Gunfighting in Autumn

"Gunfighter Five, say your state."

Paris ignored the radio chatter over the headphones in her white flight
helmet with Yankee pinstripes. Aircraft and air traffic controllers
hailed one another and exchanged information in sudden, powerful bursts
of VHF airwaves. The poor speakers in her helmet made it sound as if
she had her head between two hand-cranked Victorolas.

Sandman's cool, West Virginia drawl was unmistakable among the clutter.
"Gunfighter Five, state one plus four zero to splash. Ten miles south
of victor two zero four at angels one-eight. Visual contact with
Gunfighter Three, ready to engage."

"You ready back there, girlfriend?" he asked her over the
voice-activated intercom mike in his oxygen mask.

"Hell no."

"Great. Here we go."

In the aft ejection seat of F-14D Super Tomcat jet fighter, Paris tried
to ready herself, tightening her shoulder harness straps tight enough
for it to feel like someone digging their thumbs into her shoulders.
She gripped the stainless steel air combat handles on the radar unit
and held tight. Nothing inside the radar hood mattered. Instead she
stared directly ahead from behind a visor as dark as welding goggles
and bounced her helmet twice against the ejection seat headrest for
luck.

"Gunfighter Five and Three, clear to engage," the military air traffic
controller at Oceana told them over the radio.

Sandman keyed the transmitter key on his flight control column.
"Fight's on."

Eighteen thousand feet above the Virginia coast, the first turn hit
like they had been broadsided by a freight train. Paris' body shot to
the end of her seatbelt harness like a dog that had run to the end of
its leash. The Tomcat's variable sweep wings spread out as it turned to
block out the sun and leave her in a deep shadow, hanging upside-down
out over a thin gossamer of bulletproof glass above the swampy,
blue-green lowlands.

They passed the other Tomcat head-on, canopy to canopy, with only fifty
yards of separation, at a combined speed of thousand miles per hour.
Sandman and Paris both looked around the headrests of their ejection
seats to watch the other aircraft slingshot past the vertical tail
sections at the far end of the battleship gray fuselage with the
surface area of a tennis court.

"Wow, I think I can smell Vegas' perfume," Paris said. "Going high,
now."

"I thought that was jet fuel," Sandman sounded disappointed. He then
added, in a voice like an elevator operator closing the door, "Going
up."

The aircraft traded airspeed for altitude and curved up into a
vertical, weaving rolling scissors. Sandman crammed the throttle
quadrant full forward and lit all five stages of the afterburner on the
two giant General Electric engines, dumping raw kerosene into the
combustion chambers. The engine intakes on each side of the enclosed
cockpit inhaled the volume of air in a high school gymnasium in seconds
and the exhaust nozzles flared open to generate enough thrust for the
twenty ton aircraft to accelerate in a climb. As the plane defied
gravity in steep turns and climbs the air moving faster over the tops
of the wings expanded into white vapor clouds and vortices off the
wingtips. The wings rolled constantly to keep the other aircraft from
disappearing beneath the nose for even a split second. Lose sight, lose
the fight.

The light sky rotated with the dark earth, occasionally offering
glimpses of the coastline for Paris to orient herself. The constant
motion caused the water in her inner ear to begin sloshing around so
that even when the wings were level it felt as if they were still
spinning. Sandman did not use careful control inputs, every turn he
rolled the wings hard enough to where her helmet nearly clicked the
canopy glass. Every climb and turn explosively inflated air bladders in
her g-suit like blood pressure cuffs around her thighs and stomach to
force more blood to her upper body and brain to keep the g loads from
knocking her unconscious. At times Paris fancied she could feel her
skeleton groaning from having her slight frame carry the weight of a
grand piano. If she put her head down in a hard turn, the weight of her
flight helmet could break her neck.

The unimaginable in the seat of a passenger airliner was normal in an
F-14 during air combat maneuvers, but at some point the roller coaster
Paris was on was going to leave the tracks. All jets could easily
out-perform their human aircrews during close air combat. Getting the
advantage was a matter of being able to withstand more sustained
g-forces than an opponent before needing to ease off the rate of turn
to avoid temporary vision loss and unconsciousness. What military air
training manuals euphemistically refereed to as 'gravity induced loss
of consciousness'. An unimaginably dangerous situation in Navy combat
aircraft, which by tradition had flight controls for only one pilot. It
could leave a runaway aircraft accelerating to an airspeed that could
not be recovered from if the nose was below the horizon. From twenty
thousand feet a Tomcat at terminal velocity needed nine seconds to
impact the ground. What was no where near normal by any standards, was
the amount of g's that the man in the front seat of the F-14 with Paris
could withstand.

