Skull keyed his mike and called in the crash. At the same time, he greased his Phantom down to treetop level, looking for his buddy in the thick canopy of trees. He’d flown with Crush on something like twenty missions; he wasn’t about to lose him.
Hell damn, he’d have to start paying for his own drinks.
There was no ground beacon, no signal from the pilot’s emergency radio. They were over Laos a few miles, not the best area to be. For all Skull cared he could have been pulling circuits over the Kremlin. He crisscrossed twice, low and slow, he and his pitter taking turns peering out the side, looking in vain for a pucker of nylon or a flash from a signal mirror.
He spotted a village — sized clearing at the edge of the canopy just to the east, probably straddling the border with North Vietnam, though he wasn’t about to get out a map and check. Holding the F-4 about as slow as it would go, he eased toward it. The clearing was a perfect place for a chopper to land. With luck Crush would be hiding nearby.
Red and brown rocks rose from the jungle to his left as he approached. There was a long rift in the ground, a mountain ridge heaved up by some ancient geological pressures that had dented the South Asian peninsula. He passed the clearing.
“See anything?” his backseater asked.
They called him Little Bear. Not exactly original, but he claimed to be part Cherokee.
Might’ve been bull.
“Negative. I’m trying another sweep.”
“Copy.”
Skull brought the Phantom back around, her engines whining. Fuel burn was light. Flaps felt a bit sluggish for some reason. He was at five hundred feet, slipping toward three hundred as he made the pass, lower than the top of the nearby ridge.
Nothing. And nothing again on the third run. He brought the plane up. This much flying over any one spot in Southeast Asia was extremely dangerous, especially at low altitude.
But where was Crush? On the other side of the ridge? He took the Phantom around, still craning his head toward the ground for a sign of something.
“I’m going to run along that escarpment a way,” he told Little Bear.
“Shit— a mirror. Right wing. See it?”
His backseater leaned forward past his equipment to poke him in the back and make sure he had his attention. Skull looked over his shoulder out the F-4’s canopy, but couldn’t see the light, couldn’t see anything but the infinite variations of green below.
“Where?” he asked.
“Back there. It was something.”
“Yeah, hang on. I’ll go back.”
He could barely contain himself or the Phantom as he pulled around for a better look. He put his wings almost on the trees, holding the jet barely above stall speed, begging the mirror to catch a fresh glint of the strong, overhead sun.
He got a nose full of heavy machine-gun fire as a reward. What seemed like a hundred thousand 23mm anti — aircraft guns opened up on him from the ridge.
There was a disconnect for a second, a short between his brain and his body. Knowlington’s hand threw the throttle to after-burner, or maybe beyond; the rest of him reacted to push the plane into a line over the ridge and out of fire. None of this registered in his brain. All the pilot saw was black lead headed straight at him from all directions, red muzzles burning into his eyes.
Breaking off was the prudent thing to do, the thing any commander would have insisted he do, the thing that was right. He did it as soon as his limbs began taking instructions from his brain again.
It felt very, very wrong.
They were back at twenty thousand feet, still climbing and halfway to Burma before his backseater’s voice pulled him back to the plane.
“Throttle stuck,” Skull answered lamely. He began pulling the Phantom back, but he was spooked. They were now low on fuel, so low that he couldn’t have made another pass even he wanted to. He radioed a warning about the anti-air and headed back to home base in Thailand.
After that, the real drinking started.
No one ever found Crush or his pitter. They weren’t among the prisoners released at the end of the war, nor did their names show up among the dead, either in the North or interred in Laos. Their names were on the Wall in Washington, D.C.; Skull had traced his finger over them himself.
Officially, the Air Force decided that the two men had gone down with the plane; unofficially, Knowlington knew that was a bunch of bull, since the Vietnamese would have recovered the bodies. The reds had definitely found the plane; they had released propaganda photos of it as part of a campaign to prove that America had no respect for Laos’s borders.
As if the scumbags did themselves.
Despite the fact that he’d driven through a cloud of flak, Skull’s Phantom didn’t have a nick on it when he landed. A lot of guys interpreted that as one more sign of his incredible luck. Even Little Bear was amazed.
Knowlington saw it as confirmation that he had chickened out and was a coward at heart.
All the recognition, all the medals that had come before that flight— and certainly those that came later— couldn’t counterbalance those dark five minutes on that sortie.
He never talked about it with Little Bear. In fact, he started avoiding his backseater, worried that he might want to talk about the mission, about his chickening out. The weapons officer would have known the throttle sticking was a bunch of bull. He would have felt the second of indecision. He would have known they should have toughed it out despite the gunfire— prudence be damned.
“Devil Twelve, Devil Twelve, this is Fahd control. Colonel, how are you reading me?”
“Twelve. Go ahead, Control.”
“Sir, we need to move you around a bit.”
Snapped back to the present, Knowlington did a quick check of his instruments before responding. The plane was flying at spec and had passed all her tests; no need to keep it up any longer than necessary. Tightening his grip on the stick, the colonel pushed a long breath of air out of his lungs into his face mask, reminding himself to stay in the present, to work on just today. He told the controller that what he’d really like to do was land.
“Ah, Miller time, is it?”
“Something like that,” he told the kid.
Spinning back to take his slot in the landing pattern, Skull admired the way the Hog picked her tail up and put her nose right where he wanted, He tried hard not to think of anything else.
CHAPTER 11
Mongoose heard A-Bomb. He had his bearing, but still couldn’t see him. He continued climbing, spotting the highway they’d been flying along earlier, still without his wingman in view. Finally he caught the plane in the distance, much lower than he thought it would be.
He keyed the mike and asked A-Bomb if he was all right.
“Yeah, I told you I’m fine. Iraqis couldn’t hit a zeppelin.”
Damned if A-Bomb didn’t sound like he was munching on something. And did he have his music cranked?
“Can you see me?” Mongoose asked.
“Yeah. Gonna take me a minute.”
“We’ll come east and follow that highway again. You see it?”
Their little adventure in advanced jinking and jiving had taken them a good distance from the road and the bunkers they’d been aiming to inspect, before the SAMs interrupted. Mongoose kicked the throttle open and slipped the A-10A into a straight tack north, calculating a new plan of attack as he went. The brown ribbon that marked the highway gradually grew wider. He decided they would cross it, then slide down out of the northwest.