By now the smoke from the mortar barrage and the crashed helicopters was drifting away. Two demolitions men came up to Blade and asked for permission to set charges on the radio masts. Blade gave the permission, scrambled up on top of the radio truck, and sat on the roof.
Now the attack planes came roaring in low overhead, ten of them. Blade tuned in on their frequency, listening to their cheerful comments on the shambles unfolding below. After a minute he got their report.
Their job was also done. Two planes had gone down over the target, but the only first-class enemy airfield within five hundred miles would be out of action for at least a couple of days. They'd shot down five enemy fighters over the field, and on the way here they'd added four light-attack planes, a transport, and two helicopters to the score.
Blade gave them a «Well Done,» but he couldn't give them any targets. The dragon base was disintegrating so rapidly under the hands of the strike force that there was nothing left for the pilots to do except fly air cover until the job was done.
Blade signaled to the driver of the radio truck, and it headed for the pilots' planned drop zone near the canyon of the dragon caves. Rounding up the pilots was something Blade wanted to supervise himself. Everything else seemed to be well under control.
The biggest explosion yet shook the ground so violently that the driver nearly lost control of the truck. For a moment Blade wondered if the Demolition Group had blown the dam prematurely. Then he saw flames and smoke mounting toward the sky from the fuel dump. The smoke rose to join the vast cloud that already hung over the base, casting its shadow on the ruins. The only thing that seemed to be intact anywhere on the landscape was one of the breeding vats. As Blade watched, smoke puffed up from its base and it split apart. Most of it fell to the ground and the rest stuck up like a solitary jagged tooth.
The roar of assault transports lifting off sounded overhead. Blade looked up to see the transports of the Demolition Group pass, shifting as he watched from vertical to horizontal flight. That meant the charges on the dam were set and fused. Blade checked the left breast pocket of his battledress. On a slip of paper, there was the code to detonate the fuses by radio command if the timers didn't work.
As Blade's truck rolled into the drop area the pilots started abandoning their planes. One by one they swung low and slow over the area, pulled up, and ejected. The ejection seats kicked them up and clear, then their white and yellow parachutes streamed out behind them and they began drifting down all over the area. The cyclists roared off to pick them up. Blade sensed an urgency in their speed, a desire to get the job done and follow the Demolition Group out of here!
Blade's truck pulled up at the very edge of the canyon. As he climbed out, the transport of the Blocking Group roared overhead, its wings swinging back to the high speed position. Its engines flamed brightly as the pilot cut in the afterburners in his eagerness to get away.
One by one the pilotless attack planes plunged to the ground and exploded. Blade saw one strike the edge of the canyon, bounce, and tumble down onto the dragons far below. Blade watched as the monsters charged about in mounting panic, trampling and attacking one another, battering themselves against the rock, trying vainly to climb the canyon walls.
The pilot of the last plane nearly followed it into the canyon. Blade saw him drifting down toward the edge, shouted at him, but knew that his words were lost in the roars of the dragons.
At the last moment the pilot spilled air from his parachute. It collapsed, dropping him twenty feet to the ground. He landed no more than inches from the edge. Blade and two other men sprinted to grab the pilot before his chute dragged him into the canyon. They caught him with no more than seconds to spare. As Blade knelt, with both hands clamped on one of the pilot's boots, he saw the lake behind the dam heave up into a monstrous white dome of water.
All three charges must have gone off together. The damn did not crumble, it was blown away by the combined force of the explosions and the water they drove before them. A section of dam three hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high was gone before the shock or sound of the explosion reached Blade. Then the roar of the water followed, and after that the roar of the dragons.
Blade forced himself to watch as the flood thundered down the canyon, a wall of water a hundred feet high. It tossed live dragons, dead dragons, boulders the size of a house like chips of wood. It swept along at a mile a minute, throwing up a curtain of spray so thick it seemed the canyon was filling with smoke. By the time the flood passed below where Blade was standing, the spray rose halfway to the canyon's edge. It was thick enough to blot out the view of what was happening below, but the roar of the water was not loud enough to drown out the dying roars of the dragons.
If the dragons had been natural creatures, however dangerous, Blade could have taken no pleasure in such wholesale slaughter. But their origins were unnatural, so there was nothing he could regret in the way they'd died.
He led the others away from the canyon's rim until the roar of the water began to fade. Then he stopped and said to everyone within earshot:
«Well done, gentlemen. Now-let's go home.»
Chapter 24
All eleven of the assault transports got home. So did all but fifty of the men of Strike Force Blade. They brought with them more than a hundred prisoners, plus a mixed but valuable loot of files, code books, instruments, and so on.
Behind them they left nearly a thousand enemies dead and a mission thoroughly accomplished. They had smashed the ability of the Red Flames to wage genetic warfare, and they'd done a good deal more besides.
General Golovin's death would throw Red Flame counterespionage into confusion, and the inevitable purge of his followers would throw it into chaos. It would take at least a year for Red Flame counterespionage to recover, the most crucial year of the war.
The debut of the assault transports had even more spectacular effects. Within two weeks after the raid, the Red Flames withdrew from their armies on the Gallic frontier no less than ten divisions, with all their supporting troops and air cover. They were assigned to home defense. Meanwhile, the Empire of Englor was able to reinforce the Eighth Army with five infantry divisions and the Seventy-first Airmobile Brigade. The Red Flame offensive into Gallia was certainly off, at least until the following spring. By that time the Eighth Army would be strong enough not only to defend itself but also to destroy its enemies.
R summed things up:
«Never before in the history of human conflict have so few thrown so many into so great a panic in so little time.»
So it was not surprising that Strike Force Blade was made a standing unit. It was renamed Number Twelve Commando and placed permanently under the control of the Special Operations Division.
It was not surprising that General Sir Morgan Strong was placed on the retired list. There were some who wanted to try him by court-martial, but it was generally felt that he would be punished enough by having to spend the rest of the war raising chickens in Dorsetshire.
Finally, it was not surprising that Colonel Richard Blade received from the hand of His Imperial Majesty Charles VI Englor's highest military decoration, the Imperial Cross.
«Every man of your strike force seems to have performed some deed worthy of this award,» said the Emperor as he pinned the Cross on Blade's tunic. «But naturally, we cannot contrive to award six hundred Imperial Crosses. So we present this award not only for your own exceptional and heroic services, but in recognition of those of every man under your command.»