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Some leery old veteran with hawk's blood in his veins, tough and ca
and dangerous as an angry black mamba.
Engage two port targets, David ordered Joe, reserving the MIG leader and
the starboard echelon for his attack.
In David's headphones the missiles were growling their anxiety, they had
sniffed out the massed jet blasts below them and already they were
tracking, howling their eagerness to kill.
David switched to command net. Hello, Desert Flower, this is Bright
Lance on target and requesting strike. Almost instantly the voice came
back, David, this is the Brig- he was speaking, rapidly, urgently,
discontinue attack pattern. I repeat, disengage target.
They are no longer hostile. Break off attack Shocked by the command,
David glanced down the deep valley of cloud and saw the long brown
valley of the Jordan falling away behind them. They had crossed over a
line on the earth and immediately their roles had changed from defender
to aggressor. But they were closing the target rapidly. It was a fair
bounce, they were still unaware.
We are going to hit them, David made the decision through the cold
bright thing that burned within him and he closed command net and spoke
to Joe. Two, this is leader attacking. Negative! I say again
negative! Joe called urgently. Target is no longer hostile? Remember,
Ha
finger about the trigger and touched left rudder, yawing fractionally to
bring the nearest 1VUG into the field of his sights. It seemed to
balloon in size as he shrieked towards it.
There was a heart-beat of silence from Joe, and then his voice strangled
and rough. Two conforming. Kill them, Joe, David yelled and pressed
against the spring-loaded tension of the trigger. There was a soft
double hiss, hardly discernible above the jet din, and from under each
wing-tip the missiles unleashed, they skidded and twisted as they
aligned themselves on the targets, leaving darkly etched trails of
vapour across David's front, and at that moment the MIGs became aware.
At a shouted warning from their leader, the enULC formation burst into
its five separate parts, splintering silvery swift like a shoal of
sardines before the driving charge of the barracuda.
The rearmost Syrian was slow, he had only just begun to turn away when
one of the sidewinders flicked its tail, followed his turn and united
with him in an embrace of death.
The shock wave of the explosion jarred David's machine, but the sound of
it was muted as the MIG was enveloped in the greenish-tinted cloud of
the strike and it shattered into fragments. A wing snapped off and went
whirling high and the brief blooming flower of smoke blew swiftly past
David's head.
The second missile had chosen the machine with the red ring, the
formation leader, but the Russian reacted so swiftly and pulled his turn
so tight that the missile slid past him in an overshoot, and it lost the
scent, unable to follow the MIG around. As David hauled the Mirage
round after the Russian, he saw the missile destroy itself in a burst of
greenish smoke, far out across the valley of clouds.
The Russian was in a hard right-hand turn, and David followed him.
Staring across the imaginary circle that separated them, he could see
every detail of the enemy machine; the scarlet helmet of the pilot, the
gaudy colours of its rounders, the squiggle of Arabic script that was
its identification markings, even the individual rivets that stitched
the polished metal skin of the MIG.
David pulled back with all his strength against his joystick, for
gravity was tightening the loading of his controls, opposing his efforts
to place additional stress on the Mirage lest he tear its wings off the
fuselage Gravity had hold of David also, its insidious force sucked the
blood away from his brain so that his vision dimmed, the colour of the
enemy pilot's helmet faded to dull brown, and David felt himself crushed
down into his seat.
About his waist and legs his G-suit tightened its coils, squeezing
brutally like a hungry python, attempting to prevent the drainage of
blood from his upper torso.
David tensed every muscle in his body, straining to resist the loss of
blood, and he took the Mirage up in a slidin& soaring yo-yo, up the side
of an imaginary barrel.
Like a motor-cyclist on a wall of death he whirled aloft, trying once
more for the advantage of height.
His vision narrowed, greyed out, until his field was reduced to the
limits of his cockpit, and he was pi
sagging open, his eyelids dragging downwards; the effort of holding his
right hand on the control column was Herculean.
In the corner of his vision the stall indicator blinked its little eye
at him, changing from amber to red, warning him that he was on the verge
of catastrophe, courting the disaster of supersonic stall.
David filled his lungs and screamed with all his strength, his own voice
echoing through the grey mist.
The effort forced a little blood back to his brain and his vision
cleared briefly, enough to let him see that the MIG had anticipated his
yo-yo and had come up under him, sliding up the wall of death towards
his unprotected flank and belly.
David had no alternative but to break out of the turn before the MIG's
ca
tight climbing lefthander, his afterburners still thundering at full
power, consuming fuel at a prodigious rate, and placing a limit upon
these desperate manoeuvres.
Neatly and gracefully as a ballet dancer, the Russian followed him out
of the turn and locked into his next manoeuvre. David saw him coming up
into an attack position in his rear-view mirror and he rolled out again
and went up and right, blacking out with the rate of turn.
Roll and turn, turn for life, David had judged the Russian fairly. He
was a deadly opponent, quick and hard, anticipating each of David's
turns and twists, riding always within an ace of strike. Turn, and turn
again, in great winging parabolas, climbing always, turning always,
vapour trails spi
patterns against the hard blue of the sky.
David's arms and shoulders ached as he fought the control dampers and
the weight of gravity, sickened by the drainage of blood and the
adrenalin in his system.
His cold battle rage turned gradually to icy despair as each of his
efforts to dislodge the Russian were met and countered, and always the
gaping shark's maw of the MIG hung and twisted a point off his shoulder
or belly.
All David's expertise, all the brilliance of his natural flying gifts
were slowly being discounted by the store of combat experience upon
which his enemy could draw.
At one stage, when for an instant they flew wing-tip to wing-tip, David
glanced across the gap and saw the man's face. just the eyes and
forehead above the oxygen mask; the skin Was pale as bone and the eyes
were deeply socketed like those of a skull, and then David was turning
again, turning and screaming and straining against gravity, screaming
also against the first enfolding coils of fear.
He rolled half out of the turn and then without conscious thought,
reversed the roll. The Mirage shuddered with protest-and his speed
bled off. The Russian saw it and came down on him from high on his