Shades of Grey Series - Prologue

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- for seventeen thousand missing souls -

»Do you still see me even here?«

(The silver cord lies on the ground.)

»And so I'm dead,« the young man said - - - - - - over the hill (not a wish away).

A Passion Play, Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull, 1973

Shades of Grey

by Jürgen Anders

It was some time since they had allowed women into fighter cockpits. This was what it got you: Patrol duty in an airplane that was twice as old as the pilot, over a part of the world lost in trouble since before Alexander the Great had been in charge of it. The ritual of the day had repeated itself for months on end. After an early liftoff from a base nearby - a mere three hundred miles away - a dozen fighters would enter six separate racetrack patterns in the sky, placed about the same distance from one pattern to another as from the border, running north to south near the area, and circle them long enough to give even the most experienced aerobatic pilot a nice introduction to motion sickness. Now and then this would be interrupted by in-flight refuellings, as the tanker shuttled back and forth slowly along the fighters' stations. Those breaks were kept at a minimum to save a few bucks. This in turn meant that the fighters carried only four air-to-air missiles. Two of them infrared-guided, and of shorter range, which dated back to the early fifties, ever since improved through an endless chain of upgrades, and two mid-1980s radar guided medium-range missiles, barely good enough to evade scores of program-killing attempts during the battle of the budget. Two other hardpoints for missiles were taken up by radar jammers, since they had been thought to be too expensive to be included when the planes first had been bought. The inevitable upgrade found its line in the budget years later, and at a considerably higher price. All the other pylons carried the largest drop tanks available to give the planes as long an endurance as they could possibly have, to wait for the next fuel stop. Pilot fatigue became inevitable in this exercise of waving the flag from the distance. At liftoff, only a part of the internal fuel was carried to allow for a speedy climb. The bad old simple times, when the sound of jet engines was considered the sound of freedom, were well and truly over. Now, some fifteen different groups of protesters would take turns in waiting for the soldiers to run home from the base every evening through the gauntlet they formed at the gate. Waiting to scream and yell their favourite slogans at them, or the next TV camera, convieniently omnipresent as they were. Waiting to loudly boo the sorties every morning. Waiting to complain about the noise, about the waste of taxpayer's money, as they thought it better spent on humanitarian aid, about the killing of people, or any living beings at all, about the environmental impact of embargoes, about the corrupt military-industrial complex, and about the workings of democracy in general. The pack of fighters lined up behind the tanker to receive the first full load of kerosene of the day. As the tanker continued southwards, the fighters filled up two by two, and turned away to loiter at their predetermined stations, only linked by their radio voice and data channels. Like a pack of wolves, linked by their howls, carrying far through the Arctic, exchanging vital information and giving the comfort of friedly presence in the lonesome wilderness. Grey shadows in the long dark cold night, out hunting alone and together at the same time. This dark night was a bright blue sky sunrise, up high above the weather. As the sun popped up over the horizon, its bright light followed a tiny flickering first green dot, just there for a second, and filled the clean air with warmth, as the clouds rejoiced in a bath of pinkish orange.

On nice days, that is no rain with a very low and dense overcast, someone on the other side would climb into his - they wouldn't let women fly, they considered this to be an insult to their superior culture - souped up jet trainer to fly a single mission. One a day. This plane had the student's seat removed, its place taken by a couple of .50 calibre machine guns in addition to the two already fitted below the fuselage. They were copied from the type used during most of the time of the Second World War as a heavy aircraft weapon, for self-defense of bombers, and were fed by plenty of ammunition from the spacious and stretched front compartment now deprived of its ejection seat and controls. Tracers mostly, since the targets in question didn't require any sort of armour piercing. Still, all this was lighter than the equipment removed, so the small planes carried the full internal fuel load to search and destroy carefully, and the four small underwing hardpoints, normally used for practice bombs or small drop tanks were freed to carry cluster bombs. Mostly, these weren't necessary to achieve the objective, so he had the ground crew adapt two nasty, usually hand-held surprises for the outer pods. Just in case. Just to be safe. One final addition was a primitive infrared gunsight, looking forward, and slightly downards, from the nose. It was taken from a surplus air-to-ground missile's imaging infrared seeker and its on-board targeting equipment. These missiles were too heavy to be carried by this small aircraft anyway, and were otherwise useless, since the big jets had to stay in safe storage as long as all the other countries of the world chose to call his homeland a no-fly zone. Well, it wasn't exactly his homeland, it just happend, that his homeland had ruled what would in other countries be called a county a couple of centuries ago. Driven out by others, they always felt like victims ever since, it had become part of their culture. Now it was payback time. No, he reminded himself, more correctly, getback time. His thoughts left history for the time being, there was a pre-fight check to be completed in the very near future.

This was a nice day. Solid overcast with a low ceiling at four to eight thousand feet above ground level all over the region, the difference caused largely by the relief of the rough terrain, and a visibility of tens of miles above and below the cloud deck. With the winter on the doorstep, most of the deciduous trees on the hills and mountains had already shed their leaves, and in peace times the acres below would have been well prepared for the following year's harvest. They flew over those thick and continuous clouds ever since they had left their base in a friendly country. Well, at least it was somewhat friendly to those who fought to stop, if not the cause, then at least the symptom, the stream of refugees they weren't friendly to at all. That was because some of these poor people dared to cross the borders of that supposedly friendly and free place after running the persona non grata gauntlet for hundreds of miles. Very few made it, if any. Up here, idling at forty thousand feet under a perfect dark blue sky, it made her feel guilty. None of the blame could be placed on her, not by any logical line of thought. But coming from a land of immigrants, it meant there were emigrants in her ancestry. Only emigrants, though she had no idea of the details. As well as from any other place on the globe, some of them may have originated from that rotten corner of the continent miles below, buried just as high under the burden of its own history and decadence. Not likely, though. Most people here had a rather dark complexion, and dark brown to black hair, only rarely contrasted by light coloured eyes. What had once been a young recruit's first close shave, missing a bald head by only half an inch, and bleached white to make a not too tall woman look more dangerous, had over the last few years grown to a few inches of absolutely not styled and absolutely undefinable blonde, sort of, hair. Being nick-named Dandelion was unavoidable. Right. Pilots, male, standard issue - can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. Have to fly with 'em. Fly better than... A little smile. Which nobody could see, of course. Not just because she was alone up here in her single seat, the other fighter on her track off for the second refuelling she'd just completed, but mostly because her visor was down, a two hundred and forty-five degree sunglass of the darker kind. Dandelion, dandy lion, alright. Right below the nonexistent hairstyle, there's something bright and green, two somethings actually, scanning the instruments routinely. The deeper you go, the more is covered by leafy layers of a different green, olive as far as the g-suit goes. And there are casual, juicy, sticky and slightly poisonous comments, under pressure and ready to burst out, waiting inside. Just to make sure to be remembered. Look don't touch. Some of her one-liners had stunned the most egomaniac of her comrades, well just long enough to escape their pre-night check around the bar. But this dandelion would honour the second part of the word, this lioness was in command of a couple of millions' worth of teeth. Painted mostly dark grey with a smooth transition to lighter tones towards the rim on the upper side, and in the same pattern, but slightly lighter over all, on the lower side, and of utilitarian 1970s design, just waiting for a twitch of the hands on throttle and sidestick. She insisted on sidestick. Joysticks only come with Gameboys. That's the thing most people miss about lions: The guys may have the impressive mane, but the gals team up to go out, to do business. The team. She thought of the intrepid little band of women on the beginner's course, learning to fly, high over the desert, sharing the same three-dimensional dream, and of the few who had made it into a seat like hers. The business. Coming from a very small and very rural community on the fringes of a mountain chain far higher than the couple-o'-thousand-feet hills below, she had sucked in hunting and stalking with her mother's milk, and later washed it down even deeper with daddy's hot coffee out in the boonies. Since the time when she had taught dumb asses on the schoolyard when and where to stop, in a language they would understand, it had given her the quiet satisfaction of not being a victim. Practising this language from very early on, mostly on her brothers, had left her with a mildly athletic body and some appetite for exercise, and hiking as well, just so people could guess what was coming. A subtle way of early warning. She preferred to forget about the longer haired phase in her life, when she used to follow would-be boyfriends around, who would talk endlessly about having good times, universal peace and changing the world to make it a better place. As they saw fit. That is a crude combination of bikini blondes and superficial equal rights slogans, and less work and more fun, of course. Simple ideas. White and black. After some time, she had then realized, that it was better to take matters into her own hands, to make the decisions and face their consequences on her own, only following her own ideals, instead those put forward by the others. Politics. Social science majors. Long gone by.

