The minutes crept by and the fog thickened. The world outside seemed as if it had always been dark and silent and always would be. Then Goron stiffened, and his indrawn breath hissed between his teeth. Blade saw it too. A faint blue white glow was growing in the fog far away to the left. Slowly it turned into a pair of headlights, and behind the headlights appeared the hood and windshield of a staff car.
Blade turned to signal Rilla to lie down on the floor, but she was already doing it. Her breath was coming fast and hard, as if she'd been running. Blade opened the door on his side and climbed out. Goron did the same. Blade unzipped his jacket and unsnapped the shoulder holster that held the little automatic. It had no silencer, but the cartridges were specially stepped-down, useless at twenty feet but deadly at five, and practically noiseless.
The staff car came on fast. For a moment Blade wondered if Josip was going to be able to stop it in the right place. Then the brakes squeaked faintly and the car pulled to a stop, skidding slightly on the wet concrete. The man called Josip opened the right-hand front door and climbed out, his face showing polite surprise.
«What's the trouble?» he said briskly.
That was the signal for action. Blade put both hands on the right front fender, vaulted clear over the hood, and landed on the far side of the car. With one hand he jerked open the driver's door and with the other he drew the automatic and fired two rounds squarely into the driver's face. The stepped-down cartridges made only faint popping noises. The driver made no noise at all as he slid out of the seat and landed on his back on the runway.
At the same moment, one of Josip's crewmen opened the rear door on the far side and tried to scramble out. He was just straightening up when Goron closed in, caught the man by the hair with one hand, and with the other drove a knife up under his chin.
The other crewman got out of the car before Blade could move against him, but no farther. Blade wheeled on one foot and drove the other into the man's groin. He doubled up. Before he could fall Blade grabbed him by the collar of his flying suit, jerked him forward, and chopped the other hand down across the back of the man's neck with lethal force.
Three men down, no noise anyone could have heard more than ten feet away, no radio calls, and no visible damage to the staff car. A good job, carried out from start to finish in less than thirty seconds.
Blade picked up the body of the second crewman and carried it to the truck. Goron did the same with the body of his victim. Josip pushed the driver in on top of the other two bodies, then climbed in himself.
Goron started the truck off again, following Josip's directions. The pilot's face was as gray as the fog outside and wet with either fog or sweat or both. «I've drawn Six Nine Six,» he said quietly. «Rules for bad-weather operations call for a maximum fuel load. We have plenty to take us to Englor, even at low altitude, and no one suspects anything.»
The truck pulled to a stop by one wing of the patrol bomber. Josip slid out of the back, Blade and Rilla followed him, and Goron climbed out of the driver's seat to join the others. Blade held a machine pistol taken from one of the dead crewmen and three hand grenades dangled from his belt.
The patrol bomber loomed above them, looking lean and rakish even in the darkness and the fog. An aluminum ladder was propped against the left wing. Josip went over to the ladder and began to climb.
«I must radio in that I am at the plane,» he said.
«Can't you wait until we've started the engines?» said Blade. «Then we can move fast if we have to.»
Josip shook his head. «Then they would be suspicious. I am sorry, but there is no other way. When I have made the call, I will open the belly hatch for you and the woman.»
«I'll climb up on top,» said Blade. «I think one of us had better keep watch, until you've started the engines and Piedar is out of sight.»
Goron turned so that he could reach out with one hand to Blade and with the other to Rilla. «I would like to see you people take off, of course, but-«
«You realize that it's time you were on your way,» Blade finished for him.
Goron laughed. «Yes, I suppose so. I suppose I should not even have come this far, but I could not do otherwise. Not after that many-times damned order from Englor.»
Blade said nothing, for there was nothing to say about that order that he hadn't already said several times. He would cheerfully strangle whoever gave it with his bare hands, but that would have to wait until he was back in Englor.
Blade scrambled up the ladder, feeling it creak under his weight, and climbed onto the wing. The dull gray aluminum was slick underfoot, and he moved carefully as he made his way toward the fuselage.
Blade reached the fuselage and looked forward. Josip was already in the cockpit, head bent over the controls. The whirr of a starter floated up to Blade's ears, and the truck with Piedar Goron at the wheel jerked into motion.
Blade raised one hand in a silent salute to the underground leader. He would have given a good part of his own chances at a safe return to Englor to get Goron safely out of here.
It happened so fast that if Blade's own intuition hadn't already made him partly alert, even his own swift and skilled reactions might not have been enough. A sudden crack overhead, like the blast of a shotgun, and the fog and the wet concrete and the aluminum of the plane seemed to glow as a flare burst high above the runway. Even in the fog it blazed so fiercely that for a moment Blade did not see the headlights racing toward him down the runway. He could only hear the swelling roar of engines, but that was enough to finish alerting him. By the time he could see clearly again, he knew where to look for the enemy.
There were three vehicles racing toward him. In the lead was a small jeep with three men in civilian clothes in it. Behind the jeep was a large canvas-topped truck. In the rear was an armored car, the commander standing up in the turret and the driver visible in the front hatch.
Blade's arm curved and his hand closed on one of the grenades. In a single flowing motion he jerked the pin, swung his arm far back, and snapped it forward. The grenade arched through the fog. As the flare died it struck the runway only a few feet ahead of the jeep. At the exact moment the jeep passed above it, the grenade exploded.
The blast lifted the jeep completely clear of the ground and in the same moment ignited the gas tank in a searing flash of yellow white flame. The sound of screaming men and crumpling metal as the jeep fell back to the ground were lost in the roar of the flames.
With a desperate twist of the wheel, the driver of the truck avoided ramming the flaming wreckage of the jeep. As the truck swerved, one tire must have passed over some sharp fragment of metal. There was another shotgun sound as the tire blew and a squeal of rubber as the truck went into a wild skid. It swung left, the driver fighting desperately for control, as the men in the back started leaping for safety. Three came out, two going down and not rising, a third staggering to his feet with his rifle still in his hands. Blade started to pull the pin from another grenade, then suddenly realized where the truck was going to end up. Instead, he leaped down from the plane's fuselage onto the wing, no longer worrying about slipping on the wet metal.
He was still fighting for balance on the wing when the skidding truck crashed into the plane. The truck tore off the nose landing gear and the nose smashed down onto the truck's cab. Blade lost his footing and nearly skidded right off the trailing edge of the wing. For a moment he had the feeling that the plane was going to flip right over like a playing card and land with him underneath.