“She’s on to something,” Muldoon said. “You guys need to suit up. Now.”
“Come on, Muldoon,” a bucktoothed soldier with a perpetual grin said. “You taking tactical cues from a weekend warrior, man?”
“Skeeter, you don’t gotta listen to me,” Muldoon said, reaching for his MOPP overgarment. “You were never worth a pile of shit, anyway.”
Behind him, people moved amid the trees. Rawlings brought up her M4, and Muldoon frowned at her for an instant before putting it together.
The soldier seated to Rawlings’s right saw it as well.
“Klowns to the right!” He raised his rifle just as a Molotov cocktail arced through the air.
Rawlings fired three rounds so quickly it sounded as if she were ripping off a burst on full auto. One of the figures among the trees faltered, then fell face-first to the ground. The area to the right of the column was slightly elevated, not by a lot, but enough to give the attackers a small tactical advantage. As Muldoon ripped off his sunglasses and pulled on his MOPP overgarment, several other troops began firing as well, sending dozens of rounds ripping through the trees, bushes, and infected that were moving toward them.
A Molotov cocktail struck the side of the Big Foot’s bed and shattered, spreading gasoline everywhere. Flames enveloped the last half of the truck, and men shrieked in fear and pain. The attackers were held at bay, not by the soldiers’ return fire, but by the chain link fence that separated the road from the turnpike. That gave the soldier manning the M240B machinegun atop the truck’s cab enough time to spin his weapon around and open up, slashing at the Klowns with a withering stream of bullets.
The Humvee behind the truck was hit with three Molotovs in rapid succession, turning it into a rolling funeral pyre covered by orange flame that danced in the sunlight. The soldier manning the machinegun in the vehicle’s cupola screamed so loudly that they heard him over the truck’s engine and the fusillade of gunfire. The Humvee accelerated suddenly, its driver probably blinded by flame and smoke. Just before it crashed into the back of their truck, it veered to the left and pulled out of the column’s formation. It slammed into a minivan in the next lane.
The pileup that occurred as a result was a horrendous cacophony of rending metal and screeching tires. While the military convoy had been sticking to the right lane and maintaining an even fifty miles an hour, the civilian traffic in the other travel lane was going much faster. Cars and trucks piled up on each other in explosions of glass and plastic and blaring horns. Rawlings saw luggage fly through the air, tumbling end over end, strewing clothing and personal items across the turnpike and the grass median that separated the eastbound lanes from the westbound.
At the end of her truck, a soldier was hitting the flames with a fire extinguisher that had been clamped to the side of the bed. Another soldier clad in full MOPP gear directed him, waving his arms and yelling, “I’m in charge!” through his facemask.
“Fucking lieutenant,” one of the soldiers near Rawlings said. “Guy just doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up.”
Rawlings was about to ask him how he knew it was the lieutenant when something caught her attention—the throbbing wop-wop-wop-wop of approaching helicopters.
Hueys.
Which only the Massachusetts Army National Guard had.
NINE.
Major Fleischer watched the small engagement on the ground. He was trying to coordinate an appropriate angle of attack to bring the fight to the enemy when his pilot spoke over the intercom.
“Hey, Major, we’ve got National Guard aircraft coming in.”
Fleischer looked out the canopy and saw four dots in the distance that were slowly tracking toward them. Farther downrange, another four aircraft flew in a trail formation, but their path would take them well past the column’s rear. The Longbow radar system tracked them as well, and the software that drove the system classified the aircraft as UH-1s. That would be the Guard combat support unit that had been stationed at Logan, along with the rest of the Guard assets.
Fleischer knew from the National Guard liaison officer attached to Hanscom that Logan had been in danger of being overrun by the Klowns; hell, the battalion’s Ravens had overflown the airport just yesterday, and it was surrounded by a veritable army of lunatics. If Logan had indeed fallen, then the majority of the Guard forces there had to be written off.
With that in mind, Fleischer thought that the Huey flight’s sudden emergence from the chaos was concerning.
“What was their designation?” he asked. “Bosox, right?”
“Bosox, yeah. But if Logan’s gone tits up, I figure they’re Nosox now,” Smitty said.
“Let’s hope that’s not what’s happened.” Fleischer switched one of the radios over to the channels the battalion shared with the Guard. “Bosox, this is Tomcat Six. Over.” Nothing. “Bosox, this is Tomcat Six. You’re flying into our area of operations. You need to identify your intentions. Over.”
“Gonna get us some chickenhawks,” came the response. The speaker was doing his best to imitate Foghorn Leghorn, all while chortling.
Fleischer’s blood ran cold. “Bosox, this is Tomcat Six. Say again. Over.”
“Gonna get us some BAH-GAAAWK chickenhawks, and you can call me Colonel Sanders!” the laughing voice jeered over the radio. “I like, I say, I like mine EXTRA-CRISPY!”
The Longbow system calculated that the four Hueys were coming in at a full sprint, making a hundred thirty miles per hour, which would be their maximum speed given the heat and humidity of the day. The Apaches could cruise at a hundred sixty-five miles an hour and sprint at around one eighty-five, so avoiding the Vietnam-era aircraft wouldn’t be a problem. But fighting them off would be. While the Apaches carried a powerful suite of munitions, they were all for use against ground-based targets. The Army had toyed with outfitting Apaches for aerial engagements and had even certified the AIM-92 Air-to-Air Stinger system for their use, but those systems had never been fielded to the attack battalion. The most Fleischer’s people could do was shoot the middle finger at the Klowns in the Hueys.
“Tomcats, this is Six. Red air. I say again, red air. Wingmen, form up on your leads. Stand by for further orders. Break. Wizard, Wizard, this is Tomcat. Over.”
“Tomcat, this is Wizard Six. Go ahead. Over.” Lee sounded all business, even though he must’ve been handling the ambush that was still playing out below.
Fleischer took a second to return to that situation, and he saw a major traffic pile-up was in progress. At least two military vehicles were on fire. Holy fuck.
“Wizard, Tomcat Six. Listen, this is going to hurt, but the Klowns are coming in Guard Hueys. I don’t know what their armament is, but they are airmobile and”—he consulted the Longbow radar data—“less than sixty seconds out. Over.”
“Ah… Tomcat, this is Wizard Six. Understand National Guard forces are coming for us in helicopters. Is that good copy? Over.”
“Wizard, Tomcat. You have that right. Red air is inbound. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat. Go ahead and take them out. Over.”
“Wizard, this is Tomcat. Sorry to break it to you, but we have no air-to-air capability. Over.”
Lee’s businesslike tone suddenly changed. “Tomcat, this is Wizard. Are you telling me you cannot protect the column from red air? Over.”