The Red Horseman

19

Jake’s aircraft didn‘t want to come unstuck from the runway. With the engines at full power it was accelerating nicely, but the nose wheel remained firmly planted. He tugged experimentally on the stick.

The trim! He had guessed at the takeoff setting. He blipped the trim button on the stick with his thumb and eased the stick back. Now the nose came up. And the mains were off. He was flying. The wings rocked and he overcontrolled with flaperons as he reached for the gear handle.

It wouldn’t move. He pushed it in, then pulled it out. Now it moved. Had to be pulled.

Trimming nose down, airspeed increasing. Gear indicates up. When he felt comfortable he looked for the flap handle, then moved it to the up position. Here they come…

At a thousand feet he retarded the throttles some, lowered the nose a little and dropped the left wing about fifteen degrees. The plane stabilized in a level left turn. No warning lights, no gauges with pegged needles. He hit the switch to segment the hydraulic system.

He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of Rita’s plane.

His aircraft was decelerating. Not enough power. He added a little, readjusted his nose attitude, cursed himself for being so far behind the plane.

His oxygen mask didn’t fit right. It was leaking oxygen around his cheeks, making flatulent noises that he could hear above the background roar of the engines. He tried to tighten the retaining straps with his left hand, and finally gave up.

Another glance at Rita, who was turning with him and closing.

She’s a good stick. Don’t worry about her. Fly your own plane.

When Rita was stabilized behind him and out to the right side, Jake began looking at the ground. The base was small by U.S. standards, the buildings grouped tightly together, probably to keep everything within walking distance. Surrounding it were miles of forests.

There was the telephone line leading off, and there by the road intersection, wasn’t that some kind of junction box mounted on that pole?

He reversed his turn, and when the plane stabilized, reached for the master armament switch. He lifted it. There was no locking collar like U.S. planes possessed. Now the gun switch.

As he turned it on he felt a thud. That would be the gun charging. He hoped. Bombsight on, reticle lit. What had that Russian pilot said? Ten mils deflection for the gun? He twisted the adjustment knob.

Now into a left turn, looking again for the road intersection. It was several miles away off the left wing, slightly behind it, so he turned steeply to get the nose around.

More power in the turn, as the wings come level back off some. This will be a nice slow pass, plenty of time to aim.

He was too fast. Throttles back more, nose down a smidgen and trim.

He concentrated on finding the pole in the bombsight.

Small target. Too goddamn small…

There!

Damn, he was too close. He slewed the nose a tad with rudder, adjusted the nose attitude with stick, then quickly centered the rudder and squeezed the trigger.

The gun vibrated hard and he saw the muzzle flashes through the sight. At night the muzzle blast would be blinding.

Now off the trigger and stick back smartly. With the nose well above the horizon he rolled the plane ninety degrees and looked. Careful, boy, you’re carrying a hell of a load low and slow!

Pole and box down!

Level the wings…raise the nose. More power. Safely away from the ground, let’s turn on course 130.

He craned his neck. Rita was back there, stepped out and up. As he watched she eased in a little closer and gave him a thumbs up.

Okay!

Airborne and still alive. Okay!

The two Su-25s soon left the last of the forest behind and found themselves over the steppe. Jake had descended to about two hundred feet above the rolling terrain, which meant that he was constantly jockeying the stick and adjusting the trim as the plane rose and fell with the land contours. Below them the grass spread from horizon to horizon, broken only by stands of wheat and an occasional dirt road.

This broad valley of the Volga had been peopled since ancient times, yet now the fallout would deny it to future generations. The enormity of the Serdobsk tragedy intruded into Jake’s thoughts even as he worked on holding course and altitude.

Farther south, below the radioactive fallout zone, stood the city of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, the city built in the 1920s and 1930s as a civic monument to the new Communist way of life. In the last half of 1942 it had been the site of the stupendous battle with the German army that marked the turning of the Nazi tide. The battle destroyed Stalin’s city, of course, and nearly everyone in it. When the Red Army counterattacked and trapped the German Sixth Army, Hitler sacrificed over a quarter million men rather than give up that pile of rubble. Stalingrad, that shattered monument to a generation sacrificed in a titanic struggle between two absolute despots, was rebuilt after the war. Soon the radioactive particles and mud carried by the Volga would make the city a deathtrap once again.

