons could bear. He rolled the Mirage out, and went instantly into a
tight climbing lefthander, his afterburners still thundering at full
power, consuming fuel at a prodigious rate, and placing a limit upon
these desperate manoeuvres.
Neatly and gracefully as a ballet dancer, the Russian followed him out
of the turn and locked into his next manoeuvre. David saw him coming up
into an attack position in his rear-view mirror and he rolled out again
and went up and right, blacking out with the rate of turn.
Roll and turn, turn for life, David had judged the Russian fairly. He
was a deadly opponent, quick and hard, anticipating each of David's
turns and twists, riding always within an ace of strike. Turn, and turn
again, in great winging parabolas, climbing always, turning always,
vapour trails spinning out from their wing-tips in silky arabesque
patterns against the hard blue of the sky.
David's arms and shoulders ached as he fought the control dampers and
the weight of gravity, sickened by the drainage of blood and the
adrenalin in his system.
His cold battle rage turned gradually to icy despair as each of his
efforts to dislodge the Russian were met and countered, and always the
gaping shark's maw of the MIG hung and twisted a point off his shoulder
or belly.
All David's expertise, all the brilliance of his natural flying gifts
were slowly being discounted by the store of combat experience upon
which his enemy could draw.
At one stage, when for an instant they flew wing-tip to wing-tip, David
glanced across the gap and saw the man's face. just the eyes and
forehead above the oxygen mask; the skin Was pale as bone and the eyes
were deeply socketed like those of a skull, and then David was turning
again, turning and screaming and straining against gravity, screaming
also against the first enfolding coils of fear.
He rolled half out of the turn and then without conscious thought,
reversed the roll. The Mirage shuddered with protest-and his speed
bled off. The Russian saw it and came down on him from high on his
starboard quarter . As David pushed the stick fully forward and left he
kicked on full left rudder, ducking under the blast of cannon fire, and
the Mirage went down in a spiralling dive. The blood which gravity had
sucked from his head was now flung upwards through his body, filling his
head and his vision with bright redness, the red-out of inverted
gravitational force. A vein in his nose popped under the pressure and
suddenly his oxygen mask was filled with a flood of warm choking blood.
The Russian was after him, following him into the dive, lining him up
for his second burst.
David screamed with the metallic salty taste of blood in his mouth and
hauled back on the stick with all his strength, the nose came up and
over, climbing out of the dive, and again the blood drained from his
head going from red-out to black-out in the fraction of a second and be
saw the Russian following him up, drawn up by the ploy. At the top
David kicked it out in a breakaway roll. It caught the Russian, he was
one-hundredth of a second slow in countering and he swung giddily
through David's gunsight, an almost impossible deflection shot that
sluiced cannon fire wildly across the sky, spraying it like water from a
garden hose. The MIG was in David's sights for perhaps one-tenth of a
second, but in that time David saw a flash of light, a bright wink of it
below the pilot's canopy, and then David rolled and turned out, coming
around hard and finding the Russian still hanging in the circuit, but
losing air space, swaying out with a feather of white vapour streaming
back from below his cockpit canopy.
I've hit him, David exulted, and his fear was gone, become anger again,
a fierce triumphant anger. He took the Mirage up in another soaring
yo-yo and this time the MIG could not hold station on him and David
flickrolled off the top and came out with the Russian centred in his
gunsight.
He fired a one-second burst and saw the incendiary shells lace in and
burst in quick little stabbing stars in the silver fuselage of the MIG.
The Russian came out of his turn, in a gentle dive, flying straight, no
longer taking evasive action, probably dead at his controls, and David
sat on his tail, and settled the pipper of his gunsight.
He fired another one-second burst and the MIG began to break up. Small
unidentifiable pieces of wreckage flew back at David, but the Russian
stayed with his machine.
Again David hit him with a two-second burst, and now the MIG's nose sank
until she was in a vertical dive still under full power and she went
down like a silver javelin. David could not follow her without tearing
off his own wings. He pulled out and watched the Russian fly into the
earth at a speed that must have exceeded mach 2_ He burst like a bomb in
a tall tower of dust and smoke that stood for long seconds on the brown
plains of Syria.
David shut down his afterburners and looked to his fuel gauges. They
were all showing only a narrow strip above the empty notch, and David