Fire beat at him; the cargo bay was open to the night on one side where an entire quadrant of the fuselage had peeled back off the veetol's skeletal airframe. The rest of the space was filled with black smoke and sheets of orange flame. Seats where men and women had been strapped in were now little more than charred, indefinable things. The smoke was thickening by the moment, and he wheezed, cursing, calling out their names as he sliced through the straps still holding him upside down. The knife cut the last and he dropped, falling badly. A shard of agony shot up from his right hip and he howled.
The flames were all around him now, and Saxon felt the hairs of his rough beard crisping with the heat. He stumbled forward, reaching for spars of broken steel, searching for a foothold to get him up and out of the wreckage. The metal was red-hot and he hissed in pain as it burned his palms through his combat gloves. The smoke churned around him, clogging his lungs. It was leaching the life from him, dragging on him. His chest felt like it was full of razors.
Saxon gripped the fire-scorched spars and dragged himself up the side of the fuselage, ignoring the singing pain from the places where jagged swords of hull metal slashed his torso and his meat arm. Then he was out, falling into the dusty brown loam churned by the crash. He grasped for his canteen, and through some miracle it was still clipped to his gear belt. Saxon thumbed off the cap and swallowed a chug of water, only to cough it back up a second later. Panting, he staggered a few steps from the wreckage.
The tree-lined hill extended away, becoming steeper, falling to a fast-flowing creek bed a few hundred meters below. A black arrow of smoke was rising swiftly into the night air. There was little wind, so the line was like a marker pointing directly to the crash site.
He stopped, fighting down the twitches of an adrenaline rush and took stock, running the system check. Red lights joined the green, and there were more of them than he wanted to see.
He couldn't stay here. The drone that had shot them down would be vectoring back to scope the crash site, and if he was here when that happened…
Kano's face rose in his thoughts and Saxon swore explosively. He glared back at the burning veetol. Am I the only one who survived?
"Anyone hear me?" he called, his voice husky and broken. "Strike Six, sound off!"
At first he heard only the sullen crackle of the hungry flames, but then a voice called out-wounded, but nearby. He turned toward it.
Pieces of hull were scattered over a copse of thin, broken trees, small fires burning in patches of spilled fuel. Saxon blinked his optic implants to their ultraviolet frequency setting and something made itself clear against the white-on-blue cast of the shifted image.
A hand flailed from underneath a wing panel, and he moved to it, crouching to put his shoulder under the long edge. Bracing against a boulder,
Saxon forced it away and heard a moan of pain. Sam Duarte looked up at him from the dirt, his tawny face a mess of scratches. The young mercenary's legs were blackened and twisted at unnatural angles; he'd likely been thrown clear of the veetol when it plowed through the trees, but the luck that saved him from being immolated had left him broken.
"Jefe…"he gasped. "You're bleeding."
"Later," Saxon said, and bent down to gather Duarte up, hauling him to his feet. The other man grunted with a deep hurt as he put weight on his right leg, and Saxon frowned. "Can you walk?"
"Not on my own," came the reply. "Madre de dios, where the hell did that drone come from?" Duarte looked around, blinking. "Where…
Where's Kano and the others?"
Saxon could smell the burned meat stench on himself and he couldn't say the words; his silence was enough, though, and Duarte shook his head and crossed himself. "We have to move," said Saxon. "You got a weapon?"
The other man shook his head again, so Saxon drew the black-anodized shape of a heavy Diamondback. 357 revolver from a holster on his belt, and pressed it into Duarte's hands. "That vulture, he'll be coming back," he said, checking the loads.
Saxon nodded, casting around, scanning the drift of wreckage. He'd lost his FR-27 in the crash, but the veetol had been carrying cases loaded with extra weapons for Operation Rainbird. He spotted one off to the side and made for it.
Rainbird. The mission had been blown before they even reached the target zone. Saxon's mind raced as he ran through the possibilities. Had they been compromised from the start? It was unlikely. Belltower's mercenary forces were the best paid in the world, and there was an unwritten rule that once you wore the bull badge, you were part of a brotherhood. The company did not tolerate traitors in the ranks. Belltower policed itself, often with lethal intensity.
He reached the case and tried the locks, but they were stuck fast. The knife came out again, and he worked the tip into the broken mechanism.
"The intel…" Duarte said out loud, his thoughts mirroring those of his squad leader. "The mission intel had to be bogus…"
"No," Saxon insisted.
"No?" Duarte echoed him, his tone changing, becoming more strident. "We had a clear highway, jefe! You saw the data. No drones for twenty miles."
The lock snapped and Saxon cracked the case. "Must've been a mistake…"
"Belltower intel never makes mistakes!" Duarte snapped, coughing. "That's what they always tell us!" He tried to lurch forward on his one good leg. "Whatever happened, we're screwed now…"
Saxon shot him an angry glare. "You secure that crap right now, Corporal," he said, putting hard emphasis on the young man's rank. "Just shut your mouth and do what I bloody well tell you to, and I promise I'll get you back to whatever barrio rattrap you call home."
Duarte sobered, and then gave a pained chuckle. "Hell, no. I joined up to get out of my barrio rattrap. I'll settle for just getting away from here."
"Yeah, I hear you." Saxon dragged a bandolier of shells from the case and pulled a heavy, large-gauge shoulder arm from the foam pads inside.
The G-87 was a grenade launcher capable of throwing out a half-dozen 40 mm high-explosive shells in a matter of seconds; the Americans called it "the Linebacker." He cracked open the magazine and began thumbing the soda-can-size rounds into the feed. He was almost done when he heard the low whine of ducted rotors overhead.
"Incoming!" shouted Duarte, and the soldier stumbled toward a twist of wreckage.
Saxon looked up and shifted the optics to low-light, instantly painting the whole sky in shades of dark green and glittering white. He caught movement as something ungainly and fast wheeled and turned above them. The wings of the drone changed aspect and folded close to the spindly fuselage as it dove at them. Saxon glimpsed a ball festooned with glassy lenses tucked underneath the nose of the robot aircraft as it turned to single him out.
He broke into a run and vaulted away over fallen tree trunks just as the clattering hammer of heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the place where he had been standing. Saxon rolled, hearing the deep report of the Diamondback as Duarte fired after the drone. The aircraft's engine note throbbed and changed as it went up into a stall turn and came about.
"The trees," Saxon shouted, working a dial on the grenade launcher."Get to the trees. We stay in the open, we'll be cut to shreds!"
Duarte didn't reply; he just ran, as best he could, half-staggering, half-falling. Saxon looked up, finding the drone as it came hunting once more.
He pulled the G-87 to his shoulder, almost aiming straight up, and squeezed the trigger. With a hollow grunt, the weapon discharged a shell in an upward arc. The dial set the grenade fuse for a half second, but even as the drone passed over him, Saxon knew he had misjudged the shot.
The shell exploded and the robot flyer bucked from the near hit, but maintained its dive.