QUAI KOTAL. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
The A-10C’s nose crashed into the Cessna’s rudder with enough force to rip through the relatively softer aluminum skin, tearing off the top third. Debris flew into her armored canopy like shrapnel, grazing it before washing away in her slipstream.
“Knock knock, assholes,” Vaccaro said inside her oxygen mask, keeping an eye on her airspeed, which had dropped to 140 knots.
The planes separated on impact, and the Cessna wavered while accelerating.
* * *
“What the hell was that?” Zahra screamed, slamming into her seat belt. “Did we hit a wall?”
“Not a wall,” he replied, advancing the throttle, reaching 180 knots while pulling up his flaps.
“Then what?”
“Company,” Mani replied, testing his control surfaces. The rudder was a little sticky, but functional, and so were the elevators as he dropped almost to the bottom of the ravine and slipped the plane into the next turn. “We have company.”
“What are you talking—”
“Back there,” he said. “Someone just rammed us.”
* * *
“Where do you think you’re going?” Vaccaro mumbled, advancing both throttles to catch up to the Cessna, reaching 180 knots, pushing not just the overheating port turbofan but also the airframe as she swung the stick to the right to negotiate a sharp turn.
The g-forces piled up on her as she banked the A-10C nearly onto its side, the pressure crushing her wounded shoulder, making it difficult to breathe. The pain was overwhelming.
Jesus!
But she kept control of the center stick, emerging into another straightaway. Leveling the wings while once more closing in on the Cessna, she noticed that her target kept changing altitude, bobbing up and down in the pass as the walls rushed past at a sickening speed.
She kept her cool, working through the pain, eyes straight ahead, making adjustments, working the elevator, rudder, and ailerons along with power settings to track her target like a missile, closing in very fast. She shoved the throttles into full afterburners just before ramming the Cessna again. The crash was overarching. Her harness dug into her flight suit, squeezing the wind out of her, and she felt the force ripping into the staples on her shoulder.
The Warthog trembled, her control column quavering as more alarms blared in her cockpit. The A-10C’s nose crashed into the Cessna’s tail section, tearing through it and into the main fuselage, white aluminum skin covering her canopy.
She stared in surprise into the rear interior of the broken Caravan—a mess of twisted metal, seats, and luggage.
And the bomb!
Clearly strapped into the rear cargo compartment.
Vaccaro could almost touch it, until she pulled back on the control column, trying to dislodge the nose of the Warthog from the Cessna’s tail as both planes dropped to the bottom in a deadly embrace.
* * *
The shock from the impact dislodged Mani’s seat from its anchors on the floor, sending him crashing into the control panel, while Zahra fell against her harness and the Cessna dove toward the riverbed.
Zahra leaned back, dazed, but conscious enough to see the sea of stones rushing up at them.
“Mani!”
But the Saudi was gone, his dead eyes staring at the floor, a wide gash on his forehead where he had struck the panel full force.
Mustering savage control, Zahra reacted just as he had trained her in case of emergencies, pulling on the yoke, but the Cessna was unresponsive. Lowering flaps, she shoved the throttle to the forward stop. The turboprop screamed, pushing a gust of air over the increased airfoils in the wings, but instead of breaking the fall, the wings mysteriously began to rock.
“What the hell is happening?” she screamed, as the bottom of the ravine filled her windscreen.
* * *
Vaccaro kept the rear pressure on the control stick, trying to break the Cessna’s lock by banking the wings, but the Warthog’s nose was jammed deep in the other plane’s guts, embedded in the aluminum fuselage. Even so, she managed to pull up their combined masses several degrees, shallowing the angle just enough to avoid a head-on crash.
The planes collided against the riverbed, hard, the Cessna’s propeller stabbing the creek, chopping into the layer of river stones before the tips bent backwards. Its nose landing gear collapsed on impact, tearing away, while rocks milled the main fuselage.
But that did the trick.
The Cessna broke off from the Warthog’s nose and slid forward and to the side, spinning on its belly while the wings were ripped from the fuselage, rivets popping like a machine gun. The fuel inside them ignited while the cabin hurtled away from the flaring inferno, flipping sideways and into a line of boulders lining the eastern wall.
The Warthog gouged the ravine behind the Cessna, parting river stones as she slid right through the Cessna’s burning wings. For an instant, as flames licked the canopy, Vaccaro considered ejecting, but the realization that the rocket booster under her seat could send her crashing into the canyon walls kept her hands on the control stick and throttles.
Thousands of stones hammered the armored canopy as she slid past the fire and continued beyond where the Cessna had wrapped itself around a large rock. And that’s when she remembered the turbofans, still thrusting the heavy jet as it carved a track in the ravine. But the plane’s armored skin, combined with its hardened steel and titanium frame, kept it from breaking up like the Cessna.
Still, the stress taxed the structure, rattling its very armored fabric to the brink of its design limit, and the turbofans sucked in rock and debris, which tore at the fins whirling at thousands of revolutions per minute.
The engines exploded just as she slapped the controls to shut them down, igniting the canyon behind her, orange and yellow-gold flames licking walls of black granite. The dual blasts tore off the Warthog’s tail, and the ensuing shock wave hurled the main fuselage like a damn Frisbee. She was spiraling in a cloud of sparks, the ravine’s walls swapping places.
Until she struck something hard, unyielding.