Years ago, in this hilly place, he wouldn't have thought of even opening the hangar's doors, with this kind of weather. But back then as a young sailplane pilot in the youth league's National Society for Sports and Technology, he didn't have to run and hide by hugging the ground. Instead, he was soaring high like a kite in the updraught over the hills and ridges of the area. Last night's drizzle had stopped hours before breakfast, leaving clear and calm air beneath the clouds. The visibility was well over thirty miles today, with a cool northerly breeze. A typical day in these last gasps of autumn. The enemy was so dumb, or more correctly, they admitted that they couldn't trust even their elite pilots. Symptoms of their decrepit sub-human culture. All the other nations had decided, and this was set in paper harder than stone by their Secretary General, that they would have to positively and visually identify their target before opening fire, and bring proof of the identification back to base, lest they shoot down a poor little rich private pilot from one of the neighbouring countries, who had lost his way while tossing his money out of the exhaust. Corrupt enough to follow the world community, all the neighbouring countries denied that they had once received a strengthening injection from his country's proud and ancient culture at some point or other in history, without which they would have fallen into decay centuries earlier. Now, they had proven themselves unworthy of this gracious gift, leaving his country to stand alone. History was a mandatory course in all kinds of education here, be it elementary school or pilot training. Without it you lose your purpose and your way. With this, he made his last taxiing turn and lined up with the runway. After his final checks he pushed the single engine's throttle all the way forward. The engine worked nicely, a small miracle, since all spare parts were off limits because of the embargo, and a tribute to the maintenance crew and the patriots across the border, who took very great care to keep the supplies even more steadily flowing than they used to do in peace time. At a signal from the tower, given by waving a flag for total radio silence, he released the brakes, and before the first decision speed was reached, his Doppler signature was picked up more than two hundred miles away by the early warning radar flying in the sky behind the line of fighters.

The night's drizzle didn't harm the operation under way since early dawn. A small platoon of regular soldiers, helped by a colourful bunch of volunteers from the locals of the true kind, moved through the village street by street. It had been deserted for one or two days, thanks to some of the volunteers who had driven their message home by throwing a few dozen men, women and children of the others down the deep well on the market place. Without shooting them in advance, to save bullets, of course. Horrified, the remaining villagers had fled to the forests on the surrounding hills despite the approaching winter's cold. Just to be safe, after throwing a few handgrenades in after the people, they had filled the well with a load of sandy gravel they had found loaded on a truck, which they had promptly commandeered from a local construction shop. Its owner and his family, lying dead with broken necks from the one hundred and twenty feet plunge down the well, their flesh already torn by the handgrenades, were crushed to oblivion by its weight along with all the others. The sand would also filter the smell out of the water, should the well be used to ease the thirst of future inhabitants, for whom the place had to be prepared next. Now therefore, they set out to do the dirty part of the business. Massacring villagers wasn't dirty work at all. Just keep away far enough to avoid being spat or bled on. Flattening a village was, for it was somewhat like working on a construction site, like back in the old days, when their hard labour had been payed in soft currency. But with years of experience, they had found a way to do it without getting their clothes soiled too much. There was no embargo on heating and cooking equipment, for humanitarian reasons. Especially not on those easily transportable five kilogram gas cylinders, and neither on sacrificial candles. It was easy to use this demolishing equipment. Light the candle, which would burn on for hours, protected from the wind that sometimes blew through smashed windows, and then place the gas cylinder next to it, with its pipe connector facing away from the naked flame. Open the gas cylinder's stop-cock slightly and leave the building. As soon as a barely burnable, lean, oxygen-rich mixture is reached inside, the room explodes at a minimum of energy. The walls are carefully pushed outward, while the upper floor and the roof collapse, leaving most of the beams, tiles and bricks fit for re-use, once the place is settled again. Whether this would take place a day or a decade in the future didn't matter. The people had always been short of lebensraum in its one and a half thousand years of history. It could afford to wait until the foreigners had forgotten. This never took long, as they all knew. Everybody watched CNN or BBC World, via satellite and on a regular basis, although the latter was less friendly, or perhaps favourable, in their coverage of the area. Of course there was no censorship in their proud country. They could face the truth, and were allowed to draw their own conclusions from foreign propaganda all by themselves. At their leisurly pace, they'd take a day to remove a village from the map. A village a day keeps sanctions away. They had all the time in the world.

In the woods, three miles from what had been her home until a dull orange flash half a second ago, a tall dark woman in her early thirties looked down upon the valley. She had just decided, that she had all the time in the world to kill those non-humans down there, all of them down to the seventh generation. She had seen one of her brothers run in time from the village the day before yesterday. He hadn't stopped running that close to the village as she had, probably. Her other brother was at the far end of the well, and her ten year old son, lying in her own mother's arms, was suffering from a terrible fever. It would kill him, not in peace times, but in these times. None of the medicine which was donated and imported galore from abroad, to be used by the other's army or to be re-exported for profit, was available for them. Not in years. A soft thud arrived from the explosion in the valley. More would follow, advancing to the weather side, towards the forest. It didn't cross her mind that this was to avoid the dust settling onto the busy demolishers and their newfound cars. The others. Her father's father was one of them, highly respected by everybody in this once mixed and vibrant community. Luckily, he didn't live to see it fall apart. A skilled and generous craftsman, he had helped to build most of what was now laid waste. But his mere existence under a tombstone was enough for her people to look at her kind of warily nowadays, though she and her mother had earned the utmost respect by daring to support the few tired rebels. Two of whom were their husbands. Two of whom were heroes. Dead naked heroes, displayed worldwide on CNN, courtesy of the other's World Report department. Her blue eyes betrayed her one grandfather's infinitesimally different genetics. Now they were looking with a look that would kill, in time. Looking around the makeshift camp. Looking for arms. Brothers in arms.

Seventeen hundred miles to the east, out in the endless steppe, the large family's jurts had been put up next to one of the few wells in this wide open semi-arid highland valley. It was marked by a gnarled old tree, rising thirty or so feet above the plains. The boy had left his wooden toy on the ground to climb up into the tree. He did this as skilled as he would ride on the back of his own horse, one of those small and tenacious horses bred by the local nomad tribes for centuries. They never knew or accepted borders, whatever happened. Peaceful and humble as they lived, today as ever before, their ancestors had conquered the whole continent over a thousand years ago on the backs of their nimble horses, as if to prove the point, and had then returned to their old lifestyle quickly. The natural way, the very first way for humans to live. Now he would conquer the whole tree, right up to the top. A minute acrobat in his colourful traditional clothes, and with an always friendly face that was tanned by the intense sunshine and the dry and cold air. It took less than a minute, and he was on the thinnest and highest branch that would hold his weight. He looked down on the toy he had left on the ground, when he heard the cry of the eagle who was circling above his head. There was no sense of triumph about having reached the tree top, nor was there any yearning to take flight like the big bird, who's dark silhouette was barely discernible against the deep blue sky. This was all natural to him, fellow beings and therefore fellow souls on the face of a wide world. A round world, like the ancient tribal myths told by his grandparents went, situated between others as one of the uncountable number of concentric layers that made up the endless reincarnations of the universe, like the inside of an eternal giant onion. He just wondered what it would be like to see himself there in the tree through the eyes of the bird, or from the airplane that painted a fleeting vapour trail far above both of them. Then he looked back down, on his toy bow and arrow. In a few years, he would have a real one. For now, he was aiming at mock targets he had made from a few sticks and his grandfather's old newspapers. His father and his uncles were saddling their horses while a few camels were drinking at the water hole next to the well, led there by the women, as they shared all work and responsibilities. Here was a place that offered some cover for the animals as well as the huge round tents, because of the bushes that thrived here and there on the slightly moister ground. A nice place to play hide and seek, a rare game in a land usually devoid of trees and buildings. Far out behind some boulders that made up a barrier at the end of a large gravel plain at the foot of the mountains lay the destination of the airplane. It was glistening in the sun like a piece of burning magnesium, leaving a short and quickly dissipating yellow streak in the sky as it approached the cloudless horizon to the east. The business travellers kept themselves busy by staring at the screens in front of them, at one of the latest blockbuster action movies. Had those on the outer seats bothered to look out of the large windows, down or up, they would have seen nothing but the majestic topography that rolled away below, or some of the brightest stars, visible even in daylight in the much darker sky. There was only the same fraction of atmosphere above them as an iceberg shows above the waterline. A bright star moved as it shone above.

