Shouts and screams were coming through the radio at him. Pelishar One and Three were cursing him, even as the booming voice of the general at Command Central tried to find out what was happening and reestablish some control over the situation. The squadron leader was still recovering from his own brush with Shahim, coming around in a long arc as he watched to see what the rogue jet would do next. But Pelishar Three had not followed Shahim on his crazy climb and had had plenty of time to bank left in a smooth circle. Now he was closing fast from the north and Shahim heard the telltale ping from his radar as Pelishar Three got missile lock on him. The other pilot didn’t hesitate, firing off two AMRAAM missiles in close succession at one mile out. Shahim didn’t bother checking his radar, he had seen the launch, and he gunned his afterburner, his plane accelerating straight downward in a powerful nosedive as the missiles closed on him.

The squadron leader stared in disbelief as the other jet powered downward, plummeting toward the appropriately named Kush Mountains thousands of feet below them. The man was suicidal.

Shahim reached Mach 2 in record time, but the supersonic missiles continued to close, unperturbed by his mad downward rush. As an internal clock inside Shahim’s head counted off the fleeting seconds, his speed increased, the ground rushing up to meet him. At the last possible moment, he pulled up hard, releasing decoys to blend with the peaks as the two missiles raced down to find him. The jet’s engine screamed like a tortured demon as he pulled up into a twelve-G curve, the jet-wash and shockwave lifting dust from the hitherto peaceful valley as he rocketed through.

Confused by Shahim’s sparkling decoy flares and the approaching peaks and valleys, the two missiles darted into the ground at over three thousand miles per hour like cosmic hammers, rocking the deserted plain which only moments before had born witness to Shahim’s thundering passage.

Pelishar One and Three surveyed the explosion site from their lofty height to see if their enemy had somehow survived the desperate nosedive. It was impossible to confirm it in the predawn mist, but the plane’s trajectory and speed had been insane, and the ensuing explosions huge. The squadron leader had just begun hesitantly reporting the rogue plane’s destruction when a fleeting blip registered on his radar screen.

“Let’s go down and take a look, Pelishar Three.” The other pilot acknowledged and the two powerful fighters both rolled and entered a steep-angled dive of their own, though without applying the afterburner of their maniac adversary.

Without warning, Pelishar Three’s radar suddenly blared with a radar lock.

“Someone is locking on to me!” he shouted in surprise as two missiles came streaking up out of the pluming cloud of smoke on the ground, quickly followed by the demonic plane itself.