Hammerhead

by Jason Andrew Bond

  As Jeffrey flipped and spun the gunship in the air, she lost track of which direction was up. G’s crushed her into the seat in three quick successions, and then her entire body cavity tickled as they went weightless. The seat straps hauled down on her shoulders, her head pressurized as blood rushed up, and her vision tinted red. The pulling sensation flicked in an instant to a brutal crush down into the seat. The tunnel came immediately to her vision and she thought she was going out, but the crushing went to floating weightlessness again and her vision returned. A less intense but still harsh press into the seat followed. She looked at Leif. He grinned at her.

  “What are you–,” she stopped, gritted her teeth, and let out a guttural sound as the G-s pushed her down. The pressure let off, and she said, “What are you grinning at?”

  “Are you kidding me? My entire childhood I’ve, oh man…” The crushing weight turned to weightlessness for a split second. “I’ve had to listen to stories about this guy’s flying and always thought it was built up.”

  “So now you get to experience it firsthand.”

  “This is amazing,” Leif said, and let out a whoop.

  “Yeah, great, but,” the G-s became severe and the tunnel returned. Stacy tensed every muscle in her body, trying to keep blood in her head and hold onto consciousness. The tunnel widened for a moment and then folded shut, rolling her into darkness. As before, she felt as though she were suspended in cotton. Calm. This time the electric blue came on slowly, but with brilliance, as if a xenon bulb had been rolled open across the sky. She found herself sitting on a field of dark-green grass, which squeaked like oily plastic under her hands. The grass ran off into rolling hills. That was all, just the electric sky and plastic grass.

  She touched her face and found smooth, healthy skin where the bandage had been. “I’m dreaming,” she said.

  “You all right?” a voice to her right asked, and she turned to find Leif sitting next to her. He had turned to stone, sitting like a Buddha under the sky. He said nothing more.

  Now the sky sparkled and swirled in deep burgundy spirals. She lay back on the vinyl grass and looked up at the sky and watched the burgundy turn into fractals.

  …

  Jeffrey ground his teeth trying to stay conscious. He locked his leg and torso muscles tight, and he wondered if the pilots bearing down on him had G-suits on. When he had been given the go by Stacy, he flipped the gunship over and turned east. The other Kiowas had come to weapons range as he hammered the throttle and pulled the ship above Mach 2.5, blasting the desert with a sonic boom. He flew out over the ranches to the Cuyamaca Mountains. He would have preferred steeper mountains, but these had enough to dip down into and make life hard for the pilots behind him.

  The three gunships turned, and he lost some ground as they tacked in on him, but he needed them close. Alarms went off as the gunships behind him painted him with their fire-control systems. The Kiowa’s countermeasures jammed the targeting and the missiles became useless.

  “Guns only, my friends,” Jeffrey said, and smiled. He welcomed the other pilots to his turf: close in dogfighting. No lobbing shots from the bleachers. He came low to the deck and dropped his speed subsonic as he lanced into the mountain valleys.

  The three gunships stayed above the peaks at first, trying to get a shot off at him from a safe distance. Tracers flicked past him, but the pilots could not gain the accuracy from that distance.

  “You’re going to have to come in after me and bloody your knuckles,” Jeffrey said, and slammed on his air brakes. This had the effect he had hoped for. Two of the pilots overshot him and began turning to re-engage. The one who had slowed in time to stay behind him had the fastest reaction time.

  So, you’re the best in the group.

  Jeffrey would put that pilot down first. He snapped the gunship left and right, threading through the shallow mountain valleys. He flew low now, pulling seven or more G-s at sixty years old with no G-suit. Through a few of the turns his vision lost color, but not a hint of tunnel yet. He still had the edge after all these years, but pushing this hard in mountain valleys put the Devil’s price on his head. If he bet wrong, pulled too many G’s and lost consciousness, they would all die.

