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right?' Remember?"
"I remember. It was right after I called you an overstuffed dipshit. But I was
just teasing."
"Good. So am I."
Rotors spinning, both Deathbirds dived from the sky, zooming in from the rear.
Automatic fire spit from
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turrets. Twin streams of .50-caliber slugs slashed long trenches on the gully
floor, dirt gouting up in high fountains. Kane loosed a short burst with the
mini-Uzi just as the choppers ascended, correcting for the decreasing range.
One of the bullets twisted the struts of a landing skid out of shape.
The Deathbirds swooped overhead, and he dropped down, back into his seat. A
spray of bullets banged loudly on the Sandcat's hull. The choppers roared
past, a bare ten feet above the roof of the wag. Domi instinctively ducked as
the rotor wash drove a strong puff of grit-laden air down into the wag.
Hugging the steering wheel, she threw him a frightened, questioning glance.
"Keep going," he ordered.
He popped back up through the hatch, transferring the mini-Uzi to his left
hand and filling his right with the Sin Eater. The choppers climbed several
hundred feet and hovered, hanging in the sky, their foreports facing each
other, listing slightly from side to side. Kane heard nothing more over the
comm link. Pollard had probably blocked the frequency and was communicating
with Zack with hand signals.
Kane had known Pollard for years and had never really liked him. He was a
simple, brutal, uncompromising man. In Pollard's mind, he made the ideal
Magistrate, and more than once he had evinced jealousy of his and Grant's
reputations. Therefore, he figured Pollard wouldn't want to end this too
quickly. He would make another pass or two with the machine gun, and if that
had no effect, he would deploy the rockets. He was no doubt relying on Zack to
follow his lead.
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The Deathbirds slowly revolved in the sky, then dropped. Kane bent his knees
so only his head, shoulders and arms were out of the hatch. The Birds
descended quickly, and one leaped ahead of the other. Zack and his gunner were
too anxious, too excited. His chopper's rate and angle of descent were a bit
too sharp, his airspeed a bit too high. Pollard's craft fell behind.
Zack's gunner opened fire before the proper range and trajectory were
established. The stream of bullets flayed rock and soil, but none came within
twenty yards of the onrushing Sandcat.
Kane fixed the foreport of the Deathbird in the sights of both of his
blasters, held his breath and pressed the triggers. The two streams of
subsonic rounds ripped across the gully at 375 meters per second. Spent shell
casings fell down the hatchway, bounced across the hull. Over his helmet comm
link, he heard a garbled, screaming voice.
The Deathbird met the double streams of steel-jacketed lead halfway. A series
of starred holes appeared in the curving port, and the craft lurched as Zack
tried to bank. A few bullets from the chin turret skimmed the Sandcat's hull,
gouging shiny smears in the armor. Kane felt their impacts, but he didn't
relax his fingers on the triggers. The chopper heeled to starboard and
struggled to rise out of range of the blasterfire. .
The whirling blades sliced into the bank of the gully, digging out pounds of
rock and dirt in dust-filled eruptions. Sparks showered as steel struck stone,
and the main rotors snapped with a painfully high-
pitched, musical chime.
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In a lurching sideslip, the Deathbird flung itself away from the bank, and its
blades pinwheeled across the gully, chopping into and embedding in the soil.
The main rotor assembly continued to spin with broken, jagged stems. The craft
cannonaded port first against the gully floor.
A roaring ball of red-yellow flame mushroomed up from the ruptured fuel tank.
Kane recoiled as the wall of hot air, pushed forward by the thundering
explosion, slapped his face.
"Oops," he said mildly.
The Deathbird piloted by Pollard veered away, banking sharply, climbing above
the cloud of black smoke and the column of fire. His enraged voice crashed
over Kane's comm link "Another pair of Mags for you!
You traitor! They're the last ones! You hear? The last ones !"
The Deathbird dropped straight down, catching itself only a few feet above the
gully, as if its plummet had been checked by an invisible string. It plunged
forward in a roaring rush. A rocket burst from the port stub wing and soared,
flaming, directly toward the Sandcat. It skidded past its right side and
exploded a dozen yards ahead. Metal and rock fragments, smashed into the
vehicle's frontal armor, and smaller pieces put new cracks in the windshield.
A lump of stone bounced off the back of Kane's helmet, jarring him off his
feet. He fell clumsily into his seat. Terrified, Brigid asked him if he was
all right. He waved her off with a gesture and shouted to Domi, "Evasive!"
She swung the wheel from left to right, swerving back and forth. The heavy
machine responded sluggishly, wallowing laboriously. He knew it was already
too late for such maneuvers to be effective.
The Sandcat shook with a bone-numbing shock as a missile detonated almost
directly beneath it. The rear end jumped some three feet, and slewed around in
a one-eighty at thirty miles per hour, all direction and control gone. The
right back fender smashed broadside against the gully bank.
Kane had braced himself so the sudden jolting stop didn't fling him into the
instrument panel or through the windshield. Before his stunned eardrums
recovered from the concussion, he heard the jack-hammer clanging of treads
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shearing away from the rollers, the entire left track thrashing in a long
flapping strip.
Sparks showered and metal screamed as the roller rims slashed deep furrows
into the rocky ground.
The air inside the wag grew stifling hot as the incendiary compounds of the
warhead interacted with the armor. Smoke and the cloying smell of metal
turning molten filled the cramped interior. Grant coughed rackingly, pushing
Brigid ahead of him. "We've got to bail!"
The driver's door was jammed shut inside its warped frame. Kane shouldered the
passenger door open and dragged Domi across the seats, then helped Grant and
Brigid to climb out. From the undercarriage and from every seam of the Sandcat
boiled a mixture of white, gray and black smoke. Blobs of burning napalm jelly
clung to the armor, sending up spirals of flame.
Their backs against the gully wall, the four people crept away from the
smoke-spewing Sandcat, all of them craning their necks, scanning the sky. The
black chopper was nowhere in sight.
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Her voice raspy from inhaling smoke, Brigid asked, "How far are we from this
canyon?"
Domi jerked a thumb up over her head. "Up and over that way. We're there
already."
"So is Pollard," Kane muttered.
"Maybe he thinks we're dead," Grant added, not sounding as though he believed
it.
"Salvo ordered him to make sure we were flash-blasted," Kane replied. "So
he'll make sure."
"Hell, at least we'll be right on course when he burns us down," Grant said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]