Patriot Strike

by Don Pendleton

He figured they were safer dead, and that was Perry Baylor’s game.

  He’d learned it in Iraq, found out that he enjoyed it, got a little extra practice in Afghanistan and then discovered he could make a profit from his new favorite pastime. Someone always needed killing, and he’d learned that there was always someone willing to arrange it, if the price was right.

  The SUV was rolling south on Mansfield Highway, past Cedar Hill Memorial Park, all those dead folks underground oblivious to what was happening around them. Coming up, the driver had a choice of heading east on Turner Warnell Road to catch State Highway 287, or turning west onto Dick Price Road to make a run through open country.

  Warner knew which option he was hoping for, but if he had to chase the RAV4 down a four-lane highway, take it out in front of several hundred witnesses, he could do that, too.

  Why not?

  It wouldn’t be as clean a job, but hell, it wasn’t like the gawkers down below would see his face.

  “What’s the delay?” Warner asked him, voice small and tinny in his earphones.

  “Hold your horses. I just want to see which way he’s going.”

  “Trouble is, he’s going. Do it, will ya?”

  “Just a minute.”

  It was Dick Price Road, westbound, and Baylor smiled over his gun sights, finger tightening around the Minimi’s trigger. He fired a short burst, half a dozen rounds, and wasn’t surprised when he missed the Toyota. Hunting from the air took practice and finesse. Also a pilot who could hold the chopper steady for a nice, clean kill.

  “Edge over to the left a little,” he instructed Warner. “Gimme room to work here.”

  “I’ve got power lines on that side.”

  “So what? You can’t fly over them?”

  “I thought you liked to work up close,” Warner replied.

  “Give me a hundred feet. I’ll make ’em dance the Highland fling.”

  “A hundred feet it is,” said Warner, as the Bell began to climb.

  * * *

  “WE’RE SITTING DUCKS,” said Granger.

  “Running ducks,” Matt Cooper corrected her. “Not sitting.”

  “Feels the same to me.” She clutched a handgrip on the window post beside her, useless pistol in her left hand, as he swerved to dodge another burst of automatic fire. “Goddamn it! How’d he get ahead of us this time?”

  “Maybe the law of averages. They couldn’t know that we’d be coming, but they killed Walraven anyway,” Cooper said.

  “To shut him up?”

  “Or cut deadwood. He may have done his part. Outlived his usefulness.”

  “Does us no good,” she muttered, knowing that she sounded peevish, but to hell with that. She had a right to be pissed off, stuck in her second ambush within less than twelve hours. “We can’t outrun that bird, you know.”

  A third burst rattled past them as she spoke, one of the slugs hitting the RAV4’s low-slung luggage rack on her side, whining into space. Another inch or less, it would have pierced the roof and might have wiped out all her worries in a blinding flare of pain.

  Granger wished she could at least return fire, but she didn’t have an angle on the chopper, flying high and wide off to their left. Cooper whipped the SUV from side to side, swerving across both empty lanes. He was spoiling the airborne shooter’s aim so far, but how good did a machine gunner really have to be? Granger hung on, expecting each moment to be her last, with a storm of slugs ripping the life out of her body, hoping that the pain was brief.

  “Oh, shit!”

  A farmer’s pickup truck, loaded with hay bales, was pulling out in front of them, emerging from a private driveway on their right, the guy behind its wheel oblivious to what was happening around him. Had the windows up, she saw, lips moving, maybe singing with the radio or talking on a wireless headset. Either way, he nearly missed the RAV4 rushing toward him, goosed it at the final instant. Raised a bony fist as if to threaten Cooper.

  That was the end of him, as bullets slashed across the pickup’s windshield, turned it into pebbled safety glass and chopped the farmer’s face in half. Cooper sped on by, Granger turning in her seat to watch the pickup swerve across their lane and leave the pavement, nosing down into a grassy ditch. It tilted dangerously, then stopped short of rolling over on its side.