  He felt his back spasming, and he thought perhaps his old body could not do enough to get them out. There was a time, decades before, when he could have briefly pulled over seventeen G-s with a suit. Now, nearly forty years later, his natural resistance to black out and the modifications the military had made to his vascular system and genes could only take him so far against twenty-five-year-old pilots in G-suits.

  The best pilot had dropped in behind him and tested his guns for range. Jeffrey kept his gunship moving like a pro boxer’s chin, weaving left and right and up and down. He would turn on his left wing and nose down to turn right; then he would spin 270 degrees and pull up. There was no firing solution for the other pilot. He was close enough now to do damage, so Jeffrey had to play it right. Years of dog fighting had left him with an immediate toolbox of creativity in flight maneuvers, and he blended movements together; smooth then jagged, steep then shallow, and the other pilot had no pattern to use for prediction.

  Jeffrey saw a mountain ridge ahead of him and headed straight at it, weaving and jigging the whole time. Every so often a tracer would flash by close. He imagined the other pilot laying down a coat of foul words as he tried to land even one round in the gunship. Jeffrey knew how the other pilot felt right now. Chasing a faster, stronger pilot was infuriating. When a pilot realized that, even with a dominant 6-o’clock position, the other pilot could not be taken, he or she had to try and read patterns to predict what was going to happen. When no patterns emerged, and if the pilot didn’t have enough experience at this level of dog fighting, he or she would become desperate. When a pattern finally did emerge, even if it was blatant bait, the pilot might jump at it. That’s what Jeffrey hoped for, and he had seldom been disappointed in a dog fight.

  As Jeffrey approached the wall of rock, he gave the pilot a beautiful pattern: left, then right, and then left again. The wall of rock loomed in his windscreen, and there appeared to be no room to turn right again. Seeing this, the other pilot committed fully to the left turn in an attempt to come high and close the distance. Then Jeffrey pulled right, feeling his body crush into the seat. He growled as he clamped his body down to keep as much blood in his head as he could. The side of the mountain came closer. The other pilot, now wider in the turn, should have let him go, but youth and aggression have heavy costs. The pilot turned right to follow. Jeffrey shifted his gunship farther right, down the mountain, taking more escape angle away.

  The wall of rock loomed, and Jeffrey’s vision began to tunnel. He yelled out as the tunnel gradually collapsed around his vision. He was just about through the turn, but the mountain still came closer. He dared not pull on the stick any harder. For a moment he was not quite sure if he was still conscious, and then he cleared the mountain and righted the ship down into a ravine. He gasped for breath, pushing oxygen deep into his lungs. His vision cleared. He looked at the proximity screen and found no ship behind him. He turned on a wingtip and the mountainside came into view, blanketed with fire, scraps of gunship still rolling into the valley.

  He hated to kill such a skilled pilot, but they were not letting off, so Jeffrey had to walk them right out the door. He turned the ship again. When he looked down the valley, he could not believe his luck. One of the gunships flew directly at him about mid-valley, probably looking for him. While Jeffrey had both the ship’s IFF transponders on his screen, they had nothing but visual contact. He flew deep into the valley, approximately 500 feet below the other Kiowa. That ship made no move to engage or evade. It just kept coming up the valley. Stupid to go that slow in a fight, Jeffrey thought. Fly fast and crazy and keep looking around. Don’t roll along, especially not high like that. But then again, that pilot was probably flying lower in a mountain valley than he ever had before and did not expect a ship to come up off the
rocks from below.

  Jeffrey did just that.

  As he approached the other gunship, he slammed on the airbrakes and fired the nose thrusters. His gunship came up about 60 degrees, and he balanced it on its rear thrusters. The computer vectored the thrust perfectly, and the gunship flew along nose up and belly out. Jeffrey opened up his guns, and–as the other ship flew over him–tracers lanced through it from nose to tail. At a distance of less than 400 feet, the armor piercing sabot rounds ripped all the way through the ship.

