The sky over the Rhineland in November 1944 is a cold, indifferent blue.

It is a vacuum that does not care about the blood inside a man’s veins.

Captain Thomas Sully Sullivan knows this.

He is 24 years old, flying a P-51D Mustang named Iron Lung.

He is cruising at 26,000 ft.

The Merlin engine humming with the smooth rhythmic precision of a sewing machine.

But Sully is not comfortable.

He is wearing something new, something experimental.

It looks like a pair of strange rubberized canvas waiters cut off at the waist, laced tight around his calves, thighs, and gut.

A rubber hose connects the suit to a valve on the left side of the cockpit.

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It is the Burgger Guit.

The ground crew calls it the squeeze.

Sully calls it a nuisance.

It itches, it’s hot, and it restricts his movement.

He doesn’t know it yet, but in 3 minutes, that rubber hose is going to be the only thing holding his soul inside his body.

Break right.

Break right.

Seven bandits high.

The scream in his headset shatters the calm.

Sully looks right.

He sees them black specks against the sun, growing rapidly into the distinct jagged silhouettes of fwolf 190s, the butcher birds.

They are not just a flight.

They are a staffle.

Seven of them.

And they have the energy advantage.

They are diving at 400 mph.

Cannons winking as they open fire.

Sully is alone.

His wingman had aborted 10 minutes ago with an oil leak.

He is a single aluminum leaf in a hurricane of German steel.

The doctrine says to dive, “The P-51 is faster in a dive than the radial engine Faulk Wolf.

Run, the manual says, live to fight another day.

But Sully panics.

It isn’t a coward’s panic.

It is a predator’s panic.

The fightor-flight response shortcircuiting into pure unadulterated aggression.

Instead of pushing the nose down to run, Sully slams the throttle to the firewall and hauls the stick back into his lap.

He turns into the attack.

It is a suicide turn.

He is pulling into a wall of seven oncoming fighters.

The Mustang bites the air.

The laminerflow wings designed for speed grown as the angle of attack spikes.

The Gmemeter on the instrument panel jumps.

3G 4G 5G.

Normally, this is where the world starts to close in.

At 5Gs, the human body weighs 5 times its normal mass.

The blood which has the consistency of heavy oil under this pressure tries to drain from the head and pool in the legs.

The retinas in the eyes starved of oxygen begin to fail.

Peripheral vision turns gray.

This is gray out.

But today something different happens.

As the gmeter hits 5, a valve opens.

Compressed air from the engine’s vacuum pump rushes into the bladders of the Burgger suit.

The suit instantly inflates.

It crushes Sully’s calves.

It strangles his thighs.

It punches him in the gut.

It is violent and uncomfortable, like a giant hand squeezing him dry.

But the pressure works.

It mechanically forces the blood out of his legs and back up toward his heart and brain.

Sully doesn’t gray out.

His vision stays crystal clear.

More he grunts.

He pulls harder.

The P-51 tightens the turn.

The Gmemeter hits six, then seven.

The Fwolves are flashing past him now.

They expected the American to dive or to break gently.

They didn’t expect him to bank 90° and pull a turn so tight it looks like the plane is pivoting on a wing tip.

The lead German pilot, an overlutinant with 60 kills, sees the Mustang cut across his path.

He reacts instinctively.

He banks hard to follow, trying to get his guns onto the turning American.

This is the trap.

The German pilot is flying a machine that can handle 8GS structurally, but the German pilot is wearing a wool uniform and leather flight pants.

He is biology unassisted.

Sully holds the turn.

The P-51 is screaming, the airframe vibrating, the slipstream tearing over the canopy.

He is riding the edge of the accelerated stall where the wing stops flying not because it’s too slow but because the load is too heavy.

He looks back.

The seven Germans are trying to turn with him.

They are a wolfpack trying to corner a rabbit that has suddenly defied the laws of momentum.

Sully checks the gauge 7.5gs.

He feels his face sagging.

His lips are pulled back from his teeth in a rich grin that has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with gravity.

The weight of his own head is crushing his neck vertebrae, but he can still see.

The suit is squeezing him so hard he can barely breathe, but it is keeping the lights on.

