thing was clear: whatever the Ketty Jay was heading for, she wouldn’t make it before the Equalisers reached her.
Then, in the far distance, he saw an indistinct fuzz in the air. Gradually the fuzz darkened, until there could be no question as to what it was. Just beyond the lip of the Eastern Plateau was a line of threatening clouds. The clear blue of the sky ended abruptly in a piled black bank of gathering thunderheads.
The Ketty Jay was running for the storm.
‘How’d you know that was there, you clever bitch?’ he murmured, out of grudging respect for Jez. He naturally assumed it wasn’t the captain’s doing.
He checked where the Equalisers were. Behind him now, but closer still, flying in tight formation. Organised. Disciplined. Soon they’d be within firing range.
He shook his head and spat into the footwell. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he snarled. He was bored with the chase and angry at his nagging headache. The fact that the enemy were flying in such neat formation inexplicably annoyed him. If someone didn’t do something soon, those Equalisers would start taking shots at them, and Pinn was damned if he was going to present his tail to four sets of machine guns.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Let’s play.’
He broke away from the Ketty Jay in a high, curving loop. At its apex, he rolled the craft to bring him right-side up again. The pursuing fighters were below and ahead of him now. They’d seen the threat but were slow to react, unsure if he was fleeing or fighting. Nobody expected a single craft to take on four: it was suicidal.
But death was a concept that Pinn wasn’t really smart enough to understand. He didn’t have the imagination to envisage eternity. Oblivion was unfathomable. How could he be scared of something when he only had the vaguest notion of it? So he dived down towards the pursuing fighters with a whoop of joy, and opened up with his machine guns.
The Equalisers scattered as he plunged among them like a cat among birds. They banked and rolled and dived, darting out of his line of fire as he cut through the formation and out the other side. Lesser craft would have been tagged, but the Equalisers were just quick enough to evade him.
Pinn pulled the Skylance into a climb, rolling and banking as he did, making himself a difficult target. G-forces wrenched at him. His hangover throbbed in protest at the abuse, but the adrenaline was kicking in now, clearing away the cobwebs. He fought to keep track of the Equalisers as they wheeled through the sky. Three of them were reorganising, continuing their pursuit of the Ketty Jay. One had peeled off and was angling for a shot at Pinn.
One? One? Pinn was insulted. Ignoring the fighter that was trying to engage him, he flew towards the main formation. They’d streaked ahead, dismissing him. They thought they’d got too much of a head start while he was turning around. They thought he had no chance of catching them.
They were wrong.
Pinn hit the thrusters and left his pursuer aiming at empty sky. The Skylance howled gleefully as it accelerated, eating up the distance between Pinn and his targets. He came in from directly behind, growing in their blind spot. He was forced to fly straight to avoid notice, but he was acutely aware that by doing so he was allowing the fourth Equaliser to line up on his tail. He held steady for a dangerous moment, then loosed off a fusillade at the nearest plane.
Whether it was luck, instinct, or skill, the pilot spotted him an instant before he fired. The Equaliser banked hard and the bullets chipped across its flank and underwing, instead of hitting the tail assembly. Pinn cursed and rolled away just as the Equaliser on his tail sent a volley of tracer fire his way. The Skylance danced between the bullets and dived out of the line of fire.
Pinn jinked left and right, keeping his movements unpredictable.
He twisted his neck round, trying to get a fix on his opponents. The most important factor in aerial combat was knowing where your enemies
