I squeezed the trigger. “Fox Two!”
The missile leaped from the internal bay of my Raptor, a streak of white smoke tearing across the blue sky. Time seemed to slow down as the missile crossed the distance. The lead bogey tried to break right, deploying flares, but the distance was too short.
The missile impacted the right wing of the bogey.
A silent, brilliant blossom of orange fire erupted in the sky. The shockwave rattled my teeth as I blew past the expanding cloud of debris.
I banked hard, fighting the G-force to look back at the wreckage. A large section of the destroyed jet’s tail section was tumbling through the air, completely untouched by the fire. It spun past my canopy, close enough that I could read the markings.
My breath stopped in my throat.
It wasn't a Russian MiG. It wasn't a Chinese fighter.
The tumbling metal was painted with the low-visibility gray star and stripes of the United States Air Force.
I had just shot down an American pilot.
CHAPTER 2
The realization hit me harder than the G-forces. American. I had just fired on, and destroyed, an American fighter jet.
Before the panic could fully paralyze me, the threat warning receiver in my cockpit shrieked with a new, terrifying intensity. The remaining five jets had abandoned their attack run on Air Force One. They were scattering, pulling aggressive, high-G maneuvers to evade my incoming trajectory.
They weren't acting like confused friendlies who had just been the victim of friendly fire. They were acting like a coordinated hunter-killer team whose ambush had just been spoiled. And now, they were turning their attention to me.
“Angel One, break right! Break right and dive for the deck!” I screamed into the radio.
I watched the massive, lumbering Boeing 747 roll into a desperate, steep dive, plunging toward the thick layer of clouds below. The pilot of the President's plane was doing exactly what he was trained to do: use gravity to gain speed and get the vulnerable aircraft out of the immediate kill zone.
But he wouldn't survive if I didn't keep the wolves occupied.
The sky became a chaotic, spinning centrifuge of gray metal, white contrails, and flashing alarms. The five remaining hostile jets engaged me in a brutal, swirling dogfight.
I pulled the stick hard into my stomach, executing a punishing nine-G turn. The pressure suit around my legs and abdomen inflated violently, squeezing the blood back up into my brain to keep me conscious. My vision tunneled, the edges of the world fading to gray as I fought to keep my eyes open.
A missile streak flashed just past my canopy, so close I could feel the heat radiating through the reinforced glass.
They weren't trying to scare me off. They were trying to eradicate me.
I reversed my turn, throwing the Raptor into a snap roll. My training took over, completely bypassing the terrified, screaming part of my brain. I was a machine inside a machine. I pushed the throttle to the stops, feeling the massive afterburners kick in, shoving me deep into the seat.
I managed to slide in behind the second bogey. The targeting reticle on my heads-up display flashed green. I didn't hesitate. I couldn't afford the luxury of doubt anymore.
I squeezed the trigger. The heavy vibration of the Raptor's internal 20mm rotary cannon shook the entire airframe. A stream of high-explosive incendiary rounds tore through the sky, ripping into the engine exhaust of the enemy jet. It immediately lost thrust, tumbling out of control as the pilot ejected, a small white parachute blooming in the distance.