Labyrinth

by Jon Land

Mickey O. released two more of his rockets as he soared over the big guns and watched as the other three Pipers did the same. One of the trucks blew up in a blaze of red, struck broadside by a pair of warheads. Guns from the other three kept blasting away, the other bombs either misses or duds altogether. Forty years ago Pipers had taken on Tiger tanks and often enough had won. But age had taken its toll on their sights, and Mickey O. should have known coming in this fast was a mistake. The enemy still had one machine gun and both its cannons.

  “Pull up,” he ordered his team. “Pull up and prepare for our next run.”

  “Blue leader, I’m hit! I’m hit!”

  “Eject! Get the hell outta—”

  “I can’t! Fuel line ruptured. Trying to—”

  The explosion swallowed the rest of the younger man’s words. The big guns bore down on two more of the Pipers and just kept firing, orange flaring continuously in their barrels. The Pipers bled black smoke and went into a swoon, the only consolation being the sight of two parachutes floating toward the ground. That left Mickey O. with five planes now, including his own.

  “Red leader, this is Blue leader, do you read me?”

  Pop Keller’s wing had almost caught up with the first wave of airborne dusters.

  “I read you, Blue leader.”

  “Have encountered casualties, repeat casualties.”

  “Shit! How bad?”

  “At least four planes destroyed. Two pilots dead.”

  “God damn! Gotta take out those guns, Mickey.”

  “Negative, Pop, we can’t control these old birds sure enough to come in that low and fast.”

  “Then blast the runways from up high. Just don’t let any more of the bastards take off! We’ll finish our run here and come back and take them together.”

  In fact, no other cropdusters were even attempting to take off because Hamshi had ordered the functioning ones to swing away from the runway and taxi behind the protection of the three remaining big guns while canisters from the disabled planes were loaded onto them.

  Up ahead of him, Pop Keller watched with dismay as the airborne dusters began widening the distance between themselves.

  “Shit”—he moaned—“they’re pulling out.”

  “No,” Locke said. “They’re approaching their dispersal altitudes. We’ve got to take them now!”

  “I’ll drink to that, friend.” Hand on his headset again. “Red Wing, this is Red leader. Spread out and take ’em, boys, one to a customer.” Then, to Locke. “Now the fun begins.”

  The Flying Devils had never performed better. They fanned out neatly and expertly in the trails of the various dusters, banking away from the wedge formation. The duster pilots fought for more speed as some of the fighters roared overhead in pursuit of the first few that had taken off.

  Pop Keller drew his Warbird closer to one of the dusters in the rear.

  “Gonna crawl right up his ass and give him a fuckin’ enema to remember!”

  Locke could see the old man tightening his gloved hands on the control stick and placing both thumbs over the red firing button that operated the twin machine guns. The 2,000-horsepower engine shook the old fighter forward like a jet.

  “Here we go!”

  Locke watched Keller press the button. Bullets pounded into the back and wing of the target and Keller pulled immediately into a climb.

  The duster exploded beneath them, bursting into flames and dying right there in the sky. Still crackling, it slid through the air screeching shrilly and leaving a trail of black smoke in its wake.

  “Hot shit! One down, eleven more to go,” Pop announced proudly.

  Another duster exploded to their right, and Red Wing’s pair of Corsairs had successfully crippled a pair of dusters to the left.

  “Double up,” Keller ordered. “When you’ve made a hit, link up with the fighter closest to you and keep on huntin’.” He turned to Locke. “If any other dusters get off the ground, they’ll send them away from us in the other direction. We’ll have to go back for them as soon as we’ve finished with these.”

  As it was, though, no other cropdusters had taken off. Mickey O. followed a Piper and a Bearcat down for a quick run to head them off before they reached areas of safety behind the trucks, but the big guns found a quick bearing on the two lead planes and fired, tearing the old fighters apart before they even got close. They just seemed to disintegrate in the air, taking their pilots with them. They were good men, Mickey O. thought, damn good men.

  He swung into a climb quick enough to smack his teeth together, as his two remaining planes provided cover fire. He had another Bearcat and a Mustang left and both still had rockets, but their aim was unreliable. They were horribly mismatched against the ground-based antiaircraft cannons. There remained twenty, maybe twenty-five perfectly flyable dusters just waiting for a chance to take off. They had to be disabled. But how?

  “Blue Wing, this is Blue leader. We’ll circle around for a bit and regroup. How’s your fuel?” Both pilots acknowledged they had plenty. “All right, here’s the plan… .”

  Mickey O. was about to go on when he heard a familiar sound that sent a shudder through his entire cancer-eaten frame. He looked down toward the hangar area in time to see four armored helicopter gunships lifting straight into the sky. Damn things looked like giant black insects with two twin machine guns mounted on either front side as stingers and rocket launchers aimed forward and back looking like antennae.

  “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 a
way 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!”

  The air cannons blazed from the Messerschmitt and Spitfire.

  “Hot shit!” Pop beamed. “Kiss those choppers good-bye!”