  Call it the flying shooter’s error or a human sacrifice on their behalf—it hardly mattered. The farmer’s death had bought them little time, if any. Granger wished the RAV4 had a sunroof she could turn into a gun port, but the wishing got her nowhere. If they didn’t find some cover soon...

  Ahead she saw that Dick Price Road looped northward. Trees were coming up on either side, more on the left than the right. Farmhouses were set back from the road, but if they took it off the blacktop, in among the trees, they just might have a fighting chance.

  “Can you go off there, to the left?” she asked.

  Cooper got it, flashed a quick smile as he tapped the brake, twisted the steering wheel and jounced across the gravel shoulder through a gap between two stately elms. A few yards farther and the woods closed in around them, overhanging branches covering the SUV. Not bulletproof, of course, but any cover was a big improvement over the open road.

  As soon as Cooper had stopped and killed the RAV4’s engine, Granger bailed out on her side, popping open the backdoor for a grab at Cooper’s Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun. He already had the Colt AR-15 in hand, a better weapon in their present circumstance, but Granger would make do with what she had.

  The chopper made a pass, then circled back over the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of them below. This was the crunch, a gamble, since she knew they couldn’t simply hide and wait it out. Somebody would be phoning for the county sheriff soon, and Granger didn’t want to see him. Didn’t have an explanation handy that would do the trick. Her badge might keep her out of jail, but what about Matt Cooper?

  They had to take down the chopper and quickly. Which meant breaking cover.

  So do it! Granger thought and made her move.

  * * *

  THE FIGHT COULD end in one of three ways, Bolan thought. Best case scenario, they could bring down the chopper or inflict sufficient damage on it for the pilot to turn tail and run. Worst case, the shooter in the sky could cut them down with automatic fire. Between the two extremes, police could roll up on the scene, prompting the helicopter to depart, but taking them into custody.

  He liked plan A the best but wasn’t sure that they could pull it off.

  Tree cover worked both ways, obstructing vision from the ground as well as from the air. Bullets would pass through leafy cover, maybe sent off course by an obstructing limb, but hits came down to luck rather than skill. Bolan would have to see his target if he planned to bring it down. Which meant the target could see him.

  Granger had grasped the same idea, leaving the SUV and breaking toward a clearing twenty yards away, closer to the road. Bolan could hear the chopper coming back, ready to make a strafing run, as Granger reached the open ground and lifted the Benelli’s muzzle toward the sky. Maybe the first time shooting skeet had been a lethal proposition.

  Bolan didn’t like her chances with the twelve-gauge. The Benelli’s killing range with buckshot was approximately fifty yards, at which range the double-O buckshot—nine pellets per cartridge, each one a .33-caliber missile—would scatter in a cone-shaped pattern roughly four feet in diameter. There was a chance she’d hit the chopper, probably without inflicting any major damage; much less likely that she’d tag the shooter or the pilot.

  She was out there trying, though—and in the process, she was drawing fire.

  Bolan reached the clearing as the helicopter thundered overhead, Granger still tracking it, still firing, as a rain of bullets stirred the soil around her, somehow missing flesh and bone, spent brass cascading from the gunship almo
st as an afterthought. Granger had fired half of the shotgun’s eight rounds by the time Bolan arrived to chase the Bell with what turned out to be a wasted double-tap.

  But it was coming back.

  “Persistent little bastard,” Granger said.

  “He likely can’t afford to go home empty-handed.”

  “Hope we disappoint him,” she replied.

  “I’m counting on it,” Bolan said, the Colt AR-15 already at his shoulder.

  Hunting from the air, their two-man opposition team had drawbacks of its own. The shooter couldn’t alternate from one door to the other without getting in the pilot’s way. That meant the chopper could not simply turn around and make another pass, returning on the same course it had followed going east to west.

  The pilot had to give his gunner access from the starboard side, which meant a wider looping turn that brought the Bell back into line along the rural highway, with the clearing to its right. Five seconds, maybe ten, in wasted time. Bolan used the brief hiatus to prepare himself.

