Voyage by Stephen Baxter Page A

he’dfollowed the emergent space program with fascination. He’d got himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and – in the face of a lot of prejudice – had finally made it into the Academy, and the Air Force.
    He’d been following a dream.
    But it hadn’t worked out so wonderfully.
    As soon as he had climbed away from the base, Gershon was over jungle. It was just a sea of darkness under him, blacker than the sky, rolling to the horizon.
    His wingman had pushed in his power and was invisible; he would already be somewhere over the four thousand feet mark.
    As the Spad climbed, the noise of its piston rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Now Gershon could see flashes of light, pinpricks of crimson embedded in the masked ground. The pinpricks were muzzle flashes from the bigger guns down there.
    The air was dingy with the smoke: it was about twice as bad as the average Los Angeles smog. The smoke struck Gershon’s imagination. Down there hundreds, thousands of little farmers were patiently tending smoky fires in their own soggy fields, each doing his bit to thwart him, Gershon, and his fellows. If you thought too hard about it, it was awesome; it gave you a sense of the size of this land, of how it was capable of absorbing a hell of a lot of punishment.
    So Gershon resolutely tried not to think about it.
    Now he leveled off. ‘Back to cruise power,’ he told his wingman.
    The Combat Skyspot radar controller came on the line. He’d been expecting this. He snapped on his flashlight and prepared to mark his map.
    Gershon had been briefed for a target inside South Vietnam. But now, in terse sentences, the Skyspot gave him a new target.
    Gershon changed his heading; more miles of anonymous, complex jungle rolled beneath his prow.
    After the raid was over, ground controllers would destroy all evidence of the diversion, shredding documents and reporting that the attack had taken place, as planned, inside South Vietnam.
    And not inside neutral Cambodia.
    And, as on previous flights, Gershon was going to have to file a false report.
    He glanced into the sky. Somewhere up there, Apollo 13 was heading for the Moon.
    Gershon found it hard to reconcile the terrific adventure goingon in the sky, three guys hanging their hides out over the edge, with the mindless, lying bullshit of this war.
    After an hour the Spad started trembling – pogoing, vibrating longitudinally, so that he was juddered back and forth in his seat. Night flying seemed to magnify everything, every little problem, until you could damn near scare yourself out of the sky. It was hard to know if vibrations like this were a real problem or something that he’d just dismiss during daylight.
    He tried to ride it out, and after a while the juddering let up. Production of the Spads – single-seater Douglas A-1 Skyraiders – had been stopped in 1957. Thirteen years ago. They shouldn’t be flying any more. Operational ships had to be nursed along with components cannibalized from wrecks.
    In the dark Gershon had to fly time-and-distance: a kind of dead reckoning, based on nothing but his heading, his airspeed, and the time he flew. It wasn’t exactly accurate. Still, soon Gershon figured he was over the FAG’s reported location. The FAG was his Forward Air Guide, the friendly Cambodian spotter who had been assigned to guide his bombs home.
    He twisted the knobs of his VHF radio. ‘Hello Topdog, this is Pilgrim. How you hear? Topdog. Pilgrim. How you hear?’
    He heard the barking of a thirty-seven-mil airburst, miles away.
    Gershon tried to keep his patience. After all, the poor guy was down there in the night, surrounded by mortar-firing hostiles.
    There was a crackling of radio static, a distant voice. ‘Pilgrim. Topdog. You come help Topdog?’
    ‘Yes, Topdog. Pilgrim come help you. You have bad guys?’
    ‘Rager, rager, Pilgrim.’
Rager
for
roger
. The FAG was talking the abbreviated lingo the pilots had worked out with