Tracers.
“Breaking left!” Randi screamed, throwing the cyclic hard over and smashing down on her rudder bar.
The Long Ranger came up on one rotor tip and wailed into a diving turn of its own, cutting into and under the Cessna. The two aircraft flicked past one another like a pair of rapier blades.
Lift and power sagged, and Randi twisted the throttle grip to its stop, stabilizing the helicopter onto its new course. “Where is he?” she demanded, looking around wildly for their attacker.
“Climbing out at four o’clock,” Smith replied, looking aft out the side windows. “It looks like he’s circling back, trying to get in behind us again. Can you lose him?”
She made a few rapid mental assessments and was not happy with the outcome. “Not likely. There’s no way I can extend out over open water like this. He’s got a good sixty knots on us. He can also outclimb us.”
“Options?”
“Limited! With his gun firing out of his side door like that, he’s got a very restricted firing arc. When he comes in on us I can evade by turning into him and diving under him, like I just did. But that’ll only work for as long as we have altitude! Once he pins us down against the surface of the sea he can circle above us like the Apaches circling a wagon train. He’ll cut us to pieces.”
The wave tops glittered below the Long Ranger’s pontoons. They had not been flying at any great height to begin with, and their initial evasion had cost them a great deal of what they’d had. Randi had the Long Ranger shuddering at a maximum power climb, but in this game of dogfighting beggar-my-neighbor she couldn’t regain what she’d expended fast enough.
“Keep on that radio,” Smith commanded. “Try to get through to anyone.”
“It is no good,” Smyslov interjected grimly. He had been working the communications panel. “That plane’s jammer is cutting right across all of our communications bands. While it’s active no one will be hearing or saying anything within twenty kilometers of us.”
“Are you sure?” Smith demanded.
Smyslov gave a bitter, ironic grimace. “Unfortunately, yes. I recognize the interference modulation pattern of the unit. The bloody thing is one of ours! It’s a Russian army tactical electronic warfare system.”
“There he is!” Valentina Metrace called from her side of the helicopter. “He’s coming around again!”
Randi felt a hand reach around the seat back, yanking her Lady Magnum out of its pack holster. She didn’t have to look back to see who the hand belonged to.
“That’s not going to be much, Jon,” she commented.
“I know.” There was a grim tinge of humor in his reply. “But it’s what we’ve got.” Randi heard the wind roar of the rear passenger window sliding open, and the chill blast of the slipstream on the back of her neck.
“Be careful you don’t hit the rotors,” Randi yelled over the increased wind roar.
“I’ll be lucky to hit anything!”
“Hostile at eight o’clock, high angle!” Smyslov chanted. “Hostile is at nine o’clock, still climbing. Hostile is at ten o’clock…He’s banking! He’s turning in! He’s coming in faster this time!…”
The tracer stream cut past the windscreen, and again Randi rolled the Long Ranger into its steep evasive break. As the helicopter rolled onto its side, there was a momentary frozen image of the attacking Cessna cutting past them, the plane’s gunner half-hanging out its cargo door.
Like a Vietnam-era helicopter gunner, he was suspended from a monkey harness bolted into the door frame. Some kind of medium machine gun was strapped to his body, the belt feeding from an overhead magazine, making him a living flexible weapons mount. Looking down, he hosed death at the diving Long Ranger, the flash of an exhilarated grin glinting on his face.
Behind her, handguns crashed, both pistols firing at once, the piercing crack of Smith’s automatic and the heavier slam of her revolver. Ejecting brass flickered around the cockpit, and Randi caught a whiff of gun smoke as Smith got off half a dozen rounds before the target was past.
“No chance! Missed the bastard!” It was one of the rare times she ever heard him swear.
She got the helicopter stabilized under its rotor disk and checked her gauges. “We can do that once more,” she reported; “then we go into the water.”
It was a simple statement of fact.
“There’s a life vest under each seat, and a life raft slung under the fuselage.” Smith was equally pragmatic with his reply as he reached forward to take another speed loader from the fanny pack. “When we go in, I’ll try for the life raft. Everyone else swim as far away from the copter as fast as you can. Stay together and don’t inflate your vests right off. He’s going to strafe us, and you’re going to have to dive to evade.”
He was only going through the drill for form’s sake. Their survival time in the frigid waters of the straits could be counted in single-digit minutes.
“This would be a marvelous moment for a witty offhand comment,” Professor Metrace added dryly. “Any volunteers?” The historian’s face was pale in the cockpit mirror, but she was holding it together in her own way. Randi had to smile. Her taste in men might be questionable, but even she had to admit, Valentina Metrace had style.
Beyond the portside windows she could see the Cessna climbing into attack position once again. “Last chance,” Smith said. “Any suggestions?”
“There may be something…” Smyslov’s distracted murmur came over the intercom circuit.
“Major, do you have an idea?”
“Possibly, Colonel, but there is only a small chance…”
“A small chance is better than none, Major,” Smith snapped, “and that’s what we have now. Go!”
“As you wish, sir!” Behind his sunglasses Smyslov had his own eyes fixed on the enemy plane. “Miss Russell, when he begins his next run, you must hold your course; your straight course; you must let him shoot at us!”
Randi spared him an instant’s disbelieving glance. “You mean we give him a clean shot?”
“Yes. Exactly! We must let him fire on us. You must hold your course to the last possible second; then you must not turn and dive; you must climb! You must cut directly across his flight path!”
That was insanity twice over. “If he doesn’t shoot us down, we’ll collide with him!”
Smyslov could only nod in agreement. “Very possibly, Miss Russell.”
The Cessna banked, lifting into its wingover and final attacking dive.
“Randi, do it!” Smith’s command rang in her ears.
“Jon!”
His voice mellowed. “I don’t know what he’s thinking, either, but do it anyway.”
Randi bit her lip and held her course. She felt Smyslov’s hand drop onto her shoulder. “Wait for him,” the Russian said, tracking the pursuit curve of their attacker, calculating speeds and distances. “Wait for him!”
A tracer tentacle lashed past the Long Ranger, weaving and groping for the helicopter.
“Wait for him!” Smyslov said relentlessly, his fingers digging into her collarbone. “Wait…!”
The airframe shuddered as high-velocity metal thwacked through its structure. A side window starred and exploded inward as death screamed through the cockpit.
“Now! Pull up! Pull up!”
Wrenching her controls back to their stops, Randi lifted the Long Ranger through the flight path of the Cessna Centurion. For an instant, the whole world off the port side was filled with the nose and shimmering propeller arc of the diving plane, hanging mere feet beyond their own rotor arc. And in that frozen instant the windshield of the Cessna exploded outward.
Then it was past, and the helicopter was bucking and skidding wildly in the interlocking turbulence, on the very razor’s edge of departing controlled flight. Randi fought for the recovery, a thin, angry adrenaline-spurred cry slipping from her lips as she wrestled with the pitch and collective, striving not to lethally overstress the airframe. If she could fly the Ranger out of this, by God, she could fly it anywhere.