Two mercenary pilots mocked my battered A-10 and called me target practice on the guard frequency. I folded my hands on the stick, dove into the Devil’s Spine, and waited for them to see the black hourglass.

PART 2

The canyon basin opened wide in front of me, a natural stone bowl carved by a thousand years of wind and water. I could hear Croft’s jet coming — his twin engines screaming in full afterburner, the sound bouncing off the limestone like the roar of an approaching freight train. He expected to round the corner and find my tail.

I threw the throttles back to idle. I deployed the air brakes. And then I did what no pilot in a modern swept-wing fighter would even attempt at this altitude and speed: I pulled the stick into my lap, kicked the left rudder hard, and snapped the nose of the Warthog 180 degrees around in a maneuver that should have ripped the wings clean off a lesser aircraft.

The Hog didn’t care. It groaned, it shuddered, and it turned.

When Croft burst into the basin at 500 knots, his finger was already resting on the trigger. He was looking for a fleeing target. What he found instead was the business end of a seven-barrel GAU-8/A Avenger cannon, already spinning, already aimed at the center of his canopy.

“Oh god.” The words leaked out of him over the open net.

Inside my cockpit, my crosshairs rested squarely on his nose radome. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to.

He had called me target practice.

I squeezed the trigger.

The Avenger does not fire bullets. It unloads a wall of 30-millimeter depleted uranium shells at 3,900 rounds per minute. The stream of armor-piercing incendiary rounds caught Croft’s aircraft dead center on the nose and walked backward through the cockpit and into both engines in less than a second. The sixty-million-dollar interceptor didn’t explode — it CAME APART at the molecular level, disintegrating into a cloud of flaming shrapnel and vaporized jet fuel.

The concussive shockwave rattled my teeth. I rolled the Hog through the fireball, the titanium bathtub around my cockpit deflecting the debris like gravel off a windshield.

High above, Commander Elias Stanton watched his wingman’s blip vanish from his tactical display.

“Croft, Croft, check in.” Static. “Croft!”

A pillar of oily black smoke rose from the canyon, and from that smoke, my gray silhouette climbed steadily upward.

I wasn’t running anymore.

Stanton’s hands were shaking. You could hear it in his voice when he keyed his encrypted channel. “Vanguard control, this is Vanguard one. Vanguard two is down. Target is — target is still airborne. Requesting immediate vector for egress.”

The cold voice of his mercenary controller answered. “Negative, Vanguard one. Contract dictates airspace must be sanitized. Take altitude, acquire lock, and destroy the target. Do not RTB without confirmed kill.”

Stanton cursed and shoved his throttles into full afterburner. Twin cones of blue flame erupted from his engines as he pulled into a punishing nine-G climb, rocketing out of the canyon for the open sky. He wanted altitude and distance. He wanted to use his radar-guided missiles from a place where my slow, heavy Hog couldn’t follow.

He didn’t understand yet. I’d been three steps ahead of him since the moment he switched to Guard.

As Stanton broke out of the canyon, his jet presented a massive heat signature against the cool blue sky. I didn’t bother trying to pull my nose up for a gun shot. Instead, I thumbed the weapon selector switch on my stick. The angry growl of an AIM-9 Sidewinder seeker head filled my helmet.

“Fox two,” I said quietly, and squeezed the release.

The missile leapt off my wing, a white-hot spear chasing his afterburners. Stanton’s threat receiver screamed. He rolled into a violent barrel roll and dumped dozens of magnesium flares. The Sidewinder lost lock, tracking left, and detonated harmlessly a hundred yards from his wing.

But I hadn’t launched it to kill him. I’d launched it to buy time.

While Stanton was wrestling with his countermeasures, I pulled the Warthog into a steep, agonizingly slow climb, riding the thermal updrafts off the canyon walls. By the time he leveled off and looked down, I wasn’t hugging the deck anymore.

I was coming up to meet him.

“You want to play in the deep water, Kinsley?” Stanton’s voice had a tremor in it now. “Let’s play.”

He rolled inverted and dove. Classic boom-and-zoom attack profile. At Mach 1, he was a black spear aimed directly at my canopy. He selected his 20-millimeter cannon and placed the digital piper over my aircraft.

Inside my cockpit, Bitching Betty was losing her mind. “Warning. Stall approaching. Warning.”

I ignored her. My airspeed bled down to 200 knots. At this altitude, in a climb, the Hog handled like a flying garbage truck. But I needed him committed.

Stanton opened fire at one mile. A stream of 20-millimeter explosive rounds stitched through the air.

I kicked the left rudder hard and slammed the stick forward, deliberately inducing a violent snap roll. But I was too slow, and his rounds found me. The right side of my aircraft EXPLODED. The sound of tearing metal and shattering glass was deafening. The right engine temperature gauge spiked into the red and died. A massive chunk of my right wing tore away, spraying hydraulic fluid into the slipstream.

