could make it a losing proposition for the enemy.
It might, of course, be an air attack on the missile complex at Turpan, but Cheng had to be sure. If he had to move fighters west, away from the east coast, this would weaken his coastal defenses. Once again he was struck by the fact that you could have all the SATRECON reports, have all the experts and all the computer enhancements you liked, but there were times when there was no substitute for a beautiful woman who was prepared to go to bed with the enemy, especially the ones like Lin Meiling who enjoyed it. She pretended, of course, that she was not promiscuous, and this only made the men more anxious to conquer her. Cheng sent a message to London that Meiling was to find out precisely what the Chinese question was, and to this end she must do whatever was necessary.
This time as Brenson was having a shower, Meiling drew the translucent shower curtain aside. Brenson’s naked body was steaming, filling me bathroom with a dense fog. “Are you finished?” she said slowly, disappointedly. “Already?”
“I’m in a hurry,” he replied, grinning, flicking the towel behind him, ready to dry his back.
“You sure you’re clean?” she asked him cheekily. She had the cake of soap in her hands and caressed it and squeezed it, producing a ring of suds around her forefinger and thumb. “You need someone to wash you,” she said, smiling. Demurely she got into the tub and, pushing herself into him, began massaging his buttocks, kissing his chest, sucking on him before her soapy hands slid between his buttocks, pulling him even closer against her damp, scarlet lace panties.
“Undo me,” she whispered, and in a second the scarlet bra fell to the side of the tub, her breasts rising, pressing-lunging forward.
“Aren’t you going to turn the water on?” she inquired.
“What — oh — yes, of course. Oh, Meiling, you don’t know how much—”
“Shh—” she whispered, and now a gossamer spray of warm water cascaded over them, washing away the soap as, one arm about her, Brenson slid down, licked her, and with the other arm pulled the suction rubber that down from the side of the bath. “Don’t want to break our necks,” he said.
“Or something else,” she giggled.
“Oh Lord — Meiling—”
Suddenly she stepped out of the tub, jerked the long fluffy towel off the bar, and wrapped it about her, prancing out to the living room, her panties still about her thighs where he’d pulled them down in eager anticipation. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Teasing,” she shot back, giggling, pulling her panties up so high they seemed to be cutting into her.
“Why — you little slut,” he yelled boyishly. “Wait till I get you.”
“Have to catch me first!” She was glad to see him fully aroused. At his most vulnerable she would ask him…
There was no time — he took her hard and fast and rolled off her, satiated and silent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When the CIS — Commonwealth of Independent States, or what used to be the Soviet Union — was desperately short of cash in 1990, it sold a twenty-four-plane squadron of Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-29 Fulcrum jet fighters to the German Luftwaffe. The Germans, Americans, and others had seen the highly rated Soviet counterair fighter performing at air shows with its computer-controlled maneuvering flaps and the canton lever structure of its twin-finned tail unit demonstrating its agility.
But until now the West had never had a Fulcrum really to put through its paces, and all of the experts knew that air-show flying was one thing, air combat something else. The Fulcrum had demonstrated its ability, for example, to go into a tail-slide climb, a characteristic underscored in the hammerhead stall/tail-slide maneuver the aircraft was able to accomplish at a relatively low altitude of 2,500-3,000 feet, losing itself on radar in the near- vertical hover position.
But how dazzling would it be when put through the tight, gut-wrenching maneuvers dictated by a dogfight against, say, an F-14 Tomcat? The first up-close inspection of the Fulcrum by western experts didn’t look that promising. The German engineers sent from Messerschmitt kicked the tires and felt the plane’s skin and were frankly disdainful. One of them from Frankfurt contemptuously called the skin “Rice Krispies,” the plane’s bumpy surface, compared with the smooth surfaces produced for the American fighters, being the result of inferior rolling of the metal.
Then the Luftwaffe pilots took the Fulcrum up and were ecstatic. Some claimed the MiG-29 was the best fighter ever built. At Mach2.3, or 1,520 miles per hour, the plane, which could pull eleven G’s as opposed to an American nine, was a relatively small fighter. It was only 37 feet 4? inches from wingtip to wingtip, and 57 feet long, as opposed to the American Tomcat’s 64 feet 1? inch width and length of 62 feet. The plane’s box intake engines pushed the Fulcrum faster not only than the Tomcat but also the F-16 Falcon and F-18 Hornet, and it had a faster rate of climb than the Hornet. Only the F-15 Eagle could match its speed, but even then the Fulcrum was so good in its double S turns, loops, its flip-up midflight attack, and its spectacular dives on afterburner — its pilot equipped with an amazingly simple and cheap infrared “look-shoot” system — that the Luftwaffe quickly incorporated the Fulcrum squadron into its air force. And then the habitually skeptical engineers made the most intriguing discovery of all — namely that the inferior bumpy skin afforded the aircraft substantially more lift than the smoother, better-milled skin of its Allied counterparts.
Its two serious weaknesses were a comparatively small fuel capacity, giving it a maximum in-air time of only two hours without external tanks, which would have made it heavier, and, like all CIS-made fighters, it had been built to be directed by ground control and could take only one target on at a time. If ground control went out then the Fulcrum was effectively out, as opposed to the Allied pilots who fought largely independently of ground control. This factor notwithstanding, the speed and sheer agility of the Fulcrum made it a superb aircraft, and China, through the timely purchases of General Cheng, congratulated itself on gaining fifty of the aircraft from the CIS, all fifty planes stationed on airfields throughout the populous eastern half of the country.
One of the Siberian instructors who had come to China with the fifty aircraft was Sergei Marchenko, the renowned air ace who had downed over seventeen U.S. fighters, among them Frank Shirer’s F-14 Tomcat. Shirer had returned the compliment over Korea, but like him, Marchenko had managed to bail out to live and fight another day.
Shirer doubted he would ever get the chance to go up against Marchenko again. Even the talk of him possibly being given a try on the Harrier in Britain was no real consolation. Oh, the Harrier was a fighter, all right, but with a maximum speed of only 607 miles per hour, 5 Mach — not much faster than some commercial airliners — it was hardly a promotion to top-of-the-line. If flying B-52s was like driving a bus after the thrill of a BMW, then a Harrier was like getting a station wagon to drive after having handled a formula one racer. It would be a step up of sorts from the bombers, perhaps, but the Harrier was so damn slow compared to the Tomcat. And besides, he knew he was being asked only because of the shortage of Harrier pilots, most of them having graduated upward to the Falcons and Hornets.
Sergei Marchenko’s reputation in Siberia as the
Politically speaking, Marchenko, a Russian, son of the one-time STAVKA, or High Command, member Kiril Marchenko in Moscow, had no particularly strong beliefs one way or the other about the Chinese, the Siberians — or