  Jeffrey slammed the throttle to its stops, and the gunship accelerated up ballistically. He pulled back on the throttle and inverted through the partial loop of a Half Cuban Eight, rolling the ship upright and leveling off behind the other gunship. A thick swath of black smoke rolled out of the gunship. It listed toward the left side of the valley. The canopy blew off, and the pilot’s and navigator’s seats shot up and away. Their chutes opened. The tail ramp opened, and soldiers jumped out. They fell toward the rocks, their chutes trailing like streamers behind them. Jeffrey willed the chutes to snap open, but the soldiers did not have enough altitude. One at a time, they hit the rocks. The rocks caught the ship’s wing, and the ship spun like a Frisbee back out into the valley, parts scattering. One last soldier flicked out of the back of the gunship. The soldier’s sideways angle allowed enough time for the chute to open. Just the kind of blind luck Jeffrey had seen so many times. The ship struck the valley floor, and a fireball swallowed it as Jeffrey pushed his throttle forward. He scanned his proximity screen, found the third gunship, and turned to intercept it, hopping over a ridge and into another valley.

  “Call them off,” he said through his teeth. “I just walked through two good pilots and killed maybe eight to sixteen more soldiers. You don’t need losses like this. Just call them home and figure out your next play.”

  But the other gunship continued its patrol of the mountains. Jeffrey came to a valley beside the other gunship, flying low and waiting, still hoping.

  “Call them off, you bastards,” he said. “See this for what it is.”

  The gunship turned into the next valley and kept a solid patrol pattern.

  “Goddammit,” Jeffrey said. He couldn’t wait forever. More ships were most likely on their way, and he had been lucky to survive three. Then he thought about the IFF transponder.

  Of course. I’m invisible to the other ship. Why the hell is that so hard to keep in my head?

  He waited for the ship to turn east, and then he turned west and broke the sound barrier deep down in the valley. On a ridge, he saw some hikers staring as the gunship ripped by.

  “Sorry,” Jeffrey said for the shockwave he knew he had slammed them with. He shot out the west end of the Cuyamaca Mountains and, in a few minutes, flashed over Del Mar and out over the Pacific Ocean.

  The flat of the ocean turned to a sheet of glinting light as it caught the high sun. Jeffrey came low over the water and pushed the gunship over Mach 2. He considered the fuel supply and the consumption and did a quick calculation in his head. They had more than enough to get to where he wanted to go, and beyond.

  From the troop area he heard Stacy ask in a quiet, pitiful voice, “What’s going on?”

  “Stacy,” Jeffrey said over his shoulder, “You have had one hell of a day, and you’re safe for now. Just rest and get some sleep. Leif, how are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m good,” Leif responded from the back, his voice thin, “Stacy seems better off than I feel, but I’ll make it.”

  Jeffrey heard the shuffle of a bag and then retching.

  Stacy said, “I definitely feel better than that.”

  “Okay, you both just rest then,” Jeffrey said. “We’re free from worry for now.”

  He heard the bag crumple, and Leif asked, “You going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Just rest,” Jeffrey said. “We’ll have all evening to talk, and honestly, I think we may even take another day before we move on. We need to be sharp for what’s coming.”

  “You have a plan?” Stacy asked.

  “I’d love to lie and tell you I did.”

  He turned the gunship north to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Then, after 300 miles he dropped the ship to 100 feet off the waves and turned south. It never hurt to be cautious. He ran for an hour at this altitude, as long as he could stand the concentration. When he felt exhaustion dulling his mind, he lifted the ship up to a safer 500 feet and flew on.

  CHAPTER 9

  After almost four hours at Mach 2, the gunship had covered over five thousand miles and burned most of its fuel. Jeffrey ground the heel of his palm into his left eye, yawning wide and slow as he scanned the ocean’s surface and the sensor screens for shipping and air traffic. He wanted to pilot well clear of anything to limit errant rumors of a Kiowa in the South Pacific Ocean.

  He heard someone settle into the seat behind him and, looking into the mirror, saw Leif.