He had loved this type of flying when he was younger. Racing low across open country, working the stick and throttles to make the airplane dance gracefully, sinuously, in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the land — this was flying as it ought to be, a harmonious mating of man, machine and nature.

Today the magic of it never occurred to him. He was thinking of shattered dreams and tyrants and a people poisoned as his eyes scanned the terrain ahead and occasionally flicked across the instrument panel. On one of these instrument checks his eye was caught by a light, a small bulb that flicked on, then off, then on again.

He looked carefully, identifying it. He was being painted by a fighter’s radar. Perhaps they had not located him yet, but the fighters were looking.

Damn!

He and Rita were flying two subsonic attack planes, and somewhere up there above the clouds fighters were stalking them. Oh, yes, they’re after us. Jake Grafton assumed the worst. That was the only way to stay alive. Automatically he tugged at the straps that held him to the ejection seat, tightening them still more.

Without warning the warplanes crested a low rise and the great river lay before them, with clouds and swatches of blue sky reflecting on its wide, brown surface.

The planes cleared a power line and then shot out over the water. The sky reflections on the water drew Jake Grafton’s eyes upward. He scanned, and saw contrails…two pairs. In seconds the eastern shore swept under the nose and Jake Grafton eased into a gentle climb to stay just above the rising land.

Contrails in pairs…they could only be made by fighters in formation. Fighters. Looking for…?

This eastern shore of the Volga was heavily eroded into corrugated ravines and streambeds. Jake Grafton picked a decently large creek and dropped into the valley it had cut flowing west toward the river.

He was down here in the weeds hiding from radars that sat on the surface of the earth. These radars would provide vectors to the fighter-interceptors when they found him. If he stayed below their horizon, they couldn’t.

But fighters aloft — the new generation of Soviet fighters possessed pulse Doppler radars that allowed them to look down and identify a moving target amid the ground clutter. And the new missiles would track a target in the ground clutter. “Look-down, shoot-down” the techno-speak guys called it.

The light blinked on and off several more times.

What’s the worst airplane that could be up there? The MiG-29? It was sure deadly enough, but no. The absolute worst plane that he could think of was another masterpiece from the design bureau of Pavel Sukhoi, the Su-27 Flanker. Designed in the mid-1980s to achieve air superiority against the best planes the West possessed, the Su-27 was thought by some Western analysts to be able to outfly the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18, plus every fighter the French, British and Germans have — all of them.

If those were Flankers up there, they were probably carrying AA-10 “fire and forget” antiaircraft missiles with active radar seekers.

And a missile could be on its way down right now.

He lowered the nose and dropped to fifty feet above the rocky creek. Rita was still with him, in tighter now, only forty or so feet away and a little behind.

The warning light was on steady.

They’ve found us. Missile to follow. Or a lot of missiles.

The land was a rough wilderness devoid of trees. Rock outcroppings, meandering creeks in rocky draws, sandy places — Jake Grafton was working hard holding the attack plane in the draw. Several times he couldn’t make a turn and lifted the plane across the rim with only several feet of clearance, then banked hard and slipped the plane back into the draw.

Vaguely he was aware that Rita had slipped into trail behind him where she could ride just above his wash.

“We have fighters above us,” he told her on the radio.

No response. Radio silence meant radio silence to Rita Moravia. If she heard—

A flash on his left. He glanced over and saw a rising cloud of dirt and debris as it swept aft out of his field of vision. A missile impact!

“They’re shooting,” he announced over the radio.

He lifted the nose of the plane and cleared the little valley, then dropped the left wing. Throttles to the stop, stick back — the Gs tugged him down into the seat.

Another flash, this time on his right side.

Jesus, each Flanker can carry up to eight missiles! How many have they fired?

When he had completed about ninety degrees of turn he rolled wings level, eased the nose back down. He was running only twenty feet above the high places in the lumpy ground, which gave him a tremendous sensation of speed. The warning light was blinking.

A pulse Doppler radar identified moving targets by detecting their movement toward or away from the radar. If he could fly a course perpendicular to the searching fighter, its radar could not detect him. When it lost him the searching fighter would probably turn to alter the angles and try to acquire him again. Still…

Trying to ensure he didn’t inadvertently feed in forward stick, he craned his head to see aft.

The missiles will be coming at three or four times the speed of sound, fool! You’ll never see them. But you will kill yourself looking for them.

