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910 rounds . . .

  He fired a fifth burst in time with “Die, Commie, die!” and watched the earlier shots hit, impacting in a narrow circle, spraying the tracks.

  790 . . . The round counter clicked away with each squeeze.

  Brrrrrrrrt!

  Huge chunks of wood and metal blasted free from the train, careening skyward. The rail yard glowed with orange starbursts from the hundreds of explosions as he closed inside of 3,000 feet, still hammering the trigger for controlled bursts. Every ounce of his physical and mental skills poured into the stick and rudder to keep the fire on target.

  Blasts of hatred, spitting forth from the bow end of his airplane onto the fleeing train.

  Some odd stray rounds and ricocheting shrapnel from the exploding shells slammed into parked cargo trains loaded with wood and grain. The cars ripped apart, their contents spilling out and igniting.

  Most of the rounds, however, raked down the length of the fleeing Russian train. Shank had been aiming for the six heavy-duty armored military engines plowing hard to pull the rest of the heavy cars through the town and to safety. The rounds fell short—Shank’s estimate of the train’s speed had been off—and the damage he did was farther back, along the open-backed cars.

  But this did nothing good for the Russians. One of his bursts slammed into a fuel car, and immediately the bulk fuel and oil detonated; smoke and fire and shrapnel erupted right in front of the Warthog’s windscreen.

  Shank was forced to pull up and away from the massive fireball that rolled skyward in a glowing mushroom cloud. It took all his upper-body strength to yank the heavy, lumbering craft into a tight turn to avoid flying right into the tumult.

  Damn it! he cursed to himself, because he knew instantly he’d have to make another pass to stop the train. He skimmed nap-of-the-earth over the city, flying between and below the tops of the tallest buildings, trying to place the big, disabled Warthog as far down into the streets of Jelenia Góra as he dared. His whining aircraft raced close enough to blast the snow off roofs, his wingtips just feet from the smokestacks that dotted the town.

  This was incredibly perilous flying, but he needed to keep the buildings between himself and the train or he would receive another salvo of missiles, right up his ass.

  He checked the mirror above him and saw the train in the distance to his rear, and was mollified that even though he hadn’t blown the damn thing off the rails, his first pass had done some serious damage. The last four cars were a smoke-belching conflagration. Fuel stores were incinerated in huge jets of fire that shot into the night sky. Spouts of flame shot out like blood gushing from the ripped artery of a wounded animal.

  The train continued to flee, increasing speed.

  In order to get behind the train, Shank had to pull hard right and circle around again toward its vulnerable back side. The last railcars burned out of control, and this gave Shank an idea. The billowing black smoke would obscure his approach from the rear, and the Russians wouldn’t be able to launch missiles through the burning fuel and launching debris.

  He pushed his damaged bird to its limit, tightening the turn radius to get back onto his killing course. Again he passed the church steeples and the old castle; soon he was back over the rail yard, now burning uncontrollably. The train raced along toward the open countryside, where it could again fire on him with impunity, and where the low skies were not filled with the buildings of the town that masked his approach.

  Lining up the gun, he positioned his HUD reticle much higher than before, acknowledging his earlier miscalculation and also the train’s increasing velocity. He couldn’t fully see the target in front of him through the roiling black smoke, but he knew by instinct where the engine and other cars lay along the tracks. He drew in a deep breath and then chanted again the fire-control saying.

  “Die, Commie, die!”

  640 rounds . . .

  Eight thousand feet distance.

  “Die, Commie, die!”

  520 rounds . . .

  Six thousand feet distance.

  “Die, Commie, die!”

  400 rounds . . .

  Four thousand feet.

  “Die, Comm—”

  A loud crack, crack, crack blasted him from his concentration, and he paused in his trigger pull. Machine-gun rounds tore into the belly and nose of his aircraft, slamming against the titanium bathtub built around the cockpit.