  Leif looked around at the navigation instrumentation. “I’m rested, and you’re tired as hell. I wish I could help you fly this thing.” He scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “I’m okay. We’re almost there,” Jeffrey said.

  He heard Leif’s finger tapping on glass.

  “We better be,” Leif said. “You’re getting low on fuel.”

  “We’ll be fine, but not for long.”

  Out on the ocean, the pale, white rim and dark-green center of an island drew toward them. Jeffrey slowed as they came up on the island, tipped the gunship to the left, and circled the island looking out the window at what was not much more than a sand spit with an elongated palm and sandalwood forest in the center.

  “Too small,” he said, and aimed the ship at the next island on the horizon.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “We’re over the Tonga islands east of Fiji,” Jeffrey said. “There are well over 100 islands right here, and less than one-quarter are inhabited. It’s a great place to disappear.” The ship flew by the next island, but it was smaller than the first. Jeffrey did not slow.

  “What are you looking for?” Leif asked.

  “I need an island that’s big enough to hide the shape of this ship. Ideally, it would have a clearing among palm trees we could land in. I assume that this thing doesn’t have any form of active camouflage.”

  “None. No one has figured out how to generate a field large enough to camouflage anything bigger than a person. The power on the field is exponential, so the power requirements go far too high. To make something this big disappear you would need to park it next to a nuclear reactor and suck up all its electricity.”

  “That would surely be noticed,” Jeffrey said. He pointed to the left. “There we go. That’s nice.” They approached a much larger island with a worn volcanic outcropping. Jade-green vegetation draped the old slopes of the volcano. Dense palm trees grew at the foot of the volcano, and white beaches surrounded the forest. A crease on one side of the volcano formed a short valley. Underbrush broke up the sandy floor of the valley.

  Jeffrey circled the island once, looking for boats.

  “There’s no sign of any heart activity larger than a rat on the surface,” Leif said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jeffrey said. “You can scan for that?”

  “Yes. If you can get close enough, these ships can read the electrical activity in the heart.”

  “Did I fly close enough for an accurate scan?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  When Jeffrey circled back on the crease in the mountain, he nosed the ship right up to the cliff face and began descending. Ferns and rocks rose up around them, and the light in the cockpit shaded to greens as the ship set down beneath the surrounding palms. Jeffrey shut down the engines, unstrapped, and stood up out of the seat for the first time in some eight hours.

  Leif began to rise from his seat. Jeffrey shoved him back down, laughed, and said, “Out of the way, gotta go.”

  J
effrey squeezed out of the tight cockpit space and walked into the troop area where he found Stacy fast asleep. Her restraints held her sleeping in a position of perfect posture. Jeffrey reached down and pressed the button to release the pressure on her wrist straps. Then he walked to the back of the troop area and opened the ramp. The ramp hissed down, and bright light and the sound of ocean surf filled the cabin. He walked down the ramp and onto the white sand. He stepped between plants with waxy leaves and patches of white flowers. When he had walked some distance from the ship, he relieved himself. Then, instead of returning to the ship, he cut out under the palms toward the beach.

  The sun floated high in the western sky behind palm fronds, dappling Jeffrey with dancing patches of light. They had chased the sun across the Pacific Ocean. Despite eight hours since stealing the gunship in Nevada, it was still early afternoon here. The curve of the island formed a bay of translucent blue water. Far out toward the open ocean, a reef caught the surf. The sound of the waves crashing there slowed Jeffrey’s heartbeat.

  Jeffrey had no illusions as to why this had been the first place he thought to hide. The scent of saltwater mixed with palms and tropical underbrush returned Jeffrey to nearly forty years earlier when he had crash landed in the South Pacific. Flying at the edge of space, surrounded by the stars and the curving earth, enemy fire had punched holes in his main engine and right wing. His ship fell into the atmosphere. The wing, to his amazement, did not fall apart on re-entry, and he had just enough control surface left to glide. As he came down over the sparkling flatness of the Pacific Ocean, a small dot of an island materialized and curved up to meet him. He ejected and parachuted into the surf.