He concentrated on the flying. After twenty seconds on this heading, he rolled into a right turn, then leveled the wings after ninety degrees of heading change. Back on his original course, southeast. The warning light went out.

A small miracle. A temporary reprieve. Jake Grafton was under no illusions — he was flying a plane designed to destroy tanks and provide close-air support to friendly troops: those Sukhoi masterpieces above were designed to shoot down other airplanes. The Russians couldn’t make a decent razor or even an adequate toothbrush, but by God they could build great airplanes when they put their minds to it.

He looked for Rita.

Not there.

Did they get her?

How much fuel have those guys got? He and Rita were late getting off. Maybe the fighters were already airborne and are running out of fuel. There’s a maybe to pray for.

The warning light was blinking again.

He rolled into enough of a turn that he could look behind him. Visibility was truly terrible out of this Soviet jet! Clear right. He rolled left and twisted his body around. Uh-oh. Up there at the base of that cloud, coming down like an angel on his way to hell — a fighter!

And Jake was still toting ten 250-kilogram bombs, about 5,500 pounds of absolutely dead weight. He was going to have to get rid of the bombs or he would be meat on the table for the fighters.

He turned hard left to force the fighter into an overshoot, make him squirt out to the right side because he couldn’t hack the turn. As he did so, Jake worked the armament switches. In a strange plane he had to look to check each one, all the time pulling Gs and hoping the fighter was doing what he wanted him to do.

He couldn’t just pickle off the bombs, not this close to the earth: they would hit the ground almost under him and might detonate. If they did the shrapnel and blast would destroy his aircraft, and him with it.

When he had the switches set, he rolled hard right and stabilized in an eighty-degree bank, four-G turn. Then he pickled the bombs. The G tossed them out to the left. The instant the last one went he tightened the turn to six Gs.

Where was that fighter?

There — crossing over above in an overshoot.

And Lord, there’s another one at eleven o’clock honking around hard.

These guys weren’t first team — they came in too fast and scissored the wrong way. Pray that they don’t learn too fast!

He checked the compass. He was headed southwest. He brought the nose more west and punched the nose down. He wanted to run right in the weeds until he found those ravines and valleys that led down to the Volga. If he could just hide in those…

The fighter high on his left was pulling so hard vapor was condensing from the air passing over his wing — he was leaving a cloud behind each wing. Damn — it was an Su-27! He had to be in afterburner. That guy was aggressive enough, no question about that.

And the other one — Jake twisted his body halfway around, risked flying into the ground just to get a glimpse — at six-thirty, thirty degrees angle off, nose already down, accelerating.

How much fuel do these clowns have?

The rough ground ahead was his only chance. These guys could go faster, accelerate faster, and probably out-maneuver him. A stand-up dogfight with two of them would be suicide.

Jake was down to fifteen or twenty feet above the ground now, going flat-out with the throttles against the stops, doing maybe five hundred knots — the damn airspeed indicator was calibrated in kilometers and only God knew the conversion factor.

He was too close to the ground to look behind him. In fact, he was too close to the ground — he was sure he had hit a rocky outcrop but somehow managed to avoid it by inches. To kiss the ground at this speed would be certain death, yet his only hope to stay alive was to fly lower than those two fighter pilots would or could.

There—on the right! The ground dropped away into an eroded valley.

Quick as thought he had the stick over and was skimming down into the valley. Turn hard — pull, pull, pull! — to keep from hitting the sides that rose steeply above him.

Well into the winding valley, Jake Grafton eased over to the left side as he pulled the power levers back and deployed the speed brakes.

His speed bled off quickly. If one of those guys came into the gorge after him…

Cannon shells went zipping across the top of his right wing like orange pumpkins.

The right wing fell without conscious thought. Speed brakes in. Throttle full forward.

The fighter slid by on his right side, the pilot climbing and trying to slow.

As the sleek fighter went in front Jake pulled up hard and squeezed the trigger on the 30mm cannon. No time to aim! Just point and shoot!

The cannon throbbed and Jake hosed the shells in front of the twisting fighter, which flew into them. A piece came off the Su-27. Fuel venting aft. A flash.

Jake released the trigger and rolled away as the fighter exploded.

Where was the wingman?

A blind turn to the right coming up. Jake pulled hard to make it and got the nose coming up. As he went around the turn he climbed the side of the little valley and popped out on top. He swiveled his head.

