Goin' for guns!'
'Two-three, Two-one! I've got the shot! Clear!'
'You've got it. Breaking left!'
'I'm on him! Splash one MiG!'
'Look at that sucker burn!'
Coyote circled right, scanning the ground below. The sudden appearance of the three Tomcats seemed to have scattered the Russian MiGs. 'Cat! Where are the bad guys?'
'On the run, Coyote. I think they've had enough!'
'Okay. Did you see where Tombstone landed?'
'Negative. Negative. There's too much smoke.'
'Okay. We'll circle back. Hang on.'
'Don't die on me, Sunshine!' Willis yelled, his voice raw. 'Damn it, don't die on me!'
A hole the size of his fist had been punched through the starboard side of the aircraft, just below the canopy and just behind Sunshine's ejection seat. Air screamed past the hole, and the Intruder shuddered heavily.
Something was wrong with his starboard control surfaces too. He couldn't see through the smashed canopy at Sunshine's side, but he suspected he'd taken some pretty bad damage to his right wing.
Bracing the stick between his knees, he turned in his seat, trying to find out where all the blood was coming from.
There. The front of Sunshine's flight suit and undergarment had been torn open just over her right breast. He could see the thumb-sized, ragged hole in her chest, centered in a patch of blood-smeared skin. The blood was frothing with bubbles.
The Intruder thumped hard and Willis had to turn away, concentrating for the moment on his flying. He was at a thousand feet now, well above the hills, on a roughly northeastern course, back toward the coast. With the aircraft stable again, he returned to his clumsy examination of his bombardier/navigator.
That hole in her chest was an exit wound. Something must have spit through her ejection seat and up into her right side. Pulling off his left glove, he reached around in front of her, probing her side. There it was, a hole as big around as his finger three inches below her right armpit. He felt broken ribs grate as he pushed against it. She groaned, then choked. He reached up and pulled her mask off. The oxygen would do her no good if she drowned in her own blood, and there was a lot of it on her face, leaking from her nose and mouth.
That bubbling blood in her chest wound meant her lung had been shot through ? which was obvious enough from the trajectory of the shrapnel. A sucking chest wound would collapse her lung in seconds, would kill her in minutes if he didn't plug it tight.
With a blood-slicked hand, he unzipped his flight suit's shoulder pocket, then fumbled for the pack of cigarettes inside. Quickly, he stripped off the cellophane wrapper, discarded the cigarettes, and tore the now- slippery cellophane in half. One half he pressed down across Sunshine's chest wound.
As she drew her next liquid, rasping breath, the cellophane almost disappeared into the hole, an air-tight seal that would stop her lung from collapsing.
Reaching over her again, he stuffed the remaining cellophane in the wound in her side, then pulled her upper arm tightly against her body to keep the makeshift bandage in place.
And there wasn't another damned thing he could do for her now, except get the wounded Intruder down as fast as possible. He could tell from the feel in the stick that they would never make it all the way back to the Jefferson… and Sunshine sure as hell wouldn't survive ejecting into the sea.
He needed something closer at hand.
Tombstone dangled beneath his chute, watching the snow-patched tundra rushing up toward his feet. He bent his knees, keeping his feet together…
… and then the ground swept up into him. He hit, oofed!… and rolled, coming up with a double armful of parachute risers, gathering in the chute with swift, pummeling strokes.
He looked up into a contrail-painted sky. He could see Tomboy's parachute. She was coming down half a mile to the west. To the east, vast clouds of smoke piled into the sky from the holocaust in the Polyamyy Inlet.
With his chute discarded, he gave his survival gear a quick check: first-aid kit, flares, SAR radio, knife, pistol. Many Navy flyers carried revolvers, but Tombstone had always favored the satisfying heft of the M-1911A1. The big.45 automatic was virtually a relic now, replaced years before as the Navy's standard-issue sidearm by the 9mm Beretta, but still carried by some personnel who felt that the Colt was more reliable.
Not that a pistol would do them a hell of a lot of good. They were almost certainly behind enemy lines. Tombstone had two seven-round magazines, one in the pistol, the other in a flight suit pocket. Fourteen shots…
against MVD troops or Naval Infantry with full-auto assault rifles. Still, it was something. Drawing and checking the weapon, he dragged the slide back, chambering a round, then flicked up the safety. 'Cocked and locked' now, he hurried toward Tomboy's chute.
'Okay, Navy. You're clear to land, south-to-north. There's only one runway so you shouldn't get lost.'
'Thanks, Marine,' Willis replied. 'Have a corpsman standing by. My B/N's pretty badly shot up.'
'That's a roger.'
It had been sheer luck that he'd found the place, a Russian airstrip on the coast overrun by the Marines a few hours earlier. They'd been using it as an advance base for their Harriers and Hornets, but they'd cleared it now as an emergency runway for the incoming Navy Intruder.
Sunshine groaned. The blood on her face was bright, bright red.
'Sunshine? Sunshine, you hear me?'
No response. Oh, God, don't let her die!
The vibration was getting worse, and he wasn't getting any response from his right-side flaps. When he flipped the landing-gear switch, he didn't get any response there either. Shit! His wheels were stuck up. He'd have to belly in.
The Marines were sending out a radio beacon for him to home on. He could see the airstrip now, a single runway on the brown tundra, next to a handful of buildings. Smoke stained the sky to the east. There was still fighting going on out there.
His altimeter was reading 650 now. The air controller had already told him that the base he was angling toward was at an altitude of 275 feet, so the ground was sweeping past his belly just 375 feet below. Easing back on the throttle, he kept the Intruder's nose high, balanced just ahead of a stall, dropping now at a thousand feet per minute… lower… lower…
The runway expanded in front of him with breath-taking speed. He tried the air brakes ? no good ? and the flaps again ? still nothing ? and cut the throttles back to nothing, and then he was over the runway and dropping like a stone. His tail struck first with a sound of rasping metal… and then the Intruder's keel struck tarmac, tortured steel and aluminum shrieking, and he was battling the controls, trying to keep sliding in a straight line, but his right wing was coming around anyway, and he was out of control, sliding, sliding, sliding down the runway as flames exploded behind him like the wake of a powerboat.
Stopped! With a final lurch, the Intruder halted, its nose tipped into a rubble-filled crater, smoke boiling away from the aircraft's engines.
He hit the canopy release, praying that it would work, and it did. Then he was fumbling with his own harness and with Sunshine's. The aircraft was on fire, and he had to get the two of them out!
'That's okay, Mac,' a gravel voice said beside him. Hands grasped his arms, pulling him from his seat. Fire extinguishers shooshed and hissed as Marines hosed down the flames. 'We'll get your buddy.'
'Get her out! Get her out! She's hurt bad!'
