“Get this thing in the air now!” Skarda yelled.
Jaz dragged herself closer, raising her arm. The gap between the cargo ramp and the tail of the Chinook slowly closed.
Too slowly.
Desperately Skarda tried to get Flinders’ attention. But she was staring at Jaz, too, her bottom lip quivering.
“Untie yourself!” he yelled. “It’s our only chance!”
He could jettison the wingpack, but he couldn’t move his legs with her bound to him.
For a heartbeat, Flinders stared at him through the helmet. Then her face went serious and she bent down, her fingers scrabbling at the knots she had tied.
The Chinook lifted higher.
By now Jaz had almost reached the ramp. Blood trickled from both sides of her mouth and her bare chest, thick with hair, was a mat of red gore. How she had managed to get this far, Skarda couldn’t imagine.
Baring her teeth in a rictus of hate, she lobbed the grenade at the narrowing gap. But loss of blood had robbed her of her powers. Her aim was off. The grenade banged against the lip of the ramp, flying off in the direction of the dock.
Her sightline obscured by the bulky helmet, Flinders groped at the tightly-drawn knots.
Too slow!
Roaring with rage, Jaz leapt forward just as the big chopper lifted from the helipad in a rush of wind. Her fingers clamped on the cold metal lip of the ramp, gripping hard, her body jerked upward by the force of the lifting aircraft and the rapidly-closing gap.
Skarda stared in horror as she struggled to pull herself up into the cabin, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, her face twisting with hate.
Below her, the grenade exploded. Jaz shrieked as hot shrapnel ripped through her legs.
“Hurry!” Skarda shouted at Flinders.
Her fingers fumbled. She glanced up at him, terrified.
He knew she wasn’t going to make it in time.
Pivoting the wing sideways, Skarda tried to grope for the knife he’d left on a seat.
No use.
With inexorable effort Jaz dragged herself forward, the big muscles of her arms bulging with the strain, the fat vein on her forehead squirming. Wind blasted her, whistling as it whipped around her body dangling in open space below the level of the ramp.
The Chinook rose above the level of the fortress.
The gap shrunk. Her fingers closed on a U-ring bolted to the deck and she dragged herself further into the opening, her verdigris eyes drilling into Skarda’s, her ghastly mouth twitching spasmodically.
Then her fingers jerked. Something shook her body. Suddenly she let go of the ring, clutching on nothing as the ramp narrowed its gap to inches, until only a narrow slice of the night sky was left. Her head jerked up. Her eyes bored into Skarda’s, her face transfixed by an expression of astonished bewilderment.
Then the heavy steel lip closed like a vise, drowning out her terrible shriek.
The bloody stumps of her hands and wrists dropped free, tumbling forward with the momentum of the chopper to land at Skarda’s feet.
___
Outside the Chinook, the blast of the rotors hurtled Jaz backwards, somersaulting, the severed ends of her arms pumping out streamers of blood as she fell, screaming, into the black depths of the mountainside below.
SIXTY-SIX
THE Challenger loomed white in the gloom, gleaming with dull highlights.
Tomilin ran hard for it, his breath shooting from his lungs in gouts of steam. Charbonnet had already reached the cabin door and was lowering the entry staircase.
Reaching the jet, a sudden realization struck the senator.
The Falcon was gone.
So Belisarius had already escaped.
In spite of himself he smiled.
Charbonnet climbed into the cabin and headed for the cockpit while Tomilin slammed himself into a leather seat and yanked open the lid of a laptop.
___
Gulf of Mexico
Chomping off the end of the Dove bar, Candy Man watched the input strings from his self-designed code cracker tile up on the monitor. Long ago he’d developed an algorithm that found collisions for the NSA supercomputer’s SHA-2 hash functions. For him, it was like unraveling a giant puzzle.
But he knew the program was only part of it. The rest was his skill at pattern recognition. Keeping his eyes glued on the screen, he fed the rest of the candy bar into his mouth with a machine-like motion before unwrapping the next one.
___
Mount Tavrida
Ramming the cyclic stick forward, April eased up on the collective as the Chinook clattered over the battlefield below. Through a porthole Skarda could see sequential bursts of muzzle flashes and the yellow-orange flashes of explosions.
In the cockpit, April glimpsed the landing strip through a haze of snow. The Challenger was taxiing down the runway. “Tomilin’s taking off!” she shouted back into the cabin. “You ready?”
“Ready!” he yelled back.
Increasing the throttle speed, April headed the big chopper directly toward the departing jet.