Behind him, the German leader is dying, not from bullets, but from physics.

The German pilot pulls to match Sully’s turn.

He hits 5Gs.

His vision narrows to a tunnel.

He hits 6GS.

The blood leaves his brain.

He fights it, screaming to keep his chest muscles tight, performing the M1 maneuver, grunting to spike blood pressure.

But he cannot compete with the pneumatic bladders on Sully’s legs.

At 6, 5Gs, the German pilot blackouts.

He is conscious but blind.

His optic nerve has shut down.

He is flying a 400 mph killing machine and he cannot see the sky, the ground or the enemy.

Panic takes the German.

He relaxes the stick to regain his vision.

The fuckwolf goes wide.

It mushes out of the turn, sliding harmlessly to the outside of the circle.

Sully sees it.

The lead bandit drifts wide.

One down.

Sully wheezes, his voice sounding like it’s coming from a crushed tin can.

But there are still six more and they are angry.

Sully doesn’t relax the stick.

He keeps pulling.

He is now turning a complete 360° circle, creating a defensive spiral.

He is bleeding speed, but he is maintaining position.

He is effectively becoming a turret in the sky, rotating faster than the enemy can orbit him.

The other Germans try to slash at him.

They dive, fire, and pull up.

But because Sully is turning so tightly, their firing windows are fractions of a second.

They can’t pull lead.

If they try to pull enough lead to hit him, they black out.

It is a stalemate of physiology.

The machine is willing, but the meat inside the cockpit is weak.

Sully, encased in his rubber vice, is suffering.

His ribs feel like they are cracking.

The capillaries in his arms are bursting, creating tiny red pin pricks on his skin, petici, but he is conscious.

He is the only man in this quadrant of the sky who is fully awake.

He realizes the panic turn has become a strategy.

He isn’t outflying the planes.

He is outflying the pilots.

He is dragging them into the deep water of high G combat and waiting for them to drown.

Come on, Sully whispers, sweat stinging his eyes, who wants to take a nap.

He spots a fuckwolf trying to cut across the circle, trying to cheat the geometry.

The German is low and slow.

Sully eases the stick forward for a microsecond, unloading the GS just enough to roll the P-51.

Then he slams it back again.

The Mustang snaps its nose onto the new target.

Sully presses the trigger.

The 650 caliber machine guns roar.

The vibration is distinct, a jackhammer feeling that cuts through the GeForce.

The bullets connect.

The FWolf’s canopy shatters.

The pilot, likely already on the edge of consciousness, doesn’t even flinch.

The plane rolls over and dives into the cloud deck, trailing smoke.

Sully doesn’t watch it fall.

He is back in the vice.

He hauls the stick back again, re-entering the crushing turn.

7GS.

The suit inflates.

The pain returns.

Five lift.

But Sully is bleeding energy.

Every hard turn costs air speed.

He started at 350 m.

He is now down to 220 m.

The P-51 is getting heavy.

The controls are getting sloppy.

If he gets too slow, the wings will stall.

The plane will snap and he will be a stationary target for five hungry wolves.

He has to change the equation.

He has used the guit to survive the defensive turn.

Now he has to use it to attack.

He looks up.

The sun is directly overhead.

Time to go upstairs.

He gasps.

Energy management is a bank account.

You spend speed to buy position.

You spend altitude to buy speed.

Sully is broke.

He has spent his speed in the high G turn, ringing every ounce of velocity out of the airframe to stay inside the German turn radius.

He is sitting at 210 mph, banked 80°, breathing like a man running a marathon with a plastic bag over his head.

The five remaining fwolves are circling him like sharks.

They have stayed high, preserving their energy.

They are waiting for him to make a mistake.

They are waiting for him to stall.

Sully knows he cannot continue the horizontal turn.

The P-51 is heavy.

At this speed, it is a wallowing pig.

He needs to do something the Germans don’t expect.

He needs to use the guit not just for turning, but for transition.

The maneuver he is about to attempt is called a high G barrel roll reversal.

It is a desperate piece of geometry.

Here goes nothing.

Sully grunts.

He jams the throttle through the gate.

