The Fly Boys (34 page)

The commie troops had formed defensive groups around the surviving trucks and tanks and were now steadfastly holding their
positions. As Steve looked down at the massed soldiers, a glittering orange winking like that of fireflies flickered in his
eyes.

Rifles and submachine guns
, Steve thought grimly.

You had to give the Reds credit. Their side definitely had its share of heroes. Not even the Japs in the last war had been
so fanatical.

Steve centered his guns on the clustered enemy and thumbed his trigger. A heavy rain of fiery lead peppered the soldiers as
they crumpled away, some of the bodies rolled down the bank into the river.

“God, I hate it when they just stand there and take it like that,” DeAngelo said weakly as the soldiers went down beneath
Steve’s chattering guns.

“I hear you,” Steve said.

“What kind of political system is it that makes them into human ants like that?”

Steve fired a salvo of rockets at a tank. His Shooting Star shuddered as the HVARs tore loose. Their own engines lit at the
very moment their target opened up with its cannon and machine guns. Steve watched his rockets seem to cage the tank with
smoky contrails and then explode. As he whipped past, he glimpsed a sudden, fifth explosion, one that sent a column of fire
reaching up into the sky.

“How’d I do?” he demanded as he climbed out of the valley and veered to starboard, crossing the river. “I must have hit something?”

“I’ll say!” DeAngelo cried. “You cracked him open like he was a bug!”

“All right!” Steve laughed as he came around in a starboard circle. “Your turn, Mike. Go to it!”

As he flew back along the river in the opposite direction, he watched DeAngelo begin his attack dive. Suddenly the two remaining
machine-gun nests sparked to life, effectively broadsiding DeAngelo’s jet.

“I’m taking hits!” DeAngelo called.

Fuck
, Steve thought. “Bugs Three! Where are you?” he demanded savagely.

“I’m on my way—” Brady began.

“Negative!” Steve ordered. “You should have been here! Now there’s no time! You hang back, Bugs Three.”

“Wilco,” Brady replied, sounding affronted.

“Mike!” Steve called as he flung his jet back across the river toward the machine-gun nests. “I’m coming in to fly cover for
you.”

The diving turn was sharp. Increased gravity tore at him. Steve was on the verge of blacking out, but the bladders sewn into
his G-suit mercilessly squeezed his thighs and abdomen, forcing the blood back up into his torso and brain. He got one of
the commie gun emplacements in his sights and opened up with his nose guns, pelting it, and then veered to get the other.
The nest had moved off DeAngelo and was now firing at Steve in an attempt to defend itself from his attack.

By now Steve was too close to the slopes to use his fixed-mount nose guns. The hills were looming up at him, which meant that
he had to get his nose
up
if he was going to clear the crest.

As he streaked past the gun emplacement, he impulsively fired off an HVAR, and had time to glimpse the smoking rocket corkscrew
to earth. The HVAR exploded about fifty feet above the machine-gun nest, burying it in an avalanche of debris.

“Great shooting!” crowed Brady, who was just beginning his second run.

Steve gritted his teeth against the increased G’s as he wrenched his F-80 out of its dive and climbed, desperate to clear
the valley. The G-suit was tightening around him like a vise as he was flattened against the back of his seat. He could hear
the engine screaming as his Shooting Star struggled to regain that high perch in the sky for which it had been born.

Steve looked down through the side window of his canopy as his plane scraped past the ridge with less than a hundred feet
to spare. Below him he saw a single commie soldier draped in that quilted uniform that they wore, standing at the top of the
slope. The commie, his rifle in the crook of his arm, was staring back at Steve. The soldier looked close enough to touch.
The Red was likely feeling the scalding buffeting of the Shooting Star’s exhaust.

As Steve stared down, time seemed to stand still. The shrill roar of the F-80’s engine receded. The smoke and fire from the
valley floor dropped away. There was just Steve, strapped into the great six-ton silver bird that was struggling to find purchase
in the air.

And there was that lone communist foot soldier who was now shouldering his weapon.

Steve never actually saw the soldier shoot at him, but he felt those three ridiculously puny rifle rounds pelting his jet,
and by the third
plink!
the world rushed back with a vengeance. A trembling ran through the aircraft like a dog shaking off water. On the instrument
panel warning lights began flashing like rubies.