  He knew the deadly math by heart: leading a target, calculating angles and velocities, allowing for assorted variables such as windage, air resistance, drag force, bullet drop, sun glare, even the beating of his heart. Bolan also knew the vulnerable aspects of a helicopter: pilot, passenger, engine, fuel tank, battery and wiring, rotors and their cables.

  Inside the chopper, each projectile from his Colt would spall and tumble, causing greater damage than a straight shot through and through. But Bolan’s task was still to hit a vital spot, on men or the machine, rather than simply punching holes through empty portions of the fuselage or cabin.

  Do it right, and they could walk away from this. Screw up, and they could both be dead before he got a second chance.

  Don’t screw it up then, Bolan thought, tracking the chopper with his sights.

  Chapter 6

  “Get closer, will you?” Perry Baylor snapped. “I still can’t see a goddamned thing!”

  “You know they’re shooting at us, right?” Kyle Warner answered back, voice waspish in his headphones.

  “Well, they won’t be when I dust ’em. But I need a freakin’ shot!”

  “Awright! Awright!”

  The pilot clearly didn’t like it, but he did as he’d been told, making another circuit of the wooded ground below them where the SUV had disappeared, seeking an angle on the man and woman they’d been sent to kill.

  Baylor was pissed off at himself, as much as anything, thinking he should have taken out the Toyota before its driver had a chance to roll it under cover. Nothing wrong with the Minimi, so it had to be his aim, or else the target’s fancy driving.

  Baylor didn’t have to check his watch to know that they were running short on time. The kind of air show they’d been putting on would have the local yokels cranking up their antique phones and calling Sheriff Goober to the rescue any minute.

  That meant Tarrant County, and he knew that the sheriff’s department had a couple of Bell OH-58 Kiowa helicopters adapted from their military function to a law enforcement application. That didn’t worry Baylor, since the Kiowas would have been stripped of their air-to-air fighting hardware.

  Unlike Baylor’s ride.

  He didn’t want to shoot down any sheriff’s whirlybirds, mind you, but if they forced him to it...well, he had his orders, after all. And they did not include going to jail.

  He saw a clearing down below now, and Baylor couldn’t help smiling when he saw the woman waiting for him, aiming skyward with some kind of shotgun, like she thought she was duck-hunting. True Ranger spirit, but she obviously wasn’t clear on how this game was played. He was beyond effective range for any twelve-gauge load and about to chop her into mincemeat, when her sidekick suddenly popped out from cover with some kind of military-looking rifle and started peppering the chopper like a pro.

  Warner let out a howl as one slug pierced their windshield and another came up through the floor, between his feet. Baylor was firing back, trying to make them dance, but it was hell holding a target in his sights when Warner kept the chopper bucking like some cheap ride at a carnival.

  “Goddamn it, Kyle!”

  The bullet took Baylor then, a lucky shot that drilled the outside of his right thigh, as the chopper tilted toward his enemies. It came out through his inner thigh, blood spraying his pilot’s clothes, and Baylor knew he was in trouble. The femoral artery, no doubt about it. Baylor had to clamp a hand there, had to stop the bleeding right away, which meant he wasn’t shooting. But the sniper on the ground kept firing up at them nonstop.

  Now there was smoke inside the helicopter’s cabin, blurring Baylor’s vision, choking him. Warner was cursing, fighting the controls and getting nowhere, as the chopper pitched and yawed across green treetops, out over a stretch of desert to the west.

  “I need to set it down!” the pilot shouted, deafening through his earphones.

  Baylor knew he should ask Kyle how in hell they were supposed to get away without their bird, but Baylor was too dry mouthed to speak. Funny, because all around him, including his trousers, boots and the floorboard beneath him were awash in blood. He tried to hold the Minimi one-handed, his fingers weak and slippery, but couldn’t manage it. What did it matter, anyhow, since he had missed his shot?

