Red Metal

CHAPTER 60

Shank’s underarms were soaked. Half-moons of sweat had stained his flight suit a dark green. He hadn’t shifted in his seat in more than forty-five minutes. His crotch itched uncontrollably, but in the small A-10 cockpit he had no space to move and, with his current speed and attack angle, no inclination to do so either. He had tasked the rest of his flight with hunting for tanks, and now he and his wingman, Nooner, were scanning for deeper, more lucrative targets.

Beads of sweat dripped down his forearms and into his gloves as he gripped the throttle and stick controller. He did his best to ignore the annoyance and maintain focus on his heads-up display. He tuned out all sensations that weren’t visual or auditory while searching the darkness for Russian armor on the ground and watching the low skies for the telltale pinpricks of light that indicated a SAM launch.

His ears were on high alert as he listened for his warning systems.

It was all about balance, he’d told his students back at Nellis. If a Warthog pilot concentrated too much on offense, he’d get killed; if he concentrated too much on defense, he’d be worthless to the troops on the ground he was out there to assist and protect… and they would get killed.

“No pressure,” he would always joke, with a smile, back in the classroom.

But he wasn’t smiling now.

The HUD had the last known locations for the Russian tanks plotted, and as long as the tanks hadn’t moved too far since the last update, right now he should be screaming at top speed in a steep dive toward a cluster of T-14 Armatas that had been pounding the German and Polish forces pursuing them.

Shank used his keen eyesight to scan the wood lines, ridges, towns, and valleys. He concentrated on everything: any changes in color patterns denoting camouflage, lines, or tracks in the winter snow; smoke from exhaust rising in the frigid air; trees moving as heavy armor passed.

And then, as he dipped below one thousand feet, he saw it: movement in front of the wood line in the distance, about four kilometers away.

He adjusted his angle of attack slightly and focused on the area. What he at first thought was a column of trucks suddenly came into focus. It was a long, dark olive green shape. It blended with the trees at first, but as it emerged from the forest it snaked through the white snow, moving from southwest to northeast and growing longer and longer by the second.

Into his mic he said, “Holy shit, Nooner! Eleven o’clock low! I’ve got a train. A big-ass train moving without any lights.”

“I tally,” replied his wingman. “Could be the enemy train, but how do we know it’s not some civilian cargo—”

Nooner stopped talking when smoke trails rose above the center of the train. Four surface-to-air missiles lifted up ahead of fat white columns, and before the two Americans’ eyes, the smoke began angling in their direction.

Shank and Nooner both juked right, enacting a standard prearranged battle maneuver. Nothing was said between the men as they pulled a hard two-g turn. The twin General Electric TF34-GE-100 turbofan engines blasted them up to four hundred miles per hour; red flames issued in spouts from the engines as both pilots kicked on the afterburners. In unison they both dumped multiple chaff-and-flare pods, steering directly away from the launched missiles to provide a minimum profile to their heat-seeking warheads.

One of the inbound missiles fell away, banking toward the flares. Both men watched their radar closely, tracking the other warheads as they closed. They each launched another bank of flares and chaff.

The men juked their aircraft back hard to the left. Seconds later, relief washed over the men as the last three missiles went dumb, following the flares and chaff to the ground and crashing harmlessly into the trees.

“Shit,” Nooner said into his mic. “If I’d been carrying a lump of coal up my ass, I’d have myself one hell of a diamond now.”

But Shank was mission focused. “Nooner, we’re attacking that bitch.”

“Hey, sir… I’m just gonna say it once, but that train’s probably got more than four missiles. We close the distance again, it’ll reach out to say hello again.”

Shank said, “Copy, but intel suspects that thing is the nerve center of this whole damn invasion. We have to light it up!”

“Understood. How you wanna play it?”

Shank replied, “Easy day, Captain. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” Shank explained his plan, then asked, “You got it?”

“Copy all. I’m ready to close in, sir, but I may have to keep one hand on the ejector handle.”

“I hear you, man. We need an attack heading of zero-one-four. Less than three minutes to target. Stay alert.”

“You think she’ll stop? Get into that next mass of forest and just sit and wait for us to come back around where they can take another shot?”

“Negative. I think in spite of all their firepower, they’re racing against time to get across Poland. They know every hour they’re in Western Europe, NATO will continue to bring in new flights of attack aircraft.

