turns and twists, riding always within an ace of strike. Turn, and turn
again, in great winging parabolas, climbing always, turning always,
vapour trails spinning out from their wing-tips in silky arabesque
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
starboard quarter . As David pushed the stick fully forward and left he
kicked on full left rudder, ducking under the blast of cannon fire, and
the Mirage went down in a spiralling dive. The blood which gravity had
sucked from his head was now flung upwards through his body, filling his
head and his vision with bright redness, the red-out of inverted
gravitational force. A vein in his nose popped under the pressure and
suddenly his oxygen mask was filled with a flood of warm choking blood.
The Russian was after him, following him into the dive, lining him up
for his second burst.
David screamed with the metallic salty taste of blood in his mouth and
hauled back on the stick with all his strength, the nose came up and
over, climbing out of the dive, and again the blood drained from his
head going from red-out to black-out in the fraction of a second and be
saw the Russian following him up, drawn up by the ploy. At the top
David kicked it out in a breakaway roll. It caught the Russian, he was
one-hundredth of a second slow in countering and he swung giddily
through David's gunsight, an almost impossible deflection shot that
sluiced cannon fire wildly across the sky, spraying it like water from a
garden hose. The MIG was in David's sights for perhaps one-tenth of a
second, but in that time David saw a flash of light, a bright wink of it
below the pilot's canopy, and then David rolled and turned out, coming
around hard and finding the Russian still hanging in the circuit, but
losing air space, swaying out with a feather of white vapour streaming
back from below his cockpit canopy.
I've hit him, David exulted, and his fear was gone, become anger again,
a fierce triumphant anger. He took the Mirage up in another soaring
yo-yo and this time the MIG could not hold station on him and David