  Shank realized he should have assumed the Russians would have every gun on the train turned to the rear, firing wildly through the smoke. His approach angle and altitude had been so plainly obvious, he could have kicked himself for not thinking before flying himself into unnecessary danger.

  But he didn’t stop—he couldn’t stop: he had them now and he knew it.

  He pressed his gloved finger again, renewed his mantra: “Die, motherfuckers, die!”

  But brrrrrrrt had turned into thump, thump, thump.

  The GAU-8/A Gatling gun fired, but at a dramatically slower rate. He could hear an off, odd whine coming from the weapon below his left foot and a new unstable vibration throughout the cockpit.

  He realized his one weapon had been hit and damaged.

  He pulled the trigger anyway, letting loose a slow but steady stream of 30mm rounds. The gun counter was frozen at 370, but the weapon continued to pump out shells at a much-reduced rate.

  His master caution light began flashing; a quick glance at the warning panel showed fluid was dangerously low in not one but both of his redundant hydraulic systems. If he didn’t do something soon, the plane would be impossible to control.

  Without releasing the stick, he reached behind to his left side and, just by feel, threw a switch to “manual reversion,” then punched out the “master caution.” Like a car switching from automatic steering to manual, the plane was now controlled exclusively by mechanical connections from the stick to the control surfaces. It felt like a ton of bricks weighed down the stick when he tried to move it. His ability to make fine-tuned movements would be even further compromised, but at least he was still airborne and in the fight.

  He burst through the black smoke rising from the back of the burning train, skimming less than seventy-five feet above the roofs of the cars. He fired a constant, steady, but slow stream of rounds as he pulled back on the throttle to increase his brief time on target.

  He could see the damage now. Whole cars were ripped open from his earlier bursts; tanks, Bumerangs, and antiair batteries burned. He even saw troops on the cars, every weapon they possessed blazing wildly skyward in hopes of beating back his oppressive fire. He continued to pound them, the train’s engines now visible in front of his gunsights.

  “Die, motherfuckers, die!” he said, although he did not let up on the trigger at all. Even with the slow firing of the Gatling gun, he managed to dump explosive shells into the row of heavy engines.

  Dead ahead of him, all six engines high-order detonated, along with a car full of ammo, obviously tank rounds and 120mm mortars. The blast was so huge, he had to shove over his heavy stick to pull hard right so that the shrapnel wouldn’t tear him from the sky. He felt a wave of intense heat over him in the cockpit as he flew through the edge of the volcano-like eruption from the front of the train.

  The firing from below stopped immediately.

  He turned his even more disabled aircraft 180 degrees around, getting lower again in case some trooper with a shoulder-fired missile wanted to give him a good-bye kiss. Looking again in the mirror, he saw the front of the train was off the tracks; cars slid and crashed into one another and flipped and burned.

  Staying low, he flew to the west, concentrating on straight and level flight. He wasn’t shooting for his air base; he was vying for distance. The last thing he wanted was to eject anywhere near the exploding train.

  He hoped like hell he could find an airfield or even a flat, empty stretch of road so he
wouldn’t have to ditch his magnificent, wounded plane.

  With a shaky hand he patted the control panel and gauges like he was acknowledging a good dog that had just rescued its master from a fire.

  He had done it.

  She had done it.

  The man and the machine.

  * * *

  • • •

  CENTRAL POLAND

  28 DECEMBER

  Four minutes after taking out the train, Captain Ray Vance climbed to 5,000 feet, fighting his A-10 with all the strength in his arms. The damage was incredible. The sounds, the shakes, the lack of response from the controls . . . The thirty-four-year-old pilot had no idea how the hell he was still in the air.

  Suddenly he felt three hard jolts to his aircraft, and he knew he’d been hit by cannon fire. Both his seat and his stick shuddered and vibrated. He dropped the throttle back, slowing his wounded bird as quickly as he could, but with each passing second the flight characteristics deteriorated more and more.

  He wrestled with the 25,000-pound monster as he fought the jerking stick in his hand.