Five hundred miles above, eighteen tons of delicate metal, ceramics and glass, condensed quietly out of an as vapourous as secret ten-digit budget several years ago, stood on a lonely vigil, moving at five miles per second south to north, getting nowhere in the end. Superficially resembling a large telescope with huge solar sails, it never peeked at the stars, at least not with its largest mirror, almost one hundred inches across. What would have made a superb instrument envied by even the largest observatories, especially on this high outpost above all of the turbulent air and unpredictable weather that had haunted astronomers for generations on end, stubbornly stared down at a single obscure planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy that was visible right next to the sun, behind it, as a faint shining band of four hundred billion stars, most of them with their own little zoos of worlds, in the pitch black sky of the morning. Far in the west, the ragged fringes of an endless sea of clouds passed by. Nothing to see there up to the thin blue haze above the curved horizon, smoothing out the shock transition from near Earth to deep space. Right below, individual thunderstorms triggered by a weak cold front, ground to a halt and fizzling out over the endless land mass, sat on the browns and yellows of the wide steppes and deserts like bright white blobs of cream on a peach cake. In their wake, the sky over the desert cleared again, slowly and between herds of small white clouds. The dry ground was clearly visible there again in all its detail. Mountains folded up in hundreds of millions of years, rivers that had eroded them to gentle undulations since, dry flood plains of ice ages gone by, boulders left by the glaciers yesterday a ten thousand years ago, buildings, trees, bushes, tents, camels, horses, people, newspapers, children, toys. Its orbit was laid out in such a way that it would be twisted by the planet's imperfect shape, to follow it in its way around its star, always keeping it over the clear morning skies to stand and stare down at the wonders of the globe below. Those would be dutifully transmitted to be recorded, and then to disappear in closed archives for most of the next century or so. Only the horrors of the true blue sphere would be carefully examined immediately, some almost in real time, if this was thought necessary. After travelling twenty-eight thousand miles, spending another one of its ninety-minute days, endlessly switching from a bright ten a.m. to a dark ten p.m., it would have sent plenty of those, if the weather forecast had been different. The cloud cover was to stay for a few more of the slower days counted below. Cloudy days are quiet days.

The very artificial green of the head-up display alerted the fighter pilots to a message from the early warning plane's forward air controllers, carefully watching their radar screens. The very natural green pair of eyes reading the message from the in-flight data link happend to be closest to the possible target. All the fighters were at the far end of their respective racetrack patterns or off for a regular aerial refuelling. The others had a hand for timing.

The cranes had not, since they could change the weather as little as any other species on the planet. This autumn had chosen to end with one of the longest periods of fog on record. Irritable, too well rested, and caught up in some far too northern valleys for their unforgiving hereditary flight plan, they rose early in the morning. The northern wind which had cleared the foggy drizzle of the previous week gave them an additional boost on their journey towards a far more pleasant home for the winter. Hundreds, thousands of the grey, four feet tall birds took off in dozens of valleys in the northern parts of the country, filling the air with the sound of their wings and their voices, while assembling into energy-saving formation flights like the endless slow streams of bombers of wars gone by, under a sky as untidily grey as their tired feathers. Their cries, reminding the people below of rusty trumbones nowadays, used to be the personification of the Valkyrie Maidens to the Norsemen of long past centuries. When they rode over the battlefield at nightfall on wild eyed heavy horses, thundering through the Heavens, just as the migrant birds in the skies, who circled their resting place for the night, calling out to one another, the Valkyries would kiss the fallen warriors, to elect only the best of the toughest in single combat to accompany them to Asgård, the home of the Gods. There, granted eternal life, they would forever prepare for Ragnarøk, the last battle, for the twilight of the gods.

He was airborne for less than a minute. By now he was definitely on the enemy's radar. But with the help of the capital's civilian airport, especially its oversized air traffic control radar, the national radio's microwave links and a very unsophisticated phone line from the turn of the century, the utmost care was taken to make as much time as possible for him. Nothing could be traced to the remote - by local standards - airfield behind him before liftoff because there was no radio communication and the thick cloud deck blindfolded the enemy's billion dollar reconnaissance satellites, working in infrared and visible light, while the orbits and emissions of the few radar satellites and planes were well known. He would have at least twenty-four minutes from take off, with a little luck five or six more. Plenty of time to fly forty miles and back, leaving almost a quarter of an hour for action. As soon as the radar warning receiver would sound a fighter warning, he would switch on his transponder, which was now on a civillian setting, and on stand-by, and change that, if necessary, to a setting which meant generally, have lost my way. This would make sure that all the diplomatic niceties put carefully in the way of the enemy's pilots by his government's negotiators were obeyed, one after another. If he was in their place, he had taken the utmost care to remove on the very first day of conflict anything like airport radars, microwave links and phone lines, hell, even carrier pigeons, historical monuments, elementary schools and monasteries, from each and everyone of the grid squares of the country's map, and the adjacent ones, as well. All those were so carefully protected by international treaties and the customs of international diplomacy, which worked so beatifully for his country, that one could not afford not to use them. Which his people did to the fullest.

Turning out of the endless racetrack, a decision was made. Running in circles may be boring to anybody but Formula One drivers. Or anybody but those who like to think in silence. She sometimes would have liked to have the time to write down her thoughts. A kingdom for a dictaphone. On the ten-minute dive towards the target area, the thoughts of the last hours fast-forwarded through her mind. The rules of engagement made intercepting the small attack planes virtually impossible, with all the warnings and verifications, communications and clearances from above, imposed on those who were supposed to be working on the subject. If everything was done according to plan, they'd be able to fly three sorties by the time the interceptor was cleared to check them, much less to take them out for the first one. It seemed to her, as if the diplomats of high places weren't properly introduced to the manners of warlords. They simply didn't know the form. Looking from the ground - passing through twenty thousand feet - it looked much simpler: Make sure it hurts the bad guy a lot more to do as the bad guy wants than it hurts him to do as the good guys want. As far as results go, this last century was pretty much in vain. Time for a new approach. Faites votre jeu. The shining yellow clouds turned into an opaque grey mass as soon as she sank ever deeper into them. There was a small loophole in the three inches of paper the General had once shown them during a preparatory briefing. He had scored a good laugh by saying that the peacekeeping would be over before anyone had read all of the rules imposed on them. The best cure for insomnia, if anyone ever tried to. The loophole was that you had to catch a war criminal in action, strafing refugee convoys, for example, and you had to catch it on camera first, before tackling him, including the tractors and horse carts of those poor folks on the run. Slow run. Just to make sure, he wasn't shooting at you because he feared for his safety and was hitting the ground accidentally in his distress. The diplomats were always terribly concerned about the need for safety of the war criminals themselves, right up to the chief warlord. The media were also terribly concerned. About the risk of losing a pilot to anti-aircraft or even worse, fiendly fire. And even more concerned about the precious video feed to their news centres abroad. It was often felt, and more often repeated in prime time news specials, that a single loss of life on the right side would have to end any campaign against the wrong side. Therefore, the fighters were not to descend below seven thosand feet to stay out of range of small caliber arms and some primitive shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles suspected in the area. Therefore, they were equipped with sophisticated low-level light TV, infrared imaging and real time image transmission equipment. Therefore, monitors on board the aircrafts enabled the pilots and the forward air controllers to see the carnage below, uncut PG21. In contrast, the refugees were carefully left out of the publicized pictures, which were supplied to the world's news channels from the headquarters as well as from the warlord's very own TV cameras and studios. Carefully filtered, of course. Most media folks were pleased with the organized ready-to-join bus trips to selected sites of foreign aggression or evil mercenaries' deeds, back in time for the afternoon uplink. The refugees themselves were carefully filtered out of the public realities of the neighbouring countries just as well, partly because they themselves were afraid of being drawn into the war or were on the verge of collapsing to the spreading ethnical hatred. The borders, as in colonial Africa, could never represent the nations living here, often three or more in the same places. Moving borders could not change this. Moving people did. Making people move. More distant countries, some of which had sent forces to patrol the area, took token numbers of refugees to stay for as short as possible in closely guarded camps there. Mostly, humanitarian supplies were sent to the enormous refugee camps just across the border below. She crossed it at this point in time, the air surrounding her did not change. Nothing changed. Ever. Contain the infection.

Almost there, the targets' signatures appeared on the crude infrared display. Body heat and little camp fires, all merged into bright blobs. The fires would not be fuelled again, and their heat would soon dissipate, as would the other. But for now, they all acted as infrared beacons. The cold made it better all the time: The targets huddled ever closer to the fires, bright infrared markers, even under the coniferous tree cover. The village three miles away continued to be worked on, as several bright infrared signals there indicated. He'd take his time for a few runs along the lines of camp fires and before returning to base, he would drop the two small cluster bombs on especially selected spots as he would leave. Just to be safe. And there were two surprise packages for the enemy interceptor who would try to pick him up shortly before returning to base, as usual. Except for those, the same procedure as every time. It was fun to think that the two tiny, but very precise ground-to-air, now turned air-to-air missiles on the outboard pylons were most likely from the same country as the fighter he yearned to kill. A friend in the secret police had advised him that a single such kill, preferably including the pilot, would almost definitively rid them of this menace once and for all. He had got that far by watching the news, and all by himself, already. It would be the cheapest of victories, with a little help from their friends in the media here and, unbeknownst to themselves, elsewhere, of course. They already had the footage of the supposedly foreign civilian Cessna that lost its way on the shelf, carelessly shot down by outside aggressors, killing a father and his family returning from a holiday trip between two of the neighbouring countries, as they would claim. The wreck was in storage at the air accident investigation authority, ready to be placed at the crash site. Just as ready were the small arms to shoot the fighter's remains to pieces, mimicking a chance kill by an infantry unit supposedly resting nearby. Spin that. A peace-keeping too far.