There! Coming in from the left side, shooting.

Nose down hard. Back toward the valley.

The second fighter was going too fast and overshot. That’s the problem when you’ve got a really fast plane: you want to use all that speed the designers gave you and sometimes it works against you.

This guy pulled Gs like he had a steel asshole. The fighter tried to turn a square corner, the down wing quit flying and the plane flipped inverted. In the blink of an eye the Su-27 hit the ground and exploded.

Jake got into the valley, retarded his throttles to about 90 percent RPM and stayed there.

He examined the electronic warfare panel. Goddamn light still blinking.

He rammed his left fingers under his helmet visor and swabbed the sweat away from his eyes.

They would find him again. How many more? He had seen four up there when he and Rita crossed the Volga a lifetime ago. Two were down, two still flying, perhaps off chasing Rita, perhaps now up there somewhere in the great sky above examining their track-while-scan radars and looking for him, perhaps calling on the radio to their comrades who would never answer again.

Could they find him in this valley, which was fast ceasing to be a steep gorge and was spreading out as the creek flowed its last few miles to the Volga?

There — on the left — another valley coming into this one. Jake dropped the left wing and pulled the plane around. He went back up the new valley, still seeking shelter as the EW light blinked intermittently.

Jake Grafton had flown his first combat mission in Vietnam over twenty years ago. He knew the hard, inescapable truth: in aerial combat the first pilot to make a mistake is the one who dies. The two men who had died in the Sukhoi fighters had each made fatal mistakes. The first man pursued too fast, so he had overshot when his victim unexpectedly slowed down. The second was overanxious, had pulled too hard and departed controlled flight too close to the ground. He was dead a half-second later, probably before he even realized what was happening.

The next time Jake might not be so lucky.

He swabbed more sweat from his eyes as he examined the fuel gauge. Still plenty. Like the A-6, the engines of this Russian attack bird were easy on fuel and the plane carried a lot of it. That was the only advantage he possessed when compared to the fighters, which sacrificed fuel economy to gain speed and range to gain maneuverability.

Where were the other two fighters? Chasing Rita?

A flicker of concern for Rita crossed his mind, but he forced it away. Rita was a professional, she had been an F/A-18 Hornet instructor pilot for two years before she went to test pilot school — she could take care of herself.

He hoped.

No time to worry about her. If only he knew where she was…

They came in shooting from the rear quarter on each side. His first inkling that they were there was the sight of glowing cannon shells passing just in front of the nose, from left to right. He rammed the stick forward and his peripheral vision picked up shells passing just above the canopy from right to left. Just streaks really, but he knew exactly what they were.

The negative G lasted only for an instant before he had to jerk the stick back to avoid going into the ground. But it was enough. Even as he fought the positive G he saw the pair of fighters flash across above his head and arc tightly away for another pass.

He wouldn’t survive another pass.

Slamming the throttles full forward, he kept the nose coming up and topped the cliff on the right side of the valley, then ruddered the nose down. He pulled hard in a tight turn, trying to turn inside the faster fighter.

And the fighter pilot wasn’t looking!

The idiot had his head in the cockpit — he was worried about flying into the ground. That was a serious threat this close to the earth, the brown land whirling by at tremendous speed just scant feet below the right wingtip.

The nose of Jake’s plane passed the fighter and he began to pull ahead. Range closing as the aspect angle changed. The fighter was turning into Jake. Angle off about seventy degrees, now eighty, ninety as the two planes flashed toward each other. Jake eased out some bank. A full deflection shot—

Now!

He triggered the cannon. The tracers passed in front of the fighter’s nose, then in an eyeblink the fighter flew through the stream, which stitched him nose to tail. His nose dropped and his right wing kissed the earth.

Jake raised his nose a smidgen to ensure he didn’t share the same fate, banked and pulled.

If he could get around quickly enough, he would present the second fighter with a head-on shot, and if that guy had any sense he would refuse the invitation and pull up into the vertical, where Jake lacked the power to follow.

And that is what happened as the two planes flashed toward each other nose to nose. Jake wanted to take a snapshot but couldn’t get his nose up fast enough. He slammed it back down and was pulling hard to get the plane’s axis parallel to the canyon when he flashed over the rim. He let the plane descend on knife edge until the rock wall shielded him.

His heart was threatening to thud its way out of his chest. Talk about luck! Three mistakes, three dead men who would get no wiser.

