Ahmad Hamshi allowed himself a smile.
The smile vanished quickly at the sight of the battered blue Piper Cub roaring over the hangars, barely clearing them, coming out of nowhere.
“Heeeeeee-yahhhhhhhhhhh!”
Mickey Ostrovsky was screaming as his Piper soared over the hangar. Parts of his guts had escaped from a gaping wound in his stomach and were hanging over his belt but he didn’t care. The cancer had taught him how to live with pain, and he had only two months left anyway. He had another minute before it got to be too much, and a minute would suit him, just fine.
His Piper had almost crash-landed minutes before but he had managed to keep it whole, losing consciousness only briefly. When he came to, he pushed the fighter back into the air, feeling its wheels scrape against the hangar roof, and headed it straight over the big guns for the runway.
The men manning them struggled to change the big guns’ angle but the best they could manage was to bring them directly overhead. Only the machine gun was able to get off any rounds at all as the blue plane screamed above them.
Mickey O. took a chest full of lead and felt the blood filling his mouth, but he wasn’t about to let such inconveniences stop him. He was going out the way he had always wanted to and the rest of the world be damned.
He fired his three remaining rockets and followed them to the ground, crashing his Piper into the line of cropdusters at the front just as his rockets tore up the middle rows. The dusters were shoved back against each other, tumbling like dominoes, as Mickey O. grazed the ground and waited for the merciful explosion that would end his life. Enough of the dusters’ fuel tanks had ruptured upon impact, and the flames from his final rocket blasts sniffed out the gushing gas and stuck to it. The explosions came fast and furious, belching black smoke and orange flames, consuming the last of the air before Mickey realized he couldn’t breathe it.
Ahmad Hamshi rushed desperately about, hands flapping and signaling, ordering his men to salvage the canisters. His words were absorbed by the fire and the blasts, but he knew it didn’t matter; there could be nothing left to salvage. His men were fleeing toward safety. He fled with them.
Mickey O.’s remaining eye found the sky he had loved one last time. Two bright flashes broke before him, coming straight from the heavens, angels no doubt sent to carry him up.
“I’m gonna make a fight of this,” Pop said, breaking the red warning bulb with his bare fist. “Hang on, Chris.”
With the gunships only seventy yards back, Keller swung up and over them, hoping to move in from behind and take them with his guns. But the battered Warhawk moved too sluggishly to gain him the advantage he sought, and he fired his guns at targets already swerving to the side, angling themselves in for a direct hit. His only advantage was gone now, Pop knew. He kept firing his guns until the hammers snapped on empty chambers, which was about the same time the engine began to sputter.
Chris watched the helicopters closing for the kill, dual guns blasting at the dying Warhawk as it started to drop from the sky. The giant insects hovered with it briefly, taunting their prey, then roared forward angling for a rocket shot.
There was a blinding explosion that shook Locke’s eyes closed, and he opened them fully expecting to see a long tunnel extended toward the next world.
What he saw was totally different.
The remains of one of the gunships were slipping from the sky, shedding more parts of its carcass as it fell. Locke turned toward the second chopper just as a similar explosion shattered the air and turned it hot. He shook himself from what must have been a hallucination. In the cockpit, though, Pop Keller seemed to be jumping for joy as he struggled to hold the Warhawk steady.
A pair of F-16s roared over them and then circled back to render assistance. Chris felt the tears burning his eyes. The jets were the prettiest sights he’d ever seen, and he forgot about his injured shoulder long enough to wave at them.
“We ain’t out of the woods yet, friend,” Pop said grimly.
The engine sputtered one last time, then died out altogether. Pop had used its last spurt of fuel to level out the Warhawk’s descent into the wind.
The ground came up fast. The last thing Christopher Locke remembered was checking to make sure his seat belt was fastened. Impact shook him forward, then quickly back so that his head smashed against the wooden railing. He felt himself being shaken violently up, straining against the seat belt, and imagined he had been catapulted outward into the warm air.
But he hadn’t imagined anything. The brave Warhawk had broken up around him, and Locke had been thrown well into the air at a frightening clip. The landing knocked the wind out of him, and he felt himself rolling over again and again, crunching bones with each turn. The pain was everywhere at once yet still spreading.
Then darkness.
Part Ten:
San Sebastian, Monday Morning
Chapter 35
Ross Dogan tightened his parachute belt in the cargo hold of the C-160. Around him 150 members of the army’s elite Rangers were crowded together passing cigarettes and candy. The hold had been silent for ten minutes now. The jump was almost upon them and there wasn’t an eye that strayed long from the red signal light, waiting for it to start flashing.
Dogan stared at the light intently, trying to fight against the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm him. He needed to be in top form for the next few hours.
Yesterday Calvin Roy had heard his story, accepting his words with little argument and posing only essential questions. Roy had scrambled the F-16s to Keysar Flats but word came back that a mothballed air force base the cropdusters were using had been devastated before their arrival. The jet fighters merely finished the job, a mop-up operation. Incredibly, it seemed the participants of an air show had done the bulk of the damage but information was still sketchy, as was the fate of Christopher Locke. Dogan knew Chris had been behind the bizarre raid and prayed he had managed to survive it. He was astounded by the amateur’s resourcefulness. Amazing how fast men learned when they had to.
Roy’s first inclination was to launch an air strike over San Sebastian after reconnaissance photographs confirmed men and equipment were massing in the dead town. Dogan, though, had argued vehemently against that strategy. Yes, an air strike would successfully obliterate the canisters that were there, but who knew whether Mandala had more stored somewhere else. The only acceptable solution was a ground-based strike. Mandala would have to be neutralized. He could not be allowed to revive his mad plan another day.
Ultimately Roy had relented and set about getting the bureaucracy in motion to call up the elite Rangers for a foreign operation. The two C-160 cargo-personnel transports had left at nine the previous evening, allowing only a brief stop in Panama for refueling en route to their target in Colombia. By launching an attack from the hillsides surrounding San Sebastian, the Rangers could effectively surround Mandala’s troops. Up till now things had gone miraculously without a hitch.
The red light flashed on. Wordlessly the Rangers shuffled to their feet. Dogan fell in step among them, taking a place in line. He was here under CIA authority but answerable to the Rangers’ commander. His job was to get Mandala while the Rangers took care of the rest of the town.
Dogan swallowed as much air as he could. He had never enjoyed jumping even under the best of circumstances, so when it came to his turn he leaped from the ledge with feet trembling and eyes squeezed closed. The fall was swift and uncomfortable, the added weight in Dogan’s pack making it harder for him to stay with the group’s dive pattern. He angled his body to keep close, shifting his pack to ease the strain. It included a pair of Laws rockets, the army’s miniature bazooka; a Mac-10 machine pistol with four spare clips; and Dogan’s favorite handgun, the Heckler and Koch P-9.