Some figures moved through the brush a few hundred yards south of the launch point.
The soldiers threatening the team.
His heart thumped as he put the Flighthawk into a wide turn so he could position himself for a run back at the enemy. The Flighthawk cut a lollipop in the sky, its altitude dropping as he came around.
“I have two, three figures, in the jungle, near the road, very close to the team, in a threatening position,” he said. “Can’t see them too well.”
“Make sure they’re not our guys,” said Starship over the plane’s interphone circuit.
“No shit.” He clicked back into the Dreamland channel. “Ground, we got somebody just about on top of your guys.”
“Where?”
“Northwest.” Kick activated his weapons screen and pushed his nose down, running toward the road area in a diagonal from the northeast. Something moved on the left but he was going too fast to get a view, much less fire; he cursed and pulled off, trying to wing back and get another angle from the south. The geometry just wouldn’t work and he cursed himself again as he came out of the turn far too fast. He could feel his chest starting to pump with his quick, shallow breaths, and tried to force himself to breathe more slowly.
Zen had told him that the trick to flying the small aircraft in combat was to relax and keep your adrenaline level down. It was only by remaining relatively calm that you could process the information being given to you, and punch the right buttons.
“Let the computer do the frenetic stuff,” Zen had advised. “You’re like the CEO, checking off the options.”
“Northwest?” asked Danny on the ground.
“Looking at them — I have one blur. They’re in range of your people.”
He brought the Flighthawk around, putting the road on his left wing. He couldn’t see anything for a moment. Finally he got a target. His heart jumped, and his body moved reflexively to nail down the targeting pipper.
The computer didn’t let him. In the next second he realized he was looking at the Whiplash team. Fortunately, the signals from the smart helmets had registered in the computer system and the safeties wouldn’t have permitted him to fire without an override.
If I’d been piloting an A- I OA, Kick thought to himself, I might have splashed my own guys.
Shit.
“Hawk Four to ground team. All right, I have it all sorted out now. There are five, six men, uh, three hundred yards from where you are.” Even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Kick’s hand began to tremble. “I can take them out.”
“Negative,” responded Danny. “Hold off. We’re still not sure if they’re friendly or not. Just hold your position.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, banking around.
Chapter 68
Danny studied the blurry infrared in the left-hand side of his helmet’s visor, still trying to figure out if the people coming toward him were terrorists or government troops on patrol.
Since they were off the road, was it a reasonable assumption that they were terrorists?
“Getting closer, Captain,” said Garcia, who was crouched about ten yards to his left.
“Can you see their weapons?”
“I can’t tell.”
“How we doing back there, Boston?”
“Two more minutes. We’re doing the pre-launch countdown while we’re still inflating. This girl’s a whiz.”
“Good”
“Two hundred yards,” said Garcia. “They heard the Flighthawk that time — they stopped when it came around.”
“Hawk Four, this is Freah. Can you take a really loud pass at them?”
“Not sure what you mean, Captain.”
“I’m trying to get more time. When you cross overhead they stop. If they hear you again, we’ll get the last few seconds we need to launch the blimp.”
“Uh, I’ll give it my best. You want me to fire my cannon?”
“Negative for now.”
Danny could hear the Flighthawk come overhead. Sure enough, the patrol stopped.
“We’re launched,” said Boston. “I’m setting out the radar disrupters right now”
The disrupters were small, backpack-sized units that jammed radars in the vicinity of the blimp.
“Garcia, let’s move back up toward the road,” said Danny. “Swing up through that gully to your left.”
He waited until his sergeant had reached it before he started up himself. “We need another pass, Flighthawk.”
“Hawk Four.”
Danny moved slowly, climbing over several tree trunks as the Flighthawk took another run. His foot slid down into the muck as he got over the last tree; as he leaned back and pulled his leg out he heard a shout.
“Shit,” said someone over the Dreamland circuit.
Then the jungle lit up with gunfire.
Jennifer tapped the arrow keys on the laptop, steering the small airship to the north, away from the gunfire. She had the power set low so it would be very quiet; unfortunately, that made its speed slower than a person walking.
As the bullets continued to fly, she moved the throttle command to max. Even so, the blimp couldn’t move very quickly; it walked rather than ran away.
“Come on,” said Boston, pushing on her shoulder. “Let’s get across the road to some cover.”
“I can’t leave the unit right now,” said Jennifer.
“I’ll carry the transmitter,” said Boston. He started to reach for the antenna, which looked like a small satellite dish with a rectangular collection of tubes at the center.
“No,” she told him, grabbing him. “It’s not meant to be portable. I don’t know what’ll happen if we change the transmitting location. The blimp has to be above a thousand feet before it’ll go on auto-guide.”
“Well I know what’ll happen if we get shot,” said Boston. “We’re not going to get shot. Danny has it under control.”
“He’s not Superman,” said Boston, but he let go of the antenna and instead went and crouched between her and the area that the firing was coming from.
Chapter 69
Starship came off the refuel early and winged back toward the Whiplash team. The ground action was a mishmash, and while he had a general idea of what was going on, the two sides were so close together it was difficult to figure out exactly who was who.
“Get up to the highway and we’ll pepper the tree line,” Kick told the ground team.
Starship didn’t catch the acknowledgment — he was too busy ducking out of the way of the blimp as it rose to the north of the team. He banked back and came down just over the road, identifying the four members of the Whiplash ground unit and turning his nose just to the side of the highway as he lit his cannon. His forward air speed dropped and he had to break off; as he did there was a flash on the ground and he got a warning that a shoulder-launched SAM had been fired. He unleashed decoy flares and tightened his turn. The missile sniffed one of the flares and flew north, exploding about three-quarters of a mile away.
Danny and Garcia pulled back toward the blimp launch point as a second Flighthawk made a run at the enemy position, splashing it with cannonfire.