But this last guy — he was no overeager green kid who thought he was bulletproof. He had pulled his nose up the instant he saw the head-on pass developing. This guy would take a lot of killing.

And Jake Grafton didn’t know if he had it in him. Somehow he got his visor up and swabbed away the sweat that poured into his eyes when he pulled Gs, this while he threaded his way up the valley and looked above and aft to see what the Russian was up to.

What would you do, Jake Grafton?

I’d slow down to almost coequal speed and follow along, getting lower and lower, and when my guns came to bear I’d take my shots. And he would fall.

Jake got a glimpse of his opponent. He was high up and well aft, on a parallel course, his nose down. He must have lost sight for a moment and allowed Jake to extend out. But now he was closing.

You’ve had a good life, Jake. You’ve known some fine men, loved a good woman, flown the hot jets. Maybe your life has made a difference to somebody. And now it’s over. That man up there is going to kill you. He’s going about it just right, slowly and methodically; he isn’t going to make any mistakes. And you are going to die.

The Russian was throttled back, coming down like the angel of doom.

What’s ahead? I’ll out-fly the bastard. I’ll fly that son of a bitch into the ground.

Even as the thought raced through his mind, he knew it wouldn’t work. This guy wasn’t going to make any mistakes unless Jake forced the action. If he were allowed to play his own game he would win.

Jake Grafton risked another over-the-shoulder glance to see if he had room. Maybe. It was going to be tight.

He kept the wings level and pulled the stick straight aft. The throttles were up against the stops. A nice four-G pull so he would have something left on top. If this guy were wise and had plenty of fuel, he would light his burners and climb, avoid the head-on that was developing. A head-on pass that gave each guy a fifty-fifty chance — that was the best Jake could play for when the other pilot had every performance edge.

But the Russian pilot accepted the challenge!

Upside down at the top of the loop, Jake fed in forward stick and placed the pipper in the reticle high to allow for the fall of his shells, then pulled the trigger. The Russian was already shooting. Strobing muzzle blasts enveloped the nose of the opposing fighter as Jake pulled his trigger.

Jake felt the trip-hammer impacts as cannon shells ripped into his plane. Then the Russian blew up.

Jake knifed through the falling debris and tried to right his machine. Fuel was boiling out the left wing and the left engine was unwinding. He shut it down. A big red light on the left side of the bombsight was illuminated — fire. He needed a lot of right rudder to control his plane.

Now he was level. And alive.

For how long?

That depended on the fire warning light. It flickered several times, then went out. Maybe he had a chance after all.

He glanced at the compass. He was heading east. He dropped the right wing into a gentle turn and let the nose drift down as he juggled the rudder to maintain balanced flight. He had to get low again, avoid the radar that was probing this sky.

He steadied up heading south, descending. One of the Russian’s cannon shells had impacted the second weapons pylon on the left wing, shattering it and twisting it so badly fuel was coming out of the wing. Even as Jake stared at the damaged pylon the last of the wing fuel rushed away into the slipstream. Primary hydraulic pressure was on its way to zero. If that was the primary system gauge.

The warning lights seemed predictable. The damaged engine hadn’t blown up — if it did there was nothing he could do but die. His heart was still beating, thud, thud, thud. He was still alive!

That Russian must have been low on fuel. In a hurry. Too bad for him.

Jack Yocke tapped aimlessly on his laptop computer and from time to time glanced at Toad Tarkington sitting in the big chair. Toad had a pistol in his hand and kept looking at it, turning it this way and that, wrapping his fist around the grip and hefting it.

Herb Tenney lay on the couch with his hands taped together behind his back, his ankles taped together, and a strip of tape over his mouth. Herb seemed calm.

Jack Yocke had done the taping with a roll from the first aid kit when Toad brought him into the room at gunpoint.

Now the three of them sat — Herb calm, Yocke full of questions, Toad playing with that goddamn pistol.

“Did he come willingly?” Jack asked, breaking the silence.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the cafeteria. Waited until he had finished his coffee and followed him out.”

“Would you have shot him if he didn’t come along?”

Toad merely glanced at Yocke, then turned his gaze back to the pistol in his hand. The reporter saw the same thing that Herb Tenney must have seen fifteen minutes ago. Toad would have pulled the trigger with all the remorse he would have had swatting a fly.

