Realizing that he had the altitude advantage that the American had in the previous encounter, he rolled out and dove.
'Falcon Three, bogie on your six,' Hal shouted as he banked hard to intervene in the fast-closing battle about two miles away.
'Roger that,' Troy said, instinctively turning to screen Jenna's damaged aircraft as the enemy's missile lock- on pinged in his headset.
Troy looked back. There was a bright yellow flash as the Vympel R-60 'Aphid' air-to-air missile erupted from the MiG's wing.
Making sure that it was tracking him, not Jenna, Troy banked as hard as he could, hoping to outturn the missile.
It came so close that the lemon-yellow flame from its solid-fuel engine illuminated his cockpit — just before the explosion illuminated his entire field of vision.
The concussion knocked Troy's helmet against the inside of the canopy, cracking it. The F-16, which was in a roll when the proximity fuse detonated, began to spin.
There was good news and bad news.
The good news was that the Aphid hadn't hit Troy. The bad news was that the explosion was close enough to cause severe damage to his aircraft.
'Falcon Three… g-g-g-going… d-d-d-down,' he reported as he fought to control the shaking, shuddering, corkscrewing aircraft.
'Punch out, Falcon Three,' Hal shouted, as Troy tried to control the spin long enough to do this.
Seeing the spinning desert rushing up at him, he decided that it was now or never.
In a blinding flash, he left the F-16, and for what seemed like an eternity he hurtled through the air, spinning like a Frisbee. Somewhere within that eternity, he might have blacked out, because the next thing he remembered was when the canopy of his parachute jerked him back to his senses.
In the distance, he saw an F-16 tumbling lifelessly toward the ground. He watched it hit and disintegrate, the pieces bouncing across the desert at impact speed, swathed in dust and smoke.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something else. It was another F-16, twisting, gyrating, and falling. Who? Hal?
Suddenly a third F-16 flashed past, and in the cockpit he caught a glimpse of the checkerboard pattern of Hal's helmet.
'Jenna!'
Troy realized as the second F-16 impacted the desert that one of these falling airplanes was Jenna's.
Hal came by again, so close that the shock wave caused Troy's parachute to bounce about twenty feet.
Below, the ground was rushing upward.
The last thought Troy had before the impact knocked him unconscious was that he had better prepare for a hard landing.
Chapter 14
Troy Loensch was unsure whether he was dead or alive, but he settled on something that was somewhere in between. His first sensation was one of being enveloped in a cocoon of excruciating pain. Everything hurt — his shoulder, his knees, his head. He gritted his teeth and felt the grind of a mouth full of sand.
He opened his eyes and saw only the gravelly ground.
He tried to move and discovered that his limbs were wildly contorted, as though he had been wadded up and tossed in a sandbox — which was more or less what had happened.
Troy had started to hope that nothing was broken, then settled on hoping that nothing was broken off
He tried to summon enough saliva to spit the crud from his mouth, choked, and started to cough.
When his mouth was reasonably clear, he attempted to untangle himself and roll into a sitting position. As he did, he saw a person standing over him. 'You look like shit, Loensch.'
It was Jenna Munrough.
'Are you all right?' Troy gasped.
'Better than y'all by the looks of things,' she replied.
She didn't look it. Her flight suit was filthy beyond any recognition of its true color — and so was her hair. Her face was so dirty that the only thing recognizable about her was her voice.
Amazingly, Troy discovered that he could stand — and take steps. It hurt like hell, but he could do it.
'Guess nothing's broken,' he said. 'Least nothing important. Glad to see you got out okay, Munrough… I saw your bird auger in… didn't see your chute.'
'I was above you… I saw yours… figured you were toast from the way you were spinning.'
'Me too,' Troy agreed.
'Where do you suppose we are?' Jenna asked, looking around.
'We're in that desert… Denakil… y'know, where we shot down the MiGs. Do you have your GPS receiver?' 'It broke when I landed. Y'all have yours?'
Troy checked his gear and found that his GPS receiver was working, though the information it gave them was of little practical use. They learned that they were fourteen degrees, forty-five minutes north of the equator and thirty-nine degrees, thirty-two minutes east of Greenwich, but that was merely of academic curiosity.
Troy's radio, like all of Jenna's gear, had been crushed on impact, but the transponder with which a rescue team could home in on his position still worked.
They could see on the GPS that they were fifty miles inland from the coast, and that the mountain they could see to the north was called Amba Soira. The GPS told them that there was a road on the other side of the ridge that lay to the west, but they could have discovered that by climbing to the top of the ridge.
'Haven't heard a chopper,' Jenna said, looking skyward. 'I'm sure that Hal would have reported our position… or they'd be homing in on the transponder.'
'There were a lot of people shot down last night. I figure they're pretty busy… you suppose we ought to just hang in here and wait?'
'I really don't think that's a good idea,' Jenna said. 'Remember where we are and how we got here… we got shot down by Eritreans… this is Eritrea… I sure as hell don't want to be a female POW in Eritrea.'
'Point taken,' Troy said.
'I'll help you bury your parachute,' Jenna offered.
After burying Troy's chute and trying to disguise it as best they could, the two pilots climbed to the top of the ridge to look at the road. It was deserted for as far as they could see, so getting across it without being seen would have been possible. However, it was what lay across it that was the decision maker for them.
'Look at that,' Troy said, pointing to the immense desert, stretching into Ethiopia, that separated them from the Sudanese border by hundreds of miles.
'Sure hate to run out of water over there,' Jenna said, instinctively glancing at the small flask from her survival kit that she had strapped to her belt.
'Let's head the other way,' Troy suggested. 'There are U. S. Navy ships in the Red Sea; if they are tracking my transponder, they may be able to get a chopper out from there to pick us up.'
'Let's go and get gone before somebody comes to investigate where those two parachutes came down this morning,' Jenna agreed.
They hiked for about two hours, suffering from the midday heat and pausing from time to time in the shade of the rock outcroppings that dotted the landscape.
'Gotta conserve water,' Jenna said, scolding Troy as he reached for his flask.
'Maybe we oughta wait until dark?' Troy asked rhetorically. 'They said in survival school that you shouldn't try to hike in the hottest part of the day.'
'You oughta know, you were the one who aced the survival course.'
Troy ignored her baiting, feigning distraction as he reached into a crevice in the cliff beneath which they had