The Sandman call-sign was not given, as others were, it was stolen by the pilot who could remain conscious and able to deliver air-to-air weapons in high-g turns and
climbs that would incapacitate others. Combat pilots
were a competitive lot, but rivalry had ended at a Red Flag exercise at
Nellis Air Force Base when an Israeli fighter pilot trying to
outmaneuver Sandman ended his flying career with a separated retina. The ability was related to his height, at an even sixty-nine inches, his heart had less distance to pump blood to his brain against the centriptal forces of heavy G-loads than taller men. There was simply no other human being more at home in what Muhammad Ali called
the half-dream room.

The constant climbing and turning had depleted all of the momentum of
both Tomcats, even at full throttle, and they turned into a graceful
aerial pirouette. They avoided further turns, which would devour
precious remaining energy, hanging on until their airspeed bled away to
a trickle to avoid being the first to fall to earth and leave the other
the altitude advantage.

Sandman reckoned what Paris needed was to hear his Aw-sucky-darn,
mellow Appalachian voice that drove the girls so wild and struck such
fear into opponents over the air combat range frequency. The voice
every air traveler longs to hear over the cockpit intercom.

"Crossing angels forty-eight, now, down to three hundred knots. It's
gonna harden up here in a sec."

She laughed nervously. "Just don't take advantage of me if I go out
back here," Paris saw something and said immediately, "There they go.
Three o'clock, straight down, five miles out, moving fast."

Sandman seemed to not hear her. "Ain't that somethin'?"

"Something? What is it, Ace?" Paris attempted to see what he was
looking at in the forward cockpit. She saw only a glimpse of his red,
white and blue flight helmet with the paint scheme of Peter Fonda's
motorcycle helmet in Easy Rider.

The roller coaster had reached the top of its climb, but the bottom did
not drop out immediately. Sandman had pointed the nose into the
westerly jet stream at that great altitude that Transatlantic
commercial airliners took advantage of to conserve fuel. With the
variable sweep wings spread fully, it was enough to hold them like a
kite fluttering on an ocean breeze.

Paris wondered why the ride had stopped. "Bad guys are getting
away."

She checked the gauge to her oxygen system. They were as dependent on
the oxygen masks as deep-sea divers. The altimeter hands rolled to a
stop at 50,000 feet and she eyed the canopy seal suspiciously. The
seals rarely failed entirely, but they did spring leaks, and it would
require a succession of big gulps, like pretending to swallow golf
balls to keep her ears clear.

Looking to her right, she was drawn past the starboard wingtip to what
had captured Sandman's attention. As they hung suspended far above
Earth's warm, fuzzy troposphere she could see the width of the inlet of
Chesapeake Bay between the mainland and Delmarva Peninsula, north into
Maryland.

Off the rear quarter, she looked out over endless blue expanse of
ocean, stitched with an electric web of cresting waves and different
hues of blue and green from swarms of microscopic marine life on the
surface. Not the view from a machine as heavy as a tractor-trailer as
it sat on the concrete apron at the Naval Air Station at Norfolk, but
the view from an eavesdropping starship. It had been a muggy
seventy-five degrees and the runways had been on fire with invisible
flames of Southern spring mirages, but nine miles up, the fighter
plane's outside air temperature gauge indicated sixty below.

Checking south, she could follow Virginia Beach turning into the
endless, narrow sandbars of the intricate North Carolina coast to Cape
Hatteras. The long, hooked cape was beaten by white breaking surf blown
by high winds that had earned it the title of graveyard of the
Atlantic. Winds that Orville and Wilbur Wright had taken flight on
exactly one hundred years earlier.

"Um. The fight is down there, Ace," Paris reminded Sandman, meekly.
"You okay? Oxygen flow okay?"

"Never better," he sounded distracted. As the aircraft began to
involuntarily nose over he finally said, "Okay, hang on there, partner.
Here we go."

"Oh, joy," she muttered. "Just don't forget I'm back here,
right?"

She gasped with surprise as the nose went over and her stomach and
internal organs floated up urgently against her diaphram. Adding to the
giddy feeling of the free fall, she was surprised to feel the rumble of
the five-stage afterburner being lit for the straight down descent. The
back of the seat gave her a hard kick in the pants as they started down
like being shot out of a cannon.

"What are we doing?" she asked, uneasily. She pushed against the air
combat handles to hold herself away from the ground that was filling
the canopy. The roller coaster was losing its traction. "Watch your
speed. Watch your speed. Careful, careful, careful."

The parachute seat pan that she was sitting on was as hard as a school
desk chair with a doormat for a pad. A thicker pad would give the
ejection seat all the running start it needed to shatter all of her
vertebrae on the way out if the explosive charges were ever fired. The
first slight nudge of the control column to pull up, multiplied by
their enormous speed, hit Paris as if her seat had been dropped from a
two-story building.
The air bladders inflated and constricted around her stomach like
someone giving her the Heimlich maneuver and she began to suck at her
mask in short, fierce puffs, trying to keep the blood pumping upstream
to her brain. Sandman let the nose down a few times to help her keep
blood moving and the seat came down again and again and again.

