Free Death Orbit by Mack Maloney Page B

trailing Hornet’s tail.
    It took a squeeze, a jink, and another squeeze of his cannon trigger to shred this pussy’s tail. True to form, the Nazi pilot ejected even before his ass got hot. The F/A-18 did a slow twist and then went nose down, exploding about two hundred feet above the water.
    The remaining Hornets now knew that Crunch was there, and more out of anger than anything, they peeled off the Seamaster’s tail and turned their sights on him—a foolish thing to do. Not only did it give the Seamaster extra time to get down near the deck, it put the Hornet pilots in the position of trying to find a smaller target in what had suddenly become a very large and empty sky.
    Crunch yanked up on his stick, booted his throttle again, and put the F-101 on its tail. The Super Voodoo had outstanding climb characteristics, especially straight up, which it could do at Mach 1.2 without breathing hard. The Hornets, on the other hand, weren’t such great tree-climbers. Because the F/A-18 was half-fighter, half-attack craft, things such as climb rate, turn rate, acceleration, and speedy AOA had been compromised to some degree. The Nazi birds had to huff and puff it to catch up to Crunch—which was exactly what he wanted them to do.
    All this was taking place in the dead of night, and against a moonless sky. The Hornet had some night-fighting capability, but it was more on the rudimentary scale, maybe enough to keep its pilots out of trouble, but not much more. Crunch, on the other hand, had a ton of nocturnal combat crap stuffed into his super-plane. Two AWG-9 radars slaved to a main on-board computer. A LANTIRN see-in-the-dark pod. Plus a NightVision capability built into his HUD. Crunch was like a cat in the dark. The pair of F/A-18s—well, they were like a couple of puppies.
    It was a classic rule of dogfighting that you never, ever, put yourself in a position that makes it easy for your opponent to get on your tail. Yet this was exactly what the pair of Hornets did. When they broke through a cloud layer at 27,000 feet and found Crunch was not there, they leveled off and began searching for him with their acquisition radars. Crunch in the meantime had broken through the clouds not fifteen seconds earlier and had performed a classic loop, turning the Super Voodoo on its nose, pitching back down through the clouds just as the Nazis were coming up and poking through again once they’d leveled off. That’s when he switched on all his night-fight gear, getting images of both ’Nets just as if it was daytime. Before the Huns knew it, he was delivering an AIM-9 right up the tailpipe of the trailing F/A-18 and into its reserve fuel tank. The explosion was so huge, it lit up the sky for miles.
    This left just Crunch and the lone Ratzi, and not to Crunch’s surprise, the Hornet decided to run. It was also a classic rule of dogfighting that if an opponent decided to beat it, it was probably wise to let him go. But Crunch was never one for this page of the book. He hated Nazis, hated everything about them. And even though the chances were good that these guys were actually mercenaries simply flying for some Nazi cell, just the fact that they would climb into a plane lugging a swastika was enough for Crunch to want to kill them.
    So he took off after the Hornet. Booting up his huge engine and keeping his eye on the prize despite the darkness, he was on this guy in less than a minute. But it appeared that the Hornet was trying to flee south toward Cuba, and not to some aircraft carrier from which Crunch had just assumed it had come.
    Now this came as a surprise to Crunch—one that was big enough to make him change his tactics.
    Maybe it would be wiser just to follow this guy for a little while, he thought.
    To see exactly which hole he was heading back to crawl into.
    The wounded Seamaster had made it down to the watery deck.
    It was flying so low at the moment, the crew was amazed that they were still airborne.
    This was just the thing