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Showing posts from May, 2006
BIRDSTRIKE The radar stopped screaming. The clouds rose up and kissed the descending underbelly of the twin-propeller plane. Jack Burton had been a qualified pilot for three days, two hours and three quarters of a return flight to Laos before he encountered a situation only briefly hinted at during his two-year training. Flight Captain Leo Brokowitz had covered comprehensively all aspects of emergency manoeuvres, normally the pilot’s last resort in instance of severe mechanical failure, but had only mentioned ‘missile attack’ the one time when they had propped the bar up for 36 hours and ‘Broko’ had slipped back to his memories of the Tet Offensive. “We’d eaten about two tons of small arms fire flying those damn missions. We didn’t even know what the fuck we were trying to bomb but there was definitely a whole barn full of Charlie ripping shots off at us. Mad Frank, you remember him from that strip joint, Mad Frank’s left ear had been hit and blown clean off. Shit yeah, it stuck to the