Then a storm of bullets ripped through the unarmored cabin, ricocheting with dull metal impacts, some breaking portholes, some spanging off metal, some shredding canvas chairs to bits. Skarda wrenched himself around, slamming the back of the wingpack against a bulkhead. With a cry, Flinders clutched her arms tighter around his neck.
“We’re hit!” April yelled. “We’re losing hydraulic fluid!” Through her canopy she could see the Challenger taking off, heading directly south. She glanced at the gear hydraulic pressure gauge.
It was dropping.
Too quickly.
Applying full throttle, she rotated the knob on the cargo hook control panel to “all”.
Hydraulics whined. But the hooks refused to lower.
The gauge dropped lower.
Suddenly her body shook. In her vision, the night sky outside the windshield spun and blackness closed around her.
___
The chopper shuddered. Metal groaned.
Skarda glanced at the cockpit. He could see the back of April’s head.
But she wasn’t moving.
He yelled out her name.
No response.
“I need you to untie me now!” he shouted at Flinders.
The urgency in his voice caused her to snap her head up. Quickly she bent to the task. With Jaz gone, she was more in control of her actions now, her fingers more nimble. Less than a minute later she stepped away from him.
He separated himself from the wing. Racing for the cockpit, he found April leaning over in her seat, her eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling spasmodically. Through the canopy, the tail assembly of the Challenger was looming larger as the Chinook narrowed the gap between the two aircraft..
He called out her name.
Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at him with an unfocused gaze.
“Hydraulics are out,” she said in a whisper. “The hooks won’t deploy. I need to get to the manual release cable.”
Again he glanced up. The big jet was closer. They were running out of time.
Hauling her from her seat, he steered her into the aisle. “Are we on some kind of autopilot?”
“DAFCS,” she said. “I programmed in all the mission requirements.” Her voice was weak, barely audible.
He knew she meant the Digital Advanced Flight Control System, a form of autopilot designed for helicopters that maintained pitch, roll, yaw, speed, altitude, and heading.
Pushing her ahead of him, he headed aft to Flinders. “You’re going out with April,” he told her.
“What about you?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to have to get the hooks down manually!”
Fear shone in her eyes.
With trembling hands she helped him strap April into the flying wing. Then Skarda lashed her to April’s body with the strips of polyester.
He hit the control to open the ramp. With the sound of metal tearing, the gap p
arted. Wind blasted into the cabin.
The gap widened.
Then hydraulic fluid gushed out, spilling over the ramp in amber streams. The door froze, a quarter of the way open.
“Go!” Skarda yelled. “You can get through!”
He pushed them toward the opening, half-dragging April, who stumbled, barely staying on her feet. Her eyes had closed again.
“You’re going to have to keep her awake!” he yelled at Flinders.
April’s eyes popped open. With grim determination she nodded at Skarda. Grabbing a stanchion, she pulled herself up the ramp, robot-walking to offset the unwieldy flying suit and Flinders’ weight on her chest. When she reached the gap she maneuvered the right tip of her right wing into the open air.
“Get as close to me as you can!” she yelled at Flinders.
Flinders flattened her body against hers, her helmet jammed next to her face. Inch by inch April squeezed their bulk through the narrow opening. Behind them, Skarda, bracing himself against a crossbar, shoved them with his foot.
Then, almost as if they’d been sucked out by a vacuum, they were outside the chopper, flying free in open space. The wind grabbed them, catching the wing like a ship’s sail, flipping them over. Peering out, Skarda could see April angling her body, righting their course.
Less than two minutes.
He was racing for the center utility hatch when the cockpit exploded.
SIXTY-SEVEN
THE blast threw Skarda to the deck. A rocket from the battlefield below had found them! Through a porthole he could see the tail assembly of the Challenger rushing closer, huge in his vision. But now the Chinook’s engine had been blown to pieces and the autopilot program destroyed.
With no power, the huge helicopter would plummet like a heavy weight dropped from a tall building. But he knew that the autorotation of the rotors, fueled by the slipstream, would keep driving the aircraft forward.
But that didn’t mean that the Chinook would keep its course.
Shoving himself to his feet, he staggered forward, grabbing seatbacks for support. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, revitalizing him. The Chinook bucked and rolled, losing altitude in a stomach-lurching drop. His legs wobbled on the metal deck.
Ahead was the utility hatch. Getting to his knees, he yanked on the U-ring attached to the hatch door, feeling the blast of wind as the door opened to expose the center cargo hook hanging from its yellow beam. Below that gusts of snow streaked past.
There was nothing but open air beneath him.
The Chinook careened, dropping in a stomach-twisting dive. His heart hammered.
How much time did he have left?
It could be seconds.
