Turn of the Cards

Chapter Thirty-nine

The Su-25 strike aircraft — what NATO called a Frogfoot — began to rock in the ground effect as Podpolkovnik Sharagin lowered his flaps for landing. The stubby little Sukhoi, with its two jet engines set on the wings just outboard the fuselage, was not exactly a pulsing mass of power like its sexy cousin the Su-27 Flanker, but it felt light and inclined to skate compared to how it had handled on takeoff, with its hard-points crammed with napalm canisters and rocket pods for delivery against supposed rebel positions in the rugged Giai Truong Son.

And supposed is just the word for it, Sharagin thought. The People’s Army had a worse Vietnam War complex than the Americans did. Vietnamese officers remembered how much they’d dreaded American air-strikes, and so every time their patrols got fired up, they shrieked for air support. Which meant the lieutenant colonel and the ground-attack air company he commanded were running up a lot of time on their engines.

The problem was the rebels were probably smart enough not to hang around for the air-strikes to come in on their heads. Sharagin would have been that smart. The Viet Cong were that smart, like the black-asses in Afghanistan, where Sharagin won a chestful of medals to wear on the breast of his walking-out dress when he went drinking — like every pathetic soak in Moscow — and the dubious honor of this command.

Of course the People’s Army had not been; they gathered in vast Warsaw Pact-emulating clumps where the Yank bombers could find them, pursuant to the vision of that nitwit Vo Nguyen Giap, who based his entire strategy on building for a one-two punch: a massive popular uprising in support of the heroic Liberation Forces — which never materialized — and a single great standup knockout battle with the enemy, which worked exactly once, at Dien Bien Phu, and consistently got the Viets’ yellow asses kicked every last time they ran it on the Americans.

Of course the Americans finally beat themselves, and everybody called that turtle-headed old quack Giap a genius. Then the Vietnamese went into Cambodia and spent the last twelve years proving the Americans weren’t the only ones who hadn’t learned a fucking thing from the Vietnam War. And today’s People’s Army savants thought their current crop of opponents would be just as idiotic as they had been and wait obligingly for their nice napalm showers. Nyekulturnyy assholes.

The runway had been scraped in the red clay of a Central Highlands plateau and surfaced with perforated steel plating. Western analysts always went into raptures about the ability of Soviet aircraft to land and take off under highly vile conditions. Sharagin was proud of his ship’s ruggedness, too, but it didn’t mean it was fun to land on an airfield this wretched. The way you bounced around when you set down, you just knew a wheel strut was going to come jamming through the bottom of the plane and straight up your bunghole…

“Be advised runway damaged is not yet repaired, Kulikovo Leader,” the tower informed him. Only his passion for radio as well as other species of discipline kept him from cursing the Vietnamese controller out loud. The rebels had dumped a half-dozen mortar rounds on the runway’s end before dawn. Of course the holes hadn’t yet been repaired. Sharagin was used to the standards of Soviet Army Frontal Aviation — which was to say he hadn’t exactly learned to regard efficiency as his birthright — but these slant-eyes were simply ridiculous.

He wasn’t even sure what he and his boys were doing flying their planes into harm’s way in support of a regime that even lowly strike jocks like him knew his own government was not going to stand behind if the rebellion truly caught. Rodina Mat’ had let Eastern Europe go without a peep. The Baltic republics looked as if they might make their self-proclaimed secession stick. What beyond a weird macho Evil Empire nostalgia made STAVKA think it was worth screwing around in this humid hellhole? It wasn’t as if the slope-heads were ever going to come close to paying the USSR what they owed her for their War of Liberation, let alone —

Frenzied Vietnamese blasted through his headphones like static. “Speak English, you yellow monkeys,” he snarled at the tower, discipline momentarily forgotten.

Then he heard the voice of his wingman, who trailed him by half a kilometer, yelling something about the colonel’s left wing.

A glance at the board. No red lights. No pre-corded feminine voice. If something was wrong, the bloody plane didn’t know it. Were his circuits so screwed up that his port engine was on fire without any telltales lighting? He turned his helmeted head to look.

A man dressed in orange flew formation with Sharagin. He was just drawing even with the cockpit, barely beyond the wingtip. He smiled and waved.

The problem was he’d neglected to bring a plane.

“Yob tvoyu mat’!” the colonel yelled.

The flying man held out an open palm. Sharagin saw an orange flash.

An explosion rocked the airplane.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, glanced back over his right shoulder. The Froggie must’ve had a short run to its target; it blew up into a wonderfully gratifying yellow fireball before it splashed down on the runway and went hurtling down it like a flame tsunami. Above his head a green canopy with one red panel blossomed as the airplane’s zero-altitude ejection seat reached the top of its arc and popped its chute.

He clucked and shook his head. Clearly communists weren’t big on color sense.

Great big glowing green balls went whipping by to the right of him. That Frogfoot behind him was obviously trying out its 25mm Gatling. Ooo, I’m sooo scared, he thought. The stars on these boys’ tails were blood red, not Socialist Republic yellow. Soviet marksmanship didn’t impress him any more than the Vietnamese version did.

He dropped till the runway was whipping right below him and he could feel the morning sun heat off the metal warming his belly. He was pleased to see the cannon shells going off among the hangars. He wasn’t so jealous of his job that he hated to see the bad guys do it for him.

I’m so glad we wound up on the other side from these buttholes, Mark. I didn’t like the War either, but it never meant I loved the commies.

