Pursuit

A hotshot fighter pilot, demoted to lumbering two-seat observation planes, refuses to stop fighting. Jack Langdon trades his sleek pursuit machine for a slow de Havilland and its vulnerable crew, but he won't abandon the tactics that made him a terror in the skies. When his observer dies during a reckless low-level strafe, Langdon finds an unlikely partner in Samter, a gunner who shares his hunger for aggression. Together they hack apart their clumsy aircraft to wring out speed and maneuverability, carving a trail of enemy balloons and aircraft across the Western Front. Their success breeds conflict with Lieutenant Charles Surry Mudd, a methodical flight leader whose careful reports paint Langdon as a loose cannon. But when a Meuse River mission goes wrong, when Samter is wounded and Langdon's gun jams and his aircraft hangs crippled in the air, it is Mudd who makes the impossible choice. He slides his own wing beneath Langdon's failing plane, holding him in the sky until the lines, until the ground fire finds him. A story about the prejudice of judgment and the strange shapes courage takes in war.