“Your man in One says it’s all clear,” Ed said. “Time to go.”
“Back into the fire,” George mumbled, so quietly no one heard.
“All right,” Tony said, then cocked his head. “Man? I thought Sheila was up there.”
“She was. John relieved her. Apparently she and Weasel have been getting… reacquainted.” His mouth bent at the corners.
Tony shook his head. “Christ. You think they could have picked a—never mind. We gonna have to wait on them now?”
“No.” Ed shook his head.
George cleared his throat, what might have been a smile coloring his features. “Weasel’s more of a sprinter than a marathoner,” he added helpfully. Mark choked back a laugh.
“Well, let’s get out of here before he gets his second wind,” Tony said. “Jesus. Mike!” he called softly up the stairs. “We’re rolling.”
The two squads piled into their respective vehicles with a chorus of grunts and clanking metal. Weasel’s face was flushed as he clambered over the tailgate of the Ford. Mark grabbed him by the shoulder straps of his armored vest and helped pull him in.
“What she sees in your scrawny ass I have no idea,” the SAW gunner said cordially. Weasel just smiled at Mark and hunkered down in the corner.
“She doesn’t care about your syphilgonertaids?” Mark asked with concern.
“My what?”
Mark smiled and moved on. “I haven’t had sex in so long I should qualify as an honorary virgin,” he said sadly, shaking his head.
“Don’t you have a kid?”
“Yeah, but maybe my hymen grew back when I wasn’t looking.”
“Your what?”
The SUV was already running and as soon as the last of his teammates was aboard Quentin nosed it out from between the two houses. George was wedged between Quentin and Bobby in the front seat and their three heads swiveled back and forth as the overloaded Ford rolled down the short drive. The Toyota pulled out from its hiding place a second later, loaded down with Franklin squad. Jeff, Tavon, Arnold, and Mike sat in the pickup’s open bed, looking in every direction. John was driving, and Ed spotted Sheila with her dimpled smile and tight brown curls in the front passenger seat. Tony and the other Mark were tucked into the rear of the truck’s extended cab. The pickup pulled out right behind the Expedition as Quentin accelerated toward the Ditch.
“Get off my ass!” Quentin growled, as John demonstrated the Toyota’s superior acceleration, his grin visible through the truck’s windshield, but then the truck sank back as Quentin slowed to take the turn onto the service drive. A hundred feet down was the crossover where, once upon a time, westbound cars U-turned so they could hop on the interstate heading east. All eyes, in both vehicles, watched the far side of the freeway, alert for any signs of danger.
Captain Paul Evancho, pilot of Kilo One-Three, kept the Kestrel, the Army’s latest two-seater attack helicopter, two hundred feet off the deck as he followed the snaking pavement at eighty knots. Low and Slow, they called it, looking for trouble. He hated it, but orders were orders—fly low enough that any nearby assholes in the area with guns might be tempted to take a shot—then take them out with rockets and guns. He wished his command structure didn’t have so much faith in the armored glass and titanium that surrounded him, as he would have much preferred to be doing his patrols at 1000 feet AGL. One-Three was one of three birds up on patrol, but Kilo One-Eight and -Nine were south of the city trying to track down a squad of guerrillas that had shot up a patrol that morning. Nobody killed this time, thank God.
“Remember when they’d have a dozen birds up at any one time?” he asked his backseater. “We don’t even have that many left total.” He scanned his front, then left and right, then his bank of instruments, before starting the sequence all over again. The most pertinent information—speed, altitude, remaining fuel, and weapons status, were illuminated on the HUD of his helmet visor.
“That’s because this isn’t considered a combat zone anymore,” Lieutenant Casey Jenkins said, the very sound of the words distasteful to him. “The war’s out west. Don’t complain too much,” he warned his commanding officer. “They’re talking about shipping tanks to the front, and if it happens helos will be next.” His head swiveled left and right as well, scanning for danger. Minor G-forces pulled at him as the Captain put the bird through a gentle S-curve following the unused interstate.
“I know, it’s just that—” Evancho’s eyes moved up from his instruments and locked on the two vehicles halfway across the secondary bridge less than three hundred yards from his bird’s nose. He was more than close enough to see the rifle muzzles sticking up from the bed of the pickup truck.
“Tangos Tangos Tangos!” he yelled, arming the helicopter’s missiles with a flick of his thumb. He nosed the bird down, centered the orange aiming reticle in his visor’s HUD on the vehicle, and pulled the trigger on his joystick. It had taken the captain only two-point-nine seconds from the time he spotted the vehicles to trigger the seventy-millimeter missile, but instinctively he knew they were too close for a second missile to arm itself in flight before impact. The pilot thumbed the switch back to Guns as he roared over the bridge and released a wild burst from his nose cannon at the lead vehicle. He immediately threw the Kestrel over into a high-G banking turn to come back around. He heard Jenkins grunt through his earphones.
Ed was looking out the front of the SUV at the houses lining the south side service drive when someone yelled “Kestrel!” He looked over and the helicopter was right on top of them, having appeared from nowhere, a missile already streaking from one of the pods under its stubby wings.
“Move!” George yelled at Quentin, as the driver floored the overburdened SUV. Everyone in the Expedition was shoved back into their seats as an explosion behind them pushed the sluggish vehicle forward. A huge roaring BRRRRRRT! filled the sky above them as the helicopter fired a long burst from the electric Gatling gun under its nose. The SUV lurched and filled with smoke and the smell of ozone as a line of thirty-caliber bullets, fired at a rate of fifty per second, ripped through its thin steel body like a chain saw.
Ed got his carbine up and fired a wild burst at the retreating helicopter as he felt the SUV shudder under the impact of the bullets. The vehicle immediately began slowing down, and they’d barely reached the service drive, much less the adjoining sidestreets, but behind them Franklin’s Toyota had exploded in a ball of flame. There was nothing left of the cab but twisted metal and flames shooting ten feet into the air. Ed could only stare at it in shock.
The dive had cost them a hundred feet of altitude but as Evancho pulled the Kestrel out of the hard bank they still had seventy knots of airspeed. He saw immediately the missile had found its mark. The pickup was on fire, not moving, with bodies on the pavement all around it. The other vehicle was crawling along, smoke pouring from under its hood. Muzzle flashes caught his eye, and he heard the tank, tank of bullets bouncing off the bird’s armor. He leveled the chopper out and fought to get the targeting reticle on the second vehicle, finger poised over the trigger.
The missile had penetrated the Toyota’s thin sheet-metal body and exploded in the rear of the pickup’s cab, killing all four people inside instantly and igniting its fuel. Everyone sitting in the bed of the truck had been blown backwards by the blast. John and Tavon had been killed instantly.
Arnold found himself lying on his back in the middle of the bridge, twenty feet from the rear of the burning truck. He rolled over, his ears ringing unmercifully, and saw the Kestrel three hundred yards out in a banking turn. He looked around for his rifle but couldn’t find it.