Following Soviet doctrine, the airfield’s planes were well reveted, with U-shaped earth berms shoved up around each aircraft in its parking place to protect it from blast damage. The open sides all faced the runway. It had never occurred to anybody that this would be a problem: aircraft weapons fire straight ahead, as a general thing…

Flash just flew, slowly, right down the line, squirting sizzling jolts of flame right into those puppies in passing. He could not tarry long enough to make sure of slagging any individual target — guys in khaki shorts and pith helmets were starting to run around and shoot at him with Kalashnikovs. But he heard explosions behind him and felt their quick, hot pressure. And exposure to super-hot plasma was not going to do sensitive avionics any good, even when the plane didn’t go up…

With a rushing roar the trailing Frogfoot passed overhead, tucking its landing gear up as it accelerated.

To one side of the runway’s far end a pair of attack craft sat with their canopies up, waiting the word to take off. J. J. gave each of them a blast through the tails. He circled left for another pass.

Some fairly heavy ordnance was going off around him; the air shuddered from automatic antiaircraft fire. Like all Vietnamese airbases, this one was surrounded by AAA and SAM pits — God knew who they thought was going to be coming after them in airplanes; maybe they were nervous about the Chinese, who hated the Vietnamese as much as the Vietnamese hated them. The problem was even the finest antiaircraft defenses are not designed to take on man-sized targets flying deck-level, at highway speeds, directly over the base itself. The gunners were shooting pretty much every direction except at him.

Don’t let it go to your head, he cautioned himself. He was not bulletproof, and if, say, an exploding 57mm shell hit him, not even Moonchild’s regenerative capabilities would put Jumpin’ Jack back together again.

As he began his triumphant return engagement, he noticed the pilots had hopped out of their waiting Sukhois and were racing away across the plateau in their flight suits, trailing assorted hoses behind. “Smart boys,” he said, and gave their abandoned planes the for-true torch.

He was halfway back down the runway, spreading hot mischief, when he noticed the Frogfoot that had waved off its landing approach banking around as if to come back.

“Oh ho,” he said aloud. He’d always wanted to play chicken with a fighter jet.

No! You irresponsible buffoon! You can’t be serious

J. J. Flash grinned. Cosmic Traveler seldom managed to get his oar in when Flash was expressed; different personality types, to say the least. He must think I’m about to get up to something majestically ignorant.

And of course I am.

He broke off his strafing run, banking toward the aircraft. Making sure he didn’t stray out over the flak pits, he flew above the buildings lined up along the runway, out past the revetments. As he did so, he cut in some serious flame. He surrounded himself with a roaring, brilliant nimbus of fire till he was blazing along like a meteor on terminal guidance. People on the ground stopped screaming and shooting to point.

The Frogfoot had its nose aimed at him and was blitzing back. Time to move. Risking the ground guns, he streaked straight toward the inbound strike plane, flaming like a dozen Buddhist priests.

White smoke blossomed from under the Frogfoot’s starboard wing. Missile launch, Flash knew. The only kind of missile that would lock onto him and permit itself to be fired was a heat-seeker. And he was giving the IR-sensing head a mother of a picture to look at.

He whipped a one-eighty and flew right back at the tower.

He didn’t have too big a clue as to the flight time of the missile. He knew the damned things were fast, faster than a fighter could go full-throttle — and he’d been straining to keep up with a porky Frogfoot, slowed way down for landing approach. He flew in a straight line toward the tower for two full seconds, feeling his scrotum retracting into his belly, expecting the missile to nail him. The Traveler was yowling in his head like a cat in heat.

He saw startled faces through the polarized glass of the tower. He saw open mouths, then assholes and elbows as the crew realized they’d been had and rushed for the exits. He cut the flame F/X slam, pulled up vertical, shot a hundred feet in the air, and hovered.

The heat-seeker, suddenly deprived of prey, went ballistic. Inertia kept it rushing down the path its target had been taking when it suddenly went out.

It hit the tower in a shower of glass and flame.

J. J. Flash pumped his fist. “Yeah! It’s a gas-gas-gas!”

The strike pilot banked his plane and accelerated away from the airfield, east toward the coast, as if embarrassed to hang around the scene of his missile faux pas.

It was likewise time for Jumpin’ Jack to make like a hockey team and get the puck out of here. The Viets were pitching sufficient lead-particulate pollution into the air that somebody might get luck) after all. Somebody might also get smart, and send out for attack choppers, and he knew he couldn’t handle them.

He went low, seriously low, so far down he could reach his hand and scrape all the skin off his palms on red clay if he wanted. Between the buildings he flew, accelerating to his maximum thrust, which, while not much by the standards of jet aircraft, looked awesome to the man on the ground. It also reduced Cosmic Traveler to a mewling wreck inside him as the walls of the hangars flashed past.

There were armed dudes in front of him. He kicked his flame-aura back in. They threw away their guns and ran like bunnies.

He whipped between two flak pits, extending his arms to give each a flying finger in passing, as they stared openmouthed at a target they couldn’t depress their guns to track.

He had cost the Socialist Republic and their Soviet butt-brothers some heavy change, but nothing on the scale of even a pissant little war like this one. A blip on the scope. PAVN had other strike planes, other airfields, other air-traffic towers.

But nobody was going to feel quite as safe in any of them from here on in. That was the win that had him laughing out loud as he hit the plateau’s rim and let every bit of the wild, exhilarant energy blasting through him go in a blinding supernova flash, so that as he dove over the edge out of sight, he seemed simply to vanish.

If there was one thing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, knew, it was how to make an exit.