Jack Yocke had another question, but he didn’t ask it. Did Jake Grafton tell you to corral Tenney? Toad didn’t do anything unless Jake Grafton told him to, Yocke told himself, and once told, Toad would do literally anything. The asshole was like a Doberman, ready to rip the throat out of the first man his master sicced him on.

Yocke sighed and went back to tapping. He was listing what he knew about Nigel Keren, about the Mossad bribing Russians to get Jews out of the country and assassinating Russian politicians, about the KGB blowing up the Serdobsk reactor, about a hangarful of nuclear-armed mobile missiles and warheads that were going south into Iraq a planeload at a time. He was sitting on at least four huge stories, any one of which would win him a Pulitzer prize, and all he could do was tap on this frigging keyboard and pray that someday soon he could telephone something to the Post. If he still had a job!

He felt a little like the prospector who has spent his whole life looking for traces of color when he finally stumbles onto the mother lode. And doesn’t know where the vein leads.

All he really had were pieces of stories. Jack Yocke had spent five years chasing stories and he knew that he didn’t have all of any one of them. Oh, he had some great pieces, but he didn’t know where the roots led.

Jake Grafton knew. Of that he was convinced.

Damn, he was getting as goofy as Tarkington. Toad sat there playing with his pistol and if you asked, he would tell you that Jake Grafton knows everything. What’s your problem? Grafton will tell you what he wants you to know when he wants you to know it. If that time ever comes. And if it doesn’t, then you shouldn’t know.

Jack Yocke didn’t think Jake Grafton knew all the answers. He thought Jake was feeling his way along, examining the trees, trying to size up the forest. Jack Yocke didn’t have Toad’s faith.

The truth, he decided, was probably somewhere in the middle.

He jabbed the button to save what he had written and then turned off the computer. He closed the screen over the keyboard and pulled the plug out.

“You done?” Toad asked.

“What’s it look like?” Yocke snarled. He was extremely frustrated, and Toad marching in a big CIA weenie at gunpoint hadn’t helped.

“Would you like to help me?”

“Do what?” Jack asked suspiciously.

“Well, you gotta sit here with this pistol and watch our boy Herb. I have an errand. If Herb twitches, blow his fucking head off. If anybody comes through that door besides me, blow their fucking head off. Think you can handle it?”

“No.”

“You ought to be the pro-choice poster child, Jack. If your mother only knew how you were going to turn out she would have grabbed a rusty old coat hanger and done it herself.”

“Any time you get the itch, Tarkington, you can kiss my rosy red ass. I am not about to get mixed up in the middle of a war or shoot anybody. And no more goddamn cracks about—”

Toad tossed the gun at him. Yocke snagged it to prevent it from hitting him in the face.

Toad stood up. He looked over the items from Herb’s pockets that were spread on the low coffee table and selected a ring of keys, then faced Yocke. “Anyone besides me comes through that door, they’ll kill you if you don’t kill them first. And you can bet your puny little dick that Herb would cheerfully do the job if he had his hands free. Think about it.”

With that Toad went to the door and carefully opened it. He looked out. Now he checked to ensure the door would lock behind him, passed through and pulled it closed.

Jack Yocke looked at Herb Tenney to see if he had any big ideas. Apparently not. He then examined the pistol in his hand. This thingy on the left side looked like the safety. Is it on? Yocke kept his finger well away from the trigger, just in case.

He had had a journalism professor who once told the class that the problem with the profession was the company a reporter had to keep to get his stories. Truer words were never spoken, Jack told himself ruefully.

“If I get out of this alive,” he informed Herb Tenney, “I’m going to get a job washing beer mugs in a bikers’ saloon. Associate with a better class of people. Keep better hours. Make more money. Get laid more.”

Out in the hallway Toad slowed to talk to the marine sergeant sitting at the head of the stairs with an M-16 across his knees. He also wore a pistol in a holster on a web belt around his middle. “Everything okay?”

“Yessir. Not a soul’s been around.”

Toad glanced down the hall at the marine on the other end, who was looking his way.

Satisfied, Toad said, “He’s in there with Jack Yocke. If he comes out shoot him in the legs. Whatever you do, don’t kill him.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

When he was inside Herb’s room, Toad scanned it, then went straight to the bathroom and Herb’s shaving kit above the sink. Yep, the shit still had that plastic pill bottle with the child-proof cap. Toad glanced at them to ensure they were what he wanted, then pocketed them. He considered taking Herb his toothbrush. Naw. His fucking teeth could just rot.

