are obscene. She looked at him with almost fear in her eyes. That's
cruel, David. In Africa there is a beautiful and fierce animal called
the sable antelope. They run together in herds of up to a hundred, but
when one of them is hurt, wounded by a hunter or mauled by a lion, the
lead bulls turn upon him and drive him from the herd. I remember my
father telling me about that, he would say that if you want to be a
winner then you must avoid the company of the losers for their despair
is contagious. God, David, that's a terribly hard way to look at life.
'Perhaps, David agreed, but then, you see, life is hard. When they made
love, there was for the first time a quality of desperation in it, for
it was the eve of parting and they had been reminded of their mortality.
In the morning David went to join his squadron and Debra locked the
house on Malik Street.
Each day for seventeen days David flew two, and sometimes three,
sorties. In the evenings, if they were not flying night interceptions,
there were lectures and training films, and after that not much desire
for anything but a quick meal and then sleep.
The Colonel, le Dauphin, had flown one sortie with David. He was a
small man with a relaxed manner and quick, shrewd eyes. He had made his
judgement quickly.
After that first day, David and Joe flew together, and David moved his
gear into the locker across from Joe in the underground quarters that
the crews on standby used.
In those seventeen days the last links in an iron friendship were
forged. David's flare and dash balanced perfectly with Joe's rock-solid
dependability.
David would always be the star while Joe seemed destined to be the
accompanist, the straight guy who was a perfect foil, the wingman
without personal ambition for glory whose talent was to put his number
one into the position for the strike.
Quickly they developed into a truly formidable team, so perfectly in
accord that communication in the air was almost extra-sensory, similar
to the instantaneous reaction of the bird flock or the shoal of fish.
Joe sitting out there behind him was for David like a million dollars in
insurance. His tail was secure and he could concentrate on the special
task that his superior eyesight and lightning reactions were so suited
to. David was the gunfighter, in a service where the gunfighter was
supreme.
The I. A. F. had been the first to appreciate the shortcomings of
the-air-to-air missile, and relied heavily on the classic type of air
combat. A missile could be induced to run stupid. It was possible to
make its computer think in a set pattern and then sucker it with a break
in the pattern. For every three hundred missile launches in air-to-air
combat, a single strike could be expected.
However, if you had a gunfighter coming up into your six o'clock
position with his finger on the trigger of twin 30-mm. cannons, capable
of pouring twelve thousand shells a minute into you, then your chances
were considerably lighter than three hundred to one.
Joe also had his own special talent. The forward scanning radar of the
