The commotion outside the Huey was lost below him.
He just might make it.
The pilot of the Soviet-furnished Libyan army helicopter, transporting Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia and two of his generals, controlled the aircraft into a hover position one half mile from the scene of battle raging below them to the north. The bodies of General Pornov and one of his aides were stretched out in the rear of the aircraft, with their throats slit from ear to ear.
Colonel Shahkhia recalled the icy premonition he had felt that afternoon when Jericho's people had informed him of the paramilitary hit on a Jericho base in the Bahamas.
He had felt concern that this action around the world might cause local repercussions in his dealings with these people. That was why he was being so cautious concerning his rendezvous with Jericho tonight, in spite of his whetted appetite for the female slave that Jericho had promised.
And of course there were Colonel Shahkhia's other plans for Leonard Jericho...
Now a curt radio report from Aujila base had confirmed the earlier premonition. The communique sent word only that a sabotage team appeared to have them under attack.
Colonel Shahkhia had responded by ordering that all radio communications be cut and the full company of men down below be deployed to pinpoint this "team" of paramilitary penetrators.
Shahkhia was certain that the action had to be connected with whatever happened two days ago on Leonard Jericho's yacht in Exuma Cay.
The fires on the base below were spreading. Shahkhia watched with a constricting throat as the barracks and motor-pool structures caught fire.
Then the colonel saw an American Huey helicopter rising from the flames of Aujila oasis like some mechanical phoenix of war rising from the ashes of battle.
The virus.
The saboteurs were escaping with the virus!
Colonel Shahkhia pointed in his helicopter and bellowed a command that had his pilot goosing the aircraft into full-ahead thrust on a course of hot contact with that copter.
Ahmad Shahkhia understood the appalling chance he was taking. There was no way to ensure that the Huey chopper could be stopped without rupturing the container of Strain-7 aboard that machine. But the chance had to be taken. Shahkhia needed that cargo for what he planned...
When their aircraft was some seventy yards to the Huey's starboard side, Colonel Shahkhia ordered his pilot to open fire with the Libyan copter's 40mm cannons.
The generals and pilot understood what was at stake. There was dead silence around the cockpit.
The pilot obeyed the command to attack.
The Libyan warplane sailed in on the Huey with both 40mm cannons firing steady.
The mighty hammering of the cannons in Colonel Shahkhia's ears sounded to him like the deafening approach of Armageddon.
The Executioner held the Huey at hover for a brief moment, once the copter had gained enough altitude to put him out of effective range of the rebel troops firing at him from the ground.
The raging tide of fire across the weapons stash and buildings below was like a sea of flame.
In the shifting, flickering patterns of light, the killing machine had one microsecond to see a Libyan chopper come zeroing in on him full-throttle from behind.
He yanked the controls, jarring his big Huey smartly into a sharp evasive maneuver at the same instant that the other aircraft's cannons opened fire.
The sound pounded at his ears. It enveloped him.
22
Jack Grimaldi, in the snappy Boeing 1041 V/STOL, entered the fray from out of the southeast. He confronted the Libyan chopper nearly head-on as they converged on the Huey piloted by Mack Bolan.
The Aujila oasis army base below them was nothing but a burning hellground of devastation and confusion.
One human being named Mack Bolan had been at work down there. Far larger than any machine.
The Huey jarred to its port side and fell sharply.
A stream of tracers lasered out from the Libyan aircraft's 40mm's into nothing but dark air.
The Libyan chopper banked around for another run and a look at the sudden unexpected arrival of the unmarked V/STOL.
Grimaldi sent a sizzling stream of bullets from his own 50-cal. machine guns after the Libyan army aircraft. He thought he saw a line of holes dotting across the fuselage of the chopper. But the Libyan aircraft was not stopped or even slowed.
Grimaldi raised Bolan on the tac net.
"Striker! Let's move tail outa here!"
"Not yet, Jack." Bolan's voice came strong and in command across the crackle of static. "That's a slice of Hell down there. We've got to level it."
"Evita? Is she all right?"
"She's dead, Jack. They made turkey meat out of her."
"Oh, sweet Christ."
"We level the dump," growled Bolan.
There was a metallic quality to the voice that Grimaldi had never heard before.
Grimaldi tasted bile trying to rise in his own throat. His knuckles were white around the V/STOL's controls.
Eve was dead.
The pilot had always loved that woman. Loved, yeah. The way a brother-in-law digs a sweet sister-in-law.
"Consider 'em leveled," Grimaldi radioed back.
He hardly recognized his own voice.
The Libyan chopper had looped back for more.
Grimaldi banked around, coming back to where Bolan's Huey held in a stationary hover.
The pilot of the Libyan chopper no doubt thought he had a good chance at taking them both with one blistering strafe run from north to south with the 40mm booming.
Grimaldi arced the V/STOL back into an evasive twist, the shrill whistling of the jet more piercing than before in his ears.
Bolan's voice crackled across the tac net.
"I've got him, Jack."
Grimaldi heard the Huey's turret-mounted machine guns crackle a tattoo that ultimately outlasted the hammering of the Libyans' fire. The Soviet-made chopper hurtled through airspace separating Bolan and Grimaldi.
Jack Grimaldi caught a sudden side view, as the Libyan helicopter thundered past his cockpit, of a man in a bemedaled military uniform, staring out from that chopper over his dead pilot's shoulder with a look of frenzied, panicky realization.
Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia was pounding his fists against the aircraft's Plexiglas window, screaming something as his chopper went down.
The explosion of the Libyan copter's fuel tank as it crashed below, out of sight, was only a dull thud sound to Grimaldi's ears.
Bolan piloted the Huey on a course toward the Aujila oasis installation. Grimaldi flew another tight pattern and came in too.
The Huey chopper opened fire on the base with its big 40mm cannons on full auto mode as Bolan swooped in.
Shahkhia's rebel troops down below were sent scattering and falling. Their ranks were decimated by the criss-cross of machine gun and air-to-surface missiles from above.
Grimaldi delivered hellfire and destruction with the V/STOL's full missile capability: three fast runs interwoven around the Huey's found targets.
The night shuddered with explosions.
The two attacking aircraft leveled every standing structure amid pandemonium born of erupting mortar and tossing human bodies and equipment.
It took Bolan and Grimaldi seven minutes to destroy the Aujila army installation.
When Bolan appeared to be satisfied, he banked the big Huey gunship off into an easterly flight.
Grimaldi did the same. They would both land soon and he would take aboard the big guy.
Eve Aguilar was dead.
Jack Grimaldi was still trying to absorb that awful fact.
As the fires of destruction receded away below and behind them, Grimaldi patched himself through to Bolan.