  He had no idea what had hit him, whether it was ground fire or a Russian aircraft up here in the dark sky, pursuing him from behind. He swiveled his head around to look behind him but couldn’t see any attacker.

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Another three blasts struck Shank’s Warthog, this time hitting the left side of the fuselage and the canopy just two feet in front of his face. Metal and glass ricocheted around the cockpit, slicing him across his left arm and right leg. One hot piece of shrapnel shattered his visor and struck him high on the left cheek.

  With the broken canopy, Shank was now exposed to the whipping, freezing winter air. Blood blew up from his cheek and into his eyes, all but blinding him.

  Shank had flown damaged aircraft multiple times in combat, but flying without a canopy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and blinded as the wind blew through his exposed cockpit were more than he’d ever imagined in his worst nightmares.

  And then his plane began to spin out of control.

  Working purely by the instincts gained from years of training, he reached beside his legs, his head thrashing around as he tried to see anything through the blood.

  Where is the motherfucking ejection lever? He could feel the negative g’s tossing him left and right as he tried blindly to grasp the controller that would punch him out of there.

  Thunk! Thunk!

  His aircraft was hit twice more, somewhere aft of his cockpit. There was definitely a Russian fighter up here, and the other pilot wasn’t going to quit until Shank’s A-10 cratered a smoking hole in some snow-covered field.

  “Shit!” His aircraft corkscrewed down; he could only guess at the altitude because he couldn’t see the gauges, but he was pretty sure that if he didn’t find a way to punch in the next few seconds, then he wouldn’t be ejecting at all. He caught himself starting to go into G-LOC, or gravity-induced loss of consciousness, and he grunted and flexed all the muscles in his body in an attempt to keep the blood in his brain so he could stay awake.

  He found the side of the ejector with his left hand, but the hand seemed to be going numb and was no longer functioning properly. His right hand released the stick and reached over, as he still tried to get a hand on the redundant left- and right-side ACES II ejection controls.

  “Eject! Eject!” he croaked, just to hear himself speak, to verify he was alive.

  Finally, his right hand wrapped around the angled metal of the ejection handle and he pulled hard. Nothing. He yanked again. Nothing again. “Punch! Punch!”

  He had grown too weak with the G-LOC.

  Wham! Wham! Shank took two more blasts against the belly of his A-10. He felt searing heat grow all around him, even with the shattered canopy.

  Christ almighty, I’m on fire!

  The A-10 now fell like a sack of bricks toward the earth.

  The enemy fighter continued pounding him mercilessly, and presumably would until he exploded into the ground.

  This Russian pilot wanted Shank to die. It was as simple as that.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled breathlessly through the clatter of metal ripping away from his once-perfect airship.

  With every fiber of his being, with all his remaining strength, Shank yanked the ejection lever with his one good hand, throwing his back and shoulder into the movement with all the power remaining in his body.

  He heard a loud bang and then a shock slammed his helmet back against the headrest. The rocket-assisted seat catapulted him out of the burning and spinning A-10, but as he was oriented upside down at the moment of ejection, he fired straight down at first before the onboard gyroscope righted the seat and he angled laterally, then launched upward on a plume of smoke.

  Soon he felt a pop and a whoosh and suddenly all was slow and calm.

  He began swinging gently. God knew how far he was from the ground, but he was under a canopy.

  Thank God, he thought.

  He assessed his wounds, feeling with his one good hand across his body. Both legs were there. He could feel blood on his chest and shoulders. He looked down at his left hand and saw it was there but bleeding. He was sure it had been broken somehow, but he wasn’t going to worry about it.

  His pain numbed in the frigid and still air as he drifted toward the earth. He lifted his right hand to wipe the blood off his face so he could see a little; in doing so, he felt his left eye swollen completely shut. Through his right eye he could see that the Nomex glove of his right hand was burned, but the hand itself seemed to be working properly.