War emergency power.

The manifold pressure spikes to 67 in.

The engine screams.

Instead of leveling out to gain speed, which would get him shot, Sully pulls the stick back into his gut and kicks the left rudder.

He pulls the nose of the Mustang up and over.

He is initiating a loop, but with a twist.

The G forces return instantly.

G 7g.

The suit clamps down on his legs.

The pressure is agonizing, but this time the vector is vertical.

He is fighting gravity directly.

The German pilots see the American nose come up.

They think he is trying to climb away.

The two nearest fwols dive to intercept.

They have the speed.

They catch him easily.

They pull up to fire.

And that is when Sully hits the brakes.

Not air brakes.

He doesn’t have those.

He uses induced drag.

By pulling such high GS at low speed, he turns the wings of the Mustang into giant air scoops.

The drag is immense.

The P-51 practically stops in midair at the top of the loop.

The two Germans diving at 400 m cannot stop.

They are moving too fast.

They pull back on their sticks to follow Sully’s loop, but they hit the physiological wall.

At 400 mph, a tight pull-up generates massive GS 8 GG.

The German pilots are not wearing guits.

Their bodies betray them.

The hydrostatic pressure column in their chests collapses.

Their hearts cannot pump blood uphill to their brains against nine times the force of gravity.

Both German pilots suffer Gloc, GeForce induced loss of consciousness.

It isn’t a fade out.

It is a light switch.

One second they are flying, the next they are asleep.

Their hands fall off the controls.

Their heads slump forward.

To Sully, watching from the top of his slow, agonizing roll, the two German planes look like toys that have lost their batteries.

They stop maneuvering.

They stop tracking.

They simply arc ballistically through the sky, engines roaring, pilots unconscious.

They shoot past Sully, missing him by hundreds of feet.

They are lawn darting, flying perfectly flyable airplanes straight toward the ground because the biological link has been severed.

Sully completes his role.

He is now inverted, hanging in his straps, looking down at the two falling Germans.

“Wake up, hands,” he whispers.

They don’t wake up.

One of the fogwolfs enters a shallow dive that steepens until the wings rip off from overspeed flutter.

The other continues a gentle arc until it impacts a forest in a plume of orange fire.

Sully rolls upright.

Three bandits left.

But the maneuver has cost him everything.

He is at 140 m.

The Mustang is shaking.

The stall warning is blaring.

He is a sitting duck.

The three remaining Germans are the smart ones.

They didn’t follow the loop.

They stayed high.

Now seeing the Americans slow and vulnerable, they drop the hammer.

They come from three different angles.

A coordinated slash attack.

Sully has no energy.

He has no altitude.

He has only the suit.

He pushes the stick forward, unloading the wings.

The GS drop to zero.

The suit deflates.

The relief is instant, like taking a breath after drowning.

The blood rushes back into his legs.

He dives, not to run, but to build speed for one last turn.

He needs 300 m.

He needs the corner velocity, the speed at which the Mustang turns the tightest.

The lead German is closing fast, 500 yd.

Cannon shells spark off Sully’s left wing.

A chunk of aluminum tears away.

Sully ignores it.

He watches the airspeed indicator.

2550280300.

Now Sully slams the stick into the corner down and left.

A split as he rolls inverted and pulls through.

The GS hit him like a freight train.

8GS.

The suit inflates with a violent hiss thump.

It feels like a kick from a mule.

His vision narrows to a straw.

He is diving straight down, pulling out at the last possible second.

He is betting that the German pilot, eager for the kill, will follow him into the high G pull out.

The German does follow.

He wants the kill.

He dives.

But at the bottom of the dive, the air is thick.

The forces are multiplied.

Sully, encased in his rubber armor, hauls the stick back until the rivets on the wings pop.

He bottoms out at treetop level.

Leaves swirling in his wake.

The German pilot tries to match it.

He sees the ground rushing up.

He pulls.

He grays out.

He loses depth perception.

He thinks he is level, but he is still diving at 5°.

The fwolf clips the top of a farmhouse.

There is no explosion, just a disintegration of parts.

Two left.

Sully is now on the deck.

He is flying at 350 m, 10 ft off the ground.

