Controls still not doing their job.
Blue sky ahead.
Air speed dropping.
Still climbing.
Momentum’s a beautiful thing. Still moving somehow.
Stick feels like it’s not connected.
Do I have Kathy’s letter?
Restart the other engine.
Not this slow, no way.
Five thousand goddamn feet, a miracle to be this high.
Pointing north. Wrong direction.
Shit, no wing.
Can’t hold it.
Have to jump now while the jumping is good.
Shame to leave this old Hog. Hell of a plane. Rescued from the scrap heap to whup Saddam’s butt.
Got two Scuds at least.
Less than three seconds passed from the moment he was hit until Mongoose’s eyes shot down toward the big yellow ejector loops at the edge of the ACES II seat. His body was still going through the motions but his head was already outside the plane.
Eject. Eject.
He reached up and made sure his crash visor was down, hard hat secure, passport punched.
Eject. Eject.
He felt a soft pop, then closed his eyes as a powerful force yanked his legs back and pushed him against the seat. Wires below were severed by razor knives as the canopy blew out with a rush and the space below him exploded with a mad froth. Mongoose felt himself hurled upwards, enveloped in an icy whirlwind, then wrapped in a dark, blank void beyond time or place.
CHAPTER 16
A-Bomb pulled eight or nine g’s in the turn, whacking the Hog down into the dust and going like all hell. He had to take out that Roland or no way anybody could get close enough to pick up Mongoose when his chute landed.
He saw, or thought he saw, an ejection, even though Mongoose didn’t acknowledge. He’d have to go back for him; the Roland had to be taken out first.
A nice little Spark Vark jamming plane flying overhead right about now would have been immensely convenient. That or an up-to-date ECM pod on the right wing, where the ancient ALQ-119 was hanging.
But hell, A-Bomb told himself. He didn’t need that fancy stuff. He was flying a Hog.
He came at the site about twenty feet off the ground, so low and close he could see the Roland crew members working frantically on the top of the mobile missile launcher. They had rolled it out from under its hiding place, whether to reload or get away from the fire on the other end, he couldn’t be sure.
And he really didn’t care. A-Bomb pressed his trigger and tore the hell out of the lightly armored piece of French dog meat, framed by the roadway behind it. A dozen armored piercing and high explosive shells ripped through the tank chassis, the metal steaming with death. The four or five men who’d been atop it literally vaporized as the pilot sat on his trigger.
Some enterprising troops had set up a fifty caliber machine gun at the edge of the packed dirt road about twenty yards beyond the overpass. A-Bomb gave them the finger as he zoomed out, whipping back for a run at the Scud carriers. As he came back and started to get into position to take his aim, he saw that both missiles were lying in splinters beneath the underpass.
They’d been decoys.
No matter— he danced his bullets into the underpass as he galloped forward, working his pedals to rake the area right to left. Then he turned his attention to the machine-gun, awarding his own personal medals of heroism to the soldiers manning it.
When he came around for another pass, all he saw were dead bodies.
One more quick turn revealed nothing else was moving. He started climbing, heading in the direction he had last seen Mongoose’s plane take. As the Hog gained altitude, he tuned his radio to the emergency band, hoping for a locator beacon.
All he heard was static.
CHAPTER 17
He was thinking of the hospital. His wife Kathy was lying in the bed, scrunched up, her face red.
She was grunting. The doctor was standing at the edge of the bed.
Robby was being born. He felt himself trembling, worried that something was going wrong. But the nurse who had been with them was smiling. He trusted her, more than the doctor.
“You have to push harder,” the nurse told her. “Get into this one.”
Kathy looked at him. She didn’t say anything, but he felt fear in her eyes.
“You can do it,” he told her. He stepped forward and gripped her hand, pushing confidence into his voice. The wave hit her and she pressed against him, her muscles contracting to push their baby down the birth canal.
“Here,” said the doctor. “You can feel his hair.”
Johnson smiled as he let the doctor guide his fingers. The sensation was wet, oily even.
“That’s your son.”
The idea barely registered. The head slipped back inside Kathy’s body.
“Here comes another one,” said the nurse.
He leaned toward his wife, who raised her body with the push. She groaned and screamed and suddenly the baby squirted out, born, alive, his body all red. He looked like a wrinkled Martian.
Jesus, that’s my son, Johnson thought.
The vision snapped black. He whirled around, the moving eye of a tornado.
He was tumbling.
His visor and oxygen mask were in place, shielding his face somewhat, but still the wind was a sharpened icicle, chiseling at his face.
It was so cold that his nerve inputs couldn’t process it all and told his brain that he was on fire. He was hot and frozen cold at the same time.
Mongoose thought about his arms and legs. It was easy to break them getting out of the plane. He tried to move them closer to his body, belatedly trying to protect them. The base of his skull hurt and his neck and shoulders burned.
A stiff, hard hand whacked him backwards. The breath ran out of him; by the time he could breathe again he saw that the ejection seat’s drogue parachute had deployed. He was falling, but much slower now.
The wind was still a bitch. It was whipping cold against him, and dragging him east. But he was lucky— the seat’s canister of emergency oxygen was making it easier to breathe, easier for him to clear his head.
The main chute kicked in. He fluttered, head whirling; he reached his hands to his chest and blanked again, momentarily.
Now surplus material, the seat that had saved him fell away. He had a vague notion that he was still moving forward in the air— he’d come out an angle, propelled like a performer from a circus cannon, right over the big tent, way out past the parking lot. The sun shimmered in the hazy edge of the dirt a few yards away, as if it had gone out three seconds ahead of him and its chute had failed to open.
Mongoose felt the harness pulling against his body, his parachute being pulled by a stiff wind. He felt like he was going faster than the damn airplane.
There was a way to steer. He knew how to steer, he’d practiced it before.
It hadn’t been like this. The wind had been calmer and the air warmer, his heart beating much slower.
Checklist mode, he told himself. One item at a time.
“There’s nothing in Iraq worth dying for.”
Who had said that? General Horner? Colonel Knowlington?
Checklist mode. Item one— steer the chute away from the enemy. Steer south.
Assuming the sun still set in the west, he was already headed in that direction. The chute responded and moved even faster.