Out in the bedroom Toad got Herb’s suitcase and opened it. Well, ol’ Herb was a neat packer. His mother would be proud.

Toad dumped everything into a pile in the middle of the bed and examined the lining of the suitcase. He and Jake Grafton had been through Herb’s stuff once before, but it wouldn’t hurt to do it again. Carefully and thoroughly.

Underwear, socks, shirts, trousers, a sweater. A spare can of shaving cream. Toad squirted some onto the carpet. Yep, shaving cream.

The closet held several suits, ties, white shirts and a spare pair of shoes. Toad examined the shoes. He got out his penknife and pried off the heels. Nothing. He felt the suits carefully and threw them on the floor. Except for a spare pen and a pack of matches that Herb had overlooked, the pockets were empty.

Now he turned his attention to the room, systematically taking everything apart. As he worked he thought about Rita.

Pregnant. Refusing to stop flying.

If he were her, he would… But he wasn’t Rita. Rita was Rita and that was why he married her.

You just have to take women as they come. It’s hard to do at times, considering. Amazing that hormone chemistry could make such a big difference in the way men and women’s brains worked. It was like they were a different species, or creatures from another planet.

He threw himself into the chair and sat staring morosely at the mess in front of him. There was nothing here to be found, of that he was sure. So he thought some more about Rita in the cockpit of that jet, flying through a strange sky over a radioactive landscape, nursing the stick and throttles and dropping bombs and fighting the Gs.

There were so many things that could go wrong. And a Russian jet for chrissake, designed, built and maintained by a bunch of vodka-swilling sots.

She can handle it, he told himself, wanting to believe. She’ll get back all right. She’s with Jake Grafton. I mean, she’s good and he’s great. They’re a good team. They’ll make it.

Fuck, they’d better! He wasn’t up to losing Rita just now. She had damn near died in a crash a few years back — just the memory of those days made him nauseated.

And he didn’t want to lose Jake Grafton either. Grafton told him to snag Herb Tenney, and if Grafton didn’t come back, Toad was going to have to figure out what to do next. Not that he had a lot of options. One thing sure, though — Herb was going to be finishing off his supply of happy pills if Jake Grafton didn’t make it.

When he opened the door to the apartment, the first thing he saw was Jack Yocke’s pasty face, then the Browning Hi-Power which he held with both hands. It was pointed askew at nothing at all.

Toad locked the door behind him and took a look at Herb, who was pretending to sleep.

Yocke held the pistol out to Toad butt-first. Toad took it and stuffed it into his waistband. “Thanks,” he said. “I kept waiting to hear the shots.”

Yocke didn’t think that comment worth a reply.

“Would you have used this?” Toad wanted to know.

“I don’t know.”

After they had sat Herb Tenney on the ceramic convenience in the bathroom, then fixed a can of chili for lunch, Yocke asked, “How can you just walk around sticking pistols in people’s faces?”

Toad looked mildly surprised. “I’m in the military. Jake Grafton gives orders, I obey them.”

“This isn’t a movie, you know. That’s a real gun with real bullets.” Toad helped himself to another spoonful of chili. When it was on its way south he said, “You keep looking for moral absolutes, Jack. There aren’t any. Not in this life. All we can do is the best we can.”

“But how do you know you’re doing the right thing?”

“I don’t. But Jake Grafton does. It’s uncanny. He’ll do the right thing regardless of the consequences, regardless of how the chips fall. I’ll take that. I do what I’m told knowing that the CAG is trying to do right.” Even as he said it his mind jumped to Rita. He had bowed to Rita’s decision to fly while pregnant based on faith in her judgment. Now the chili made a lump in his stomach. He dropped the spoon into the bowl and shoved it away. “You gotta believe in people or you’re in a hell of a fix,” he said slowly.

“You answer a question, Toad, by evading it. What is right? Why do you think Grafton knows what right is?”

Toad was no longer paying attention. He was staring at his watch, watching the second hand sweep. They should be on the ground by now…if they were still alive. Why hadn’t they called? Did he really trust her judgment, or was he a coward not to assert himself? If anything happened to her…

Jake Grafton saw the smoke column twenty miles away. The black smoke towered like a giant chimney at least three thousand feet into the atmosphere. As he got closer he could see that the wind had tilted the column, which was visibly growing taller, mushrooming into the upper atmosphere.

