Final Flight (46 page)

He could hear the chatter of the MiGo pilots over
the loudspeaker. One lone American F-14.
Qazi smiled wryly. It was probably Captain
Grafton. I should have killed him and done a better
job of destruction of the planes on the flight deck
of the United States. Ah well, it went as
Allah willed it. For all his professed piety
and bombast, El Hakim had never understood that
basic fact. A man must accept his fate; though
he can use every ounce of brains and cunning he has in
the interim, he must in the end submit.

Qazi squatted and looked aft, through the door
to the passenger module and beyond. Hard to believe this
flying leviathan could be torn to shreds.

He straightened and leaned against the bulkhead,
listening. The MiGs had the American fighter on
radar and were almost within range.

Perhaps, just perhaps.

Jake put the pipper on the 11-76 and
pulled the trigger. This would be a stern quartering
deflection shot, from the starboard side. The gun
spit a few shells, then went dead. Fuck! And
it’s not empty! Over a hundred rounds remaining
on the counter. Sonofabitch has jammed!

He lifted the nose and flashed across the top of the
transport. “The gun’s jammed,” he told
Toad. “Pull your harness as tight as you can stand
it.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means we’re going to ram the bastard.”

“Like fucking shit we are. I’ll eject first.
I’m not-“

“Oh yes you fucking an, Tarkington, you
asshole. We’re not blowing the canopy off until
we’ve killed this guy. There ain’t no other way.”

Jake was craning back over his right shoulder. He
popped some more chaff. He was about three miles
ahead now. He lowered the right wing and racked the
plane into a six-G turn.

“Jesus! You really mean it.”

“Yep.”

Toad struggled to talk above the G. “You’re one
crazy son of a bitch, Grafton.”

Jake had his head back. The Tomcat
was in a 90-degree angle of-bank turn and the
transport was straight overhead. He kept the
G on. “I hope you make it, Tarkington. Just
don’t pull the handle until after we hit.

Promise me”

“I’m behind you all the way, CAG,” Toad mumbled. They
were almost through the turn. The ECM was wailing. Those
MiGs were close. They’d be fools to risk a
missile shot this close to the transport.

“I don’t think you’re cut out for this business,
kid.” He rolled wings level and pulled the
throttles aft to about 80 percent RPM.

Inside the Ilyushin the crew heard the roar of the
fighter’s engines as it shot over them and watched it
depart toward their ten o’clock position. They cheered, then
watched in silent horror as the fighter began a
level turn toward their twelve o’clock. Now it was
coming back, head-on. The copilot was sobbing.
Qazi squatted behind the crew and looked forward through
the windscreen, waiting for the fighter’s cannon
to erupt. The Tomcat looked like a bird of prey
from this angle, closing, growing larger, its wings
waggling as the pilot adjusted his course, straight
for the Ilyushin’s cockpit. The pilot must be
Grafton.

Why doesn’t he shoot? Yet even as Qazi
wondered, he knew. Without thinking, he seized a
handhold and braced himself. His wrists were still cuffed
together.

Oh, too bad, too bad!

At first the transport was just there, in the great
empty blue sky in front of the F-14, fixed
in space. Then it grew visibly larger.

And larger. Now it filled the windscreen. At the
tilde t possible instant Grafton slammed the
left wing down and pulled.

The planes hit.

Jake’s head slammed against the starboard side
of the canopy and the Gs smashed him and threw him forward
and he lost his grip on stick and throttles.
Incredibly, the Gs increased. He was flung
forward and sideways and upward all at the same
time.

He fought for the lower ejection handle, between his legs,
but he couldn’t reach it. Even with his straps tight, the
G had pushed him up and forward away from the seat and
as the G tore at him, he couldn’t reach the lower
handle, which was closer than the upper handle. It had
to be back under him. If Toad would only pull
either of his ejection handles then both seats
would fire. He 11 saw red as the little veins in his
eyeballs burst and he screamed 1 through clenched
teeth to stay conscious and fought with superhuman strength
to reach the handle between his legs with his left hand while
he used his right to push himself backward toward the seat.