He is sweating so much his eyes sting.

The guit has left deep red welts on his legs.

He feels bruised, beaten, and exhausted.

But he is alive, and the two remaining Germans seem to have realized that this particular Mustang is haunted.

They circle high above, unwilling to come down into the heavy air where the GS are brutal.

They have seen five of their comrades fall without the American firing more than a few bursts.

They have seen planes fly into the ground.

They have seen pilots fall asleep in the middle of a dog fight.

Sully checks his fuel.

He is low.

He checks his ammo.

He has plenty.

He keys the mic.

Iron lung to any relay.

I’m on the deck near Cologne.

Two bandits high.

I’m heading home.

He doesn’t climb.

He stays low using the terrain.

He knows the guit gave him the edge, but it didn’t make him invincible.

He is just a man in a rubber bag pushing blood around his body with compressed air.

But as he races toward the Allied lines, a shadow falls over him.

The last two Germans haven’t given up.

They have repositioned.

They are diving on him from both sides, a pinser attack.

They are committing to a high-speed strafing run.

They aren’t trying to turn anymore.

They are trying to execute him.

Sully looks at the Gmeter.

He looks at the suit hose.

One more time, he says to the rubber tube.

Don’t burst on me now.

He prepares for the final panic turn.

The one that will break the plane or the pilot.

The pinser attack is a classic execution maneuver.

Two attackers coming from and .

If Sully turns right to face one, he exposes his belly to the other.

If he flies straight, he is cross-fired into scrap metal.

Sully is flying at 380 m, skimming the hedros of the French German border.

The ground blur is dizzying.

He checks his mirrors.

The fogwolves are closing.

They are not turning.

They are slashing.

They learned their lesson.

No more turning fights.

Speed and boom.

Sully knows he cannot outrun them.

The FW190 is faster on the deck.

He has seconds before the 20 cannons bracket him.

He needs a maneuver that neutralizes two attackers at once.

He needs the flat scissors.

The scissors is a series of rapid reversing turns.

You turn hard left, then hard right, then hard left.

It forces the attacker to constantly overshoot, unable to get a firing solution.

But to do it at this speed on the deck requires G tolerance that borders on the superhuman.

Every reversal is a slam from plus 6G to minus 2G to plus 6G.

It is a physical beating.

Sully takes a breath.

He tenses his abdomen.

The M1 maneuver.

He waits for the muzzle flashes.

Vlash.

The German on the right fires.

Sully slams the stick right into the fire.

It’s counterintuitive.

He turns toward the attacker to ruin the angle.

The guit inflates.

Wump 6GS.

The world narrows.

The German overshoots, his bullets, tearing up the field behind Sully.

Sully instantly slams the stick left.

He reverses the turn.

The guit doesn’t have time to deflate.

It stays pressurized.

The sudden change in direction whips Sully’s head against the canopy glass.

Clack.

His helmet rings.

6GS in the other direction.

The second German coming from the left finds Sully suddenly turning underneath him.

He can’t get the gun pipper on the Mustang.

He overshoots.

Now comes the rhythm.

Left, right, left, right.

Sully is weaving a braid of death.

He is turning the P-51 into a pendulum.

Each turn bleeds speed.

350 m.

300 mph 250 mph.

The Germans intending to slash and run are caught in the web.

They try to slow down to stay behind him.

They chop their throttles.

They deploy their flaps.

They are trying to force their high-speed interceptors to fly slow.

This is where the guit wins the war.

Every time the Germans pull hard to match Sully’s reversal, their vision dims.

They have to ease off the stick to clear their sight.

Every time they ease off, Sully, clamped tight in his pneumatic armor, pulls harder.

He gains an angle.

He gains a foot.

He gains a degree.

He is literally turning inside their consciousness.

The German on the right makes a mistake.

He tries to pull a high G reversal to get back on Sully’s tail.

He yanks the stick.

He hits 7GS.

The German pilot grays out completely.

He loses spatial orientation.

He thinks he is banking left.

He is actually banking right.

His wing tip catches the grass.

At 200 m, the Fwolf cartwheels.

It tears itself apart in a shower of dirt and aluminum.