  Now running on adrenaline alone, he looked around for his aircraft, found it, and watched it fall away from him in the darkness, slipping below his feet at a steep downward angle, burning a fiery streak earthward. Soon came a blast and a shock wave as the fire reached the A-10’s aviation fuel and the ship exploded while still dropping.

  In the distance, with his one good eye, he saw an aircraft. Then another. They were heading his way.

  He felt his consciousness slipping.

  He saw the first plane race past, narrowly missing him. He could see the silhouette of the pilot in the low light, a black helmet and shiny face visor staring back. His pain-addled brain understood in an instant from the aircraft’s profile that it was a Russian Su-57.

  But what stuck him the most as he fell into unconsciousness, wounded and spiraling downward in a damaged parachute, was the red eagle talon on the tail of the aircraft.

  Then his world went black.

  CHAPTER 61

  SOUTH-CENTRAL POLAND

  29 DECEMBER

  Forty-five minutes after the utter destruction of Red Blizzard 2, the wreckage continued to burn and smolder in the darkness, a long ribbon of stationary twisted metal, fire, and death that wound around desolate snowy farmland outside the Polish city of Jelenia Góra.

  Thick black smoke raged from windows and jagged holes in the aluminum-shelled train cars and rose into the early-morning sky, disappearing into impossibly low gray cloud cover.

  A column of Russian armor had appeared at the site just minutes after the attack, and by now it had arrayed itself in a defensive perimeter around what remained of the long train, their medium and heavy weapons all pointed skyward, ready to unleash a hail of gunfire if the Yankee aircraft returned. Troops had spilled out of the train, many wounded, and they joined their arriving compatriots, sought aid, picked through the wreckage for dead comrades, and smoked cigarettes uneasily, their weapons at the ready.

  The number of Russian vehicles increased even more when a company of Bumerangs arrived from the west. They pulled up to the command car and its back hatches began to open. A dozen armed men leapt from the vehicles and adopted their own security barrier; many more carrying shoulder-fired antiair weapons fanned out and peered into the night sky; and then a man emerged from the rear
of one of the armored vehicles.

  Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev climbed out in a crouch but quickly rose to his full height in order to survey the wreckage. He wore his heavy boot-length coat and a thick fur hat. He was surrounded by Colonel Smirnov and several other subordinates.

  He turned to Smirnov now. “Go back and check on the prisoners. Give the generals a chance to get out and stretch their legs, too.”

  Smirnov began walking back to a cluster of APCs farther back in the line.

  Sabaneyev and the others had left the train just twenty-five minutes before the attack from the air. It had been at Smirnov’s urging that Sabaneyev agreed to move himself, a portion of his command force, and the prisoners into armored command vehicles heading east, under the assumption the train’s chances for survival declined every hour it remained in NATO territory.

  Western GPS satellites were back online; by now surely the Poles had figured out antiair missiles were being fired from someplace other than the main column, and if they hadn’t already known that the Russians were using a modified train to egress through their territory, they certainly would have figured this out during the twelve-hour delay caused by Dryagin getting his armor out of Wrocław and heading back in the right direction.

  The general had depended on the train as long as he dared, then acquiesced to Smirnov’s urging.

  And not a moment too soon.

  Sabaneyev was shaken, but he was hiding it. Since the beginning of the attack in Wrocław he’d been in a state of fury and near disbelief, but he’d let nothing show other than confidence tinged with anger that his men weren’t executing tactically in accordance with the strategic decisions he made.

  Wrocław had been devastating to his forces: the Poles destroyed fully 21 percent of his armor, killed or severely wounded 335 of his men, and, even more critically, significantly slowed his exodus from Poland, because the once-organized column was now just dozens of groups of armor vehicles fending for themselves in small packs, often traveling overland, and the speedy highway travel had turned to a slow crawl over frozen fields. His thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were scattered all over south-central Poland now, with some units engaged in combat at this very moment, and all his forces under danger from the air.