This isn’t right, he told himself. What the hell are they doing with hotter planes than we’ve got?

“I’m hit!” Morrison wailed in his earphones. “I’m going down!” The wingman’s Wildcat spun toward the ground and the sea far, far below. Flames licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit.

“Get out!” Peterson screamed. “Get out while you can!” But he didn’t think Marvin Morrison could.

And then he had to stop worrying about Marv and try to save his own skin. The Jap he’d been hunting had been hunting him, too. Now the bastard was on his tail. Peterson jinked like a maniac, but he couldn’t shake the enemy or turn the tables on him. Tracers flashed past. Peterson tensed, not that that would do him any good if a shell slammed through his armored seat and into his back.

Machine-gun bullets stitched across his wing. Two cannon shells hit his engine, one right after the other. It quit. None of his cursing and clawing brought it back to life. All of a sudden, he was flying the world’s most expensive glider.

He’d told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice-if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free… right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.

He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so… Better the jungle than the sharks.

Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who’d shot him down? One burst from the bastard’s machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.