The engine block goes tumbling through a stone wall.

One left.

The final German pilot is good.

He sees his wingman die.

He realizes the scissors is a trap.

He slams his throttle forward.

He wants to go vertical.

He wants to climb away from the madman in the Mustang.

He pulls up a pure vertical zoom climb.

Sully is slow 200 m.

He cannot follow the German up.

Gravity will kill him.

But Sully has the K14 gyro gun site.

It is a piece of computing magic.

A gyroscope inside the site calculates the lead angle based on the geforce and the turn rate.

All Sully has to do is keep the pipper on the target.

Sully pulls the nose up.

The guit squeezes one last time.

He is hanging on the prop.

The aircraft shaking on the edge of a stall.

He puts the dot on the climbing German.

The German is 600 yd away going straight up.

Reach out and touch someone.

Sully rasps.

He fires.

The tracers arc upward.

It is a long shot, a desperate shot, but the gyroite accounts for the gravity drop.

It accounts for the turn.

The bullets walk up the spine of the climbing fogwolf.

They hit the cooling fan.

They hit the engine block.

They hit the cockpit.

The German plane shutters.

Smoke pours from the cowling.

It stalls at the top of its climb.

hangs there for a moment like a suspended cross and then falls.

It enters a flat spin rotating lazily toward the earth.

Sully levels out.

He is alone.

The sky is empty.

The ground is littered with the smoking pers of seven aircraft.

He checks his own body.

He is shaking uncontrollably.

His legs are numb from the constant crushing of the suit.

His neck feels broken.

He tastes copper in his mouth.

He has bitten through his tongue during the hygiene turns.

He looks at the rubber hose connecting him to the plane.

The squeeze.

“Okay,” he says, his voice thick.

“I take it back.

You’re not a nuisance.” He sets the throttle to cruise.

He trims the plane.

He heads west.

But the flight isn’t over.

As the adrenaline dumps from his system, the pain sets in.

The G measles ruptured capillaries are burning on his skin.

His vision is blurry, not from GS, but from exhaustion.

He has to land, and landing a P-51 after a fight like that is dangerous.

His legs are so numb he can’t feel the rudder pedals.

He calls the tower at his home base in Belgium.

Little friend, coming in hot.

I need a medical wagon.

Roger, little friend, what’s your status? I’m okay, Sully lies.

Just tired.

I think I left my legs over Germany.

He brings the Mustang in.

The approach is sloppy.

He bounces on the runway.

The tail wheel shimmies, but he keeps it straight.

When he taxis to a stop, he can’t get out.

The ground crew has to climb up onto the wing.

The crew chief, a sergeant named Miller, looks into the cockpit.

He sees Sully slumped in the seat, the guitated, clamped tight around his legs.

Captain, you okay? Sully unclips his oxygen mask.

He smiles, blood on his teeth.

Miller, he says, do we have any spare tires? Tires, sir? Yeah, I think I squeezed the air out of all of them.

Miller looks at the gun camera footage later that night.

He calls the intelligence officer.

They watch the film in silence.

They watch the world spin.

They watch the German planes fall out of the sky simply because they tried to turn.

What is that? The intelligence officer asks, pointing to a segment where the film goes blurry from the vibration of a 9G turn.

How did he survive that? Miller taps the screen.

He didn’t.

The pilot passed out, I bet.

But the suit The suit kept the blood moving.

The suit flew the man.

Sully sleeps for 18 hours.

When he wakes up, his legs are black and blue.

He can barely walk.

The flight surgeon tells him he has strained every muscle in his torso.

He is grounded for a week.

But the report goes up the chain.

The Burgger suit is no longer an experiment.

It is a necessity.

Because over the Rhineland, one man just proved that the limiting factor in aerial warfare is no longer the aluminum.

It is the flesh.

And if you can reinforce the flesh, if you can wrap it in rubber and compressed air, you can turn a panic reaction into a weapon of mass destruction.

Sully walks out to his plane a week later.

The ground crew has painted seven kill marks on the nose.

They are small swastikas.

Underneath them, Sully has painted a small yellow picture.

It’s a pair of pants.