In the dark Gershon had to fly time-and-distance: a kind of dead reckoning, based on nothing but his heading, his airspeed, and the time he flew. It wasn’t exactly accurate. Still, soon Gershon figured he was over the FAG’s reported location. The FAG was his Forward Air Guide, the friendly Cambodian spotter who had been assigned to guide his bombs home.

He twisted the knobs of his VHF radio. “Hello, Topdog, this is Pilgrim. How you hear? Topdog. Pilgrim. How you hear?”

He heard the barking of a thirty-seven-mil airburst, miles away.

Gershon tried to keep his patience. After all, the poor guy was down there in the night, surrounded by mortar-firing hostiles.

There was a crackling of radio static, a distant voice. “Pilgrim. Topdog. You come help Topdog?”

“Yes, Topdog. Pilgrim come help you. You have bad guys?”

“Rager, rager, Pilgrim.” Rager for roger. The FAG was talking the abbreviated lingo the pilots had worked out with the locals they had to deal with. “Have many, many bad guys. They all around. They shoot big gun at me.”

Big gun? Gershon peered down at the dark. Maybe it was so. He couldn’t see any muzzle flashes, so maybe the fight was just a small-arms affair.

Small-arms fire was okay with Gershon. It was even kind of interesting. It sounded like rain on tin, and put little holes in the airplane.

But “big gun” could mean a mortar.

It was hard to be sure. Things would be looking kind of different to Topdog, helpless in his blacked-out hellhole on the inky ground.

“Okay, Topdog, you give us coordinates where you are. We come help you.” Gershon flicked on his flashlight and wrote out the numbers, then checked them against the map.

The coordinates didn’t tie up with where the FAG was supposed to be.

Gershon called his wingman. “Hey. You copy that?”

“Copy.”

“Either he doesn’t know where he is, or he’s a hundred miles from here.”

“Your call, Pilgrim.”

Gershon hesitated, trying to figure what to do. Sometimes this kind of hide-and-seek was normal with an FAG.

Then again, sometimes voices would come floating up out of the dark to the bombers, confidently calling out positions to hit. On checking, the flyers would find the locations to be the designated areas of friendly troops.

“Topdog, this is Pilgrim. You hear my airplane?”

“Pilgrim, Topdog. I hear your airplane. You come north maybe two mile.”

Gershon pushed north.

Gershon looked down. The mountains there were high, and his cruising altitude of 10,500 feet didn’t put him all that far above them.

“Hey, Topdog. You hear my airplane now?”

“Rager, rager, Pilgrim. You over my position now.”

There was a valley below him, a black wound in the landscape, coated with the fur of jungle.

“Topdog. Pilgrim see big valley. Where are you?”

“Rager, Pilgrim. Bad guy in valley. You put bomb in middle of valley.”