Probable Kill: A Novel of MiG Alley

Captain Walt Brennan flew his first war over Germany at nineteen. In the autumn of 1951 he starts his second one at zero: a fresh hundred-mission tour over Korea, flying Sabres against the MiG-15s massed just across a river he isn't allowed to cross. He counts everything: fuel, seconds, angles, kills. What he can't get to add up is the aircraft that keeps finding him, a MiG with markings no chart matches, flown by a pilot who watches, tests, and almost never fires. Intelligence believes he's Soviet. No one will say so out loud. As Brennan's confirmed kills climb toward the number that would make him an ace, a scrap of paper hands him something no rulebook ever has: quiet authorization to end it. The permission is real. The paper trail isn't. And the risk won't only be his to carry, because his wingman, who has flown four hundred feet off his side through cold, damage, and a lie Brennan told him, has already drawn the one line he won't cross. Two kills from an earlier war still sit unopened in an envelope on Brennan's desk, filed forever as "probable." He knows exactly what that word costs a man. With his hundredth mission closing in, he'll have the shot, the authority, and every reason to make sure this one doesn't join them, and to decide, once and for all, what a confirmed kill is actually worth. PROBABLE KILL is a novel about the distance between what a man is allowed to do and what he can live with having done, told through some of the coldest, most exacting air-combat sequences in recent fiction.