Then the cockpit disintegrated and he was slammed
by windblast, as if he had been hurled into a wall,
and his arms were flailing. The windblast subsided and the
G was gone.

He was falling, still attached to the seat, falling,
spinning slowly, unable to move. Through a reddish
haze he saw the sun 1 and the sea blink past,
changing positions over and over. It 1 seemed to go
on forever, this fall through space. An awareness that the
parachute had not deployed was there somewhere on the edge
of his consciousness.

Falling and slowly spinning, under a brilliant
sun toward the sea deep and blue, falling as the
Gods fell, falling, falling.

FROM HIS BED Toad Tarkington could see the
blue of the Mediterranean in the sun. The sea was
three blocks away. The hite sand beach was hidden
by buildings, but he knew the sand as there, waiting.
Maybe next week, after they put a walking cast
on this leg. He would borrow some crutches
and hobble to the beach even if it took all morning.

A breeze stirred the curtains. It was warm and
comfortable. Toad “put his head back on the pillow
and sighed.

He was bored. Ten days had passed since an
Israeli missile boat had plucked him from the
sea. Two operations on his right leg ago. A
lifetime ago. A former life, with its fears and
terrors fading, though too slowly. It had taken
two nights and a day for the boat to reach port. They
had kept him sedated. The second day in the
hospital, after he had fully recovered from the
effects of the anesthesia of the first operation, the Naval
Attache from the U.s. embassy had spent two
hours questioning him with a tape recorder running. The
attache had ordered Toad not to talk to any
reporters, had given him a handful of Israeli
money from his own pocket, and had shaken hands
as he left. Toad had seen no one but hospital
personnel since. Not a single reporter had wandered
by for a snubbing.

He had read his only magazine, a month-old
international edition of Time, three times cover
to cover. He picked it up and threw it across the
room.

He glared at the telephone on the
bedside table. It had not rung since he arrived.
And why should it? He had tried to call his folks in
Los Angeles, and when no one answered he
remembered they were on vacation. They had probably
gone to the mountains, and there was no use trying to reach
them because there was no phone in the cabin and he would have
to leave a message at that grocery store at the
crossroads. A message like that would upset his
mother-too ominous. No sense in alarming her. He was
alright and would get well and a letter describing his
adventures would be enough. She and Dad could read the
letter when they got back to L.a.

Still, it would be nice to talk to someone, to hear a
voice from the real world.

Under the telephone was a telephone book. No
listing for Judith Farrell. Or for J.
Farrell. Or for any Farrell or Ferrell or
Ferrel.

Of course not, Toad, my man, that was an
alias. He had searched the listings anyway. He
was damned tired of lying on his back. Twice a
day they sat him up, and occasionally they rolled him
over for a while. He was sick of it. His ass was
sore and his back was sore where the sheets
chaffed him and he was sick of this whole rotten
hospital gig.

When the nurse came he would see if she could
get him some western novels, maybe some Louis
L’Amour. Somebody in this corner of the world must read
cowboy stories.

He turned as much as he could and slapped the
pillows, trying to plump them. He cursed under his
breath. When he got himself rearranged, a woman was
standing in the doorway.

“Hello, Robert.” He gaped.

“May I come in?”

“Of course. Please.” He remembered
to smile. “How… ?” She sat in the only
chair, her hands on top of the purse in her lap,
her knees together. Her hair was different, fluffier.

“I was thinking about you,” he said at last.
“Wondering, you know.”

She was even more lovely than he remembered.

“I’m sorry about Captain Grafton,” she
said. Toad reached for the bed rails to steady himself.
Whenever he thought about it he remembered the Gs, the
violent slamming and the struggle to remain conscious as
he fought to reach the ejection handle, and he remembered
the terror. Holding the cold, smooth
aluminum bed rails helped. The sun was still shining
on the sea and the breeze was warm and soft and she was still
sitting there in front of the window with the breeze stirring
her hair.

