Another time and Jason Charless would have been willing to get into the battle, more than willing to try the training and equipment of his own way of life against that of another ideology. But this was no time to set man against man. There was a more definite enemy, and man must join man to fight the common foe, forgetting their differences of opinion.
Grunting in effort, Charless shoved his throttle all the way in and raced towards the converging fleets.
He snapped the radio, hoping to call. The speaker blared forth a myriad of orders in two languages all across the tuning dials. Jason shook his head unhappily; any hope of penetrating that curtain of signals with his own was gone. His own radio, he calculated, was no more powerful than the individual sets of the fleet aircraft. Then, with himself at maximum range for radar, his signal would have been completely lost in the powerful mixture of transmitters at the close hand of flight pattern.
His only hope was to beat both fleets to the converging spot.
He watched the two fleets coming across the range-marker circles and made some quick calculations. Then he groaned wearily; they would be locked in sky battle while he was yet twenty miles to the North.
Maximum radar range was thirty minutes of flying time; therefore with two fleets converging, it took fifteen minutes for the lead planes to meet. The fore squadrons of both fleets hurtled at one another out of the sky and the gunners took a firm grip on the controls.
Nose Gunner Hammond set his dials, aimed his sights, and pressed the trigger. Radar, fire director, and flight-angle computer would do the rest and the gun would chatter when all conditions were satisfied. The gun was pointed off at a cockeyed angle, which did not bother Gunner Hammond because bullet at a few thousand feet per second and enemy target at five hundred miles per hour would meet at an hypothetical point apparently illogical to people who thought the way to hit anything with a gun is to point at the target.
So he waited.
And he waited.