“It’s no good, Jon,” she yelled. “I’m connecting, but the damn bullets just explode when they hit. Too much vel. It’s not going to work.”
“What else can we try?”
She looked up at him from the deck. “We try for the pilots. There’s the same velocity-and-penetration problem, though. I’ll have to first blow out the windscreen and then fire through the hole to get at the men.”
“If that’s what we’ve got, we go with it.”
“One additional problem.” She shoved her hand into her sweatshirt pocket. When she removed and opened it, three slender, sharp-nosed cartridges gleamed in the palm of her glove. “That’s the lot. Then the cow’s dry.”
“Like I said, if that’s what we’ve got. Randi, set us up.”
She had been listening to the exchange. “I’ll have to drop below the rotor arc to give you a line of fire into the cockpit. They’ll get to shoot back.”
“I’ll say yet again, if that’s what we’ve got.”
“Where are they?” the Halo’s pilot demanded, eyeing his sideview mirrors. “Where’d the cocksuckers go?”
“I do not know.” His copilot twisted in his seat and peered out the side bubble. “They dropped behind us.”
“What is it?” Kretek demanded from over the pilot’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” the pilot replied shortly. “They’re back on our six. They’re trying something.”
Then he felt the vibration through his controls as a second blast of rotor wash interfered with his own. A shadow tore over the cockpit as the floats of the Long Ranger flashed past, mere feet overhead, in a shallow accelerating dive. Pulling a couple of hundred feet ahead, the smaller helicopter skidded in midair, presenting its open side hatch to the Halo.
“What the f-”
The left side of the cockpit windscreen exploded in a hailstorm of pebbled glass. The copilot screamed incoherently, clawing at his shredded face. Then his scream was abruptly cut off as the second murderously precise rifle slug caught the Byelorussian in the throat, almost decapitating him.
A combat flier’s instincts took over, and the pilot locked his controls over. The nose of the Halo came around, sluggishly but quick enough to put the third bullet past his shoulder instead of into his head.
The Halo continued its wild turnaway, shuddering on the verge of a rotor stall. The pilot could hear the door gunner blazing wildly back at their attacker as he fought with the cyclic and collective, trying not to further stress the Halo’s critically overloaded airframe. His hand went to the T-grip handle of the emergency sling release.
“No!” The muzzle of Kretek’s automatic jammed into the pilot’s throat. Glaring like a wild boar at bay, the arms merchant wedged himself between the cockpit seats, his left arm a bloody ruin from the hypervelocity bullet that had missed the pilot. “No!”
Grimly Randi held her course until she heard Val’s rifle crack out its last shot. The Halo was turning on them like a ship of the line presenting its broadside, automatic weapons fire lashing from its side hatches. Submachine gun slugs dotted the flank of the Long Ranger. With her windscreen starring with bullet hits, Randi kicked up onto a rotor tip and dove under the firestreams.
In the cargo bay, Smith locked one arm around a seat brace and the other around Valentina as the radical evasion threatened to hurl them both out of the plunging aircraft. For a fragment of a second they could see the anthrax reservoir lashing wildly at the end of its sling cable, threatening to sweep down on them like Thor’s hammer. Then they were past and diving clear, beneath and behind the Halo.
Smith stuck his head out into the slipstream, looking after the fate of the stricken heavy lifter, hoping, praying to see the sling cable breaking or the big helicopter spinning down out of the sky. For a few heartening moments the Halo did seem to stagger on the verge of departing control. Then it stabilized and resumed its remorseless drone to the southeast.
The outer islands of the archipelago lay very close now.
Randi swung in behind the larger helicopter once more, climbing for position. When she called back, her voice was light. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had it with this. I’m just going to go up there and stick a pontoon in his rotors. We’ll land a little lopsided, but that’s okay.”
It was the casual declaration of a kamikaze run. Tapping the Halo’s rotor with one of the Ranger’s floats would indeed finish the job. But the odds of the Long Ranger surviving the resulting kinetic explosion and spray of disintegrating blade fragments were almost nonexistent.
Randi knew this full well. So did Smith and so did Valentina. The black-haired historian gave him an ironic smile and a faint throwaway shrug of her shoulders. It was the way of the trade. It must always be the job and getting the job done. Survival was not mandatory, especially with the lives of thousands in the balance.
There was no sense in prolonging matters. Randi had them positioned above and behind the lumbering Halo once more, poised to strike. Before giving the word, Smith took a final look around the Long Ranger’s interior, seeking for some asset, some option, that he might have overlooked.
There was simply nothing left. Only the big aluminum carryall of lab gear and his half-emptied backpack, a few loops of well-used climbing rope drooling out of it.
And then Jon Smith grinned, a tight, humorless, feral grin.
“What are they doing now?” It was growing harder to yell over the engines. Kretek could feel the weakness creeping upon him. The crude tourniquet on his shattered arm was only slowing the growth of the blood pool at his feet.
“How the fuck should I know?” the pilot raged back, casting a longing look at the release lever. “They’re hanging behind us again.”
“Hold your course.” Kretek stumbled back toward the crane cab amidships. From where they huddled near the open doorways he could feel his men’s eyes upon him. They were starting to fail; they were beginning to fear death more than they feared Anton Kretek. And Kretek felt the first shadow of that fear himself.
How could he be beaten by someone called Jon Smith?
Somehow the arms merchant knew it was the American team leader from Wednesday Island back there. The man the college professor had spoken of but whom he, Kretek, had never met face to face. Who was he? Who was this anonymous man with the bland name to end so many dreams and plans?
Painfully Kretek hauled himself into the glass-walled crane cab, looking astern.
There it was! The Long Ranger was almost on top of them again, diving in like a striking hawk. And this time there was something suspended beneath the smaller helicopter.
As if it were aping the Halo and its sling load of anthrax, a silver metal case dangled below one of the Long Ranger’s pontoons on a rope. And a man was braced in the side hatch of the Ranger, feeding the rope over the side. Kretek had an impression of dark hair flattened in the rotor wash, and hard, fine-planed features and narrowed, intent eyes that cut across the distance between them like a cold blue death ray. This, then, was Smith. This was his executioner. Kretek bellowed a wordless cry of denial and rage and horror.
The heavy equipment case dipped into the Halo’s rotor sweep. Smith felt the end of climbing rope smoke out from between his gloved hands as the case was smashed and hurled away by a blade tip.
Smith rolled back into the Long Ranger’s cargo compartment, Valentina helping to drag him through the side hatch. “Randi,” he yelled, “get us out of here!”
A savage, racketing vibration jackhammered through the Halo’s frame as Kretek staggered back toward the cockpit. The pilot was fighting with the blood-smeared controls, his dead copilot looking on, his near-severed head shaking sardonically.
“That’s it!” the pilot screamed. “We’ve got to jettison and land!”