“We’ll hit her on the far side of the woods. Let’s take it even lower. Need to stay below the trees to block her radar. I want to crest them at our twelve o’clock and hammer down. You take lead — you’ve got two missiles left and I’ve only got one.”

“Two copies,” came the simple response from the number two airplane.

Both men concentrated hard on controlling the Warthogs; perfect stickwork demanded huge effort, especially with the throttles open at such a low altitude. The A-10 was not a nimble aircraft, and it had never been intended for precision flight. It had the nickname “the flying tank,” and sometimes it drove like one. Heavy and slow, but powerful and dangerous.

Flying at just over two hundred feet, Shank and Nooner raced over a narrow village that wound along a two-lane road. The undulating landscape meant the two men were constantly pulling back and pushing down on their sticks, fighting for the right balance of low flight and avoiding the absolute worst nightmare of any pilot.

The anodyne official term was “controlled flight into terrain,” but that was just a fancy way to say “crash.”

Any military pilot would have much preferred getting blown out of the sky by a missile than going off into eternity with the rest of the flying community knowing he’d slammed his jet into the damn dirt.

They coursed over the fields now, still skimming the surface of the earth, the ground whipping below them in a blur. Ahead, the last wood line before the tracks rose above them.

At the last second, both Nooner and Shank pulled stick and barely crested the tall Polish pines; then they sank back on the other side over a wide clearing in the scattered but thick evergreen forests.

“Ten o’clock!” said Nooner.

Shank flicked his eyes to his left. “I tally.” He banked slightly to line his nose up for the kill.

Across the field, just over two kilometers distant, the train slithered between snowy fields on the outskirts of a city. It moved due east now. More dense woods lay ahead of the train, and in seconds it would be back in cover, and the pilots would have the disadvantage of having to fly directly over the top of the train to look for the best shot.

“Fox Four!” Nooner said as he fired both his missiles.

Immediately two AGM-65 Mavericks bolted forward from Nooner’s pylons, boosting and accelerating rapidly to six hundred knots per hour.

The enemy must have spotted the attacking aircraft at the exact same time.

More white smoke erupted above the train in the evening moonlight, turning into ten distinct plumes as ten missiles rose from ten antiair missile tubes right as Shank fired his lone remaining Maverick.

“Guns, guns, guns!” said Nooner as he let loose with a burst of extreme long-range cannon shot; then both pilots pulled a hard right pitch and gunned their engines to maximum. If they could dip back down on the far side of woods, they might send the missiles crashing into the tall pines instead of into their now-vulnerable tails.

The Warthog had one of the tightest turning radii of any jet, but every millisecond felt like an eternity as Shank and Nooner cranked the noses of their aircraft 180 degrees, grunting loudly against the g-forces.

The Russians had fired eight short-range SA-24 Grinch missiles and two of their longer-range S-400 Triumf batteries with 9M96E2 missiles. The 9Ms ejected from their launchers with a gas charge and popped up to a height of forty meters; then their booster rockets kicked in. The SA-24s rapidly acquired the two A-10s, and accelerated to their 1,200-miles-per-hour maximum speed in pursuit. In seconds they reached a frightening 2,200 miles per hour, nearly Mach 3.

Shank and Nooner were now flying beyond the recommended maximum speed. The Polish wood line rose in front of them and they closed the last two hundred meters in seconds. The 9M missiles quickly overtook their smaller, slower SA-24 brothers and reached Shank and Nooner just as they were cresting the trees.

The huge array of flares and chaff dumped by the pair of A-10s was not enough to stop the nearly three-meter-long missiles. At the last second one streaked through the cloud of decoys, detonating into a flare virtually right next to Nooner’s left wing. The other smart missile, its advanced technology detecting its proximity to its intended targets and also their rapid down angle, instantly computed that there would be no room to turn and reengage, so it detonated immediately.

Shank took shrapnel to virtually all of his aircraft; chunks of metal sprayed through his left engine, eviscerating a small portion of his left wing and cutting off a chunk of his tail.

He looked over at Nooner as they just leveled out below the wood line. Behind them none of the other missiles had been smart enough to avoid the trees, because their algorithms didn’t account for obstructions. All but two detonated against the tall pines. One of the others tumbled into a farmer’s field, where it detonated in the snow. The second spun wildly up in the air, careened around in a spiral, then tumbled, its stabilizer fins ripped off as it dropped through the hundred-year-old pines and exploded against the ground.