  Warner was grappling with the cyclic stick and the collective lever, dancing on the antitorque pedals, about as useful as if he’d been strumming on a ukulele. They were spinning now and seemed to be accelerating at the same time, as if they’d been sucked into a tornado Baylor couldn’t see. They damned sure weren’t in Kansas anymore, and from the blurred landscape in front of him, he couldn’t swear that it was Texas, either.

  More like hell, in fact.

  He couldn’t read the chopper’s gauges, but who needed an altimeter to tell him that they were in a nosedive, headed for the desert at a hundred miles an hour, maybe faster? In his fantasies, Baylor had always thought that, when his time came, he’d have something cool to say. Now it had caught him by surprise.

  There wasn’t even time to scream.

  The helicopter blew on impact, its ruptured fuel tank spilling fire. The rotor blades snapped off and skittered off across the flatland, clipping sage and desert willows. Oily smoke rose straight up for a hundred feet or so, then caught a breeze and fled eastward in tatters, staining the pale blue sky.

  “You hit?” asked Bolan.

  “No,” said Granger. “You?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I think he dinged your ride a time or two.”

  “Cosmetics,” Bolan said. “We need to clear out while we can.”

  He couldn’t quote an average response time for the local law and didn’t want to test it. Someone must have placed a call by now, unless the nearby farmhouses were all deserted. Even then there was no reason to remain and press their luck.

  The RAV4 featured permanent all-wheel drive, nothing to shift or fiddle with on the dashboard as Bolan gunned it around through a U-turn and out of the grove that had saved them from being shot to pieces moments earlier. Back on the road, he put a hasty mile behind them, then slowed down to an approximation of the posted speed limit, not racing like a fugitive or creeping like a driver with a snoot full, trying to avoid a DUI stop.

  Normal, right, after a running firefight with a helicopter, twenty miles or less from downtown Dallas.

  And Big D was their destination, although at the moment they were headed west, away from it and toward Fort Worth. The plan was fairly simple: catch West Pioneer Parkway to West Loop 820 northbound, then pick up Interstate 30—also known as the Tom Landry Freeway, named for the late Dallas Cowboys coach—eastbound, back into Dallas.

  Looking for a rocket man.

  “You think we’ll get to him in time?” asked Granger.

  Him was George Roth, hea
d of Lone Star Aerospace’s program, a NASA castoff who had found a new home and had greatly increased his annual salary by signing up with Lamar Ridgway’s team.

  “No way to tell,” Bolan replied. “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s got rockets in his blood,” said Granger. “Third generation German immigrant. His granddad was one of the whiz kids our government picked up from Adolf’s gang after World War II, along with von Braun and that bunch.”

  “Operation Paperclip?”

  “Whatever. His grandfather’s name was Herman Rothmann when he got here with his wife and kids, but someone trimmed it down to Roth. The son—that’s Frederick—picked up his Ph.D. from Stanford and went on the NASA payroll, working at their Jet Propulsion Laboratory while his daddy helped put Alan Shepard into orbit. Grandson Georgie got his doctorate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and joined the team in time to do his bit for the space shuttle program and the International Space Station before austerity kicked in.”

  “You’ve done your homework,” Bolan said.

  “I was a Girl Scout. ‘Be prepared,’ you know?”

  “It rings a bell.”

  “So I’ve been wondering. I know it sounds far-fetched, but what if Roth had something more than fascination with the universe passed down to him from Grandpa and his dad?”

  “Ex-Nazis,” Bolan said.

  “You think they’re ever really ex?”

  “Depends,” he said, “if they were true believers or got forced into the party for survival’s sake.”

  “Maybe. But if you heard the old war stories growing up, the blitz and V-2 rockets smashing into London, rockets that your grandpa built, it might sink in.”

  “Something to ask him, anyway,” Bolan agreed.

  “Assuming that we get the chance.”

  Walraven’s execution bothered Bolan, only for the loss of a potential source. If George Roth was the next to go, they might be robbed of any chance to look inside the Ridgway operation, short of a direct assault, and he preferred to gain more detailed information prior to using that approach.