There was another burst of fire. Tracers ripped the sky again, but no bullets hit the plane.
"I don't understand it," Whitlock said. "They could blow us out of the sky."
"That was like a shot across the bow. They want us to land. They probably think they’ve got themselves a planeload of spies. Capturing us alive ought to get somebody promoted.”
Cole thought about that. It was an option. They could turn around and head back to the airfield like the Russians wanted. There could be some kind of diplomatic wrangle. They might get home someday before the end of the century.
But not Inna. Not Dmitri. It would be the Gulag for them. Or a bullet.
Cole didn't plan on spending the next few years digging holes on some Gulag work crew for another version of Barkov.
The plane rocked as it hit a pocket of turbulent air. He gripped Whitlock's shoulder, steadying them both. "Got any ideas?" he asked.
"No. We sure as hell can't outrun a fighter," Whitlock said.
"Can't you do some fancy flying?"
"In this beat up old bird? Cole, it's like a goose trying to out-maneuver a hawk. We don't have a prayer against that other plane. It’s a lot faster than we are, and we aren’t even armed.”
"Gotta try something."
Whitlock did. He forced the stick down, moving the plane into a steep dive. Wind whistled at the wings, threatening to rip them off. The whole plane bucked and shook. The Russian fighter raced past overhead and swung around in an arc to come at them again. Effortlessly. It was easy enough to imagine the Russian pilot with his gunsights on them, finger on the trigger, waiting for a radio message with orders to put another shot across the bow or just let loose with a killing burst through the fuselage so that he could get home in time for borscht and vodka.
The fighter pilot fired. The flurry of rounds punched holes the size of golf balls through the skin. Inna screamed. Vaccaro had been pale before; now he was the grayish color of dishwater.
The Russian pilot had not finished them off — yet. He was just showing them that he meant business. He wanted them to land the plane. He was making it clear that they were going down — one way or another.
Cole decided that he’d had enough. He wasn't going to wait around for them all to be shot out of the sky. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to become a prisoner. That just wasn’t his style.
He got down close to Whitlock's ear. "Listen up, Whitlock. You hold this plane real steady. I'm gonna try something."
He left the cockpit and made his way back to the cargo area. He reached for his rifle. Vaccaro, Inna, and Dmitri eyed him with a look that seemed to ask, What’s that crazy hillbilly up to now? It was too loud to even attempt an explanation. Each breath turned to icy vapor. The plane rocked as frigid winds buffeted the fuselage. The wind coming through the bullet holes whistled like an angry teapot.
Truth be told, he wasn't sure that this was going to work. It was only a half-baked plan, but he had to try something.
He was glad that he hadn’t wasted any more bullets than necessary on Barkov. He was down to his last two shells.
The question was, would it be enough?
Cole made his way as far back in the cargo area as he could. There wasn't any sort of bulkhead at the rear of the plane, just a seam where the two sides of the plane joined. It reminded Cole of how the stern of an aluminum canoe was riveted together.
He took out his knife and punched a hole through the skin, then sawed the knife blade in a rough circle. He soon had a hole the size of a dinner plate, about ten inches off the floor of the plane. Looking out the hole at the ground far below made his head swim. Nothing out there but air. He tried not to think about it.
Behind them, riding in the cargo plane's slipstream, was the Russian fighter. Head on, the fighter resembled something predatory, like maybe an oncoming falcon. Meanwhile, Cole and the others were riding in the pigeon. The fighter had a single propeller. Above the propeller was a windshield. Behind the glass, Cole could make out the silhouette of the pilot. If the pilot even noticed what Cole was up to, he must have been left scratching his head.
He lay down and rested his elbows on the floor of the plane. It was not comfortable, but he ignored the feel of the metal jarring up through the bone. Never mind that it was goddamn cold with the arctic air sucking at the hole in the airplane. He put the muzzle through the hole he had cut. Through the scope, the enemy fighter sprang much closer. The pilot's head went from being the size of a dime to being the size of a baseball.
The crosshairs settled on the target, then bounced away. Cole struggled to hold the rifle steady. The plane hit another pocket of rough air and shook all around him like a dog that had just come out of the rain.
All he needed was a patch of smooth air. He let the crosshairs drift over the target, finger taking up pressure on the trigger. At just the precise moment, the pad of his finger would take up the last bit of tension in the trigger.
Wait, he told himself. Steady.
The thing about this kind of shooting was he you didn't want to think about it too much, at least not with the front part of his mind. He let his mind go kind of fuzzy. The crosshairs drifted while the finger stayed on the trigger. The back part of his mind would know when everything was lined up. His eyeballs and his trigger finger were connected in that back part of his mind.
Behind him, the Russian pilot fired another burst. The guns flared and crackled. A few rounds hit the fuselage and Inna screamed again. Vaccaro swore. Fortunately, most of the burst passed overhead.
The Russian was sending a message that he wanted them to put the plane down. Now. All he had to do was keep his finger on the trigger for a couple seconds longer, and they would be blown out of the sky.
Through the scope, he could practically see the pilot lining up the next burst. His crosshairs drifted to the pilot’s head, just visible through the windshield.
Around him, the cargo plane quit bouncing.
Cole fired.
He wasn’t sure just what he expected to happen next, which was why it came as a surprise.
The pilot opened up on them, firing nonstop. The burst clawed at the cargo plane until Whitlock, up in the cockpit, veered to the right so suddenly that Cole lost his grip on the rifle and slammed painfully against the fuselage. He crawled back to the hole he had made and acquired the target again. He couldn't believe that he had missed. Had he somehow miscalculated about firing on a moving plane, from a moving plane?
He had one bullet left.
By now the Russian pilot had stopped firing. The fighter simply flew on in a perfectly straight path, not bothering to follow the cargo plane on its new course. Cole worked the bolt, got lined up for another shot. The fighter flew blindly past them, headed to nowhere. As it went by, Cole caught a glimpse of a starburst of broken glass where his bullet had punched into the cockpit.
He hadn’t missed. He realized that the final burst must have been the death reflex of the pilot's finger on the trigger.
Then the plane started to drift even farther to the left, off course. Soon after that, the nose dipped. The fighter plane started a long, steady slide toward the earth below.
All around them, the blue sky now stretched empty and limitless.
And he still had one bullet chambered in the Springfield rifle, so the possibilities were endless.
EPILOGUE
Two hours later they were somewhere above Finland when Whitlock spotted a runway carved into a forest. They decided to land, considering that a plane with Soviet markings would not get a warm welcome if they flew clear to Helsinki. Having narrowly dodged a Soviet fighter plane, they didn’t want to take any chances with the Finnish air force.