In the dim light he could make out only bulky shapes. With frantic hands he groped through the machinery. The manual release cable was on top of the hook assembly. He pulled. With a groan of metal, the talon-shaped hook descended into the howling wind.
He stood, taking a quick glance back out the porthole.
Tomilin’s jet seemed only inches away.
No time for the wingpack.
Without another thought, he poised himself on the edge of the open utility door and jumped into empty space.
___
Gulf of Mexico
Candy Man’s fingers pounded the keyboard. On his screen were the complete schematics of the DRO satellite over the Arctic Ocean.
Scrolling through the bird’s programs, he typed in a series of commands. Windows tiled on his screen.
One tap of his finger would shut down the entire electronics payload.
___
Mount Tavrida
Icy wind slashed at April’s bare face.
Turning her head, she damped down a jolt of horror. Off to her left, she saw Skarda dropping away from the plummeting Chinook, freefalling without his wing, his body somersaulting over and over in the blast of the rotor wash.
Then the wind grabbed him, jerking him backward like something attached to a string, and he was tumbling again, out of control, plunging toward earth.
SIXTY-EIGHT
TOMILIN stared at the laptop in disbelief. A second ago he’d been ready to fire the laser at the sunken isomer bars and now the satellite had completely shut down.
In the cockpit Charbonnet twisted around and yelled. “We’ve got a bogey on our tail!”
But Tomilin wasn’t listening. He was already bringing up the firing sequence for the Black Sea satellite on his screen. Could the beam reach as far as the Arctic?
He didn’t know.
But he sure as hell was going to find out.
“We’re going to get hit!” Charbonnet yelled.
Shutting out the man’s words, Tomilin hunched over the laptop, typing in the GPS coordinates for the hold of the sunken icebreaker.
He entered the firing codes.
His finger hovered over the “Enter” key.
Then the horrific howl of rupturing metal tore his concentration apart. Jerking his head around, he gaped as a huge steel hook breached the fuselage, ripping a jagged gash in the side of the cabin, tearing the aluminum skin apart.
A tornado of wind blasted through the ragged gash. The laptop flew out from under Tomilin’s poised finger and smashed against the cabin bulkhead.
___
Desperately April wrestled the wing to steer toward Skarda as the Chinook and Challenger narrowed exponentially, the huge chopper angling toward the jet, its blunt nose tilted directly at the tail, its twin rotors spinning, the center cargo hook trailing beneath the fuselage like the talon of a bird of prey.
Then with a crash the hook grappled the Challenger’s skin, sinking deep and holding fast. With a shuddering metallic squeal the big helicopter was dragged back toward the jet as if in slow motion, seemingly inch by inch, its fuselage cracking in half, the front end tumbling toward the plain below, lost to April’s sight. For a moment, the aft end looked like it would topple away also, but then it listed to the right, finally teetering over, its still-spinning rotor blades biting into the back of the jet, ripping the fuselage apart like a can opener.
With a sound like a snapping tree branch, the jet’s rudder and vertical stabilizer sheared off, falling away into the darkness.
The big jet soared ahead.
Forcing the wingpack into the wind, April aimed herself at Skarda. Without the drag of the wing, he was dropping into natural freefall, faster than she and Flinders were falling.
Her brain calculated the speed and distance between them. There was no way she could get to him before he reached terminal velocity and plummeted to the ground.
But there had to be a way.
Something sparked in her brain.
The micro-jet engines!
Groping with her right hand, she ran her finger over the electronic starter and pressed the button.
An instant later she felt the surge of power from the four kerosene engines at her feet. The flying wing zoomed forward, then flipped, rolling, buffeted by the wind. She fought the controls. In her ears she could hear Flinders’ muffled screams coming through the helmet. With a great lurch, the wingpack seemed to stall in the air, then it wallowed, trying to stabilize its fall.
April regained control. She zoomed toward Skarda, using the hand controls to throttle up her speed, plunging down beneath his tumbling body.
But now he had his arms and legs outthrust, flattening out his profile against the wind to slow his descent. She saw him move his arm up and down, signaling that he’d seen her.
Manipulating the jets, she soared up alongside him, slowly maneuvering the wingpack closer to his position, matching his speed, until they were flying in tandem.
With a lunge, Skarda reached out and grabbed the top side of the port wing. Then he dragged himself toward the center above April, throwing his arms around her neck and hooking his feet under the trailing edge of the wing.
Feeding fuel into the engines, April grinned and headed for the ground.
___
When
the whirling blade buzzsawed through the cabin Tomilin leapt from his seat, diving for the protection of the built-in bar. The sound of tearing aluminum shrieked in his ears, drowning out Charbonnet’s frantic yells.
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