  “Negative effect, Red leader,” the Spitfire reported. “Achieved direct hit with negative effect.”

  Pop leaned forward. “They’ve got armor plating. Our shells won’t cut through it. Go for the rear propeller.”

  A helicopter’s rear propeller is its most vulnerable point. Knock it out and you strip the machine of balance and stability. The Messerschmitt and Spitfire, though, never got the chance to try. A pair of rockets blasted from the warships’ rear launchers blew them into a thousand pieces that fluttered to the ground.

  “Dirty bastards! I’ll get you for that!”

  Pop went into another climb, bringing him almost into the path of the two choppers. Their bullets pounded the side of the Warhawk, sending steel shards everywhere and just missing the fuel tank.

  “Come on, old girl, hold together for Pop just a little longer,” he urged his plane, tapping it tenderly. He went into a dive that took him between the four gunships. He spoke frantically into his headset.

  “Form two wedges, boys. We’ll take them from different angles. Reds seven through ten, try to get over them and use your rockets. Might score a lucky hit.”

  Pop knew the chances of that were virtually impossible. Perhaps, though, the sight of falling bombs would distract the choppers’ attention long enough to allow a full frontal assault.

  “My bombs are loaded with firecracker stuff,” Pop told Locke. “Not as potent as the real thing but they’ll still make a helluva mess… .”

  With that, Pop swung into a climb that took him over the two gunships that had originally given chase. More bullets sprayed their rear and Keller had to dive again, ducking and sweeping like a crazed bird, fighting to stay out of the sights of the second pair of choppers.

  “Fuck this strategy,” Pop said. “I never went in for the sneaky shit anyway. Hold on to your balls, Chris!”

  Pop went into a climb, then banked at an angle that brought him head-on with the two trailing gunships, his machine guns blasting away more for effect than anything else. The other two choppers veered off toward the approaching wedge made up of a pair of Mustangs, a Corsair, and a trainer.

  “Get ready, Chris!” Pop grabbed the throttle tight.

  A collision with one or both of the gunships seemed inevitable when Pop kicked in all 2,000 lovely horses of the stubborn Warhawk. As it climbed he released all four of his firecracker-loaded bombs. The gunships slowed suddenly, just as Keller expected they would, and at least two of his bombs exploded on impact against one. Glass shattered and metal gave way as a burst of Fourth of July colors sprang from the chopper’s frame. The pilot fought frantically with the controls but black smoke and bright colors stole his sight away. The chopper’s engine died and the machine went into a hopeless dive. Its crash sent more pretty colors flying outward.

  Two of the remaining gunships were firing away at the first wedge and they disabled one of the Mustangs. The second wedge banked
in front of them, machine guns spitting. Bullets poured through the windshield of one of the gunships, killing the pilot instantly and sending the giant insect into a dying spin. The second chopper escaped the fire by dropping beneath the attack. It tilted its laser-aimed rocket launchers upward and released a burst of four. The last trainer and a Corsair exploded in twin fireballs, while another of the Mustangs limped away, gray smoke pouring from its injured engine.

  “Reds six and seven, get the hell outta here,” Pop urged the battered Mustangs, and turned his attention to the spectacular aerial dogfight going on between the two gunships and his two remaining fighters.

  Forty years ago, the Red Wing’s last Mustang and Corsair might have made mincemeat out of the choppers, but their engines were laboring from the strain of the chase now and the planes moved sluggishly. Exchanges of fire were frantic, the two fighter pilots struggling to take aim on the slippery gunships, which were never in the same place for long. The final Mustang swooped down trying to take one of the gunships from behind. But the other chopper was equal to the task, dipping effortlessly and spraying the attacking fighter with its machine gun. The Mustang fell immediately, spitting black smoke. The pilot ejected.

  “That makes it two against two,” Pop reported grimly, driving the Warhawk forward toward a gunship’s tail.

  The gunship he was trailing seemed to drop straight down, under the Corsair that was banking into an attack run. The Corsair pilot kept enough cool to drop both his wing-mounted rockets, but the wind took them and they soared harmlessly away. He turned to link up with Pop’s Warhawk but the helicopter fell in on his tail, machine guns blasting.

  “They’re on me!” the pilot shouted into his headset.

  “Hang on,” Pop commanded. “I’m coming.”

  “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

  “Eject! Don’t stay with the damn thing! … Do you copy? I say again, do you copy?”

  There was no reply. The Corsair went into a death dive and spun to Earth.

  “Just us against them now, Chris” was all Pop said.

  The gunships fell in line and roared at the Warhawk together, gunners struggling to adjust their aim at Pop’s daredevil dips and darts. For twenty years he had practiced such maneuvers to thrill fans and sell tickets. Now he was using them to save his and Locke’s life but it felt little different, just a routine to follow and somewhere a crowd to please. He performed magnificently. But the 2,000-horsepower engine had been pushed to its fullest for too long now and the tach’s needle was dancing crazily.