Nooner’s voice was strained over the radio. “Shit, Shank, I gotta head back. This thing’s not gonna hold together. I’m leaking fuel and I don’t have full control.”

Shank had been checking his own gauges. Thankfully he found they looked better than his view outside the windscreen of his fuselage and control surfaces suggested. “RTB, Nooner. I seem to be holding together, and I still have something I need to do.”

“Sir, you can’t go it alone. I can at least stay nearby. Find and report your position if you get hit.”

“Dude, I’m looking right at your bird. You aren’t leaking fuel — you are gushing fuel. You won’t make it five minutes before you’ll have to punch. Plus, you’ve lost maneuverability. Don’t give the enemy an easy kill. You get back; I’ll take one more pass and join you.”

“Copy that. Good luck, Ray,” said Nooner. In his emotion he’d forgotten to use his flight leader’s rank or call sign. Shank’s wingman turned for a heading that would take him back in the direction of their expeditionary airfield on the old German highway.

Shank knew Nooner wouldn’t make it anywhere near Germany, much less their airfield, but at least he’d be gone from here before he had to bail.

With his tail rudder damaged, Shank had less-than-optimal stick control. It felt heavy, sluggish, like a car riding on a flat tire. The A-10 responded, but every sweep to the left or right took a few moments and this had to be fitted into his mental calculus as he guided the bird.

He skimmed the fields and forests at four hundred feet now, mindful that his moves and any small rise in terrain would have to be anticipated and calculated well in advance.

He could see the woods in the distance at the edge of the town. If the train had accelerated, as he’d guessed it would, it would now be nearing Jelenia Góra. The map showed a very large industrial rail yard and switching station on the far side of the urban center. The train would have to slow to take a long curve to get around the town and then remain slow as it passed through the industrial yard.

He decided to try to time his attack on the train to hit it in the rail yard. It wouldn’t be in the center of a populated area, and it was an easily identifiable landmark he could focus on as he approached.

But if his calculations were wrong, he might arrive before the train and then catch a flank shot from its missile batteries.

Shooting 30mm GAU-8/A Gatling guns at a stationary target was tricky. Shooting the gun at a train as it moved at an unknown speed away from him, while simultaneously watching out for another battery of missiles — all with a severely damaged aircraft — seemed utterly impossible.

But he flew on.

His integrated flight-and-fire-control computer, or IFFCC, calculated his aircraft’s airspeed over the ground. The computer, intended to make it easier for the pilot to get bullet convergence, also calculated the bullet drop needed and depicted this in the HUD reticle.

But Shank knew he also had to mentally calculate the appropriate lead of this moving target in only seconds or else his rounds would fall harmlessly short. The computer was designed to provide an aiming point, like the sight on a rifle. The reticle placed the maximum number of rounds in the smallest possible diameter ellipse on the ground in order to kill a tank.

Shank flew over a dam and a hydroelectric power station, then over the Bóbr River.

He glanced down quickly at his joint operations graphic air map. The JOG-Air was useful, as it showed only landmarks and topography that could be seen from the air.

He checked the lead-in features — terrain landmarks he used to guide himself into the target area — on his kneeboard. The power station, a small hill, a bend in the Bóbr River, then a small lookout tower perched on a hill overlooking the city of Jelenia Góra. The river bend was now behind him as he passed low over the tower. He barely had a moment to notice a small throng of people in the tower below, all hitting the deck as his jet screamed by.

Ahead, the city rose in the night; the church steeples he’d seen on the JOG-Air map were just where they should have been. He ticked them off one by one. A castle tower, then another church to his right… He should spot the rail yard shortly.

His hands perspired through his gloves. His pounding pulse quickened.

The last church steeple. Then… There it is.

The rail line came into view, and there, skirting the city, he saw the massive green Russian military train, burning from multiple missile strikes but racing east at speed. He found himself aligned almost perfectly with its rear as it pulled along the long curve, picking up speed, following the banks of the Bóbr.

Shank pitched the aircraft down, trying to align the gunsight in his heads-up display. His aircraft responded lethargically. Parts of the broken tail assembly clattered against the empennage, making a loud clacking sound that threatened to break his concentration.

He put his reticle on the track running through the distant rail yard, well in front of the first engine of the massive train, and saw that he was one and a half miles from his target. This was within cannon range, so he put his finger against the red trigger.

A-10 pilots normally fire one-second bursts from their cannons, and to maintain a uniform length of firing time they often chant a mantra, dating back to the Cold War, out loud while pulling the trigger.

