“Good show, Jim!” Adrienne called, and whooped.
Tom ignored that, and the Indian mercenaries. The ones left on the ground were doomed anyway, and he didn’t much like shooting at effectively unarmed men. Instead he lifted his thumb and kept the turret swinging; it had a nice fast traverse. A few seconds later the main sighting pip slid onto the side of the Cheetah on his right. That was lashing the road with both weapons, a heavy machine gun and a belt-fed grenade launcher beside it… and both of those would rip the thin armor that surrounded him the way a machete would open up a soda can. The grenades arched out almost slowly enough to see, bursting with bright snaps in rows like firecrackers.
The Cheetah spurted forward onto the dirt road, its turret whickering spiteful flames in the darkness. Tom’s foot came down on the firing pedal.
BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!
The 40mm automatic cannon cycled through three rounds as it pistoned back and forth, and a massive blade-shaped muzzle flash belled out from its muzzle. The twelve-ton weight of the Catamount surged back on its suspension as the massive recoil was transmitted through the trunnions to the turret and hull, like three hard punches in succession.
Those shells were fused for contact; each punched into the little vehicle and exploded, one in the turret, one in the fighting compartment and one in the fuel tank between the engine and the turret basket. That was enough to rip the Cheetah apart along the seams of its welds; fractional seconds later the belts of grenade ammuntion went off; the contents of the tank sprayed out into a finely divided mist of hydrocarbon mixed with air and then they exploded—the original meaning of a fuel-air bomb. Tom grunted as the big armored car rocked back on its wheels, and Adrienne yipped in involuntary alarm; the Cheetah’s turret went flipping up into the air like a steel tiddlywink. Most of the rest of it was converted into the equivalent of fragments from an enormous grenade. Some of them went pting! off the hull of the Catamount.
He didn’t think they’d have to worry about the Colletta riflemen between them and the armored car, much.
“Goose it, Tully!” he called, reversing the controls and swinging the turret northwest with a wrenching suddenness that made the servos whine in protest.
Jesus, I was a Ranger, not a tanker—
The armored car was moving before the first syllable was out of his mouth; Tully threw it into reverse and swung the wheel hard right. All four of the first two pair of wheels were steerable; the Catamount had a tighter turning radius than many much smaller civilian vehicles. That turned the bow back toward the remaining Cheetah at the other end of the line considerably faster than the turret could have done alone.
Someone there had realized what was happening. The little car was scooting away, its turret reversed to fire behind it and the twin bars of tracer swiveling toward him. They were throwing .50 caliber hardpoint bullets, each the size of a thumb and moving at better than three thousand feet per second. If they hit the thin armor of the Catamount, they’d be moving at least half that when they went through him, or Adrienne or Tully.
But driving straight away from him was a bad idea. Zero-deflection shot… His foot came down on the firing pedal.
BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!
“Tom, the transports!” Adrienne called urgently from where she rode with her head and shoulders out of the commander’s hatch.
As she spoke he heard thumps on the roof of the turret, and the gunner’s hatch popped open. He looked up, and saw Sandra Margolin’s pale, strained face; she climbed down across him—which would have been interesting, under other circumstances—and then dropped to crouch on the floor of the turret basket. She even muttered an apology as she did it. He checked quickly to see that she wasn’t in a position were she’d be in the path of the gun breech or loader.
Adrienne went on sharply: “Tully, Sandra’s here. Get us out on the runway. Now.”
Tully did, straightening the wheels and hitting the accelerator. The engine was a three-hundred horsepower turbocharged diesel, and the twelve-ton vehicle had acceleration like a jeep. It had a lot more inertia, though, and Tom braced himself with a foot and a hand as it bounced over the ditch on the side of the road, over several bumpy objects—he resolutely didn’t think of them as human bodies, probably still alive until a dozen tons rolled over them—and across the strip of dirt. The fence beside the runway was chain-link, with barbed wire on top.
“Close the hatch!” he called to Adrienne as the fence loomed up in the field of the gun screen; you could get decapitated by something like that, if you weren’t careful.
She dropped down, pulling the hatch after her; the Catamount lurched as they struck the wire. Some of it broke in a shower of sparks; one of the thick timber posts snapped across and tumbled out over the dirt runway, dragging open a section like a huge door. The Catamount swayed to one side as Tully cut a sharp turn—he wasn’t used to driving something this heavy or overpowered either, but Jesus, Odhinn and Almighty Thor witness he was doing a good job!—and hit the gas. The Catamount surged forward like its namesake, going after the sixth transport. The big plane had its ramp up, and the rising scream of its engines came even through the closed hatch.
Tom Christiansen had ridden in a lot of C-130 transports, a couple of them into places where they thought there might be hostiles waiting near the landing fields with heat-seeking missiles. He could imagine exactly the fear and confusion aboard the big aircraft, the dim light and crowding and the mind-numbing noise.
And he could imagine exactly what the hundred-odd men packed into it cheek to jowl were about to experience.
The aiming pip slid across the flat rear of the Hercules, eight hundred yards away to the west. It tilted as the nose left the ground…. And Tom’s foot hit the firing pedal.
BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! The first burst of three rounds hit the thin aluminum of the closed ramp like a giant blade. The ramp dropped open as the shells cut the couplings, shedding great rooster tails of sparks as it dragged on the ground.
BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! Flashes as the shells exploded in the troop compartment. Tom’s lips writhed back from his teeth in a grimace of horror.
BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!
He hit something vital this time, the control cabin or the hydraulics. The huge aircraft stopped accelerating away; it tried to turn sharply left while it was traveling faster than a race car, and then pitched over onto one wing as it overbalanced. There was an explosion of sparks, probably from one of the props beating itself to death against the ground, then a real explosion—vaporized kerosene from one of the wing tanks hitting something white-hot. Tom flung his hand up in a reflex action, even though there was nearly a thousand yards of space and a quarter-inch of armor plate between him and the holocaust that followed. A towering ball of flame enveloped the Hercules, and engines and part of a wing flipped out of it. The armored car rocked back, harder than it had from the recoil of its own weapon, then surged forward as Tully hit the brakes. The frame of the C-130 showed again for a moment, and then the stored munitions on board went off; bits and pieces flew into the air, trailing fire and white smoke through the night.
“Jesus,” Tom whispered. “A hundred and thirty men. Jesus!”
“Tom!” Adrienne said sharply.
“Yah,” he replied, scrubbing a hand across his face.