Rotors throbbed. Pardee saw dust clouding against the glare of the mercury-arc lights. He holstered his Colt, ran for the second helicopter.
* * *
Jerking a tangle of chain link away from the truck cab, Jack Grimaldi swung open the door. Forty millimeter and 5.56mm brass casings fell to the asphalt. Grimaldi took the passenger seat even as the truck accelerated.
"Hey, Rosario! Que pasa?" The flyer extraordinaire gave Blancanales a punch in the shoulder. "Saw the fireworks down there. Anything left for me to do?"
"Sure," Blancanales grinned. "Best part is yet to come. But first, could you reload everything for me? Been kinda too busy."
"Yeah, looks that way." Grimaldi looked around at the bullet holes in the cab, the spider-web shattered windshield. He picked up the M-203, found magazines and 40mm shells.
"It's super-fly!" Lyons joked through the shattered back window.
"Ironman! When do I go to work?"
"Ever fire 106mm recoilless rifles from a Huey? A hundred of them?"
"What? Never even heard of..."
"Lyons!" Gadgets shouted from the tailgate. "Helicopter coming after us!"
Scrambling over the weapons, boxes, and rolling cartridge cases, Lyons went to the tailgate, saw the silhouette of a helicopter against the flames and smoke of the camp. But it banked to the south.
"They're going toward the highway," Lyons said. "We got them fooled."
"Guess again."
A second helicopter rose from the camp, banked north. "Oh, shit," Lyons muttered. "Up front, prepare to get strafed!"
Grimaldi heard Lyons' warning, looked over to Blancanales. "Tell me, Rosario. How exactly does someone 'prepare to get strafed'?"
"Say your prayers," Blancanales suggested.
"No time." Grimaldi jammed extra mags for the M-203 in his jump suit's pockets. He pulled a tiny MAC-11 out of a shoulder holster, looped its strap over his right arm. He chambered a round in the M-203, opened the truck's door.
"Where you going?" Blancanales asked.
"I'm preparing to strafe back!" Grimaldi laughed as he climbed onto the roof of the truck cab. He jammed his legs down between the cab and the canvas canopy, hooked his boots through the shattered window. He braced the auto-rifle/grenade launcher on the canopy frame and waited.
Dropping down to only ten feet above the desert, the Huey paralleled the road at a hundred miles an hour.
"Pilots or the tail rotor!" Grimaldi shouted. He didn't wait for the helicopter's door gunner to fire the first round. He snapped bursts of two and three shots at the Plexiglas windshields of the Huey.
Holding the trigger down, Lyons emptied a magazine at the helicopter, dropped the empty mag, slapped in the second as .308 slugs slammed into the steel of the truck. Gadgets held the MAC-10 in his right hand, the M-203 in his left, and sprayed the helicopter, oblivious to the slugs and tracers streaking past him. Letting the machine pistol hang by its strap, Gadgets fired a 40mm grenade as the helicopter dosed on them.
The grenade popped against the helicopter, releasing a puff of CN gas. "Oops, wrong box," Gadgets muttered.
As the helicopter roared past, with the door gunner firing the M-60 point-blank into the truck, Lyons sighted on the side door and fired his 40mm grenade. The flash lit Pardee's face behind the M-60, then a man crouched behind him in the interior of the Huey exploded, pieces of his body and the bodies of other men falling from the opposite side of the helicopter.
The line of tracers from the M-60 went wild, spraying the sky. On top of the truck, Grimaldi fired a 40mm HE grenade directly into the tail rotor. Steel shrieked. The tail boom disintegrated, the helicopter pitched sideways, losing the ten feet of altitude separating it from the desert. The skids hit the sand sideways, flipped the helicopter.
Rolling, rotor blades flailing the earth then breaking loose, the helicopter cartwheeled.
Blancanales didn't slow the truck. Shot through-and-through, the two right rear tires flapped against the frame. Smoke poured from the tailpipe and from under the hood. He took his sheath knife, cut the last shards of shattered windshield from the frame.
"Everybody alive?" Blancanales called out.
"We're all right," Gadgets shouted. "Where's Grimaldi?"
"I'm okay." Grimaldi, little Stony Man hero, slung his M-203 over his shoulder and climbed down from the roof of the truck. The cab's passenger seat had been shredded by .308 slugs. It smoldered from a tracer. He patted out the smoking plastic. "That was fun. But I came to fly. When do I get to do my stuff?"
"In a minute," Blancanales answered, then shouted. "Reload! Airstrip coming up!"
Accelerating, the truck lurching and bumping on its two shot-out tires, Blancanales left the road. At sixty miles an hour, he hit the chain link fence straight on. He ducked below the dash at the last instant.
Chain link and razor wire tangled on the truck's hood. Metal grinding, the truck came to a stop. Blancanales revved the engine, downshifted. The truck lurched forward a few feet, dragging wire and poles. Grimaldi leaned out the side window.
"You got a steel post jammed in the front end."
Blancanales climbed out, stepped over the tangled wire and steel, went down on his hands and knees in front of the truck. He gave the thumbs-down sign. "Time to walk."
Gadgets and Lyons gathered weapons. Gadgets paused to listen to his hand-radio, the voices frantic and chaotic. "Trucks coming. The airstrip sentries have spotted us."
"Jeep on the runway, coming this way!" Grimaldi shouted. He rested his M-203 on the truck, guessed the distance to the twin headlights, estimated the vehicle's speed, fired a 40mm HE grenade. The jeep exploded, the burning hulk rolling to a stop. "Jeep no longer coming this way!"
Loaded with weapons and ammunition, the four men jogged toward the hangars. They saw three sets of headlights on the road from the base. Another jeep left the hangars, racing toward the wrecked truck. In the center of the runway, the blasted jeep burned.
"Quick distraction," Lyons called out to the others. "Three high-explosive rounds, mortar-style for the airstrip turnoff. Maybe it'll slow down those trucks."
They braced the M-203 butt stocks against the asphalt, fired in high arcs. Reloading, they continued across the runway. The 40mm grenades hit without any effect, two popping in the open desert, only one near the road. But the trucks slowed. Gadgets flipped the switch on his hand-radio, screamed through it to the enemy: "Get back, all of you! Back! We got Feds all over the place. They're setting up a mortar. Make a run for it. We have to surrender. They're everywhere."
For emphasis, he fired another wild 40mm round. By some miracle, it actually hit the road, though one hundred yards short of the first truck. Several voices at once blared from the hand-radios.
"Not enough confusion," Gadgets grinned. "Give me your hand-radio." He snatched Blancanales' radio, switched it to the mercenary frequency. He set one radio to transmit, the other to receive, put them face to face. A high-pitched shriek filled the air. He looped the radios together with the wrist straps. "Until the batteries go out, nobody uses that frequency."
"Mr. Wizard strikes again!" Lyons laughed.
Spreading out to a four-man skirmish line, they rushed the hangars. Lyons saw a man run around the corner, then stop to raise his rifle. Lyons shot him. Blancanales watched the sentry station at the gate. The sentries heard the rifle shot, ducked down and aimed their rifles. Blancanales put an HE grenade into the station. There was a scream. A man crawled into the open, clutching at a twisted leg. Blancanales raised his rifle. Lyons shouted: "Don't! Don't kill him. These guys are just ex-cons down on their luck. The Feds'll pick him up."
"Lyons the nice guy," Blancanales called back. "Can't believe it!"