This time, she would take a gamble. It was worth taking, since most intercept attempts ended in just catching the other pilot landing at his base, without the proof necessary to take him out, much less the authorisation to do so. They would claim to have been flying traffic patterns for training or maintenance flights on Red Cross planes not covered by the no-fly rules, often citing the inaccuracy of distant airborne surveillance radars. They were just as accurate at a hundred miles as they were at a hundred feet distance. Radar just happens to work by measuring distance and direction exactly, not like optics, where you have to guess from parallaxis. Who cares. The problem now was to guess where he would do his dirty work, today. She had noticed that some of the burning villages showing up on overhead imagery of recent dates were clustered in six areas. Guessing from the last pictures and, most importantly, the attacking plane's heading, she picked one of the two areas most likely. There was a village in which something had started at the time of the last recce flight two days ago. She broke through the cloud deck at barely over seven thousand feet above the dark hills. This time, the radar stayed off. No warning for the other guy. Make a three-sixty, go get a few nice pictures. And maybe a bad guy in action. It took a second circle to notice, and even then a short eternity to recognize. About ten miles away, a line of tracers came out of a nothing a few hundred feet up in the sky, but fully in front of the ground below. Near the forest was a village. The village, she presumed. It was situated on a shallow slope in a larger basin, climbing towards the forest, and opposite a row of parallel valleys, each with their little stream, emptying into a larger river flowing along the mouths of the valleys. Like the inside of a hand, the village in the centre of the palm, the forest at the thumb's base, and the valleys along the fingers. As the tracers fizzled out near some faint spots in the woods, the infrared display even showed the tiny exhaust signature of the non-afterburning engine, which was throttled back for the slow attacks on some target in the woods, as the converted trainer turned to the right to line up for another run. She switched on the image transmission to the flying radar post. Three taps on the push-to-talk button to alert the contoller in the huge converted jet transport somewhere out there. Then she carefully zoomed in on the bad guy, to get a good shot out for the record and the daily press briefing. And for the war crimes tribunal, she still hoped, idealistically. She shook her head a little, as she lifted the darkened visor. Naively.

The warning display in the small attack plane flashed just for a fraction of a second. Just a spurious signal. Or time to sting. Earlier than planned. He dove for the ground, just in case. It took fifteen invaluable seconds until he spotted the approaching fighter, a spot-like dark silhouette against the grey sky. He switched on the transponder, pretending to be a lost Cessna in the middle of trouble country. It didn't matter, since the fighter's radar was still off line, as a transponder only answers to a signal sent by a radar beam, and the controller on board the radar surveillance plane didn't bother to look. Everyone there watched the continuing TV show from the fighter. Everyone there had seen enough after seconds already. This had definitely scored a rare case of good German beer from the headquarter's spokesman to the press. One rare enough to save the bottles with their exotic traditional lid-lever mechanism.

The paint job on the ex-trainer did work. Highly adapted to the terrain and the season, it was extremely difficult to spot as it followed the naps of the earth. The best outcome would be to force the bad guy to fly himself right to the nearest friendly base. This wouldn't be easy, though. Her fighter was somewhat full of fuel for that exercise. The weight would reduce her agility, but if push came to shove, she could still drop the tanks and have somebody else accompany him out to jail later. First, she had to get him, though. A short dash put her in front of the fleeing attacker, as she radioed out the obligatory identify-and-follow-me-immediately messages to the disobeying plane below.

This scored a good laugh inside the attacker's cockpit. As he cut the power even more to be able to use the superior maneuvering capabilities of his plane at lower speeds, he thought to himself that he would blast that silly girl back to her maker. Caps Lock on. He Himself would take care to tell her for what He had created females. Definitively not flying fighter planes. So weak were the foreign agressors that they were forced to let unruly girls out on patrol duty. He would be home sooner than she could radio for help. For the helicopter to pick up her dead body. Why they were so eager to retrieve the remains of losers was a mystery to him, anyway. Something neither worth an effort nor celebrating. At most, a solemn and quiet notification of the parents. He dropped his two cluster bombs on a farm building, not yet cleared by the volunteers, which happened to be conveniently in the way for the occasion, to get closer to the agility of his plane's two-seater versions, famous among aerobatic teams of air forces the world over. The cluster bombs released a load of bomblets, each. As they hit the ground, they killed the most of farm's livestock. From above, it looked like two giant's hands full of toy-torpedos thrown out on the green below, side by side, starting a barbecue convention. He was surprised to see the fighter overshoot and turning sharply in front of him and above the valley he was following. The afterburner flame was clearly visible, as it assisted the turn, as were the condensing cores of the vortices above the wing and on the wing tips, produced by the air forced to lift the plane hard around the corner. He heard the voice from the other cockpit again, slightly lower and far more threatening than before. He was to turn on a given compass course, or face being fired upon immediately. She is nervous, he thought. Forgot the warning shot. Here comes the surprise. The warble from the port side missile's seeker in his headphone started, as he armed the missile and tilted the nose upwards to the incomig fighter. As the fighter zoomed in without evasive action, he fired.

As she turned towards the small plane, she immediately lined up to fire on the attack plane, approaching it head on. The idea being to get him away from the ground and then to drive him towards the nearest friendly outpost. As the first rounds left the gatling gun, a small dot of smoke expanded in front of the other plane. This took a split second, to realize, too. Air-to-air missiles weren't in the briefings for this type, only short range machine guns supposed to be there in front of her, and perhaps unguided air-to-ground rockets. Before this thought was over, she was already in a steep climb and a sharp roll above the other plane, disappearing into the clouds. She need not have worried, the twenty millimeter shells of her cannon had missed their target, as intended, but they triggered the proximity fuse on the missile. Blades had touched.

This decadent playmate might be a real pilot after all. At least she knew that one could fire the warning shot after the kill, as they would tell young infantrists before their first guard duty on the airfield perimeter. The thought whisked as uncomfortably through his head as his plane flew trough a load of decoy flares and chaff ejected from the fighter now off in the clouds. Follow a compass course, she said. This is the place where I live, I'll live. I don't even need a map flying here, and a hundred miles in either direction.

GPS and a moving map display, and you're at home everywhere. She carefully took the fighter below the cloud deck again. There was her very special friend again, three miles ahead, flying away from her and still hard to spot. No chance to fly that slow. No chance to fly that low, either. As the small trainer aircraft seemed to grab trees and buildings like children grab the poles of a merry-go-round to be flung into another direction, she tried to real him in with the gun, but the low cloud deck and the hills below reduced this to a largely two-dimensional exercise. No dream. This guy was good. And slow. There simply wasn't enough height and time to dive towards the target to get the marker on his back before overshooting. About two hundred of her cannon shells had already found their resting place below the countryside in this futile act of herding cattle. The cattle she remembered from her youth were much easier to direct. You could at least kick their big fat asses with the bullwhip, if necessary. This oxen was particularily hard to drive without killing him in the first place. Just cripple him enough to convince him to obey. She was carefully avoiding to hit the hamlets and villages that were lined up in the valley one after another, and she had an inkling that the bad guy had noticed this. He wouldn't give in, not to her, even if his life was at stake. No chance in hell. Not until it froze over. Back into the clouds, she armed one of the radar-guided missiles. As she came out below the cloud deck again a couple of miles behind, she switched the radar from stand-by to active, had it and the missile locked on the target in record time and fired the missile while she was barreling down the valley towards the other plane. Capable of Mach five at altitude, the missile still made an impressive acceleration down here, a few thousand feet above sea level, as it homed in on the target.

