2315 Hours
Aboard Spirit of Rio
"Here they come!" Walker's voice was tight with tension over the intercom. Rosemont barely paid attention, his eyes fixed on the instruments, the airspeed indicator that was wavering past 300 knots and the altimeter hovering somewhere around 500 feet barometric as they shot through the foothills of the Alps. He was in the zone now, a place he hadn't been since he lead his squadron back to their carrier over a pitch-dark Bismarck Sea, and before that off the African coast on his way to Cape Town. The charts he'd looked at before takeoff were bright in his mind, and with the radar out only the instincts and reflexes of a seasoned mail pilot kept him from spreading Spirit of Rio across the side of a mountain.
"What do we have, Guns?" It was almost like listening to someone else speaking in his voice, as he banked the plane around a hilltop and shot across the valley below.
"Two fighters, Skipper, coming in fast and high! Unknown type, something we haven't seen before. Too fast for Night Owls, too slow for Peregrines. My guess is some kind of day fighter working off a ground controller, but I dunno how they're getting us on radar."
"I do." Fujita laughed darkly. "The Snakes wanted to make sure the Swiss didn't make trouble while they Yoked Spain, so there are Watchtower sets all up along the Alps. Closer we get to the border, the better return they're going to have on us."
"Bloody marvelous. Were you going to tell us about this then, Fuji?"
"Only if it came up. It's not as if we can do anything about it."
"Point." Rosemont nudged the Spirit's control yoke to the left, dipping the wing and curving them neatly around a mountain peak jutting up out of the dark Earth. "How long, Walker?"
"Starting their runs now. Any fancy pilot tricks, Skipper?"
"Sorry, Jimmie." Rosemont pulled them up and along an upward slope, narrowly dodging the snow-capped crest. "I think missing the ground is about all I can manage right now."
"Ah well. Cheers." As Walker scanned the sky through the back of the Spirit's canopy, he saw a pair of brilliant white lights snap on above them, then swoop down in deep power dives like angry ghosts. He pushed down on the butterfly grip and tried to center the leader in his ring sight, sqeezing grips and sending a stream of 20mm shells into the night. The Draka fighter showed no response, and he cursed under his breath. Both tried to pull into position behind the Spirit, but there was something wrong with the leader's controls- while the wingman pulled out without a problem he only managed to pull from a deep dive into a shallow one. There was no time to react or compensate at the altitudes the Spirit was flying at, and the Draka Falcon fighter disintegrated into a fiery mess as it plowed into the Italian countryside at nearly four hundred knots.
Jimmie Walker stared at the sight- only for a moment, but it was a moment he and his crew no longer had. Before he could slew the sight around to aim the turret at the other Snake it was already closing for the attack, malevolent orange light winking from its guns.
In the cockpit, Rosemont felt the Spirit shudder under the impacts, felt the yoke go mushy in his hands and the pedals go slack as his elevators and rudder were shot away. The Spirit shot out over an ancient pine forest and into the clear, moonlight reflecting off the vast expanse of water that was suddenly below them. Even as he mentally cursed the lack of cover Rosemont recognized its long, winding shape from the maps he'd studied in Reprisal's intelligence center what seemed a lifetime ago. Lago Maggiore, nestled among the Alps and running north into Switzerland.
The Draka Falcon came in again, its tracers lashing in Rosemont's peripheral vision and stitching across their right wing. Spirit of Rio staggered, airspeed indicator dipping as the engine nacelle disintegrated into a pile of whirling metal fragments. Instinct slammed the throttle for the other engine forward until it screamed protest, fighting to hold the crippled plane in the air as Rosemont pulled up into a climb. Maybe, just maybe he could get enough altitude to glide them to the other shore. The Falcon shot past, crossing in front of the nose and looping easily up and over for another firing run. This time it was head on, the Falcon's prop coming straight at him out of the darkness. Brilliant white sparks danced across the nose in front of Rosemont's eyes, a machine gun bullet starring the glass in front of his eyes and whizzing past his shoulder.
He could see the northern shoreline now- visible mainly as a black void without any reflected moonlight to mark its surface. It rushed closer as the Spirit forged forwards, air rushing in through the bullet hole in the canopy with a mad, piping whistle that seemed to merge with the strained scream of the last Allison. Safety was achingly near, almost close enough to vanish under the nose and sweep under them, but the Draka Falcon was bending around again, coming in for what would surely be the final pass. No orange sparks reaching back in the rearview mirrors- Walker wasn't firing. The Spirit shuddered as tracers began to strike home.
The eye saw. The hands and feet reacted, before the mind could form the intent. With her last bit of power the Spirit of Rio snapped up into a half barrel roll, inverting and barely clearing the crest of the ridge that had appeared out of the night. The Falcon tried to follow, but all the agoge trained reflexes in the world didn't match a veteran's pilot touch, the feeling in his spine for just how much his mount could take. The pursuing machine slammed into the hilltop, scattering itself across the landscape in a smoking ruin. There was no fire. No explosion. No marker for what was perhaps the ultimate grave of the Draka.