Shank pressed his trigger.

Through the gunfire he shouted, “Die, Commie, die!”

Firing shells the size of Coke bottles, the weapon roared, a cacophony and vibration in the cockpit. A burst of flames and white smoke spit from the nose of his aircraft as the GAU-8/A gun system’s seven hydraulically driven barrels spun, launching a torrent of 30mm depleted-uranium and high-explosive rounds.

He let off the trigger and immediately pressed it again and again.

“Die, Commie, die! Die, Commie, die!” He was still lined up on the tracks, and each phrase uttered meant another squeeze of the trigger and another burst of 30-mike-mike from the gun. He didn’t look at the round counter, just as he’d taught his students at the weapons school not to, but it clicked down at a rate of 3,900 rounds a minute.

Ahead of him the train raced on through the rail yard.

1,150 rounds…

Brrrrrrrrrt!

1,030 rounds…

Brrrrrrrrt!

910 rounds…

He fired a fifth burst in time with “Die, Commie, die!” and watched the earlier shots hit, impacting in a narrow circle, spraying the tracks.

790… The round counter clicked away with each squeeze.

Brrrrrrrrt!

Huge chunks of wood and metal blasted free from the train, careening skyward. The rail yard glowed with orange starbursts from the hundreds of explosions as he closed inside of 3,000 feet, still hammering the trigger for controlled bursts. Every ounce of his physical and mental skills poured into the stick and rudder to keep the fire on target.

Blasts of hatred, spitting forth from the bow end of his airplane onto the fleeing train.

Some odd stray rounds and ricocheting shrapnel from the exploding shells slammed into parked cargo trains loaded with wood and grain. The cars ripped apart, their contents spilling out and igniting.

Most of the rounds, however, raked down the length of the fleeing Russian train. Shank had been aiming for the six heavy-duty armored military engines plowing hard to pull the rest of the heavy cars through the town and to safety. The rounds fell short — Shank’s estimate of the train’s speed had been off — and the damage he did was farther back, along the open-backed cars.

But this did nothing good for the Russians. One of his bursts slammed into a fuel car, and immediately the bulk fuel and oil detonated; smoke and fire and shrapnel erupted right in front of the Warthog’s windscreen.

Shank was forced to pull up and away from the massive fireball that rolled skyward in a glowing mushroom cloud. It took all his upper-body strength to yank the heavy, lumbering craft into a tight turn to avoid flying right into the tumult.

Damn it! he cursed to himself, because he knew instantly he’d have to make another pass to stop the train. He skimmed nap-of-the-earth over the city, flying between and below the tops of the tallest buildings, trying to place the big, disabled Warthog as far down into the streets of Jelenia Góra as he dared. His whining aircraft raced close enough to blast the snow off roofs, his wingtips just feet from the smokestacks that dotted the town.

This was incredibly perilous flying, but he needed to keep the buildings between himself and the train or he would receive another salvo of missiles, right up his ass.

He checked the mirror above him and saw the train in the distance to his rear, and was mollified that even though he hadn’t blown the damn thing off the rails, his first pass had done some serious damage. The last four cars were a smoke-belching conflagration. Fuel stores were incinerated in huge jets of fire that shot into the night sky. Spouts of flame shot out like blood gushing from the ripped artery of a wounded animal.

The train continued to flee, increasing speed.

In order to get behind the train, Shank had to pull hard right and circle around again toward its vulnerable back side. The last railcars burned out of control, and this gave Shank an idea. The billowing black smoke would obscure his approach from the rear, and the Russians wouldn’t be able to launch missiles through the burning fuel and launching debris.

He pushed his damaged bird to its limit, tightening the turn radius to get back onto his killing course. Again he passed the church steeples and the old castle; soon he was back over the rail yard, now burning uncontrollably. The train raced along toward the open countryside, where it could again fire on him with impunity, and where the low skies were not filled with the buildings of the town that masked his approach.

Lining up the gun, he positioned his HUD reticle much higher than before, acknowledging his earlier miscalculation and also the train’s increasing velocity. He couldn’t fully see the target in front of him through the roiling black smoke, but he knew by instinct where the engine and other cars lay along the tracks. He drew in a deep breath and then chanted again the fire-control saying.

“Die, Commie, die!”

640 rounds…

Eight thousand feet distance.

“Die, Commie, die!”

