“Circle back, circle back!”
Miller turned his own aircraft sharply toward the attacking MiGs. With a shock, he saw their guns blazing as bright pinpricks along the wings. They were firing at him. He responded by unleashing a burst from his 20 mm guns.
The two groups swept through one another, no harm done. Miller directed his Panther into a hard left, gritting his teeth at the tremendous G forces. The bold maneuver caught one of the MiGs unawares and as it passed through his gunsights, he let loose with the Panther’s 37 mm cannon. Bright flashes punched holes in the sky as the rounds struck the MiG dead center. Without warning, the enemy fighter erupted into a fireball.
He just had time to fire at another MiG, which began to trail smoke. He punched it again with the cannon and now the MiG broke apart with a shotgun burst of debris that the Panther had no choice but to fly right through. Miller caught a glimpse of the tumbling wings and a chunk of burning fuselage just a few feet from his fragile canopy. He breathed again when he saw open sky ahead.
Miller gave a cowboy whoop of satisfaction. He had just shot down two enemy planes.
“Guzzle, watch my tail.” No response. “Guzzle, come in.”
Anxiously, Miller swiveled his head in all directions, looking for that third MiG. Unless Guzzle had shot it down, the son of a bitch was still up here somewhere, but Miller didn’t see it. He also didn’t see his wingman.
He moved his eyes lower.
Off to his four o’clock he saw a plane on fire, plunging toward the earth.
It wasn’t a MiG. There wasn’t any parachute.
“Oh no, no, no!”
Miller tracked the tumbling, burning Panther, trailing smoke and debris as it fell. Before it could hit the earth, the plane disappeared with a final pop like a bottle rocket exploding.
Guzzle Walsh was gone.
But where the hell was that last MiG?
He got his answer when he spotted the plane rushing at him from below. Having finished off his wingman, the MiG was coming for him.
Not if he could help it.
Miller felt enraged and bent on revenge, but he tamped down those emotions, knowing that they wouldn’t do him any good if he hoped not just to survive, but to win. He had to fight with his head.
He pulled hard on the controls, forcing the Panther into a hard left and rolling at the same time. It was a maneuver that he had practiced countless times, and all that practice paid off now as the plane responded by dropping like a stone, upside down.
Taken by surprise just as it was prepared to pounce, the MiG found itself in Miller’s gunsights as he opened up with all three cannons, raining hellfire upon the enemy aircraft. The MiG responded by bursting into flame. Miller whooped.
“That’s for Guzzle, you son of a bitch.”
His sense of victory was short-lived. Something glinting high above caught his eye. There wasn’t supposed to be anything up there. He had shot down all three enemy planes, right?
His heart hammering in his chest, he realized that the remaining four MiGs had not flown away. They had simply been biding their time. They came at him down, directly out of the sun.
His Panther didn’t have a chance as cannon fire flayed the air. All at once, his aircraft was suddenly full of holes. On his instrument panel, gauges spun like roulette wheels. An alarm beeped insistently. Yeah, what do you want me to do about it?
The controls that had been so light to the touch a moment ago, almost an extension of himself, now felt as heavy as if he was trying to fly a barn through the sky.
Smoke appeared. Then fire. There wasn’t any hope of getting this baby back to the carrier in one piece.
The Panther was going down. Incredulously, Miller realized that he had just been shot down.
He felt a strange sense of calm. If the aircraft exploded or if the MiGs returned and hit him with another burst of fire, he’d be dead instantly. But there was a chance, just a chance, that he might get out of this alive. Survival would take every ounce of skill that he possessed.
His training took over once again. He likely had just a few seconds to act. He reached for the eject switch.
Tiny explosive charges sent the canopy hurtling away, even as flames swept over him. An instant later, he felt himself ejected from the burning aircraft. His parachute blossomed above.
The enemy fighters swept past, one of them having the audacity to waggle its wings at him. But they didn’t open fire. The MiGs raced away, bound for their destination, but with three fewer aircraft.
Miller watched his burning aircraft disintegrate. He felt relieved that he wasn’t on it. He felt a strange sense of calm, even dangling beneath a parachute.
He looked below, seeing that the hills were coming up fast. Up in the plane, he had felt so disengaged from them, like he was looking down at a map or diorama. Now, individual trees began to take shape. As the Navy sailors liked to say, this shit was about to get real.
Hitting those trees was going to hurt. Those branches promised to pummel his body like a bitter old lady beating a rug. Desperately, he looked around for something resembling a clearing. But all he saw was trees.
Finally, he glimpsed what looked like a stone wall and a clearing and steered the chute in that direction. This parachute sure as hell didn’t respond like a fighter jet. He tugged again at the stays, guiding out into the open.
He hit hard, rolling as he had been trained to do, but he still felt his ankle twist. No time to think about that now. He kept rolling.
When he came to a stop, he sat up. Thankfully, he had come down in a clearing — more like a gap in the trees, really — next to a tall stone wall that was covered in vines and vegetation. The damn thing looked ancient. If he’d smacked into that, he would have ended up with worse than a twisted ankle.
Miller gathered up his chute and shoved it out of sight, under some bushes.
He looked around, trying to figure out where he was. He knew that they had been flying over North Korea, just north of the 38th Parallel. It stood to reason that he had come down in enemy territory.
One thing for sure — he had a long walk ahead of him.
Miller tensed. He thought that he had seen something move among the trees at the edge of the clearing. His hand drifted toward the service weapon at his belt, but he didn’t unbuckle the holster yet.
Worst case, it was a Chinese patrol. No point trying to shoot it out with enemy troops.
Best case, he had startled some kind of forest animal.
He saw the movement again.
Then several figures materialized from the brush. They wore old, mismatched clothes, like maybe they were farmers. But what really got Miller’s attention was that one of the men was holding a rifle.
He’d never get to his pistol in time.
Slowly, Miller raised his hands into the air.
Chapter Three
Don Hardy had never ridden in a helicopter before. The so-called “choppers” were usually just for flying the brass to wherever they needed to be, and they had to be highly polished brass, at that.
He tried not to think too much about the fact that he dangled from beneath a rapidly rotating blade — a giant eggbeater in the sky. With its bubble-like windshield, the front of the chopper resembled nothing so much as the bug-eyed face of a blue-bottle fly.
Ugly and ungainly, the chopper wasn’t at all like the sleek U.S. fighters that streaked across the sky. The chopper also made a nice, fat, slow target for anyone on the ground.
Hardy settled himself into the tight space behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats. It was more like a bench or a rumble seat than anything designed for transporting passengers in anything resembling comfort. The fact that Hardy was a big, strapping farm boy from Indiana made squeezing into the cramped space even harder.