The Warthog rolled violently right and began a death spiral toward the canyon floor.

“Vanguard control, target is neutralized,” Stanton laughed breathlessly. “The Widowmaker is going down.”

Black smoke poured from my right nacelle. Red warning lights painted my face. The G-forces pinned me against my seat. My vision narrowed to a tunnel.

But the panic never came.

I reached forward and yanked the T-handle for the right engine fire extinguisher. The flames died. Then I grabbed the manual reversion switch and threw it with everything I had. The heavy mechanical linkages that connected my flight stick directly to the control surfaces engaged. There is no fly-by-wire computer in manual reversion. There is just cable, metal, and muscle.

I fought the spin with both arms burning, pushing the stick hard left, stomping the rudder. A thousand feet above the rock. Eight hundred. Five hundred.

The wings leveled out with an agonized shudder. I was flying on one engine, half a wing, and pure mechanical cables. The jet crabbed sideways, bleeding airspeed, but it was flying.

Above me, Stanton orbited, waiting for the impact. He glanced down through his targeting pod, expecting to see a crater.

Instead, he saw the gray silhouette of the Warthog, battered and smoking, still airborne just above the tree line.

“Impossible,” he whispered. “Half her wing is gone. The engine is dead. How is that thing still flying?”

Rage blinded him. He inverted his jet and dove, determined to put a missile up my surviving tailpipe.

On the ground, Sergeant Mitchell heard the whine of my single remaining engine before he saw the aircraft. “Look!” he yelled, pointing over the tree line. The crippled Warthog was flying directly toward them, low and slow, with the black interceptor dropping from the clouds behind it like a falcon.

My radar warning receiver screamed. “Spike! Enemy lock.” I had no flares left. No hydraulic power to evade. I was flying in a straight line at 150 knots.

So I did exactly what a dead woman would do.

I keyed the radio. “Mitchell, get your men flat in the dirt. Cover your ears.”

Stanton’s targeting computer beeped a perfect lock. He pressed the missile release button. Nothing. He pressed it again. Weapons malfunction — his aggressive diving had caused a feed jam. He cursed and switched to cannon. Three seconds of fire was all he needed.

He brought his nose down. My Warthog grew massive in his gun sight. Two seconds. One.

I didn’t evade. I didn’t turn. I pulled the heavy mechanical stick directly back into my lap with every ounce of strength I had left. The nose of the A-10 pitched violently upward — ninety degrees — turning the entire flat underbelly of the Hog into a massive airbrake. My forward airspeed dropped to zero.

The Cobra maneuver, born of pure brute force and mechanical failure.

Stanton, diving at 600 knots, found my aircraft suddenly stopped in midair right in front of him. His instincts screamed at him to pull up. He yanked his stick back, his jet pulling nine G’s as it pitched up, exposing its fragile, unarmored belly to the nose of my stalling Warthog.

For one breathless fraction of a second, the two aircraft hung suspended in the sky — nose to belly.

Through his canopy, Stanton locked eyes with me. My mask was down. My visor was up. My eyes burned with the cold, absolute certainty of the Grim Reaper.

My finger squeezed the trigger.

At point-blank range, the GAU-8 Avenger roared. The 30-millimeter depleted uranium shells severed Stanton’s jet in half just behind the cockpit, instantly detaching the twin engines and tail section from the rest of the aircraft. Explosive bolts blew his canopy away, and the ejection seat fired just milliseconds before the front half of his multi-million-dollar interceptor tumbled into the earth.

Stanton dangled from his parachute, swinging in the wind, watching the wreckage of his superior machine burn in the mud.

The Warthog dropped its nose and stabilized. My single engine screamed in protest as I gained a meager altitude. I didn’t look back.

Over the tactical net, a stunned silence hung for a long moment. Then Sergeant Mitchell’s voice crackled through the static, thick with awe.

“Hog 1-1, this is Mitchell. Hostile fast movers are down. Ground forces are retreating. You — you cleared the board, Captain.”

I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. The stick was heavy. The warning alarms were still screaming. I had a hundred-mile flight back to base in a flying scrap heap, and the right wing was still trailing a thin line of smoke.

I keyed the mic.

“Copy that, Mitchell. Buy me a coffee when you get back. Hog 1-1 RTB.”

On the ground, Mitchell lowered his radio and stared at the limping gray silhouette as it crawled toward the horizon. The black hourglass was still visible on its nose, scratched but unbroken.

He didn’t know the full legend yet — about the wingman I’d lost three years ago, about the two enemy fighters that had never returned to base, about the ghost story whispered in every mercenary bar from Ankara to Jakarta. He didn’t need to.

He had seen enough.

The Widowmaker doesn’t run. The Widowmaker sets the trap.

And the black hourglass, faded and scarred, was still flying.

THE END

Disclaimer: This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.