That was it. He had wondered why the ol' lady over there had taken five runs to get bored with the gun, only scoring a scratch on, or through, his left elevator. As the fighter radar warning came on, he pulled his plane over the ridge on his left side, separating this valley from another one running in parallel. Crossing the hill a few feet over the tree tops, he turned right sharply and pushed down to follow the other side of the ridge as closely as possible, the tip tanks never more than thirty or fifty feet from the trees on the slope. Jump and run. There goes one of your bonus points. Game over coming up next. After the break. The missile, although fitted with a lot more machine intelligence than the old infrared guided ones, couldn't make much of a plane seemingly hitting the ground like a kamikaze. As it crossed the ridge only a few feet above the trees for the last echo of the target, it had already lost lock on the target and as neither it nor the fighter's radar managed to reacquire in time, it proceeded on auto pilot. Coming in low on an estimated course based on the targets last known position and velocity vector, as a fall-back option for short times without proper guidance information, it dove towards the valley floor. As it took notice of this fact, it pulled up, still scanning the valley, facing the opposite ridge. A time-out signal triggered the self-destruct by detonating the warhead. Nice expensive fireworks, he thought as he saw the blast-fragmentation charge sparkling over an already cleared village in his rearview mirror. This fight was back to level one. World War One. That suited him fine as a pilot instructor and former national aerobatics champion.

She would not make the same mistake again. She would only make it look like, as if she did. As she pulled up the fighter, the radar locked on as soon as it could see over the ridge. Keep him busy with the warning. She approached him in the other valley in the same way as she had before, trying to come in low to give the missile's seeker a good signature of the target by having the highest Doppler shift. The slow plane could only be separated from the ground clutter by this signature which was caused by it having another speed than the background, from the radar's point of view. Since the plane was flying slowly and not by any means in a straight line away from or towards the fighter, the signature was weak and changing all the time. This time, he would have to spot the missile's exhaust trail to know that it had been fired. She pressed the trigger, and moments later, the missile left the rail on the wingtip.

He promptly did see it coming, and returned to the first valley in pretty much the same way, only turning the other way this time, that is flying back to where they had first met. He had some unfinished business to do, and felt pretty comfortable with his ability to evade that multi-million big girls' toy. That girl was obviously badly trained, not even noticing her own mistakes in plain standard procedures. A video kid, probably. Lusting for adventure, and deprived of fantasy and imagination by being swamped in that random culture surrogate his people were proudly rejecting.

As soon as the attack plane turned to jump back over the ridge, she pulled up sharply, racing into the clouds. The radar would feed the missile with updates on the target's position visible from above, and she hoped that the missile would jump over the ridge as well. It did, and it accelerated after losing a lot of speed in the sharp turn. Although it crossed the ridge at a point closer to the fighter than the mountain pass the target used, it fell behind for a couple of seconds. You have to slow down to fly a close turn. Now it homed in on the target. Contrary to the short range missiles, which only followed a bright dot somewhere out there in the black infrared sky, it had an idea of how far away the target was. The proximity fuses were only activated as it was closing in for the final leg of its short journey. The infrared-guided missile's laser proximity fuses were activated as soon as a safe distance from the launching plane was reached. Flying this close to the ground, it would detonate its warhead at the same moment as it armed itself. It would mistake the ever present ground for reaching the target. As the valley turned slightly to the right, the missile approached the slope ever closer, trying to cut corners approaching the target. A few yards below a burnt house on the slope there was a single, now useless clothes-line. To make it weather proof, and to give it more strength to hold the clothes up and away from the dirt in the stronger winds up here, the old man and his wife, who were now decomposing near this mountain retreat above their vinyard, had put up a strong Nylon line. The next best thing to Kevlar, the latter mostly used to make flak jackets because of its ability to absorb large amounts of energy. As the missile flew inches below it, and only two hundred feet behind the attack plane, it lost one of its forward control surfaces to this rugged piece of household equipment, seemingly made for eternity. Consequently, it careened off into the sky above the valley. The on-board computer noticed the loss of control, and again the sky was lit by fireworks.

The bright flash and the shock wave stunned him for half a second. This was close. The radar warning was still on as that bitch's radar pinged on like mad. No way to tell where the fighter was, or what she was up to. But a way to tell the chance of this happening again: Counting down. The result: Nil. She was out of the expensive missiles her leaders were obviously too afraid or too greedy to give to their pilots in larger numbers. He knew that this type of fighter carried only a small number of cannon shells, since it was developed only a short time after the Vietnam victory, the gun patched in half-hartedly at the very last second. Only then had they realized, that a well trained pilot in an old subsonic MiG-17 gunfighter, which was hardly better than World War Two standards, could easily kill America's supersonic electronic monster battlecruisers of the skies. They came down like wrecked shiny new two-tone convertibles after a high speed crash on their highways. Just because the greedy industrial-military complex had coerxed their leaders into believing that guns and aerobatic craftsmanship were obsolete. This would not, this could not happen in a country with true leadership, like his. Now she was obsolete, soon to be phased out, as he was well trained in the skies' ways of infantry.

After popping out above the cloud deck during the climb to stay locked on the small aircraft, she had returned to below the grey haze just to be hit by short jolt of disorientation. Yes, this was the right valley. There was a cloud rising from the missile's exploded warhead above the slope. No, the guy had survived. The radar quickly found the attack plane still hugging the ground. And found it far in the distance, as he went the wrong, no, the right way. Towards an airport closer to the war crimes tribunal. She couldn't believe this for a second, though. Despite her doubts, she radioed a last warning. Again. Level off at some altitude and turn to that heading immediately.

Now she's lost it. He wouldn't be bluffed into giving himself up to some corrupt and partial so-called judges in a far away palace who placed individualist chaos and individual effeminacy higher than the needs and the well-being of old and battle proven nations of high culture and noble comradeship. He turned the other way, towards his unfinished business, without accelerating, still flying evasively in the valley, hopping from settlement to settlement.

Okay. That's that. She approached the small plane below, hiding herself in the cloud deck. One advantage of the short range missile's frequent design overhauls were ever more sensitive infrared seekers. They were still based on the typically 1950s' rotating telescope design, but nowadays, they could home in on their targets from almost every direction, at least with the cold, black sky as background. The original design could only hit the red hot nozzle of a jet flying straight and level, right ahead and not too far away in the cold upper air. Even against the ground, which was not too warm on a day like this, and free of reflected sunlight, the new ones could still lock on to a jet from most of the aft hemisphere. She dived out of the cloud cover almost vertically above the attack aircraft. With the engine idling, and the speed brakes extended, she had time to aim carefully at the target. Its planform, almost glider-like to a jet pilot, was barely visible due to the well adapted camouflage. It could not hide the hotter parts of the exhaust. The missile left its rail under the wing and, true to its name, it snaked in towards the target. The smoke trail was a spiral fairly large in diameter, but at least clearly bent towards the target, since the heat signature was quite weak from above, the hottest parts hidden underneath the other's elevator. Closing in from above though, it would be very unlikely that it was triggered prematurely.

He spotted the dark silhouette of the fighter as it dropped out of the clouds. From that position, he could guess what was coming. He fired three of his flares and tried to fly even lower.

The missile found the third flare more appetizing than the jet engine only some one hundred feet away. It bit the air behind the target. Just about to pull out of the dive, she fired a few rounds from the cannon, more like an afterthought. One went through the outer part of the attack aircraft's port wing without doing much damage, well behind the wing spar. She didn't notice, since she was very busy pulling up after the dive. She had already crossed the ridge, as she had been approaching the target almost perpendicular to the slope's surface. Moments later she started to climb again near the centre of the neighbouring valley, barely three hundred feet above its floor. This had been a manoeuvre from the don't-try-this-at-home department, with so many hills around ready and waiting to jump into her way. She would start a wide circle below the clouds now, leading back to the other valley to check the target's status, and to stay well clear of his missiles, if there were any.

Both planes' structures were designed to withstand high g-loads, so there was plenty of healthy structure left to carry the aerodynamical loads. Only the slight vibration induced by the vortices starting at the punched sheets of aluminium on both surfaces of the wing sounded a pianissimo memento mori, buzzing to him. He didn't care.

