2034: A Novel of the Next World War(82)

At five miles out he could see traffic on the roads.

At three miles he could see the waves breaking on the beach.

At two miles the individual windows in the skyscrapers winked at him as they caught the sun—

Then he rocketed his stick, hard back.

The Gs pressed on his chest like an enormous hand. Pinpricks of light did their familiar Tinker Bell dance in his vision. Had anyone been listening, they would’ve heard his grunts, which were like a tennis player hitting from the baseline. A long stream of tracer fire arched toward him from the shore as he careened above Shanghai. Wedge rolled his plane belly skyward. With his cockpit hung toward the ground, he glimpsed two wispy missile launches, whirling upward toward his head. He deployed the last of his chaff and flares, dumping the white-hot magnesium beneath him and hoping it would be enough to confuse the missiles.

His altimeter orbited past three thousand feet.

Behind him, the pair of Indian Sukhois now appeared. He’d flown low enough and fast enough that they couldn’t have tracked him. They must’ve figured he was heading here.

His altimeter passed four thousand feet.

The Chinese systems didn’t distinguish between him and the Indian pilots. All three of them corkscrewed and juked through the antiaircraft fire that chewed up the sky while their engines, with a dismal rumble, forced them ever higher. Wedge struggled to reach his drop altitude of ten thousand feet while the Sukhois kept up the pressure, slotting into position on his tail. Any second they’d take their shot. Wedge knew he needed to deal with the Sukhois if he was ever going to get up to altitude.

He barreled right.

We’ll decide it here, he thought, at five thousand feet.

Beneath the three aircraft, the city was lit up, spitting tracers in every direction. When Wedge had barreled right, the Sukhois had barreled left. The two sets of aircraft traveled in opposite directions along the circumference of a shared circle whose miles-long diameter was nearly the size of Shanghai itself. Wedge couldn’t help but admire the Indian pilots, who had made an astute tactical move. By giving up their position on his tail they’d each be able to make a head-on pass, leveraging their two-to-one advantage.

Wedge made his orbit around the city and prepared to meet the pilots somewhere along that path. They would come at each other like jousting horsemen of another era—lances down, forward in their saddles, the issue decided in a blink. Events were playing out in seconds and in fractions of seconds. This is it, Wedge thought—the it he’d been chasing for the entirety of his life. He was ready. His thoughts returned to his family, to that lineage of pilots from whom he’d descended. He could feel his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, their presence so close it was as if they were flying off his wing. A certainty possessed him: the advantage in numbers wasn’t with the two assholes in the Sukhois but with him, Wedge.

Odds are four to two, motherfuckers, he thought—and almost said it aloud.

He locked onto the first Sukhoi, releasing a sidewinder from his wingtip, while simultaneously firing an exhalation’s worth of rounds from his cannon. The Sukhoi did the exact same to him, so that their air-to-air missiles passed one another in mid-flight. However, the first Sukhoi had made a mistake. When Wedge diverted toward the second aircraft, so, too, had the sidewinder fired by the first. Wedge was out of chaff and flares to confuse the sidewinder, but if he could bring it in close enough to the second Sukhoi, that might disorient it.

The second Sukhoi observed the threat of the incoming sidewinder.

From its fuselage, it deployed chaff and flare.

Wedge could see the sidewinder spiraling toward him as he rushed closer to the second Sukhoi, like a three-way game of chicken. Then the sidewinder dipped on its axis, following a burning piece of chaff. Simultaneously, both Wedge and the second Sukhoi released bursts from their cannon. When the two passed one another, there was a sound like a limb snapping off a tree. . . .

. . . Blue sky everywhere, it turns to black, then rushes back to blue.

The wind on Wedge’s face.

When he bolted awake, the stick had flopped out of his right hand. Wedge grabbed it, snatching back control of his Hornet. Checking his instruments, he hadn’t lost much altitude. He couldn’t have been unconscious for long, maybe a second, like an extended blink. A puddle was growing beneath his legs. He touched his right thigh and could feel a protrusion. A piece of steel—likely from the fuselage—had embedded below his hip. Two thumb-sized holes—around thirty millimeters, a little larger than his own cannon—had pierced the front-left and back-right of his cockpit, hence the wind on his face.

He glanced behind him, to where the second Sukhoi would’ve passed. He found it easily, a brackish trail of smoke heaving from one of its engines. In the same direction, a little farther on, an oil-black smoke cloud lingered in the otherwise perfectly clear sky. This could only be one thing—the other Sukhoi. His sidewinder must have found its mark. He’d tallied his first-ever air-to-air victory. He felt dizzy, which might have been loss of blood and might have been his body’s response to the thrill of this achievement.

Wedge now needed to climb to ten thousand feet. He still had his payload to deliver. Then he would figure out how to get home, or at least how to get far enough out to sea to bail out. Slowly, he climbed. His left rudder was shot out, making the plane skittish in its ascent and hard to control. Neither of his engines were at thrust capacity; the pair of them were bleeding fuel. Whatever damage he’d done to the second Sukhoi, it had done about the same to him. And as he climbed, that stubborn second pilot slotted in behind him, giving a limp chase.