“He was the best,” Toad said at last, seeing the
airliner fill the windscreen, feeling the
gut-ripping jerk as Jake Grafton slammed the
controls over and the fighter rolled and the transport’s
wing came straight at the cockpit in a blur,
veering at the last fraction of a second to impact the
fighter’s left wing. Grafton had prevented the
catastrophic head-on that would have instantly launched
both him and Toad into eternity. Grafton had
saved Toad’s life.

Toad had passed out in the cockpit as the
negative and longitudinal G-forces pooled
blood in his brain. How many Gs had there been? It
had started bad and gotten worse, as the shattered
fighter wound itself into a rolling spin. When he
recovered consciousness he was in the sea with his life
vest inflated. Perhaps Grafton had ejected them,
or the plane had broken up and his seat had fired
somehow. He would never know. His life vest had
inflated automatically when the CO2 cartridges
were immersed in salt water. After a
struggle that threatened to drown him, he successfully
got rid of the parachute and inflated the one-man
life raft from the seat pan. With the last of his strength
he dragged himself half into the raft. As far as he
could see, in all directions, the sea was empty.
He had been very sick from the motion of the raft and all
the sea water he had swallowed. The Israeli
missile boat picked him up in midafternoon and spent
the rest of the day searching. The boat had found a few
pieces of floating wreckage, but Toad was the
only survivor, eyes shot with blood and face
swollen and bruised black from the effect of the G,
with a badly broken leg. But alive.

The white was coming back to his eyes now, and the
swelling and splotches on his face were fading.
Eventually his leg would heal.

Maybe someday the nauseating panic when he
recalled those moments would fade. What would he do
with the life Jake Grafton had given him?

“There are so many questions,” Toad said. “Who are
you?” She rose from the chair and faced the window.
“We were after Colonel Qazi that night at the
Vittorio. We didn’t know what he was
planning, merely that he was there. But if we had
gotten him then, perhaps the… incident…

aboard your ship would not have taken place. Perhaps the
sailors who died would be still alive… Captain
Grafton… Callie not a widow.”

She turned back toward him, and he saw her
face again. It hadn’t changed. “So I came
to see you. You and Captain Grafton stopped
Qazi and El Hakim. Both were aboard that
Ilyushin transport you rammed. You succeeded where
we failed.”

“It’s a funny world,” Toad said softly because
he couldn’t think of anything else. She opened her
purse and removed a folded-up section of a
newspaper. She came over to the bed and handed it
to him, then retreated. He opened it. It was a
three-day-old front section of the New York
Times. There was a picture of the United States
under a banner headline. And the navy had released a
photo of Captain Grafton. He scanned the
stories. One of them announced that
Vice-Admiral Lewis, Commander U.s.
Sixth Fleet, had been relieved and had
submitted his retirement papers. The story contained
a verbatim transcript of a radio conversation between
Admiral Lewis and Captain Grafton that had
been recorded by a ham radio operator
in Clearwater, Florida, a retired railroad
engineer. Toad read the story carefully.

“So that’s why,” Toad murmured, still reading.
He finished the story and looked again at the
photograph of Jake Grafton, the nose, the
eyes, the unsmiling mouth, the ribbons on his chest.
Toad folded the newspaper and laid it on the table
beside the bed. He cleared his throat. “Thanks for
bringing this.”

She was seated again, on the front edge of the chair.
She nodded and slowly scanned the room, taking in
everything in turn. After another minute she stood.
“I still have your letter.”

He searched for something to say. “The doctors
tell me my leg’s going to be okay.”

She took a step toward the door.

“If you ever… maybe we… At least tell
me your real name. You won’t even call me
Toad. I won’t tell anyone. I need to know.”
She smiled britflely. “judith Farrell is
dead. Now I am someone else, with a new past and a
new future.”

“Not your new namle. Your real name.”

“My new name is real. It can’t be any other
way.” The smile was rozen.

“The name your parents gave you.

The smile disappeared and she twisted the strap of
her purse. he stepped over to the bed and leaned over.
“Hannah Finkletein.” Her lips brushed his
cheek. “Good-bye, Robert,” she hispered. He
listened to the fading sound of her heels clicking in the
corridor. He listened long after the sound was
completely one.

The sea was so blue, with flecks of light
reflecting off the swells. He watched it through his
tears.