In the forest, the survivors assembled away from the fires, where the many dead were still lying. Somebody had to be in command. It hadn't occurred to her that she would be the one until after she had told the first ten or so confused villagers what to do. Dozens of dead bodies and screaming children, some now orphans of war, couldn't distract her, as they would have done ten years ago. It had become an everyday experience, only intellectually noticed, not emotionally affecting her, although it was closer than ever before. They wouldn't play easy target again. A young man, still visibly shaken from the experience of having his loved ones shot to pieces only inches away, came to her, saying that he had served briefly in the army, years ago. He wore a far too large steel helmet of the local design, and he wanted to help, although he didn't look very skilled at all. The sound of jet engines could still be heard in the distance, from time to time. He said that one could shoot down modern airplanes fairly easily, provided one filled the air in front of them with lead from assault rifles or similar light weapons. They had practiced these tactics over and over again back then. She had heard that years before, from her husband, as he talked to her in the kitchen over an empty bottle of dry red wine, to relieve himself of bad memories as she prepared dinner. Although she never spoke much, he knew that she was listening carefully while she was working, a silent consolation to her husband. Her understanding and honest man had died so long ago, and yet it seemed only like yesterday to her. She didn't tell the odd-looking guy of her deeper knowledge though, but instead thanked him for the advice and sent him off to deal with some less important stuff. The previous night, some of the old men had sneaked back into the village to recover some food and a few weapons hidden in the houses. They weren't well equipped by any standards especially as far as ammunition was concerned, but they had nothing left to lose, anyway. She ordered everybody with a rifle or a shotgun to the edge of the forest to maintain a scan for the attacking plane. When it approached, they were to open fire at her command. This was strange in a region, where women only had a say in running their household, but apparently everyone saw this forest as their cold home, now. Nobody argued, and most of the men who were deemed fit to fight had been separated from them two days ago in the village. So she had to make do with women, grandparents and the older children, all those who had at least seen a gun before. Everybody else, those for whom there was no firearm, were told to run into different directions as soon as a jet approached, and to take the wounded with them. Just don't be a single target turkey shoot again. The swarm principle. They already had put all the remaining dry wood on the fires and had added some wet leaves, as a decoy. They still thought in terms of smoke visible from above, not heat visible through the trees. If he tried for a massacre again, he would have to face mom's rag-tag army. What a cruel joke. Pale faces scared shitless were scanning the grey sky. No need to fill it with lead, judging by its colour.

She was approaching the woods the bad guy had fired on when she first had spotted him, but from the opposite side.

He was already approaching the small plain around the village from the far side, which was at the confluence of several of the parallel valleys, following the million year old fold and fault lines of this mountainous region.

Having surged ahead to the side opposite the attack plane's point of arrival at the village by using the fighter's higher speed, she switched the radar back to a low intensity scanning mode. Probably there was a rebel position on the hill, inside the forest. She pulled a little harder on the stick, banking the plane into a steep and fast turn towards the approaching attack plane. It was timed to get her into a good firing position as he would enter the plain above the village where he would have less places to hide. The condensing vortex cores flowed from above the leading edge extensions like the long mane of a galloping white horse as she pulled harder, banking to more than sixty degrees. The blanket of air above the wings was cooled by expansion due to the increased lift, and it too became a ragged and turbulent cloud, just like those riding along under an approaching thunderstorm, torn and twisted by the gales. She switched the radar back to stand-by again.

The screeching sound of a jet engine terrified the people in the forest. It was approaching from a different direction this time. The tall dark woman told her fellow desperados to ready themselves. They clenched their old rifles like the proverbial straws. Blue eyes filled with anger and contempt. As the fighter came into view, she realized after a second or two, passing like short eternities stretched by fear, that there must have been two of them. This wasn't the attack plane with long, almost unswept wings, this was a foreign jet. Not out here to kill them, just to scare the attackers away, so her people wouldn't be driven to other countries too fast and bother them with their messy little civil war of the last decade. Not a friend, not a foe, just a useful neutral, at the moment. As most of the people started running from the woods as fast as their feet could carry them, and the wounded on some of their backs, she yelled to her little army to hold fire.

Scanning the ground for the suspected mortar position, she first thought she had scared a flock of sheep, but in the split second that she had, flying at almost four hundred and fifty knots, and only one thousand feet above, she realized that there were people running on the ground directly below her, fleeing in high panic to every direction, carrying or dragging others, wounded or dead, with them. That asshole had been shooting up refugees!

It had happened before.

Two or three times in her life. Afterwards, she had never been pleased by the results. This flashlight impression on her retinas burned through her mind, shredding all the barriers and blowing all the fuses that were supposed to keep the necessary anger under firm professional control, which they usually did. The gates of delirium swung wide open. Sometimes she felt as if the rage of a thousand previous lives was waiting patiently inside, just to be released at the time it deemed right. It was as if her conscious self was retreating from her body, releasing the controls to a deeper director of judgement. Leaning back at a safe distance, say on the Moon, to watch the most violent movie ever made down there on Earth. The last time this had happened was when an older schoolmate had tried to rape her best friend. She was barely sixteen then, her friend a cheerleader only a year older. He was eighteen and filled to the neck with testosterone, and some traces of cocaine and cheap liquor, as well. The doctors found that out later, although he hadn't that much blood and urine left to be examined. After her defensive action, he spent his last two weeks dying from the internal injuries she had inflicted on him, in the grip of stronger stuff. As far as she was concerned, the other pilot would never do this again. Never fuck again. Never wake up again. Never sleep again. Never eat again. Never pee again. Never drink again. Never breathe again. There he crept out of the valley, towards the patch of wood. Still daring to breathe in her presence, that an insult to her very self, an insult to all mankind. Now she was on internal guidance, her gyros aligned to some eternal absolute space and released to give her steady direction. Another set of crosshairs was projected into view, not before her green, determinately focused eyes, on the nearly perfectly clean plates of high-quality coated optical glass of the head-up display, but behind them, in the perfectly crystal clear great black yonder of her mind. She pushed the throttle all the way forward to full afterburner, kicked and twisted the controls, homing in from below and behind, only inches above the tops of hedges and bushes in the plain. That last missile would see as bright a nozzle as any missile ever had.

As he left the valley, ready to finish his job in the woods, he was still looking for the fighter. Had she crashed it finally, after that daring dive moments ago, or was she still alive and desperately trying to get him? The strength of the radar warning signal had slowly fallen to zero. Probably she was running home to mummy, licking her wounds and seriously contemplating the place set by the Creator for womenfolk in the world. Children, kitchen and church, as far as he and his wife, and more importantly, his people were concerned. He carefully pulled the plane up to about one hundred feet below the altitude of the last mountain top of the ridge to his right. Approaching from the side beyond the village, he started a very shallow dive towards the woods on the other side. The fires were still painting bright dots on his infrared sight. Smoke was rising above the treetops. They wouldn't even notice him until he was opening fire, from that deep inside the forest. In the corner of his eye, he noticed something like a grey ghost approaching from behind. The fighter. With probably one infrared guided missile left, and here he was, one perfect target shining brightly in the cold sky. He immediately pushed the throttle and started an accelerating, diving turn to the right, into the safety of the second valley.

This time, the last missile stared right down to the hot turbine blades as it left its rail. First it climbed straight towards its target, then it followed its turn towards the ground. As it did so, the plane threw out the remainig six flares, which left the missile slightly dazed and confused, as they yelled out loud their infrared bite me. Finally, it too decided to taste the decoy fireworks rather than the spinning turbine, which was reducing its signature by turning away from the seeker's view. As it dived ever faster towards the ground following the motion of the flares, it strayed too close to the church spire and took out the weathercock when it triggered the proximity fuse, well crafted and reflective, polished as it was. The small plane levelled off a couple of tens of feet above the plain leading to the valley, running for cover. This time, she fired a long burst from the gatling, as soon as the missile started to lose its way. Still homing in on the attack aircraft, now manoeuvering wildly again, she only pulled up at the last moment, whizzing past only a couple of feet above the smaller plane after barely avoiding the spire, climbing and turning at full power to line up for another run.

This time, he collected five hits. Two pierced the port tip tank, and it started to trail fuel. One had apparently disabled the outboard aileron on the same side. The other two had punched through the flaps, not important for the time being. The plane though felt as if it was still firmly under his control, only rolling a bit slower. There was no apparent flutter from the disconnected aileron. He armed his remaining missile, and the machine guns.

She had dropped the seven external tanks on the village, as she was racing in for the fleeting target. To hell with the few hundred gallons of kerosene. Those spread over the still intact part of the village. Kerosene doesn't start to burn easily on its own. It takes some effort to mix it with air and then to ignite the combustible mixture. Of course, there was no Hollywood explosion. None was expected.

Alerted by the noise, the demolition men in the vilage dived for cover as the drop tanks tumbled down towards them. Still surprised by their landing without an explosion like in the movies, they rallied to collect all available firearms. They all had had the same training in the same army as that insecure guy up the hill.

Alarmed at the loss of one of four hydraulics systems, he radioed to get the commander of the platoon in the village on the line. The comrade on the ground answered quickly, already listening in on the secret frequency. He would try to lure the fighter to fly over the village again, so they could give it a try, down there with their guns, while he could look for a safe place to bring the plane down or bale out, if that turned out to be necessary.

