“Yo, get into the trees on the other side,” Danny yelled as he ran toward them.
“We’re almost ready,” replied Jennifer. “I’ll be able to transfer control to the central unit in another minute or two.”
“Put it in auto mode,” said Danny.
“I can’t until it’s at a thousand feet.”
“Just let it go”
“Sixty seconds,” protested the scientist.
“Boston,” said Danny. “Move her.”
“Urn, yes, sir, if you say so.”
The sergeant physically picked up the scientist and began dragging her off the road.
“EB-52 Indianapolis to Whiplash leader,” said Major Alou. “Danny, if you can put more distance between you and them I can launch a five-hundred-pound bomb”
“We’re working on it,” said Danny. “We’re going to go off the road to the northeast and get across that ravine there”
But as they started, gunfire raked the highway and the ridge. The guerillas were now on both sides of the road; Danny and his small band retreated along the pavement. Reinforcements were coming up from the southwest; another twenty had made it to the road about a mile and a half away and were trotting toward them. If the nearby group managed to bog them down, the Whiplashers might be overrun.
“I don’t know if we’re going to make it to that ravine,” Danny told Alou.
“Acknowledged. Hold on,” added Alou.
Danny’s helmet included a laser-dot pointer showing where his MP5 was aimed. He fired as three figures came up the road, hitting one and sending the others scurrying back.
“Danny, the Brunei air force is two minutes from your location,” said Alou. “They have napalm and want to know if they can help out.”
“Sounds like a great idea if you can get them into the right location,” Danny told him. “Maybe we can sneak the helicopter in at the same time.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
McKenna spotted the tail end of the little Flighthawk three hundred yards to her left as she approached the target area. The moonlight wasn’t strong enough for her to see more than a smudge, but the smudge was enough to get her on course.
“You see that?” she asked Captain Seyed, who was flying as her wingman.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right. Follow him into the target. Once the flare ignites I’ll come in and give them a good thrashing.”
Lacking high-tech night-vision gear and GPS locators, McKenna had fallen back on a strategy dating to World War II. Seyed, following the Nighthawk to the area where the American unit was under fire, launched a large parachute flare called an LUU-2 just as he passed overhead. Descending by parachute, the flare illuminated the darkness, a giant candle that descended slowly because of the heat of the flame. An old method — but highly effective.
McKenna swooped downward, nose at a thirty-degree angle as she cleared the narrow roadway. She saw four or five guerillas ducking behind the tree line, pushed them into her bomb screen, and dropped two of the napalm canisters. The bombs — which were probably nearly as old as her tactics — dropped down and ignited. McKenna didn’t stop to admire her handiwork; as soon as she pulled up she spun the Dragonfly back and dumped two 250-pound bombs behind the conflagration. Her right wing sagged as she started to recover; she’d been peppered with gunfire and one or more of the bullets had damaged the ailerons, elevator, and her rudder. She had to fight a bit, arm wrestling the wind gods to get the plane level.
“Commander, you’re on fire,” said Seyed.
Shit, thought McKenna. She started to climb to the north, trying to both get away from the terrorists and to get her plane high enough to bail out if she had to.
The helicopter, meanwhile, had swooped in about a half-mile away to pick up the Whiplash ground team. As she passed by it, she saw the shadow of the mountain rising quickly in front of her. McKenna pulled the stick back and slapped the throttle against the last stop, but the Dragonfly wouldn’t put her nose up. Realizing she wasn’t going to clear, she muscled the aircraft right. The controls began to buck, the stick jerking in her hand as if an elephant were jumping up and down on the control cables. McKenna glanced at the instrument panel and saw one of the oil pressure gauges spinning, as if it had decided to unscrew itself from the panel.
“Listen, Seyed, I don’t know that I’m going to make it very far from here,” she told her wingman.
“You’re on fire!”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said as another mountain loomed ahead.
Danny could see the aircraft flaming in the sky as their helicopter took off.
“We better follow her,” he told the pilot. “See if we can pick her up”
Starship watched as the front of the Dragonfly came apart. It didn’t look like an explosion — it was more like a sneeze and then a disintegration, with the plane separating into large chunks. He steadied the Nighthawk and waited, watching the sky nearby.
“Got a chute!” he said finally. “Got a chute. Good chute. I’ll feed you a GPS coordinate.”
For all her experience, McKenna had never actually hit the silk from the pilot’s seat. She had taken a grand total of six jumps for training purposes, including two jumps at night; none compared in any way to this.
The seat pushed her out of the doomed plane with the loudest sound she had ever heard in her life, except for the time her cousin exploded a cherry bomb in her aunt’s bathroom. She flew straight into the darkness, soaring into the black night on what seemed like an unending trip. And then, just as she thought she’d reach orbit, something grabbed the top of her chest and yanked her backward, pulling her along as if from the back of a freight train.
Whoa, she thought. This might be pretty cool if it weren’t so dark and weird.
Somewhere in the back corner of her brain was a long lecture on the intricacies of a night-time ejection, instructions on the importance of checking the chute to make sure it had opened properly, tips on controlling the descent, some pointers on how to hold your body and the pros and cons of giving yourself a pep talk as you fell. But McKenna’s brain cells were so awash in the adrenaline of the moment that they didn’t have the patience to search for any of that information. She felt herself tipping forward and to the right; somehow she managed to get her body situated perpendicular to the ground just as a large shadow came up to meet her. She tried to get her legs ready to hit the ground. As she did, something smacked her from behind and she lurched to the right — she was falling into a large tree. McKenna grabbed for a branch, tumbling and twisting around as she skidded downward. When she finally stopped she was hanging upside down, suspended several feet from the ground. Her arms and face burned with the scrapes.
“Well, that was fun,” she said to herself, reaching for her knife.
The lads got a good image of the parachute twisted around the top of the trees, beaming it back through the Dreamland network and down via satellite to Danny’s smart helmet. Jennifer had stalled just long enough to get the blimp operational, and while Danny felt he couldn’t condone the fact that she had exposed herself to the bullets, he was grateful for the result. He spotted a clearing a hundred or so yards from the trees, up a rocky slope.
“There’s a spot where you can put us down over there,” Danny told the pilot, pointing to the clearing.
“Terrain’s rough back to that tree,” said the pilot. “If you have to take her out with a stretcher you’re going to have a hell of a time.”