Her vision was narrowing, but she could clearly make out flickering
white clouds of vapor enveloping the canopy. She had never experienced
vapor forming so far forward and she panicked. The pressure she was
under was too violent to be anything except horribly wrong. Her first
thought was that the excessive speed had torn off a control surface and
they were having catastrophic mechanical failure.

The ejection handle ring nestled between her thighs was useless. They
had long since passed airspeeds where humans had survived ejection.
Invisible people were jumping on her wrists to get her to let go of the
air combat handles, but if she did they would fall paralyzed and be at
the mercy of being broken flailing around the cockpit.

Paris began to slip beneath the shroud of white vapor. She could not
expand her rib cage any longer to snort air or flex her stomach muscles
to keep the blood flowing through the large arteries in her neck. She
could no longer breathe at all. The oxygen mask had become a piece of
cellophane.

"Gunfighter Five, get your nose down, no delay," Paris vaguely heard an urgent
female voice over the headset. Vegas sounded like she was watching an
air crash. "That's enough, Five, you are coming way too hard. Five,
comply now."

Paris then vaguely heard another voice. A voice under incredible strain
but entirely devoid of fear with a familiar twang.
"Mach...two...point...four...passing...angels...one...two...howdy...Vegas."

The roller coaster retreated backwards into a dark tunnel and Paris
became uncontrollably sleepy. Terror and embarrassment swept over her,
like she had caught herself nodding off while driving. Then the roller
coaster smoothed out for her and she slipped off into oblivion. Her
helmet wobbled around and fell pinned against the headrest. Her hands
in the Nomex gloves went to her lap with the palms slightly up, exactly
as if she had nodded off in a college lecture hall after a monotonous,
boring lecture.

With a supersonic pop! Bishop connected with a precision towel strike
on DeBartolo's ass beneath her olive drab flight coveralls. He called
out loudly, "Fox One!"

She yelped and whirled, snapping wildly, but he had already leapt back
and gotten the locker room bench between them. She retreated quickly,
hopping to fight off the pain.

Bishop was defending the male officer's locker room against three
female intruders while wearing only a towel wrapped around the waist of
his narrow, surfer build and rubber shower shoes. Even in his thirties
he had not quite filled in yet, and kept the nearly feline athleticism
and lack of body hair of his youth.

Vegas stepped up quickly to cover DeBartolo's retreat. Vegas had tall,
Southern California cheerleader good looks with her flight coveralls
unzipped to her navel to show the red turtleneck that air crews of the
squadron wore to show unit integrity, only hers had been cut off at her
ribcage to show her smooth, slender midsection. She moved her shoulders
with a sensual, Cobra-like rhythm, waiting for Bishop to be the
instrument of his own destruction by attacking her. Her peroxide blond
hair was pulled into a tight French braid behind her head and smashed
flat from the flight helmet so that she looked like a flapper from the
Roaring '20s.

Pom Pom had been caught half of the way into her dress blue uniform by
the call to action. She was barefoot in her black skirt. The sparkling
white blouse that would go under her uniform jacket was unbuttoned to
show a peppermint striped bra that held breasts that had earned her the
call sign.

She disregarded the prohibition against hitting above the waist in
towel fights and looked for an opening on any bare skin. She tried to
rattle him. "That all you got, pretty boy?"

"Bitch," he said, incredulously, completely unaffected by the odds. "I
got one for you, too."

DeBartolo unzipped her flight coveralls as if they were on fire
stripped them down around her red turtleneck to her thighs, pivoting to
see behind herself. Her butt was light from the winter without the
beach and sliced with a white thong. She had a red spot the size of a 
silver dollar almost exactly in the center of the right cheek.

"You big meanie." She was fighting back tears. "You whooped my
whoopee."

Paris pushed open the doors into the men's locker room from the female
side. She had gotten rid of her helmet and oxygen mask at the parachute
rigger's shop, but still wore her g-suit, trailing its umbilical that
had connected it to the air system inside the Tomcat and the combined
survival vest and life preserver over her flight coveralls. She winced
at the sight of DeBartolo's wounded rear end and dropped down heavily
onto the bench near her. She stretched her narrow arms, checking
herself for soreness and damage as if she had just walked away from a
savage car wreck.

Vegas saw her out of the corner of her eye. "Aw, poor baby, you cranky
after your little nap?"

Paris glared at Vegas, disappointed. "Why did you guys have to piss him
off like that?"

"Sorry," Vegas snickered. "But, you're not the first girl to climb out
of his back seat looking like that."

Bishop laughed. "We were just trying to give you an idea of what you
were in