“Bugs Flight, this is Bugs Leader,” Steve began calmly as he left the ridge behind. “I’m hit. I’m hit.”

Whatever damage he had sustained seemed minor, so he immediately began to climb, to give himself as much sky as possible to
work with should things go radically wrong. He studied his instruments. Everything seemed normal, but his warning lights were
still on. He still had some rockets left, so he was tempted to make another run through the valley, but he decided against
it. It was more important to get his jet home in one piece than try to kill another tank.

“Brady, I’m on my way home,” Steve radioed. “You and Molloy stick around and take your final pass.”

“Wilco,” Brady replied.

“Major, what do you want me to do?” DeAngelo broke in.

“Keep me company on the way home, will you, Mike?”

“Wilco, I’ll chaperon,” DeAngelo said genially. “But I’m warning you now, I expect a kiss at the front door.”

“If I
get
to the front door,” Steve said as he streaked away from the valley on a course for home. “Japan seems a long way off at the
moment.”

“Do you think you need to bail out?” DeAngelo asked.

Steve studied his instruments. “Negative… plane seems to be responding all right. But I’ve got warning lights flashing all
over the place. I just don’t know….”

“Bugs One, this is Super Snooper,” Evans cut in. “Bugs One, come in please.”

“Snooper, this is Bugs One,” Steve replied, relaxing a little as his altimeter read twenty thousand feet. “Soupy, you still
around?”

“I’m on my way back to Cha-Cha,” the TCG pilot said. “Listen now, Bugs Leader. You don’t want to be ditching anyplace around
here. There’s a whole bunch of commie stragglers wandering around these parts, and they don’t know they’ve lost their war.
They get hold of you, Bugsy, they’re gonna cook themselves up some winged jackrabbit stew in one of their Mongolian hot pots.
You read me?”

“Affirmative,” Steve said as he leveled off at 25,000 feet. The North Koreans were not known for their kind and merciful treatment
of prisoners, and
especially
not pilots. “Some neighborhood you’ve got here, Evans.”

The TCG pilot’s deep, melodious laughter filled Steve’s helmet. “Bugsy, this ain’t nothing compared to where I grew up in
Philly….”

“Steve, I’m coming up behind you,” DeAngelo cut in. “Stay level and I’ll look you over.”

“Affirmative. My hydraulics and fuel readings seem okay,” Steve said, and laughed. “Good thing, too. I never would have lived
it down if some commie with a squirrel gun had salted my tail.”

“Steve, you sure your hydraulic pressure is reading okay?” DeAngelo asked, sounding concerned.

Steve felt his stomach clench.
Shit—shit—shit
— he thought. “What’s up, Mikey? What do you see?”

“You’re leaking something.”

“Hydraulic fluid?”

“Some sort of fluid,” DeAngelo replied vaguely. “Fuck, Major, they taught me how to fly’em, not fix’em—”

“That makes two of us,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you this much—this bird is going into the shop when we get back.”

At that moment, as if to perversely contradict him, Steve’s engine died. He felt the jet seem to stumble in flight like a
fly abruptly hindered by the sticky strands of a spider’s web.

“Christ! Steve!” DeAngelo suddenly shouted. “You’ve got a flameout!”

I kind of know that
, Steve thought. In the sudden, sickening silence there was only the mournful keening of the wind against his canopy, mixing
with his own harried breathing. The red lights of the instrument panel cast crimson reflections against Steve’s visor. The
warning lights glowed bale-fully, as if to say, “
we told you so
.”

With his engine out, his hydraulic boost had dropped, making his flight controls feel like they’d been soaked in molasses
and then dredged in sawdust. The jet’s forward glide speed would keep the engine’s turbine blades wind-milling at sufficient
speed to keep up hydraulic pressure, but Steve would have to keep his use of the controls to a minimum to avoid exhausting
the accumulator pressure supply.

“I’m attempting a relight,” Steve said, thinking that the windmilling engine should have evaporated the excess fuel by now.
He went through the relight procedure, but it didn’t work. He switched from his main fuel flow control system to the emergency
system and again went through the restart procedure, with no luck.

“Mike, I can’t relight her,” Steve complained. “Are you clear of me?”

“You bailing out?”

“Negative. I want to blow off my garbage—”

“I’m clear.”