520 rounds…

Six thousand feet distance.

“Die, Commie, die!”

400 rounds…

Four thousand feet.

“Die, Comm—”

A loud crack, crack, crack blasted him from his concentration, and he paused in his trigger pull. Machine-gun rounds tore into the belly and nose of his aircraft, slamming against the titanium bathtub built around the cockpit.

Shank realized he should have assumed the Russians would have every gun on the train turned to the rear, firing wildly through the smoke. His approach angle and altitude had been so plainly obvious, he could have kicked himself for not thinking before flying himself into unnecessary danger.

But he didn’t stop — he couldn’t stop: he had them now and he knew it.

He pressed his gloved finger again, renewed his mantra: “Die, motherfuckers, die!”

But brrrrrrrt had turned into thump, thump, thump.

The GAU-8/A Gatling gun fired, but at a dramatically slower rate. He could hear an off, odd whine coming from the weapon below his left foot and a new unstable vibration throughout the cockpit.

He realized his one weapon had been hit and damaged.

He pulled the trigger anyway, letting loose a slow but steady stream of 30mm rounds. The gun counter was frozen at 370, but the weapon continued to pump out shells at a much-reduced rate.

His master caution light began flashing; a quick glance at the warning panel showed fluid was dangerously low in not one but both of his redundant hydraulic systems. If he didn’t do something soon, the plane would be impossible to control.

Without releasing the stick, he reached behind to his left side and, just by feel, threw a switch to “manual reversion,” then punched out the “master caution.” Like a car switching from automatic steering to manual, the plane was now controlled exclusively by mechanical connections from the stick to the control surfaces. It felt like a ton of bricks weighed down the stick when he tried to move it. His ability to make fine-tuned movements would be even further compromised, but at least he was still airborne and in the fight.

He burst through the black smoke rising from the back of the burning train, skimming less than seventy-five feet above the roofs of the cars. He fired a constant, steady, but slow stream of rounds as he pulled back on the throttle to increase his brief time on target.

He could see the damage now. Whole cars were ripped open from his earlier bursts; tanks, Bumerangs, and antiair batteries burned. He even saw troops on the cars, every weapon they possessed blazing wildly skyward in hopes of beating back his oppressive fire. He continued to pound them, the train’s engines now visible in front of his gunsights.

“Die, motherfuckers, die!” he said, although he did not let up on the trigger at all. Even with the slow firing of the Gatling gun, he managed to dump explosive shells into the row of heavy engines.

Dead ahead of him, all six engines high-order detonated, along with a car full of ammo, obviously tank rounds and 120mm mortars. The blast was so huge, he had to shove over his heavy stick to pull hard right so that the shrapnel wouldn’t tear him from the sky. He felt a wave of intense heat over him in the cockpit as he flew through the edge of the volcano-like eruption from the front of the train.

The firing from below stopped immediately.

He turned his even more disabled aircraft 180 degrees around, getting lower again in case some trooper with a shoulder-fired missile wanted to give him a good-bye kiss. Looking again in the mirror, he saw the front of the train was off the tracks; cars slid and crashed into one another and flipped and burned.

Staying low, he flew to the west, concentrating on straight and level flight. He wasn’t shooting for his air base; he was vying for distance. The last thing he wanted was to eject anywhere near the exploding train.

He hoped like hell he could find an airfield or even a flat, empty stretch of road so he wouldn’t have to ditch his magnificent, wounded plane.

With a shaky hand he patted the control panel and gauges like he was acknowledging a good dog that had just rescued its master from a fire.

He had done it.

She had done it.

The man and the machine.

Four minutes after taking out the train, Captain Ray Vance climbed to 5,000 feet, fighting his A-10 with all the strength in his arms. The damage was incredible. The sounds, the shakes, the lack of response from the controls… The thirty-four-year-old pilot had no idea how the hell he was still in the air.

Suddenly he felt three hard jolts to his aircraft, and he knew he’d been hit by cannon fire. Both his seat and his stick shuddered and vibrated. He dropped the throttle back, slowing his wounded bird as quickly as he could, but with each passing second the flight characteristics deteriorated more and more.

He wrestled with the 25,000-pound monster as he fought the jerking stick in his hand.