She lined up quickly for the finishing touch, as the attack plane surprisingly made half a loop towards her, on top of which he fired a missile and his machine guns, their bullets being to small to be detected by the missile's fuse. This time, it was her turn to dive into the next valley. The small missile obviously had trouble locking on in this speedy head-on situation with high background radiation from the valley below, but still passed close enough to the fighter to do considerable damage. As the distance between the planes was so small, it had not had the time to arm itself by then, and so it continued in a straight line until it ran out of its solid fuel and self-destructed. The .50 calibre's rounds missed her by several barn door distances, followed closely by the other plane, as it rolled to right-side-up. After recovering from the surprise, which took half a second or less, and only pumped her up a few beats higher, she went right into an over ninety degrees banked turn, a looping tilted down to a side from the vertical, to dive back in behind him after pulling up from the valley, using her higher speed to close the distance between them. After another pass with two short bursts, the small jet started to trail even more fuel, this time from the inner starboard wing, though she again failed to notice, as she pulled up and around into another high-g turn to finish him off.

That was it. He only had one or two minutes left before the fuel was out, plus fifteen seconds from the negative-g-tank. He headed for the village while he prepared to eject immediately after crossing it. There was plenty of clean space behind the village. No trees or power lines, the latter would have been demolished and shorted, anyway.

Having overshot the target in this follow-on attack, she was getting calmer, only outwardly, of course, and more focused on the prey. She had seen a few muzzle flashes from the village before, and as he was heading there climbing slightly, she went in from well below. No need to be distracted by the infantry down there. Again, they were heading towards that one forest. She took her time, got the plane into a perfect position below the white trails of kerosene, twisted by the evasive manoeuvers. She had just noticed the huge leaks with pleasure as she pressed the trigger. The last seven rounds were on their way to the small attack jet, then the gatling spun without food. She was surprised and outraged by the smallness of the magazine. She counted them all out, as they were tracers fired from quite a distance, and she counted them all back in. On the target. To her surprise. It continued to fly on fairly level. He still dared to breathe. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of ending this flight honourably as a kamikaze, and even less to bale out and to enjoy watching his plane crashing among the refugees.

Again his plane shuddered from the hits. The remaining hydraulics collapsed at different rates as the fluid got lost, and the engine's instruments started to go haywire. He was almost over the village and out of the rugged terrain of the parallel valleys. He reached down for the black and yellow handle, finally just happy not to have been injured too much by the shell that had cracked the Perspex canopy seconds ago. With luck, the plane would take out some inferior beings on the hills ahead, when it crashed.

Furious at herself, that she had wasted so many rounds earlier, she popped the speed brakes to slow the fighter down, almost to the speed of the attack plane as it started to climb slightly while approaching the village. She was still out of sight to anybody down there, below their horizon. She remembered the old tale from a Middle East war, when one of the earlier versions of her plane had landed safely, the pilot lived to tell the tale, missing most of one wing, as she pulled up sharply and rolled at left full rudder to add spin to the kick. Her starboard wing tip hit the other plane's port wing tip hard like a swirling battle staff. Her wing tip's launcher rail tore off, as did the other's tip tank. She pulled full rudder to get away from the mess quickly as the plane had rolled fully to one side in its wild turning, after three more rolls. One and a half seconds later the trainer's wing lost its structural integrity and collapsed like a failed origami in the dustbin, the holes punched by the last cannon shells greatly easing the aerodynamic force's destructive work. The crippled plane rolled sharply and speed-stalled the remaining wing moments later, which also collapsed, both still loosely held by the fillings at the wings' roots. This consumed enough energy to almost stop the plane dead in its tracks. It fell vertically to Earth, resembling an angel of darkness fallen from grace, his wings slashed and torn by providence.

The cranes had settled into their daily routine, each one taking turns at the tip of the triangular squadrons, while the others rested in the uplift induced by the wingtip vortex of the bird ahead. As each one tried to make the few grains of maize and barley and the odd potato from the last breakfast to last as long as possilble, they held their bills into the little amount of energy wasted by the one ahead to at least make it work for themselves, and thereby for the group. While carefully staying out of the other's wake, only slightly deprived of energy, as they were honed to effectiveness by millions of years of evolution, and a little more turbulent, as they felt on their wingtips' black long feathers, pointing towards the inside of the formation, they followed each other closely behind. The regular beating of their wings therefore synchronized along parts of the formation's legs, propelling them forward to cover a marathon distance every twenty-odd minutes. Many of those would have to add up to make the day's trip. The dark elastic feathers bent under the soft pressure of the well controlled streamlines in the clean air of the morning.

Suddenly there was only Earth above him. As the shock of impact pulled the handle for him, the fragmentation cord finished the job on the canopy started by one of the last hits. It splintered into thousands of harmless fragments as the ejection seat passed through it. Advanced seats can save the pilot in almost every situation, but this one, developed in the early sixties, worked safely only above five hundred feet and at airspeeds higher than one hundred knots. He was fast enough, as he fell towards the kerosene-soaked parts of the village, but he was well below three hundred feet and pointed down and backwards, cancelling out any useful movement of the disintegrating plane. He plunged almost vertically towards the ground, accelerated heavily by the ejection seat's rocket motors, and left the building to buy the farm on the darker side of Styx, before he even realized that he had left the plane unhurt.

Caught between the fires lit by the plane's wreckage and kerosene, and the gas explosions triggered by the blast wave of the crash, a good portion of the volunteers died. Slowly and consciously. The soldiers who had returned to the road entering the village were so surprised by the sudden arrival of the fighter that some almost forgot their air raid drills, while others tried to figure out at which plane to shoot. Except for a few torn eardrums, they survived unscaved, for the time being.

As she raced into the first valley for the fourth time, she definitively saw muzzle flashes from the nearer end of the village, but she didn't hear any hits on her plane. A short way up the valley, she climbed to inspect her tired warhorse after shutting down the afterburner. Everything seemed just fine, except for the missing launcher rail and the somewhat dented and scratched wingtip that it had been attached to. Increasingly low on fuel, she turned around to get to the tanker, or at least a place safe enough to eject in case she didn't make it in time. Don't go too hot on afterburner too long. Just in case, she told the radar plane's air traffic controller to send the tanker in towards her. On the direct route she would have to cross the village again, so she chose to avoid it at the expense of five more miles. No need to be shot down as the fat lady sings, by those mad mudcreepers, while feeling so thoroughly satisfied with the day's work, and perfectly at peace with the world. This was new. This meant that she would have to fly over the forest full of refugees again, but she decided to skip the victory roll until the ground crew had inspected the damaged wing. Therefore, she carefully and softly pulled her fighter up into a very easy climb, leaving the wings perfectly level as the engine's control unit adapted to the reduced power. As she approached the forest again, she thought she had seen a thin line, just like a scratch in the canopy for a split second, as she throttled the engine back even further, to the most economical cruise setting.

Aircraft engines and canopies are tested thoroughly during development and prototyping, as well as during qualification runs in production. But as the engine ingested six of the big birds, they themselves flying at nearly full power, it was just too much to swallow. Coming in almost in parallel to one leg of the triangular formation of migrant birds, they completely clogged the jet intake as they piled up at near sonic relative speed. Each of the cranes alone was more than twice as heavy as and far more muscular than the very fat frozen goose, usually shot into an engine to test its ability to withstand bird strike. Three other birds were cut in half by varoius fins and pylons on the plane, without doing much damage to it, at the same moment, while others had their delicate wings broken by the sudden change of airflow around them or tumbled down simply being stunned by the shock surprise without ever touching the jet. A split second later the remains of what had been half a dozen of the most beautiful endangered beings on this lonesome planet stuck fast in the ever narrowing duct of the high pressure compressor. Scores of the spinning rotor's blades were torn loose by either their futile attempt to compress the chopped meat any further, or the centrifugal force of the thereafter imbalanced compressor discs. They perforated the engine casing, which was designed to stop one or two, but not most of them, from leaving their place in case of a chance failure. After this, the coaxial shafts of the two-spool engine started to smash themselves to pieces on the stator's blades holding them in place. The turbines got lost by disconnecting from their respective shafts, and left the drama by retreating through the afterburner, the fittings and flameholders of which spontaneously decided to join them on their way, taking out the convergent-divergent nozzle, too, which had already been partially closed due to the reduced thrust. The debris left the engine compartment radially, leaving in the sky the impression of a mirror ball in a smoky 1970s disco, seemingly lit up by the hundreds of feet long orange flame trailed by the jet, slowly burning to black smoke that would have been the pride of a Soweto road blockade of the same era. All systems momentarily lost their pressure, electrical energy, control signals, or whatever kept them operating in an orderly fashion, as most of the lines and tubes in the plumber's nightmare surrounding the aft third of the plane were punctuated or cut off entirely. Being one of the first partially unstable fighter designs, it had to be constantly regulated by the redundant flight control computers, moving rudders to make the wayward plane follow the commands given through the sidestick, which unfortunately, in engineering terms, was only a very rugged and slightly more sophisticated joystick, after all. It only fed its electrical signals directly into the computers. All this was necessary to very quickly cancel the plane's urge to move ever faster into one direction once it got started down that way. It could not have been done by hand or any mechanical transmission to the rudders. Normally, this allowed for faster and more precise manoeuvers than could be achieved by naturally stable planes, simply by giving in to the plane's inherent instability for split seconds at a time. Now, with all aft control surfaces rendered ineffective by the damage, the plane pitched up violently and oscillated with the fuselage in a nearly vertical nose-up position, which was marginally stable as long as the wings were bent upwards before snapping off.

