He seemed frozen with shock. The cigarette fell from his hand and he took a couple of uncertain steps toward her and then collapsed on her body, crimson pouring from his severed jugular, the shard of glass still protruding.
She lay there screaming in rage and frustration and disgust as Barragan's life-blood gushed over her and soaked into the bed. Then she noticed that the shard of glass was near her right wrist and she moved the leather thong against it.
It took several minutes, but gradually she worked herself free.
Outside on the airfield, every single weapons emplacement seemed to be in action, but to what purpose it was far from clear. Tracer crisscrossed the sky in wild abandon, and on the ground explosion followed explosion.
She threw on some clothes over her blood-soaked body, grabbed her AK-47, and ran outside to see if she could make sense of what was going on. They were under attack obviously, but whether from the air or from the ground she could not tell.
The scene that greeted her was total chaos. She ran toward her helicopter. Around her, an ammunition dump was exploding and the flames from a fuel bowser licked at the sky, but her helicopter seemed untouched. Better still, her pilot was already at the controls.
She jumped in, and seconds later they were airborne.
Above Madoa Air Base,
Tecuno, Mexico
Calvin banked the microlight steeply to the left as a stream of green tracer arced toward him.
There was bedlam below. None of the fire seemed to be aimed, but so much lead was being thrown up there was a reasonable chance he would be hit by accident unless he got out fast. He dived to fifty feet and accelerated to maximum speed.
A mortar pit below started to fire as he flashed over. In their haste they had misjudged the range, and the heavy teardrop-shaped bombs instead of landing outside the airfield among the imagined attackers were landing inside it among the defending troops as they crouched in their trenches and blazed away into the darkness.
The little aircraft lurched as he crossed the perimeter, and he had to lean to the right to keep his balance. The miniature machine was hit, fuck it, but he did not take the time to check the damage. Instead he concentrated on the decidedly hairy business of flying down a long twisting wadi at ground-hugging height. The dry riverbed was pointing northwest, so it was in the wrong direction, but it took him away from the action and another chance encounter with an unfriendly projectile.
He slowed down, activated the sound suppressor, and climbed.
A quick glance showed him that one of his supporting struts had been severed.
Unless he made some emergency repairs fairly soon, the wing might go on flying, but the fuselage that contained him would part company from the airfoil and head straight for the ground. This was not a prospect that attracted him. To maximize his weapons load under the tight weight constraint, he had opted not to wear a parachute.
He put in an airborne radio call to Fitzduane, but either he was out of range or things had gone badly wrong for the ground-based members of Team Rapier. Suddenly he felt very alone, and as the adrenaline rush wore off, the reaction hit and he felt tendrils of fear.
He decided that he just did not have time to feel afraid.
He activated the FLIR and looked for a reasonably friendly patch of ground to land on. The bottom of the wadi was a mass of loose boulders and larger rocks, so he focused on the perimeter.
Three minutes later, he was on the ground.
In the distance he could see that the fireworks display at the airfield was still continuing and he wondered how much damage he had done. He had certainly gotten their attention, but the key issue was the extent to which the helicopters and the MiGs had been damaged.
He started to get out of his tiny cockpit to repair the damaged struts, and it was only then that he realized that he had been hit.
The whole front of his duvet jacket had been torn away, and under it the ceramic plate body armor insert that protected his vital organs was exposed. The heavy round had hit him on the diagonal and cut through the outer layers of Kevlar as effortlessly as if they were paper, but had then been deflected by the ceramic plate.
He had damn nearly left the insert plates behind but had rethought after Fitzduane's caution.
Calvin sat down on a rock and for nearly two minutes shook like a leaf. The spasm ended when he heaved violently and threw up.
He felt weak but able to function again, and went back to work.
Outside The Devil's Footprint,
Tecuno, Mexico
Fitzduane tried to look at his watch, then swore as Steve threw the Guntrack into reverse and shot backward for thirty meters.
A tank shell impacted in the hill just behind the spot they had just vacated and showered them with debris.
‘Shoot and scoot,’ was the tactic, but as the battle progressed and the enemy began to learn the rules, it made sense for there to be more emphasis on ‘scoot.’ It was then that the driver's battle skills really came into play. There was not time for him to merely respond to the vehicle commander's instruction. He had to read the battleground and follow his intuition.
Cochrane turned the. 50 GECAL on the tank and hosed for a weakness away from the glacis at the front. Individually, the armor-piercing rounds would not penetrate a tank's frontal armor, but at sixty rounds a second against the less protected areas, hit after hit pounded its way through.
His periscopes blinded, and the tank's commander – fighting from his open cupola to try to see what was going on – was obliterated. Shortly after, there was penetration under the turret ring by explosive-filled multipurpose. 50 rounds and the stored shells blew up.
It was time, in Fitzduane's opinion, to get the fuck out. Belting across this brutal terrain in a Guntrack with a repressed Formula One racing driver like Steve Kent at the wheel was dangerous enough in itself without hostiles shooting at you.
"Shadow One, this is Shadow Four," said the Brick. "Mission successful. We are loaded up and ready to come out."
"Roger that," said Fitzduane. "Shadow Two – where the fuck are you?" The plan was that Lonsdale's unit, Shadow Two, having infiltrated through the wire on the rim, would hold the blockhouse until the Brick had done his thing in the valley below. Then both would leave together.
There was an access road from the blockhouse on high to the supergun valley. They would then cross the perimeter road with the other three Guntracks, who had already made the trip, providing cover.
The plan had not included an armored column approaching from the south and a major firefight in progress. Still, life was rarely perfect, and as of now, the column was stalled and in decidedly bad shape, though it still had fangs.
Shadow Two was barreling down the access road to the valley floor with Shanley at the wheel when Fitzduane's check call came in. In Al Lonsdale's view they had stayed perhaps a minute or two too long on rim, but the domination of the battlefield they had enjoyed from that position linked to all that ammunition had been hard to resist.
"Shadow Two to Shadow One," said Lonsdale over the open net. "We're sixty seconds behind Shadow Four. We'll make the break together."
"Roger that," said Fitzduane.
"Affirmative," said the Brick from Shadow Four. "We'll break in about forty-five seconds."
"Make smoke! Make smoke!" said Fitzduane.
All three Guntracks beyond the perimeter road and already under cover now fired their smoke dischargers, and within seconds a thick blanket of black smoke blocked the view of the supergun valley entrance from the column.
The smoke contained particulates that obscured infrared-vision equipment as well as normal vision, but this was overkill since none of the T55 tanks or armored personnel carriers was so equipped. However, the survivors of the mechanized column, already shattered by the intensity of the unexpected assault, panicked when the thick black smoke rolled over them.