Corbett realized that the aircraft approaching him would be more dangerous if its pilot jinked upward to catch the hellbug in his exhaust, so Corbett did it first, again using the nose diverter to help flick the nose upward so suddenly that G forces nearly dragged his head down. Then he was over and past the Harrier, darting quick glances in search of enemies, which were plentiful, and cover, which was nonexistent.
The almost silent shuddering from his left wing made his decision for him; four neat holes had punched a straight pattern between leading and trailing edges. Corbett had penciled the line that defined the main spar of Black Stealth One, and he knew where that crucial structure lay under the hellbug’s skin. One of the Huey slugs had missed it by less than six inches. Corbett rolled his aircraft onto that wing from an altitude of three hundred feet, seeing the rotors of two Hueys flash as they moved in from that side, seeing other flashes from a chin turret.
And ahead, cutting into the hardpan soil like angular fingers, lay one branch of a ravine that deepened and broadened as it stretched away to the southeast. More than one cadet had made of himself a flesh and metal marmalade by playing in these arroyos with fast, heavy airplanes. Corbett kept his left wing down, knifing toward the ground like a broad arrowhead in a long sideslip that brushed shrubs at the right-hand lip of the ravine.
Typically, the lip of a Texas ravine is an absolutely vertical cliff, abruptly becoming a slope that is not curved, but angled, toward the bottom. The wider that ravine, in general, the deeperand the longer that vertical drop at its lip.
No airplane falling in a sideslip at nearly two hundred miles an hour could maneuver abruptly enough to avoid careening into the opposite slope of this ravine, without thrust diverters beneath its wing and nose. Among the excited voices clamoring in Corbett’s ear was one that said, “Scratch one bogey.” As Corbett let the hellbug’s diverted thrust align him, now angling his right wing down, perfectly parallel with the ravine’s left-hand slope and no more than a man’s height above jumbled stone, he knew that his abrupt disappearance must have looked like a hopeless fall into destruction.
Ravines do not simply quit. They issue either into flat lower plains or bigger ravines. In his haste and bedeviled by G forces, Corbett punched a wrong instruction, erased it, then punched the right one into the pixel program while keeping the hellbug’s belly mere yards above the slope that was leading him downward toward a blind bend. Virtually the only real curve associated with such a ravine is the graceful bend that changes its horizontal direction. If he could only reach that bend ahead, and bank tightly around it before one of them saw him, he could…
“Bogey in the ravine, Broom leader,” called the only voice that did not sound perplexed. “Still taking evasive action but that canopy sparkles like a diamond ring. Broom nine pursuing,” it went on, and Corbett cursed. I had to polish the goddamn-canopy, didn’t I? Should’ve left it dirty. A fragment of his mind said it would not have mattered. They would have borne him down like this anyway, sheer numbers overwhelming Black Stealth One’s bag of tricks.
Corbett was already committed to a tightly curved bank to negotiate the bend but, as he swept through it, saw that the ravine was only an arm of a broader depression. Eastward, to his left, the glitter of whirling blades peeled over the ravine’s lip a mile distant. Almost immediately he saw the Huey crabbing toward him, winks of light almost a steady gleam from its chin turret. Corbett dropped lower, following the slope contour, and saw what appeared to be a small volcanic eruption halfway up the slope across from him. It was a small area of ravine disintegrating in a solid hail of minigun fire, and the pattern seemed to be moving only up and down slightly, as if some huge beast were writhing just beneath the rocks.
The bastard doesn’t see me, he’s just keeping up a curtain of fire, Corbett realized. But he locked the scanner onto that Huey anyway and hoped that his canopy would not give him away again until he had flashed below that steady withering blast. Corbett actually heard the ricochets humming like bees in hell as he passed two hundred yards from that disintegrating rubble, beneath the line of gunfire.
He found himself pointed toward the mouth of another ravine, shadowed in early light, and swung into it even though he knew it would become shallower, not deeper, as he flew up its gullet. Another voice, then two, announced that he had been seen before his canopy ducked into the ravine’s shadow. Twenty seconds later, as he climbed over the lip and dropped near the brushy plain again, a series of small explosions flung debris into the air three hundred yards ahead. He jinked upward to miss any stray hunks of rock that might still be raining down; he had not even noticed the rocket salvo, but it had missed by a fair margin.
Then, before darting down to ground level again, he saw the next ravine, less than a mile ahead. If his eyes were still perfect, it was a wide onetherefore probably deep. If his parallax perception was off, he could soon be a smear mixed with plastic. Two big, strong blips on his rearview were closing hard, and patiently settling into that ravine ahead to wait, four Hueys dipped below Corbett’s sight.
Boxed. Trailing those two Harriers on his tail were other blips, flying higher as cover and, in a final, almost certainly suicidal ploy, Corbett prepared an appropriate exit. How do you get out of a box? Same way you got in. Or not at all, he decided, taking five precious seconds to tighten his harness and reset the pixel program. Not to fool anyone watching his upper surfaces: to fool anyone watching the hellbug’s belly.
He could not see those waiting Hueys until he had nosed over at the ravine lip, and they were there, all right, blasting away as he judged the depth of the ravine and risked tearing the waste-gate controls loose. He hauled the stick into his gut, pouring full emergency power into the nose diverter, and started the first part of a loop. This time it would not become an Immelmann.
He had judged himself no more than five seconds ahead of the pursuing Harriers, but he was wrong: they were still approaching the ravine lip as the hellbug swept up above the ravine, upside down, and he leveled off that way. Inverted, ten feet above the plain at full tilt, Kyle Corbett flew out of the ravine and almost directly below the Marine craft. His pixel program painted not the top, but the bottom of Corbett’s aircraft, and his canopy was completely hidden as he arrowed away, still inverted.
He took another risk, yawing slightly to change course, switching to the Huey channel. One of them had seen his maneuver and was bellowing it out as hard as he could, giving chase although, the Huey pilot admitted a moment later, he had “no joy.” He too had lost sight of Black Stealth One, and hanging upside down while gasoline trickled from his plastic bag into the cockpit, Corbett set the scanner to show him where the rest of his enemies were.
Coughing, eyes streaming with gasoline fumes, Corbett passed beneath the last of the covering Hueys without provoking a shout of recognition. He could not remember how long that experimental rotary engine behind him was supposed to run inverted, but the hell with it, he had enough velocity now to gain a little altitude and roll rightside up, if his engine seized. He kept waiting for signs of engine trouble, and blinking gasoline fumes from his eyes for a five-minute eternity as he streaked toward the border near Laredo. And he listened with joy to the Mop and Broom channels for even longer than that, until he had righted the hellbug and cracked his canopy door to flush the worst of the fumes out.