sped as the yaw turned into something dangerously close to a spin.
By now they were barely a thousand feet above the ground, and Kieu had almost no room to recover. The biplane slid sideways through the air, a hockey puck gliding on ice. As it came over through the invert, Kieu managed to get it level.
Mara, her brain scrambled, threw her hand out against the windscreen.
And there was the field, right next to her thumb.
“The field is there on the right,” she told Kieu. “Get us there.”
“Okay, Okay. Hold on,” the pilot said, though he didn’t alter course.
Either thinking the biplane was going to crash or simply not realizing that Kieu would try to land, the pilot in the MiG pursuing them took a lazy turn above.
“Hold on!” yelled Kieu once more, and then he pushed the nose forward, setting up for his landing. But almost immediately he began to curse. The stick pulled and jerked, as if trying to wrestle itself out of his hands. Mara closed her eyes for a second, then decided she didn’t want to go out that way, if that’s what was going to happen. She bolted upright, facing reality with eyes wide open.
The ground, now mere yards away, was coming at them a lot faster than she had thought possible.
The biplane vibrated madly even before its wheels hit the ground. The first touch sent it bolting back upward. Kieu settled her down, holding the aircraft in a straight line as it ran down the old landing strip. He jammed the brakes. Dust flew everywhere. Pebbles and little rocks spit up so violently against the fuselage that Mara was sure they were being-fired at from the air. But the MiG was moving too fast to get a shot in, and passed harmlessly overhead as Kieu finally got the plane to stop about three-quarters of the way down the field.
“I knew you could do it,” Mara said.
“Out! We have to get out!” yelled Kieu. He undid his seat restraints and leapt up, running through the cabin to the door.
Mara followed. Kieu waited by the door; when he saw her, he threw the lever and pushed it open.
“Go!” he yelled, pushing her ahead of him.
Mara jumped to the ground. The MiG was starting a run above.
“The trees!” she shouted at him, then bolted forward, running on a diagonal toward the ditch at the end of the field about fifty meters away.
The Chinese fighter began to fire its cannon just as they got there. The 23 mm slugs hit the ground with a thick thud, chewing up the hard-packed dirt like a road cutter drumming through asphalt. Mara jumped on her rump and slid down into the ditch, huddling against the side as Kieu came down facefirst.
The MiG flashed by.
Mara help Kieu get to his feet.
“What did you do to my plane?” he said. “Why are they shooting at me?”
“I didn’t do anything. It’s the Chinese.”
“Look at my plane!” A look of shock come to Kieu’s face. He seemed a different man. “I have to save it.”
He started toward the airplane before Mara could grab him. She scrambled up the slope, chasing after him as the MiG began another run. Mara lunged just as the Chinese fighter began to fire, catching Kieu by the back of his legs in an open-field tackle that would have done an NFL free safety proud.
The air above them seemed to break in two: one of the tracers had found the biplane’s fuel tank, igniting the remaining fuel and vapors. The burst sent a fireball ricocheting upward from the plane, propelling the nose forward as shrapnel flew through the air.
“We have to get out of here,” said Mara, getting to her feet and dragging Kieu backward to the ditch.
Blood seeped across the back of his shirt. He began to moan.
Mara reached the ditch, slid down, then tried to hoist Kieu onto her back so she could carry him into the jungle, where they’d be less of a target. But though Kieu was shorter and lighter than most men, and Mara was bigger and stronger than most women, she couldn’t get enough leverage to hoist him; she had to duck down and practically wrap him around her upper body before she had a good enough grip to move.
By then, the MiG had banked again. Mara felt the ground start to shake. She ran for a few more yards, then felt Kieu starting to slip. She tried to keep him on her back by going down to her knees, but she stumbled. Her right arm scraped hard against the rocks as she sprawled forward, but she still managed to keep the pilot on top of her.
The MiG passed, rising nearly straight up as it went. Mara pushed back to her feet and staggered a few yards, gaining momentum. The ditch opened into a shallow field on her left; Mara picked up speed as she ran through it, finally reaching the trees and safety.
She let Kieu down off her back slowly. He collapsed like a half-filled sack of potatoes.
“Don’t fuckin’ die on me,” she said, clawing at the back of his shirt to check his wounds.
Blood oozed from two spots. One was below his left shoulder, where it seemed to be just easing out, almost by osmosis. The other pulsed in a small rivulet on the left side of his neck.
Mara ripped his shirt off and wadded it against his neck, pushing as hard as she could.
“Come on, come on,” she told him. “Stop bleeding.”
Kieu groaned. She took that as a good sign. But when she tried slipping the shirt away a short time later, blood quickly began to ooze out.
Mara twisted her body around so she could apply pressure with her knee and free her hands temporarily. Then she pulled off the rest of Kieu’s shirt. She tied it around his neck as a bandage, applying what she hoped was enough pressure to stanch the flow, but not quite enough to choke him.
The bleeding slowed, and he continued to breathe, though the breaths were shallow. Mara shifted her position around, keeping pressure on the wound with her hand while taking her sat phone from her pocket.
DeBiase picked up as soon as the call went through.
“How are you, Mara?” he asked, his usual jaunty tone replaced by a somber seriousness that seemed almost foreign.
“I’m okay. My pilot was hit by shrapnel. We’re at Nam Det.”
“What kind of shape is your plane in — ”
“Pieces. A MiG caught us and destroyed it on the ground. Maybe he was mad that we got away.”
“What kind of MiG?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was a MiG,” confessed Mara. “Is that important?”
“It’s all right. Whatever details you can remember, that’s all right. If you can’t, it’s not a problem.”
DeBiase was gathering intelligence, thinking about the bulletins he was going to send back to the States — bulletins he might even be sending as they spoke.
She was just thinking of dumb little things, like saving her neck.
“Did he fire missiles?” DeBiase asked.
“No. Machine gun or a cannon.”
“Okay. How many planes?”
“One.”
“Usually they work in pairs.”
“I only saw one, Jess.”
“Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax.”
“Listen, Mara. I’ve been in difficult situations myself. I can tell you from experience — ”
Mara didn’t hear the rest of what DeBiase said, not because it was a lecture about staying calm that she didn’t particularly need right now, but because when she looked up in exasperation, she saw four cone-hatted Vietnamese villagers staring down at her from the embankment.
They didn’t answer. She tried thinking of the word for help, but couldn’t remember it.
“He’s hurt,” she said in English, gesturing to Kieu.