There was no time to celebrate for Julius Rosemont. The last strain had sent the temperature gauges of his last remaining engine far past their red lines, and already he could see the red glow of fire starting to lick from the outside of the nacelle. He shoved the yoke over, using the last power he could wring from the faithful Spirit to get her right side up. He mashed the button down and screamed into the intercom, hoping it wasn't shot away or blanked out by the mad piping that filled his cockpit.
"Eject, eject, eject!" An eternal moment, and then the glass nose in front of him shattered, a bright yellow flash, and a pair of steel rails were sticking up in his vision. Fujita's, guiding his seat up and clear of the Revenant's high tail.
The nose began to dip, and Rosemont could feel the Spirit edging towards a stall from which she would never recover. He yanked his oxygen hose and interphone cords clear, straightened his spine, and pulled the yellow-striped handle between his legs.
There was an almighty bang, and a giant slapped him open-palmed across the face. When he opened his eyes again it was because he had fallen out of his seat, and his parachute had jerked him from a terminal-velocity fall to a gentle, floating descent. Below him he could see the yellow-orange streamer of flame from the Spirit of Rio's left engine, falling away into the blackness until it struck the ground and sent a last fireball up into the night.
Rosemont fell through the blackness, unable to see anything but a few vague shapes by the light of the moon and the burning wreck of his plane. When he did see the ground it was almost too late, but he managed a decent tuck-and-roll the way he'd learned a lifetime ago in survival school. His parachute caught the wind and threatened to drag him against a tree at the edge of the clearing where he'd come down, until his fingers found the Koch fittings on his chest and released them. Freed, the parachute's white sheet climbed away into the night sky, circling once in the wind before it was gone.
Rosemont laid on his back and groaned out loud. His whole body ached, his spine felt like it had been played like an accordion, and somebody inside his skull was pounding on it with a sledgehammer. It was a long minute before he managed to draw a decent deep breath, and another before he sat up. A twig snapped in the woods, then another, and Rosemont wheeled around, stumbling to his feet as he fumbled for his revolver. Just as he got it out and managed to raise it in one shaking hand, he could see a human figure at the edge of the treeline, holding a pistol on him. Rosemont's eyes were wide, his heart pounding. In the haze of adrenaline and pain pounding through his head, nothing seemed impossible. An ex-SS partisan band. Draka deep reconnaissance patrol.
The figure took a step forward limping a bit on one leg, and Rosemont looked into Kenichi Fujita's face. For a moment they just stood there, gaping, holding their pistols on each other. Then Fujita started laughing, and Rosemont started too, and before they knew it they were embracing and laughing together, because they were alive, whole, back on solid ground, the task they'd set for themselves accomplished. When they moved on from that place, Rosemont's arm around Fujita's shoulder to help the man limp through the woods, they were still laughing- every time they trailed off, it seemed one of them would start again and get the other going. They crashed through the forest, heading for the firelight.
Spirit of Rio's wreck was only burning in a few places by the time they reached it. It lay in the middle of a newly made clearing, the trees around the edges fire-blackened and split from the explosion. One of the wings stuck out of the ground at a crazy angle, but other than that the only recognizable piece of the plane was the rear fuselage. And it was there that they found Jimmie Walker, eyes open and staring up at the sky, his throat ripped away in a bloody mess by a Draka machine gun bullet.
Rosemont stared down at Walker through a glassy pane of shock, a familiar black bile rising in his throat. This wasn't right. It had been his sin they were blotting out. Walker had never supported an alliance with the Draka, had never done all the other thousand things Rosemont hated himself so viciously for. It shouldn't be him lying there dead.
"It should have been me." He wasn't aware he had spoken aloud until Fujita said,
"But it wasn't. What now?" After a long moment, Rosemont knelt down and reached through the twisted remnants of the canopy frame. He took one of Walker's dog tags from around his neck, leaving the other one in place to identify the body. Reached up, and gently closed Walker's eyes. Some hidden impulse from childhood told him he should say something. He tried to recite the 23rd Psalm, but it wouldn't come out right- his head was still pounding and stuffed with cotton, and he kept mixing the phrases up after the bit about laying down in green pastures. After a while he gave up and just said,
"Goodbye, Jimmie. Thank you." Next to him, Fujita knelt down and reached into his flight suit, drawing out a still miraculously unbroken bottle- the sake they'd all shared the first night. He reached down and left it by Walker's side in the ejection seat, saying quietly,
"See you in Valhalla, Jimmie." Rosemont glanced over, and somehow Fujita managed a wan grin. "I'm sure they'll let me visit."
They were halfway down the mountain, two hours later, when a Swiss militia patrol found them.