Maxine West
Pure Pursuit
How long have we been going at it, do you think? I haven’t checked my watch since you first came into my life. I’ve been measuring the passage of time in loops, banks, missiles, bullets. It’s starting to feel like my hands are glued to the stick; no matter how hard I yank it, I can’t seem to get you in my line of sight. Is this how you are with everyone you meet, do you play hard to get? It almost feels like you’re teasing me, letting me get my hopes up, letting the tone on my missile-lock beep for a second just to pull it away. Who taught you to play like this? Who taught you to be this cruel? If one of us wasn’t destined to kill the other I’d ask you to get a drink with me. I feel like a husk, I think I’ve sweat out every drop of water in my body. I think the only thing that could quench my thirst now is more jet fuel.
I make a wrong turn and now you’re on top of me. I can feel your cross hairs sliding over my fuselage, and when the bullets hit, my wings tremble. I flail, let my ailerons flap wildly as I scramble to get out of the way. I barely escape the second burst, but this is game of inches played at Mach 1.5. I get out from under you and try to gain some altitude, water droplets streaking across the cockpit as I thrust through a cloud. Below us there’s a war going on, your country’s invading mine, or maybe it’s the other way around. The politicians are trying to figure out where to draw the lines on the map. Men are chucking grenades at each other and crawling around in the mud, fighting to the death over every last foot of land. I don’t care. Right now we’re birds, leave the dirt for the worms.
The Vietnamese realized that you can’t win without the human element, that the dance we’re performing now is as integral a part of warfare as timetables and logistics and engineering. There’s a rhythm to life that a computer can never tap into, something buried so deep in the noise that no algorithm can ever pull out the signal. Something great is about to happen, one man is going to die here and another is going to walk away victorious, and neither of us know which is which. But that’s the fun part, isn’t it? If you pin me down and blow me apart and send my remains spewing back to Earth, I can’t be upset. I won’t have the chance to. I’ve enjoyed every minute, every second of this, and I know you feel the same.
I remember what you were wearing when I first saw you. Everything about you was sleek, your silhouette was all curves and clean lines, and you had on that tasteful gun-metal gray. I remember the way you looked at me, coming hot off my 10 o’clock, guns blazing. Down inside there, under all of that, I have no idea what you really look like. I don’t even know if you’re a man or a woman. If it makes you feel better you can imagine that I’m a woman. I’ll be doing the same. Not that it matters. The only thing I care about right now is your turn-radius and altitude, the rest is all drag.
If we met on the ground there’d be nothing to say: we don’t speak the same language. But up here among the clouds we understand each other perfectly. We’re speaking the language of bank angles, airspeed, fuel usage, kinetic energy. It’s the universal language, the literal language of the universe, the fundamentals of physics and aerodynamics that silently govern everyday life. I feel like I could riff with you all day, but I’m starting to run low on fuel. Maybe we could call it a draw and try again tomorrow, but we both know that’d be unsatisfying. Our commanders would never allow it, it’s too frivolous, they don’t get it like we do. It’s now or never.
I get back on top and send out my last missile. As I watch it make contact with your left wing, I feel happy for you. You seem to crumple under the pleasure as the smoke and flames engulf you, caught there suspended in time as your air-frame loses all integrity. I feel like I can breathe again as I level out and watch your wreckage tumble back to terrafirma. I imagine the shards of metal falling into some sunflower farmer’s field and digging their way into that black earth. I imagine the village kids playing on top of your rusted carcass. Maybe one of them will stare at it too long and get the crazy idea that they belong up here, where you come from, in the cockpit. I hope for their sake that hatred and division continue to be an integral part of the human soul like they do in our time, so that they might come to understand another person like I have.
Did you know that when McDonnell Douglas first designed the F-4 Phantom, they didn’t put a cannon on it? They thought they could just slap some heat-seeking sidewinders under the wings and call it a day. The bean counters and engineers all assumed that the wars of the future were going to be decided by advances in radar and signal processing, that everything was a matter of specifications and that every outcome could be mathematically computed. They thought the romantic age of air-to-air combat was over. Then they found themselves over Vietnam and watched as those slick NVA pilots in their tight little MiG-21s pegged them left and right. The MiG pilots figured out that they could just lay in wait for the bomber group to fly over and engage them in a hit-and-run, that all they had to do was to get close enough to the Phantoms so that their sidewinders were useless. After that it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The second iteration of the Phantom had a cannon.