Steve rechecked to make sure, then jettisoned the remaining HVARs and the external wingtip tanks. It hurt to see those custom-built
Misawas fall away, but since this bird had just turned into a glider, Steve wanted as little drag as possible, and extra fuel
weighing him down was the last thing he needed. He began shutting down the airplane’s unessential electrical components. The
engine would not windmill enough to provide adequate output to the generator. Whatever electrics he used would have to draw
power off the battery, which at best could last no more than ten minutes.

“Steve, you sure you don’t want to bail out?” DeAngelo asked nervously.

“Negative. You heard what Super Snooper said.”

“You sure as hell aren’t going to make it to Japan.”

“Affirmative,” Steve said briskly. There was no sense denying that he was going down someplace far from home. The question
was where?

He was now down to about 22,000 feet, and falling, but slowly. He patted himself on the back for having been smart enough
to get altitude when he’d had the chance. It also helped that there was no wind. At least the weather, if not luck, was running
his way.

“Hey, Steve!” DeAngelo exclaimed. “They’ve been working on the airfield at Taegu, preparing it for F-80s. Maybe the work’s
gone far enough along for you to set down there.”

“Negative. Taegu’s too far away. I’ve got maybe another twenty miles before this bird goes to ground.”

“If not Taegu, where?”

Steve hesitated. “I’m going to try to put her down at Cha-Cha.”
There
, he thought, exhaling a deep sigh of relief.
Saying it out loud was almost as hard as actually doing it
.

“Say again?” DeAngelo requested. “I don’t think I read you….”

Steve chuckled. “You heard me, all right. I’m landing at Cha-Cha.”

“Major,” DeAngelo began patiently, “Cha-Cha is an advance base. Strictly a prop-plane fly-by-night operation. You can’t set
an F-80 down in the boondocks.”

Steve glanced to starboard. DeAngelo had cut his own speed to fly at Steve’s side. Steve, looking out through his canopy,
could see Mike in his helmet, oxygen mask, and visor staring back at him.

“Since when does a lieutenant tell a major what he can do?” Steve joked.

“Steve, don’t be such a jerk.”

Steve smiled. “That’s ‘Don’t be such a jerk,
sir
.’ I happen to outrank you.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m older than you.”

“Got me there.”

“So you’d better start making some sense,” DeAngelo grumbled. “Before I decide to drop back and put an HVAR up that good-for-nothing
F-80’s ass pipe. That would get you to bail out whether you liked it or not!”

Steve waved to DeAngelo. “Have I ever told you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?”

“I’ve also got a few hundred rounds left in my guns,” DeAngelo said firmly. “Ought to be enough to chew off your tail.”

“Okay,okay,” Steve laughed in surrender. “Here’s my thinking. I still have control of the airplane, even if she is a glider.
That means I still have choices. So I’m choosing to stay with my airplane. If it turns out that I crash in an attempted landing,
at least it’ll be at my own hands. That’s one hell of a lot better way to go than being executed while I’m on my knees by
the commies, or even worse, being picked off by a sniper while I’m dangling helplessly in the air from my chute.”

“I read you, Major,” DeAngelo said quietly. “But you could also bail out once you’re
over
Cha-Cha. That way you won’t fall into enemy hands.”

But I could still be picked off by a sniper
, Steve thought. “You’re right, Mike. Maybe I will do that.”

“You’d
better
do that!” another voice cut in.

“Evans, is that you?” Steve demanded. “Where are you, Soupie?”

“A couple of miles from Cha-Cha.”

“Have you been monitoring the entire time?”

“Affirmative,” Evans replied.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Then you know my situation.”

“You better know
Cha-Cha’s
situation. What we have is a thirty-eight-hundred-foot clay and gravel runway.”

“Great….” Steve sighed. The F-80 was happy with a little over twice that. “Is it in good shape, at least?”

“If you like potholes,” Evans said.

“What the hell kind of operation do you TCG boys run?” Steve complained.

“The kind of operation we like. We got us a genuine cinder-block building, and some Quonsets, and some tarpaper shacks; we’ve
got us some jeeps and trucks, a first-rate radio-radar setup, a couple of T-6s, and a baker’s dozen of F-51 Mustangs equipped
to fly close support.”

“Personnel?” Steve asked.