Creeping up to two hundred feet to avoid the dust being sucked into the inferno raging at the base of the smoke, he bounced in turbulence even here on the up-wind side of the fire. The turbulence made his bowels feel watery: that damaged wing might have a broken spar. As the plane bucked the stick felt sloppy and the secondary hydraulic system pressure dropped. He must be oh so careful.

The hangar was ablaze. Rita.

Ten or fifteen minutes ago?

Something silver on the mat? A wing?

It couldn’t be a wing from Rita’s plane, could it? Could it?

He edged in for a closer look. No. It was a big wing, attached to a transport that was also on fire. She caught someone parked on the mat and shot them apart.

He turned away from the blaze and consulted his fuel gauge. Fuel would have been okay plus a bunch if he hadn’t spent all that time maneuvering at full throttle and let that jerk shoot up his plane. Going to be tight.

Right engine was still alive and pulling hard — no more warning lights. The slop in the controls when operating on the backup hydraulic system was acceptable as long as he didn’t have to defend himself, as long as the secondary pump held together, as long as he could make his aching right leg work. The plane flew okay on one engine if he held in forty pounds or so of right rudder. The rudder trim wasn’t working. Sorry about that!

He had about forty miles of radioactive terrain to cross before he could get out and walk. It was a little like flying over a shark-infested ocean — you prayed for the engine to keep running, counted every mile, watched the minute hand of the panel clock with intense interest.

Jake Grafton’s eyes scanned the vast distances between the horizon and the bottom of the cumulonimbus clouds. He gazed up into the gaps between the clouds, searched behind him and out to both sides. The sky appeared to be empty. Because he knew how difficult another aircraft was to spot in a huge, indefinite sky, he kept looking. And occasionally his eyes came inside to check the clock.

So she made it to here and took out the hangar and that transport on the mat. He hadn’t seen any craters on the mat that would mark misses. Apparently she put all her ordnance into the bucket, a neat, professional job.

Thank you, Rita, wherever you are.

He listened to the engine. He watched the clock hand sweep. He unhooked his oxygen mask and swabbed the sweat from his eyes.

Forty miles of terrain required about ten minutes of flying to cross. When the ten minutes had passed Jake began to relax. His right leg was hurting since he had to maintain constant pressure on the rudder, but he felt better. It was goofy when you thought about it — Captain Collins said about forty miles, and of course the fallout zone had no definite boundary. The intensity of the radiation would just decrease as the miles went by. Knowing all this and feeling slightly silly, Jake still felt better with each passing mile.

If this shot-up jet would just hold together…

When the city of Lipetsk appeared in the haze at ten or twelve miles, Jake Grafton eased the nose of his Su-25 into a climb. He went across the city at several thousand feet and made a gentle turn to line up for the northwest runway about eight miles away.

Nothing happened when he lowered the gear handle. He found the little emergency switch and held it in the down position. The gear broke free of the wells and fell into the slipstream — he could feel the drag increase.

His numb right leg refused to put the right amount of pressure on the rudder. The nose wandered a little from side to side. Carefully playing his single engine, Jake Grafton tried to keep the speed up and fly a flat approach. Only when he was sure he could make the field did he use the electrical switch to drop ten degrees of flaps.

He cut the engine immediately after he felt the tires squeak. Without brakes this thing would roll forever; he had no idea how to engage the emergency system. He had tried turning the parking brake handle ninety degrees and it didn’t want to rotate.

When the jet was down to about twenty MPH it began to drift toward the edge of the runway. There was nothing he could do. It rolled off the edge and came to rest in the grass.

For the first time in over an hour, Jake Grafton relaxed his right leg. It was numb, shaking.

Jake used the battery to open the canopy. As the huge silence enveloped him he took off his mask and helmet and wiped the sweat from his hair. He was drained.

Somehow he managed the energy to get his gloves off and begin unstrapping. When he got the fittings released he sat there massaging his right thigh.

“Admiral! Admiral Grafton!” It was Rita, running across the grass toward him.

“Hey, kid. Am I glad to see you!”

She slowed to a walk, just fifty feet or so away. She glanced at the shattered wing pylon, then looked up at Jake. “I got the hangar, sir.”

“I know,” Jake said, and wiped his eyes with his fingers. “I know.”