“Holy Christ …”
The helicopters had to be taken out. Otherwise they’d catch Pop and blow his entire wing to hell.
“Blue Wing, this is Blue leader. Go for the helicopters. Repeat, go for the helicopters. Hit ’em with everything you’ve got! I’m gonna draw the fire of the big guns so you can come in unhindered.”
Mickey O. banked around the outskirts of the base and roared downward much too fast to even think of using his remaining three rockets over the big guns lodged on the truck beds. His teeth clamped together, and he was thrown back hard against the cockpit’s shoulder rest, which snapped off from the impact.
He felt the bullets pound his wings and tail, and the Piper sputtered. The windshield shattered and glass blew into Mickey O.’s face, drawing blood everywhere and blinding one of his eyes. But he had done his job by drawing the fire of the big guns away from his Fighters long enough to allow them to engage the gunships. He turned his remaining eye in their direction.
The Mustang and Bearcat were in the midst of a vicious air battle, firing as they darted through the sky. The gunships, though, could match them in speed and easily outmaneuver them. Mickey O.’s pilots managed to position themselves for several volleys of fire from their machine guns. But only a direct hit in a vital area could cripple the gunships, and virtually all their bullets bounced off the choppers’ armor.
The Bearcat streaked in front of one of the choppers and a rocket from the gunship blasted it into flaming oblivion. The Mustang settled into an escape run, but a second gunship drew near quickly and pounded it with cannon fire intense enough to tear the plane in half.
Mickey O. pushed for enough thrust to reach the choppers himself but the Piper handled listlessly, showing the effects of its wounds. The engine sputtered. He was drawing straight over the big guns again and tried desperately to drive the Piper into a lift.
It climbed a little but the big guns still found him. Mickey O. reeled as a piece of shrapnel thudded into his side and part of a ricocheting shell smacked his stomach. With the last of his strength, he pulled the dying Piper up and away from the big guns, and limped off into the hills, as the helicopters took off on Pop’s trail.
“Red leader, this is Blue leader,” he muttered through the blood starting to collect in his mouth. “Watch your rear. Big … guns … coming….”
His radio, though, had been knocked out by the first rampage of bullets. Pop Keller never heard his warning.
On the ground, Ahmad Hamshi gazed happily at the helicopter gunships streaking away in the trail of the ghost planes. By his count there were still twenty-eight cropdusters waiting to take off, with ten destroyed and twelve airborne. Even if all twelve of these were destroyed by the ghost planes, Hamshi calculated that the remaining twenty-eight could still accomplish their task. There was no way of contacting Mandala, so he was forced to take matters into his own hands. The distribution strategy would have to be altered a bit, the range of the dispersal pattern modified. Little of Tantalus’s effect, though, would be lost. The range would only be narrowed, the time for total infection lengthened accordingly by only a week, even less maybe. Mandala wouldn’t have been able to do better himself under the circumstances.
Meanwhile Hamshi would not risk any more of the cropdusters until the helicopters completed their chore of destroying the other half of this ghost squadron.
It wouldn’t take long.
Pop Keller and the Red attack wing were closing on the last four dusters, the first four that had taken off from Stonewall Jackson. They were all in sight of his fighters and coming rapidly into range.
“Fire when ready,” Pop ordered as he pushed his Warhawk into range of the duster he had trained in his sights.
He had left this one for himself and assigned three of his fighters to the other three remaining dusters. There were a lot of low-flying clouds and the dusters had passed into them in the hope of shaking off their pursuers. This unnerved Pop slightly because it took him out of eye contact with his wing and that was something a squadron commander dreaded. He wanted to be done with this, link the wing together, and make tracks back for the base to find out what had happened to Mickey O. and Blue Wing.
A flood of black smoke stained a cloud to his far right.
“There!” Locke pointed.
“My Messerschmitt did that,” Pop boasted. “You can make book on it.”
More smoke billowed from a cloud to his left.
“That was the Spitfire’s work.” Pop beamed. He gritted his teeth. “Okay, you bastard,” he said to the duster before him as the clouds broke and they flew together into sharp blue sky. “Get ready to join the fellows.”
The duster could have released its canister contents there quite effectively but refrained, as the others had, because it would have required a substantial loss of speed. The pilot didn’t realize that escape from Pop’s 2,000-horsepower engine was impossible no matter what he did. Pop snapped his thumbs and tore into the plane’s fuselage with machine-gun spray. The duster burst into flames.
“Straight to hell, asshole,” Pop shouted after him as a similar orange ball erupted far to the right. A pair of Mustangs had finished the final duster.
“Red leader, this is Red Wing three” came a pilot’s old, panicked voice. “Something’s coming up on me from the rear. I’m turning to. I’m trying — Oh, God, it’s—”
The volley of bullets came right over the headset into Pop’s ears. Then nothing.
“Red Wing three, what the hell happened? Red Wing three, are you there?”
The trainer, which had taken up a position behind them, wasn’t answering. Locke glanced back to his rear and felt his bladder weaken as the helicopters roared toward them.
Chapter 34
“Oh, shit!” was all Pop Keller could say after he completed a wide turn that brought him face to face with the four gunships. “We got a bit of trouble here, Chris.”
“Then why the hell are you—”
Locke’s words were drowned out by the Warhawk’s engine as Keller lifted into a sudden climb and streaked over the four helicopters. They turned effortlessly and continued their pursuit.
“Red Wing, this is Red leader. I’ve got four big bugs on my ass and I need some help fast. Reds three and four,” he said to the Messerschmitt and the Spitfire, “come in from the rear and take them with your air cannons. The rest of you hang close.”
“They’re right on your rail, Red leader!” came a pilot’s desperate voice.
“I know that, numb nuts,” Pop muttered, and proceeded to drive the Warhawk up and over, defying gravity, diving fast with its shark mouth swallowing air to elude the gunships on his tail.
Two of them broke off and headed for the rest of the wing.
“At least we took out the dusters,” Pop said simply.
“You didn’t impress me as the kind of man who’d give up.”
Keller’s crusty features flared. “Who said anything about giving up? I was just stating fact.”
A volley of machine-gun fire sprayed them. Pop dove, then climbed, fighting to stay out of the gunships’ sights if not their range.
Up ahead, two of the gunships were bearing down on four of Red Wing’s fighters that were acting as decoys for the strike by the Messerschmitt and Spitfire. Suddenly the decoy planes dove together, as the two assault fighters dropped out of the clouds and fell in behind the two gunships.
“We’re on them, Red leader. In range … now!”