Lyons swung inside. "There's a plane up above us. Rifleman firing from the passenger side."
Bits of white plastic and urethane foam exploded from the ceiling. In the bedroom, Gadgets pressed tight the Velcro closures on his Kevlar and steel-plate battle armor. Lyons rushed to the equipment, and Gadgets handed him his battle armor.
Lyons pushed it away. "Put it on, Floyd. He's the witness we're protecting." He slipped on his shoulder holster and Python, then buckled on a bandolier of box magazines for his Atchisson selective-fire assault shotgun.
"Up front!" Blancanales shouted, steering as he sealed his armor's closures.
Setting the Atchisson's safety, Lyons snapped back the actuator to strip the first twelve-gauge round off the magazine. The motor home lurched as he ran forward. Lyons staggered, fell against the driver's bucket seat as a line of slugs smashed the windshield.
Through the patterns of shatter-crazed safety glass, Lyons saw two gunmen with Uzis scrambling from a rusted, dented Plymouth station wagon. The gunmen black men in jeans and flowing African shirts, their hair ratted into globes took cover behind the Plymouth as the driver leveled a shotgun through the passenger-side window.
Lyons jammed the fourteen-inch barrel of the Atchisson through the shattered windshield and thumbed the weapon's fire-selector all the way forward.
A storm of high-velocity steel shot swept the old station wagon. Handloaded by the Stony Man weapon-smith, Andrzej Konzaki, each twelve-gauge shell packed a mix of fifty number-two and double-ought steel balls, a mixture developed and proved in the jungle wars of Malaysia by British counterinsurgency commandos. Unlike lead shot, the steel shot did not deform or flatten when it struck objects or flesh. An automobile's thin sheet metal did not deflect or absorb the balls.
Glass exploded, plastic shattered, brains and blood sprayed in clouds as a three-round burst one hundred fifty steel projectiles found the first gunman where he crouched at the Plymouth's rear bumper. His head and right arm gone, blood foaming from his yawning chest cavity, the dead man flew back, his pocked and gory Uzi clattering across the access road.
Two blasts found the driver, the first round's high-velocity steel punching through the passenger door to jerk him upright, the spent balls smashing his hands and face, bloodying the gunman but not killing him. The second round, velocity undiminished by the auto's sheet steel, passed through the open passenger window and tore his head away.
Looking over the Atchisson's sights, Lyons saw the third gunman glance over at the headless body of his comrade, the nerve spasms of the blood-spurting corpse jerking the arms and torso in fish-flops. Lyons put the last two rounds of the mag into the third man's chest and head. Another suddenly headless dead man went flopping to hell.
The Atchisson's action locked back. Lyons dropped out the empty magazine and took another from his bandolier.
Blancanales had snatched a double-edged knife from a sheath on his left ankle as he drove, and he slashed at the plastic and shattered glass of the windshield. He saw another car carrying black men with Uzis fishtail from the freeway.
"Hit them!" Blancanales pointed with the blade.
Before the gunmen could throw open the doors of their red Cadillac, Jefferson's sawed-off Smith & Wesson boomed, a load of number-six lead birdshot annihilating the windshield and spraying the interior of the Cadillac with bits of glass. The young reporter tromboned the slide and fired again, the lightweight birdshot wounding the driver. As Jefferson worked the slide to fire again, Lyons's assault-shotgun raked the enemy's car.
Straining against the weapon's jackhammering recoil, Lyons held the muzzle on line as steel shot slammed the hood, windshield and interior. Blood and flesh splashed over the upholstery as the full-auto fire shredded the four gunmen.
Blancanales accelerated past the demolished Cadillac. In the back, Gadgets saw a dying gunman stagger from the car. One arm hung limp, blood was bubbling from a pattern of holes in his chest, but he still gripped an Uzi. One-handed, he raised the 9mm submachine gun to avenge himself.
Sighting his CAR-15 on the gunman, Gadgets fired through the rear window. Tempered glass sprayed both inward and outward as Gadgets triggered one burst, then another, then another. Deflected by the glass, the first burst skipped off the asphalt and banged the Cadillac, only one slug punching through the already dying man's chest. But the second and third bursts knocked him back, slugs tearing away his jaw and forehead as he staggered back, finally dead.
Slugs from the rifleman in the plane above them continued to punch through the roof of the motor home. Meanwhile all in the vehicle heard the continued buzzing of Gadgets's electronic detector.
Peering through the shattered windshield, Blancanales swerved into the freeway traffic. Gadgets ran forward with the droning detector. He adjusted a dial, then waved the unit over the floor of the motor home.
Near the gas and brake pedals, at the point nearest the front bumper, the detector buzzed. As he backed away, the buzzing stopped. He told the others. "We got D.F. up front here. Must be radio-switched. That's why I didn't find it before."
"Prescott!" Lyons cursed. "That pink shit!"
Blancanales glanced into the rearview mirror. "Quit the talk, Ironman. We got two more cars gaining on us."
Slugs from the plane punched through the roof. Auto-fire from the pursuing cars hammered the back of the motor home. Slugs tore through the interior.
Lyons slapped another magazine into his Atchisson. He crouchwalked through the wrecked interior of the mobile political office.
"Prescott's going to get it."
Gadgets followed a step behind him. "Not if we get it first."
17
Hurrying past the few patrons having breakfast, legislative aide Bob Prescott went to the pay phone at the rear of the fashionable cafe in the financial district of San Francisco. He pulled a handful of dimes and quarters from his pocket. Punching a long series of numbers, he then dropped in three dollars in coins.
"Good afternoon, sir. You've heard the news. Your men failed... The ones last night and this morning No sir, he won't escape."
The stylish young attorney glanced to the nearest tables. A man and a woman spread a fanfolded computer printout on the table. The man, in a tie-dyed shirt blazing with a hundred colors, his thinning blond hair in a long ponytail, totaled figures on a briefcase-sized computer. The woman, in a conservative gray suit, explained the significance of several lines on the printout. Neither the man nor the woman had any interest in the man a few steps away speaking into the pay phone.
"They won't escapeThe reporter told me he has the photographs and negatives on him. So they will burn with him I activated the units I held in reserve, the mercenaries no, not your countrymen, no one will link these soldiers to your country. That black journalist Jefferson will die. I'm using blacks to kill a black."
18
Weaving through the light traffic, the two cars of black gunmen used trucks and passenger cars as shields. Unwilling to risk killing innocent drivers, Gadgets and Lyons held their fire. Above them, the rifleman continued firing down through the motor home's roof.
Lyons watched slugs punch through the ceiling. Bits of plastic and bullet fragments rattled on the linoleum floor. He picked up a deformed fragment of 5.56mm slug.
"If they had an M-60 up there," Lyons yelled, passing the slug to Gadgets, "we'd be closed down."
An impact showered them with plastic. Setting his CAR-15 on semi-automatic, Gadgets sighted on the plane above them.