He had no idea what had hit him, whether it was ground fire or a Russian aircraft up here in the dark sky, pursuing him from behind. He swiveled his head around to look behind him but couldn’t see any attacker.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Another three blasts struck Shank’s Warthog, this time hitting the left side of the fuselage and the canopy just two feet in front of his face. Metal and glass ricocheted around the cockpit, slicing him across his left arm and right leg. One hot piece of shrapnel shattered his visor and struck him high on the left cheek.

With the broken canopy, Shank was now exposed to the whipping, freezing winter air. Blood blew up from his cheek and into his eyes, all but blinding him.

Shank had flown damaged aircraft multiple times in combat, but flying without a canopy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and blinded as the wind blew through his exposed cockpit were more than he’d ever imagined in his worst nightmares.

And then his plane began to spin out of control.

Working purely by the instincts gained from years of training, he reached beside his legs, his head thrashing around as he tried to see anything through the blood.

Where is the motherfucking ejection lever? He could feel the negative g’s tossing him left and right as he tried blindly to grasp the controller that would punch him out of there.

Thunk! Thunk!

His aircraft was hit twice more, somewhere aft of his cockpit. There was definitely a Russian fighter up here, and the other pilot wasn’t going to quit until Shank’s A-10 cratered a smoking hole in some snow-covered field.

“Shit!” His aircraft corkscrewed down; he could only guess at the altitude because he couldn’t see the gauges, but he was pretty sure that if he didn’t find a way to punch in the next few seconds, then he wouldn’t be ejecting at all. He caught himself starting to go into G-LOC, or gravity-induced loss of consciousness, and he grunted and flexed all the muscles in his body in an attempt to keep the blood in his brain so he could stay awake.

He found the side of the ejector with his left hand, but the hand seemed to be going numb and was no longer functioning properly. His right hand released the stick and reached over, as he still tried to get a hand on the redundant left- and right-side ACES II ejection controls.

“Eject! Eject!” he croaked, just to hear himself speak, to verify he was alive.

Finally, his right hand wrapped around the angled metal of the ejection handle and he pulled hard. Nothing. He yanked again. Nothing again. “Punch! Punch!”

He had grown too weak with the G-LOC.

Wham! Wham! Shank took two more blasts against the belly of his A-10. He felt searing heat grow all around him, even with the shattered canopy.

Christ almighty, I’m on fire!

The A-10 now fell like a sack of bricks toward the earth.

The enemy fighter continued pounding him mercilessly, and presumably would until he exploded into the ground.

This Russian pilot wanted Shank to die. It was as simple as that.

“Fuck you!” he yelled breathlessly through the clatter of metal ripping away from his once-perfect airship.

With every fiber of his being, with all his remaining strength, Shank yanked the ejection lever with his one good hand, throwing his back and shoulder into the movement with all the power remaining in his body.

He heard a loud bang and then a shock slammed his helmet back against the headrest. The rocket-assisted seat catapulted him out of the burning and spinning A-10, but as he was oriented upside down at the moment of ejection, he fired straight down at first before the onboard gyroscope righted the seat and he angled laterally, then launched upward on a plume of smoke.

Soon he felt a pop and a whoosh and suddenly all was slow and calm.

He began swinging gently. God knew how far he was from the ground, but he was under a canopy.

Thank God, he thought.

He assessed his wounds, feeling with his one good hand across his body. Both legs were there. He could feel blood on his chest and shoulders. He looked down at his left hand and saw it was there but bleeding. He was sure it had been broken somehow, but he wasn’t going to worry about it.

His pain numbed in the frigid and still air as he drifted toward the earth. He lifted his right hand to wipe the blood off his face so he could see a little; in doing so, he felt his left eye swollen completely shut. Through his right eye he could see that the Nomex glove of his right hand was burned, but the hand itself seemed to be working properly.

Now running on adrenaline alone, he looked around for his aircraft, found it, and watched it fall away from him in the darkness, slipping below his feet at a steep downward angle, burning a fiery streak earthward. Soon came a blast and a shock wave as the fire reached the A-10’s aviation fuel and the ship exploded while still dropping.

In the distance, with his one good eye, he saw an aircraft. Then another. They were heading his way.

He felt his consciousness slipping.

He saw the first plane race past, narrowly missing him. He could see the silhouette of the pilot in the low light, a black helmet and shiny face visor staring back. His pain-addled brain understood in an instant from the aircraft’s profile that it was a Russian Su-57.

But what stuck him the most as he fell into unconsciousness, wounded and spiraling downward in a damaged parachute, was the red eagle talon on the tail of the aircraft.

Then his world went black.