The remaining cranes of that ill-fated flock regrouped, and cried for their mates who had left the cold wind for Valhalla.

Something had gone badly wrong. All warning lights had flashed for a split-second and then went dead, just as her vision blacked out by the blood pooling in her feet because of the sudden, seemingly vertical acceleration far beyond the buffering capabilities of the g-suit. Her inner ear told her otherwise, there had been some violent rotation. As soon as she regained consciousness, she pulled the black and yellow cord of the ejection seat. It could barely push her free from the rapidly decelerating wreckage, orientated itself roughly to a right side up attitude, before it seperated from her, leaving her on her own parachute, while it and the emergency equipment descended on theirs from the altitude she had just so calmly climbed through, some two thousand feet above the treetops. After the opening shock of the parachute, she tried to regain some rudimentary orientation, as she was hit by a bullet penetrating through her overall and the skin above her left biceps. As she swivelled to look towards the village, she saw hundreds of muzzle flashes. Some more bullets went through the parachute, but because of the large distance they were already too slow to be aimed precisely. Nevertheless, she tried to make herself as small a target as possible by huddling up in an embryonic position. This fudged her landing as she had only about one hundred feet above the ground when she fell out of view of the village. As she hit the ground fairly hard in the small clearing that she had unintentionally flown her parachute to, the helmet's visor slammed down. She didn't notice this. Instead, she started taking stock of the situation. Lost one plane, got one wound, presumably from an assault rifle's bullet, not deep and bleeding not very heavily, one severely sprained ankle, perhaps broken, several effusions of blood, caused by the g-shock, in her legs and feet, judging by the pain. But everything was still in place, and moving properly, if sometimes painfully, as she went along the check list of her own body. Retrieve the emergency equipment first. Call in the cavalry, next. Hide from the enemy's search parties. Painkillers, thank you, but no thank you.

The soldiers in the village jumped madly, cheering their anti-aircraft victory. They forgot about their own aviator smashed amidst them in their rage and joy. They celebrated by emptying their magazines into the grey sky above, suddenly filled by hundreds of grey birds streaming in from the north, some of whom lost a few feathers during the course of the celebrations. None of the soldiers noticed the wonders of nature above. They would have to wait for their schnaps binge drinking until the evening, though, since vodka was hard to find around most of these villages, for traditional reasons. If the locals drank at all, they preferred the dry red wine the region was once famous for.

The remains of the big grey fighter jet plunged towards a former gravel pit in a small valley roughly two miles beyond the forest, that hadn't covered the refugees well enough. The now deserted small business there had most of its digging equipment still in place. As the heavier parts of the airplane crashed in at a shallow angle, and mostly drained of the remaining fuel, they stripped the thin cover on a mass grave holding the bodies of the men of the village deemed fit to fight, aged between thirteen or fourteen and sixty-seven. All of them had been carefully executed by a single shot in the neck, after they had dug the trench themselves. The bulldozers readily available were only operated afterwards by the killing squad. Bullets and fuel were somewhat expensive recently, due to the embargo.

The tall woman, her dark brown hair as full of the dirt blasted up by the attack aircraft's bullets as her shabby clothes, stumbled out of the forest, pointing an old assault rifle at the pilot who stood in the centre of the small clearing near the edge of the forest. She had two or three bullets left in the magazine, from when it had been used for hunting during the last winter of hunger. A few old men with hunting rifles and shotguns followed her in some distance, as well as the younger man who obviously didn't have much experience in handling his handgun. It was still on safe.

As she struggled to get out of the parachute's harness, she heard an order in a language she didn't understand. Sometimes, the sound only is clear enough to get the message across. She lifted her arms slowly, thinking of the dagger in her boots and the .357 Magnum in the emergency pack she had yet to find. Slowly, she turned around. As she faced the motley band of peasants, led by an almost starved, but still proudly standing woman in black old-fashioned and fairly worn leather boots, a dirty brownish apron and a pale blue dress with white flowers, she slowly lowered her left hand to lift her helmet's visor. A painful move. It reminded her of her injury.

Thousands of birds flew over the village, the forest, the valleys and the mass grave, as the stench of the decaying bodies rose up into the sky towards them. It was filled with their distant cries as they rode on to their southerly paradise. The first blue patches became visible between the clouds far behind them, growing fast as the bleak autumnal sun finally managed to dissolve the clouds. Another hour's sunshine, and this might still become a brighter day. A few feathers so violently torn from some of the majestic birds slowly fell towards Earth, drifting with the wind.

Seeing their faces at last, the two women stared at one another in complete disbelief. The arms and hands holding the assault rifle sank down slowly, as if in trance, as well as those in the green pilot's overall, her left one already quite stained by the blood still seeping out of the wound torn between sky and Earth. Both their jaws soon followed.

As three of those wonderfully lightweight and yet robust designs of nature fell on the clearing, she looked up and saw and heard the birds in their endless formations. She realized, that she hadn't been shot down after all. Another feather drifted closer to her from above, large and grey and black, shining in the first rays of the sun breaking through the clouds.

They stood in confused silence, as the lonely feather settled on the sticky blood stains near the smaller woman's wound. Surprised by the sudden movement on her shoulder, she quickly turned her head. After a second of wonder, she then carefully picked it up with the other hand, the one that had just held a fighter at her finger tips, seconds ago. It felt good. Free. A trace of a smile passed over her face, again. The worst experience in both their lives, by far, had in a blink of four eyes, two green and two blue, turned into the best:

You are not alone.

The taller woman regained her composure first, having lived through over ten years of more or less intense fighting already, as opposed to the other's mere ten minutes. Desperately she was searching in her mind for a word to say, any word. She remebered hearing once, that most pilots spoke some English, and the parachute lying on the bushes of the clearing made it somewhat more likely, that the smaller green-eyed woman was one, however unlikely this appeared to her. After what seemed like an eternity to her, not used to making many words anyway, she thought, that she had connected perhaps one of the very few English words she knew with what she wanted to say.

»Friend?«

Enough dialogue was spoken

during the production of this

short scroll

just in case you ask »I want to see it in the movies exactly like it was written in the scrolls...«

(in order of appearance)

foreign pilot ... Reneé O'Connor

local pilot ...

control tower signalman ...

demolition platoon in the village ...

angry woman in the woods ... Lucy Lawless

her mother ... Darien Takle

her son ...

villagers in the woods ... the Amazons of Hooves and Harlots, and Hercules and the Amazon Women

man with helmet and gun on safe ... Ted Raimi

The characters, locations, contexts, and stories

of this scroll

are entirely fictional.

The experiences they had to face are not.

Special Guest Credits

go out to...

all those who made a noise become the sound of freedom

Jeanette Atwood, for a dandylion

several tens of thousand migrant birds, for a freezing cold foggy night with the Valkyries

Jethro Tull, for the living horsemen's cry On A Cold Wind to Valhalla

Formula One, for delaying Xena, unlike the bard's pen

Douglas Adams, for the Kakapo not properly introduced by evolution

Bernard Baruch, for two tones on America

Brian Hanrahan, for counting

And I say thank you for the music, to everyone from ABBA to Zappa, for giving it to me...

What's Still Unwritten... (Song of Illusia)/Little Ditties/Into the Chandra/Joxer The Mighty/Prepping Gabby, The Bitter Suite; Joseph LoDuca, Pamela Phillips Oland, Dennis Spiegel, Steven L. Sears, Chris Manheim; Xena: Warrior Princess - The Bitter Suite, #3, Varèse Sarabande VSD-5918

Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits; Mark Knopfler; money for nothing, #12, Vertigo 836 419-2

The Gates Of Delirium, Yes; Anderson, Howe, Moraz, Squire and White; Relayer, #1, Atlantic 7567-82664-2

Heavy Horses, Jethro Tull Ian Anderson; Heavy Horses, #8, Chrysalis CDP 32 1175 2

Cold Wind To Valhalla, Jethro Tull; Ian Anderson; Minstrel In The Gallery, #2, Chrysalis CDP 32 1082 2

Thank You For The Music, ABBA; Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus; The Definitive Collection, #16, Polar/Universal 017 445-9

all stories, elements, designs, and other products of creativity not previously copyrighted or otherwise documented

v.1.0.0.3.

<- Disclaimer - Shades of Grey - 2004 restored version - Black Feather on White Wings ->

by Jürgen Anders

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