He reached over and unlatched the door, drawing it inward several inches; enough to allow him a view of the panorama of parade ground and the raging fire beyond.
The two Bell Huey copters still sat side by side in the center of the parade field, thirty yards from him.
The Executioner centered his attention on the chopper carrying the cargo of Strain-7. Colonel Shahkhia still had not arrived. Jericho still had his security on tight.
Seven mercs stood guard near the aircraft that carried the living virus, their rifles held at port arms.
The killing machine quit the doorway of that house in a full frontal assault, Thompson yammering.
He must commandeer the helicopter.
He must lift the cargo of Strain-7 up and out, away to safety.
No matter what the odds.
The killing machine kept right on killing.
He blitzed five men between the house and the Huey. Two mercs were stitched in a tight pattern of blood before they even saw their executioner. Another came running and the Thompson sent him back-flopping across the paradise field with his head lifted away. Two mercs tried running for cover. They could not outrun the Thompson.
The Executioner reached the chopper as the pilot tried to slam home the door and aim his .45 at Bolan at the same time. He accomplished neither. The Thompson erupted one more time and the pilot was ripped nearly in half by the hail of slugs. He dropped onto the ground beside the Huey.
Bolan leaped into the aircraft, slammed shut the side door on its runners and bolted to the controls.
He could see some Libyan troops across the parade field, by the burning equipment, who understood that a hijacking was taking place and were shouting out an alarm.
He gunned the engine and listened to the rising high-pitched scream of the revving transmission and the blades activating overhead. His fist tightened around the collective pitch-control lever to his left and he powered the big bird into a lift-off.
The commotion outside the Huey was lost below him.
He just might make it.
The pilot of the Soviet-furnished Libyan army helicopter, transporting Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia and two of his generals, controlled the aircraft into a hover position one half mile from the scene of battle raging below them to the north. The bodies of General Pornov and one of his aides were stretched out in the rear of the aircraft, with their throats slit from ear to ear.
Colonel Shahkhia recalled the icy premonition he had felt that afternoon when Jericho's people had informed him of the paramilitary hit on a Jericho base in the Bahamas.
He had felt concern that this action around the world might cause local repercussions in his dealings with these people. That was why he was being so cautious concerning his rendezvous with Jericho tonight, in spite of his whetted appetite for the female slave that Jericho had promised.
And of course there were Colonel Shahkhia's other plans for Leonard Jericho...
Now a curt radio report from Aujila base had confirmed the earlier premonition. The communique sent word only that a sabotage team appeared to have them under attack.
Colonel Shahkhia had responded by ordering that all radio communications be cut and the full company of men down below be deployed to pinpoint this "team" of paramilitary penetrators.
Shahkhia was certain that the action had to be connected with whatever happened two days ago on Leonard Jericho's yacht in Exuma Cay.
The fires on the base below were spreading. Shahkhia watched with a constricting throat as the barracks and motor-pool structures caught fire.
Then the colonel saw an American Huey helicopter rising from the flames of Aujila oasis like some mechanical phoenix of war rising from the ashes of battle.
The virus.
The saboteurs were escaping with the virus!
Colonel Shahkhia pointed in his helicopter and bellowed a command that had his pilot goosing the aircraft into full-ahead thrust on a course of hot contact with that copter.
Ahmad Shahkhia understood the appalling chance he was taking. There was no way to ensure that the Huey chopper could be stopped without rupturing the container of Strain-7 aboard that machine. But the chance had to be taken. Shahkhia needed that cargo for what he planned...
When their aircraft was some seventy yards to the Huey's starboard side, Colonel Shahkhia ordered his pilot to open fire with the Libyan copter's 40mm cannons.
The generals and pilot understood what was at stake. There was dead silence around the cockpit.
The pilot obeyed the command to attack.
The Libyan warplane sailed in on the Huey with both 40mm cannons firing steady.
The mighty hammering of the cannons in Colonel Shahkhia's ears sounded to him like the deafening approach of Armageddon.
The Executioner held the Huey at hover for a brief moment, once the copter had gained enough altitude to put him out of effective range of the rebel troops firing at him from the ground.
The raging tide of fire across the weapons stash and buildings below was like a sea of flame.
In the shifting, flickering patterns of light, the killing machine had one microsecond to see a Libyan chopper come zeroing in on him full-throttle from behind.
He yanked the controls, jarring his big Huey smartly into a sharp evasive maneuver at the same instant that the other aircraft's cannons opened fire.
The sound pounded at his ears. It enveloped him.
22
Jack Grimaldi, in the snappy Boeing 1041 V/STOL, entered the fray from out of the southeast. He confronted the Libyan chopper nearly head-on as they converged on the Huey piloted by Mack Bolan.
The Aujila oasis army base below them was nothing but a burning hellground of devastation and confusion.
One human being named Mack Bolan had been at work down there. Far larger than any machine.
The Huey jarred to its port side and fell sharply.
A stream of tracers lasered out from the Libyan aircraft's 40mm's into nothing but dark air.
The Libyan chopper banked around for another run and a look at the sudden unexpected arrival of the unmarked V/STOL.
Grimaldi sent a sizzling stream of bullets from his own 50-cal. machine guns after the Libyan army aircraft. He thought he saw a line of holes dotting across the fuselage of the chopper. But the Libyan aircraft was not stopped or even slowed.
Grimaldi raised Bolan on the tac net.
"Striker! Let's move tail outa here!"
"Not yet, Jack." Bolan's voice came strong and in command across the crackle of static. "That's a slice of Hell down there. We've got to level it."
"Evita? Is she all right?"
"She's dead, Jack. They made turkey meat out of her."
"Oh, sweet Christ."
"We level the dump," growled Bolan.
There was a metallic quality to the voice that Grimaldi had never heard before.
Grimaldi tasted bile trying to rise in his own throat. His knuckles were white around the V/STOL's controls.
Eve was dead.
The pilot had always loved that woman. Loved, yeah. The way a brother-in-law digs a sweet sister-in-law.
"Consider 'em leveled," Grimaldi radioed back.
He hardly recognized his own voice.
The Libyan chopper had looped back for more.
Grimaldi banked around, coming back to where Bolan's Huey held in a stationary hover.
The pilot of the Libyan chopper no doubt thought he had a good chance at taking them both with one blistering strafe run from north to south with the 40mm booming.
Grimaldi arced the V/STOL back into an evasive twist, the shrill whistling of the jet more piercing than before in his ears.
Bolan's voice crackled across the tac net.
"I've got him, Jack."
Grimaldi heard the Huey's turret-mounted machine guns crackle a tattoo that ultimately outlasted the hammering of the Libyans' fire. The Soviet-made chopper hurtled through airspace separating Bolan and Grimaldi.